IVAN BERCEDO, JORGE MESTRE. Las sombras más habituales representan a dos ancianas que caminan cogidas del brazo, una niña de perfil con una mochila y una joven en jarras. Vemos su silueta de forma persistente en los carteles de las asociaciones de vecinos, los trípticos de los ayuntamientos, los anuncios sobre las medidas de seguridad de los aeropuertos y los programas de los partidos políticos. Personifican a la gente. Al carecer de rostro, pueden ser cualquiera. Al tener unos rasgos tan definidos de edad, género e indumentaria (cultura), aparecen como individuos reconocibles. Como grupo, encarnan al conjunto de la ciudadanía en su diversidad social. Los diseñadores gráficos utilizan estas imágenes silueteadas como sinónimo de pluralidad y democracia; y, en cierto sentido, son el complemento perfecto de la representación tradicional de la justicia como una mujer con los ojos tapados. La edad de oro de la silueta coincide con la época de las revoluciones burguesas, la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII y las primeras décadas del XIX, justo antes del advenimiento de la fotografía. El retrato del contorno del rostro de perfil es una alternativa rápida y barata al retrato pictórico y escultórico. El dibujo se sistematiza: el modelo se sitúa posando de perfil entre un foco de luz y una pantalla, y el retratista resigue el contorno proyectado a contraluz. El rostro se sintetiza para reproducirse como icono. Las siluetas de George Washington y Jane Austen se difunden así fácilmente entre sus muchos seguidores como recortables o impresas en positivo y negativo. Esta simplificación será llevada al extremo un siglo más tarde por el diseñador Gerd Arntz y el economista Otto Neurath, del Círculo de Viena para la concepción científica del mundo, que convertirán la figura humana en número y en estadística. Sus figuras isotópicas han ocupado definitivamente los gráficos de la prensa, los rótulos de los centros de congresos y las puertas de los aseos públicos. Sin embargo, en los tiempos de las revoluciones americana y francesa, el retrato silueteado todavía no implica igualdad sino una diferenciación respecto de los retratos de la realeza y de la aristocracia y a las imágenes religiosas. El contorno de la cabeza con el rostro completamente ennegrecido no deja de ser un ejercicio de iconoclastia; y, en cierto modo, es el contrapunto perfecto de la guillotina. Al igual que la sofisticada máquina del Dr. Guillotin, también el término “silueta” es un epónimo que proviene de Étienne de Silhouette, un patético secretario de finanzas de Luis XV, protegido de Madame de Pomapadour, cuya mala gestión le hizo rápidamente impopular y objeto burlas. La silueta es así en origen la caricatura de un gobernante ridículo. Pero lo realmente curioso del término es que Silhouette era de origen vasco y, de hecho, su apellido es una adaptación al francés de Zuloeta, cuya etimología remite al zulo, al agujero, a la caverna e, irónicamente, al mito de Platón.
Referencias animales.
Estos meses han coincidido varios anuncios en los medios de comunicación en los que la desaparición de la figura humana (o su presencia fantasmal) se complementa con una reconquista del espacio por parte de los animales. Estas imágenes de ambientación espectral se basan en el trabajo de Karen Knorr. En su serie Fables Knorr fotografía a animales recorriendo libremente los espacios deshabitados de las vi- llas campestres y pabellones de caza: los Castillos de Chambord y Chantilly, la Kenwood House de Londres, el Museo de la Caza y la Naturaleza de París, y edificios emblemáticos de la mediación entre arquitectura moderna y la naturaleza como la Ville Savoye de Le Corbusier. Estos espacios están atestados de referencias animales. El control de la naturaleza es inherente en ellos al esplendor y al lujo; y el contraste que produce la presencia de los animales en el lugar en el que son representados como trofeo es profundo. Cada fotografía escenifica un relato paradójico: un ciervo observa un tapiz en el que un ciervo es abatido mientras los conejos se reúnen sobre un canapé Luis XIV y las gallinas picotean bajo los butacones tapizados; un zorro observa a una liebre que descansa en una alfombra persa, junto a un fresco de una cacería en la que los sabuesos acorralan a un zorro; un grupo de ratas en un salón rococó se levantan sobre sus patas traseras para entretenerse con una escena pastoral en la que un gato acecha a unos polluelos; un pájaro carpintero repiquetea los tablones de un montaje expositivo en la sala del Museo de la Caza; los gorriones, las urracas y las grullas han hecho suya la consigna de Le Corbusier de eliminar la diferencia entre el exterior y el interior doméstico, y deambulan tranquilamente por su sala de estar. La naturaleza ha dejado de ser natural, pero al contrario que en las fábulas de Esopo y La Fontaine los animales no encarnan aquí a los humanos, ni representan su vicios, actitudes y pasiones. Más bien los sustituyen, con una lógica simétrica a la suya. El resultado es absurdo y revelador.
Fábulas de Esopo.
Las fábulas de Esopo siguen adormeciendo a los niños, los animales de peluche les protegen durante el sueño y las películas de Disney los hacen omnipresentes en la decoración, la ropa y los envoltorios de comida; pero los adultos sabemos que los animales son fantasmas: los que integran la industria alimentaria están ocultos, los domésticos se han transformado en personas y los salvajes trabajan de actores. Cuanto más se estudia e investiga un animal, cuantos más reportajes y documentales se le dedican, cuanto más presente está en los medios de comunicación, más seguros estamos de que nunca nos encontraremos con él casualmente y que lo más probable sea que esté en peligro de extinción. Todo esto los sabíamos ya desde hace bastante tiempo. La novedad es que ahora, afuerza de representarnos a nosotros como sombras y a los animales como fantasmas, estamos desarrollando un sentimiento de compenetración en la irrealidad. No se trata de nada muy intelectualizado, no tiene demasiado que ver con la sostenibilidad, ni con la globalización, y ni siquiera tiene un efecto subversivo o político: no es más que un reflejo.

- Why did you choose a uniform format for your earlier black and white work? What determined the choice of typographies?

A conceptual approach structured the series. Similar lighting, camera angles and conventions of environmental portraiture were employed throughout the work. The typographies vary depending on the series: Gentlemen uses ‘Garamond,’ Country Life uses ‘Boldoni’ and Connoisseurs ‘Times.’ Belgravia utilises ‘Century Schoolbook,’ evoking a school textbook on upper class ideas and attitudes constructed out of conversations. In order to point to the artificial nature of the text composed beneath the photographic image certain key words are capitalised, such as “Privilege” in “There is nothing wrong with Privilege, as long as you are ready to pay for it.” A very privileged position indeed!

- After several series in black and white why did you decide to work in colour?

To change and challenge my working methodology, but I also thought the bright cibachrome colours, verging on “kitsch,” were appropriate for disturbing aesthetic judgements on taste. In England bright colours are considered “garish.” Recently at the Courtauld symposium on Indian wall paintings I witnessed that such discourse still seems to underpin academic notions of taste.

David Batchelor’s book Chromophobia discusses this fear of corruption through colour. The idea of a classicism based on a phantasized Greek ideal of the pure white temple was much cherished by English connoisseurs during the Victorian era when colour may have been considered effeminate. In fact these Greek temples and statues were once painted and coloured. Yet there are beautiful coloured rooms designed by the Adams in Kenwood House and Osterley Park House which delight in the use of colour and the Etruscan Italian style. It is in this rooms that I staged a contestation of the “canon’ of the collector’s taste bringing in the allegorical motifs of chimpanzee and Diana the huntress to disrupt the symmetry and proportion of taste.

- You have been worked in series since 1979. What makes the serial form possible?

It is a matter of meaning, with different tensions to be found in the work. As one goes from “room” to “room” there are different stories and ideas being told. Irony and humour are difficult to produce in one photograph; several are necessary to make various points about class, power and privilege.

- Your work has an element of social conscience. Is there a documentary tradition in your photography?

Yes it is social documentary. The Belgravia series, exhibited at Photo España, describes class and power amongst the international and wealthy during the beginning of Thatcherism and Reagonomics in 1979. I was also interested in showing the different gender positions within the family: women talk about kitchens, motherhood, marriage; men about the stock market and cattle breeding. The work looks at the lifestyle of youth, who are wearing designer clothes, clubbing, thinking about their debutante parties, but who are also interested in power, glamour and rebellion.

The photographic works Gentlemen (1981-1983) and Country Life (1983-1984) further elaborate on the social aspirations of the English middle classes, investigating the marks of distinction that ally these classes to conservative aristocratic values where primogeniture is still an issue. Until the early 1970’s married women still needed her husband’s endorsement for any household purchases. Whilst woman now have full property rights, they still remain under represented in key positions of governance and in financial and academic worlds. It is still a boys club in which some women are honorary members.

I wanted to make critical work that used humour to tackle attitudes prevalent amongst the English establishment in the 1980’s under Margaret Thatcher. Despite being Prime Minister and head of the Conservative party, Thatcher as a woman was not allowed full membership at the Conservative Gentlemen’s club ‘The Carlton.’ Old Etonians, like the present leader of opposition David Cameron, still belong to such Gentlemen’s clubs.

- Could you tell us a little bit about your work Belgravia? Could you describe the relationship between images and text? How would you describe the relationship between your work and “the everyday,” the theme of this year’s festival?

Belgravia is a cosmopolitan and rich neighbourhood in London near Harrods in Knightsbridge with many non-domiciled residents. My parents lived in Belgravia and the first image of the series is a photograph of my mother and grandmother in the front room of our “maisonette” on Lowndes Square. Whilst certain members of my close family held relatively conservative views I did not share the same lifestyle positions or opinions as those of other Belgravia residents. Belgravia is therefore a critique of class using the tools available to me as an ‘outsider’ on the inside. I think the work becomes grotesquely funny when one does not agree with the ideology described. A few of the people in the photographs could not see this humour or irony, since they lived completely within the ideas and attitudes I was critiquing. The work was produced in anger against social injustice, provoked by a desire to challenge the lack of fairness and equality in life.

When I made this work there was already a well developed celebrity culture appearing in the gossip pages of Tatler, Vogue and Harpers & Queen magazines, yet simultaneously there existed this very private world of the rich and privileged that I wanted to show. I was an implicated observer documenting what I thought at the time would be the last dying embers of class distinctions in Britain yet it still lingers.Prince Charles recently used his royal power and influence to dissuade investment in a Richard Rogers’ project on the site of the former Chelsea barracks.

The meaning of the work can be found in the space between image and text: neither text nor image illustrate each other, but create a “third meaning” to be completed by the spectator. The text slows down the viewing process as we study the text and return to re-evaluate the image in light of what we have read.

The work describes the ‘everyday’ of a privileged minority. Historically, portraiture of the upper classes has tended to be flattering but the combination of image and text brings this work closer to satire and caricature, without losing the strong reality effect specific to photographic typology. All the people portrayed become actors and perform their identities in a collaborative fashion with me. At times there is a real complicity between us.

- How has your work evolved since the photographs we see in the Photo España exhibit up to the present day?

Academies, a series started in 1993, researches the history of ideas that underpin western aesthetics, exploring the transmission and reproduction of such ideas through the fine art academy and the museum. The work explores the foundation myths of European fine art culture and the link to national identity and patrimony, traces of which remain today in art institutions such as Goldsmiths College where I was a visiting tutor. Photography and women have changed the academy, more than 50% of my students at the University for the Creative Arts are women. Things are changing but resistance still remains and an even playing field is difficult to achieve.

Elements exist in my work that continue to ‘trouble’ the realist endeavour: captioning and use of titles, taking different points of view of the same room, the framing and presentation of the photographic object. Each series searches for different ways of disturbing everyday conceptions of reality and taste. Photographing animals from a natural history collection in a fine art old masters painting; the use of furniture to disturb the immutability of the Wallace collections at Hertford House in London; a woman tracing a shadow on the wall of the Royal Academy in Stockholm, referencing Butades’ daughter; a black hand lovingly stroking Canova’s Psyche, transgressing the taboo of touch.

- In Fables you introduced animals into a variety of different places including palaces and museums. What are you trying to achieve with this series?

Fables develops some of my earlier issues around power but in a more playful manner. The work is staged in national heritage sites around France, including Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Museums of national collections become animated by animals, creating scenes that allude to the stories of Aesop and La Fontaine. Some of the animals are dead but others are alive, photographed in zoos and studios. The rooms themselves have been photographed from a very low position in order to identify with the animal’s gaze.

