HEROES OF EVERYDAY LIFE
by Deborah Bürgel | Translation Joanne Moar

Coloured plastic bags are inflated like windsocks by a white household fan. Green bags grow out of a wooden tree trunk. A black plastic bag is lying like a corpse on a pile of industrial pallets. Grey rubbish bags have been arranged in two perfectly parallel rows. Metal storage shelves are neatly stacked with various bags that have been filled with air.

The protagonists of the photographs and videos in The Half of Life Itself (2004-2006) are all common plastic rubbish bags, mostly inflated, in an astounding variety of sizes, shapes and colours. The unusual use of the bags alienates them from their intended function and places them in a new, unfamiliar relationship with reality. In the strange, makeshift visual setting for no apparent reason, the new function of the bags remains unclear; in fact this inversion becomes an ironic parody of determinism. In this “Finality without an end” the bags reveal their unprecedented beauty.

Regardless of whether they are photographed hanging limply on a washing line, neatly stowed on shelves or tied onto two folding chairs while seemingly having a conversation, the bags are the main characters in the images, in which they appear to be on stage. With much wit and ingenuity Tamara Lorenz makes the silent objects eloquent and they take on an unexpected life of their own. They undergo a fantastical metamorphosis: each object becomes a character in its own right. This transformation resembles that of a dream, in which objects are frequently symbolic representations of people, body parts or functions, as described by the psychoanalyst and dream-interpreter Sigmund Freud. In this photographic series the bags function as tropes of everyday reality and represent states and conditions of being human. Playful, dynamic compositions set off against static installations reflect the two contrasting principles of human life, vita activa and vita comtemplativa. Various forms of human interaction and group dynamics are depicted by using plastic bags, for example, to simulate sitting in a circle, standing in straight parallel lines or by means of a ladder that dominates the chaos of an accumulation of bags on the floor. A typology emerges in the course of the series of photographs, in which the bags, as heroes of everyday life, demonstrate patterns of human behaviour. The simplicity of this representation and the complete lack of any dramatic expression distance it from that which it depicts, and thus it becomes a persiflage.
With her sure eye for small and obscure things, Tamara Lorenz seeks out random situations and curious objects in the universe of trivia and collects these in numerous photographs. The peculiar and unique, sad and abstruse, deliberate and incidental, broken and composed, assembled and found are given equal status and together they become the poetry of everyday life. At the same time the individual objects point beyond themselves and are linked in a multilayered network of symbols and meanings. In Mythologies, the French writer and philosopher Roland Barthes describes the supreme elegance and perfection of the Citroën DS 19, which leads him to declare the car as a contemporary equivalent of the Gothic cathedral. But the beauty of the common rubbish bag, its rich diversity of colour and the sculptural quality of its inflated form is rarely noticed and appreciated: there is possibly no item in the common household that is more trivial. Tamara Lorenz stages them in her photographs and videos and at the same time attacks their identity, by bursting them or slowly letting them deflate. In the video Operator (2005) from The Half of Life Itself, using her body the artist tries to burst one inflated bag after the other from a seemingly inexhaustible supply. The air escapes with a hissing sound, a loud bang or a strange rustling, sometimes quickly, sometimes only after a lot of pressing and turning, twisting and squeezing. In so doing, strange sculptural forms are created. The squeezing and pressing, transposed onto the person carrying out the action, can be interpreted as the moulding and carving of sculptural forms and as a metaphor of the artist and the creative process.
Both the presentation of basic and repeated actions and the technical simplicity and stillness of Tamara Lorenz’s videos – she neither moves the camera nor edits the take – are reminiscent of early video-work by the US artist Bruce Nauman that he produced in his studio in the early sixties and which show him carrying out simple actions. His video Stamping in the Studio (1968), for example, shows him doing just that – stamping through his studio. The principle of repetition is also central to one of Richard Serra’s videos. Hand Catching Lead (1971) shows a hand catching strips of lead as they fall down one after the next, holding each briefly before letting it go to try and catch the next strip. The energy and physical effort required are clearly visible as the hand becomes slower and obviously fatigued. Once again in Operator it is the representation of repeated physical exertion coupled with the varying reactions of the different rubbish bags, which determines the minimalist dramaturgy of the 19-minute video. The never-ending repetition of an action without any discernable goal or purpose, central also to the videos drag and drop or dropdown (2005), conjure up associations of the myth of Sisyphus, who is cursed to roll a boulder up a mountain and then watch as it always rolls down again. The French Philosopher Albert Camus defined Sisyphus as the absurd hero, who is happy because he is conscious of the futility of his task.

