Andrea Robbins and Max Becher: The Transportation of Place
at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, through March 5
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In the series “German Indians, 1997/98,” Meeting shows six people in full Indian dress in front of a tepee. Their Caucasian features and random poses–they seem to be just milling around–call their authenticity into question, as does the title. Knife Thrower shows a middle-aged mustachioed man sporting a headdress complete with horns, his face utterly lacking the fierceness his attire might suggest. A wall text for the series explains that these are Germans attending an annual celebration of the birthday of Karl May in his hometown of Radebeul, Germany. May was the German novelist whose “pro-Indian” books supported Germans’ “romantic view of a pre-industrial past,” the text tells us; he was much admired by Hitler, who “made his generals carry around volumes of Karl May’s writings” while he was “researching American Indian reservations as models for concentration camps.” The contradictions evoked by the text echo those in the photos, and such messy and even ugly specifics of history further distance these images from the modernist quest for universals, locating them instead in present-day cross-cultural discourse.
In the series “Bavarian by Law, 1995/96,” Children’s Chorus #2 shows little girls in pinafores and white blouses who look convincingly Bavarian but not like a disciplined chorus: one is sad, one smiles, one sticks her tongue out, seemingly preoccupied. In Mayfest young people in Bavarian folk-dance costumes circle a maypole before a backdrop of Bavarian-style buildings. The crowd observing them seems quite American, however, and a “15 minute parking” sign is a further giveaway that this is a tourist attraction. In fact the series was taken in Leavenworth, Washington, which responded to an economic decline in the 1960s by choosing a Bavarian “new look,” according to the text, regulating architecture and even requiring Germanic typefaces as a way of encouraging tourism. The scheme worked, though some townspeople are said to remain unhappy with the regulations. The mountain scene painted on a motel wall in Motel With Mural serves as a metaphor for the whole town, whose “actual” scenes are as much a confection as this illusionistic image. The series’ proximity to the wall text for “German Indians” summons up disturbing echoes: Hitler had Bavarian roots, and the Nazis valorized the cultural stasis symbolized by traditional attire.
Among the 20 works, many with identical titles, at City Gallery are two small vertical prints, both called Pumping Station, showing the joints between giant water pipes. Rather than constructing a balanced composition, Szoradi gets close enough to make the pipes seem to strain against the frame’s edges, emphasizing the way they extend far beyond the image’s borders. In yet another titled Pumping Station, a motor in the foreground is apparently powering water through the huge curving pipes behind it. The uninformed viewer may not know exactly how everything works here, but the high-angle view seems designed to cause one to think about functionality as well as compositional beauty.
