Heinz Cibulka

Cibulka’s development from an (actionist) actor to an (photo-artistic) author can be retraced with the help of the antipodes of passivity and activity – not, however, in the sense of a substitution of the one position for the other.¹⁵ The resolution of this contradiction was already implicit in Cibulka’s role as ‘passive actor’ (‘passiver Akteur’). In the conception of the picture poem, specifically in the understanding of authorship and the creative act that manifests itself in it, these antipodes arrive at a new form of interconnection. In addition, this theme also appears in Cibulka’s later philosophic reflections on art and life.¹⁶ A connection between actor and author can furthermore be made based on the notion of recording.

As an actor in a scripted, dramatic-ritual event, Cibulka was something like a primary medium for the Actionist Nitsch (and, incidentally, in no way his material in the manner of many of the women deployed by Otto Muehl in his actions). In this role, he ‘passively’ acquiesced to what was happening around and to him, while also being active in the sense that he did not simply submit himself to these events, but presented them through his reaction in terms of his physical, cognitive, and psychological presence – and thus revealed or recorded the events in order to render them perceptible to the audience witnessing the action from the outside. As a photographer, he is the sensitive receptor of reality, whose pictures are simultaneously a documentary record, a visual trace of a translation or transposition, and in their final constellation as a picture poem, the initiator of individual, creative processes of perception and association.

Within Cibulka’s conception of the picture poem, active and passive aspects of the production and reception of art are redistributed between artist and viewer in a distinctive manner: a ‘stimulus function’ is not only at work in the viewer’s interaction with the completed picture poem, it also plays a decisive role in Cibulka’s artistic production process.¹⁷ This becomes somewhat clear when Cibulka describes how a phase of taking distance should precede the actual completion of the picture poems. This enables him to see his photographs, as it were, with new eyes; to expose himself to the images as ‘unbiasedly’ as possible, in order to be able to develop his combinations of images as an immediate reaction to the given.¹⁸ He describes the viewer’s process of reception as similar to his own work: just as he subjects himself to the material and allows it to ‘stimulate’ him while photographing and selecting the elements of the four-part constellations, so should the viewer be inspired by his quadripartite pictures to an individual, creative act of image reception.¹⁹

Cibulka discusses the production process behind his photo quartets in a number of texts; these initially served to help reflect upon and explain his work, but later also served a didactic purpose in the context of his teaching.²⁰ His progression through (at least two; or four, if they are broken down in more detail) distinct stages is significant:

determining a theme or field of interest (for example, the investigation of a specific cultural landscape and existential aspects of its living conditions)
recording significant picture details (photographic act) of the selected theme and having the prints commercially processed in keeping with standardized parameters
analysing the resulting pool of images through further viewing as well as grouping
assembling rectangular constellations of four images.

When this working process is viewed in the context of Cibulka’s discussions, it reveals itself as a complex strategy in which complementary affinities and diverse counterforces are linked up in relation to the tendencies referred to in the previous chapter. Cibulka’s exposure to the aims of Actionism is thus obviously manifest in the central importance of sensually experienced and intellectually apprehended reality, and accordingly, of extensively sensitized experience as the primary realm and activity of art (and of ‘being’). However, with the conception of the picture poem as a work of art, Cibulka’s notion of art diverges in fundamental aspects from the Actionist art manifested by the ‘Orgies-Mysteries-Theatre’. Reality constructed in the form of image/language takes the place of the unmediated event (in Actionism). This constructed reality initially takes the form of a collected bundle of images, and finally, in cycles of composite pictures whose organization is informed by a considerable semantic openness within the framework of a rigorous formal structure.

Seen as the final product of an artistic process, the picture poems trace back to a (modified) notion of the artwork which the Actionists disavowed. Cibulka’s photographic work takes up its position precisely at that point where a dilemma of action art becomes virulent, in the area of tension between unmediated experience and the representation or documentation of reality.²¹ These issues are immanent to Cibulka’s invention and development of the picture poem (even if his photographic work is not to be understood as explicitly critical of media or representation).

