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SANDRA MANN’S “DAYLIFE” EXHIBITION TO OPEN AT
THE AMERICAN HOSPITAL ART GALLERY “OPERATION ROOM”
Daylife exhibition may be visited from 5 November - 25 January 2008 at the American Hospital.
"Your gaze is cold but not without feeling. The coldness of your gaze is a requirement. You must not resonate with it if you wish to see clearly. Seeing something with a cold gaze means reducing yourself to an eye. There is no other way of empathizing with a landscape or a person. Empathizing means above all and primarily forgetting yourself, being out of yourself." (Peter Stamm, "Wir fliegen" Frankfurt/Main 2008, p. 173)
What can happen is this: You look at a photo by Sandra Mann and only recognize at second glance what she has focused her attention on. She embeds this thing in a context that might appear incidental. Conversely, this thing may become immersed in a strong visual composition. In both cases a risk is involved: You tend to overlook the casual, while the manifestly visual distracts from the specific focus. Sandra Mann does not engage in hide-and-seek. It has to do with her discretion. Discretion, not shyness. Sandra Mann can "strike", but she never exposes. Two examples that clarify what I mean. In Helsinki she photographs a street along a facade. Towering from the facade directly above the pavement is a narrow, glass balcony; a closer look reveals the model of a three-master on the window ledge. I would describe the photograph as casual. But the three-master becomes the emotional center of the image. The bare and barren winter image develops from out of this center. Suddenly, this rather casual image becomes an image that sticks in your mind. Then: In Rome she looks more by chance into the window of a pizzeria, sees reflected in it a blonde girl in a short denim skirt, who strides along boldly her arms bent, shoots a photo. There is a force to the image, but it is only afterwards you realize the girl is walking right over the pizza lying on the baking sheet.
In front of frame-encompassing house facades in Milan– the balconies with green shutters resemble incubators – Sandra Mann detects packed tightly together five sets of green painted traffic lights. The viewer looks at the facades, the artist is startled to realize that the green painted traffic lights correspond with the green of the window shutters. Five sets of lights at once, hardly recognizable. I would claim that nobody – unless pointed in the right direction – can detect Sandra Mann’s focus. But once you have grasped this focus it serves to unlock the image’s meaning.
Sandra Mann has a gaze that gets below the skin. But you also have to recognize this gaze. It infiltrates; compels you to look over her shoulder.
The statement that the image contains the document, but the document never needs to contain the image needs to be reconsidered since in Sandra Mann what is special is manifested frequently and seemingly casually. In the metro in Milan parts of the face of an attractive woman advertising hair-care products hang down in shreds. Someone has disfigured the face on the enormous billboard. Sandra Mann does not stand in front of it. She sees this face with the detachment of the startled pedestrian, who is suddenly struck by something. But simultaneously, it seems to me there is also a noticeable shyness.
You must put yourself in her line of vision, adjust to her rhythm of seeing, accompany her unexpected pause, follow her curious gaze, which may be focused or boundless.
This curious gaze that is also searching. You could put it this way: there is nothing into which Sandra Mann would not stick her nose. She smells with a seeing eye, peeks for example on the roof of a Paris department store into the lid of a bin filled with water, discovers in the reflection of the Eiffel Tower, like a fata morgana, without houses, as into a landscape of clouds. Nobody has ever seen the Eiffel Tower like that before. It balances a cloudy puff of cotton wool on its tip. There is a comparable image taken in Frankfurt/Main. Mann uses the window ledge in the Main Plaza Hotel as the foreground and photographs the city skyline. The window ledge appears like an enormous, deserted beach. The bird shit on the outer left recalls seals. Sandra Mann does not orchestrate a viewpoint. She adopts it. That is the difference. Her instinctive seeing has to do with the constant change of perspectives. With her intuition for the moment she invents perspectives that can barely be imagined. This is the mark of an artist! The mobility of her observation does not follow any scheme. Every image is composed as a new start.
In Mexico City she photographs an enormous, circular Nivea advert with a couple kissing. And this couple kisses damn well. In Paris she captures two toothbrushes, bristles entwined, determines the angle of inclination such that the upper one plays the more active role. Two toothbrushes kissing. And they kiss damn well.
It is generally known that braces not only serve a practical purpose but are also sexy, because they are also worn when they are not needed at all, have a similar impact maybe to the gleaming metal teeth sported by a Western hero. In the display of an orthodontist in Mexico City she photographs dentures with braces and compares them to the feet of an escort, whose double-chain jewelry around both ankles has a similarly eroticizing effect. On the right in the background you see the shadows of dancing legs (International Automobile Show, Frankfurt/Main).
A hand holds up a strawberry. The green leaves have been removed. Surrounding the red of the berry is a white circle in which there is a dark opening. How harmless some people would say because they cannot conceive that this is the sweetest asshole in the world. The idea is not that eccentric considering you can buy bean plants whose hulks when fully grown read "I love you". (photographed in Mörfelden, near Frankfurt/Main)
It is not the unusual but the exceptional that interests Sandra Mann. This wandering, searching and finding gaze of hers! Perhaps she does not search at all but only finds. (As Picasso once said.) It makes sense to say so because the gaze tenses up when searching. Finding is about having eyes in the back of your head, avoids overexerting them. Then this suddenness like a nose-dive, yet maintaining cool, and charismatic detachment.
Like in Helsinki, looking down onto a partially frozen rock. On the frozen part lies a pack of paper tissues. "Feeling" is the brand name, visible in the image. And virtually in the same breath her gaze sweeps out onto a snow-covered waterfront. It pushes into the image field from the right. On the left is the water with swans. And once again the key feature that is by no means hidden but you have to see it, recognize it: At the end of the quay on the parapet is a snowman made by a child.
