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Claudia Rogge: U N I F O R M
The beginning of modernism, whose roots go back to the age of enlightenment and the beginning of industrialisation in the 18th century and which reached its first heydays in Western metropolises in the 19th century, was accompanied by the development of two seemingly paradox and contrasting phenomena, individualism and mass society.
The trend towards uniformity of economic systems, mass transportation and mass media, which we nowadays associate with the term globalisation, also leads to a certain uniformity in peoples’ life designs. That is why many people want to stand out from this homogenous crowd. The various forms of subjectivism and standing out from the masses that were tried out in the first avant-garde movements since romanticism by artists, actors, and poets became a model for an individualistic concept, whose mirror image was reflected by fashion and its two extreme representatives, diva and dandy.
Once daily needs are covered, and often times even before that, people begin to display their own individuality, from clothing and hairstyle to piercing and tattoos; all this is intended to ascertain their uniqueness within a mass society. And where this striving for individuality goes hand in hand with lifestyles that seem to contradict traditional ideas and values, it is once again the object of intense criticism from orthodox religious circles of different origins and is regarded as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western liberal lifestyle.
It is from this sociological development that Claudia Rogge derives her central theme, the relationship between the crowd and the individual. Her central thesis, however, reduces the dichotomy between crowd and the individual to absurdity. For her, individualists are also representatives of a role model, whose different ways of expression, in the last analysis, can be traced back to social conventions. She does appreciate this striving for individualism, which is closely linked to the pursuit of personal freedom, because it extends the individual’s range of options to act, but in the last analysis it remains a first or second order derivative of accepted social standards, to which it remains structurally linked – even in its provocative negation.
Claudia Rogge has sounded out her subject matter in different ways and with different strategies. Following her work in the public space with her two projects “mob il 1” and “mob il 2”, the first one being multiple reproductions of babies’ heads and the latter one multiple reproductions of crouching men, which she exhibited on her glass-sided truck in many European cities to trigger off an open discussion, she moved on to photography and thus entered the space dedicated to art in the narrower sense of the word. Each of the pictures of her “Rapport” series, which was first exhibited at Voss Gallery in 2005, shows individual human beings, mostly in a static pose, whose photographs were mounted into regular groups with the help of a computer. Intersected by the image borders, these groups seem to extend far beyond the visible space, and they produce a striking perceptional-psychological effect, which consists in the attempt of our perception to comprehend each individual figure as a single real-life person in spite of the apparent identity of the models that are multiplied in the picture. Even before the onset of any rational thought, this contradiction generates a tremendous suspense, which can only be broken, if the concrete form of human bodies gives way to their perception as a pattern repeat. Accompanied both by the fascination and horror of uniform, well-disciplined crowds of people, an ambivalent field opens up, full of associations, ranging from the military to prisoners’ camps, sports and variety shows. After a series of other works, in which Claudia Rogge further explored the topic of pattern formation, by arranging figures and parts of the body into ornamental configurations, which, as installations, could then be used to decorate walls and floors of rooms, in her current pictures she now differentiates the crowd in a new way. The pictures at the U N I F O R M exhibition no longer depict single models in largely static constellations. Her new pictures are characterised by an encounter of different protagonists in spaces full of action and determined by movements. For this purpose, she took pictures of her models in several postures and in different sequences of movements, a process, which increased Claudia Rogge’s workload tremendously, since she now had to look at about 10,000 pictures, select them, and process them on a computer for photo-mounting. Her photographic work was preceded by an analysis of masses with a view to identifying basic role patterns, which the protagonists of her pictures embody as role models. These protagonists form the iconographical background for a deeper understanding of her pictures, in analogy with the personifications of an allegorical concept, which was used in the Occident to illustrate types of being, types of action, and ethical concepts.
Claudia Rogge’s prototypes carry poetically sounding names that convey their meaning. Names like the female soul catcher, the criminal, the icon, the relevant man, the woman that is being evaluated, the unworthy, the conservative woman, the spiritual man, the follower, the intruder, and the one who passes judgment. This does not mean that these prototypes are tied to a specific gender, nor does Claudia Rogge claim that they all exist in their pure form. In real life, these prototypical aspects always exist in a mix, and yet often individual aspects dominate and determine the perception of others and one’s self-perception and define the position and the action of the individual within a crowd.
