...I am extremely pleased to have at last been invited as a guest to the House of Photography on the occasion of the exhibition by the Austrian artist Marielis Seyler.
Although there is an audience present here of great expertise, I should like to offer some considerations pertinent to the works of Marielis Seyler.
Every society is confronted by a single problem, that society and every individual is transient. Since people have become aware of this, they have actually been occupied with nothing other than mastering this transience; and people have become extremely imaginative in this respect. They have attempted to deal with this transience, through myths and religions, via ideologies and machines. In a society such as ours, in which images have been so important for many centuries, it is also natural that we attempt in our Occidental culture to conquer our transience with them. Since the 19th century, photography has played an utterly new and fundamental role, and that because it is not only a medium that can reflect a visual reality in a new way, but because it is the only image medium in the history of pictures that gives us the certainty that we have existed or do exist. In an elementary sense, photography cannot show what has not been given in one form or another before the camera. I believe that this places photography at a very important starting point, perhaps at the heart of the photographic and artistic work of Marielis Seyler.
Marielis Seyler first and foremost uses photography for what photography is really for, to confirm what a photographic image shows. Whether it is animals or a forest, Marielis Seyler is concerned primarily with depicting the animals and the forest. On a second, so-to-speak artistic level, she begins her confrontation with the photographic image by going above and beyond the purely technical capacity of photography, and brings herself as a person into the picture. Her confrontation with photography, or with the concrete image before her, is an attitude one must describe as reworking or processing, but above all as a process of transformation.
In this she is concerned with two extremely essential aspects: the very personal question of the capacity to experience our existence. Among other things, the processing of the photographic image is begun with the use of the most varied materials, such as wax or earth colours, to enable the capacity to experience existence to be explored by means of an aesthetic discourse.
Insofar we are able, within human possibility, to be an aesthetic being, we are told above all in the artistic work of Marielis Seyler that through photography the world not only gives us a confirmation of its existence, but in the aesthetic work the attempt to escape our transience also remains hidden.
Perhaps you can now understand why this work of image transformation by Marielis Seyler is so important to her. In the moment in which we are able to constantly transform do we achieve the state of non-transience.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote a wonderful essay many years ago entitled “The Age of the Image of the World”, in which his opinion was not that world image meant a “picture of the world”, but “the world as an image”.
Perhaps through this you can understand why in our society the relationship of image and time, since the invention of photography, plays such a fundamental role. The opinion has always held true that photography has the power to abolish and to fix time. It is therefore the photographic medium through which society has attempted since the 19th century to achieve a perennial now. When we do manage to really stop time, we would then be timeless and therefore non-transient.
I believe that Marielis Seyler places her focus, directs her concentration and her attention to this utterly neuralgic point of a social and individual existence. Thus when Marielis Seyler works with photography and in a very personal and subjective way on the transformation, this is an approach that bears the attempt at achieving timelessness.
Perhaps you can also come to understand why in our European society for 200 to 300 years that art, or what we call art, plays such a significant role: because artistic works or the artistic act can represent not only a form of the intensification of existence, and because that aspect is contained within it, we as homo aestheticus can be brought to a state of immortality, when only momentarily, through art.
I have the luck to be able to often watch Marielis Seyler when working. I have seldom seen among artists an artistic approach that can lead to ecstasy through the work. I also believe that in this sense that the work of Marielis Seyler is very singular in an Austrian context.
When you now observe the pictures here, do not forget that the pictures also observe you. And since we are already a society of looking and seeing, we not only find our own identity in seeing and observing, but also the attempt to escape the transience of our existence. You must therefore invest a great deal of time in observing these pictures, because only then when you are prepared to do so can these pictures return the time of your observation. If you also forget to look at the clock, it is all a success.