Between tunc and tanks

Photographer Karin Jobst shows a nuclear power plant at the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus

Atomic energy as something to hoik or heat us up in a dangerous way, has often functioned as a symbol for too hot or too destructive energy in general or, especially, sexual: first atom bombs associated with hydroid peroxided "sex bombs" like Marilyn Monroe, as before traditional bombs were name givers for Hollywood stars like the „bomb shell“ Jean Harlow. Thus, in the glamourous beauty of a femme fatale's "shells", sexuality and energy have a kind of traditional connection with each other. In a series of photographies by Karin Jobst, currently exhibited at the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus, we find this in the quite too stylish shells and surfaces of a high-technological object's architecture.

Jobst, who had studied photography with Katharina Bosse in Bielefeld after some years in advertisment photography, shot a nuclear power plant in Germany.

She exhibits now quite small pieces, creating a private atmosphere, that shows enlightened walls, doors and machines. A floor in white and orange becomes a reminiscent of the famous italian bowl chair of the 60ties. A huge hall for cooling water reminds of a swimming pool, with balconies to look down from the upper floors.

Then and but then, other pictures show the outside of the nuclear power plant, some flatten up to a nearly completely abstract white plain, others reduce surfaces to nearly virtual constructions of rooms, and, again completely different, some shots of the natural surrounding show the nuclear power plant in a rural world of yellow rye. Swinging around in the wind and hot air, photographed with a kind of red atmospheric effect. The small picture of about 12 to 10 inches as something quite romantic, like the exhibition's curator Th. Elsen explained, also reminds the viewer of allegorical scenes – unfortunately of the 30ies or 40ies.

This is perhaps accidential and in any case not intended by the artist. But Jobst has an open tendency to adore the streamlined outfit of the high-tech architecture as an constructive achievement of engineering. She has seen the nuclear power plant more than one and a second times, because her father has always worked in it. Thus, she explains, she tends to experience the technology as interesting and governed. Not every detail in her pictures shows exactly this – you can see the architecture as overloaded up to the limits, or, like the croppy landscape, destructively undercovered by heat and photographically unfocused, with double-lighted and differently coloured areas, as if the picture had been radioactivated, as the artist herself kidded.

But even this is, in a way, pure beauty. Unlike that of sex bombs as usual, this beauty belongs to the unhuman technical construction, more like Lawrence Durrells aphroditic radiator in „Tunc“, its constructiveness and high-technological achievement, its way of perfection, its visuability. Thus, the nuclear power plant in the background of the golden landscape let us unpleasantly think about the white and light skirted workman on the cropfields of the propagandistic allegorical art of fascism and stalinism. But what has been a male body, - already in the allegorial scenes presented as merely a source of horse-craft - has become a pure technological thing – something more than an object but less than a person, perhaps not only a surface but a face of technology. In her mimetical, nearly imitating approach to picture the technological object and her individual impression, the technological idea of functionability and creativity gets lost. When Jobst describes her photographical project as trying to find something new and various in comparison to advertising or industrial photography, she affirms the impression of her art as obviously primarily depictive, even if or even because she changes styles, motives and strategies – all just different colourforms of something. In pictures which show just small details and can be found especially in a book with twenty handsigned c-prints, the depicted real forms – for instance, a huge ductwork - can just be imagined because only a small section of its surface is shown. Another example is a white plate with red lugs, perhaps a door, but photographed along the angular and thus its function unidentifiable.

Thus, the glamourized high-tech, its details and surface becomes defunctionalized, merely a picture between imagination and sense impression. As Jobst's art can be judged as unfitting the real properties of its not unimportant, primary functional and quite dangerous object, this is perhaps an unconscious way to get in distance to the technicity's force. The photographies do not only show the marilynesk face of the male connoted engineering, but destruct exactly its functionality into superficiality and semblance. In some pictures, the de-construction is more obvious than in others, for instance, in a little series of three pieces, where a man in a yellow security suit sits in a breakdown crane high up in a floor and above a kind of cooling cell. The person is reduced to a kind of point in an allover ornamental surface showing thus the lack of human's mastering the object's technology , because the very kind of high-technology has obviously to master itself and to be capable not to depend on a human helping hand in its daily going on and in case of critical situations. Other pics, showing floors and doors, suggest icy and slippy bobsleigh runs and italian furniture designs of plastic molding, emphasizing the different kinds of ways and runs people and machines need to move forward, thus reminding the viewer of the problem to close up the physical object but let the human beings come out of the nuclear power plant in case of an accident. This can be seen in photographies of an elevator – instead of a staircase - and another, metal-made floor shimmering in strange lights of silver, that both show the floors and ways in the nuclear power plant as not be made for men but for machines only. What is business as usual for the daily work in the nuclear power plant becomes for a photographer strolling around an impressive and deconstructive allusion to the beyond-control-technology of such an architecture. Thus, judged at large, this strange and postmodern little exhibition fits its nuclear object - with its doubled face of a sex bomb's beauty, which brutaly suggests objectuality but behaves dangerously selfdetermined.

Atomar – zone 1 . Photographies of Karin Jobst.

Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus

Maximilianstraße 48

86150 Augsburg

Telephone: 0049 (0) 821 324402

Opening hours:

Tuesday 10 am to 08 pm

Wed – Sun 10 am to 05 pm

No admission fee

Report and photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter

First photo shows the heads of the Augsburger Kunstsammlungen and the artist Karin Jobst, third photo shows the V.I.P.s at an evening organized by the Augsburgian responsible of equality of treatment with the subject „Women in the arts“.