Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning: It wants meaning, but at the same time it wants this meaning to be surrounded by a noise […] which will make it less acute. Hence the photograph whose meaning (I am not saying its effect, but its meaning) is too intense is quickly deflected; we consume it aesthetically, not politically. (R. Barthes)
We can use Lichtenberg’s writings as the most amazing divining rod; wherever he makes a joke, a problem is hidden. (J. W. Goethe)
Lars Eidinger creates pointed images. Like an aphorism or a joke, almost every one of his photographs makes a point. To what extent this becomes a punctum, a point that affects or indeed “pierces” us, as Roland Barthes has put it in his photo theory Camera Lucida, has, naturally enough, just as much to do with us, with how much we open up and let ourselves be touched by the images. In analogy with aphorisms, the danger with these succinct images is that we do not take them seriously enough and are happy with just discovering their point. But to shrug them off (or revel in them) as simply ironic, means however to deprive them of their explosiveness and fails to give them the appreciation they deserve. Contrary to “system-conforming” irony, Eidinger demands a new earnestness. This, however, does not mean that his images are not funny, for — as G.K. Chesterton noted as early as 1906 — we are deceiving ourselves when we think that “funny is the opposite of serious.” He explains: Whether a man choses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he choses to tell the truth in French or in German. Whether a man preaches his gospel grotesquely or gravely is merely like the question whether he preaches it in prose or verse.
Klaus Speidel, 2022
