Robert Hutinski: Totality of a sequence

Robert Hutin­ski — pho­tog­ra­pher thinker

In the era of the hyper­pro­duc­tion of images, the major­ity of them com­ing from the bosom of media kitsch gov­erned by appetite for profit, it is becom­ing increas­ingly dif­fi­cult to come across a seg­mented work that would — within the lim­its of indi­vid­ual sequence shots and their spon­ta­neous com­bi­na­tion — com­bine sub­tle aes­thet­ics and an in-depth analy­sis of the meaning-sense — this often ignored, yet cen­tral ele­ment of the pho­to­graphic medium. The series Sequences by Robert Hutin­ski, who has already stirred the Slovene world of expres­sive pho­tog­ra­phy with his pre­vi­ous cre­ations, uses dis­sec­tion of the basic pho­to­graphic ele­ments, espe­cially the cen­tral sig­ni­fiers, woven from basic graph­i­cal ele­ments, inter­venes directly into the field of pho­to­graphic gram­mar. Nat­u­rally, the author achieves this in a famil­iar, rad­i­cal and sug­ges­tive man­ner, forc­ing the spec­ta­tor to (re)animate his think­ing and become sus­pi­cious towards the inher­ited seman­tic con­stel­la­tion, in par­tic­u­lar the cat­e­goric ide­o­log­i­cal premises, i.e. those prin­ci­ples that (for the spec­ta­tor) cre­ate or inter­pret the envi­ron­ment. Each ges­ture that injects unease into the field of vir­tual com­fort and tyran­ni­cal impo­si­tion of apa­thy pro­duced by flavour enhancers is nowa­days con­sid­ered a ges­ture of new human­ism, exo­dus from the intel­lec­tu­ally impo­tent post­mod­ernist illu­sion of equal­ity and the end of his­tory that was able to under­stand the human­ity of being only through the prism of imposed util­i­tar­ian values.

Sequences and sig­ni­fy­ing potency

Through­out the entire Sequences series, Robert Hutin­ski offers a vivi­sec­tion of the body, only this time it is not vivi­sec­tion in the clas­si­cal renais­sance sense, but rather vivi­sec­tion in the neo­hu­man­is­tic man­ner. The body in the series does not per­form its direct bio­log­i­cal func­tion – it is sub­tly dis­sected in its sig­ni­fy­ing potency, reveal­ing a series of ide­o­log­i­cal sub-connotations, which, like the pho­tographs them­selves, syn­the­sise the Real into arbi­trary bear­ers of mean­ing with social, even polit­i­cal dimen­sions. The expo­sure of the prob­lem­atic arbi­trari­ness of the cat­e­go­r­ial clenches of the body attests to the author’s in-depth, per­haps uncon­scious or not entirely artic­u­lated the­ma­ti­sa­tion of the cen­tral tis­sue of our dis­cur­sive real­ity – the sig­ni­fier, i.e. the basic func­tion that in the dual­ity of binary matrix of oppo­sites syn­the­sises face­less­ness into an under­stand­able and entirely unde­served certainty.

The sym­bolic crucifixion

In this series, the sym­bol of arbi­trari­ness in its real func­tion of impos­ing con­no­ta­tive­ness of the visual is exposed in the func­tional image of clear lines or bor­ders, which, with regard to the view­point, repeat­edly give each ele­ment of the pho­tographs, even if in reprise, a new, but at all times solid time-meaning-sense. The con­stel­la­tion of each sequence always dis­places another view, expos­ing the pur­suit of total­i­tar­ian pri­macy of arbi­trari­ness of the cur­rent view, and reveal­ingly also the blind faith of the post­mod­ernism decom­pos­ing in front of our eyes.Works of art more often than not remain half-way, mean­ing that they are only capa­ble of detect­ing the symp­tom, and are far from being able to reach beyond. In this sense, too, the Sequences are supe­rior; in their grand finale, they bring insight into the end of the post­mod­ernist solid­ity of brack­ets, espe­cially those sur­round­ing bod­ies. Sequences series brings a sug­ges­tive enact­ment of mod­ern cru­ci­fix­ion, i.e. sym­bolic cru­ci­fix­ion. If the era up to post­mod­ernism was based on the Chris­tian­ity of cru­ci­fied God-Man, then the era fore­told by Robert Hutin­ski will be based on the icon of the cru­ci­fied body in the sym­bolic sense. Cru­ci­fix­ion of the body in the sym­bolic sense, which must hap­pen in the medium of pho­tog­ra­phy if it is to become eter­nal, com­mu­ni­cates a reprise of the basic philo­soph­i­cal expe­ri­ence, con­ceived in the maieu­ti­cal ges­ture of ques­tion­ing, repeated in the sus­pi­cion towards the inher­ited cer­tain­ties typ­i­cal of enlight­en­ment and rounded up in Derrida’s decon­struc­tive plough­ing through the land­scape of real­ity. In the omnipresent expan­sion of pho­to­graphic blind­ness brain­lessly rely­ing on the cer­tainty of its own gram­mar and the secu­rity of the rules of the craft, meet­ing a photographer-thinker, a free nomad putting the meaning-sense to the test, is a rare and ecsta­tic experience.

Robert Hutin­ski is one of the few photographers-thinkers who, over­com­ing his own van­ity and shyly hid­ing behind his own images, opens the gates through which eter­nity slides into the mov­ing images of our time called sequences.