Blind

»Blind« is a four-part photo sequence from the unfinished film »Wor(l)d Cinema« by Valie Export and Peter Weibel, which was conceived in 1967 and 1968 and realized in parts on 16 mm in 1972. As the title of the film says, »Wor(l)d Cinema« creates a relationship between words and the world. Words are shown as food, as baked goods, as objects, as three-dimensional sculptures. Every word a bite, every bite a word. Words are eaten, devoured, put in the mouth of others and stuffed. Language is shown as food, the language process as digestive process. By making words representational, linguistic communication becomes material and related to the function or situation it describes. It is perceived as physical, as act(ion). 

Blind shows Peter Weibel with closed eyes in front of a wall ledge. Next to him stands the baked word »blind«. We automatically transfer the word to the person and identify Weibel as blind. Only when Weibel eats the word »blind« the blind person becomes seeing again. Of course, this is only possible in photography, the work reflects the relationship between photography and reality and the philosophical problem of representation reliability. It anticipates a new artistic genre: performance for photography: »Performance for the Camera« – as a title of an exhibition at Tate Modern, London, 2016.