Every now and again we like to prop up, disguise, drape, paint over and cover – the leaning wall, the ageing face, the widening crack, the dented car. We like to organize our world so that its infrastructure, its mechanisms and operations are no longer visible. Then we sit before this perfectly wrapped, glossy box to observe and admire it. Process is transformed into result; deviations, shortcomings and errors are concealed; blank spaces are edited out, or we resort to crafty tricks, such as taking nine out of twelve pieces of cake and making a perfect circle out of them, creating an entirely new arrangement. We like the result, the presentation, the action, the event, the glamour. We leave out the steps in-between, the absent, the dull, the anti-climactic; anything undesirable is tossed into the real or the virtual bin. In this way our version of the world is often no more than a series of staged appearances, rewarding activities with presence and style, while the voids – waiting, nothing happening, boredom – are swept under the table. Trying to defend ourselves against horror vacui, we turn ourselves into 24-hour bottling machines, pumping out events and spectacle into the world, non-stop.

Stefan Burger is aware of these presentations of perfection and spectacle (especially in photography, with its smooth homogeneity, its brilliant surfaces and mass-media distribution). So here he is, scratching at the paint, poking around behind the façade, discovering the messy structure that lies beneath. He tends to remove the camouflage in order to draw attention to what he finds: the half-finished, the unsteady, the tentative, the abandoned. He is not interested in the blooming flower but the empty planter; not in this season’s fashions, but the clearance sale; not in the grand entrance, but the vacant stage, the turned-off spotlight. He is interested in the framework in which constructs are shown or occur, the jigs and supports that allow things to be manifested on top of them. He likes to uncover mechanisms of perception, production, and operation. His conceptual interests lead him to the world’s “conditions”, the backstage activities, the ensuing constellations. His eye is drawn to the modus operandi of making art, to the production of images, the spectacle and the exhibition of works. Just as the police mark out a crime scene so that they can reconstruct an accident or incident step-by-step, Burger sets up “buoys”, using them to mark possible showplaces, narrative strands, and situations; to question conditions, to ask why, and why again, and what is it all about, anyway? As a rule, these marker-buoys don’t provide any sort of ultimate truth; rather, they pose new, more difficult questions, which take us deeper and deeper into the woods, as if we were orienteering in the wilds.

In his refreshing, multifaceted work thus far, Burger has followed a course involving many enquiries, pitfalls and puzzles related to visual imagery. He questions the production of images, while subtly demonstrating how they are used, applied, shown, staged and exhibited. The way that the process of producing images conceives of itself is marred, broken apart.. Images can only be interpreted and understood within a strict, complex contextualisation. In general, however, most people involved in producing and consuming images are not prepared to invest the time and energy to contextualise them. Images flutter through our cities and our minds like confetti from a parade. Atomised snippets of the world dance seductively through the air, destroying any thought or action related to continuity, which is fusty and out of date. Confronted by this symphony, this endless flow of pictures, Burger’s search for context, at first glance, seems to represent the rejection of images. He seems to be spurning images with images, intent on getting behind their superficial impressions to discover the detritus beneath. Yet, it is precisely through this process of revealing the functions of an object, by observing the course of its creation and destruction, that the rejected object becomes interesting. Equipped with a Nebelhorn (Foghorn, C-print, 115x90cm), Burger gropes his way through the fog and froth, searching for a moment of real clarity in the pretended clarity of this glittering world of mirrors. 

Sediment is a photographic installation that continues this search. Postcards, souvenirs and family snapshots are often pinned to a wall or – as they are here – tucked inside the frame of a mirror. Gradually, over time, they begin to slip down into afterthought, into the void of vanishing memory. They begin “composting”, as Burger himself puts it. Almost convulsively, the structure of this installation struggles against the gravitational pull of time: supports drive the picture frame back up the wall, all the way to the ceiling, creating a tension between sinking and sustaining, between supporting and falling, an impossible condition, which – rather like the collapse of the euro – has some Quixotic traits.

For Total Liquidation, Burger appropriated a former window-display case from a jewellers’ shop window, lined with faded silk. Before the store went out of business, photographs had been displayed on top of the fabric. Now, like a magic trick, their absence has left a lasting impression. Previously covered by the photos, sections of the richly coloured fabric, unbleached by the sun, suddenly tell another story, about the long history of a small shop, about the owner of a watch and jewellery store, about photography as a less expensive – yes, cheaper – way of representing real objects. The abstract rectangles provide no details, but they give shape to the weeks, months, and years that have been inscribed upon them. Do pictures tell more, and in a profound way, when they vanish? Did the arguments of early Christendom and Islam indicate a more profound sense of time? Here the visual immediacy of the present, the duration of the snapshot, is held up to the mirror of continuity. The luminous, orange “Total Liquidation” sign pasted across the shop window announces not only the end of the store, but also the end of the easily produced image.

