metropolis m

This is the art of absorbed time. By registering the stages of a drawing with a camera, Katja Mater presents us with more than what photography and drawing normally reveal of themselves.‘Does it ever not work?’ I was wondering while Katja Mater (b. 1979) told me about the instructions she had given herself for the parameters of one of her recent pieces. She makes a drawing on a wall in an exhibition space and at different moments during that process takes Polaroid photographs with a technical camera. Six to be exact. There’s one shot that marks the moment halfway through, when everything is saturated with black, before flipping and going back the other way to white. When the Polaroids (as unique as the drawing is – was) are shown in the same space, they’re hung on top of the vanished drawing and then there are five; if they’re shown separately, on a different occasion, in a different space, then there are six: this series includes the shot of the end result, the white wall.‘That can happen, yes. Definitely … things can not work out. And so what I often do is re-make works. Again and again.’Why?‘Well, because something indeed did not work out. But regardless, it’s always a play between, on the one hand, a controlled process and, on the other, a chemical reaction. I can’t predict exact results. Changing light, reflection, a type of paper reacting to moisture, how it combines with paint … these unpredictable ingredients are ones I like because they’re the ones that refer to the moment itself, when I was there, when it was 3-D instead of only 2-D; they refer to the material itself.’ The ongoing series of numbered works called Density Drawings (started in 2010) are related to the Site Specific Density Drawings described above, but are created by a slightly different procedure: during the making of a drawing (or painting) multiple exposures are taken onto the same negative in such a way as to ‘document’ the process of the ‘making-of’. This time though, the final drawing is completely saturated (a monochrome) and the resulting c-print has captured a work that points to what was, but ultimately never really existed. It’s as though the photograph learned the art of implying. ‘The camera,’ Mater explains, ‘can let us see what is truly there, but what we cannot perceive with our eyes only.’ Those of us who studied art history in Holland in the 1990s most likely read Frank Reijnders’ Appearance and Disappearance (1984). I distinctly remember a door opening, a slit not far off here: the idea that something could be and not be at the same time was an encouraging (exciting?) new perspective on the instability of the world and the things in it. Of course their disappearance and reappearance – you would think – depended on the viewer’s perspective. But it was much more challenging to think about the things themselves willing their own disappearance. Like the parts of an acrylic drawing ceasing to exist in real time, only to continue their formal passage via the lens of a camera onto a different medium, namely photographic paper. Parallel Planes (2011), like other works, plays with the recording or the witnessing of genuine ‘events’, in that the actual steps in a process are recorded onto film. However, due to multiple exposures and altering perspective, these so-called concrete elements are subsequently thrown into the realm of the intangible, and the result – a series of two, sometimes three c-prints and a saturated acrylic drawing – manages to straddle the realms of information and interpretation. Mater explains her fascination for the technical aspects of photography as part and parcel of the work itself, as on the one hand necessary data to the narrative (hence the explanatory titles), though on the other, a narrative that should be sufficiently explicit visually ¬– the relationship between the various parts of a work is clear without prior knowledge of the exact ‘making-of’. For her, it’s ‘a balance between how much you give (as maker) and how much you keep for yourself’, that creates the tension between what you see (as viewer) and what you don’t or can’t anymore.In Time Passing Objects (2011), we’re left with the ghost of objects past – sort of. Photographs of geometrical painted shapes (all appearances in Mater’s works until now are geometric) that hang or possibly sit in abstract space while the actual three-dimensional remnants (folded paper objects) of what they were when captured on film are shown in real space/time close by. The eye travels from image to thing to thing to image trying to find the similarities, trying to find the one that matches. But can’t, quite. Again, the suggestion of empirical proof (here, the real objects; in Density Drawings and Parallel Planes, the c-prints) is given to the viewer, though their testimony remains one you might term as having a double status. The English aesthetician Edward Bullough wrote an article in 1912 called ‘Psychical Distance’ as a Factor in Art and an Aesthetic Principle explaining this term he coined. Bullough claims that what the viewer most desires in both the production and his perception of an artwork is ‘the utmost decrease in distance without total disappearance’. In other words, we long for a thing’s vanishing but not for its absolute loss. Like the concept of disappearance and appearance being simultaneous, ‘psychical distance’ allows for two opposing desires to exist as one. Perhaps not dissimilar to Mater’s approach in her own production, whereby strict and rational rules are set up yet formal interests are ultimately given leave to veto them. Mater’s images show us what was there and not there at the same time. Maxine Kopsa is associate editor of Metropolis M