Jiøí Hanke

Jiri Hanke: Standpoint Points have zero dimensions. A good way to imagine them is to consider dust particles in a light beam. Still, there are acrobats who manage to step on such a particle, transform it into a standpoint and to persist on that precarious place for five long years. Such an acrobatic feat is admirable and the photos of Jiri Hanke show it. The present reflection is an expression of admiration for such an acrobatic achievement. Points are characterized by their swirling. This insight is older than the one we owe to nuclear physics with its particle swarms. Thus we know that each object in the world is surrounded by a swarm of viewpoints. Recently we have even invented a tool for jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint. On each of those points it fixes the corresponding aspect and it then colects them. The tool is called a „photocamera“, the fixed aspect a „photo“ and the view of the fixed aspects a „photo-retrospective“. That retrospective serves as an overview of all objective aspects. But look: Here comes a photocamera acrobat called Jiri Hanke. And he obliges the camera to insist upon one single standpoint. Before asking him and asking oneself why he thus reverses this photographic gesture, a preliminary remark is in order: The original cameras were static: heavy, massive, clumsy gadgets perched on mostly three-legged tripods like shortsighted lynxes. They defended insistently their own point of view as do short-sighted politicians. In front of such staring gadgets equally static scenes were set: newly married couples, for instance. Immovable cameras and unmoving persons about to become immortalized thus stared at each other to become a photo. And this was so, not because it is essential to photography, but on the contrary because paleophotography, although aiming at mobility, was technically unable to achieve it. Hanke´s acrobatics should not be confused with such an archaic rigidity. He does not revert into mutual rigid staring but he climbs into a loft to be above all points of view, and it is there that he installs his apparatus. He does so in order to photograph from there a stream of appearances as it flows by. Were one to describe such acrobatics as a climbing into transcendency one would be poking fun at it. Because this specific transcendency is the window of a not very lofty apartment. And the stream of appearance is in this case the traffic on a not very impressive Prague street. If one considers the context, however, laughter is stopped short: The photos were taken during the years between 1982 and 1986, which was an uncomfortable period in the history of Czechoslovakia. What Hanke did was to emerge not from an indifferent swarm of standpoints but from that drift of standpoints which the ominous words normalization, contestation, repression and hypocrisy denote imprecisely. And the transcendency into which Hanke does climb is not that of some noble objectivity but is rather that lofty viewpoint from which an observer tries to see history for himself, in spite of the drift of viewpoints. Hanke shows how one may climb into decency and observe events as they flow by, in spite of the swarming, colliding and diverging drifts of viewpoints that characterize totalitarian oppression. Such an achievement of artistry merits admiration even after the lifting of the pressure to which the streets of Prague were subject for so long.
Vilém Flusser

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