It is the photographic medium, with its ‘perception political’ dimensions and semiotic implications that is at the core of this dilemma. This enables Cibulka to realize an image-based work as a relay that ensures the aforementioned ‘distributive parity’ of participation and confrontation between viewer and producer (and thus softens the traditionally extensive demands on an active creator subject and emancipates viewers from their passivity respectively).

Cibulka perceives the individual photo in a direct sense as a storage device.²² Secondary literature on his photographic aesthetic makes reference to an intentionally naive eye that can be best compared with an amateurish photographic technique. His renunciation of exercising any influence over the print’s processing and printing (for example, through variations in cropping, colour definition or print quality...) has been repeatedly emphasized.²³

Within the historical context of the appearance of the first cycles of picture poems, Cibulka’s photos did not take the form of individualized pictorial compositions in the sense of Autorenfotografie.²⁴ It seems reasonable to interpret these aesthetic qualities as an attempt to retreat as much as possible from the role of photographically creative author. Nonetheless, even in its apparently unmediated ‘given-ness’, the reality depicted in Cibulka’s photographs reveals the presence of an author (who, when considering his oeuvre, becomes more and more distinct). Hence, the photographically ‘given’ is a trace of reality that mediates and communicates the circumstances of its shooting. Even if Cibulka’s statements suggest that in this no artifice is being employed, nonetheless, a specific authorial stance is clearly manifested.

Cibulka becomes tangible in his role as the photographic author not only by incorporating friends and family (which not every viewer can identify), but also more generally by photographing people who very often react to the photographer and to being photographed. The photograph thus also conveys an impression of the circumstances of its shooting and the (communicative) attitude of the photographer. This participatory orientation can be effectively characterized as the opposite of a voyeuristic gaze equipped, for example, with a telephoto lens, which clandestinely snatches an image of the recorded situations or people (even the pair of lovers at the beach in the 1986 Napoli series is not secretly observed; this is an event in public that occurs in full view at the beach).

The artist avoids pictorial effects, such as defamiliarizing abstraction, compositional emphasis (e.g., through cropping or differential focus), spectacular exaggeration of scenes or also a distanced, documentary style. This gaze can also be clearly recognized in the images of objects, such as field crops or seafood, already presented within their real context: spread out on tables or laid out and waiting to be prepared. Activities and scenarios are also recorded in terms of coherent, easily understood entities. The motivation for taking the picture can usually be directly recognized in the depicted subject matter. The main motif is often in the centre of the image, but there are certainly also fragmentary elements, such as the crowns of trees, partially cropped monuments and statues, as well as images that are blurred by movement or are overexposed, in which the medium’s merely reproductive capacity wanes. What becomes all the more apparent in these cases is the nature of the photograph as a conditioned image – in terms of the apparatus, but, above all, in terms of the gaze of the photographer. As Gerhard Roth trenchantly formulated: in Cibulka’s photography, the gaze takes the place of the image.²⁵

Pages of books, illustrations, screenshots, posters, and paintings repeatedly appear in Cibulka’s picture poems and deserve attention within this context. This has nothing to do with the author of the image withdrawing for the sake of a reproduction or with reflections on the media of representation, because the pre-existing, represented images always remain perceptible in terms of their materiality as perceived objects. Cibulka sees them as citations and, accordingly, sometimes also uses images by other photographers in his works.²⁶

Particularly when surveying the several decades of Cibulka’s photographic production, it becomes possible to understand stylistic differences, which are sometimes related to the subject matter of certain cycles of works and, presumably, also to his combinatory practice’s influence on the aesthetics of his individual image. Thus, in the 1991/92 cycle Antwerpen, an interest in colour relations and reflected light becomes apparent, an interest not found in earlier works. However, Cibulka does not grasp these changes in his photographic approach in the sense of a continuous development, but rather as a consciously pursued variability in his photographic idiom(s).²⁷ This can be thought of as analogous to an individual’s use of spoken language, which varies according to context; for example, in the form of the adaptation or transfer of nuances and vocabulary, even to the point of using foreign languages.

