Magdalena Stöger und Leon Hösl:
The Cathrin Pichler-Archive
From RPU-Artaud001 to DAV-Plakate-029
[excerpt]
Patrizia Bach spent several weeks in the archive and devoted herself to all the photographic prints found in it. Photographs with correspondingly different motifs, contexts, intentions, or authors: reproductions of artworks, photos of openings, portraits of colleagues and friends, and views of empty exhibitions spaces, as well as puzzling, nearly abstract, or unclassifiable motifs appear in eleven subcategories. Patrizia Bach transposed all these photographs into drawings. For this, she took a short period of time—exactly five minutes—in which she looked at a photograph and produced a drawing as a direct reaction to it. The drawings thus always focus on different aspects of the photographs: separated figures, particular gestures, forms or objects, movements, or ornamental structures. The short timeframe functions as a control tool that works against a conscious translation of the photograph based on clear aesthetic and conceptual parameters, and is instead intended to prompt spontaneous decisions. She produces her drawings in pencil on acid-free paper, the sort of paper that is inserted as dividers in the archival boxes. Patrizia Bach developed these so-called inventory drawings for her TOMIKO Archive, an artistic project comprising over 500,000 private photographs from a diverse range of sources with which she has been working in various forms since 2006. Another practice that she transfers from her own archive is that of keywording. Patrizia Bach also performs this standard archival activity as spontaneously and associatively as she proceeds when drawing. The result of her artistic translation is an index of drawings and keywords that challenges the actual inventory of the archive through the consistent use of subjectivity and intuition.
