Jörg Sasse - Texte
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Jörg Sasse in Wolfsburg

Flash Art Review by Frank Frangenberg & Andrea Winkler

Jörg Sasse in Wolfsburg - it's like kind of looking at thick little "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" growing up. Wolfsburg stands for "Volkswagen" stands for "Wirtschaftswunder" stands for FRG. As Sasse`s photographic themes are tied up into the specific german cultural stock his works are often moved close to the field of documentary photographies. His early works mostly showed cuts of interiors of this German living culture. Therefore they were often only considered as documentary. But at the same time the themes are refusing their contemporarity. Because of the choosen cut even the most trivial things of everyday surfaces appear as foreign and strange. Therewith the works are in their best moments well managed "objets trouvées" of colours and forms.
The exhibition in Wolfsburg shows a retrospektive profile of Sasse`s oeuvre. Not only the above mentioned early works, analog "real" photos, of which the models in front of the view-finder were in the third dimension, are shown there, but also the recent works, digital "manipulated" ones, which are shown for the first time at Wilma Tolksdorf in Hamburg in summer 1995. The models of the new works are not photographies, which Sasse made himself, but private photo material. He decomposes this material in digital data, which he then edits. The part of unconsciously hold topics at the photo disappears for the benefit of the control of what is constructed. The extrusion of privacy makes it very difficult to finally suggest in the exposed photo/picture the model, so for example in the case of the dissolved small hut to suggest the couple of tourists at the beach. Because of their higher solution, the information of pictures consists in digitalised condition of more details. The solution is even higher as it would be possible with the finest photographic papers. In this high solution, structure, pattern and details of a picture emerge more clear. At the same time the pictures show a disintegration, a disappearance. More than that: the solution of the pictures makes the pictures dissolving themselves, until they loose the appearance of coherence.
And this seems to be the very problem in the trial of a description of Sasse`s works : - what to talk or write about, how to describe the specific effect of solution. This profound quality distinguishes Jörg Sasse`s works from other samples of so called computer art, which often are only arrangements of effects and features, solid demonstrations of technique and it's possibilities, as in the works of artists like Inez van Lamsweerde or Aziz and Cucher.
The frame set from the photos of amateurs - after the adaptation it will be missing and it gets in a certain way kind of out of focus. Information gets refused, something is excluded, one gets uncertain. The former main point of photographic construction gets moved during the work on the photo-material, the pictures are some kind of tilting into uncertainty. Sasse plays with our convention of perception. Because of the lack of points for visual orientation, what is outside the limited representation becomes more and more interesting. In the image itself there`s nothing which holds you tight. The pictures are, but they don`t portray anymore.

Frank Frangenberg, Andrea Winkler, 1995


Link zur Ausstellung