The theme of “empty” images appears once again in the “incredibly heavy non-statement” (Burger) of a large photo mural, in which a blank road sign set into a boulder and surrounded by withered tomato plants is turned into an image of informational disaster. In the same way, a balletic installation of round and rectangular signs found at the seashore becomes a forest of misdirection, the blank signs issuing orders to each other blindly.

Several works examine the idea of “making an impression”. The rug, for instance, that bears the imprint of one-and-a-half years’ worth of receptions at the Fotohof Salzburg on it. Do these fading footprints add up to a final, picturesque metaphor for the disappearance of analogue photography, in which light rays are inscribed like footprints? 1,5 Jahre Nadelfilz im Fotohof [1.5 years of needle-felt carpet at the Fotohof] – which Burger had unsuccessfully offered to a variety of other photography institutions.– is transformed into a piece of photographic history. Impressions were also left by the backsides of a gallery-owner and his assistant, who used the cushions on the chairs before they were sold as Brutvorrichtung für Kleingruppen im Kunstsystem [Breeding device for small groups in the art system]. A deep impression is left on Burger himself by the sedative Dormicum, when he appears as the protagonist in his video 4’33’’ (Dormicum I.V.), in which he attempts to play John Cage’s famous silent piece while fighting off overwhelming fatigue. 

The absence of images, the doubts about images, are counteracted by works in which the image functions as a catalyst, as a mechanism for posing questions and setting traps. These pictures of Burger’s perform; they are given a shape, installed, positioned in a room and, in turn, they trigger more motion, other performances. It is said that behind a wall at the Wawel Palace (the former seat of the Polish kings in Cracow) can be found one of the seven chakras, or spiritual energy sources. So people are always rubbing up against the wall, at the spot where the seventh chakra is supposed to be located. Using this legend as a basis, Burger created a large, obstructive installation, which visitors have to squeeze past in order to see a mural, which uses photographed objects to make A few suggestions about how one should behave in front of a wall, and a recommendation as to how one should not behave in front of a wall. In Analoges Monument [Analogue monument] the controlled explosive demolition of the Agfa building in Munich is turned into a vivid installation which heralds the end of analogue photography in a striking play of light and shadow, while at the same time mischievously offering it some vocational retraining. Anweisung zu einer erweiterten Bildnutzung (von hinten mit Schwung über ein Bild stürzen) [Instructions for extended image use (leap energetically on to a picture from behind)] is an installation turned into a photograph. It consists of a monochromatic billboard set in a snowy landscape, in front of a chain link fence; behind the billboard is a wooden ladder that can be climbed. The title contains an ironic allusion to a phrase found in copyright statements: “use of image”. In this case, however, the phrase does not give permission to copy a picture for other purposes; instead, the image is transformed into a kind of hurdle race, a goal to be reached by climbing a ladder, a picture to be straddled. Another photo, Entstaubung [Dusting], shows a factory-made oriental carpet being beaten with a broom in a courtyard to get the dust out of it – a cheeky allusion to the practice of dusting photographs. Falle für einen Fuchs oder einen Fotografen [Trap for a fox or a photographer] comprises a little booth set up in front of a butcher’s shop window at night. Inside the booth, a piece of sausage hangs from the ceiling. The installation represents a kind of image-release. In the hope of capturing a photo of an urban fox eating the sausage, the photographer has spent a whole night stalking the fox, waiting, stalking behind the window of the butcher’s shop for it to appear – in vain. 

Photo becomes wall becomes photo, photo becomes text becomes photo becomes installation: photo, text (captions), and installation all blend together in Burger’s work, until, by design, it is no longer clear what is supporting what, who is setting up or triggering which context. Burger fosters a light-hearted iconoclasm; he plays with the possibilities of the image, with the traps that are manifest in production, montage, and exhibition, or in the reception, in the polygonal relationship of viewer, image, motif, material and text. His photo games (alluding to Wittgenstein’s language games) are comprehensive puzzles, which trigger actions while also reflecting on the context of art as an expandable space, where the outcomes are unpredictable, buoyant, and sometimes unfathomable. Double Focus, which features a seductive variety of tulip that misleads bees, has a companion piece of a planter that fits snugly into the corner of a house: this two-part trophy is surely deserved by the artist himself – the amusing, ironically Nietzschean “Hinterweltler” who reflects on visual imagery and meaning.