Juergen Teller - Swimming, Glemmingebro, Sweden 2015 - 2015/2017
Juergen Teller's new edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST is a self-portrait as swimmer, though we wouldn't recognize this figure as him from looking at the picture: at the center of the shot, far from the camera and shoreline, just below the horizon, which tilts ever so slightly to the right, the artist appears as not much more than a speck within the bluish-grey expanse of sea and sky. At first glance, it may seem that he is staging his own body in a Romantic tableau.
Renowned for his portraits of celebrities, Teller often poses them in peculiar or even clearly uncomfortable situations, tripping up even the most un-camera-shy. His pictures convey a distinctive intimacy, whether via the physical reactions he captures or the goose bumps and bruises he doesn't hide. Teller's photographs are affecting precisely because they convey the ostensibly unvarnished truth.
The motif he chose for this work - a swimmer at sea - may recoil the aesthetics of conceptualism or a trope native to painting, but Teller turns this familiar model literally around: rather than bidding farewell to the beholder end the world, he is approaching from the distance, his right arm raised above the water in mid-stroke. Teller shows himself here swimming toward the camera: putting aside irony and Romantic Idealism, the protagonist in this natural scene genuinely aims, here, to meet us.
Medium: Giclée print,
Size: 25.4 x 30.5 cm
Edition of 120 + 20 A.P.
Numbered and signed certificate
Price: € 350,-
Josh Kline - Swallowing News, 2017
The rise of neo-fascism, the persistent denial of climate change despite its already devastating impact, the increasing threat of nuclear war ― to keep current on world events today is to submit to a stream of information that, in its sheer intensity and terror, is utterly unbearable to directly engage. However, rarely do we engage directly. Rather, we receive the news already narrativized, already calibrated to elicit a certain adrenaline/affective response and with just enough of a cliffhanger to ensure we'll need more. And as readers, we cannot help but keep coming back, taking the news like a ketamine drip, no matter that it renders us catatonic save far the reflex to perpetually refresh the feed. The news immobilizes us physically, but also politically, as the mimetic tendencies of social media warp our commonly held lexicon beyond rational use We connect through this new psychedelic process of language-making, but in a way that makes us tribal; in a way that causes us not to better understand each other but to weaponize words along micro-political lines. And yet in this narcotized news space, we believe news to be good for us, a supplement we take daily to stay abreast of world affairs even as our ability to democratically respond to them feels increasingly compromised.
Josh Kline addresses this contemporary condition in his edition for TEXTE ZUR KUNST, Swallowing News, framing the once broadly trusted New York Times as an addictive drug. For the work, pages from the Gray Lady have been pulverized to fill medical-grade gel-caps and portioned into individual prescription vials:
Medium: Plastic pill bottle, spray paint, gel capsules, New York Times newspaper
Size: 9.4 x 4.1 cm
Edition of 60 + 20 A.P.
Numbered and signed certificate
Price: € 350.-
These limited editions by Juergen Teller and Josh Kline are available at Texte zur Kunst