From the very beginning, Cibulka’s specific pictorial idiom, with its alleged artlessness (the use of commercial developing process and its predefined colour, for example), distinguishes him from his colleagues. In Austria in general, up until the early 1980s, black and white photography predominated. It was either orientated on genre-specific aesthetics (such as photojournalism and reporting) or certain photographic styles (such as subjective photography or American documentary photography) and developed these styles further. Photographers working in a conceptual, feminist, or media-critical vein also often created their work in black and white. Whenever colour photography was used, colour took on a comparatively strongly expressive form. (To avoid going beyond the scope of this text, more detailed comparisons of Cibulka’s work with other photo-artistic positions will not be pursued here).

15 |    The relationship between Cibulka’s role(s) in Actionism and his later work as a photographer has been treated in multiple publications, extensively in, e.g.: Kurt Kaindl, ‘Über das Verhältnis von Aktionsfotografie und bildsprachlicher Arbeit bei Heinz Cibulka’, in Heinz Cibulka, aktion & Fotografie, ed. by Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna 1989, unpag. [pp. 14–22]; Hanno Millesi, ‘Zwischen Realitätsverlust und Wirklichkeitsdefinition – Standardbegriffe’, in Heinz Cibulka / Lucien Kayser, Bildgenerationen/2, ed. by Niederösterr. Landesmuseum, St. Pölten, Vienna 2003, pp. 23–27 (Millesi entitled the section dealing with Cibulka’s changing roles ‘Reaktionismus’).

16 |    ‘My presence in and upon this world simultaneously expresses itself through activity and passivity, through active influence on external conditions and through aggressive internalization of external qualities within my ego. Eating, drinking – destroying, killing – mating, giving birth … I accept these basic biological activities as a constant model for my behaviour in life. I can’t use qualities to so clearly define “passive coming into possession” … “Active or/and passive being” can operate through giving and taking, recognizing and judging ... also through naming, explaining, describing, contemplating, and empathizing as well as through the attempted reliving of moving events or through thinking ahead and feeling ahead ... The complex process of perception, the translation into a medium of communication, the exegesis and interpretation: these are steps in our appropriation of the world that are specific to our species, but also entirely personal. … One form of interpreting obvious facts, mysterious feelings, and impressions is generally understood to be artistic appropriation. [...] Thus, in a certain sense, every statement is also simultaneously a more or less artistic one, because it demands and produces the preceding process of translation, interpretation, and projection.’ Heinz Cibulka, ‘Aneignung von Welten: Ariadne, Emilie, Perseval, Camillo, Theresa und Julia zuliebe’, in Heinz Cibulka, Linz: Fotografische Bildgedichte (Ladendorf, 1993), unpag. [pp. 3–9, p. 3].

17 |    This argument is only indirectly aimed at the paradigm shift inspired by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Umberto Eco, among others, which led to a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between author and reader or semantic foundation and the task of interpretion. Instead, the following is intended to show how Cibulka adapts the authorial role (traditionally defined as primarily active and autonomously creative, but ‘relativized’ through this paradigm shift) to his own needs by himself taking on the role of the viewer (also expanded, but traditionally thought of as passive) within his productive process. See also: Kurt Kaindl, ‘Entstehungsbedingungen der Fotoblätter Heinz Cibulkas’, in Heinz Cibulka, Weinviertler Bildersetzkasten (Mistelbach, 1990), unpag. [pp. 12–15].

18 |    ‘First, I put my photos aside or, sometimes, superficially look through them, but I don’t begin to sort them yet. By eliminating the developing and printing processes [Cibulka brings his negatives to anonymous, commercial developers, who apply automatized colour definition and, initially, he used only prints in the format of 13 × 18 cm], I confront the so-called individual photos without preconceived notions. The photo as a part of my archives is, to a certain extent, new to me ... I let this heap of pictures “ferment” in my memory; I repeatedly take another look at them and try to note as many of their qualities as possible. The process of getting to know them is to be understood as a sort of ingestion. [...] My sensitivity is to be put to the test at as many levels as possible. I use the photos as a means to excite my natural excitability.’ Heinz Cibulka, ‘Fotografie – am Beispiel meiner Arbeiten’, in Camera Austria, 6 (1981), pp. 3–9 (pp. 4 and 9); repr. in Heinz Cibulka, Land-Alphabete. Fotografische Arbeiten 1969–1983, Vienna 1983, pp. 80–92).

