REVIEWS

ROBERT HUTINSKI – VIOLENCE OF TRUTH

Robert Hutinski is very unusual photographer. And when I say unusual I mean uncommon, rare, curious, extraordinary, offbeat, out-of-the-way, peculiar, queer, singular, strange, unaccustomed, uncustomary, unique.
He is also very strong and it seems that he never try to show anything by his photographs. Still more: he shows us nothing at all. Or to be more precise: he shows special sequences,differences. And this is precisely his strongest artistic gesture.
In order to be on the level of his artistic performance, we must make differences as well.

DIFFERENCE NO. 1

Photographsmade by Robert Hutinski signify nothing. Why is this cognition so important, for we are accustomed to a thinking that photographs always show or signify something, tell stories or even use symbols or signs to become complex pictures, images or objects?
His photographs are very important, because it really doesn't matter what does the work of art mean; it really matters what can be produced, what follows from it, what kind of multiplicity it is, what ‘unwrought’ work does it offer the viewer. On the other side, it also matters what is a viewer as a thinking being capable of when he stands in front of a picture. Namely, he or she is not a supreme master of art, artistic production or works of art. On the contrary, to put it short: only God is a real master. Every human being is only a thinking subject, able to free itself of the everyday prisons. Robert Hutinski is trying to set us of these prisons which we are mostly not aware of.
Art is therefore a way out of (symbolic, spiritual) prison. It's liberation, not only of an artist or a viewer but mainly of life itself. This is very important: a photographer should not show us the world as it is in its truth. His duty is to deconstruct the world as it is in its supposed truth. In other words: Robert Hutinski knows that we always live in a world which is something else and not the pure world itself. There are therefore at least two worlds, and not just one as we usually believe. Because of that there is always something strange and unknown in artistic production. An artist is trying to liberate himself in order to become a true subject of pure life energy and pure thought. Robert Hutinski is such photographer because he is aware of the status of truth in every reality.
He knows very well what is a violence of the truth, he is aware that this violence is needed if we really want to understand the world we live in, but he also knows that he himslef is not an artist who thinks the world (he therefore knows, that his art works are not true representations of the objective world), because it is thought itself that thinks through the artist – itself.

DIFFERENCE NO. 2

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once said that a philosopher must live in order to think and philosophise.Life is thus a necessary condition of every actual life, every thought and every art or philosophy. There is no philosophy without life. This is an axiom.
It is also a task, a command, so to speak. It is our duty, it is a philosopher's duty, and it is also an artist's duty. This is a duty to accomplish what? It is a duty to live – in truth, the truth of life.
But to live doesn't mean simply to be alive. We are all alive, of course, but that doesn't mean that we really live and that we know what the truth of our lives is. There is a profound gap between pure life and our more or less lifeless everyday existences which are all just kinds of prisons and traps. We live in traps and we call this living.
We usually simply don't question ourselves and our perception of life, because we spontaneously believe that life is simply life. Robert courageously explores this gap, because he knows that our beliefs are mostly wrong.
A violence of truth is needed in our everyday life if we really want to accomplish our life obligations.
Robert is capable, as an artist, to create new spaces of life, which are, that is rather paradoxical, uninhabitable. Such placesare strange, very strange to our everyday eyes and we are afraid to inhabit them. Every new place, every new reality represents new forms of life, new shapes, lines, connections and relations, new powers and forces. We know that – and we are afraid, because we don’t recognize them.

DIFFERENCE NO. 3

We must also rethink Deleuzean concept of progressive paralysis of the author, because Robert is a very uncommon author. The goal of this paralysis is, of course, total paralysis and it is precisely this paralysis that opens what is always already open– the life itself which is opening (the life) and is openness (of life).The openness of life is at the same time openness of pure thought. In its purest form art produces nothing else but pure thought or – philosophy.So, it is not true that art somehow reaches beyond words and thoughts. On the contrary, pure thought is beyond everything, even beyond art and science, beyond everyday life, beyond experiences etc. Pure thought is God himself. God creates himself, he expresses himself in thinking and by it. Thinking is thus – for human beings – the ultimate process of creation; there is no creation beyond this.
Robert Hutinski elaborates this progressive paralysis. And he is very efficient – his photographs serve this purpose very well.

