Prospekto gallery and Goethe Institute Vilnius presents famous German photographer's exhibition "Dressur real" The exhibition runs from 26 of January till 20 of February 2005.
Today more than ever we live in a forest of signs. It is both a semiotician's delight and a pleasure for artist and viewer to walk down a street and drink in the myriad images, signage, architecture and other constructs that simultaneously pass before our eyes.
Add the obvious noises and sounds, hip hop, brass bands, machinery, conversations, and the twittering of birds and beasts, and it becomes the soundtrack to the movie of our lives, our daily performance. It is all right under our noses if one knows how to look, or, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes admonishing Dr. Watson, one must not just look, one must see.
Cologne-based photographer Wolfgang Zurborn has a flair for finding the incongruities of day to day life we often overlook while we go about our business. In a series of images that cherish the absurd he leads the viewer through a cavalcade of vignettes in the strangest of most normal places. It's just another walk around the block for Zurborn and his camera, but for the viewer, a revelation. Whereas in the white spaces of those ancient maps that charted unknown territory, terra incognita, beyond the realm of the known, the cartographers of yore would render fanciful creature with the warning, "there be monsters," Zurborn gives us monsters and more. The pictures delight.
Dressur Real-the title refers to Roland Barthes's concept of dressage or conditioning of the eye, a mode of leading the viewer to see things in certain ways-represents a way of seeing the fractured modern world in its overlapping images and contexts. Zurborn has the knack of finding the sublime in the ridiculous condition of modern life, a Dadaist awareness of the found object-the ready-mades of architecture, advertising, and the masses in the street, and a surrealist sense of humour in the collision montage of juxtaposed, multi-layered images combined on a single picture plane. He seems to detach the pieces of images from their referents and recombines them into a new mosaic that remains a straight photograph. His photography, at once thoroughly modern in its attention to the post-modern effects of signs and symbols, is, however, thoroughly classical and refers the viewer back to the fact that what the camera does best is to represent the world in front of the lens. It's all there if only we can condition ourselves to see it. As such, Dressur Real is photo history in a microcosm and humorous to boot.
Bill Kouwenhoven
