One noticed the vibrant colors through the windows of the ground-floor gallery before even entering it: light pink, dark blue, ocher, emerald, violet. Andreas Duscha approaches photography conceptually, through the use of historical techniques, and he characteristically limits himself to the use of black, white, silver, and—when making cyanotypes—blue. And he is fond of murals. For this exhibition, “Geplante Obsoleszenz I” (Planned Obsolescence I), Duscha tinted the rooms to match the pages of the monograph that accompanied the show as well as a space very different from the white-cube gallery: the Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien in Vienna.
Using photographic methods, such as salt printing, that date back to the nineteenth century, Duscha explores the limits of the photographic medium while creating works with a strong aesthetic appeal. Duscha’s show was an ode to the early experiments of analog photography; chemists, not painters, invented photography, as Roland Barthes said in Camera Lucida (1980). In his recent works, the artist deliberately prioritizes the haptic and the processual as a counter to the overproduction and consumption of digital photographs via algorithms and AI. An almost empirical interest in image production was evident in Duscha’s “mirror works,” which he has been creating since 2014. These are sheets of glass coated with a chemical mixture (silver nitrate, distilled water, ammonia, and Rochelle salt) that creates a reflective surface of different opacities. The pieces are seductive, not just thanks to a crowd-pleasing return of the gaze (#selfie), but also because of their painterly quality. The abstract mirror works on view, part of the larger series “Palimpsest,” 2014–, are related to nonobjective painting, while other mirror pieces have clear representational content. In seven works from the series “CV Dazzle,” 2023, the “mirrored” surfaces are etched with different graphic patterns of, as the title suggests, camouflage designed to elude machine vision systems. Looking simultaneously at the work and at their own reflection, viewers can position these computer vision dazzle patterns on their faces, observing how the use of an analog marking could make a person unidentifiable.
Time is a recurrent concern in Duscha’s art. In earlier works, such as the series whose very long title begins “ . . . wir lassen alle Uhren zerschlagen” (We Have Smashed All Clocks), 2015, “Cry me a river,” 2015, and “Deadline,” 2017, he registered duration through extended exposures, using chronophotography or a camera obscura to capture a prolonged period, rather than a single moment. The recent series “Ghostcard,” 2023, creates an oddly compelling sense of a shadowy visitation: In each of the seven works, reproductions of black-and-white postcards are superimposed to form amalgams of buildings that no longer exist. Majestic architectures of the past, such as the twin towers of the World Trade Center or the Rotunda that was the centerpiece of the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873 (and the largest dome construction in the world for more than half a century), are constructed by combining existing photographic depictions taken from a similar angle.
What will be preserved and what will be forgotten? What is the role of the artist as an archivist and chronicler but also perhaps as an alchemist? These are the kinds of questions Duscha posed in the somehow romantic, museum-like atmosphere conjured inside the gallery. One thing seems certain: For an image to be revealed, extracted, mounted, and expressed, one needs the action of light—and of time.
— Hana Ostan Ožbolt