Obst und Gemüse III

Fruits and vegetables—when it comes to still lifes, this topic cannot be avoided. Since antiquity, fruits have been a subject of fine art.
I have often asked myself why I have treated them as a subject at the same time as I dealt with plastic, and why I have treated both similarly as a photographer. One reason may be the unobtrusive but ubiquitous presence of the foodstuffs fruits and vegetables and the everyday plastic objects in our everyday lives. On a purely formal level, it its notable that as far as materiality is concerned, essential to both is the strong coloring and variety in terms of texture. Both can easily be photographed “naked,” i.e., without any attributes or markings.

Still, fundamentally I find it difficult to give a convincing answer to the question about the seemingly unsuspected encounter of the two groups. The topic is ambivalent.

Fruits are organic. They are subject to a life cycle of inheritance, sowing, growth, consumption, decay.
Plastic, a product of chemical laboratories, is not subject to that cycle. Its remnants flood the world without integrating themselves into a reproducing cycle.

Fruits, vegetables, and plastic have in common that as mass products of industrial production, they regularly end up in our shopping baskets. They are basic consumer commodities, and as such omnipresent in advertising. They are representatives of our way of life.

Intellectually, a larger field of tension opens up. Fruits and vegetable inevitably call up the association of naturalness and simplicity. From that comes the hallucination that they might possibly be still connected to a paradisical original state. Plastic, a product of the petrochemical industry, marks the maximal distance to this original state, namely its destruction.

One thought leads us to transcendence, the other confronts us with the fatal consequences of our actions here and now.

It is possibly this collision that led me to treat these subjects simultaneously.

The work E-8, 1997 (…) . A bright red pepper (…) at the center, mirrored like a playing card, and at the same time intelligently duplicated. A horizon and a clear spatial order are intentionally denied to us. For every art critic, trained to look for motivic models and to uncover stylistic analogies, this color photograph is a true treasure trove. In view of the colorfulness and the circularly arranged rectangle that with photographic finesse remain a bit out of focus, we may think of Matissean precursors and models here. Furthermore, in the history of photography, the pepper is hardly innocent. Before the middle of the twentieth century, the American photographer Edward Weston created a quasi timeless portrait of a pepper, which withits extremely corporeal lighting evoked mystical qualities. (…)

Goedicke succeeds impressively in taking up an original artistic position on the very fine line between New Objectivity and food photography, between Pieter Breughel the Younger and Giorgio Morandi. (…)

The instruments he uses are familiar to us mainly from painting. They are the relationship between volume and plane, of light and shadow, and of course the highly skillful use of color which not infrequently create red herrings for us as beholders. I would like to point to lines and ornament-like shapes that cannot be clearly assigned to the respective pictorial spaces. Compositions that slightly disturb the symmetry, horizons that are slightly shifted. This element of blurriness that increases the instability of our gaze. In their sum, all these strategies serve in the end a concentrated interrogation of the images. Photographs that in their quiet concentration develop enormous power.

Christoph Schaden, Speech at the opening of the exhibition “Claus Goedicke,”
Museum Schloss Moyland, 2002