Plastik III

In this way a laboratory comes into being, a sanitized sphere in which nothing but the essential visibility of the objects has a place. Goedicke’s photographs call up memories of advertising pictures created under studio conditions: pictures with reflective surfaces, meticulous lighting, and immaculately groomed objects, frequently in lurid colors. He is alluding to this idiom while at the same time subverting it. As a form of camouflage he utilizes elements of its grammar, but he does so in order to formulate a contradictory statement. For where the language of advertising wishes to communicate the semblance of unambiguous clarity, (...) it is precisely the multiple layers of the objects, the inexhaustible dephts of their appearance that Goedicke’s pictures plumb. (...)

But what interests Goedicke more than anything else is how the putative identity of the single object is altered when it enters into a dialogue with others, and what happens when, say, the background changes? These seems to be formal questions but behind them the fundamentally questionable nature of reality looms. By that he means the process of constant change where the visible is in a permanent state of flux for which we have no concepts, know no reasons, but for which, nevertheless, modern art by trying many and varied approaches has developed a pictioral language. (...)

His pictures are an affirmation not of single objects with an unquestionable identity which sets them apart from one another, but rather of a constant transfer among them. Their contours are only a distinct line at their outer edge. But when they stand alongside one an-other it is the spaces between them that are thematized, a zone of color exchange full of implications which transcends the physical boundaries. (...)
More important than the objects here is what is made visible between them. From these pictures in particular it is clear that the visible can reach beyond the nameable.

From: Heinz Liesbrock, Zwischen dem Sichtbaren – Claus Goedickes Stilleben,
issued in Goedicke Hatje Cantz Verlag 2001

Claus Goedicke devotes himself to things at a point when their life span would normally be over, and they would have landed in the trashcan. He walks backwards on the path of design, “undresses the containers” and returns their original nudity to them. In his photographs, cleansed of all traces of use, they shine in the new brilliance of a seeming inviolability. As if they had just sprung from production and could never age, the containers in these photographs are starkly contrasted to how we usually deal with them. […]

The shapes as signs of everyday life are reduced to what cannot be taken from them: color, materiality, and form. Their display in these photographs is the search for the knowledge the photographic image can provide about things, and it is a reflection on the scope of the gaze.

From: Maren Polte, Der Fotografische Akt – oder die Nacktheit von Flaschen und Bechern, [The Photographic Act, or, The Nudity of Bottles and Cups], published on the occasion of the exhibition “Ganz in Weiß,” Galerie Ulrich Fiedler, Cologne 1999