by Claudia Siefen-Leitich

One of my favourite works by Austrian sculptor and filmmaker Josef Dabernig is his transcription of the health guide Beauty and Digestion: Human Rejuvenation Through the Appropriate Maintenance of the Intestines by the Austrian medical doctor Franz Xaver Mayr, originally published in 1920. The human body is to be distrusted, especially one’s own. To dedicate oneself with this attitude to the body and above all to the space created by humans is artistically comprehensible and of an unusual beauty. Meticulous note-taking abounds in Dabernig’s work, and his films can be seen as a consistent continuation of this healthy and also sympathetic mistrust. Dabernig’s framing and directing, creating spaces and movements, stillness and acting: Dabernig has been making films since 1996, and they work both at festivals and in museum contexts.

Thus, when looking at his fine copies, one may well be struck by the feeling and also the question, “What would his films look like?” (this often happens to me, by the way, with some visual artists), only to be reassured, “Wait a minute! A good question and how reassuring, there are films in his artistic universe. They exist!” So one can calmly continue to bend over these transcripts, pursue other thoughts, and some of his films will certainly find their way into this text.

“I hadn’t studied film at all but sculpture and wanted to get my sculpture diploma without sculpture, i.e. only with drawings. Early on, I was probably less interested in the materialization of ideas, but only in concepts, and drawings and sometimes text were enough for me. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to do that at the time and I converted several drawings into the third dimension. With five ‘diploma sculptures’ I had finally more than satisfied the requirements and was awarded a diploma prize to boot.”

Josef Dabernig

And returning briefly to appropriate maintenance of the intestines, I could not help but think of the Japanese author Tanizaki Junichiro, who in his 1933 classic essay about Japanese aesthetics In Praise of Shadows also devotes a chapter to the Japanese toilet. Among other things Tanizaki writes: „As I have said there are certain prerequisites: a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito. I love to listen from such a toilet to the sound of softly falling rain, especially if it is a toilet of the Kanto region, with its long, narrow windows at floor level; there one can listen with such a sense of intimacy to the raindrops falling from the eaves and the trees, seeping into the earth as they wash over the base of a stone lantern and freshen the moss about the stepping stones. And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons.“ So here we have it: a space is defined purely by its meta-level. This is particularly perceptible in Dabernig’s framing and editing.

In Dabernig’s excursus on fitness (2010), for example, a pan shot from left to right, window frames, plastic chairs stacked on top of each other, training bars, glaring lighting. We are in an improvised studio. Arms, shoulders, legs, knees, they form diagonals, lines of movement, the windows,  trees peek in here and there, right angles, a radius described with the shoulder. And the room slowly fills. A single man sits at a desk, takes off his glasses here and there, observes briefly, glasses back on his nose and fingers at the keyboard! Typing along, but slowly. Body shapes and angles gradually form a unity until a shot on the screen clarifies: we are reading the script. The movements we have just followed are meticulously recorded.

Different rhythms with Dabernig’s Stabat Mater (2016). The arrangement of the tables and chairs, an elegant hotel breakfast room, and the waiter at the reception always has to close the door. He tucks his sweater in and the curtain hints that there is a story out there. As the room fills with guests, the choreography multiplies. There are alternating shots of nature, rock and stone of bizarre beauty, a voice, offstage (text by the Swiss writer Bruno Pellandini): the story is no less bizarre. A drought threatens. The voice eats through the rocky landscape and the curtain will not close.

In Dabernig’s films there are elements of the architectural theorist Stephan Trüby, I am thinking in particular of his book History of Corridors, where Trüby speaks of his conviction and the importance to contemplate architecture from the perspective of its elements. Dabernig lets spaces speak by letting people manoeuvre through them. Often there seems to be no connection whatsoever between the individual protagonists until the space appears and connects them all and also lets them speak together. An often quiet chorus of people and spaces, always filled with life and warmth, even if one or the other is conspicuous by their absence… In the corridors of a cinematic world of thought, one also traverses Max Wertheimer’s work with his main tenet of his Gestalt Theory: “The whole is different from the sum of its parts”. Spatial perception is always at play, we are always surrounded by spaces that have an effect on us, that we interpret, that structure our everyday lives, even if these effects are rarely reflected upon. However, the spaces that surround us are not simply there, they have been designed, they are the result of an architectural conception, they have been created to fulfill functions. But no less important are the effects of the designed spaces, whether or not one wants to harmonize their function, form and tones.

Within Rosa coeli (2003), Josef Dabernig is working again with the words by Bruno Pellandini. Language and bodies, bodies and language. How language can determine the rhythm of the body, sometimes barely perceptibly. Do you remember what it was like as a child, as a teenager, getting drunk with friends, knowing you were doing something forbidden? The intoxication. It will never be like that again. When you grow up, you have to travel, sign contracts, the liquor tastes different then. And a window will also just be something you could have looked out of. To see something. Did you do it? You have to wear suits, look serious. Talk serious. And suddenly you remember your father’s sentences. Or your mother’s. It will never be so carefree again. But was it ever so?

In Parking (2003) we witness a regulation of a somewhat different kind. A car stops on a sunny, busy road in a small wood. A few trees only, the car offers the right angles. The two occupants begin to undress briskly. The driver drags the other young man out, there is a hail of angry words, vigorous gesticulating, even beating with the car floor mat. But cars continue driving past, the sun is shining. The displeasure remains cool and almost distant. Maybe it is not between them, but only displeasant fort he viewer? Both men get back in the car and dress quickly. Attentive looks and sometimes frighteningly simple trains of thought, hardly noticed by an uninvolved outside observer. Only the sound is deafening. Oh, and the two men have changed the driver’s side now…

So let’s take a look at spatially effective, cinematic design devices such as framing, editing and narrative perspective and transfer them, a little cockily, perhaps a little rashly, to Dabernig’s work: the cinematic concept of framing, which deals with the different ways of viewing the image section, also introduces the concept of the ‘extra-image’ of architecture and explains how the viewer’s imagination can be activated by deliberately concealing parts of the space. As with film editing, it can be assumed that the perception of space in architecture is not a continuous process, but is composed of individual segments, sections or visual spaces. Film editing, image and sound, circumscribes an experience of space that takes into account subject-related sensory experiences. The narrative perspective examines structures and narrative strategies, bringing them into the architectural analysis. This shows, for example, that movement choreographies generate multi-layered views of space and thus condense the spatial impression.

Can we say that the assignment of meaning to words, but also to images or spaces, is learned within the framework of the respective cultural conventionalization process? In other words, that the ability to read a cinematic image or to recognise the expression of a space requires a learning process and is not physically given? A filmmaker consciously uses signs and thus offers the viewer a perceptual offer that is interpreted and understood according to personal competence. In architecture, on the other hand, which is more oriented towards functional parameters, the intentional use of signs is often secondary. Ultimately, however, architectural design is also a game with signs – or conventions.

As I wrote in the beginning: The human body is to be distrusted, especially one’s own.

Maybe there’s some truth to that.

(The artist’s website: https://dabernig.net/ )