Shifts / Verschiebungen - N I C O L E P R U T S C H

Shifts / Verschiebungen, 2018, #6 front

Prutsch examines methods of investigation using (historical) examples from anthropology such as that of Jacques Philippe Potteau (1806–1876), who as a member of the anthropological department in the Paris "Muséum d’histoire naturelle" between 1860 and 1869 photographed portraits of soldiers in Algeria, by members of the diplomacy of the former colony in French Cochinchina and the French protectorate in Annam for the "Collection anthropologique du Muséum de Paris". His photographs not only show the portraits of the corresponding people, but they also show the anthropological and ethnographic perspectives that produced the (racist) image of subjects that they thought they were investigating. The fact that his “method of investigation” produced not only anthropological but also aesthetic products is demonstrated by the fact that he already presented his photographs at photo exhibitions in London (1862) and Paris (1863). The analysis process itself becomes a mode of image production.

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Shifts / Verschiebungen, 2018, #2 front and profile

The documentary image, valued for its “image qualities,” comes to the fore as an independent aesthetic dimension and appropriates the supposed properties of the depicted as a photographic motif. The documentary standards of the investigation method is turned into a standard for the aestheticization of (cultural or ethnic) difference. His almost continuous half-figure portraits with a frontal and profile view against a neutral background generate a typology in the context of which racist differences should be conveyed through clothing, skin color, hair style, facial features, etc. The standardization of his recordings becomes the yardstick for generating difference. His photographs only produce the difference they are looking for. What they actually document is less the people than the an- thropological search for a measure of difference, which implicitly are the differences that distinguish the colonial power from the colonized countries and peoples. With respect to the motifs being taken out of context and isolated and tailored to fit an anthropological image standard, portrait photography works like a pair of scissors.

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Shifts / Verschiebungen, 2018, #4 front and profile

The supposedly documentary act of photography documents itself as a mode of cutting with the camera being a pair of light scissors. Prutsch takes up this cutting—the cutting apart and the cutting up—in order to cut into the methodical cuts of this scientific practice, to bring the cut that they make into the foreground and make them visible. By cutting the reproductions of Potteau and elevating the cuts themselves to the motif of her work, she significantly cuts into the history of measurement. What is shown in her work is no longer the differences between the anthropologically tailored subject, but the cuts that underlie the supposedly documentary, objective and apparatus methodology. Methodically and drastically, her scissors cut the scale’s measured demands. - Excerpted from introduction by Andreas Spiegl in Beyond the Measuring Principle

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Shifts/Verschiebungen, 2018, #1 front and profile

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Shifts / Verschiebungen, 2018, #5 front and profile

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Cuts and Shifts Installation view, Neue Galerie Graz, Studio, 2018

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