Like in her “rapport” series of pictures, spatiality is created by the arrangement of the figures inside the space of the picture and through the perspective she chose for the shot. But from picture to picture, this arrangement follows a different, complex choreography. The picture, in which Claudia Rogge simulates a Mexican wave, forces the viewer to envisage a grand stand full of naked protagonists. Her pictures, in which persons are running towards a centre, or away from it, however, point to a space with an oblique upward inclination. In other pictures, plane surfaces are the ground, on which the figures are placed inside the space. The lighting atmosphere is dominated by a dramatic setting of light against dark, which reminds us of the tradition of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, and instils a stage-like presence into the situations she depicts. Of equal importance is the flesh colour of the skin of her naked prototypes, above all in relation to the apparel of the others, which follows an almost monochrome scale of mostly dark hues. Whereas one part of Claudia Rogge’s prototypes are defined – in Gottfried Keller’s spirit - by the clothing they wear, by the costumes that reflect their role in society, the other part is defined by their bodies, which describe them in part, in the double sense of the word. Thus, sections from Robert Musil’s novel “Man without Qualities” cover the body of the unworthy. In addition, others are permanently marked with tattoos. These characters, which run in parallel across the bodies, can be perceived as a pattern that resembles a leopard’s skin. And in this way, groups of naked bodies, sitting or crawling on the ground, acquire an animal expression, which may even become threatening when they move towards the onlooker.
The different pictures in the U N I F O R M exhibition, whose protagonists are presented individually in separate and full frontal pictures in a separate section, can be interpreted as specific patterns of social interaction within a crowd. Not only individuals can be role models for a pattern that questions their own individuality; also when acting what is perceived by society as our own free will, we very often follow well-established rules, which sheds a critical light on the highly-praised freedom of decision. And these questions are up for discussion. But Claudia Rogge’s pictures are not just limited to this; over and above their critical potential, they have an aesthetic power, and maybe she herself appears as a seductress in them, since searching for ugliness in her pictures would be in vain…
Text by Thomas W. Kuhn, Düsseldorf, Germany
The Difference of Repetition
“Selection is made among repetitions: those who negatively, identically repeat, will be eliminated because they repeat only once. The eternal recurrence takes place only by the third repetition, within the third repetition. The circle can be found at the end of the line”. Gilles Deleuze In Claudia Rogge’s work mass is really a whole representing a single body. Around this singleness of the body her images connect with each other and develop themselves. By a special procedure the artist covers (and makes the images cover) a distance in a direction opposite to that of the body, which, on the other hand, is never represented, turning into the intricate road of the bodies’ multiplication. The bodies’ repetition is however not a simple pattern or theme, but the pattern we find here shows to be different from the initial form. The accumulation of the same image suspends the individual’s identity, who is then massified and ordered at the same time, by this repetition. Then a real uneasiness circuit starts between whom observes and whom is observed, where the singular look is forced to repeat its attention towards singleness and multiplicity, within a time coinciding with that empty center where all these images refer to. Uneasiness reemerges after the repetition of the same individual where the body plays the role of the model or pattern to turn out into declension: persona/personae. The person (man, woman, adolescent or child) in Claudia Rogge’s work is really the mask to which the Greek etimology refers: prosopon. But repetition is what moulds the shape of the single body and person. Then from a body pattern we have a body of forms. They are often people in uniform, suggesting the unique form, that is the uniform. Here repetition emerges from indifference and mass representation refers to historical images that reminds of massacres and all these places which have historically witnessed the indifference of history. Claudia Rogge standardizes bodies, she gives them a single shape by multiplying them and, above all, operating on the order which clashes with all disorder of personal individualities, starts a revision process of the use of photography which announces the end of each individual narration. This is the focus of her work, because these bodies not only remind of the classical iconography of the body, but they give back to the image the overcoming of any narration, the end of all tales. In the end, by their technological replication, these bodies give the idea of a collectivity which is by now only a uniform mass. Here there are no classes or individuals, here the only reality is represented by the rationalism of an order which overcomes the identification of the body-mass and stops referring it to the pre-eminence of being. It is exactly the opposite of the ideas expressed by the School of Frankfurt and particularly by Erich Fromm. Here no one is and no one has. No one is himself and no one has got himself. However everything is in order, everything seems as it were this way. It is the real sense of order which dominates Claudia Rogge’s images and however, through that quite geometric order, photography performs its last function, cutting the image itself, limiting and edging its capture, that, at last, proposes a centre without a centre and of a margin without a margin. Here development is endless, indifferent, uncontrollable by order and vision. What happens beyond the edges of these images? Beyond the uniformity of these people? Is there still a difference from reality? The difference in itself and the repetition for itself in these images are invisible. Identity and similarity are questioned and strongly visible. And the uneasiness which some images of children or adolescents cause is really only the fruit of our false conscience of seeing better than looking. Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that “differences not similarities look like each other”, they show that the relation between the identity of the image and its representation develops the difference of repetition. Something has changed in the history of images, the idea of mass cannot be represented as subject, turned into object, it can undergo an inverted process compared with the historical images of rebellions or massacres, of crowds consuming shows or occupying urban or touristic spaces. The mass which Claudia Rogge shows, is a mass without space, it does not consume, it does not look, it has got neither time nor history, it is completely deprived of any object reference (the clothes themselves stand for the standardization of the same bodies) and at the same time it is subject of representation. These images declare the end of History and on the other hand they announce the difference of Histories.
Text by Antonio d’Avossa, Salerno, Italy