What characterizes Sandra Mann’s photos?Her strength -and in this she is unique – lies to put it crudely in her talent not for inferring the fly from God but rather God from the fly. Sandra Mann has an eye for detail that does not assert itself formalistically, but rather emphatically opens up a sounding space. Her female gaze might have a male undertone and conversely it can develop that specific femininity, which is less interested in the motif and more how she captures it. An example: In Helsinki she photographs her Lebanese friend standing legs apart in front of Beate Uhse’s window. The women in the window both as photos but also as dummies are larger-than-life. There is a huge difference in size. It is this difference in size captured from a side perspective that interests her and not the weird and wonderful objects in the window. A specific male view might be that seen when she photographs the legs of girlfriends in a street café from a dog’s perspective. This was the commission from a magazine for a photo series. The gaze between the naked thighs leaves open the question whether the young women are wearing panties at all. What makes the photograph so wonderful is that the white curved legs of the table intersect with the many slim legs of the women. You might interpret as a specifically female view the photograph showing a woman with four children, two in a stroller. She is walking past a job agency. There is a red heart next to the large lettering "I love work". But perhaps this example is too obvious. Specifically female might be that fantastic image in which a woman – holding a cigarette – in her other hand provocatively holds in front of her mouth the photo of an enlarged, bearded mouth and does so in such a manner that this mouth really does suggest her own mouth. Going by my own knowledge of Sandra Mann this could be her self-portrait.
A comparable image is that depicting a naked woman, who stands legs apart holding a large-sized magazine in front of her sex. It shows a full-page, powerful, erect phallus with testicles. The effect is astonishing. Not only is there correspondence in the positioning the same goes for the color tones – there is also perfect correspondence between the woman’s skin tone and the coloring of the magazine photo. The image was produced in 2000 for the magazine "Styleguide" in connection with a shoe ad for the store "Insomnia" in Frankfurt/Main. This is the reason why the woman wears black men’s shoes. Chaplin-like, her feet point outwards. The photo is of a provocative beauty and intelligence. It begins just above the breasts. As the head is not visible the sole posture of the body is in the foreground. The expression on the face might have competed with the photograph depicted in the magazine. Or put differently: The expression on the face would have inevitably been a comment on the phallus, which the woman holds in front of her face. As such, for all the irony this image possesses striking directness, is to some extent the counterpart to the Californian Lesbian association, CLA. Naturally, the zeitgeist plays a role: Tough girlie gangs, who fight their way free using swirling karate blows. Sandra Mann contradicts them mischievously and far-sightedly. As such, this image is lent something timeless, you could even say mythical: This aggressive taking possession, annoying men; this penetration into the male domain and the use of traditional masculine instruments. However, reversibility in the sense of a pulsating, dynamic osmosis points the way ahead.There are images that are simply there:
On the ferry crossing from Rostock to Helsinki Sandra Mann looks out of the window. Her gaze through the semi-transparent curtains extends over the breadth of the sea, recalls the innumerable pictures full of yearning out through windows as we know them from the art of the 19th and 20th centuryies .
In the middle of Mexico City this enormous Skiny advert on the roof of a house. The young, sparsely-clad woman lying in a hammock is breath-takingly beautiful.
In the bathroom of a hotel in Acapulco hang on a rail, eight pairs of panties lined up in a row. As if a class of girls were staying here. And you can see the girls already.
In Helsinki, in a school for drawing: On the left a table lamp, switched on, with shade, to the right, somewhat raised and developing from a twisted waist a woman’s magnificently curved behind of dark painted plaster.
Inside the women’s toilet in a bar in Mexico City: On the inside of the toilet seat you see the face of a woman with shoulder-long hair. The portrait is painted with love. It shows an angular, harsh face. Perhaps the woman was a fighter in a revolutionary period.
As if Sandra Mann had orchestrated this photo: In Acapulco on the beach stand seven crows in a semi-circle like a necklace around a table, which is covered with an orange-colored plastic cloth. The eighth crow is on the table next to a coke bottle and a slice of lemon.
In the middle of Stockholm a tiger, in black-and-white, trots along the wall. Maybe it is by Banksy? Then this chance is found, likewise in Stockholm: The plaster next to a door has peeled off to reveal the form of the African continent. And speedily someone has written in large, clear letters "AFRIKA".
In Milan in a café: The cup stands on a brocade colored tablecloth adorned with leaves. The coffee in the cup is the same color as the tablecloth. Light leaf patterns float over the beverage. "Is that a reflection?" I ask Sandra. She laughs, answers, the waiter had drawn the pattern using cream. The photo, simply a cup and tablecloth is an enchanting still life recalling those times when there were still coffee houses and not espresso bars.
Finally, I would like to talk about the photo that shows an excerpt from a work by Sandra Mann. As Director of Frankfurt’s Museum for Modern Art I was able to acquire it for our collection in 2000. The work ("Expedit") consists of 1,630 records (Ø 30 cm), which are arranged in 16 compartments of a shelving unit measuring 149x149 cm. The unit is built into a wall so that at first sight you have the impression of an image. All the records are about love – right down to the titles. Some of them are decades old; they encompass the entire European, Latin American and North American region. You can read the titles on the back of the record sleeves. Love is the great catalyst. The passion, power, desperation, intensity and melancholy with which love is expressed in songs and chanson is a secret of cosmic order. The "archive" is a veritable powerhouse, and not intended for hearing. But the sheer number amazes us, recalls the pain and happiness that everyone has experienced.
"I can’t understand
She let go of my hand
And left me here facing the wall."
(Bob Dylan)
This work is a manifestation of Sandra Mann’s soul. Without evoking sentimentality, you can describe it as a common denominator for all her photos! The aura of her charisma nestles everywhere. Her lack of prejudice is bantering, hungry, astonished curiosity.
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