In 272Pages, the catalogue published in 2001 to mark the exhibition of his work co-produced by the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the Centre national de la photographie in París, the Fotomuseum in Winterthur and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, an essay by curator Helena Tatay remarks that as usual with Feldmann, the book does not include his biography as an artist. However, she considers it essential to mention his place and date of birth - Dusseldorf, 1941 - because she maintains that ‘art is not universal but rather a function of the time and place in which it is created'.
Feldmann is one of those artists who reinvent art. They spend their time just being artists, but there is something in the positions that they take, in their works (or lack of works), in the creative freedom that they grasp so naturally and firmly, in their particular sense of humour in regard to society and the ease with which they laugh at themselves, that somehow revives a common feeling about art: something that makes artists want to continue producing, curators want to continue organising exhibitions, critics want to write about them (and with them) and audiences want to continue to enjoy them. This turns his works into a prism that radiates different forms and colours depending on when they are observed and who observes them. He shies away from the canons of art, from boring analyses of his works, from abstraction as a symbol of individualism, and sides with popular art, constructed on the basis of the parts of the consumer system that he experiences in his youth when the US was building its empire on the ruins of Europe. But where and, above all, when an artist is born are important data.
His career can be seen as having two stages: from the late 1960s to 1980, after which there was a nine-year hiatus in his output, and then from 1989 to the present day. The first stage saw him produce what are probably his best-known works: the photo-books entitled Bild [Picture] or Bilder [Pictures]. These inexpensively produced books feature cardboard covers stamped with the title, a number and his name, and contain a number of black and white photos grouped by themes: snowscapes, cyclists, unmade beds, women's knees, tools, vehicles, etc. This is classic photo classification based on existing pictures. To paraphrase Helena Tatay, what interests him is the series, the set of pictures, or rather what emerges when they are shown together. It is not the pictures themselves but the world that opens up when they are grouped together. An isolated image is a phrase, but when combined with others it becomes a narrative.
The idea is to look at pictures, to cut them out, save them up, use them to create photo series and publish them in books. Any compilation aspires to the status of an anthology. Thus, 100 Jahre [100 Years (2000)] shows 101 photos of people between eight weeks and one hundred years old. Seen as an exhibition, it represents a timeline in which the viewer sees his/her own life through the specific ages of each subject. Another paradigmatic series is All the Clothes of a Woman, in which Feldmann photographs the entire wardrobe of a woman, garment by garment. By cataloguing these clothes, he seems to anticipate any possible combination. The accumulation of photos is never without intent. Finally, Feldmann has shown great interest in kitsch, as the epitome of conventional taste: something which, from the viewpoint of art, seems naive or corny but which defines much of the world's aesthetics.
In 272 Pages, the catalogue published in 2001 to mark the exhibition of his work co-produced by the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona, the Centre national de la photographie in París, the Fotomuseum in Winterthur and the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, an essay by curator Helena Tatay remarks that as usual with Feldmann, the book does not include his biography as an artist. However, she considers it essential to mention his place and date of birth - Dusseldorf, 1941 - because she maintains that ‘art is not universal but rather a function of the time and place in which it is created'.
Feldmann is one of those artists who reinvent art. They spend their time just being artists, but there is something in the positions that they take, in their works (or lack of works), in the creative freedom that they grasp so naturally and firmly, in their particular sense of humour in regard to society and the ease with which they laugh at themselves, that somehow revives a common feeling about art: something that makes artists want to continue producing, curators want to continue organising exhibitions, critics want to write about them (and with them) and audiences want to continue to enjoy them. This turns his works into a prism that radiates different forms and colours depending on when they are observed and who observes them. He shies away from the canons of art, from boring analyses of his works, from abstraction as a symbol of individualism, and sides with popular art, constructed on the basis of the parts of the consumer system that he experiences in his youth when the US was building its empire on the ruins of Europe. But where and, above all, when an artist is born are important data.
His career can be seen as having two stages: from the late 1960s to 1980, after which there was a nine-year hiatus in his output, and then from 1989 to the present day. The first stage saw him produce what are probably his best-known works: the photo-books entitled Bild [Picture] or Bilder [Pictures]. These inexpensively produced books feature cardboard covers stamped with the title, a number and his name, and contain a number of black and white photos grouped by themes: snowscapes, cyclists, unmade beds, women's knees, tools, vehicles, etc. This is classic photo classification based on existing pictures. To paraphrase Helena Tatay, what interests him is the series, the set of pictures, or rather what emerges when they are shown together. It is not the pictures themselves but the world that opens up when they are grouped together. An isolated image is a phrase, but when combined with others it becomes a narrative.
The idea is to look at pictures, to cut them out, save them up, use them to create photo series and publish them in books. Any compilation aspires to the status of an anthology. Thus, 100 Jahre [100 Years (2000)] shows 101 photos of people between eight weeks and one hundred years old. Seen as an exhibition, it represents a timeline in which the viewer sees his/her own life through the specific ages of each subject. Another paradigmatic series is All the Clothes of a Woman, in which Feldmann photographs the entire wardrobe of a woman, garment by garment. By cataloguing these clothes, he seems to anticipate any possible combination. The accumulation of photos is never without intent. Finally, Feldmann has shown great interest in kitsch, as the epitome of conventional taste: something which, from the viewpoint of art, seems naive or corny but which defines much of the world's aesthetics.