Alienation Study (#1), 2014
Prutsch‘s cuts reveal a criticism of science that is less about the goals of science than the claim to scientificity that is objective and independent of ideological contexts. Thus she leads her examination of the “anthropometric” photographs by the Austrian anthropologist Josef Szombathy (1853–1943) to show how the supposed scale and standards can be used as an opportunity to take inappropriate measures when taking measurements. His anthropometric measurements of women from Vienna show nude photographs in which women were not only taken naked next to a scale, but were also photographed in pin-up poses. In these recordings, the scientific documentary surveying is expanded to include an erotic perspective that hardly seems appropriate to the goal of the investigation.