A Certain Point of View
Candida Höfer: Louvre VIII
Rather innocently I went to an art exhibition. I wasn't expecting anything, and that is when it always happens isn't it? You are blown away and end up thinking "wow!" A few days later, hopefully, more coherent thoughts sneak in - but for those few days your brains is just trying to sort out all the impressions. The artist in question was German born Candida Höfer. This is a few days later - and these are a few more coherent thoughts.
Candida Höfer: Louvre VIII
Museums are power. Not in a packing-a-punch sort of way, but more the power of preservation. They frequently preserve objects, but they also preserve and help maintain certain points of view.
Höfer's art focuses on the latter aspect. She shows how in the Louvre the art of Ancient Greece and Rome are situated in cathedral like surroundings. How the impression of this art is given added significance and severity because of its surroundings. The clue is that when art is given venerable quarters the impression rubs of and the art appears more venerable as well.
Candida Höfer: Louvre XIII
There is another aspect made visible by Höfer’s images - and that is the role given to these statues as art. Once many of them were cultic objects - fames statues from famed temples placed in clearly religious surroundings. Now the surroundings are much more secular and the focus is on the objects aesthetic side and foremost their role as art-objects with a clear place in an art historical context. Notice how the statues and paintings are placed in a row - lined up like scientific specimens. Which in this setting they are.
Candida Höfer: Louvre XVIII
Not all religious art is turned into art historical objects. That is a process mainly fixed on western cultic objects. Religious art from say Africa or the Pacific is just as often found in Ethnographical Museums. Here its is sometimes displayed side by side with clothing, cooking equipment and the occasional wax doll illustrating the person whose objects these are.
Imagine the same with say western religious objects from the Middle Ages? A gilded Madonna next to a wax doll dressed as a friar. Perhaps he is shown writing on a piece of parchment and on his desk a candlestick decorated with religious symbols. The text to the tableau informs the viewer of the friar, the work he is doing and uses the words "typical scene". The Madonna statue is only mentioned in passing - identified not so much by title of the piece (as it would be in an art museum) as by use. "Religious object illustrating the Goddess Virgin Mary, ca 1230 North-France".
Candida Höfer: Deichmanske Bibliothek, Oslo
Höfer’s art also focuses on other places than museums and power structures in more general settings. For instance the library as the wall of knowledge and the power the written words have in our culture. A book automatically receives a certain sense of authority. If it’s written down then it must be important. Right?
Candida Höfer: Juristische Bibliothek, München
Perhaps books are seen as objects of power because they preserve? Books are caretakers of society’s memories - all its facts, poetry, stories and songs. The books remember this so that we don’t have to. If we wonder we can look it up.
In this light a library is a powerful thing - in this light it’s a place of power and preservation. Much the same as museums.
Candida Höfer: U-Bahn Station, Theaterplatz, Oslo
I also find significance in the fact that most Höfer’s images lack people. It’s the structures and surroundings that are depicted and the people - the users of these structures - are left out.
On one level the lack of people make the structures shine more clearly. On another level what is deliberately absent is also always of significance. Without people the rooms and the halls of Höfer’s images appear, at least to me, like hollow, empty places. They are structures devoid of the very characters that invest them with meaning. Without people the structures appear stilted and a little artificial - and that is perhaps food for thought all on its own.