We are instantly embroiled in it. No introduction, no preamble, no explanation. On television interviewees are always carefully ushered in, fine dining includes an hors d’oeuvre, operas and ballets generally start with an overture, visitors to splendid villas and public buildings are shown into antechambers and vestibules. Not so here. We fly straight in between hand and mouth and land on a hirsute stomach. Our gaze is abraded by badly reddened fingers, the skin of old people and of multicolored reptiles, combining thumbs with nipples, folds of skin and splayed fingers, until in the end our gaze is struck and wounded by dazzlingly white teeth framed by glowing red upper and lower lips, or it plunges into ice-cream colors and lands directly in a navel. No mercy, no courtesy, no apology. The film continues, unceremoniously.  

The history of photography is filled with interesting advances, with technical and pictorial innovations, and behavioral changes in step with and instigated by photography. One of the most compelling is the amalgam of a reduced viewing distance and a narrowing of the visual field. In the nineteenth century the photographic gaze was calm and distant. Cameras were on tripods and images were captured on large glass plates. The distance to the motif, to a landscape or a human being was considerable—as technically and fittingly considerable as was “proper”, for people, things and landscapes to be duly embedded in the composition.

However, the introduction of much lighter, compact cameras—such as the famous Leica—did away with conventional viewpoints. Even the photographer became more mobile, his/her gaze more enquiring, people were caught unawares—in mid-conversation, eating, touching their noses, situations were exposed, long lenses zoomed in on distant motifs, bringing them closer. Photography started to “uncover” things, snapshots caught bodies in mid-flight, lovers kissing, a drop of milk on impact, a figure that reveals itself stretching, ascending stairs. Large telephoto lenses, electronic night-vision devices soon intruded on film stars in intimate moments and on intact outer space. The gaze narrowed, it became sharper and more invasive. 

Ultimately nothing was too close or too extreme for electronic and digital photography. At the same time, it now became clear that research and discovery are in fact the duller side of photography; the shinier side is all about showing and demonstrating, presenting and revealing: “Here, look here, see what we’ve got for you.” The history of photographic, video and digital technologies is the visible tip of an increasingly voracious tide rushing from distance to proximity, from bodily integrity to fragmentation, which also muddies the private and the public, shifting and dissolving distances. The nineteenth century draped and concealed; in the twenty-first century genitals slap against the screen from inside—such is the immediacy and precision of the images. So, no more calm, no more perfect, intact bodies: this new pornographic gaze oversteps all the marks, it fragments, it proffers, it renders accessible—all at a hectic pace. This combination of close-up vision and demonstration creates a radically ever-accessible world, which—in tandem with maximum distribution—conveys the impression of an opulent, gigantic buffet of signs that is always and forever available. 

The proximity and acuity of the gaze, the abstracting fragmentation of what is seen, the uncompromising cropping of images arranged in a long stream of visual scraps as a video installation in an exhibition, as a picture sequence in a book— this is what distinguishes PRIMAL. Anna Stüdeli prowls through the city seeking out the billboards, the big-poster advertising campaigns that have defined the look and the feel of the city since the 1970s or 80s. Her search for image events, her scanning gaze conjures up the idea of a wandering telescope. Face to face with a billboard, she zooms in on the images, she locks onto them, she frisks the images with her eyes and her camera, with an ever narrower focus. The data she takes home is filled with textures, with tissues: human skin, animals’ skins, textiles, eyes, lips, hair, eyebrows, nail beds, bodily wrinkles, foodstuffs. She moves—in reality or with the camera lens—so close to these surfaces that motifs appear to dissolve and the picture carrier looms into the foreground. We see many, many dots, depending on the dot grid used in the printing process, which—following the reduction from 3D to 2D, following total disembodiment—reveal the image to the viewer’s eyes. We also identify smears, paste from when the poster was put up, tears in the paper, air pockets, joins and overlaps, marks left by splashing water and rain, by frothing soft drinks.

