The Brooklyn Rail

Astrid Klein’s “photoworks,” on display in New York for the first time at Sprüth Magers, operate on several levels. The eight photographs of collages, printed at movie-poster scale using a photographic enlarger, depict female film stars of the 1960s and ’70s. The grainy gray-scale images are pulled from newspapers or magazines—in some, like Untitled (painting my life…) (1979), you can make out the tops of words that ran in a headline or an advertisement underneath the figure in the original—but four of the collages also feature color, either the hues that heightened the source material, as in Untitled (transcendental homeless…) (1979), or as vestiges of process. In several, Klein reproduces the peachy-brown tape that held the assemblage in place along with wisps of phrases, bound by ellipses and crossed out by strings of Xs, typewritten onto scraps of paper or directly over the pictures.

In juxtaposing image and text, the photoworks investigate the possibility of equivalence between the two forms of expression, as well as the slippage that occurs within what remain distinct forms of communication. These inevitabilities were examined in the conceptual work produced throughout the 1970s, and Klein’s pieces nod to that by including thoughts that do not necessarily correspond with the images we’re beholding. A double image of Brigitte Bardot—Untitled (je ne parle pas, …) (1979)—includes the phrases, “je ne parle pas [I do not speak], je ne pense/ rien [I don’t think anything] to paint my life/ to paint my life/ so many ways[.]” How do these words relate to the publicity images of the actress? Is the first-person statement meant to be Klein? Or Bardot? Or are we reading it to ourselves in our own voices, translating it as we go? Such questions are what the artist herself seems to be asking, as she notes that the two are, “equivalent formal means that I use to develop my works.” We might also ruminate on the various roles that the actresses played, both in the movies in which they performed and as faces linked to the debates around sexual liberation. Here, despite Klein’s protestations to the contrary, we can detect the political at work, “in the dense, poetic meaning of the term, finding an expression that directly illuminates the cruxes and abysses of human existence,” as Doris von Drateln wrote in an early review. It is especially felt in the pinup pose of the figure in Untitled (la sans couleur…) (1979): she makes eye contact with the viewer as she looks over her shoulder, while her contorted yet seductive body assumes the position of the famous Sleeping Hermaphroditus sculpture of classical antiquity. The text accompanying this image reads, “la masque est la sans couleur [the mask is without color].”

In addition to these observations, my thoughts kept coming back to the temporal. Whether it’s in the tracking of how a collage is built—which elements get placed first, and what comes next—or even in the act of photographing a collage to begin with, Klein’s process is such that the timing of things is always kept close to the surface. Brigitte Bardot had stepped away from film for several years before Klein produced this series of photographs, and what were universally understood in the seventies as typed letterforms indexically produced now read as merely a font (Courier New) used to convey typewriterliness; these elements are “dated” several times over. As the philosopher Gerhard Richter has discussed, though art exists in the present, photography itself is a medium of “afterness”: the photograph always follows what it tracks, it is a doubling. The afterimage (Nachbild) of photography is echoed in the translations that we undertake when reading texts in languages not our own. That Klein is interested in the translation, the double, is reinforced in the second room of the exhibition, which houses three “White Paintings,” all dated 1988/1993, each of which includes duplicated texts and the suggestion of imagery picked out in ghostly white acrylic and gypsum alabaster. Two of the paintings include metallic silver elements, one painted and the other made from crinkly foil, that reflect light and nearly mirror what is before them. The largest canvas is gridded and includes the word “Wahnzettel” written twice in sans serif letters and with additional iterations reproduced more lightly just behind them, as though the words were casting shadows (the Wahnzettel were Friedrich Nietzsche’s “delusion notes,” produced after his psychic break). Astrid Klein’s practice of working in series—to restate but not necessarily to repeat—reverberates throughout the show: we witness her returning to her strategies even while the image that we confront when entering and exiting the gallery admonishes us to “leave no memoirs [memories].”