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| Town, Country, River by Jenny Gaschke |
Void, Image, and Distance
The void thematized in the Berlin images approximates Bürkle’s scenes from Beirut, a city that, like Berlin, has experienced both a past war and a new beginning. The photo of a road emerging from a tunnel, winding—new, smooth, and full of promise from the debris and chaos of a construction site—in an elegant curve toward the upper edge of the image bears direct comparison with Bürkle’s photos and paintings of Berlin construction sites. In the Beirut photo, Bürkle provides an aesthetic component to the image of the new street’s dynamic emergence.
In her multiple trips to Beirut since the mid 1990s, Bürkle follows the researchers and artists of 200 years ago who ventured through the Middle East collecting images of architectural monuments that gave the public at home—sometimes for the first time—a concept of the Ottoman Empire. Around 1800, the artists who sought to capture their travels in image were particularly drawn to the current picturesque fashion. According to the art theoreticians of the time, the picturesque in a landscape or town was the unusual, the irregular, even the ruinous. But it was also that which made the scene interesting and image worthy, triggering in its beholder historical and literary associations.
Bürkle’s work updates the notion of the picturesque. As in the case of the image of the street and construction site, Bürkle selects her sights from the city of Beirut, a place of fundamental upheaval, and gives them an aesthetically-founded timelessness by means of her camera. Likewise, her images of Lebanese cities make possible an associative analysis of the present and a deeper understanding of what is represented.
The fact that elements of her Berlin images can be recognized in her Beirut work allows Bürkle to go a step further as she searches for, and attempts to understand, the familiar in the foreign. Here the subject is the city, with its hopes and problems, on the verge of a new start, as well as the architectural will-to-create that accompanies it.
In 2001 and 2002, Bürkle’s work on the Window of the World theme park in China intensified her problematization of how we view the foreign. Located in Shenzhen, one of China’s special economic zones in the province of Guangdong, the park features scale models of the world’s architectural monuments from every epoch. (The Cologne cathedral is placed directly next to the Eiffel Tower.) The theme park gives its Chinese visitors a place to photograph themselves in front of the sights of the Western world without having to travel to reach them. In this way, visitors (as well as the Shenzhen administration) can assure themselves of—even, in a certain sense, appropriate—the cultural tradition of the non-Asian world and make it a part of their lives. For the Chinese, it is neither about the geography, nor the history, nor the size, nor the other relations of these architectural paragons. Like tourists generally, the Chinese put even contrary things in foreign culture under the heading of “sights worth seeing.”
This unifying view of what is distant is sharpened when a European artist turns to the Chinese view of Western culture. Bürkle’s work legitimates, on a compositional level, the impossible meeting of the Cologne Cathedral and the Eiffel Tower. Her work—especially the comparison of the seemingly ordered theme park architecture with her box hedges against the background of the Swabian forest as well as a Zen garden whose “natural” wildness is also a product of cultural design—makes available to us the moment of a culture’s construction and the absurdity of the opposition of real, authentic reality versus false, constructed reality.
Here as well, the ambiguous validation strategy of the picturesque rings through, a strategy that searches in nature for the supremely cultural—i.e., that which is suitable as a picture. Human beings are a rare phenomena in Stefanie Bürkle’s visual world. The relations of size between human scale and architecture are always shaped by polarity. While construction sites let the human being, even if not in the image, seem very small, the relations in Window of the World become convoluted. The buildings are actually much too small, but the human being could enlarge them through the perspective of his or her camera objective. When humans do appear in the image, they thematize, as in the Palast der Republik series, seeing itself or they become like the two amateur climbers at the “Magic Mountain” climbing wall, whose isolation gives them a thoroughly romantic depth. This is the driving force behind Bürkle as an artist: the discovery and presentation of meaning in the world by means of the artfully conceived image.
Jenny Gaschke is the curator of prints and drawings at the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, London. She was previously an intern at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Gaschke studied art history, archaeology, and English in Freiburg, Glasgow, and Berlin. Her research concentrations are European landscape painting and travel culture between the 17th and the 19th centuries.
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