The work marks a transition between analogue and digital photography. I still shoot on film that is then scanned before postproduction on Photoshop. There are now multiple times which are brought together and become layered in the photograph: the time of the animals photographed in their environments or studio, the very slow time of photographing the interiors with a large format Sinar camera. Some photographs now take months to make whilst others are quicker. I compare this work in its infinite detail to “phototissage,” a form of photographic stitching or weaving, rendering the pixels like threads in a tapestry.

- Which kind of current photography interests you? How do you see your work in this context?

Photography of all types and places interests me. My work enters into a dialogue with bird photography, architectural photography, documentary photography but also pre-photographic forms such as painting and sculpture.

- What projects are you currently working on?

A series of images and films exploring Mughal architecture in Rajasthan, India and the stories engendered by such spaces. Making work for an Indian audience referencing the myths of one of the oldest cultures on earth is both challenging and frightening. In addition I am completing a commission at the Louvre museum in Paris that explores its collection of paintings and antiquities, whilst also helping set up a transnational photography research centre with a digital archive at the University for the Creative Arts with my colleagues at Farnham, Surrey, where I continue to teach undergraduates and postgraduates in photography.

Established in 1768, the Royal Academy of Arts aimed to elevate the status of the artist. Instead of teaching practical skills to the commercial artist, the Royal Academy encouraged its students to create works of high moral and artistic worth. The monkey perched before the easel in Karen Knorr’s ‘Painting after Nature,’ photographed in the Life Class Room of the Academy, can be seen as an example of a civilised post-Darwinian gentleman engaged in a refined and educated endeavour. Yet traditionally the monkey is known for its ability to ‘ape’ or imitate reality. In photographing the monkey, Knorr draws upon a nineteenth century trope of the photographer as an organ-grinding monkey who cranks a handle to generate a tune. Photography was satirised as an unskilled and repetitive endeavour that could be performed without thought, even by a mindless monkey. Comparisons were also drawn between the artist and the monkey: both were able to copy without thought, but neither were believed capable of creating an original art work. Such beliefs are compounded by the teaching methods employed within the Royal Academy. The importance of copying old master paintings was stressed to students, alongside drawing from casts of Antique sculpture, examples of which are documented by Knorr in ‘The Order of Things.’ Knorr inserts her own naked body into the space of the Royal Academy, mimicking the pose of Manet’s 1863 painting ‘Olympia’ and using the same title to make her quotation explicit. The ruse of Manet’s motif suggests a criticism of such teaching based on the duplication of copies, indicating how academic training of this kind may result in a lack of creative originality.

In composing her portrait in the Life Class Room, Knorr draws attention to the contentious practice of life drawing within nineteenth century art institutions. Whilst studying the human body was considered vital to academic training, the naked body was often cited as possessing the ability to morally corrupt students. Consequently, male students had to slavishly copy engravings and anatomical figures before they were permitted entry into the life class; women, in their brief two year admittance to the Academy, were forbidden from witnessing the naked form. The brutal castration of the sinewy male figure in ‘The Order of Things’ testifies to the conservative values of the time. Defiantly confronting the viewer’s gaze, Knorr’s ‘Olympia’ disrupts the academic institution in which she is located on several levels: as a woman, Knorr trespasses into the exclusively male domain of the Life Class Room; as a photographer she intrudes into the sanctuary of the ‘creative’ artist; and in her nakedness she confronts a taboo of conservative Victorian society.

The viewer must therefore consider how far society has since evolved, or alternatively, contemplate the possibility that the values represented by the Academy still persist today. Issues of preservation permeate Knorr’s images. As photographs they fulfil the desire in man, identified by André Bazin, to “preserve, artificially, his bodily appearance […] to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life.” In photographing statuary and taxidermised animals, stuffed and preserved after death, Knorr also documents attempts by others to fix the corporeality of the body. The Wallace Collection, in which several of Knorr’s photographs are set, is similarly preserved within a specific moment of time. Amassed by generations of Marquises and Lords, the collection of art works and artefacts was bequeathed to the British nation in 1897. The bequest dictated that no item was to ever leave the collection, even for temporary exhibition, and that no new works were to be added. The Wallace collection remains hermetically sealed and impervious to change, embalmed within the moment of its donation, a relic from the end of the nineteenth century that registers as anachronistic to a modern day audience.

The animals that appear to wander through the rooms of the Wallace collection exist, much like the museum itself, in a space suspended between life and death. A monkey and parrot resting on the back of a wolf in ‘High Art Life After the Deluge’ are artificially kept in the hold of life: as taxidermised animals they are irrevocably deceased but appear at their most animate in the photograph. Freud discussed this uncertainty over an object’s status as alive or inanimate in terms of the uncanny. Yet the uncanny element of Knorr’s photographs is not located in the potential animation of the dead animals; rather it concerns the value systems preserved in the patriarchal and aristocratic spaces she photographs. Freud stated that uncanny experiences can be prompted “when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed.” The uncanny makes itself felt in Knorr’s images through a realisation that the antiquated values embodied by institutions such as the Royal Academy and the Wallace Collection, values which should have been relegated to the past, still linger over the production and reception of art today.

The title ‘High Art Life After the Deluge’ offers a clue to interpreting Knorr’s photographs. The flood metaphor, with its biblical allusions, threatens a destruction of old values in order to make way for a new culture. The satire that runs throughout Academies suggests that we should look towards a renaissance in culture that will finally allow outdated beliefs to be relegated to the storerooms of the past, alongside the ornate gilded frames and antique sculpture casts.

The problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations, but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations.

AS WE MOVE closer to another millennium, we enter a period of transition marked by the rapid expansion of global markets based on lesser developed countries’ cheap labour force. Technology, the media and its owners, will run the world of the future. Those who own the means of production in the media are becoming a major force in international politics. The future president of the United States may well be Ted Turner, Head of Cable News Network.

Meanwhile, in England, the heritage industry has developed a captive audience with its views of history. A heritage trail of stately homes and preserved villages that conjure up past hierarchies of tradition, authority and allegiance, fascinate the modern tourist. Coal miles, steel and textile mills become picturesque in areas once considered the industrial heartland of a proud national labour force. Leisure and tourism define our relationship to the English landscape marked by sediments and layers of its industrial past. Views and prospects of the past; a green and pleasant land, fertile fields enclosed by hedges, teas and cricket matches on village greens, vicars cycling off to never- ending glorious dawns with church bells pealing their sweet refrain. Wright of Derby, painter of the landscape of the early stages of the industrial revolution, has been replaced by Claude Lorrain, famous for his mythical Arcadian landscapes. The sublime has passed; we truly live in the age of the picturesque.
In the era of Bosnia and Maastricht, questions of identity and nationalism inevitably raise their bloody heads; ethnic cleansing in South Africa, Iraq and Bosnia; Le Pen in France wants France for the French; national parties rising out of the ashes of communism; in London a candidate from the British National Party wins a seat in Tower Hamlets.

British national identity is undergoing changes particularly in its relation to Europe. No longer an island separated by the channel but now linked to France by the cross-channel tunnel. Doubts have arisen concerning the social charter and the Maastricht Treaty. There is a growing fear that an elective dictatorship of the majority parliament can no longer be relied upon as a guardian of individual rights. There is now a call for a Bill of Rights by Charter 88 which would protect those liberties. There are calls for a written constitution. With the 1989 revolution in Russia, things are changing at an alarming rate in Europe. These changes are bound to crack some of the revered pillars of Britain’s parliamentary democracy.

I will now present some of the issues which concern my recent work. It marks a shift from the realist style that I have employed in the past , but is nevertheless the logical outcome of my earlier work, particularly Gentlemen(1981-83) and Connoisseurs (1986-93) which, with recourse to irony and humour, set out to criticise the received ideas of a privileged elite in British culture and society. The Virtues and the Delights takes as its objects history, aesthetics and the landscape, and woman’s position in this essentially male order of things. It parodies history-painting found in the classical academy and at what some call the ‘end of history’; it takes another look at history.

The Britannia Commission

In 1991 I was approached by the South Eastern Arts, Kent County Council, Towner Art Gallery and the Cross Channel Mission in England, with the Britannia Commission. I was attracted to this commission by the possibility of researching British history and how it related to the memory of an ‘imagined community’ of nationals in Britain today.
Britannia personifies an idea of British virtues such as military and imperial might, which reached their zenith towards the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. The image based on Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, appears on Roman coins. It is an allegorical image meaning ‘other speech’. It says two things at the same time: showing one thing and meaning another. Initially this woman with the shield commemorated the subjection of the various tribes in Britain. This image underwent changes; the pile of coins at her feet (wealth) turned into a beehive (industry) and during Victorian times the spear changed into a trident, representing Britain’s maritime strength. Britannia, the only portrait to appear on British bank-notes before 1960 had been adopted by the Bank of England as its seal in 1694.

A repeated theme in allegory is the use of the female body which personifies virtues. Marina Warner in her book Monuments and Maidens reminds us that, although women embody virtues in allegory, their presence in this sort of symbolism does not guarantee power, nor does it imply that women actually possess liberty or wisdom. The French, despite having used Marianne as their representative of freedom, liberty and equality, did not give women the vote until as recently as 1945.
Although the allegory Britannia has popular appeal (particularly in its Iron Lady guise), I rejected this bellicose image of conquest. The underpinnings of this image and its imperialist past became the sort of history the project set out to challenge. The empire with its invented traditions based on customs of crown, sceptre and robes, had to be exorcise Britain with France had another heritage, another history, which had been too long submerged by a prolonged collective melancholia for past glories.
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled with the presence of now.

Walter Benjamin argues against historicism which culminates in universal history, comparing it with historical materialism which understands the present in terms of transition. History, in his view, is seen as a dialectical movement in its relation to the past. Universal history musters a ‘mass of data’ (dates, places, wars) to fill what he calls ‘homogeneous empty time’. This illusory continuum of history entails not an identification with those marginalised by its movement, but with a heroic scenario of events and victors.

There has been now for some time a critique of this universalist history with its linear pursuit if progress. There has been a paradigmatic shift in which the new historical writing allows a chorus of voices to speak. It focuses on a process and not just the moment, on the scene and not just the individual, on the body and not just the figure.

A storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel no longer can close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

The Virtues and the Delights

The Virtues and the Delights, a work in progress, looks at some of the historical foundations of what we call progress (in Europe) in order to examine (perhaps salvage) some of the debris. It is a vindication of female and male philosophers who have the courage to use their understanding in pursuit of an equality with difference. This enlightenment is one that respects cultural, racial and sexual difference.

The work is bilingual (English titles and French captions) in order to emphasise the common heritage of French and England in shaping our hopes for an egalitarian and better future. Framed colour photographs of different formats (circular, rectangular and square) refer to the decorative panels found in 18th Century houses. Texts from the philosophers accompany the installation of the work. The disposition and hanging layout of the work changes according to the site.
The Enlightenment is interpreted as an ‘unfinished project’ which promotes a secular ‘principle of human perfectibility’ (surely there is still room for improvement), where beings are affirmed as active agents determining their independence and futures. To regard it as a totalising project culminating in the horrors of modernity is to vulgarise it and reduce it to the cliché of the object/subject split in Cartesian thought. It is more complex than that and unfortunately the scope of this piece of writing will not permit elaboration.

History, and its exclusion of women, slaves, blacks and others is the master narrative that early feminists in the 18th century challenged. They knew what virtue meant for women (chastity) and how it delegated them to the margins of history as mothers or educated helpmates to Great Men. Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Women disputes the Rousseauist vision of woman as ‘natural companion’ to man, who aims to please and delight. If women pursued knowledge for its own sake, she argues, they would no longer be considered the weaker sex.

The important task of education will never be properly begun till the person of a woman is no longer preferred to her mind.
Feminism retains the emancipatory tradition and refutes the doctrinaire interpretation of the ‘age of reason’ as reduced to eternal truths reliant on normative views of woman’s nature. Early feminists such as Astell and Wollstonecraft took issue with the moral backlash of the Enlightenment, demanding a vital place for women in the setting of the agenda for life in the ‘cities of the future’. This work highlights their contribution and critique of the philosophies of their time.
‘Virtue can only flourish among equals’ wrote Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1740), in response to Edmund Burke’s apologia of hereditary privilege and chivalry in his Reflections on the French Revolution.

