Selfportrait

CR 109. Year 1993

Selfportrait Jochen Gerz CR 109 web 1 Montreal

Coming finally to a halt in front of the picture, she saw something else: As if she were moving, everything moved, even as she stood still. While her eyes tried to hold on to what they saw, her mind ...

Text and picture, the two components of description, are thereby subject to their specific possibilities for existence inside and outside time; the text, itself tied to the stretching of time, and the picture which exists without a purpose, and which seems to intend to make a certain moment present for us. Gerz gives the two elements aspects of timelessness in his particular use, when he uses the narrative time of the texts in the time-indifferent form of the past, which in the European culture of writing both eliminates the working time of the writer and transposes the time-quality of the action into an incomprehensible dimension.

Ulrich Krempel 1988

Categories

Installation

Red vinyl letters, pane of glass Size variable

The text is applied to the outside window of an exhibition room.

A similar version of the text is part of the installation entitled A sense of attention (107). On the basis of the installation the edition entitled Dear Stieglitz (838) is realized.

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver.

Exhibitions

Montréal 1993 (Meaux 1993). Vancouver 1994 (Newport Beach 1995. Purchase 1996. Winnipeg 1996/97). Tel Aviv 1995

Bibliography

I: Vancouver 1994, p. 103. Düsseldorf 1997, pp. 215-21

Access general bibliography

My name is Jochen Gerz