INJURIES

You examine this figure and at the same time discover the infernal power, the dreadful fragility, the weakness: that which is unconquerable in the extremis of frailty
(Marguerite Duras)

If one occupies oneself more intensely with Marielis Seyler's comprehensive photographic work, an artistic focus crystallizes which deals fundamentally with the broad thematic spectrum of injury, being injured and injuring. Since the beginning of the nineties and following the resumption of her artistic photographic activity, she decided - to a certain extent unconsciously - to make her artistic strategy the confrontation and possibility for making visible the most various forms of injury, whereby the tension between nature and culture, and the element of chance, plays a not insignificant role. In this catalogue the artist has made a personal selection of her works to retrace this general aspect and present not only the possibilities of comparison, but also developments given chronologically.

One of the earliest complexes of works, which focused on the theme of injury, was created in 1992 under the title "Natura Naturata". The starting point for an - in several respects - artistic transformation is seen in the accidental discovery of animal cadavers found in the near vicinity of the artist's environment. Marielis Seyler preserves these finds, felt by many to be disgusting or abject, to serve as the setting for complex meditations upon mortality, injury and death, and subsequently upon infinity. The lifelessness of these objets morts is heightened in their photographic depiction, which taken in light, non-spatial surroundings throw practically no shadows - they develop, one might say, no physical or bodily presence, and leave no trace in the world. The artist holds them captive in spatial suspension; they appear not to be of this earth but float in an artificially created limbo between life and death, which is an effect created through the alienation of photography. The reductive photographic mode of the photographs negates time and space to the extent that they present a statement made both objective and generalized, but at the same time the photographs are prepared as projection areas for further processing with purple gentian, earth, wax or other natural materials with which Marielis Seyler intuitively places differing accents in the pictures. She thus marks the centre of the injury in the photograph of a dead lamb with red wax, while in other works within the series the injury or cause of death remains fully absent and in its place a protective, covering component is given through the reworking in the picture. Thus for example in the photograph of a lifeless bird lying on its back, its feathered stomach appears to be softly draped in a veil of pale purple gentian, which shrouds the dead body and packages it almost tenderly - as if in balsam for eternity. The dead and defenseless body, mostly met only with disgust and fear, is given back its essential dignity. Because and despite their vulnerability, they are inviolable, because an artistic barrier is created by means of the reworking, which makes that which is beyond depiction, and that which is frightening, perfectly recognizable. The artistic motivation behind these pictures appears, as already formulated by Richard Milazzo, to demonstrate Marielis Seyler's far-reaching capacity for empathy, sympathy and sensitivity for the injured and helpless body. The loving solicitude, which appears to be expressed in the painting, is seen almost as a projection of a soul, which wishes to be itself embalmed. Now when Marielis Seyler takes on the plight dead animals, cares for and immortalizes them, she heals her own injured soul, which is now protected through the shield of art. That which is disgusting and of no value is transformed by her on an aesthetic level, whereby she also treats her own pained sensitivity and transcribes what is made visual to us, the observers, who now experience her sense of esteem.

The motif of injured nature, which is embedded in an artistic reworking, unites "Natura Naturata" with the "Engravings" series created in 1999. Details of tree trunks photographed with extreme patience, form here the photographic starting point of the work, whereby the visual and at the same time textual accent, as the title leads one to assume, lies in the carved and scalloped traces made by a human hand in the bark of the tree. Through the process of reworking with red pastel chalk, Marielis Seyler accentuates the already given aspect in "pure" photography, intuitively and more precisely: the intensive layer of red chalk leaves fills only the figure-like inclusions of the carvings, governed by the choice of packing paper as a base for the pictures in their basic brownish tone, is reminiscent of scars. Through the complex interaction of several artistic processes - finding the motif, photographing it, as well as the act of reworking it, in "Engravings" Marielis Seyler also achieved in the simplest and most unnoticeable things within her surroundings the creation of general metaphors for human emotionality, or even images of the soul. Thus the incisions in the bark of a tree can be understood as an allegory of the character of a human created by the environment and other human beings. Very similar to the bark of a tree, a person also stores - externally as well as deeply within - injuries and other emotional "marks". But the photographic pictures of the bark of a tree appear to say, with these wounds and injuries, as deep as they may be, we continue to grow.