19 |    The task of active reading, which the picture poems initiate in the viewer, is discussed in connection with Umberto Eco’s semiotic theories in: Dieter Schrage, ‘Dichte Assoziationsfelder: Zu den Bildbotschaften von Heinz Cibulka’, in Heinz Cibulka, Land-Alphabete, 1983, pp. 27–31.

20 |    Heinz Cibulka, ‘Vom Brechreiz bis zur Glückswallung: Meine Arbeit mit Fotografien’, in Heinz Cibulka, Stoffwechsel, ed. by Otto Breicha, Graz 1977 (pp. [7f.]); Cibulka, ‘Fotografie – am Beispiel meiner Arbeiten’, 1981, pp 3–9; Heinz Cibulka, ‘Most – fühlt/Cider – feels’, in Camera Austria, 8 (1982), pp. 73–79 (repr. in Cibulka, Land-Alphabete, 1983, pp. 92–96); Heinz Cibulka, ‘Mit Fotografien dichterisch kombinieren und gestalten’, in Nationalpark Hohe Tauern: Klasse Cibulka – Eine Fotodokumentation, ed. by Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst Salzburg, Fotohof Salzburg, 1988, pp. 16–18; Heinz Cibulka, ‘Es gibt keine Regeln, wie das Bild zu lesen ist’, interview with Adam Mazur, Fototapeta (Nov. 2002) http://fototapeta.art.pl/2004/hcbd.php [accessed August 2011].

21 |   In addition to the texts mentioned in Note 15, see also: Michael Ponstingl, ‘Heinz Cibulkas Präsentationen montierten Sprachmaterials – Zwischen “Kiahdrichln”, “Hollunderblütenversprechungen” und “Eiterpink”’, in Heinz Cibulka, Saft aus Sprache: Abschriften, Notenbild-Verbarien, Freie Reihungen, Texturen 1970–1990, ed. by Michael Ponstingl (St Pölten, 2010), pp. 224–38 (p. 232). Ponstingl cites the writings of Peter Gorsen and Oliver Jahraus in his discussion of the dilemma that the ‘registration of a real event in the absence of aesthetic alienation’, a goal pursued by Hermann Nitsch (at least in the earlier phases of his development), proves futile, because there can be ‘no complete identity between representation and that represented’.

22 |    ‘I accept the individual photo as a reality, how it produces discussions in me, affects me. Because I assume that I am a constantly varying factor, my relationship to the photo also changes. A photo used by me is not a reproduction of something, of a thing; it is always a matter of a so-called reforming or original forming.’ Cibulka, ‘Am Beispiel meiner Arbeiten’, 1981, p. 9. ‘Fundamentally, I am not investigating the laws and the structures of photography and the machines that produce it. Likewise, I am not directly concerned with the regard for photography as an artistic medium.’ Cibulka, ‘Cider – feels’, 1982, p. 73. ‘The foundation of those pictures that I will later use in my poetic compositions is formed by a view that is, in some form, phenomenologically oriented and is as unbiased as possible regarding objects and situations. … It is a sort of approach to real situations, or to aspects of the visual, that is as direct as possible – from the very beginning, I try to advance without any formal rules. This is where I see a sort of “montage of realities”, a very simple attempt at a translation of reality – reality is to be saved in the form of an associative cipher.’ Heinz Cibulka, ‘Es gibt keine Regeln’, 2002.

