Between my consciousness and my body as I experience it, between this phenomenal body of mine and that of another as I see it from the outside, there exists an internal relation which causes the other to appear as the completion of the system. The other can be evident to me because I am not transparent for myself, and because my subjectivity draws its body in its wake.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1

Produced over a five year period, the prints in this exhibition by Garry Kaulitz are autonomous images which permit a reading as a larger narrative whole. At once both technical tour de force works and penetrating and unflinching series of observations of human relationships, Kaulitz' prints organize into a narrative movement from lost innocence to liberation. This narrative structure has its formal correlate within the several prints: the problematics of vision and the visible, of observation and representation, pervade these works. Kaulitz disrupts the primordial unity of the image plane with the interruptions of imposed elements, through the manipulation of signifiers by juxtaposition and contextualization, and by embedding image within image in the visual analogue to quotation. 2

The artist appears in Self-Portrait, face filling the lower register of the image area, surmounted by a large eye filling the red chine collé field of the upper register of the image. The motif of the eye is a synecdoche for the artist, recalling the bon mot attributed to Cezanné regarding Monet as "only an eye," 3 and recalling Leon Battista Alberti's emblematic eye 4, detached and winged: a trope subsuming omniscience, detached observation and the male gaze. The representation of the artist's gaze in Self-Portrait is at once outside of and central to the representations of observation comprising Kaulitz' work. Kaulitz' self-representation of the gaze is the chiasmus, the crossing between vision and the visible, the embodiedment of visuality in the flesh: one can see because one can be seen. 5

Provocations begins a sequence of intaglio works in which two images are embedded in the field; juxtaposition of the two images elicts their comparison and contrasting in viewer response. In Provocations, the female body is represented in both images, on the left as it might be observed, but nevertheless with the conventional devices of the right hand raised to the face, and the left hand raised at shoulder height, on the right in the idealized form of classical sculpture, a torso with head, arms, and legs broken off. The shifter underlying a rhetorical move from real and ideal, of representation qua direct observation evoked on the left to representation qua photomechanical reproduction on the right subsists in the syntactical signifiers of chierographic marks on the left, and of the gravure image on the right; the distinction is emphasized by the use of chine collé on the right to render the embedded image a sheet of printed paper within a sheet of printed paper. The practice of juxtaposing the apparently hand-drawn with the apparently photomechanically reproduced, the 'original' with the 'copy' continues in the other four prints in the sequence, putting into question the notions of 'original' and 'copy' central to printmaking in particular, and visual artworks in general as re-presentations.

Provocation 1 juxtaposes a crouching female figure on the left with a doe seen in profile on the right: the association of the two images suggests objects of hunting, and the notion of being startled 'like a deer caught in headlights.' In Provocation 2 a female figure kneels on one knee at the left, juxtaposed with a photomechanical reproduction of an Egyptian head on the right, overlayed with a geometrical diagram of the proportions of the head. The pensive female figure on the left in Provocation 3 is seated on the ground, right hand to face, left hand on raised right knee; the right image reproduces male and female standing figures, clothed, before an archway decorated with foliage, hands joined. The figures seem medieval, or are a reproduction of a later representation of late medi-eval or early Renaissance lovers, Tristan and Iseult, perhaps. At the left of Provocation 4, a seated female nude, pensive, again with right hand to face, is juxtaposed with a mermaid holding a circular form, or a spherical form represented as a circle, with a sailing vessal motif.

Tempest has a richly textured field with majuscule lettes randomly disposed on which two images are embedded. In the upper register, a crouching female figure is represented as if in a photograph crumpled and then flattened, 'held' to the ground plane by a strip of tape at the top and bottom edges. In the lower register, a head of a salmon is represented in profile.

The division of Tempest into upper and lower registers is repeated in Confidential Copy. The juxtaposition of a swan reproduced in the embedded image in the upper register with a female nude, crouching with both hands on left foot, below elicits a reference to Leda and the swan. At the left of the embedded images, the text NUDE runs vertically, at the right of the embedded images, the text SWAN runs vertically. On the embedded image of the nude, CONFIDENTIAL COPY is stamped in red ink, with another partially visible stamping of CONFIDENTIAL at the upper edge, extending beyond (and if as under) the platemark.

Confidential Copy, along with Fragments and Cover-Up, represent the female figure as divided between segmented embedded images. The image segments each provides a slightly different representation; their juxtaposition suggests the assembling of a whole from parts, with each part a discrete segment of space during individual increments of time (as, for example, in the photograph collages of Joyce Neimanas and of David Hockney). Cover-Up represents the same individual as Cynthia, and perhaps is the same individual in the crumpled and unmfolded embedded image in Dorothy's Vision. In Cover-Up, the image of the crouching figure is divided into three parts, with an upper and lower large rectangles and a small triangular wedge at the center.

Flight seems to end the sequence of works in the exhibition. A reclining nude female figure stretches across the field, parallel to the image plane, seeming asleep. To the left above the figure, an umber chine collé area demarks a representation of a male and female couple holding hands and dressed in late nineteenth century bathing costumes, male figure with two feet on the ground, female figure with right foot raised as if about to test the water. To the right above the reclining figure, a female nude-apparently the same person as represented in the reclining figure-runs toward the image plane. Is this an internal narrative, collapsing several temporal instances into a single image? Or are we observing a representation of a sleeping figure dreaming, a representation that privileges us with seeing dreamer and dream at once? At the upper left, two postage stamps are collaged to the print: a one cent stamp with an American Kestrel, and a 32 cent commemorative of the "First Supersonic Flight 1947." These two stamps are canceled with a USPS rubber stamped cancellation applied to the print in red ink, dated "FEB 18 1998." Below and to the left of these two stamps, two one cent American Kestrel stamps, conjoined at the vertical perforation, are overstamped with red ink in a outline font: "RUSH." An obvious ambiguity on 'flight' obtains, turning on the bivalent polysemy of the term: 'the condition of flying' and 'the situation of running away'. But when does this flight of freedom, this running away occur? In the sleeping figure's dream, but as remembered day residue, or dreamed-of project? This aporia, finally, adumbrates another overarching undecidability: who speaks in these works?

Does author-ity reside with the artist qua observer, or with the represented? From the works alone, on intrinsic evidence, one cannot determine who originates the tales told in these prints. This indeterminancy has is correlate in the material cause of the works, which problematize the notion of original and copy within the medium. That one comes in the end to an aporetic indeterminancy is, in the end, to assert the inadequacy of terms to engage the domain with which one is confronted. The most powerful works of visual art are, in the end, those to which words will not stick.

Garry Kaulitz is professor of art and head of the printmaking area at the University of Alaska at Anchorage. Recent exhibitions include Colorprint USA, Texas Tech University, 1999; International Print Competition, Freiken, Germany; Philadelphia Print Club Invitational. His work is included in the collections of the Speed Art Museum, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The Dahl Art Museum. Kaulitz received the Master of Fine Arts and the Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from Rochester Institute of Technology.

1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962, 1989), p.352. Return
   
2. For the concept of embedded image and visual quotation, see Norman Bryson, Mieke Bal, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73:2 (June 1991), 174-208. Return
   
3. "Monet is only an eye, but what an eye!" Attributed to Paul Cezanné; see Elizabeth Knowles, ed., Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 200.9. Return
   
4. Verso of Matteo de' Pasti's portrait medallion of Leon Battista Alberti, 1446-50; see George Francis Hill, A Corpus of Italian Medals Before Cellini, vol. 2 (London: British Museum, 1930) and reproduced in Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 69. Return
   
5. 5 See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968). Return