Anna Stüdeli photographs eyes, eyebrows, hair, hands, legs, underwear, sausage ends, shoes, feet, salad leaves, eggs, sandwiches—but not in their first reality, she photographs them in their second, photographed reality and in their third, printed reality and in their fourth, you might say, when that printed reality is reintroduced into the fabric of the city. She focuses on the surfaces of billboards, adjusting her lens to capture those planes, those interfaces between pictorial illusion and pictorial reality, between skin and paper, leg and printer’s ink, lips and grids. A strange, odd interface, maybe even bewildering, unfathomable. It is the dividing line between illusion and reality. The more brilliant the depiction of an image—in the medium of photography this is done by adding a high-gloss finish—the more the viewer forgets the picture carrier, and vice versa. It is as if the medium gets lost in the brilliance of the image and its reproduction. The sheen, the semblance of beauty, of the image, of lust, of sexuality overpowers the materiality of the picture carrier. Anna Stüdeli toys with the boundary between illusion and reality, sometimes approaching more closely, sometimes keeping her distance. She also often crosses that boundary, and the resulting images seem “tainted”, contaminated. The beautiful semblance is shattered by the visibility of the medium, positively sullied by visible traces of poster paste. The illusion of beauty, of something magical, the illusion of the picture implodes.

Stüdeli clings—lustfully, it seems, but maybe also urgently—to that boundary, to that place where beauty tips into ugliness, where that which is beautiful and pure is revealed as no more than an illusion, an illusory sheen. She operates on the frontiers with obscenity, with disgust, at the switching point between decent and indecent. 

Her images, which—in terms of their form—have as much to do with reality as fish fingers with fish, as minced meat with cattle, as conserves with life (and even less in terms of their content), seem from afar like seductive sirens, but seem more like party killers from close to. Anyone who looks too hard can only shudder. Stüdeli appropriates these printed realities, crops them, cuts them up and generally places two distillates directly side by side (sometimes a single image extends across a double spread). We can still make out the original, “intended” realities, they still glimmer through the appropriation, but in their new status they appear so changed, so transformed, curtailed, abstracted, that we read them as new entities, new natures, we see them as surreal. We, the viewers, waver between recognition and non-recognition, between delight and discomfiture, and also somehow between lust and disgust. We know that feeling from Surrealism and its relish for defying decorum and the norm, only here it is transposed into the present, into the Now. 

But these pairs of images also talk of violence—the violence of abstraction, of cutting about, of decontextualization, the violence that is intrinsic to all image-making, the violence of reducing nature, corporeality, to two-dimensional, odor-free surfaces, the fragmentation of the body, of the context and of the complexity of life. Pictures even attract violence. Pictures arise from strength, power, violence. Their purpose is not just to represent, to show, but also to be present, to be monstrative as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it in his essay “Image and Violence”: “Thus the image is, essentially, ‘monstrative’ or ‘monstrant’. Each image is a monstrance. . . . The image is the prodigious force-sign of an improbable presence irrupting from the heart of a restlessness on which nothing can be built. It is the force-sign of the unity without which there would be neither thing, nor presence, nor subject. But the unity of the thing, of presence, of the subject is itself violent.” And it is violent due to “an array of reasons”. Moreover, as Jean-Luc Nancy continues, the image must be able to appear in its own right, it must “tear itself from the dispersed multiplicity”, it must reduce itself, externalize itself, and exclude from itself everything which it “ought not to be”, in a violent reduction in favor of its own presence. And the same is also seen in Anna Stüdeli’s pairs of images—intentionally or not, they are powerful manifestations of the latter. 

We thus enter this album at our own risk. We leaf through it as if perusing carpet patterns in book-form, we leaf through abstract planes, piercing eyes, fathomless mouths—beguiled, seduced, repelled, shocked. A constant to and fro that increasingly gives pause for thought. Or as the artist herself has written of her own work—now predominantly sculptural: “Our perpetual conflict with nature is expressed in our need to control, dominate and subdue it. Despite our efforts to emancipate ourselves from our own animalism, we remain tied to it in a libidinous attraction. I am fascinated by the enormous, ambivalent power of this paradox. A power play between repulsion and attraction—in constant, never-ending flux.” This sharply trimmed book block with its fabric of full-bleed images is an object in its own right: a primal embodiment of the painfully lustful nature of pictures. 

Translated from the German by Fiona Elliott