Before the police begin searching for an unknown crime suspect they first assemble a phantom likeness of the person as an identikit picture. In this way the police attach a face to each case, thereby feeling their way forwards to what is unknown, alien and disconcerting. Since the early 1990s Gerhard Lang has been using an old identikit image device, a Minolta Montage Unit[1] as formerly used by the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) in Germany. Using this special mirror assembly technology, the police were able to compose a new face from sections of up to four different portraits of detained subjects, an identikit or phantom image. In 2000, Cathrin Pichler[2] and Roman Berka from the museum in progress invited Gerhard Lang to comment on Austria’s first right-wing conservative government coalition between the ÖVP (Austrian People’s Party) and the FPÖ (Austrian Freedom Party). Lang used the identikit device to assemble an image titled The Government (Ill. XIII), which was reproduced in the Vienna daily paper Der Standard. To make this phantom image Lang used press shots of the politicians instrumental in forming the coalition: chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel (ÖVP), vice-chancellor Susanne Riess-Passer (FPÖ) and the chairman of the FPÖ Jörg Haider (www.mip.at/projects/transact).

The performance Simulacra ex speculis[3] and the eponymous exhibition were held in the gallery Schauraum Angewandte, which was not accessible to the public. Visitors watched the event through two glass walls. At the beginning of the performance Gerhard Lang entered the space with a walking stick and barred the door. Holding the stick in his right hand and a microphone in the left, Lang scanned the gallery by skirting the perimeter of the space, tracing with his stick a single invisible line along the walls, the glass partitions and a curtain in front of the shelving. The sounds produced in the process were relayed via microphone to a loudspeaker installed outside the gallery. At the point where the traced line joined up with its starting point Lang carefully laid his walking stick, handle first, on the floor, allowing the tip of the stick to maintain contact with the invisible line.

The microphone was then placed next to the identikit device to record any sounds made while the phantom images were being produced. Shortly afterwards Lang switched on the Minolta Montage Unit and assembled the first identikit image from photographs of faces of people and animals (Ill. X). This was followed by the assembly of a phantom image of clouds (ILL. XI). The montage unit was then switched off and thereafter Lang used no more source images. Instead, the apertures where the source images are normally attached were left empty. These openings admitted sections of the surrounding space into the device. The outcome was a phantom image of a different, unknown space with disorienting characteristics. A moment later Lang began moving the table supporting the montage unit, causing the phantom image also to move. Lang slowly rotated the table by about 180°, then stopped. The phantom image created in this position (Ill. XII) was relayed live to a monitor for the duration of the exhibition, just as the microphone continued to record everything until the exhibition came to an end. C.N.Illustrations:

Ill. I: While creating the first identikit image.
Ill. II–IV: Scanning the room
Ill. V: Immediately after putting down the walking stick, with the handle pointing down and the tip maintaining contact with the invisible line.
Ill. VI–VII: While mixing the identikit pictures
Ill. XIII–IX: While the table was being rotated the phantom image was also in motion. Once the table stopped rotating the final image was transmitted live, right up until the end of the exhibition. (Ill. XII)
Ill. X: The first phantom image
Ill. XI: The second phantom image
Ill. XII: The phantom image created with excerpts of the surrounding space; see notes on images XIII & XIV above
Ill. XIII: Identikit image The Government (detail of the image published in the Vienna daily paper Der Standard, 6 July 2000)
Ill. XIV: Exhibition with the live transmission of the spatial phantom image (monitor) and the film Phantom images (1992/97) being projected onto the glass pane on the right. One element of the exhibition was also the identikit image The Government (Ill. XIII), of which, cropped on the left, the black reverse side of the frame can be seen.

[1] The Minolta Montage Unit was originally designed for the plastic surgical reconstruction of faces of Hiroshima victims. From the 1970s until the mid-1990s the device was employed in search operations by police forces in the United States and in Germany.
[2] Cathrin Pichler, deceased in 2012, was an Austrian researcher, teacher and exhibition maker. Together with Jean Claire she curated the 1995 Venice Biennale exhibition Identity and Otherness.
[3] The exhibition Simulacra ex speculis opened with the eponymously titled performance on 28 February 2018 at 7 p.m. The exhibition ran from 1 March until 28 April.

Curators: Ruth Schnell and Tommy Scheider
Technicians: Johannes Kunböck and Luke Williams
Photos I,IV and Video Stills II, III, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX: Gebhard Sengmüller
Photo XIV: Gerhard Lang
Post Production: Stefan Daub

Thanks:
Q21 MuseumsQuartier Vienna
Universität für Angewandte Kunst Vienna
Lucius und Annemarie Burckhardt Stiftung
Edith and Hans Fritz Lang
Wolfgang Lang
Helmut Aebischer
Eva Dertschei
Katharina Hillenbrand
Christina Lammer
Peter Lutz
quintessenz
Martin Reinhart
Volker Schreiner
SpringerParker
Herwig Turk
Tom Westerdale
Stephan Weyer-Menkhoff

Translation: Matthew Partridge

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