Fragments Of An Unknown Collaboration
This piece started off as part of a public action with a now long extinct group of other photographers called Fotoforum in Basel, Switzerland, largely connected to the Werkraum Schlotterbeck Project. I had a studio there from 1991 - 1993. At that time, among other things, I used my Polaroid SX-70 camera to generate abstract imagery. At one point I made Canon Laser enlargements from the original Polaroids. I rapidly installed them in a public space not far from the Kunst Museum descending to the Rhine river in Basel. I re-photographed the already displaced "originals," looking more for interesting new images within the installation, rather than a complete documentation. One month later I returned to the site and did the same. The resultant two groups of pictures are presented here.
At that time I was very interested in John Cage's indeterminate procedures and wanted to experiment with this in photography. Also, the work is an homage to Aaron Siskind who pictured abstract details of ripped posters and the like. This piece is essentially about the truth of impermanence, incompletion, and imperfection.
The authorship of "Fragments" is open in the sense that the work is really an unknown collaboration between me, the police, local unknown graffiti artists, time and nature. It is up to the viewer to decide whether the interdependence of these actions was art or vandalism.