21. São Paulo Biennale, Brasilien
21. September – 10. Dezember 1991
Empty Frames, 1991. Aufzeichnung der spezifischen Raumlicht-, Temperatur- und Luftfeuchtesituation zum Zeitpunkt des Biennaleaufbaus. Thermographische Abtastung mit Handkopierer (Detail, 27x8cm).
Franz John – Empty Frames
21. Bienal International de São Paulo, 1991 (Ausstellungskatalog, englischer Originaltext)
Empty Frames is a series of projects, in which Franz John integrates physical discharging processes into his installations. The Empty Frame Installation in the Biennial space is made out of temperature–sensitive paper, which was exposed via a portable copymachine. It´s just that the copymachine did not reproduce a surface of an original as it would have been usual, but reacted media-specific by a CCD-chip to its surrounding as a whole, and produced that way the record of an „error-function“. In the course of this process blackish graphisms, drawings, signs are originated on white paper, differing in blackness, denseness and the shading of grey. There is a dialectic between the picture and it’s constituting materials in every handmade painting. On the one hand one can always describe the material level, where you can perceive colors, canvas and certain techniques but no picture, and you are on the other hand unable to describe why you nevertheless understand this material inventory as a picture; thus the perception of pictures is indeed a creative process, a reproduction in the true sense of the word, a reciprocal activity in relation to painting as such, which translates a seen or an imagined picture via certain techniques and a certain medium onto a picture supporting surface. The handcrafted production of an image is always cultural controllable by education and commission of the painter and is a conscious act. Franz John’s Empty Frames are the result of a mechanical way of producing pictures, rather the model of a complex organical function and just like these nearly uncontrollable. The chaotic structure of it’s signs corresponds with the infinite data which actually constitute the world of today. In so far the Empty Frames are not art but the complex translation of reality into the truth of a machine. To probe onto this machinemade truth as a viewer means to make up one’s own picture, to create art, an art that is up to date. Text by Markus Müller
(…) Franz John, schon 1989 dabei, brachte wieder einen tragbaren Handkopierer mit und nahm auf den langen Thermobändern nichts anderes auf als die Licht- und Temperaturverhältnisse im Ausstellungsraum. Die Streifen hängte er auf ein typisch brasilianisches Plakatgestell aus Eukalyptusholz(1), eine Anspielung auf die Diskussionen um die Regenwaldabholzung. Sebastian Preuss
Auszug aus: German Art in São Paulo, Deutsche Kunst auf der Biennale 1951 – 2012,
Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2013
(1) s. auch: Eukalypse Now, in: Die Zeit, #35/1993