Review by Volker Harrach, Cologne KRAUS - Zeitstreifen / KRAUS - Time Stripes "I don’t want a picture to look like something it isn’t, and I believe that a picture is more real if made from parts of the real world." (Quote by Robert Rauschenberg.) Time Stripes, “Zeitstreifen“ – the visual or graphic representation of a sequence of events in time, thus documenting some historical development. All collages by Max Otto Kraus exhibited in this show are based upon the same formal concept. Image fragments cut out from old editions of the German news magazine "Der Spiegel" are glued across a sheet of paper of regular letter size into a horizontal band, a composite image of new content. The photo fragments are radically detached from their original context of information, particularly so as captions and legends are removed. According to the principle of décollage, the cut-out loose fragments of a bygone reality assemble into a new, heterogenous arrangement, and thus disclose how indifferent the erstwhile image intention was. That’s precisely what fascinated Kraus: „Which images resp. image fragments do I recognize, what do they have to do with me, which memories and feelings etc. do they evoke, which associations do they call up – associations that have nothing, absolutely nothing in common with the ‘original informations’.“ From a distance, the Time Stripes appear like varicolored strips of film negatives, or as independent compositions of bits of color and shape. On closer inspection, however, they reveal a complex pictorial reality. The succession of details, each with a history of its own, eludes any clear-cut meaning. The Time Stripes, legible from either end, lack any manifest historical context. The variegated arrangements prompt the observer to realize semantic relations of his own, to interpret them, or to develop ranges of interpretation. Yet all collages and the picture fragments they are composed of are interconnected in a way, in that they are part of the collective image memory of times that have been shared by many. Comparable to the Dadaists’ challenge of the bourgeois understanding of art and the moral precepts it was based upon, the work had initially been conceived as a „visual war diary“ of the second war in Iraq (2003). Later this intention broadened to a non-systematic documentation of contemporary history and a preoccupation with the personal history (i.e., the biography) of the artist’s father. The Time Stripes are the result of an appropriation of reality – which in retrospect is always a non-reality, whose events when visually quoted generate but an esthetic factuality. As the papiers collées refer fragmentarily to technical, social, and political aspects of today’s world, they attempt to cope with reality by means of art, and thus enter into a visible tension with each other. As for the technique: Starting material are photos from the German newsmagazine "Der Spiegel". Fragments of them, always 32 mm high but variable in width, are cut out, then puzzled and glued together to form a continuous picture series, the "time stripe", horizontally across the reverse side of unused stationery of the artist’s father. Thus the subjectivity of the appropriation by the act of cutting out and reassembling image fragments on a sheet of paper turns into a new objectivity beyond the intention of the original pictures. The empty sheets mutated to image carriers provide a comment on the information contained in the picture sequences, in a language of their own. The red thread here is the business name KRAUS, shining through in reverse type, signalling the father’s biography. This purely „analogous“ work procedure is irrevocable, it cannot be undone like a computer command. Each next cut-out must fit to the preceding one, and must work with it.

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