The Virtues and the Delights is dedicated to Mary Wollstonecraft who esteems those philosophers in the past as well as those now living, who use their understanding in the pursuit of the virtues of freedom, religious tolerance and quality, the natural rights of every person. It celebrates the friendships and collaborations of French and British freethinkers in the 1 8th century. The work refers to both the virtues and the delights of the dialogue and exchange between two cultures, French and English, masculine and feminine, reason and emotion, past and present. The androgyne figure stands in as a cipher for a state of transition, an in-between. The dramatis personae of this version of history include: Emile du Châtelet, Louise d’Epinay, Jean Marie D’Arouet, Mary Wolistonecraft, and Condorcet.
The historical setting from 1750-1794 refers to a period of transition when nation, virtue and the republic were in the process of being elaborated. The parliament set up by French revolutionaries (including Paine) marked a shift of power from loyalty to a King or Empire to its replacement, the nation. The nation was defined by republicans as a body of citizens whose collective sovereignty constituted a state which was their political expression. Radicals such as Paine and Condorcet argued for universal suffrage: the right for every individual to political and social determination.

The first section of The Virtues and the Delights was shown in Ferney-Voltaire, France, in 1992 during the Fête de la Batie in Geneva (2 kms away) and the occasion of the staging of Zaire by the French-Algerian director, Hervé Loichmol.

Marie d’Aroute, libertine, anglophile, Diest, liberator of peasants, militant against religious persecution, invents himself, changes his name to his literary nom de plume, Voltaire. The great ‘homme des lettres’, ‘philosopher’, retires to Ferney near the republic of Geneva to cultivate his garden. Instead, he writes a best-seller, Candide, which deals with the follies of optimism (fatalism) based on the fashionable philosophical premises of ‘the best of the possible worlds’ and supports the liberation struggle of the peasants in the nearby Jura region. The Jura, snow-capped mountains, appear in the background of My Happy Moments.

Jean Jacques Rousseau, a neighbour of Voltaire’s, first pays his respects to the ‘Patriarch of Ferney’, but then they fall out. Jean Jacques, convinced that man’s good nature is corrupted by the vice of culture, blames theatre as being part of the problem since it is artificial and elitist in its appeal to the educated bourgeoisie. What is needed is an interactive, popular street theatre where all can participate. Rousseau dreams up an early model of the citizen’s festival. This is a genuine spontaneous event, people rejoicing and dancing in the streets (or nature), a celebration of and for the people. This idea becomes the prototype of revolutionary fetes from David to Gaultier. Every year Geneva opens its streets to the pleasures of its citizens in ‘La Fête de la Batie’.

Marie meets his intellectual match in Emilie du Chatelet. Emilie, philosopher, physicist, translator, teaches him physics. They set up house as a ménage a trois with Emilie’s husband in Cirey and pursue together their research on the contemporary theories of physics. Emilie learns English and translates Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees but also is the translator of Newton’s Principia (written in Latin) into French. She eventually leaves Marie for a younger man, Saint-Lambert.

Later after Emilie’s death (from the consequences of difficult childbirth) he befriends another woman, Louise d’Epinay. Louise is now known more for her relationship with Grimm (Diderot’s best friend) and her patronage of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She wrote Pseudo Memories (published posthumously), an autobiography which reveals among other things that Rousseau did not practice the education he preached.” In her book Conversations d’Emile, written for her grand-daughter Emilie, she criticises Rousseau for his Sophie in ‘Emile’ . Louise d’Epinay’s book was received with great acclaim. It promotes an ambitious and rigorous education for women which transcends their accepted roles as companions, mothers and submissive daughters.

Through the eyes of Mary Wolistonecraft, feminist, philosopher, writer friend of Condorcet and Paine, Voltaire becomes Marie (d’Arouet). Feminised, yet sexually ambiguous androgyne, s/he appears in the photographs. The Virtues and the Delights is utopia, good place and no place, where women can dream of having it all.
Pseudo Memories is such a person dressed in the Hollywood version of an 18th century wig, reclining (like Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus painting) and surveying a landscape we cannot entirely see. A body partially in silhouette and part flesh, surrounded by objects found in allegorical paintings; mirror, jug, bowl, books, a death mask at her feet, husked down to emblems they quote history. This history is somehow depleted, there is a crack forming on the parapet upon which this figure relines. There are no real victors in this history. The caption La Maitresse des Lieux means Mistress of the Place or Lands. Louise d’Epinay, author of Pseudo Memories, gave Rousseau a room of his own, the hermitage where he began La Nouvelle Héloise.

The Virtues and the Delights resorts to parody by ‘singing after the style of an original but with a difference’. A description of parody would contain at least two texts and their worlds. This is the concept of parody as both double voiced and one reliant on contrast and dissonance.

Picture the picturesque view from Voltaire’s terrace in Ferney. The snow-capped Jura, to the right a pink magnolia bush in full bloom, to the left a hardy evergreen, a dark elongated triangular shadow pierces the freshly grown lawn. The caption L’Aiguillon de Venus means Venus’ dart and the title My Happy Moments (a book written by Louise d’Epinay on love and life). L’Aiguillon, the dart (Venus’ dart is a term of endearment for the clitoris), the site of a woman’s pleasure and delight.
Another Venus appears in The Story of Juliette (Sade’s book, the antithesis of Rousseau’s virtuous feminine, as the androgyne figure in the middle. Voltaire becomes Marie (d’Arouet) between his friends Emilie (du Châtelet) and Louise (d’Epinay). Who is s/he standing between Justine(virtue) and Juliette (vice) holding the apples found in an allegorical painting: The Judgement of Paris. Newton’s apples have found themselves in a photograph captioned Institutions de Physique written by du Châtelet. The visual reference of the three figures is to Raphael’ Three Graces. In the judgement, Paris is faced with the task of choosing between three forms of beauty. Politics is represented by Hera religion/philosophy by Athena, and sexuality/fertility by the middle figure Venus, who promises him Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world. The judgement made by Paris is the cause of the Trojan war. This scene, the myth of origins, the beginning of European history, is a version of Paradise Lost with Venus as Eve. What is played out is the tripartite division of western civilisation and the over-idealisation of women as love objects.

In this version of the story Juliette is Venus. She exhorts us: ’0 charming sex, you will be free; do as men, you will enjoy all the pleasures of which nature makes a duty, from not one will you be withheld. Must the diviner half of mankind be laden with irons by the other? Ah, break those irons: nature wills it.

The Virtues and the Delights vindicates and celebrates the cultural achievements and intellectual rights of women with recourse to parody and humour. It is not about the individual characteristics of a nation defined by race and creed, but attempts to reinvent the past through the eyes of the present. It reinvents history, proposing an experimental form of history writing, a hybrid between the spaces of images and words: a reframing of history.
I ask is not the new man a she who remembers that sense cannot exist without sensibility?

(1) Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock Publications, 1974 (translated by A. M. Sheridan) (pp 5).

(2) Joseph Wright, born in Derby, worked for members of the Lunar Society (including Darwin, Wedgewood, Bonbon, Arkwright(who were interested in light, meteorology and geology. He depicted his contemporaries (scientist,, industrialists, gentry) showing the links between science, craft and industry in the early stages of the industrial revolution. He is known for his theatrical use of light used to imbue his scenes of scientific experiments such as The Ottery and Experiment with an Air Pump (1768), with religious awe and a strange sense of the sublime.

(3) Claude de Lorrain, a t 7th century French painter who lived in Italy painted the landscape in a manner that epitomised what we call the beautiful and the picturesque in English garden design. His idealised landscape scenes with characters from Greek myths were transposed into vistas and prospects littered with temples and ruins found in the landscapes gardens of the aspiring middle classes.

(4) This work (1979-89) is published in Marks of Distinction, Thames and Hudson, 1991.

(5) Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, Fontana, 1983(pp263).

(6) Grisetda Pollock argues convincingly for a feminist intervention in art history. ‘This leads to a major aspect of the feminist project, the theorisation and historical analysis of sexual difference.’ Vision and Difference, Routledge, 1988, (pp 56).

(7) Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, Fontana, 1983 (pp 259-260).

(8) Jean Marie Condorcet’s tenth epoch in Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind states these ideals clearly liberty, equality, difference.

(9) Jurgen Habermas responded to the postmodern debate in the early 1980s by arguing that modernity has inherited the ideals of the Enlightenment, Jean Francois Lyotard’s position at the time rejected liberation and progress. Modern

conscience, for Habermas, is made up of the intersection of historical and utopian perspectives (the one in form of political disasters such as Stalinism and Nazism providing a necessary balance for the other). See my essay ‘Photography: Modernity and the Contemporary’, Camera Austria No. 27, 1988..

(10) Contemporary philosophers have reappraised feminism’s contribution and critique of the Enlightenment. See Christine Battersby’s essay ‘Situating the Aesthetic’ in the ICA Documents series. Pauline Johnson points out that a craicature of the Enlightenment fails to acknowledge its anti-dogmatic spirit in her essay ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment’ published in Radical Philosophy No. 63. Elisabeth Budinter published Emil in, Emilie in order to vindicate d’Epinay and du Chatelet as influential to the age of reason. The Virtues and the Delights is indebted to these writings.

(11) Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Penguin 1983, (pp3l5)

(12)The right to work and get paid an equal salary to men is still an issue. Abortion rights are being taken away on a Pope’s decree. In England nursery provision is expensive and inadequate. John Major’s ‘Back to Basics’ endorses typical male double standards and blames single mothers for the deterioration of family values.

(13) In 1756 after the Lisbon earthquake that killed thousands, Voltaire accused some of his contemporaries of accepting the horror by suggesting that ‘all is for the best’. Pangloss in Candide (1759) represents the acolytes of Liebniz (a parody of those that distort his philosophy). Even after Pangloss has been flogged and tortured he clings to his belief that he is living in the best of all possible worlds.

(14) Theatre is the bad object since it is contrived. Rousseau, an early ‘wild man’ hippy, did not believe in make-up.

(15) In Emile (1762) Rousseau conceives that feminine happiness resided in that type of love that finds its fulfilment in reproduction and mothering. He recommended that children be raised by their biological parents. Rousseau had five children by his lover Therese Le Vasseur, who were sent to a foundling hospital.

(16) Elisabeth Badinter points out that Sophie is subjugated by Emile. She is in ‘formed lobe agreeable, she will be timid, modest and flirtatious’, Emife, Emil in, Flamma,ion, 1983 (pp387).

(17) Margaret A. Rose, Parody Ancient, Modern and Postmodern, Cambridge University Press, 1993

(18) In the series a bust of Helen with a blood tear called Malheurs de la Vestu is titled Justine.

(19) De Sane, ‘The Complete Justine’, Philosophy in the Boudoir and Other Writings, Grove Press, 1965 (pp 3011. (20) Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Penguin 1983.

In his book Science and the Arts (1935), Jacob Opper describes the change in the theory of nature from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries as one that involves a shift from Cartesian and Newtonian mechanics, to biology – the science of life. It is this turn from the rigidity of mathematical physics to natural history that sparked a parallel movement in the arts of the time. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who eerily shares his place of birth with Karen Knorr (Frankfurt-on-main), straddled this change in the sciences and carved out one of the most prolific series of writings of the age of enlightenment. These writings are best known as works of fiction (namely the great tragedy Faust,) but also prolific to the time were his developments of scientific study – particularly anatomy and colour theory. In 1784 Goethe published his independent discovery of the inter-maxillary bone in man, therefore relating man to other ‘higher animals’ and understanding that man and nature are fundamentally tied in evolution; governed by the same natural principles. It is these discoveries in good science that should force a perceivable equality between man and animal today, so why then, is an imbalance still prevalent?
Nature and man-made culture are antithetic; they are distinct in as much as nature, on the one hand, retains a certain integrity and honesty, and mankind, on the other hand, seems to thrive on the principles of greed, arrogance and deceit. As nature and mankind have drifted apart, nature, which was once by its very definition natural, has become a spectacle. The appearances of the objects of nature into the built space or environment of the modern city come as a surprise to us – they are somehow regarded unnatural (the fox in my garden, the mouse in my kitchen, the pigeon in my chimney). It is this incongruity between objects and space that is central to Knorr’s photographic practice.

On two levels, the taxidermised animals – as foreign objects unusual or ‘other’ to the environment they inhabit – recall the central intent of the pagan fable. The first level represents the traditional definition of the fable as a fictional narrative that uses animal characters to teach a moral lesson. For example Aesop’s The Fox and the Grapes where the central and only protagonist, a fox in this case, realises he cannot reach the grapes he desires and therefore defaults to a position of indifference, exclaiming “The grapes are sour anyway!” – the moral of the story being – “it is easy to despise what you cannot get”. And the second, more complex and to some extent subversive level, admirably seeks to hold the anti-humanist position that animals need not be anthropomorphised by the writers of folkloric literature in order to teach a moral lesson to humankind; but instead, simply by being their animal selves, they are equally capable of moral teaching. In this sense Knorr’s work removes the need for allegorical storytelling, and uses the animals in their purest, non-fictional form to deliver a striking ethical lesson. These animals are removed from their natural habitat as a means to directly compare ‘pure nature’ with ‘high culture.’

