Sigmund Freud-Museum | Newsletter - Sigmund Freud Museum Wien

ausstellung / exhibition
Joseph Kosuth | ‚ Ansicht der Erinnerung‘ – ‘A View to Memory’
In the former storefront of the Kornmehl Butcher Shop, the Sigmund Freud Museum together with the
Society of Friends of the Fine Arts is presenting an installation by the American conceptual artist
Joseph Kosuth starting on 1 May 2002.
,Ansicht der Erinnerung‘ – ‘A View to Memory’ shows a fleeting moment in the history of the house
at Berggasse 19. What is seen is a historical photo of the kosher butcher shop taken by Edmund
Engelman in May 1938. A passerby stands with his back toward the camera looking into the display
window filled with meat products. Above the photo is a quote from Sigmund Freud’s Psychopathology
of Everyday Life.
What is not overtly related by the photo is the historical and political context in which it was created.
This is clarified by a small photo that is also mounted on the facade of Berggasse 19: A swastika flag
hangs above the house’s entryway – as it did at the time on many other Viennese residential houses.
German troops had marched into Austria two months previously.
The detail view selected by the artist from the entire photo could also derive from a time other than
that of National Socialism. It is not until one sees the historical full view including the house’s
entryway that the installation’s meaning becomes transparent. This brings to mind the memories of the
events of those days: Shortly thereafter, in June 1938, Sigmund Freud succeeded in emigrating with
his family to London via Paris. Siegmund Kornmehl fled together with his wife Helene to Palestine
in 1939.
The documentary, neutral perspective that the photograph seems to carry is displaced by an awareness
of its historical context. The observer in the photo’s foreground disappears, for instance, while the
pieces of meat in the little shop’s display window take on an eerie life of their own. Or the passerby
viewing the wares becomes an observer whose passivity is paradigmatic. Historical photographs give
rise to problems in the present. In them the question is posed: What do we see when we look at an old
image; what does it remind us of?
Below we present the original text of the address given by the artist on April 30, 2002 on the occasion
of the presentation of his installation at the Sigmund Freud Museum.
Joseph Kosuth | The Text Between Memory and the Photograph
I.
“The part played by word-presentations now becomes perfectly clear. By their interposition internal
thought-processes are made into perceptions. It is like a demonstration of the theorem that all
knowledge has its origin in external perception. When a hypercathexis of the process of thinking takes
place, thoughts are actually perceived – as if they came from without – and are consequently held to be
true” (Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XIX, p. 23).
We begin with an understanding that every photograph is also a text. It is information, as Roland
Barthes once pointed out, and its structure is not an isolated structure. Attached to every image is a
linguistic, textual component. With photography the past becomes anchored in the present. But here
the ‘present’ survives only as a kind of theoretical object. It is really an interface between the past and
desire. Language, that always present if internalized text, remains just that: a presence of the present.
And the present is a flood of practical need compromised by desire. The photograph is a reduction
caught in its own institutionalization, which, itself, is a screen for reality. A photograph exhausts
reality, however, being a kind of self-contradiction which is itself central to its own ontological
statement. Our very epistemology of seeing is very much now comprised of all of the photographs that
depict our cultural reality. Few of these need to call themselves ‘art.’ Indeed art is increasingly located
in the viewer, not in the viewed.