Dieter Appelt
In the second Self-Portraits Appelt also presses himself against glass, but here he takes a stab at using photography’s transformative powers. We see a nude Appelt in a variety of positions–sideways, upside down–as if he were floating in a tank of water in some otherworldly, disembodied space. In each photo some part of his body–chest, shoulders, buttocks–is flattened against the glass, and we realize that his weightlessness is an illusion: we’re merely looking up at him lying on a piece of glass.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In two of the images from the 1890 series “Tableau Oppedette,” Appelt stands on a ledge wearing a gigantic set of wings (the actual wings are also on view, above the photos), as if he were about to take flight. The cavernous space that surrounds and dwarfs him seems to invite a journey forward, but the regular geometry of the near-triangular wings effectively separates them from the organically textured surrounding surfaces. Just as Appelt cannot pass through the glass of the Self-Portraits or of the camera lens, here he’s imprisoned in the flightless human world, isolated from nature, his wings recalling past human failures at flying.
Searching out guns and corpses may also have indirectly inspired the 1977 “Eye Tower” series. Appelt built a large tower out of tree trunks and branches bound together with linen and placed it in an Italian lake. In the photos, a nude Appelt assumes different positions in this tower. In one he sits near the top, with a commanding view of the surroundings, but in most of the others he aligns his body with some of the sticks. His poses when he’s pressed against them, curled up within them, or has his eyes buried in his hands make the work’s title seem ironic: this observation tower, which seems to guide his body to rhyme with its lines, actually cuts him off from his surroundings, turns his eyes away from the world and back on himself. Like the camera in the early Self-Portraits, the tower is an image-making device that ultimately denies contact with real objects.
The finished Space Tableau is monumental. Two grids of 15 and 24 prints over 30 feet wide are linked by a single print along their bottom rows. In some prints, the object appears almost completely solid and still; but most mix solidity and implied movement. Some use multiple exposures to superimpose traces of an object on itself in different positions. In many, the object appears to sit on a kind of base, almost like a sculpture; in other, the object has no visible support. The lighting is similarly varied; some objects are lit from a single clear source; others from harder-to-identify multiple sources; still others are lit evenly. These mysterious photos seem at once abstract light studies and machinery from another planet, its physics operating on different principles of light and motion. While the turn-of-the-century futurists and their celebrations of mechanization were one of Appelt’s many influences, this work is no paean to the machine. These sui generis images are beyond any obvious explanation; they’re neither glorious nor horrible. Appelt creates without judging.
And so my favorite of his works, along with Space Tableau, is the most hermetic and abstract: the 1993 mixed-media piece is Canvas Tower and Drawing, at Ehlers Caudill. Towers are typically heroic, assertive, phallic; but this canvas one is nondescript, about four feet high, its lower half square and its upper octagonal, its cream-colored surface revealing little detail. It has minimal presence. The drawing is a network of black lines and shapes punctuated by white areas. At first it seems there’s an image behind the black, but on closer inspection it’s revealed to be another abstract pattern of varying shades of gray. Canvas Tower and Drawing is the diametric opposite of a Nazi sculpture, a work that asserts no power, almost no physicality, no identifiable emotion. Instead, in the tradition of mystical art and thought, it proclaims its own absence.