The Corridor, Musée Carnavalet, 2007

In these images the photographed animals defy the construction of human spaces for solely human use; they enter into our domain reducing the human-defined gap that separates animal nature (as base and untamed), and human culture (as relatively advanced and refined). By appropriating the fable, Knorr represents this gap between nature and culture and calls into question the very logic of the institutions in which the animals are placed. By re-staging nature in the built environment by way of positioning these animals in a variety of museum spaces, Knorr seeks to question why cultural institutions such as the museum remain so fundamentally unnatural. Many museums are, after all, narcissistic reminders of human cultural worth, built and adored by humans themselves, which deny entry to nature other than by way of pictorial representation. Museums are, as art theorist Danielle Rice has put it (referring to a consensus amongst theorists) “ideological symbols of the power relationships in today’s culture.”

The Rooftop, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 2008

Circa 1929, Swiss architect Le Corbusier completed his Villa Savoye, a building that would come to epitomise high-modernism. Just prior to the Second World War, the building developed a structural fault in the roof (initially designed so it’s flat surface could be of some practical use to its owners), but has since been fully restored and made available for public viewing. It has, quite literally, become a museum.
“The idea of this house is that it is a free-flowing space that blurs the boundaries between the inside and the outside. I chose birds as the animal type to go into this building because all the work with the animals and these architectural spaces is about blurring the boundaries, disrupting the boundaries, or transgressing the boundaries between nature and culture. These birds [the crane and the magpie] formally echo the architectural space with their colour; they are, in a way, playfully formalist devices. The building is very clean – you can’t imagine organic matter. The birds are unnatural in this environment, totally unnatural, like the building itself.” (Interview with the artist, February 2009.)

The slick, hard lines of Le Corbusier’s design contrast the natural and soft aerodynamic curvature of the birds in these Villa Savoye works. Both the shots taken in architecturally Baroque museums, and the newer pieces at the modern Villa Savoye, seem to point directly at some of the issues facing the art museum as a supposedly accessible cultural institution today. In his essay Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era, Nick Prior recounts Bourdieu and Darbel’s 1969 study of art museum audiences. This study reveals the poignantly elitist nature of museum culture as a phenomenon that breeds and reinforces social difference (class, education, distinctions between high and low culture). Although the situation has vastly improved since the late sixties, with more diverse education programs and increased museum visitor numbers being recorded (surely a reflection of museums doing better work?), there is still an issue prevalent, elucidated by Knorr’s concerns of why, when directly compared to nature, such institutions remain fundamentally unnatural and possibly immoral? Her appropriation of the fable into a photographic device necessarily raises this fundamentally important issue.

The Stairs, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 2008

Knorr’s work subverts the power of the museum setting. While creating artworks of visual beauty and conceptual clarity (a pairing rare in much contemporary art), Knorr’s photography consistently challenges the spectator’s assumptions about the nature of representation – and indeed – the representation of nature within the art museum.
From a curatorial perspective, it is work such as this that functions well as an apéritif to exhibition strategising; by way of its critique of high culture it provides a lucid reminder of the ever-pervading didacticism in contemporary museum curatorial practice (important, as we have now just been subjected to the next implausible neologism, ‘altermodern,’ courtesy of the Tate Britain’s Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art).

In conclusion, Karen Knorr’s photographic practice is a constant reminder of the essentially unnatural phenomenon of the classist, hierarchical structure of modern society. It is within the very institutions that Knorr photographs, and in turn displays her work that these issues still ubiquitous in contemporary culture can be most readily understood.

The Passage, Villa Savoye, Poissy, France, 2008

LIBRE-PENSEUSE. Née à Francfort, Karen Knorr est Américaine et vit à Londres. Après avoir grandi au Puerto Rico, elle a étudié en France et en Grande Bretagne, notamment au Polytechnic of Central London. Voyageuse invétérée, elle est curieuse de tout et de tous. Devenue célèbre avec sa série Gentlemen, un travail sur les clubs masculins very select de nos voisins so british, son intérêt pour l’upper-class ne l’a pas empêchée de s’immerger dans des milieux beaucoup plus underground, tel que celui des punks, qu’elle regrette de n’avoir pu intégrer étant « trop vieille » selon ses propres dires ! Ces investigations sociales, à dominante documentaire, forment l’un des piliers de son œuvre, qui s’apparente en quelque sorte à un triptyque dans lequel on trouve aussi un pan très conceptuel – auquel se rattache sa série Virtues and the Delights, par exemple – et toute une partie essentiellement narrative, dont Fables se rapproche. L’esthétique extrêmement soignée de ses clichés, la profondeur de la réflexion qui les habite, ainsi que sa démarche iconoclaste, font de Karen Knorr une artiste incontournable. Exposée partout dans le monde, de Genève à Londres en passant par New York, ses Fables seront exposées à la Maison de la Photograhie de Toulon du XXXXXXX et une Rétrospective est annoncée au Musée Municipal de la Roche-sur-Yon du 17 octobre au 9 janvier 2010.

LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE. Très tôt, les animaux se sont invités dans son œuvre. Ce furent tour à tour les chiens de la haute société rurale anglaise, les singes téléportés dans les musées et enfin tout un bestiaire mis en scène dans des contextes aussi inattendus que les lieux de culte et ceux de culture. Jusqu’à cette dernière série intitulée Fables, étonnante narration sans parole dont les animaux sont les protagonistes. Pour ce travail, Karen Knorr s’est rendue dans les châteaux de Chambord et de Chantilly, ainsi que dans le musée Carnavalet, le musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris) et encore d’autres lieux prestigieux. Elle a photographié, à l’argentique, les espaces de ces hauts lieux de la culture humaine. Dans ces intérieurs hantés par le snobisme et la vanité des siècles passés, elle a disposé des animaux empaillés ou vivants, tantôt au moment de la prise de vue, tantôt par retouches numériques. Ce travail très original séduit immédiatement par son esthétique d’un raffinement extrême. Mais il recèle des trésors qui ne se laissent découvrir que par les spectateurs les plus attentifs…

MELANGE DES GENRES. Si l’on en doutait, Karen Knorr prouve encore qu’elle n’a pas pour habitude de s’embarrasser ni de préjugés ni de valeurs convenues. Très personnel, Fables est un ensemble qui se nourrit de multiples influences. Le titre de la série, en premier lieu, en appelle à un art vieux comme le monde. Ce genre littéraire, qui consiste à recourir à l’allégorie animale pour illustrer un propos moral, remonte en effet à 2000 ans avant notre ère ! Quant aux références plastiques, on pense, pour nombre de photos, aux peintres hollandais du 17ème siècle. Du moins à ceux qui, tel Vermeer, représentaient des intérieurs intimistes dont les plans mis en abyme sont chargés d’une symbolique à forte teneur philosophique. Dans le cliché intitulé The Corridor, véritable tableau vivant, les nombreuses portes et fenêtres multiplient les plans de la composition mais, en définitive, le spectateur ne voit à travers aucune d’entre elles. Il reste enfermé dans son monde culturel étriqué, tandis que les animaux, réputés sauvages, ont le regard orienté vers une fenêtre que l’on devine ouverte. Ils sont les seuls à voir le monde tel qu’il est, comme s’ils étaient dotés d’une clairvoyance dont l’homme serait dépourvu. Ce rappel à l’ordre et cette invitation à l’humilité que nos cousins illettrés nous adressent dans le silence n’est pas sans évoquer l’art de la vanité. Si l’on ajoute à cela que le plus grand nombre des figurants de la série sont des animaux empaillés, fatalement morts, son travail s’inscrit alors plus largement dans l’héritage des natures mortes. Influence que confirment les constantes ambiguïtés entre vivant et mort, spontanéité et mise en scène, réalisme et artifice… Mais Karen Knorr, impossible à cataloguer dans un genre plutôt qu’un autre, s’est aussi inspirée du cinéma, notamment pour The Green Bedroom, dans lequel de « vulgaires pigeons » virevoltent devant un lit à baldaquin. La photographe déclare s’être inspirée du chef d’œuvre d’Hitchcock, Les oiseaux. Et en effet, il se dégage de cette image une atmosphère aussi pesante et inquiétante que dans le film. Une étrange menace qui plane et qui vient à la fois de la présence anormale des volatiles dans cette chambre d’apparat, de la tonalité vert glauque des couleurs et de la frontalité claustrophobique de la composition.

RIRES ET CHUCHOTEMENTS. Bien qu’on ne soit pas loin, dans cette série, de l’acerbe critique sociale d’un Ingmar Bergman réalisant Cris et chuchotements, Karen Knorr, elle, préfère rire de nos travers plutôt que de grincer des dents ! L’humour est ainsi le principal ressort avec lequel elle pointe nos complexes de supériorité par rapport à la nature, notre éternel snobisme, nos préjugés… bref, toute cette bêtise que ne connaissent pas, justement, les bêtes. Face à ces images, le spectateur peut bien sûr tomber en pâmoison mais il faut bien vite qu’il se relève pour comprendre que les animaux se moquent de lui ! De façon théâtrale, et même burlesque, les renards, cigognes et consorts vivent leur vie dans nos musées en nous ignorant magnifiquement, nous les spectateurs. Ils sont un peu comme ces enfants qui narguent leurs parents en faisant des bêtises sous leur nez… Si parfois leur regard est tourné vers nous, c’est pour nous témoigner davantage d’ironie que d’admiration ; face à la nature qui s’approprie le territoire de la culture, nous voilà donc impuissants et, disons-le, franchement idiots… La dimension sociale de cette critique de l’homme par l’animal vient aussi des lieux choisis par Karen Knorr. Faire-valoir sociaux pour l’aristocratie d’Ancien Régime, ils sont devenus nos sanctuaires culturels, essentiellement fréquentés par les nouvelles élites. Karen Knorr, d’un coup de balai absolument décomplexé, « dénature » ces endroits et, dans le même élan, nous incite à remettre en question la vanité de notre fonctionnement et de notre interminable course à « celui qui se distinguera le plus des autres » !

Ces derniers temps, la plasticienne a troqué les hautes sphères culturelles d’Europe pour le Rajasthan. A travers l’architecture vernaculaire et les zenanas – ce sont des sérails, version indienne – elle s’intéresse à cette culture où cohabitent plusieurs religions dans la tolérance, ainsi qu’à la place de la femme dans la société. Gageons qu’elle nous rapportera des images aussi parlantes que ses Fables animalières !

The work of Karen Knorr has developed intellectually and aesthetically at quite a speed since the mid 1980’s. Following an initial practice relating to social documentary, Knorr discovered a new area of investigation that went hand in hand with her natural curiosity, interest and knowledge of art theory and art history.

More recently, Knorr’s practice has engaged with increasing fascination with taxidermy, objects and spaces, and a conceptual practice that continually and consistently plays at disrupting the institutional gaze. Knorr’s practice embraces pluralism and the deconstruction of institutions, language, desire and fantasy; issues that dominated the post structural theoretical landscape of the 1980’s and 90’s but the originality and strength of Knorr’s recent work has taken these themes a step further.

In her photographs, Knorr uses space in a formalist way, but also acknowledges the natural world. Her take on subverting the museum can be seen via the French philosopher Michelle Foucault’s writing on power and his singularity to see through the fictions of the structures of society, and the need to subvert those restrictions.

Simultaneously Knorr is fascinated by ritual, display and death, and her work can be described as poetic, deeply mysterious, playful, smart, and fascinating in its originality, in ideas and concepts, and in her methods of production.

Knorr’s vision is also important, there is no doubt that her originality and the techniques that she utilises make her akin to a painter rather than a ‘straight’ photographer. Following on from a location (museum) photo shoot, Knorr spends many hours in her studio on the production of a single image, moving and inserting, editing, enhancing, highlighting and intensifying colours; Knorr’s key board and computer screen are her palette and paintbrush, the final photographic print that the viewer sees via the gallery is her canvas. Knorr’s practice is enacted via a creative process that is a direct and intense encounter with technology whilst at the same time embracing traditional photographic techniques.

