In Barbara Probst

Barbara Probst 12 Moments books Hartmann This book is dedicated to Christoph, David, Dominique, Laura, and Stefan, the protagonists of the 12 Moments. Essay by Robert Hobbs p. 51 Biographies P-63 Robert Hobbs Noted art historian Robert Hobbs has written widely on modern and contemporary art, including extended essays on David Altmejd, Keith Haring, Jonathan Lasker, Sterling Ruby, Yinka Shonibare, Frank Stella, Kara Walker, Kelley Walker, John Wesley, and Kehinde Wiley, among others. His mono graphs have focused on such artists as Alice Aycock, Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, Mark Lombardi, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Smithson. Hobbs has served as curator for the American and Bahamas Pavilions at the Venice Biennale and for the Ameri can Representation at the Sao Paulo Bienal. In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions at major international museums and has been a professor at Cornell University, Yale University, and Virginia Commonwealth University. Barbara Probst Barbara Probst was born in 1964 in Munich, Germany, and studied at the Akademie der Bildende Kunste, Munich, and the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf. She has exhibited widely in Europe and the US. Her work was shown in New Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2006. She has had solo exhibitions at CentrePasquArt, Biel, Switzerland; Domaine de Kerguehennec, Bignan, France; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Stills Gallery, Edinburgh; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin; Olden burg Kunstverein, Germany; and the Rudolfinum, Prague. Her work is represented in numerous public collections, including Folkwang Museum, Essen;The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Barbara Probst lives and works in New York and Munich. 63 Barbara Probst: 12 Moments Copyeditmg: Tas Skorupa Graphic design and typesetting: Silke Fahnert, Uwe Koch, Cologne Typefaces: Akku rat Reproductions: Perfect Image, Ostfildern Prmt1ng: Offsetdruckerei Karl Grammlich GmbH, Pliezhausen Paper: Profimatt. 170g/m2 Binding: Buchbinderei Lachenmaier GmbH, Reutlingen © 2016 Hartmann Projects, Stuttgart © 2016 for the essay: Robert Hobbs © 2016 for the reproduced works by Barbara Probst: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn All rights reserved. No partof this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. Published by Hartmann Books Rulfingerstrasse 18 70567 Stuttgart Germany www.hartmannprojects.com Hartmann Books is the publishing arm of Hartmann Projects, a company promoting artists, curating and organizing exhibitions, and publishing books. First edition, September 2016 Published in conjunction with shows in 2016/2017 at Lars Bohman Gallery, Stockholm Monica De Cardenas, Zuoz Galerie Kuckei + Kuckei, Berlin Hartmann Books are available internationally at selected bookstores. For further information, please visit our homepage: www.hartmannprojects.com ISBN 978-3-96070-005-0 Printed in Germany Barbara Probst: Moment as Multiplicity Robert Hobbs Of all the means of expression, photography is the only Going against the still prevailing tendency to view photo one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. graphs as decisive and frozen moments, notably located in the past perfect "that has been," theorized by French Henri Cartier-Bresson, semiotician Roland Barthes (1915-1980),1 the New York The Decisive Moment, 1952 City-based German photographer Barbara Probst (b. 1964) has restructured the all-important fraction of a second when the camera's shutter clicks and a single picture is taken in All photographs are memento mori.To take a photo her Exposures, which she initiated in 2000. Her goal in this graph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) series is for several cameras' shutter-release buttons to be mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing simultaneously triggered through a radio-wave transmitter, out this moment and freezing it, all photographs thereby exploding photography's formerly heralded climatic testify to time's relentless melt. instant to reveal a host of divergent and often radically dif ferent perspectives. As this essay intends to demonstrate, Susan Sontag, Probst's Exposures represent concerted and thoughtful re On Photography, 1973 readings of photography as not only a medium and genre but also a system that was initially used in her work to represent and then participate in her early sculpture.Subsequently In the Photograph, Time's immobilization assumes she employed photography to make consciously articulated only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged. self-contained and layered images-a situation that can ...That the Photograph is "modern," mingled with be characterized by the term mise en obyme. Later, she re our noisiest everyday life, does not keep it from hav framed the idea of nested imagery in the simultaneously ing an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, taken photographs constituting the Exposures, which I will the stasis of an arrest .... contend work in concert with the theoretical lens of French The noeme [meaning] of Photography is simple, theorist Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), with the resultant works banal; no depth: "that has been." ... The Photograph becoming engaging reconfigurations of his theories in terms then becomes a bizarre medium, a ...shored hallu - of photography. Most recently in 12 Moments Probst has cination (on the one hand "it is not there," on the inverted her approach so that she begins not with situations other "but it has indeed been"): a mad image, that she then explodes in her work but instead with still chafed by reality. haunting memory or dream images that she investigates, and these works also appear to rely on certain Deleuzian concepts. Roland Barthes, In the nineties Probst discussed Deleuze's theories with Camera Lucido, 1981 fellow artists in Munich. Of particular importance to artists 51 are his ontological views of life as an ongoing (and definitely order to study at its famous Kunstkademie where she cre ated wood sculptures with a chainsaw under the direction of not static) process of never-ending becoming. This approach seemed particularly timely in the mid-nineties with the first the group Zero artist GUnther Uecker (b. 1930) and also stud widespread use of the Internet. At this time Probst was read ied photography under the guidance of conceptual photogra ing Deleuze's two volumes on cinema. Since these tomes pher Bernd Becher (1931-2007). In addition, she worked on rely on this thinker and philosophic historian's prior work, occasion with Becher and his wife, Hilla (1934-2015), who including his notable co-authored publications with psy have been honored not only for their groundbreaking, extended chotherapist and fellow philosopher Pierre-Felix Guattari series of straightforward images documenting superannu (1930-1992), particularly the concept of the Body without ated pieces of industrial architecture but also for teaching Organs used to dramatize the effects of ongoing forces and and influencing such noted photographers as Andreas Gursky intensities on life itself, some of these other publications (b. 1955), Candida Hofer (b. 1944), Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), and will be considered pertinent to her project. Thomas Struth (b. 1954). Probst assisted Bernd Becher on Before focusing on the Deleuzian connection, which I scouting expeditions in the post-industrial neighborhoods of Bielefeld, Dortmund, and Essen, in addition to helping believe to be crucially important for the Exposures, it helps to look at Probst's early work as a sculptor and maturing Hilla Becher in the darkroom, often being invited after a day's photographer-experiences that one might also view as work to join the couple for dinner. Thus, she gained valuable working in accord with Deleuze's ideas before considering insights into their work and lives as well as a first-hand this early work as a logical step in her overall artistic devel view of one of the truly significant chapters of recent photo opment. With the exception of Probst's commendable self graphic history. In addition to these formative experiences, published group of five catalogues on her art, which she had Probst believes one of the great benefits of her DUsseldorf created in the nineties, plus an additional museum publica schooling was learning how its art students were involved tion on her work, the critical and art historical literature on in recent art, new theoretical ideas, and the types of art her art has not referenced her all-important formative years galleries that might represent them. 3 in sculpture and photography.2 The daughter of Munich After one year in DUsseldorf, Probst returned to Munich sculptor Georg Probst, known for his monumental works in with a greater sense of the significant interconnections stone, wood, bronze, and ceramics for the Catholic Church, comprising the contemporary Euro-American art world. Barbara Probst began learning about making sculpture by At the time she was particularly intrigued with the art of interning at age nineteen at the local Munich Herbig Foundry, Dan Graham, Jeff Koons,

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