Barbara & Michael Leisgen

About the work of Barbara & Michael Leisgen
(Excerpt from catalogue "De la beauté usée", "Whomever has contemplated beauty...", Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris)

Forty-five years ago Barbara and Michael Leisgen were part of a group of artists who appropriated the medium of photography because it allowed them to explore and experiment with the image, something that seemed...

About the work of Barbara & Michael Leisgen
(Excerpt from catalogue "De la beauté usée", "Whomever has contemplated beauty...", Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris)

Forty-five years ago Barbara and Michael Leisgen were part of a group of artists who appropriated the medium of photography because it allowed them to explore and experiment with the image, something that seemed impossible in painting. One has to add: in the seventies all the disciplines of the fine and dramatic arts, and of literature and music were readily available for one’s use, and with a consciousness of being at point zero, fantastic inventions were made in all of these disciplines, the effects of which are still felt today. [..]
At point zero Bruce Nauman discovered that the empty space underneath his chair was a sculpture, and Richard Serra filled the corner between the floor and the walls of his studio with liquid lead (it was also the time when man first walked on the moon). During this period the Leisgens discovered the sun.

Barbara and Michael Leisgen are part of a generation of artists who, right from the outset of their careers, showed an affinity for the landscape, for nature — like, for example, Richard Long or Hamish Fulton in England, Paul-Armand Gette in France or, in a larger sense, Walter De Maria in America. They all have to admit that the history of their ideas on nature are rooted in European romanticism. Barbara and Michael Leisgen acknowledge this fact with a range of references to the most well known romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich. [...]

In an early work called Mimesis, Barbara Leisgen, seen from behind, integrates herself into the hilly landscape through the gesture of her arms. She takes the place of the female figure who, in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Morgenlicht, is acting for the viewer in stretching out her hands tenderly to nature. There is another aspect of Friedrich’s work which the Leisgens also utilise: his paintings not only demand concentrated contemplation, but devotion, a religious attitude in which the image of nature opens up to infinity and to God. A sacral sphere, a zone of holiness envelopes the work. [...] At the outset of the Sunwritings is a creative act: the mimetic gesture with which Barbara Leisgen, with her right hand, catches the sun and throws it into space.

If one reads the first Sunwritings over the background of reflections on the media in which many of the artists of the seventies were engaged, one realizes that at the time Barbara and Michael Leisgen invented a radical gesture to extricate photography from it ’s historical zone of objectivity, authenticity, and credibility and transfer it into the other absolute zone of artistic subjectivity. For them photography didn’t mean the acceptance of the impression of luminous apparitions of reality on chemical emulsion, but rather the appropriation and use, for one’s own ends, of that apparition. In the Sunwritings the glowing star is chained to the camera and has to move with it, as the camera dictates.[...]

The word “apocalypse” appears for the first time in a wall installation in 1979. The individual panels with inscribed light letters are arranged in the shape of an ellipse which is open to the left. In the opening a stuffed crow with outspread wings is fixed to the wall in such a way as to suggest that it is gliding into the oval. This crow appears frequently. In the series “Palimpsests” it is as much a part of the sunwritings as the hand and foot prints in the sand, set onto golden back grounds, as if they were the traces of the first men, or the ashes of burned bodies. [...]

By this I mean that the analysis of numinous contents with cosmic appearances and myths of creation never caused Barbara and Michael Leisgen to abandon an intelligible dialogue with the spectator. One understands that therefore the photographic medium, with it’ s own history anchored in reality, it’ s echoing claim for authenticity, is inalienable to the development of their pictorial language. Only in this way (and under no circumstances through the painting of their time) could they transpose a pictorial idea, hidden in the mechanics of the medium, into original pictorial poetry.

Wolfgang Becker
Translation : Andrea Holzherr