Knorr also, if diffidently perhaps, embraces the spaces of high culture, as she recognises they represent something that still resonates, a nostalgic link with the past, the disappearing rituals and sensibility, hierarchical values, royalty and aristocracy as a lost race, a trace of history, private as well as public as in the past many of the museums Knorr chooses to photograph were the homes of the royal and aristocratic families.

Another predominant element to Knorr’s photographs is a sense of the ‘Baroque’ aesthetic. Knorr’s prints embody perfection; the intense colouration drenched onto the surface of the photographic paper produces an excess of aesthetic experience, which is a familiar sign in Baroque imagery and architecture. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Baroque style was set out in relation to the Roman Catholic Church. Art and architecture was required to communicate religious themes in a direct and emotional manner.

The drama of Baroque architecture expresses scale, power and control, the entrances of courts, grand staircases and reception rooms of sequentially increasing opulence. Knorr is obsessed with such details, as well as a rendition of architectural space her photos are an encounter with repeated patterns, excessive interior decoration and fixed notions of class and aristocracy. Knorr’s photographic prints contain an abundant amount of detail, bright colour hues, as well as strange and unexpected content, producing a sense of awe and wonder in the viewer, which was also one of the most fundamental aims of the Baroque aesthetic.

As well as acknowledging and recognising the importance of these historical, voluptuous and highly decorated and preserved institutions, in her choice of venue as a back drop to her aesthetic and conceptual ideas, Knorr subverts their original intention via her playful interceptions of stuffed and live animals. Surrealism could be one influence on Knorr’s practice; the chance encounter of Andre Breton, the strange juxtaposition of incongruous objects.

In L’Amour fou Breton speaks of an aura and anxiety in relation to an intensity of sensation when experiencing the chance event, he describes it as, “a mixture of panic-provoking terror and joy” (Amour Fou, Editions Gallimand, Paris 1937: p40)

In the Surrealist Manifesto of 1920 Breton sets out an agenda to subvert the institution and bourgeoisie culture of art via playful and subversive interactions, desire and experimental methods and language. Breton’s link with Freud’s unconscious was explicit, as he rallied the Surrealists to pay attention to the dream world as set out by Sigmund Freud as a separate sphere, or a ‘dream reality’.

Knorr’s recent photographic practice is a series of works ‘Fables’ in which she utilises stuffed and live animals.
This can be viewed as a return to, and a reinstating of surreal imagery at the same time as infiltrating the museum context. Knorr’s imagery and symbols carry plural meanings and yet engage also on a psychological level, animal desire, a wish to tame and control the primitive instincts, also discussed by Freud in his essays on Sexuality (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Penguin 1986). Knorr’s imagery moves toward the uncanny, and eventually the death drive.

Traditionally fables (stories or myths) have intersecting narratives and deeper latent meanings as in Freud’s writings on dreams. Knorr’s work also engages with the aesthetics of the dream, particularly dream landscape, or a screen memory from the past. Knorr’s repetition and spaces uninhabited by human existence also equate with Foster’s discussion of Surrealism and compulsive beauty.

“Breton hoped that the surreal would become the real, that surrealism would overcome this opposition with liberatory effects for all. But might it be that the reverse has occurred that in the postmodern world of advanced capitalism the real has become the surreal, that our forest of symbols is less disruptive in its uncanniness than disciplinary in its delirium?” (Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty, MIT Press 1993: p210)

In The Blue Salon- Louis XV1no 2, (Musée Carnavalet) Knorr’s choice of abundant furniture crammed into the corner creates a dialectic with the single fox which we as the viewer see only the back of. Curvature of the French chairs and harp and the intense colouration of the walls and patterning of the rug, in combination with the framing, intensify the claustrophobic effect of the image. The insistence of the reality of the fox brings a sense of the uncanny for the viewer, and draws on our fears of the wild animal, it’s stillness and perfection, glossy coat and fixed gaze produce an encounter with the death drive, exacerbating the question for the audience of whether the fox is alive or taxidermied (dead), and a drive to see or know, to uncover the truth.

A disparity between the romanticised museum space and the animal occurs here. The fox is related to wolves but they are not usually pack animals, as loners they are able to sneak up and to kill their prey quickly using a pouncing technique practised from an earlier primitive age. In folklore of some cultures, the fox represents cunning and trickery, or as a familiar animal possessing magical powers.

Wild foxes are normally extremely wary of humans and are not kept as pets however the urban fox is a recent phenomena whereby suburban houses and city apartment buildings are stalked by foxes that ravage through waste bins causing havoc. The presence of the fox and other taxidermied birds and animals in Knorr’s images offers something both frightening and familiar, something that disturbs everyday existence, that makes dysfunctional the calm and quiet of the museum space;

“The subject of the uncanny is a province of this kind. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening – to what arouses dread and horror . . . the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads us back to what is known of old and long familiar”. (Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin Classics 2003: p124)

Two of Knorr’s images that can be compared to each other in many conceptual and visual ways are The King & Queen’s Bedchamber, which Knorr made at Chambord. Gender plays a part. The wild boar in The King’s Bedchamber is centre stage, and moves towards the door, its strange, large and cumbersome feral presence permeates the pristine interior. Along the corridor (perhaps, as we do not know for sure the exact whereabouts) is The Queen’s Bedchamber which is inhabited by some smaller animals as well, a vixen is curled up on the bed and a nervous badger snarls and displays its teeth as the massive boar billows towards the bed, the scale of the animals is exaggerated and uneven. The combination of playfulness and threat within this single image is strong, as finally we see a parrot jay above the four-poster bed, evoking otherness, strangeness and the uncanny. It seems as if the outside inhabitants of the natural world have invaded the interior, and taken it over, as the animals stand in for the once controlling human element symbolic of power and control, the hierarchical structures of patriarchy, of male power and sexual threat is also enacted via metaphor in Knorr’s animal invasion of the King and Queen’s bedrooms.

Fantasy and play form part of our psychic imagination and Knorr’s images penetrate those spaces as well as re arranging material from the real world. The imagination can advance into the full depth of our visual field as well. In Freud’s essay Creative Writers and Daydreaming 1908 he discusses activities in the imagination such as dreaming, fantasising, playing and the creation of art as means of accumulating pleasure by re arranging reality into new and more congenial forms. Freud searches for activities analogous to the imaginative work of the creative writer that occupies all human beings and he discovers it in child’s play. Freud’s ‘reality principal’ places restrictions in adulthood on the directions that play can be encouraged and useful, but the creativity of the artist is one way that the conflict between the reality/pleasure principal can be resolved and balanced out. (Sigmund Freud, The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, Penguin 1986, p505).

Knorr’s intense ‘work’ in her production methods can also be seen as analogous to the key theories of Object Relations, as set out by Melanie Klein (Juliet Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein, Penguin 1986). Klein maps out an internal psychic drama, based on our relation with objects that we have attachments to from the first experiences in life. The objects are metaphors for many things, the mother’s breast, goodness and nourishment for example. Destructive urges against the mothers breast form part of the psychological pattern in this theory as mapped out by Klein as an intense internal psychic drama, as she delved deep into the psyche and fantasies, Klein also emphasised the defence mechanisms, which were utilised by the child.

These early anxieties, fantasies, , and defences had not been previously explored, and her conclusions radically altered perceptions in the development of what Freud had called, “the super-ego”, to an earlier stage of development, the time of the ‘Imaginary’, the semiotic time and space before language is formed. Klein revealed a harsh and self-critical/accusatory aspect inherent in this early super-ego development. Klein also established that the libidinal drive in the child is related to the drive ‘to know’, and placed all curiosity from a knowledge-seeking component of the libido.

The final stage of this internal drama for the infant is accompanied by feelings of anxiety and guilt, and a desire to preserve the mother from his/her aggression and destructive instincts. ‘Restorative’ fantasies and behaviour resolve the depressive anxiety, and so the ‘reparation’ is complete. Reparation is possible only if the constitutional capacity of the ego is strong enough to tolerate the feelings of anxiety and guilt.

Klein is optimistic in relation to the reparation. She sees this as a genuine expression of love for the mother, regret for the destructive fantasies, and a deep gratitude for the goodness and nourishment he/she has received from her, rather than a reaction formation against destructiveness, or simple anxiety arising from dependence on the object. “Along with the increase in love for one’s good and real object goes a greater trust in one’s capacity to love and a lessening of the paranoid anxiety of bad objects”.

This process of reparation has since been emphasised in writing on art and creativity as it manifests by means of ‘creative labour’ on the part of an individual, most notably it has been discussed by Hanna Seagal Segal and Adrian Stokes. Stokes made a direct analogy between this “symbiotic relationship” between good and bad, part and whole objects, to the creative process involved in the production of an artwork.

Klein’s radical methods of play-technique free the limitations within language of the possible communication between the pre-conscious, which holds the key to consciousness and many neurotic and psychotic states. So Knorr’s practice similarly involves processes of play, of mapping together and reparation, of psychic dynamism and intent.

Knorr takes objects from the outside and places them in a series of incongruous situations; she infiltrates the stasis of the museum with animals that symbolise the unpredictable power of nature, primitive sexuality, the passing of time and death are also implicit. The final perfect complete photographic prints are a result of Knorr’s restorative playful creative process, and intense workmanship and labour.

The artist who is driven mainly by the imagination aims to provide an alternative reality where possibilities are more flexible than the real world. The spatial expanses of Knorr’s photographs, are equivalent to the ‘transitional spaces of play’ described by the English psychologist DW Winnicott. Knorr’s engagement with disrupting the museum space produces an interesting analogy that corresponds with Winnicott’s theories of ‘transitional’ space described in his book Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1971).

The cultural spaces of for example the gallery and museum are where adult play can take place, also in the artist’s studio. Winnicott was one of the best-known psychoanalysts in Britain during 1950’s and 60’s. He was a gifted communicator, and was able to describe sophisticated psychoanalytic concepts in simple terms, and so was a widely known broadcaster and public speaker. Winnicott delivered his theories in easily understood and engaging lectures, and was criticised as being too personal and idiosyncratic to be held within the general body of scientific knowledge.

Winnicott introduced the idea of a third realm of experience, apart from the two described in previous psychoanalytic theories, internal and external realities. Winnicott described a (third) ‘transitional’ space, and noted it’s importance in establishing a creative and healthy life-style in order to promote mental well-being.
Objects in this space possess both internal and external reality, selfhood and otherness, and activity is fluid, satisfying and accommodating.

“All playing, all culture, and all religion belong in this transitional realm, which only develops in so far as the mother responds sufficiently sensitively and promptly to the infant’s tendency to hallucinate the objects of it’s desire, to create for itself the illusion that it has subjectively created objects that objectively exist independently…if this is successfully created, and premature disillusionment is avoided, the individual will feel at home in the world and have a creative relationship with it”. (Charles Rycroft, Edited: P.Fuller, Psychoanalysis and Beyond, Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, 1985 p. 145).

Architectural space can also relate to Winnicott’s transitional spaces and third realm as it produces a barrier between the internal and external worlds, and we experience architectural space physically and psychologically on a daily basis. Knorr’s photographs from Villa Savoye can be discussed particularly in relation to this. Villa Savoye (1929) is considered to be the seminal work of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, built just outside of Paris at Poissy, it is one of the most recognisable architectural presentations of the International Style, a new aesthetic of architecture from the beginning of the twentieth century, and is constructed in reinforced concrete.

Knorr’s choice of Villa Savoye as a location for her photographs moves the discussion of her work to a consideration of the domestic site and space, even though the house now acts as a museum. Le Corbusier’s house is emblematic of formal modernism, however, the scale of the rooms in the photos by Knorr is more intimate than in the museum pieces interiors.

In Gaston Bachelard’s writings from his book The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press 1994), the emphasis is on the house as a habitat, dwelling, as ‘home’, where we accumulate physical things, where habits are formed, and where memory is located. This type of space is never indifferent, even when empty or uninhabited. Houses, nests, rooms, corners, cupboards etc are all examined in Bachelard’s phenomenological theories of space as vessels for the imagination, and havens for objects, as he explores the structures and experience of space.

Human beings have an understanding of space on a deeper unconscious level for Bachelard, a separate realm of understanding that transcends time. Bachelard states that people crave private space to shelter not only their physical selves, but also to accommodate the interior space of the imagination and reverie particularly for daydreaming; the house protects the dreamer and allows one to dream in peace. Le Corbusier wanted to design the perfect house for habitation in the Villa Savoye.

