300m
Type
Book
Authors
Category
Publication Year
2002
Publisher
Edition Haus am Gern, Switzerland
URL
[ private ]
Abstract
Just over is also wrong!
The hit rate in this photo book is indeed enormous: the photographer Rudolf Steiner has hit far more than 200 Swiss disc and shooting ranges with his old Kodak-Knips camera into black and white. The recognition rate of the shooting ranges, on the other hand, is so marginal that this standard work in Swiss shooting club circles was met with skepticism and rejection.
Nevertheless, "300 m" is a beautiful and important book that only becomes more beautiful, more important and more relevant with distance!
It would be a mistake to assume that only shooters would have the proverbial right to excuse if they miss their target - even artists have it. In the present case, the excuse is particularly astonishing because here someone claims to do what they call "art in public space" - with a book. In it are full-page black and white photos gathered from over 200 medium-range shooting ranges, without text and without location. After all, connoisseurs can make out the Riedbach facility under the recordings - which would already mention the only connection between book and reopening. Otherwise, it remains the secret of the Art Commission of the City of Bern, why she entrusted the Bieler artist Rudolf Steiner with the task of carrying out the artistic intervention in the public space of Riedbach with this book. But hand on heart: Who would have wanted a sculpture in front of, behind or behind the Rützenhaus, who would like a new color concept for the stand numbers or even a background noise in the entrance area? The book, however, hardly disturbs the eye of the shooter, especially since it comes along in a pleasantly discreet field gray.
The fact that this book, once opened, could be about art, is gladly taken as a side effect. Because it shows no more and no less than the already known: Stand numbers in black on white or white on black, more or less crooked in front of a more or less dark edge of the forest, more or less perforated, odd numbers only or just or both, from 1 to 2 or 1 to 80 etc. These pictures alternate with those showing entrances to the pointer trenches - weird doors and stairs that lead directly into the ground or just do so; Buildings that are more reminiscent of the trenches of Verdun than of a forest edge in Hasle-Rüegsau. Maybe it's the strict tone of the photographs, the omnipresent black and the slight blur that go together over the details, which gives the pictures that historic dimension of war and cold and earth - that is not all, says the author. What interests him beforehand, according to Steiner, is the most complete documentation possible of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers. be as complete as possible documentation of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers. be as complete as possible documentation of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers.
The pictures, on the other hand, are strangely indifferent to the act of shooting aimed at precision. By using an old box camera with blind viewfinder and only two apertures and two shutter speeds, Steiner places his target just outside of photography in an area where the analogies of shooting and photography are less linguistically (a photo "shoot") as phenomenologically effective : the camera captures something and «preserves», the gun sends out something and «destroys». But to reduce the weapon to its potential for violence would be too easy, too boring, says the author. Rather, he is concerned with the naming of that precise view, which means a short-term expansion and change of the body into the space during shooting as well as taking photographs. to - in one case - to effect a hole in fractions of a second at a distance of 300 meters; or - in the other case - to obtain a vanishing space in years of work.
Trmasan Bruialesi
lives as an ethnologist and publicist in Berlin
The art book «300 m» by Rudolf Steiner appears in the «Edition Haus am Gern» and was presented to the public on 22 March 2002 on the occasion of the reopening of the Riedbach shooting range.
Part of the edition is intended for the shooting clubs and shooter companies in Riedbach.
http://www.edition-hausamgern.ch/300m.html
The hit rate in this photo book is indeed enormous: the photographer Rudolf Steiner has hit far more than 200 Swiss disc and shooting ranges with his old Kodak-Knips camera into black and white. The recognition rate of the shooting ranges, on the other hand, is so marginal that this standard work in Swiss shooting club circles was met with skepticism and rejection.
Nevertheless, "300 m" is a beautiful and important book that only becomes more beautiful, more important and more relevant with distance!
It would be a mistake to assume that only shooters would have the proverbial right to excuse if they miss their target - even artists have it. In the present case, the excuse is particularly astonishing because here someone claims to do what they call "art in public space" - with a book. In it are full-page black and white photos gathered from over 200 medium-range shooting ranges, without text and without location. After all, connoisseurs can make out the Riedbach facility under the recordings - which would already mention the only connection between book and reopening. Otherwise, it remains the secret of the Art Commission of the City of Bern, why she entrusted the Bieler artist Rudolf Steiner with the task of carrying out the artistic intervention in the public space of Riedbach with this book. But hand on heart: Who would have wanted a sculpture in front of, behind or behind the Rützenhaus, who would like a new color concept for the stand numbers or even a background noise in the entrance area? The book, however, hardly disturbs the eye of the shooter, especially since it comes along in a pleasantly discreet field gray.
The fact that this book, once opened, could be about art, is gladly taken as a side effect. Because it shows no more and no less than the already known: Stand numbers in black on white or white on black, more or less crooked in front of a more or less dark edge of the forest, more or less perforated, odd numbers only or just or both, from 1 to 2 or 1 to 80 etc. These pictures alternate with those showing entrances to the pointer trenches - weird doors and stairs that lead directly into the ground or just do so; Buildings that are more reminiscent of the trenches of Verdun than of a forest edge in Hasle-Rüegsau. Maybe it's the strict tone of the photographs, the omnipresent black and the slight blur that go together over the details, which gives the pictures that historic dimension of war and cold and earth - that is not all, says the author. What interests him beforehand, according to Steiner, is the most complete documentation possible of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers. be as complete as possible documentation of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers. be as complete as possible documentation of a typical Swiss phenomenon, before it disappears. The advance of the edges of the settlement to the targets, the displacement of the shooting ranges from the villages (despite legal Schiesspflicht) and the consequences for the communities, for the clubs, the society - all this coagulates in the book to a critical-nostalgic look back into a landscape which was still to be divided into precise goals with simple numbers.
The pictures, on the other hand, are strangely indifferent to the act of shooting aimed at precision. By using an old box camera with blind viewfinder and only two apertures and two shutter speeds, Steiner places his target just outside of photography in an area where the analogies of shooting and photography are less linguistically (a photo "shoot") as phenomenologically effective : the camera captures something and «preserves», the gun sends out something and «destroys». But to reduce the weapon to its potential for violence would be too easy, too boring, says the author. Rather, he is concerned with the naming of that precise view, which means a short-term expansion and change of the body into the space during shooting as well as taking photographs. to - in one case - to effect a hole in fractions of a second at a distance of 300 meters; or - in the other case - to obtain a vanishing space in years of work.
Trmasan Bruialesi
lives as an ethnologist and publicist in Berlin
The art book «300 m» by Rudolf Steiner appears in the «Edition Haus am Gern» and was presented to the public on 22 March 2002 on the occasion of the reopening of the Riedbach shooting range.
Part of the edition is intended for the shooting clubs and shooter companies in Riedbach.
http://www.edition-hausamgern.ch/300m.html
Number of Copies
1