23 |    ‘Heinz Cibulka’s individual photos do not feature any dominant composition or specific signature style (in contrast to what is otherwise standard fine-art photographic practice). They really do seem to repeat the gesture of pointing: “That, there.” Rainer Fuchs wrote the following of Cibulka’s working method: “A child sees a sheep in the pasture and says: Look, a sheep. That is exactly how Cibulka takes photos.” [Rainer Fuchs, ‘Cibulkas Auge’, in Heinz Cibulka, exh. cat. Stedelijik Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, 1983)]. The uncomposed-naive individual photos make us forget the photographer.’ Kaindl, ‘Aktion und Fotografie’, 1989 (p. [18]). ‘The investigator Cibulka, who is not concerned with a scientific, but with an artistic collation of facts, [cites] reality in his artless snapshots … Cibulka’s photography is as direct as the real objects standing on the shelves or in the display cases before us. His practice is deliberately artless. His snapshots, mostly taken from close up, show something, they point to something, they take hold of an occurrence, they call attention to something.’ Peter Weiermair, ‘Heinz Cibulka. Bildgedichte als Suche nach dem ursprünglichen Leben’, in Heinz Cibulka, Bild Material, ed. by Peter Zawrel, Kulturabt. des Landes Niederösterreich (Vienna 1993), p. 8. ‘[Cibulka’s photographic works make use of] a seemingly artless superficial structure, whose secret artistry lies exclusively in the power of the material.’ Zawrel, ‘Kraft des Materials: Bilder’, in Bild Material, p. 15. ‘Cibulka sees photography as a recording of slices of reality, irrespective of the difference displayed between the technical pictorial idiom and reality. … In the context of his own work, [he works] as an applied photographer, one who makes use of an emphatically uncomplicated technique, which renounces every refinement.’ Hanno Millesi, Zur Fotografie im Wiener Aktionismus, ed. by FLUSS NÖ-Fotoinitiative (Wolkersdorf 1998), p. 26. See also the instructive analysis of an amateurish photographic practice, deliberately deployed in the art context: Georg F. Schwarzbauer, ‘Die Bedeutung der Fotografie in der bildenden Kunst der Gegenwart’, in Manfred Willmann and Christine Frisinghelli, Symposion über Fotografie, steirischer herbst (Graz, 1979), pp. 83–97 (p. 92).

24 |    In the first decade of his photographic work, which was soon noted and prized in the most important exhibitions and publications on contemporary photography, the term Autorenfotografie represented – also for Cibulka himself – a tendency that was something like the polar opposite of Cibulka’s own, a tendency from which he distinguished and differentiated himself. This direction can be roughly characterized as an ambitious, fine-art photography with an associative, anti-mimetic pictorial idiom and stemming from an emphatically subjective stylistic impulse, in the tradition of Otto Steinert; in Vienna it was advanced by the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt and in Graz by Erich Kees. This polarization becomes problematic when it leads to the conclusion that Cibulka’s work is thus to be assigned to the category of a documentary, ‘objectivist’ approach. In the following, an attempt will be made to show that this does not even apply to the first step of the production process of his picture poems, the taking of the photographs.

25 |    ‘The gaze takes the place of the image. … His ideal camera would be a mechanical contact lens whose shutter is ‘released’ merely through thought. Cibulka changes nothing. … He exposes, lights, shades; he does not use a tripod, zoom, distort – he notices and approaches. … He does not present anything more or less than how we look. Every photograph contains an indication of how we look, overlook, notice, cast aside. Gerhard Roth, ‘Cibulka – Der Blick’, in Gerhard Roth, Über Bilder: Österreichische Malerei nach 1945 (Vienna, 1990), p. 123 (repr. in Cibulka, Obraz#, 2007, pp. 51–54.)

26 |    ‘Different photos make their way into my store of images. [...] All of them are welcome to me and offer me that pictorial material which I need for my compositions. In the first picture poems, I almost never worked with images created by others. Since around 1980, I have occasionally inserted such images into the picture poems in the form of citations. My wife, Magdalena Frey … repeatedly provided images for my picture poems and photo series and, later, for my digital collages.’ Cibulka, ‘Es gibt keine Regeln’, 2002.

27 |    ‘For me, there is a general rule: I do not attempt to create “good” individual photos corresponding to any specific traditional model. When taking photos, I find that my “inborn, individual artistic style” is simultaneously a sort of corset, from which I continually attempt to free myself. I attempt to create as many different pictures as possible. If I could choose, I would have ten different heads to take photos with – not just my own. I want to go beyond myself and my limited possibilities. In principle, however, I am working for the sake of my later collages when I am taking pictures, and in this role, I need to gather material that is as diverse as possible – different material, that opens up a great deal of possibilities for my poetic combinations.’ Cibulka, ‘Es gibt keine Regeln’, 2002.