In Knorr’s photograph from Villa Savoye, The Shelf, two exotic birds swallows inhabit the corner of a room. Knorr again is playful with scale, and there is a humorous element here, a dream-like quality, also we are not certain if the shelf that the little bird perches upon actually exists or was part of Knorr’s re creation. In The Stairs another incongruous pairing of birds stand in the hallway of Villa Savoye, facing different directions. In both photos there is an emphasis of the surreal, as well as ‘pure’ architecture, as Knorr’s birds wander nonchalantly inhabiting the space inside this modernist palace, looking for an exit perhaps?

As viewers we are reminded that the house we inhabit on a daily basis is made of real people and things, objects and memories, spaces to hide in and to safely retreat into the world of the imagination. Knorr’s tribute to Le Corbusier re instates Bachelard’s text, her photos re frame modernism as a drive to perfection, minimal and empty.

Reading a system of signs as within post structuralist theories produces the meaning of Knorr’s work and can produce many interpretations. The juxtapositioning of objects and environments in her photographs enables the viewer to interpret on many levels as fragmentation occurs, and attempts to produce an understanding of the psyche, that is constituted of many layers, evoking memories, cultural, social and personal.

Photography’s place in art history is also one theme of Knorr’s oeuvre, as within the paradigms of postmodernism Knorr has created her own unique visual language that is playful and intelligent, and she has consistently created beautifully rendered photographs that mimic paintings and resonate with many layers of meaning. Knorr’s practice can be seen as a series of dialogues with psychoanalysis and space via surrealism, desire and the unconscious; objects, play and phenomenology; the museum, history and memory; aesthetics, photography and technology.

Gilles Deleuze (1)

Like the mutilated classical statue, a photograph seems to result from the artwork’s encounter with a scythe of real time, showing the bruise imprinted upon an artwork by a clash with a time not its own.

Denis Hollier (2)

Karen Knorr’s photography isn’t particularly easy to think about. It seems easier to think with it or through it. That is, with or through its subject matter. There is so much to think about within the images, that the images themselves become elusive. We cannot see the wood for the trees. Yet her images are in many ways particularly photographic. I think this reveals itself through their way with time. It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the meaning of Knorr’s images is a complex experience of time, but the layers of possibility within them are inextricably linked to their temporal character. So what I have to say here isn’t so much a free-standing account of Knorr’s photography as a speculation on the time structures that allow the images to mean whatever they mean.

I shall start with the past. Karen Knorr’s work deals with cultural heritage. This has been her most continuous theme since the late 1970s. She deals with taste, power and histories older than photography. She looks at how the culture and ideology of conservatism seek definition. She looks at how they seek this in a past that sometimes never really was. This is why the museum, which constructs a representation of the past from the ideological needs of the present, recurs throughout her work as a theatre for making photographs. Within this theatre she photographs, among other things, works of art. This is a practice with its own long and complicated lineage. Indeed the photography of art has a pedigree as old as photography itself. Consider this short list:

A crumbling facade of Queen’s College, Oxford; an elevated view of a Parisian boulevard; four shelves of China pottery; three shelves of glassware; a bust of Patroclus; an open door with a broom; a leaf of a plant; two shelves of books; a printed page of text; a haystack; a lithographic print; the bridge of Orleans; Queen’s College Oxford again; three men and a ladder; Lacock Abbey; Lacock Abbey, again; the bust of Patroclus, again; Christchurch College, Oxford; Lacock Abbey again; some lace; The Martyr’s Monument, Oxford; Westminster Abbey, a drawing of Hagar in the Desert; an arrangement of fruit.

This is an itinerary not too far removed from Knorr’s own subject matter. No doubt the repetition of Lacock Abbey alerts the reader to the figure of William Henry Fox Talbot. In fact it is a list of the subjects that comprise his book The Pencil of Nature from the 1840s, a publication that aimed to outline possible uses for the medium. The list has a remarkable variety. In plotting out a range of potential applications of his technique, Fox Talbot anticipates so many of the ways in which the photographic was eventually exploited. Documentary, architecture, topography, tourism, modern publishing, advertising, taxonomy and modern art history are all ‘pencilled’ in here, in their nascent states. The abundance of artifacts and commodities before Fox Talbot’s camera is in part a consequence of his class and social standing. As an educated man of means, he photographs what he owns, where he travels and what interests him. On top of this, such artifacts are inanimate and portable, which means they keep still and can be placed in the light (considerable advantages for early photography). But perhaps there is more at stake in the recurrence of art and artifacts in the list. Why might a photograph of an artwork be so well disposed to ‘demonstrating’ the medium?

A provisional answer might be that it allows two versions of time to clash – the time of the artifact and the time of the medium of photography. In clashing they emphasise each other’s particular characteristics. The answer is provisional because the reality is more complicated. For example, it could be said that all photography clashes with a time not its own. It brings a moment into another moment. We might also say that any artifact clashes with a time not its own in so far as it is a representation. Moreover an artifact might be further wrapped in other times by the activities of collecting, exchange, display and so on. Still, there is some truth in the provisional response, for when media are made to clash they tend to suppress their own internal complexities in order to offer up the more obvious differences to each other. We tie ourselves up in knots attempting to define ‘painting’, or ‘sculpture’ or ‘photography’ in isolation, and opt for the ease with which media appear to clarify themselves through comparison. Perhaps only much later are we able to grasp – or in Karen Knorr’s case, stage – the problematics within and between media at the same time. But let me keep things simple for a while longer.

Very early on art photography had a spell of a few decades in which it took up artworks as subject matter. These were decades before the understanding of all art came to be percolated through mass reproduction. In the 1850s and 1860s the photography of artworks was a recognised genre of art photography. Interpretive expression of the essence or spirit of the artwork was the aim. (3) Artistic photography and the photography of art were not mutually exclusive. It was a rich, strange and frustratingly brief period, cut short when art history was rationalised and expanded by the more utilitarian and artless deployment of photography as publicity. The photography of art soon became so ubiquitous that it began to mask rather than reveal the character of both artwork and photograph. Modern art history established itself by using photography mechanistically. It exploited the photograph’s powers of description and reproduction to give us the slide lecture, the catalogue, the journal, the monograph, the popular print and the portable history. It isn’t a coincidence that the great and false battle over the ‘soul’ of art photography, the battle between the painterly and the ‘straight’ image that replaced that earlier hybrid moment, took place against the becoming mass, the becoming popular through reproduction of the art of the past. All that uncertainty as to whether art photography should mimic painting’s crafted singularity or Modernity’s multiplicity was in effect a consequence of the fundamental shift in understanding of the very category of ‘art’ itself that was wrought by mass reproduction. Photography became art firstly as homage, then as imitation of the painterly and eventually became modern only within this new concept of art that was tacitly organised and regulated by reproduction. Since then photography has had two roles in modern art history: as an art itself, and as a mute, nameless mediator of all art. This of course puts it schematically. These aren’t so much roles as poles of the general tension between the photograph’s objectivity and its subjectivity. On the one hand art photography has always negotiated with the utilitarian aspects of the medium, and on the other the photography of art regularly has its utility undermined by accusations of partiality. The ambiguities of Knorr’s photographs derive from this polarity. Somehow we expect a photograph of an artwork to function as a record of it. We expect it to be trustworthy and silent, and there certainly is this aspect to her photographs – they do tell us what artworks look like and what particular museum installations looked like.Yet at the same time – but with a different relation to time – the images are not just objective but critical. This is because they are themselves artworks. They are put back into the spaces and discourses of art.

Knorr’s photography stages the clashing of times in very specific ways, although to my mind the results are far from specific. In general, the art of the twentieth century is not present ‘in’ her work. With rare exceptions the artworks described or contained in her ouevre predate photography. This has three consequences. It gives both the photography and the subject matter space to breath before they come to ‘clash’ with each other. It gives the images a deceptively simple entry point (on some level photographs are always easy to look at). It also means Knorr neatly leapfrogs all those bad infinities and arguments about copies of copies that so preoccupy more excitable speculations about reproduction.

Much art of the twentieth century, concerned as it was with the ‘nature’ of art and conceived wholly within the time and the aegis of the modern art museum, was either aspiring to unattainable timelessness (for example, abstract expressionist painting) or bouncing around with ecstasy or horror (usually both) in the excesses of industrial image multiplication (for example, Pop Art). Knorr’s work loops back to set up a dialogue far more complex than such rejection or repetition of the time of the museum. But it is not simply a dialogue ‘with’ the artworks she depicts. It is a dialogue with what the modern museum did with them for us, good or bad. It is a dialogue with the layers of time that build up on these works as surely as the dust is removed from them.

All of this begs some difficult questions. Can an artwork carry ‘its time’ with it like some kind of melancholic passport through all the trauma of displacement and historical change? The ideology of the museum encourages us to accept, or expect that a painting or a sculpture might be able to cling to a sense of time and place that is ‘true’ to it. As if we see it in the museum but not belonging to the museum. Can photography do this too? Or do we expect that photography, by taking on, by assuming the character of other times and places, keeps nothing for itself? Does it have a self to keep? Perhaps like the filmmaker Woody Allen’s allegorical figure Zelig, it clings only to nothing but the circumstance in which it finds itself. What happens then when photography clings to painting or sculpture? Onto what layer of time can it hold?

We can see now that a simple notion of ‘clashing’ is not really going to account for the complex registers of time in Karen Knorr’s photographs. These images are temporal puzzles. Perhaps the allegories they speak, and speak of, are in the end only available to us through a more mute allegory of time. The late Roland Barthes once spoke of the punctum – a rare occurrence whereby a photographic detail or disposition might prick the viewer’s consciousness and throw them out of the time of the image and into disjunction with their own unconscious, their own history. If I’m honest, I hadn’t thought Knorr’s photography would really allow for such inadvertencies of spectatorship. They appear so controlled. So conscious. Nevertheless standing before her image In the Green Room installed in the Wallace collection in London, I was struck by a particular detail. Lurking below the frame of Fragonard’s painting The Swing is a little sign, made up of two icons: a silhouette or shadow of a human profile, and a pair of headphones. It indicates that a headphone commentary on this is available. One may borrow a ‘Walkman’ and be guided around the museum by a commentary in one’s head. I hadn’t paid much attention to these signs until I caught sight of this one in Knorr’s photograph. In a rebus too dense to grasp fully, images and words raced through my mind: all those versions of ‘The Origin of Painting’ in which the cast shadow of a profile is traced on a wall… all those books in which photography is described as ‘the art of fixing a shadow’… all those reproductions of allegorical paintings in art history books accompanied by written elaboration of their half-defunct codes… memories of gallery visits watching people crane to read titles and descriptions… my own first use of such a headphone commentary which threw me into the time of the art but out of the social time of the museum. I was involuntarily fixed before In the Green Room. Not transfixed. The image didn’t swallow me. It occupied my eyes while my mind went elsewhere momentarily. My vision and my knowledge were allegorised for me, by a detail that is not actually in Fragonard’s painting (although it depends on it in some ways) but is in Knorr’s photograph. At such moments one feels one’s eyes both alive and dead at the same time. They are stimulated but not connected to a consciousness, like an automaton or a mannequin… or a stuffed bird.

We could see the presence of animals in some of Knorr’s photographs as irruptions into the decorum of the museum. If they are, they are as much irruptions in time as space. For what is the time proper to an animal? They mock the distinction between ancient and modern. And their taxidermy mocks photography’s ability to freeze things in time (a stuffed bird will look more alive in a photograph than anywhere else).

In an essay published while Roland Barthes was writing Camera Lucida, his reflection on photography and memory, Thierry de Duve attempted a different dissection of photographic time.(4) Barthes preoccupied himself with the stillness of the portrait, but de Duve saw two different times in photography. One is melancholic, the other is traumatic. For de Duve melancholy surfaces in the ‘time exposure’, an image made of the world at rest. A still image of a still world. The time exposure doesn’t seem to stop the world, rather the stillness of the photograph finds consonance in the stillness of the scene. By contrast, traumatic time expresses itself in the ‘snapshot’, which freezes the world and separates the stillness of the image from the movement of the scene. We call this the ‘decisive moment’. What is interesting about Karen Knorr’s photographs that contain artworks and animals is that they are time exposures and snapshots at once. It’s not easy to see if the images are arresting the world or simply depicting an arrested world.

The time exposure and the snapshot coexist and complicate each other in the same frame. What’s more these images were taken in museums. Museums are places where history is arrested, where things are plucked out of time and out of place but made to look natural, calm, ordered and still. As if they truly belonged there. What better describes both the time of Knorr’s images and the time of the museum than a complicated coexistence of melancholy and trauma?

