In public appearances there is a correlation between the size of an audience and the size of the performers. The rule is: The larger the crowd, the smaller the perceived figures of the performers. The rule is also: The larger the crowd, the more momentous the performers appear in the societal power base. The performers lose, in ratio to the size of the gathering, their perceived, physical presence while at the same time their significance in symbolic space increases.

Throughout history, in order to augment the physical perceptibility of performers, various techniques have been developed. In ancient theatre, for instance, the actors wore buskins – a laced boot with thick soles – to gain height. The acoustics of ancient theatre architecture also made their voices audible at great distances. In the highly technical times of the 20th and 21st centuries, the voice can be amplified with microphones and loudspeakers. It has now developed a heretofore unattainable sound level and spatial omnipresence – for those speaking into the microphone their voice returns to their ear as that of a stranger. The progress in video technology also allows something on an optical level that was only possible before on the acoustical level: a simultaneous self-enlargement. Via beamer or large-format screen, the performer is displayed as a monumental, glowing image while operating in front of this large projection in his or her small original size. In ancient theatre, the body of the actor was directly enlarged. The electronically amplified voice already heralded the separation of the “enlarged” voice from the body of the speaker; now in the simultaneous video projection, the performer is split between a small, genuine but original I and the I as a public large-scale display. This duplication, arising apparently from the pragmatic cause of an increased perceptibility, implies a specific form of media rhetoric.

The principle of media duplication was extensively used first of all in pop music for performances by superstars in front of huge audiences. Now it has found increasing application in party conferences, shareholders’ plenary meetings, sport events or symposiums; that is, whenever the idea is to transcend pure perceptibility and to stage positions in the societal power base. In addition to video images, slide projections and billboard-sized posters are also used. The latter are preferred by totalitarian regimes, but in a democratic election campaign also, media-savvy politicians pose in front of their posters in public places. Equipped with brush and bucket of glue they perform a self-postering, so-to-speak, for the cameras of the journalists at press conferences that are disguised as mini-events. The politician posturing in front of his own photograph again becomes a photograph himself.

In her photograph series “Self-Self-Portrait”, Gabriele Obermaier takes up the media staging style and reflects photography as a rhetorical form of public self-situating. In the background of her photographs, the artist projects the view of her face, dominating the whole format – it shows an emphatically self-confident and winning smile. Standing in front of her photo face, she employs gestures such as those taught to speakers in schools of acting and rhetoric in order to sell what they are saying, and therefore themselves, convincingly.

On principle, gesture is conveyed on a visual level, whereby the perception of the gesture triggers a kind of corporeal sympathy in the viewer. Gesture amplifies and transmits what is said from body to body, in a manner of speaking. The more vehement the gesture, the stronger the transmitting energy. If one looks at the primary visual media of television, one can ascertain therein a symptomatic phenomenon, the prevalent increasing lack of concept and growing image dominance. In a popular German television programme where quartets of speakers once discussed literature and now discuss art, the extremely forceful gesticulation of the speakers is striking. The exaggerated vehemence of the gestures attempts to disguise weak arguments and to draw the viewer in front of the television over to one’s own side using the visual avenue of television. The gestures of the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, reminiscent of those from an inferior school for rhetoric, are also conspicuous. Her initially large gestures finish meagrely; her arms and hands appear to be remote-controlled. The gestures remain detached from what is said and speak first and foremost of an emphatic will to assertion. Rhetoric devolves into its emptied form. In this sense, the gestures in Obermaier’s photographs also become independent. That is, Obermaier stages the gesture as form. What is said remains unheard, the gesture is visible as a gesture, detached from what it is emphasizing or commenting upon.

Gestures are rhetorical hollow moulds that the speaker fills with the spoken word. Pictures can also unfold their own media rhetoric, as do gestures. The iconology of the picture within a picture also functions rhetorically in this sense; the photograph showing the actor posturing in front of his own billboard poster. Obermaier’s photo series directs the attention to the media rhetoric of the image. Her photographs resemble press, documentary or propaganda photographs. What distinguishes them from the usual documentary photographs is that the audience, to whom she is apparently speaking in her photographs, never existed but it still evokes in the photographic constellation its imagined presence. The performance in front of the billboard is suggestive of its being a grand public performance. The poster floats like a divine apparition, a numinous power over the body of the actress.

What is also interesting in this context is how, in societies in which authority finds its zenith in personality cults, photographic pictures are employed publicly as a demonstrative presence of power. This use follows the model of representative publicity: The ruler lends his or body to the office, is incorporated in the office. The publicly distributed photograph of the ruler – king, queen, president, dictator – acts as a substitute for the ruler and represents power. If one transposes this model of representation onto the constellations photographed by Gabriele Obermaier, the relations – our respects to Jean Baudrillard – turn upside down. The large-format photograph is the dominating power. The body in front of the billboard seems to be a sort of relic that validates the photograph enthroned above everything. The luminous projection appears to be a step further detached from material things and determines the photographic frame as a divine image. The actress stands in front of the imaginary public appearance of her own picture.

Heinz Schütz / Translation: Greta Dunn