If the main focus in "Engravings" is focused on the making visible of these scars, the injuries in "Precious Objects" changes from a purely motif-like experience, or the sensory level in paper as a material, whereby an almost leitmotif-like theme by Marielis Seyler in connection with injuries is made manifest: the dealing with and experimentation with surfaces and their structures, which has already been announced in "Natura Naturata" in the reworking of the photographic paper. In "Precious Objects" the artist now chooses a transparent paper as a base for the pictures, on which the photo-emulsion is applied. Through the development process, the paper receives a vital, in part, torn - thus injured - three-dimensional surface, which lends this series the character of transient photographic objects. The paper is emancipated of its function as a base medium and becomes predominantly a base for a purpose, such as supporting the photograph in its power of expression, as in the preceding series of integrated natural materials or colors. Marielis Seyler developed pictures of bare, sometimes completely leafless trees, in detail or in their full size in the center of the paper. Thus in black and white ensues through the opaque white of the paper, a mistily veiled graphic web of twigs and branches, which awakens the semblance of touching tenderness and fragility, which is hardly to be grasped in the photography and which repeatedly retreats in a grayish mist, but become literally comprehensible on the level of the paper. One can also speak more of landscapes of the soul here, which as photographic objects symbolically demand in their vulnerability to be handled with care, as opposed to actual, topographically concrete landscape photographs.
"Precious Objects" is therefore also at the beginning of a new phase of confrontation with injuries. If a strategy of protection and preservation somewhat dominated in "Natura Naturata", Marielis Seyler herself now takes on the role of the injured by crumpling and slitting the paper. As a result she then constantly develops this concept further to a point where she transfers the responsibility for the injury to an accidental incident. But beforehand she examines the handling of people with injuries who are mostly unknown to her, resulting in "trample pictures" from a performance-like situation. This series comprises large-format photographs with motifs chosen by Marielis Seyler herself. The artist consciously chooses objects that are all to be considered as fragile, tender and vulnerable, something of a collection of the most differing snail shells, or a small unprotected child, which appear to crawl over the paper. This is then subjected to violence when visitors to a coffee-house - which was the scene of one of the performances - walk over the spread-out paper and spill liquid onto it. These traces then finally contribute formally to the composition and replace the gesture of alienation in Marielis Seyler's earlier photographic pictures. The artist now distances herself fully from this process of reworking and withdraws to a position of pure observation of the way in which people deal with her challenge of walking over a small child and to visually injure the child with their shoeprints. The copy of a sculpture of Maria Theresia assumes a special role here, because its "reworking" by Marielis Seyler was directed to a second person through instructions given orally. The reworking, which was realized purely in the moment and through the action, appears to grapple with the Austrian empress as an exemplary, strong woman and person of authority, whereby feelings of ambivalence towards her are seen in the work. An orange-yellow nimbus surrounds the head of the depicted, but on the other hand, however, her body is marked by scratches and violent attack.
While the accident is seen to this day to have been predominantly directed by intuition, or embedded within the context of an everyday event, these components in the last series, which Marielis Seyler chose for this catalogue, are fundamentally changed. The starting point for her "Open-Air Pictures" are again on large-format paper, on the surface of which photographs of objects were developed, which Marielis Seyler photographically "picked up" - such as a bird's nest of twigs and grass - within the natural landscape of her close surroundings. But instead of further changing the structure of the pictures by her own means, the artist this time allows the transformation process to take place fully and naturally within nature: paper was spread out in the garden and thus subjected to the weather and made accessible to wild animals that gnawed or made holes in the paper. If the theme of injuries began with nature wounded in the form of a dead animal, which with purely artistic means was to a certain extent cared for, the catalogue for the "Open-Air Pictures" resolves in a development of a return turn to nature, to the powerful forms designed by nature. A circle also closes in content, in which nature previously subjected to injury now injures itself and appears destructive, although the "Open-Air Pictures" are to certain extent a symbol of reconciliation in which Marielis Seyler presents the injuring and being subjected to injury as being merely a part of a natural and necessary cycle of life. Maria Schindelegger
Vienna, 2003