Alienation Study - N I C O L E P R U T S C H

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.

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Alienation Study (#1), 2014

The object of measurement and the object of his desire are merged here. Prutsch measured the deviations between the anthropometrically appropriate poses and the desires, which are expressed in body language at the same time, by overlaying the images with (supposedly) normative poses and marking and calculating the deviations on this basis. In her work, the scientifically quantified image of the subject is accompanied by the quantified deviance of desire, thus measuring the transition from a scientific and objective search for data to a search for other criteria and points of view. By examining the scientific investigations and measuring the measurements, Prutsch expresses the measured claim of a scientific nature that hides its productive part in the manufacture of the objects to be examined. – Excerpted from Introduction by Andreas Spiegl in "Beyond the Measuring Principle".

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