“Don’t think, but look!”: Leopold Museum honors Wittgenstein’s deliberations on photography with a comprehensive exhibition

15.11.2021

The large-scale exhibition highlights the philosopher’s photographic practice and creates resonance chambers of contemporary art

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. 70 years after the death of the ground-breaking thinker and 100 years after the publication of his early main work Tractatus logico-philosophicus, the comprehensive exhibition at the Leopold Museum Ludwig Wittgenstein. Photography as Analytical Practice does not focus on Wittgenstein’s seminal philosophical writings and their impact on the fine arts, but rather highlights his keen interest in photography. Featuring more than 200 historical objects, the presentation showcases Wittgenstein’s photographic practice as an author, collector and arranger of photographs. The exhibition focuses on his practical and theoretical use of photography and on his profound understanding of the medium.

“In many respects, the exhibition enters into unchartered territory and focuses on the Wittgenstein family – and especially on Ludwig Wittgenstein – as important catalysts of the Modernist movement in Vienna around 1900. This appraisal of Wittgenstein is accompanied by association chambers which bridge the gap to contemporary art,” according to the Leopold Museum’s Director Hans-Peter Wipplinger. In these resonance chambers, Wittgenstein’s photographic practice is placed into a dialogue with works by select contemporary artists – a total of 140 works by 46 artists, including Vito Acconci, Miriam Bäckström, John Baldessari, Gottfried Bechtold, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Christian Boltanski, Hanne Darboven, Ólafur Eliasson, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Günther Förg, Herbert W. Franke, Nan Goldin, Peter Handke, Heinrich Heidersberger, Peter Hujar, Anna Jermolaewa, Birgit Jürgenssen, Mike Kelley, Anastasia Khoroshilova, Friedl Kubelka, David Lamelas, Sherrie Levine, Sharon Lockhart, Inés Lombardi, Dóra Maurer, Trevor Paglen, Sigmar Polke, Timm Rautert, Gerhard Richter, Martha Rosler, Thomas Ruff, Norman Saunders, Alfons Schilling, Cindy Sherman, Katharina Sieverding, Margherita Spiluttini, Dominik Steiger, Sturtevant, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Warhol, Gillian Wearing, Peter Weibel, Manfred Willmann, Otto Zitko and Heimo Zobernig.

“Ludwig Wittgenstein embodies the revolution of Modernism more than most. This is due not only to his origins in the grand bourgeoisie and the cultural milieu into which it was embedded, but also to his tireless efforts to reflect traditional ethics and aesthetics, and – accompanied by the development of his own theory of language and realization – to overcome them if need be. Rather than focusing on the thinker’s philosophical oeuvre, however, our exhibition looks at the medium of photography through the eyes of Wittgenstein. Based on the photographs from Wittgenstein’s estate, which were commissioned or even taken by him, and his repeated comments on photography in his philosophical and private writings, the presentation sheds light on Wittgenstein’s understanding and use of photography as an analytical practice.” Hans-Peter Wipplinger, Director of the Leopold Museum

Up until now, discussions about Wittgenstein’s connection with photography have focused primarily on a few iconic photographs and statements, including a composite photograph created in the early 1920s according to the ideas of the scientist Francis Galton, the philosopher’s photo album filled with 102 photographs and Wittgenstein’s letter to Ludwig Hänsel from 1938, in which he expressed his intention to write a “Laocoon for photographers” inspired by Lessing’s work Laocoon on the fundamental differences between painting and poetry. The present exhibition opens up this field for the first time. Operating with a more broadly defined concept of photography, it includes aspects that have hitherto attracted little attention, such as Wittgenstein’s picture postcard correspondence and excerpts from his Nonsense Collection, a compilation of nonsensical newspaper articles.

“Along with the hitherto only partly published photo album from the 1930s, the famous composite portrait of the Wittgenstein siblings, the photo booth pictures and other staged self-portraits, as well as the pictures of the house designed by Wittgenstein together with Paul Engelmann for Margarete Stonborough-Wittgenstein, the exhibition also includes excerpts from his Nonsense Collection as well as a selection of his picture postcard correspondence with family members and friends which reveals a style of communication that is always also reflective of the medium’s pictorial level. Against the background of his deliberations on photography, which extended as far as his intention to write a ‘Laocoon for photographers’, this stock of materials affords the opportunity to subject Wittgenstein’s understanding and use of the medium to a contemporary revision.” Verena Gamper and Gregor Schmoll, curators of the exhibition

Wittgenstein’s photographic practice ranged from his own use of the camera to the conception, compilation and montage of photographs, via the cropping of prints, comments on their material qualities, the mailing and requesting of photographs, to the formulation of preferences, evaluations and viewing instructions.

