One noticed the vibrant colors through the windows of the ground floor gallery even before entering: light pink, dark blue, ocher, emerald, purple. Andreas Duscha approaches photography conceptually, through the use of historical techniques, and he characteristically limits himself to the use of black, white, silver and, when making cyanotypes, blue . And he loves murals. For this exhibition,Geplante Obsoleszenz I(Planned Obsolescence I), Duscha tinted the rooms to match the pages of the monograph that accompanied the exhibition as well as a very different space from the white-cube gallery: the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien in Vienna.
Using photographic methods, such as salt printing, that date back to the 19th century, Duscha explores the limits of the photographic medium while creating works with strong aesthetic appeal. Duscha’s exhibition was an ode to early experiments in analog photography; It was chemists, not painters, who invented photography, as Roland Barthes said in Lucid Camera (1980). In his recent works, the artist deliberately favors haptics and process to counter the overproduction and consumption of digital photographs via algorithms and AI. An almost empirical interest in the production of images was evident in Duscha’s “mirrors”, which he has been creating since 2014. They are sheets of glass coated with a chemical mixture (silver nitrate, distilled water, ammonia and Rochelle salt) which creates a reflective surface of different opacities. The pieces are alluring, not only because of a crowd-pleasing return of the gaze (#selfie), but also because of their painterly quality. Part of the larger ‘Palimpsest’ series, 2014–, the abstract mirrored works relate to non-objective painting, while other mirrored pieces have a clear figurative content. In seven works from the “CV Dazzle” series, 2023, the “mirrored” surfaces are etched with various graphic patterns of, as the title suggests, camouflage designed to evade artificial vision systems. Looking at the artwork and their own reflection simultaneously, viewers can position these patterns of computer vision glare on their faces, observing how the use of analog tagging could render a person unidentifiable.
Time is a recurring concern in Duscha’s art. In earlier works, such as the series whose very long title begins “. . . wir lassen alle Uhren zerschlagen(We Have Smashed All Clocks), 2015, “Cry me a river”, 2015, and “Deadline”, 2017, he recorded duration through long exposures, using chronophotography or a camera obscura to capture a period prolonged, rather than a single moment. The recent “Ghostcard” series, 2023, creates an eerily compelling sense of visiting in the shadows: in each of the seven works, reproductions of black and white postcards are superimposed to form amalgamations of buildings that no longer exist. The majestic architectures of the past, such as the twin towers of the World Trade Center or the rotunda which was the centerpiece of the Vienna World’s Fair of 1873 (and the largest dome construction in the world for more than half a century ), are constructed by combining existing photographic representations taken from a similar angle.
What will be preserved and what will be forgotten? What is the role of the artist as an archivist and chronicler, but also perhaps as an alchemist? These are the kinds of questions Duscha posed in the somewhat romantic, museum-like atmosphere evoked inside the gallery. One thing seems certain: for an image to be revealed, extracted, mounted and expressed, it takes the action of light – and time.
