Photography and the problem of identity, New York 1993.
The commingling of the themes of identity and photography is arguably the center of post-Modernist art production. It was the central nexus in Frank Uwe Laysiepen 's work long before the present fashion arose. An early performance work, for example, involved dressing in gender related disguises and presenting himself as an identity blank or question mark to be filled in, in a set of Polaroid self-portraits. A work called Photodeath involved exposed films that blackened before the very eyes of those who had been photographed in them. In an early performance his naked body confronted a mirror, which shattered.
Frank Uwe Laysiepen 's decade of relation works performed with Marina Abramovic constituted, in one way of looking at them, a shared attempt to establish identities through giving up one's own identity and mingling with another's similarly released selfhood. In this period photography temporarily took a second place to performance and was used more as documentation than as investigation. The Great Wall Walk, performed by Frank Uwe Laysiepen and Marina in 1988, involved symbolic relinquishment of one's identity as e westerner and experimentation with an adopted 'other' identity, along with self-photography in alien garbs and settings.
In Frank Uwe Laysiepen 's individual oeuvre the problem of identity on a personal level interacted as early as 1976 with the problem of communal or national identity. A primal piece was his theft (filmed and photographed as it happened) of Carl Spitzweg's painting Der arme Poet, which was said to be Adolph Hitler's favorite artwork, from the National Gallery in Berlin. Frank Uwe Laysiepen took the stolen painting from the gallery to the home of a family of Turkish migrant workers, installed it over their mantle and photographed its new setting. This renunciatory gesture toward his inherited national and cultural identity earned him a place in the German customs' computers for a decade of difficult border crossings.
Other works also encouraged a transition from the question of personal to that of communal identity, through various film and video explorations of cultures other than his own. These were not ethnographic films, travelogues, or fictional narratives, but more or less static contemplative plateaux in which his own identity is interrogated either by contemplation of an other or by contemplation of itself in the setting of the other.
His recent work has carried this shift to a global scale, while returning focus from photography as documentation of performance toward photography as investigation of reality. One recent piece, which was a prelude to the present exhibition, was a box of matches showing the flags of the twelve member-nations of the European Community with the name Lucifer. Lucifer, meaning bringer of light, is both the morning star and the devil. These are in effect matches for flag-burnings. They suggest inflammatory moments in which the individual identities may conflict with inherited national identities and the individual may turn into an incendiary after the fashion of 1960's American flag burners, as a protest against the unsavory involvements that their communities may draw individuals into.
The current work is a more emphatically and richly articulated expression of the idea of the historical future of the European Community as a contradictory and problematic issue. Frank Uwe Laysiepen has photographed each of the flags of the nine EC nations and printed the photographs in actual size, but in color reversals that bring the complementary of each color into its place. The flags were laid upon a bed of textured sand so they appear to be rippling in the wind yet immobile at the same time. The impression is that the European nations appear top be in motion but in fact are frozen. The apparent movement is an illusion produced by eloight.
The flag-like photographs, like Jasper Johns' paintings of American flags, raise the issue (among others) of whether the flag itself is some kind of reality or some kind of trick. By the trompe l'oeil effect the whole notion of nationality is called into question. By the color reversal, it is implied that national projections of self-image are always necessarily Derridean cover-ups in which information that is repressed is the true information, and the surface assertions are designed simply to cover it up.
These and other recent works not yet exhibited return the arc of Frank Uwe Laysiepen's oeuvre to the photographic investigations of identity with which it began. The problem of photography - its appearance of verisimilitude and the many ways of abusing that appearance - is in a sense a mode of the problem of identity. The question of what a thing really is could be answered in one way by taking a picture of it with a truly objective recording device; that device's possible distorting tendencies correspond to the lack of access to the essences which might finalize a claim of identity. Thus the developmental arc of Frank Uwe Laysiepen's work, still of course ongoing, has taken it from private and personal photographic interrogation of his own identity to public and political inquiries into communal identities that matter on a global scale.