Overview

Georg Gatsas (b. 1978, Switzerland) is an artist who uses still and moving photography to map the intersections between creativity, location, memory, and focus. A steadfast participant in DIY and underground creative communities, he has spent his life unveiling the connections that bind artists across genre, generation, and identity. Solo exhibitions of his work have been mounted by Kunsthalle St. Gallen, Switzerland; The Swiss Institute, New York; and JUBG, Cologne. His work has appeared in The Wire, zweikommasieben, and ANP Quarterly, and monographs dedicated to Georg’s photography have been published by Nieves (Switzerland) and Loose Joints (France and UK). Spanning 2002 - 2007, The Process was Georg’s first major series, documenting five years of life in New York City. It’s an alienating span of time, bookended by September 11 on one side and the emergence of the smartphone on the other. The terrified, reactionary America of these five years craved comfort and safety, but a spiky, risky underground coalesced in that creative dead zone. In Georg’s words, “There was a sense of most of the world not understanding. And this is an opportunity.” The predominant culture’s patriotism and assuredness left a lot of unsupervised space for individuals interested in addressing fear and danger. It sometimes felt as if entire city blocks had been abandoned, the remnants corrupted and rebuilt by bands and artists, by concerts and exhibitions with small, dedicated audiences. This was the terrain of The Process. Georg sought out the people wandering this terrain, and made portrait of them: Genesis P-Orridge, Black Dice, Antipop Consortium, Kembra Pfahler, Ira Cohen and Stephonik Youth. These are not artists bound together by generation or gesture, rather they are connected through their dedication and intention. They share a sense of refusal, and an ability to see the opportunity in not being understood, in not being recuperable. Everyone in these photos is on edge, tense and tightly-wound. Their faces display the same resistance that you hear in their songs and read in their words. Georg matched their focus and ruthlessness in his photographs. The direct eye contact is consistent. The camera’s unobstructed harshness is consistent. Even the non-portrait photos—a cat-filled alley or an empty parking lot—ask the same questions about belonging, about looking away. About the potential of a broken umbrella, or the everyday ad hoc approaches to evading systemic annihilation. The Process is the first book issued by light-years, the independent label founded by Caterina Barbieri in 2021. Light-years is known best for densely-crafted, labyrinthine compositions, and The Process is no exception. Alongside the large format reproductions of photographs, the book presents a vast collection of record covers, garments, correspondence, and ephemera from Georg’s personal archive. Alternating between Georg’s portraits, these archival spreads are initially obscured from view through the use of an antiquated printing technique which leaves the top edge of the book uncut. The folded gathering at the top edge of each page must be sliced with a sharp edge to reveal the book in its entirety, a practice entirely familiar to 19th century readers, but nearly forgotten today. The poet Stéphane Mallarmé rejoiced in the process of separating pages with a blade, noting the action was the only way to introduce movement to a book. In his 1895 essay The Book: A Spiritual Instrument, Mallarmé wrote that the uncut foldings “invite the kind of sacrifice that made the red edges of ancient tomes bleed; I mean that they invite the paper-knife, which stakes our claims to possession of the book.” This design ultimately makes clear the intent of The Process, and of Georg’s practice as a whole. Reflecting on this incipient body of work decades after its completion, Georg observed, “You can see I just started.” It sounds like an admission that he’d only just begun using the camera in those years, but it can be reframed as an affirmation, an understanding that he jumped in and used the camera without hesitation. That he didn’t fret, didn’t strategize. That movement must be introduced, even blood, but this dedication and resistance is within reach for anyone with the will to reach out for it, to stake the claim.

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