CHRISTOPH KELLER Christoph Keller, Introduction | Page 5

medium specificity has been widely contested, the
engagement with the specificity of a medium has
surfaced as important mark of artistic sophistication
and rigor. In her groundbreaking 1978 essay, art
historian Rosalind Krauss wrote: “But what appears
as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as
rigorously logical from another. For, within the situation
of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation
to a given medium—sculpture—but rather in relation
to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for
which any medium—photography, books, lines on
walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used.” 5
Exhibition View: Grey Magic, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2015
Artists such as Keller who choose to deliberately
employ the specificity of a medium according to
each individual project appear especially attentive
to a medium’s highly charged histories of forms,
significance of technological methods, and the
plethora of art historical, cultural and social
connotations. At its most reflective and conceptually
nimble, this approach of articulating each project
through a formal execution appropriate to its
conceptual basis, allows Keller to employ a medium
as richly connotative sign.
For Keller working with multiple mediums has become
an integral part of his practice, incorporating their
associative histories and contiguous meanings into the
projects. This might include epistemological models
from diverse and distinct disciplines: anthropology,
behavioral theories, physics, the history of science,
fringe or pseudo scientific explorations, or the
development of technological apparatuses and media
studies. The formal heterogeneity coheres around the
artist’s rigorous attention to the structural logic of each
operation: form, medium, installation, and conditions
of display are carefully coordinated, their individual
connotations orchestrated to achieve coalescence
while still preserving the works’ openness.
The artist’s sustained thinking about media and
photography (perceived in its theoretical definition
as a practice that, along with the givens imposed by
its technological apparatuses, also determines the
conditions of its production, distribution, and reception)
exemplifies Keller’s play with the complex associations
of a medium. Combining elements of the photographic
and cinematic, in his early career Keller invented
processes for recording time photographically: devising
cameras that transported the film during exposure,
creating what the artist called Rundumbilder (all-
around pictures) that registered movement and by
implication time. Working to overcome the limitations
of the medium—influenced by experimental and
structuralist filmmakers such as Bruce Connor, Maya
Deren, or Stan Brakhage—the apparatus determined
the parameters of the formal outcome. 6 The images
seem to dissolve the photographer’s perspective into a
temporal continuum, a technologically assisted process
that invokes psychological operations, namely the
dissolution of an unchanging self, and an awareness
of its motion in time and space. The extensive series
of Rundumbilder photographs—almost constituting an
archive itself—addressed contemporaneous theoretical
discussions, such as the indexicality of photography,
the durational condition of cinema, the experiential
aspect of viewing art, and the dissolution of the
authorial subject.
Detail: Menschen am Alex, 2000, Lambda-Color
13,2 x 123 cm (CK 038)
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