Perhaps this uncanny effect is most pronounced however, not in her photography but in the video work The Visitors. Here we are offered a delicately slow sequence of motionless images of monkeys, roaming amid the marble sculpture of the Musee D’Orsay in Paris. It is difficult to tell if these are freeze frames of live animals, or long takes of stuffed animals or a mixture of both. (5) While video is so often associated with the constant jittery flow of everyday life, Knorr realises that it might be equally well characterised as a medium of fixity, pause and repetition. She approaches the medium of video as being somewhere between film and photography. It has an integral relation to both but belongs to neither. And it has its own time.

By way of conclusion, and in the spirit of the work I have described here perhaps I should loop back to repeat my earlier remark: It wouldn’t be quite right to say that the meaning of Knorr’s images is a complex experience of time, but the layers of interpretation within them are inextricably linked to their temporal character.

Footnotes

1 Gilles Deleuze, ‘The Brain is the Screen. An interview with Gilles Deleuze.’ Gregory Flaxman, editor, The Brain is the Screen. Deleuze an the Philosophy of Cinema, Routledge, 1997.

2 Denis Hollier, ‘Beyond Collage. Reflections on the Andre Malraux of L’Espoir and of Le Musee Imaginaire’. Art Press, no. 221, 1997.

3 Anthony J. Hamber (1993) ‘Photography of Works of Art’ in Jacobsen, Ken & Jenny,Etude D’Apres Nature. 19th Century Photographs in Relation to Art. Ken & Jenny Jacobsen, 1997.

4 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Noonday Press, 1981. Thierry de Duve, ‘Time Exposure and Snapshot: The Photograph as Paradox.’ October no.3. MIT Press, 1978.

5 The are echoes here of a passage in Chris Marker’s celebrated photo- film La Jetee. The hero recalls a dreamy afternoon in a Parisian museum of natural history spent with a lost lover. They lose themselves amid the stuffed birds and assorted mammals. The sequence of still frames places the animals and the people in the same register of time, somewhere between the living and the dead, just as the hero’s memory places events somewhere between ‘now’ and ‘then.’

Dans une récente monographie, Antonio Guzman qualifie la démarche de Karen Knorr comme « un projet de la photographie comme une réécriture et un inter-texte dans la poursuite d’un programme allégorique » , au sens où l’entend Roland Barthes, c’est à dire « l’impossibilité de vivre hors du texte infini » (Le plaisir du texte). C’est dire si le hasard n’a que peu de place dans ces compositions minutieuses où se croisent, se mêlent, s’opposent et mutent les conventions et les représentations.

Ainsi, au sein de l’œuvre l’animal se révèle genius loci, l’esprit du lieu qui autorise une continuité entre l’image et celui qui la regarde. Il concrétise et unifie l’espace de la représentation en lui insufflant l’actualité et le sens de sa présence, en même temps qu’il réfère à la présence intuitive du spectateur. En fait, nous regardons moins ces animaux qu’eux-mêmes regardent à l’intérieur de nous, dans le procès d’extraction des formes symboliques qui nous habitent.

En regardant les œuvres de Karen Knorr, au fil de l’entretien qu’elles ont suscité et à l’évocation de ses sources dans la peinture anglaise des XVIIIè et XIXè siècles, je me suis souvenue que le portrait animalier rendu par George Stubbs succédait à une opération primordiale : celle de la dissection. Pour le célèbre artiste anglais, il fallait remonter à l’anatomie la plus effroyable pour parachever l’ordre pur de l’extérieur, déchirer les chairs pour réaliser le plus beau des portraits. A l’inverse, le photographe décrypte les apparences dans une investigation subtile pour atteindre au plus profond de l’âme de chacun.

NL – Après Ferney-Voltaire (Les vertus et les délices), l’Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (Academies), le Musée d’Orsay (Visitors), la Bibliothèque des Jésuites de Valenciennes (Lecteurs : portrait d’un artiste), le Château de Cheverny offre un cadre patrimonial inédit dans votre travail. Non loin, près de Tours, se situe de le Château d’Oiron, qui héberge in situ une collection d’art contemporain dont le thème est le cabinet de curiosités. Cette notion apparaît au centre de l’espace de vos oeuvres, dans l’esprit du Kunst und Wunderkammer germanique, la « chambre d’art et de merveilles ». Dans nombres de vos séries – Connoisseurs, Académies, Sanctuary, et dernièrement Spirits – vous avez choisi et indexé des lieux dévolus à la collection, dont les objets virtuoses sont offerts à la contemplation, à l’émotion mais aussi parfois au trouble que suscite leur mystère. La luxuriance des couleurs, la multiplication des plans dans le cadrage, les correspondances formelles et symboliques semblent autant d’apostrophes lancées au regard du spectateur. La mise en abyme de l’identité du lieu et de ceux qui l’habitent ou le fréquentent se décline dans la présence de ces objets ouverts à l’interprétation, dans une relation qui est loin d’être silencieuse. Dans ce « colloque de chiens », vous débusquez la « curiosité » dans une forme de mise en scène du vivant.

KK – Si j’ai déjà traité de la figure singulière du chien, photographier un groupe entier était pour moi une nouveauté. J’ai voulu travailler d’une façon différente, dans une improvisation qui réserve des surprises, posent des problèmes mais génère aussi des solutions formelles intéressantes.
Dans la meute, les individualités sont absorbées dans une hiérarchie collective, strictement structurée. Chacun y a sa place, comme dans le château, chaque chose a sa place. Cette ordonnance était le théâtre de mon étude. Le château, avec ses meubles et ses tapisseries comme il se doit imposantes et princières, est le musée vivant d’une époque fondée sur une déclinaison ample de classes sociales, de la plus subalterne à la plus noble. Certains aspects de cette hiérarchie se manifestent encore dans la chasse et surtout dans l’économie de la meute composée de chiens que l’on croirait croisés entre le fox-hound anglais et le poitevin français. L’agencement des objets, des peintures et des meubles dans le château en révèlent certaines conventions ; c’est pourquoi j’ai choisi de les illustrer en les photographiant « à hauteur de chien ».

Mais c’est au sein du chenil que j’ai souhaité observer les signes de cette ordonnance. Le château de Cheverny est aujourd’hui une entreprise commerciale gérée par la famille Vibraye, sous la forme d’un parc à thème offert à la visite. La dimension historique est mise en valeur, notamment à travers ses résidents illustres, comme la « Grande Mademoiselle », sœur de Gaston d’Orléans. Dans l’Orangerie se déroulent des ventes aux enchères qui connaissent un grand succès public, particulièrement auprès des Américains. Avant même mon arrivée au château, je savais que j’allais concentrer mon travail sur les chiens. Dans un premier temps, j’ai filmé un moment qui constitue un véritable événement : le repas des chiens, dont le « service » est réglé comme un rituel, à la vue des visiteurs installés derrière les barreaux du chenil. Tout d’abord, la place est lavée à grande eau ; puis on dispose la nourriture, des carcasses animales broyées avec des compléments alimentaires ; enfin, on fait rentrer les chiens, les chefs de meute en tête.

Le déroulement de ce protocole est ponctué par les exclamations variées d’une audience en pâmoison à chaque mouvement de la meute, les chiens s’arrachant les morceaux en montant les uns sur les autres et urinant ça et là. Vers la fin du repas, quand les chiens sont repus, arrive le moment de la toilette : ils se lèchent les uns les autres, et certains se livrent à quelques assauts avortés sur des femelles dont l’indifférence est manifeste …
Laurent Chevalier, le maître-chien, m’a confié que ces chiens souffrent de la solitude ; le groupe et la hiérarchie qui l’anime constituent leur cadre de vie exclusif. Tenter de capter les individualités au sein de la meute relevait de la gageure, et pas seulement à cause des conditions atmosphériques maussades. Dans le mouvement général, distinguer ce qui relève du libre-arbitre du chien et de ce qui résulte des ordres de Laurent Chevalier n’est pas une mince affaire.

NL – Si l’animal comme extension critique est une figure allégorique récurrente de votre démarche, les registres qu’il a interprétés se déclinent sur plusieurs portées (psychique, esthétique, philosophique, mystique). Le Colloque de chiens confronte une dimension plus âpre, plus ancrée dans le rite social, à travers la fausse curée que constitue le repas de la meute, dans une mise en scène de retour d’une chasse qui n’a jamais eu lieu. L’énergie non dépensée des chiens semble entièrement recyclée dans le « show » destiné au visiteur. Ces conventions imposées par la tradition châtelaine exploite la dimension domestique du chien, assujetti au rôle de guerrier obéissant dans la société du spectacle. Sa bestialité est canalisée dans un usage défini et circonscrit à la recomposition d’une réalité en forme de caricature. Ce n’est plus « la mort que la bête porte dans ses yeux » et réfléchit au visiteur, mais le pastiche d’un combat fictif, la semblance d’une existence parodique. Cette version édulcorée du divertissement violent, résidu conventionnel du panem et circenses latin, n’est pas exempte d’un certaine mélancolie inhérente à la notion de spectacle.

KK – J’éprouve une certaine fascination pour cette nature acculturée dévolue au spectacle. Cet élevage produit une espèce canine dont le sort est de manger, dormir, déféquer et d’uriner en public – un public uniquement humain de surcroît. Tout ce festin n’est qu’une vaste simulation de la frénésie du retour d’une chasse couronnée de succès. Il ne faut en outre pas négliger le fait que ces chiens, malgré tout l’attachement qu’ils peuvent inspirer, ne sont pas des animaux de compagnie mais bel et bien de labeur, dont on exige neuf ans de bons et loyaux services dont ils ressortent exsangues. Leur périmètre d’épanouissement est clairement délimité : le chenil et la foret, sous le contrôle attentif de leurs maîtres.

NL – Comme archétype mythique, le chien entretient avec l’homme une relation particulièrement étroite. Après avoir été le compagnon fidèle de l’homme dans le jour de la vie, il incarne le psychopompe, qui le guide dans le nuit de la mort (Anubis, Cerbère …). La dimension anthropomorphe du chien a connu une grande fortune dans le genre du portrait. Votre dyptique High Life / Low Life fait lui-même référence à l’œuvre éponyme de Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1829), dont les modèles canins exhibent les contrastes d’une société de classes, ici rurale et patricienne. Ils y tiennent une fonction allégorique au même titre que les objets et signes qui les entourent, dans un mimétisme exemplaire dont les poses de A distingued Member of the Humane Society (1838) et de Dignity and Impudence (1839) sont éloquentes. La distance parodique dont sont empreints ces « véritables portraits » persiste dans les œuvres que vous avez produites à Cheverny.

KK – J’ai toujours privilégié divers niveaux d’interprétation au sein de mes œuvres, à travers leurs données tant visuelles et linguistiques. Je ne recherche pas l’authenticité, l’originalité ou l’expression personnelle, car je considère que nous sommes des produits de l’histoire, traversés par les idées de notre temps. L’Histoire vit dans le présent et se soumet à toutes les réinventions. Et c’est peut-être ce processus de réinvention, dans l’incorporation de fables et de fictions contemporaines, qui fait la nouveauté.

J’emprunte littéralement des titres ou des références d’œuvres du passé, de peintures, de musiques, de films. Cette tendance se manifeste clairement dans Sanctuary, à travers le jeux de lumières et les références à Alfred Hitchcock (In the Green Room s’inspire des Oiseaux). Je puise dans une généalogie de références visuelles antérieures. Cette fois-ci, j’ai choisi la peinture de genre anglaise du XVIIè, XIIIème et XIXème siècle déclinant le registre de la chasse. Mais certains portraits de groupes de chiens pourraient sortir des vignettes de Walt Disney et des 101 Dalmatiens ! J’aime que mes images oscillent entre la méditation et le divertissement.