DIFFERENCE NO. 4

There is another idea of his photographs that is worth exploring. The image is movement, says Deleuze, and because of that the image is something very different from a representation of so-called empirical reality. Moreover, such reality never really existed in the history, because there is no reality without movement. Photographersaregenerally trying to capture reality, on their own ways, of course, but that is their false movement towards reality, that is their radical mistake. Every photographer should create reality instead – that is his duty.
Robert knows his duty well, and he repudiates above mentioned photographical habit. He clearly sees that reality is movement and is, at the same time, creativity itself. Hence, it is not a photographer who is, in his best moments, creative, because the reality itself is creative and is creativity. Photographer should capture this creativity itself, rather than static 'objective' reality. This is the main reason why Robert is all the time on the margin, on the edge where all is prepared for him to become – a movie maker.

DIFFERENCE NO. 5

To take a photograph is thus definitively not a process by which a photographer representssomething of a reality – that is to say, a photograph represents reality through reality. That simply means that a photograph is reality itself – it is not a representation of anything. And as reality it is multiplicity.
In other words, photographer is not a creative human being who captures – in his own way, of course – static, objective reality for viewers. Far from it. He does not make pretty images of reality – he makes reality, because reality is always already images. Reality is made up of light, as Deleuze put it, and we are all images as well.
We don't take photographs or pictures and images, we are images, which is something very different. But the beauty of this idea is that these images are also ideas. Photographer's eye is hence not directed at objects as almost all photographers still naively believe. Deleuze: photographs are already snapped.A photographer thus only participates in the creation of photographs of these shot photographs or ideas. In a way photographers put us, by their photographs, directly into reality which is created in this way.
When we look at the photographs which create the sequence A violence of the truth we put ourselves directly in the whiteness of light itself, which is, of course, very obvious. If we don’t do this we are outside, ignorant. When we are inside we first meet this naked young women without face which is clearly afraid of something – it could be us. She is always there, in the corner of this strange room with big, mostly white, delusive pictures on the wall. We must be astonished. There are some necessary questions which we should articulate at this time: What is she doing there, how she came there in the first place?
The questions apply to us, too. They are interwoven with the creative gesture of the photographer.
Or more precisely: this gesture put us into reality in a way which is completely new for us. Robert thus doesn’t show us anything; he creates something new and he offers us what is new. And what is really important is precisely this: the new reality is also new for him, not just for us.

DIFFERENCE NO. 6

It became obvious that a special gesture is needed to create such images and a photographer must become a subject of this gesture if he wants to create anything new at all. What precisely is this gesture?
This is a gesture which is itself a creation; it is a creation of difference.A photographer thus doesn't create new images – he creates differences; Robert does exactly this as I said before. Because of them a photograph doesn't resemble reality or 'real objects'. If it resembles anything at all, it resembles the powers of life itself.
No relationsexist between a photographer and the objects he wants to make a photograph of. There is only infinite process of subjectivation, because a photographer is a subject in precise Kantian sense, that is, a transcendental subject of thought. To be a subject means to be a medium through which thought thinks itself, not the world, because the world literally is this thinking. Again: it is not just a result of thinking, it is thinking. A subject is thus not a thinking centre or focus of the objective world, it is not a self-sustainable substance or entity capable of thinking the world around itself and its truth, but on the contrary, it is a necessary and even urgent formal gesture of thinking, that is, of the world itself.
A violence of the truth is about this.
A subject is always already inside time and space, as Kant has said two centuries ago, but at the same time it is also transcendental. It always transcends reality which is also possible – strictly speaking – because of this empty gesture which is the ability of human beings for subjectivation and creation. Transcendental subject is a subject who thinks the world in the world, because the world always alreadythinks itself – and the subject is the most important part of this endless flow.
His task in not to define or explain something, his duty is to explicate what something is. If he wants to understand anything, he must express it and this expression is actualisation; actualisation is nothing else but the production of truth. Photographs don't signify real objects, they express them as multiplicities. Therefore, photographs are multiplicities.
In other words: photographs are not representations of reality and they don't signify anything. They have no meaning whatsoever, and because of that we can't pertinently say this picture means this or that.
What is, in the end, the main idea of Robert Hutinski’s photographs? The main idea is precisely this: every reality is part of God and God is every possible reality, and because of that it is our mission in this world to overcome horror and terror of the truth which is always something radically new. A good photography is thus an expression of God, it is not a photographer’s ability to express his secret or even subconscious ideas, feeling and emotions. Photographs which are the result of such process, don't endure – they are endurance. They dissolve themselves, they become time itself. On the one hand, Robert Hutinski explores with his photographs these ideas, on the other hand he writes new chapters of the logic of photography itself.

Dušan Rutar