Why do we generally prefer to watch cows go by rather than go and see a contemporary art exhibition? It is because something changed in the dominant regime of art something that discourages us in advance? The art scene has been solidly anchored into a second necessity, the need for commentaries, its way of justifying itself within the art system. By increasing its presence in topicality, art only ends up revealing its profound helplessness and radical loss of vocation. It has, so to speak, forgotten that day could break.

The increased prevalence of audio-guides and mediators is a striking symptom of this. In a space where we should experience works of art, a secondary voice steps in that takes away that opportunity to see what is in front of us. By pretending to help us chew the information, the audio-guide carries out an act of substitution: the experience of the work of art is replaced by the voice of the commentator and his point of view. And this has distorted our relationship with images to such an extent that we now wonder whether we might do better to stay at home and chew. 

But no, we must go out. Lohner & Carlson’s videos establish themselves immediately as a remedy to the muddy anesthetic of this regime of images. They have the power to re-capture our attention. Cut the sound. Godard did it a few times. But here the sound doesn’t come back. We are left with the prehistory of the images, which are free to deliver again their primitive sound. We suddenly tragically perceive what still persists everywhere and yet is missing – plumes of smoke, the steps of a man, alone or drowned out by an anonymous crowd, the way the wind disturbs the surface of sand or water. And the simple fact of paying attention to these elements triggers and initiatory impulse that gives the shot, the image its vital palpitation, a heartbeat.

Many of Lohner & Carlson’s videos have a singular rhythm, something between painting and cinema. The architecture of the shots, their fixed framing and their length are those of a painting or at least inspire the same feeling. Actions are rare enough to allow us to delve into the shot. At the same time, some sort of slow movement modifies more or less noticeably the content of the imagem or some lement from outside the field of vision may suddenly cross the shot. So many microevents that are, after all, real events, acting upon the image like developer. And what is revealed by these movements shows us that there are no random objects or actions. 

There is a melting temperature for each metal, a state of intertia specific to each body, differences of mass, velocity or weight relative to each object. There is the seemingly equal immensity of the night and the sea, differences that will disappear or become more obvious over time. The image features permanent elements (a piece of the horizon, a stretch of side wall, the sea below, a tree planted alongside a wall, a streetlight opposite) and those which introduce change (light, wind, rain, a mobile entity moving). Lohner & Carlson’s Active images capture these relationships and retain their ›sound‹. As our attention increases, our glance takes in both what transcends this and its primary state.

That Lohner & Carlson’s films are presented under the generic name Silences also echoes Cage’s philosophy that directs perpection toward this field before intentions, where the initial given is not yet assimilated nor entirely lost; toward that moment where, according to Henning Lohner we perceive »the individual images exactly for what they are, no more, no less«. Words that designate the precise moment of the non-treated advent of sound (Cage) and that of images (Lohner), with this proviso of a material separation of the levels of perception, since sound and image can only be perceived separately to deliver their substance. Hence this bias extending to the level of a work that unhooks the images both from their symbiosis with sound and from all narrative context in order to present them in naked form. 

Yet, you may ask, how do these image ›capturings‹ differ from all the other images produced throughout the four corners of the globe? Would it not be enough to set the frame and leave the camera running to create images like this? No, because the choice of shot is reinforced by the project and ultimately bears a load in line with the message. The blueness of the sky cannot be invented. You just need to raise your head.