Dans Le Roi de la Forêt, un petit chien de chasse nous tourne le dos regardant la forêt à l’horizon, comme une alternative au tableau de Rosa Bonheur (1878) qui montre un chien sortant du bois confrontant le regard du spectateur. Dans Le Domaine d’Hurault (du nom des premiers propriétaires du château), la scène est traitée à la manière d’un nu dans le paysage. Dead Game (gibier) tire sa référence d’œuvres éponymes de Frans Snyder et de Landseer (1832). Sous ce titre générique s’expose souvent le butin de la chasse généreusement distribué sur des tables ou à terre. Mais dans ma composition, plus que le gibier ce sont les chiens qui semblent morts, assoupis épars sur le sol du chenil …

NL – Depuis ses premières incursions dans les années 80, l’animal constitue pour vous une figure problématique de la relation de l’homme à la nature. Au sein du cabinet de curiosités, l’œuvre catalysait ce rapport dans un processus d’historicisation destiné à établir une classification naturelle, une généalogie dont l’être humain serait la finalité. L’animal est perçu comme un symptôme de notre environnement, un indicateur d’existence – dans l’épanouissement ou la régression. Le zoomorphisme et la physiognomonie ont abondamment exploité la dimension symbolique et narrative de la bête comme modélisation codifiée de l’humanité. Ce « Carnaval des animaux » a connu dans votre oeuvre des formes (le singe, le paon, le loup …) et des intentions diverses. Dans le catalogue de l’exposition La part de l’autre au Carré d’art de Nîmes à laquelle vous participez actuellement, Françoise Cohen analyse le « territoire ouvert » de l’animalité dans le champ de l’art moderne et contemporain comme une pure commutation représentative entre les caractères fondamentaux de l’instinct animal et de la psychè humaine : « A tout moment, l’homme peut se glisser dans la peau de l’animal (…). Le recours à l’animal apparaît comme un nouveau théâtre qui ouvre les limites du corps de l’artiste imposées par les expérimentations des années 70 comme lieu de l’art, une manière symbolique d’inscrire les relations d’un individu à la société, une comédie où chacun peut être acteur pour l’autre (…) » .

KK – Quand j’ai photographié pour la première fois un chimpanzé – notre cousin éloigné – en 1986, à Osterley Park House (Connoisseurs), il tournait le dos au spectateur, un obélisque érigé à sa gauche. Il représentait pour moi une sorte de personnage « darwinien », qui aurait évolué et rendu son appréciation de l’influence de l’Afrique du Nord sur l’architecture européenne. Je connaissais une œuvre d’Edwin Landseer de 1827 intitulée The Monkey who Had Seen the World (le singe qui a vu le monde). Le mimétisme anthropomorphique du singe révise non sans ironie la hiérarchie de l’histoire naturelle qui place l’homme et ses origines au sommet, près de Dieu.

Plus récemment Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, dans Mille Plateaux (1980), ont tenté de rendre la définition d’un « devenir-animal » comme salut de la condition humaine. Dans L’Animal postmoderne (2000), Steve Baker démontre que l’animal, dans les nouvelles de Kafka, a une fonction métaphorique : il incarne la fuite dans une métamorphose qui constitue le seul échappatoire possible.

Dans un esprit voisin, j’essaye de construire un point de vue qui ne soit pas celui de l’humain, une façon d’interroger et de mettre en doute l’ordre civilisé et policé des choses engendré par un système étouffant d’inventaire, de classification et de comptabilité du monde. Ainsi à travers l’animal s’incarnent la transgression mais aussi l’altérité radicale, mystérieuse, antagoniste mais aussi séduisante. Ce n’est pas un hasard sur la série produite à Cheverny s’intitule La Vénerie. Ce vocable évoque non seulement l’art de la chasse dans la traque du gibier, mais aussi, dans un sens plus ancien, dans la recherche du plaisir.

1) Antonio Guzman, Karen Knorr, Ed. FRAC de Basse Normandie, 2001, p. 30
2) cat. La part de l’autre, Actes Sud / Carré d’art de Nîmes, 2002, p. 19

A pigeon, oppressed by excessive thirst, saw a goblet of water
painted on a signboard. Not supposing it to be only a picture, she flew
towards it with a loud whir and unwittingly dashed against the
signboard, jarring herself terribly. Having broken her wings by the
blow, she fell to the ground, and was caught by one of the bystanders.
Zeal should not outrun discretion.1

Fables are due for a revival. Short, pointed narratives, peopled with familiar animals and barbed with cruel morals, they explore the myriad facets of human vanity. They seem particularly well suited to our own era, with its decadent consumption, spectacularity, and highly developed taste for shadenfreude. Fables have been used since ancient Greece to consider the baser aspects of human nature. Writers and artists from Jean de La Fontaine to Charles Schulz have drawn on Aesop’s legacy to skewer specific politics or attitudes of the day. And certainly, many of Aesop’s morals ring true to our own moment, not least “Familiarity breeds contempt,” (The Fable of the Fox and the Lion) “One bad turn deserves another,” (The Fox and the Stork), or “Any fool can despise what he cannot get” (The Fox and the Grapes).

Karen Knorr’s most recent series is entitled Fables, but the morals of the individual images are not immediately apparent. The colour Lamda prints, staged in the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, feature classic animal characters: the cunning fox, the foolish pigeon, the parsimonious squirrel and the pesky rat. Yet these creatures—borrowed from a taxidermist’s shop rather than a zoo—are not doing much to move a narrative along. Rather than earning some kind of humiliating comeuppance, these intruders are mostly sitting or standing quietly. Their gazes draw us into the highly loaded recessive space and provide an allegory for the way we look at this strange rarefied world of culture and at the photographs themselves.

Knorr punctuates her elegantly composed period interiors with details that jar us back to the present. In various Fables we can see an illuminated exit sign, wall labels, and contemporary track lighting. These details provide the clues that these images are not supposed to represent some kind of time-travel to the original incarnation of these rooms. Rather, we are in a time apart, an imaginative time/space parallel to our own, akin to the subversive scenario in which the nursery toys come to life after the children have gone to bed.

In Demarteau’s Study, three rats and a grey squirrel occupy a remarkable Rococo room the walls of which are painted with pastoral and farmyard scenes. While one rat concentrates all his attention on the floor, the other two stand upright looking, as if in recognition, at some painted chickens and a cat. If we anthropomorphise these rats as philosophical creatures, we might imagine them drawing a moral conclusion from the decorative painting they examine. How foolish or arrogant the chickens to be sitting in plain view of the cat. The squirrel, meanwhile, looks out at the viewer, drawing us into the play of looks and layers of representation.

Knorr’s works are site-specific. Her prior projects have found their richness in the baggage of particular modes of architecture and sculpture, and of specific cultural institutions. Many works have been set in 18th and 19th century British interiors, the territory of Sir John Soane, Lord Burlington, and Robert Adam.2 Knorr leads us to reflect on our ongoing relationship to the spaces and artifacts depicted, and also on the Enlightenment values that they represent: rationality, order and an elegant austerity on the one hand, and a darker tradition of elitism, exploitation and control on the other. The French context of the Fables gives the work a slightly different emphasis. We are still located in the museum, that is to say in a version of the past as projected by the present.3 The Musée Carnavalet presents period rooms from different sites and eras in the history of Paris. The photographs in this series are set in the museum’s ancien régime interiors. While these rooms serve to display the wealth and magnificence of their original inhabitants, they also attest to an engagement with the key artistic notions of the day. In the case of Demarteau’s study, we are looking at a decorative scheme based on a playful slippage between nature and culture, a highly self-conscious art, delighting in its own artificiality at the same time as it mimics certain aspects of the natural world.

In this context, Knorr’s sewer rats are vermin, providing an element of abjection. They are as out of place in this painted barnyard as the sound of a cock’s crow or the smell of chicken shit. Flattened onto the same plane as their painted rivals, the rats and squirrel add another layer to the Rococo discussion of artifice and illusion, a layer that takes place in contemporary photographic terms. The camera angle used throughout the series helps to draw us into strange identification with the animals. Angling her large format camera up from the floor, Knorr has given us a rat’s-eye view, with perspectival distortion optically corrected by tilting the back of the camera. The result is a disconcerting mechanical view that implies a very low, non-human spectator.4 Using photographic means as well as the skills of a child at play, Knorr recuperates this room for a contemporary reprise of the kinds of conversations about art that might once have taken place within it.

In The Blue Salon Louis XVI, the flavour of the room is neoclassical, but with a decidedly pre-revolutionary twist. While artists during the French Revolution may have seen classicism as the style of republican masculinity and gravitas, artists at the tail end of the ancien régime turned to Greece and Rome for a model of refined simplicity and grace, a kind of feminised classicism.5 In this interior from the 1880s we see furniture with long slim legs, and a folding screen decorated with grotesques, inspired by the frescoes at Pompeii. In the background hangs a portrait of a female sitter styled with a loose muslin head wrap and informal gown. In contrast to the formal court portraiture of ten years earlier, images like this were designed to reflect a Rousseauian naturalness and simplicity—the kinds of values that led Marie Antoinette to dress up as a shepherdess. Knorr has peopled this room with a family of foxes, a female with two cubs. Poised warily across the bottom of the frame, the foxes criss-cross the picture plane with their glassy gazes. These are not cute Beatrix Potter animal-people, but something more awkward and troubling. Without the foxes, the photograph might be seen as a contemporary document of a historical interior. Their presence charges the room with Knorr’s own personality and humour. She has penetrated this historical interior with its highly stylized version of naturalness, and has introduced another layer of un-natural nature.

Staged photography provides a suitable extension of the 18th century preoccupation with the relationships between nature, culture and the artist’s imagination. The digital element of the work gives the photographic artist additional power to master and subdue the index, potentially moving towards painterly ideas. Knorr has turned only recently to digital technology. Like many contemporary practitioners, she now shoots her images on large-format film, and then scans the negatives so that she can tweak and alter. She could use this capacity to make the images more believably illusionistic, to enliven them. But Knorr is clearly not aiming for the photographic realism of wildlife photography. For the most part, the animals appear stiff, even a little clumsy. Visual clues suggest that some of them may have been inserted, repeated, or flipped via digital means. We cannot account for how the pigeons in The Green Bedroom Louis XVI came to be suspended across the space, in an elegant swag of outstretched wings. Without the kind of blurring or anatomical distortion that we expect in photography of moving animals since Muybridge, these pigeons seem decidedly un-photographic. This image is the most dynamic of the series, and also the most mannered. While objects of taxidermy might be able to stay propped up in many of the poses that Knorr depicts, these pigeons have attained their flight through the will of the artist. Their composition, complete with disorienting shadows, transforms a relatively plain room into a swooping rococo composition. In this case Knorr’s intervention has one-upped the historical interior.

Aesop’s fable of the Thirsty Pigeon offers a counterpoint to Pliny’s allegory of painting, in which Zeuxis and Parrhasios compete to create the more illusionistic picture.6 While Pliny’s tale deals with the power of the very skilled artist to trick even his peers, Aesop focuses his attention on those who are fooled. And of course it could be any one of us whose questing desire for an item pictured in a mail order catalogue or internet personal ad leads to humbling disenchantment. Karen Knorr is never out to trick us; she lays all her illusions out before us to be examined. This work, perhaps more that any of her earlier projects, stages illusion not merely as a means but an end, to lead us beyond the consumption of historical images and into an irreverent and questioning engagement with them. In Knorr’s work, we are the bystanders with the discretion to identify the illusion, and to keep it separate from lived experience. Still, we enjoy the looking.

These curious photographs address the circumstances in which Knorr finds herself. First, she has arrived rather late at the banquet of history. Many of the grand ideas that attract her are trapped, like flies in amber, within the space of the museum, waiting to be rediscovered. Using staging, technical virtuosity, playful humour and a pinch of deliberate awkwardness, Knorr teases some of the most exalted themes of art history out of the objects of elite material culture and into photographic terms. In doing so, she claims an ambition and importance for photography as a medium capable of such work. She also claims a serious role for herself, a woman artist, reworking spaces that were created by men of power and taste. As in the tradition of fable, animals provide Knorr with a vehicle for exploring human desire, vanity and ambition in a mock serious tone that sparkles with wit.

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1
Aesop’s Fables, in a classic English translation by George Fyler Townsend, are in the
public domain, and are available online at sources including www.literature.org2
This aspect of Knorr’s work is discussed by Antonio Guzman, “Rewind and Fast-
Forward: Photography, Allegory and Palimpsest,” in Genii Loci: The Photographic Work
of Karen Knorr (London: Black Dog, 2002), p. 11.
3
See David Campany, “Museum and Medium: The Time of Karen Knorr’s Images,” in
Genii Loci, pp. 114-123.
4
Conversation with the artist, 2 September, 2005.

5
For a discussion of the overlap between Neoclassic and Rococo tendencies in 18th
century France see Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art
(Princeton, 1967), pp . 3-10.
6
For a discussion of this motif in Knorr’s work see Rebecca Comay’s interview with the
artist, “Natural Histories,” in Genius Locii, pp. 65-6.