Jeff Weber: An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology, Roma Publications, Amsterdam 2018

The black-and-white photograph spanning the full cover of this book shows an artist’s studio with the blinds of a large window and an overloaded working table. The front side depicts a small table with one of Jeff Weber’s Image Storage Containers (2010) and a 16mm film projector on top of it; next to a fan are flip-flops and clothes atop a radiator, conveying the sense of a busy living and working space. The caption Jan van Eyck Studio, Maastricht (2012) specifies where and when the photo was taken, obviously in the context of an artist residency. Visually, the cover indicates a place where artworks emerge and the film projector hints at the early days of film, the use of light, while the Image Storage Container references the topos of the archive and its systematic regimes. Next to the title Jeff Weber: An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology is the addition Kunsthalle Leipzig specifying the frame where the artist examined the contemporary condition of the image by means of film and photography in several collaborations, starting in 2012, where the idea manifested in an exhibtion, and continuing on through 2014–17 within the actual space of a Kunsthalle. The project stands in line with the tradition of conceptual artists setting up their own art spaces to exhibit and discuss contemporary projects and to experiment with an institutional structure. In the exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Leipzig, Jeff Weber did not show his art but manifested his work in collaborations. With this concept, he as a one-man-undertaking aimed both “to present the processes of collaboration and of knowledge generation . . . [and] to develop an artistic form of experience and presentation of that” (p. 449).

The book borrows its title from Jeff Weber’s work An Attempt at a Personal Epistemology with the Help of a Cardfile as Generative Mechanism (2010), a wooden box containing a filing system. The referencing mechanisms of the work rely on an analogy of the organizational structure of the nervous system to fathom the boundaries of subjectivity, it builds on an indexicality that closely relates to both: the card file system (as a model for the subject) and photography. The work further constitutes the place of departure for the publication; it was translated into book format and printed at the end. Another starting point was  The Photo-Synthetic Generator (2009),¹ where the breath of the beholder is needed to support the photosynthetic process, which in turn generates the video image, conceiving the exhibition space as the extension of an image-making apparatus. Reflecting on the process of image-making, including its tools, while also understanding (photographic) image-making as a relational process, builds the meta-narrative of the publication.

With more than five hundred pages and a small-scale format, the compendium resembles a reader. It is beautifully bound with a comprehensive image sequence on coated paper, enveloped by sections of referential images and texts on uncoated paper, making it a precious object. It starts with photographs of the newly renovated, empty gallery spaces. To look at the following 415 pages with one image per page, the beholder has to rotate the book by ninety degrees in reference to the card file box: the manual act of turning pages, flipping through the mainly black-and-white, landscape-format photographs, which are of nearly the same size in the strict layout, turns the book into a contemplative object that evokes a proto-cinematic experience. The captions, sitting always in the same position on the left, reveal that nearly all photographs exist as gelatin silver prints on barite paper, 5 × 7 inches each.

In a chronological order, the book shows collaborators and projects: Alexi Kukuljevic who is an artist and philosopher, Snejanka Mihaylova who has a theater and performance background, the tinkerer Helmut Rings who owned a film laboratory with self-built industrial processing machines, Adrien Lucca who works with color and color reproduction, the French philosopher Anne Lefebvre who gave a lecture on Gilbert Simondon, and the avant-garde filmmaker Robert Beavers. Weber refers to this matrix—which is still based on the systemic regime of the card file box—as an “Epistemologie der Begegnungen” (epistemology of encounters).² In the image sequence, he juxtaposes the documentation of the projects at the Kunsthalle Leipzig (installation shots, portraits, photos from exhibition openings, or artists at work) with his own works (different projects, photograms, or stereo images) and adds photos of modernist works (Kukuljevic) or historical artifacts (Mihaylova), both taken in museums, or photos of the film laboratory in Bad Honnef (Rings). Weber thus takes a cinematic approach to montage, as it was a premise for experimental film. Translating questions of avant-garde film into the medium of photography, he works on the visibility and interrelatedness of photographs.

The documentation of the artistic scene in the Kunsthalle Leipzig at openings or events—and the documentation of works of art, art installations, and performances—blurs the boundaries between various categories of photography: photos for catalogues, magazines, websites, or social media, among others. Weber explores the status of the photograph as an artwork and, for instance, takes up the question of autonomy and different conceptual strategies, which Michael Baers thoroughly explains and discusses in his lengthy essay “What Comes Under, After, Beyond: Notes on Jeff Weber’s Kunsthalle Leipzig” printed in this volume. With this publication that marks the final point of the project Kunsthalle Leipzig, Weber unravels the structure of his learning system and shares his personal epistemology with the reader.