Conclusiones finales

As I developed these works I also examined the role of the human figure within them. The nature of my source photographs, casual snapshots taken in public or tourist locations, often resulted in back facing figures. These back facing figures or Rückenfiguren, repeat the position that the viewer takes in front of the work.

The use of the Rückenfigur or ‘back figure’ in German, is a pictorial device dating from the ancient world,226 _{though appearing in the Western painting tradition around the 13th century}

in paintings by Giotto di Bondone and Jan van Eyck.227 _{Early Rückenfiguren, like those}

depicted by van Eyck and Giotto, were primarily side motifs, operating as compositional or spatial devices rather than being the central subject.

In Giotto’s Lamentation of Christ, there are several figures with their backs to the scene in the foreground (Figure 30). These Rückenfiguren create a strange compactness of pictorial space. Giotto often suggests a figure’s position in space by overlapping. As other spatial devices such as atmospheric, colour or linear perspective are absent, these overlapped figures often form spatial anomalies, seeming to occupy a paper-thin depth as if the figures were glued together in the same plane.228 _{In Giotto’s depiction of space “the viewer does not receive cues as to}

how far apart pictorial objects are, or how ‘deep’ the foreshortened planes and objects go.” 229

The solidity and planarity of the wall that the frescos are painted onto, combined with the Rückenfiguren in this example, reinforce a peculiar compression of space.230

226 Margarete Koch in Kunibert Bering and Rolf Niehoff, Visual Profiency: A Perspective on Art Education, trans. Margaret Hiley (Oberhausen: Athena Verlag, 2015), 60.

227 Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the subject of landscape (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 162.

228 William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 28.

229 Samuel Edgerton in ibid. 230 Dunning in ibid.

However, Caspar David Friedrich’s continual use of Rückenfiguren231 _{has concentrated the}

art historical critique of the trope onto Friedrich’s oeuvre (Figure 31). Joseph Leo Koerner proposes that Friedrich’s use of Rückenfiguren redefines landscape as experiential, depicting the landscape as “the encounter of subject with world.” 232 _{The Rückenfigur is a device that}

mediates the viewer’s own experience of the scene shown,233 _{or as Elizabeth Prettejohn}

succinctly contends, “we look with not merely at, the Rückenfigur.”234 _{The Rückenfigur}

causes this effect by repeating the viewer’s position of looking235 _{and by anonymising or}

universalising the figure.236

This echoing aspect of the Rückenfigur can be considered recursive, a term defined as an “action or an act of recurring or returning.”237 _{The term recursion is also understood in}

common usage via the term meta-, meaning a concept that is self-referential or self-reflexive. While the Rückenfigur has many interpretations in art historical discourse covering themes of politics,238 _melancholia,239 _{and isolation,}240 _{within my research the Rückenfigur is a pictorial}

device primarily concerned with self-reflexivitywith ‘looking at looking.’ This is typified in my photographs of other people taking photographs: a self-reflexive reverberation of myself as photographer, a self-conscious narrator, looking at others looking (Figure 32). This self-reflexive interpretation of the Rückenfigur alsounderscores the paradoxical qualities of the liminal and virtual aspects of images within my project.

231 Koerner, CasperDavid Friedrich, 182. 232 Ibid., 163.

233 Ibid., 181.

234 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Beauty and Art: 1750-2000. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 56. 235 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 182.

236 Ibid., 179.

237 Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “Rückenfigur,” accessed 6 January 2017.http://www.oed.com.virtual.anu.edu.au/view/ Entry/160102?redirectedFrom=recursion#eid

238 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 243.

239 Barbara Maria Stafford, Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 80.

240 Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Centre, trans. Brian Battershaw. (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 121.

The Rückenfigur can create a sense of distance from the viewer by hiding with the back facing body, “the very thing repeated: the gaze of the subject.”241 _{Therefore, the Rückenfigur is an}

innately enigmatic device. The viewer is placed virtually into the position of the Rückenfigur by echoing their stance in front of the painting, creating a repeated visualisation of themselves. Simultaneously the viewer is also excluded from the scene242 _{due to the liminal threshold of}

the painting. Thus, in my research the Rückenfigur underlines both the liminal and virtual qualities of the painted world, while also repeating the liminal and virtual nature of the sites of my subject matter; the aquarium, the botanical glasshouse and the habitat diorama. The visual and conceptual aspects of these sites will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Four.

241 Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 182. 242 Ibid., 217.

Conclusion

During this phase in my research, I discovered that collage and photocopying had transformed the static representations of time and space in my photographs into conceptions that were more mutable and elastic. I found that collage detached the photographic image from a one- point perspective and its fixed relationship to time. It allowed me to recreate a sense of moving through a space by including multiple views and vanishing points. Through collage I could evoke the mobile action of human vision, which scans and gathers information from separate glimpses, accrued over time. Collage also echoed the processes of memory, which are by nature unstable and mobile. Therefore, while the spaces in my monotypes might seem somewhat real, like memories they are effectively part fact and part fiction.

Additionally, I began to connect the textures of the monotype to the visual qualities in my snapshots and the degradation that occurs through photocopying. I recognised that the porous quality of the surface of the monotype produces a sense of provisionality that echoes the fleeting and mobile nature of memory and of human vision. This mutability of the monotype arises from the paint being absorbed into the paper rather than sitting on top of it and from the erosion and indistinctness caused by the transfer process. Additionally, the lack of material weight the monotype exhibits comes from being an imprint. From these findings I concluded that the monotype constitutes an indexical image, reinforcing the relationship between photography and the monotype. I also concluded these monotypes were not only illusions of space existing in the outside world, they were equally representations of the inner workings of memory and the visual system.

In the next chapter I will examine the physical and visual qualities of the three primary locations of my subject matter; the aquarium, the botanical glasshouse and the habitat diorama. I will evaluate how these locations relate to my studio techniques and to the interpretation of my monotypes. I will demonstrate that these sites relate to the world of images and in particular to the mediated experience of the early 21st century through shared notions of virtuality and indexicality. Finally, I will propose that the amalgamation of photography, collage and painting in my research has created an original form of monotype process that provides new interpretations of the monotype within contemporary experience.