Review of Atavism by Robert Hutinski 2014
1000 words magazine,
A privately published, hand made book, Robert Hutinski’s Atavism ostensibly, shows family archives, prior to the Nazi holocaust, which are then redacted, and excavated; creating absences that perversely translate as a contemporary memento mori.
In doing so, Atavism, invites us to empathize with what is popularly described, as the spectre of fascism being ever present.
In Michael Haneke’s 2009 film, The White Ribbon, various set pieces based in rural Germany of the 1910’s presciently suggested the oncoming violence of WW1. The actual conflict wasn’t yet physically present and rather than rely upon an iteration of it’s consequences, Haneke conjured a heavily charged prelude via the everyday.
Family and documentary archives can act as a final point, a fixed marker in time, yet Hutinski’s digital interventions into the photographic vernacular, re-position fragmented lives, only for them to disappear before our eyes.
We witness no trauma, yet gaze at victims before they become so. Any ‘double violence’ has yet to occur, not with the act of photographing, but genocide. We find ourselves at the limits of allegory, the works projecting tragic inevitabilities, and us, unable to act to change the course of history as if the sequence is already set.
Perhaps, predictably, I hear Eliot’s ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.’ * As I handle the book, it begins to feel like a slim prayer pamphlet in my hands. It’s intelligent design and use of semi-transparent papers combined with image manipulation and sequencing offer its own interpretation of uncertainty.
Surprisingly, Atavism relies not on indexicality; the images may have been made contemporarily, but a seductive and emotive power through aesthetics, collective consciousness and design.
Hutinski knows that to continually re emphasize such histories, to keep these ghosts alive, is essential, but, and whether this is by choice or circumstance I do not know, what happens when an elegiac and beautifully created testament to loss such as this can only be owned by a handful of collectors?
*translates as ‘I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German.’
From; The Wasteland, T S Eliot.
1000 words magazine,
A privately published, hand made book, Robert Hutinski’s Atavism ostensibly, shows family archives, prior to the Nazi holocaust, which are then redacted, and excavated; creating absences that perversely translate as a contemporary memento mori.
In doing so, Atavism, invites us to empathize with what is popularly described, as the spectre of fascism being ever present.
In Michael Haneke’s 2009 film, The White Ribbon, various set pieces based in rural Germany of the 1910’s presciently suggested the oncoming violence of WW1. The actual conflict wasn’t yet physically present and rather than rely upon an iteration of it’s consequences, Haneke conjured a heavily charged prelude via the everyday.
Family and documentary archives can act as a final point, a fixed marker in time, yet Hutinski’s digital interventions into the photographic vernacular, re-position fragmented lives, only for them to disappear before our eyes.
We witness no trauma, yet gaze at victims before they become so. Any ‘double violence’ has yet to occur, not with the act of photographing, but genocide. We find ourselves at the limits of allegory, the works projecting tragic inevitabilities, and us, unable to act to change the course of history as if the sequence is already set.
Perhaps, predictably, I hear Eliot’s ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.’ * As I handle the book, it begins to feel like a slim prayer pamphlet in my hands. It’s intelligent design and use of semi-transparent papers combined with image manipulation and sequencing offer its own interpretation of uncertainty.
Surprisingly, Atavism relies not on indexicality; the images may have been made contemporarily, but a seductive and emotive power through aesthetics, collective consciousness and design.
Hutinski knows that to continually re emphasize such histories, to keep these ghosts alive, is essential, but, and whether this is by choice or circumstance I do not know, what happens when an elegiac and beautifully created testament to loss such as this can only be owned by a handful of collectors?
*translates as ‘I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, I am a real German.’
From; The Wasteland, T S Eliot.