In dealing with the new technological possibilities of image production and circulation, Oliver Laric is a subversive actor. His works put our understanding of authorship and visual truth to the test by digitizing, transforming, and refining art works in the form of 3D scans that he creates using the latest reproduction techniques. His works often address practices of collective authoring, as in his long-term project of 3D scans (threedscans.com) which he allows the public to download and edit copyright-free. Saint Veronica is an ancient example of anonymous authorhood. Her attribute is the ‘acheiropoieton’, or icon ‘made without hands’: the sweat-cloth on which the face of Christ, without any intermediary handling, is seen to have been imprinted as a ‘true’ image. Laric’s St. Veronica is based on the moulding of a sculpture from a public space in Vienna. It takes up the idea of direct imprinting as supposedly authentic image creation. In Laric’s exhibition at the Riesensaal of the Hofburg, the figure of the activist Auguste Fickert (1855–1910), a champion of women’s rights, a social reformer, and journalist, is juxtaposed with the philosophical figure of Saint Veronica and the political figure of Maria Theresa. His video essay Versions explores the unbarred access to the means of producing and distributing images that we associate with ‘prosumer’ technologies. The assertion of political truth, as in Maria Theresa’s stately pictorial arrangement in the Riesensaal, gives way to the emergence of a ‘felt’ truth: a simultaneously subjective trust and distrust of circulating images.

Text: Jürgen Tabor

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