Her sculptural treatment of materials, play with form and non-form, and interest in sculpture and process, link Tamara Lorenz with the extended definition of sculpture prevalent since the 1960s and with the exploration of the artistic process of representation. This theme is central to her 30-minute video Soap Opera (2005) in which inflated bags fall into the space of the image one after the other. The image changes slowly yet constantly and it literally grows. The typical association of rustling and crackling is removed as the bags sink silently into the frame; the viewer focuses, almost meditatively, on the ever-changing image and the video becomes evocative of the process of painting. The complexity of the relationship between the two visual media becomes apparent. On the one hand they are very sculptural and, emphasised by the constructive quality of her precise, simple composition, they are characterised by their three-dimensional appearance; on the other hand they are images, photographed moments in time or kinetic sculptures captured in a video frame. Photography puts the temporary sculptures in the picture and documents them, not so much to reproduce them but rather to invent a new reality. Through the staged settings the individual moment is invested with greater meaning. The photographs however don’t hide how they have been made. On the contrary, props and supports, a multiple power socket and even the grey studio floor remain visible. In this way photography and video confine the objects to a world of their own. Through the established distance the objects in the images are alienated and removed from their everyday triviality, thereby gaining independence and autonomy. The photographed constructions conceal neither their temporal and momentary states nor their delicate balance.
The temporary sculptures resemble our instable constructs of reality. This can be observed in the three-part photographic series Pragmatic Principles (2005) – a series of experiments in which complex constructions of wooden slats are captured onto light sensitive paper, before the gravity defying transient things of beauty threaten to collapse again.

With its geometric compositions of black rectangular cardboard, photographic stands and dark black, glossy, inflated plastic bags, the work Beings of Noble Origin is representative of the series The Powers That Be from 2007. The black plastic bags attain an extraordinary expression of individuality – or is it the viewer who projects this into the smooth outer surface, which is formed by nothing more than air? The individual characters are like those found in character studies or reference books for facial expressions widely known to artists in centuries past. The heavy black constructions appear to be precise and yet at the same time they are oddly imperfect, as slight irregularities can soon be detected in the perfect, symmetrical shapes: the underlying structure and the texture of the studio floor are discernable; the wall and the photographed materials can be seen. This charming imprecision undermines the individual heroes of this series and their ambitions to establish, by throwing around their macho weight, their supposed power and substance, and slowly deflates their inflated egos. In her half-serious formal precision, which evokes associations with hard edge painting or other approaches to formal geometric painting, The Powers That Be is an ironic commentary on constructive, formalist painting, sculpture and photography, as well as their demonstrations of power and force.
With similarly ironic earnestness Sigmar Polke also humbly obeyed the commands of the Higher Beings more than once, at the same time as mocking stereotypes of abstract painting as in his painting on canvas Higher Beings Commanded: Paint the Top Right Corner Black! (1969). The character of the Higher Being, unmistakably recognisable in the typical plastic guise seen so often in science fiction scenarios, as, for example, the plastic figure of Darth Vader from the cinematic saga Star Wars, also seems clichéd. This photographic series is neither dedicated to the hero nor the anti-hero, but rather it deals with the in between - the ordinary and everyday - out of which it extracts, as if with alchemy, the metaphysical.

A photograph from the series The Half of Life Itself depicts a curious encounter. On a small table lies a pair of ladies shoes. There is a fully inflated blue plastic bag underneath it, a glittering garland of green tinsel on the wall above it, and a splayed peacock-like fan to the left of it. As in Lautréamont’s much quoted image, surrealist avant la lettre, about the beauty of a chance meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table, objects, which have no logical connection to each other are brought together here to mingle, while the unloved bag stays under the table.

Surreal encounters of the most diverse objects often occur in dreams, when disparate fragments of the dream are united into one situation. As in dreams, the works of Tamara Lorenz are also full of non-competing contradictions – sad and strange, absurd and hopeful, tragic and ridiculous, random and precise, incidental and persistent. They are full of humour and multilayered innuendos and references, as for example when an accumulation of bags hanging on the wall like a picture is entitled Sated Workforce and ironically refers to the saturated canvases of gestural painting. Tamara Lorenz conveys mediocrity in poetry and discloses small moments of happiness in everyday life. Through minimal, barely noticeable displacements in the usual order of things, moments of imperfection in our world are revealed, not maliciously, but with playful earnest and subtle humour. Her visual stories are parables of human life in its transient beauty.
Footnotes