Looking for an adequate way to visualize this practice, the curators decided to highlight it through associatively placed dialogues with works by contemporary artists. Their media-specific articulations and contemplations expose numerous parallels, intersections and points of contact. The selected contemporary works never refer directly to Wittgenstein’s philosophic work, and much less to his photographic practice. Instead, the juxtaposition of Wittgenstein’s historical artefacts with contemporary artworks opens up resonance chambers which follow a strategy of reciprocal visualization and aspectualization; the exhibition with its temporary neighborships becomes a site of showing. The spectrum of these motivic and thematic resonance chambers ranges from the topics of composite photography and blurriness, to (self-)portraits, via the album and photographed spaces, grammar and the use of photography to the lies of photography, before closing with “the last photograph” of the thinker on his deathbed, which the philosopher had decisively influenced as a last image in the world, representing the inner boundary of depictability and therefore of speakability.

In the manuscript volume of his Philosophical Investigations (1936), the philosopher demanded: “Consider for example the activities that we call ‘games’, I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, competitive games, and so on. What is common to them all? – Don’t say, ‘There must be something they have in common, or they would not be called “games”’, but look and see what they ||whether there is anything they all have in common. – For if you see || look at them you will see nothing || not see something that is common to them all, but you will see similarities, relationships, and a lot of them for good measure. To repeat: don’t think, but look!” If we replace the term “game” with “photography”, this quote makes for an impulsive motto to introduce this exhibition. Much in keeping with a Wittgensteinian spirit, this is to encourage us to find our own readings and points of intersection, resulting in a “network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing” which reveals “similarities large and small”.

The catalogue accompanying the exhibition

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive catalogue in German and English:

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Photography as Analytical Practice, edited by Verena Gamper and Hans-Peter Wipplinger, with essays by Verena Gamper, Elisabeth Kamenicek, Michael Nedo, Ulrich Richtmeyer, Gregor Schmoll and Joseph Wang-Kathrein, and a foreword by Hans-Peter Wipplinger.

The book comprises 304 pages and approx. 580 illustrations and was published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König.

The publication is available for EUR 29.90 at the Leopold Museum Shop.

The exhibition opening

The opening of this homage to Wittgenstein was attended by Josef Ostermayer, the head of the board of directors of the Leopold Museum Private Foundation, and board members Elisabeth Leopold and Sonja Hammerschmid, Moritz Stipsicz (Commercial Director, Leopold Museum), the CEO of the Austrian Post Georg Pölzl (Head of the Circle of Patrons, Leopold Museum), the lenders Michael Nedo (Wittgenstein Archive Cambridge, catalogue author), mumok CEO Karola Kraus, the CEO of the Austrian National Library Johanna Rachinger, Klimt Foundation Director Peter Weinhäupl, Ines Ratz (Archive & Estate Alfons Schilling), the gallery owners Christine König, Ursula Krinzinger and Thomas Krinzinger, Ernst Hilger, Markus Peichl and Andreas Huber (Galerie CRONE), the philosopher Allan Janik, Dorotheum CEO Martin Böhm, numerous members of the Wittgenstein family, the artists represented in the exhibition Anna Jermolaewa, Anastasia Koroshilova, Inés Lombardi, Manfred Willmann and Otto Zitko as well as Lisa Rastl, Claudia Rohrauer, Hans Kupelwieser, Ingo Nussbaumer and Walter Vopava, curator Bettina M. Busse (Bank Austria Kunstforum Vienna), director Joachim Dennhardt, collector Diethard Leopold, the Wittgenstein experts Elisabeth Kamenicek, Ulrich Richtmeyer, Radmila Schweitzer (Wittgenstein Initiative) and Alfred Schmidt (Austrian National Library), Bernhard Fetz (Director of the Literary Archive of the Austrian National Library), Uwe Schögl (Picture Archives and Graphics of the Austrian National Library), the business consultants Jörg Markowitsch, Sylvia Eisenburger-Kunz and Gerd Eisenburger, Michael Ponstingl (Bonartes), Christine Frisinghelli (Camera Austria), the art critic Nicole Scheyerer, the graphic artist Christian Schienerl, art expert Christian Witt-Döring, Michael Rössner (Institute of Culture Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences), and many others.

Press release and press images

Further images in the APA photo gallery

 

For questions, please contact:

Leopold Museum Private Foundation
Mag. Klaus Pokorny and Veronika Werkner, BA
Press/Public Relations
0043 1 525 70 - 1507 and 1541
presse@leopoldmuseum.org
www.leopoldmuseum.org

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