schwebende rahmung / floating frames
Bright frames before blue backgrounds. Rectilinear or, less frequently, curved. The view of the sky is unobstructed or crisscrossed by transverse struts; occasionally clouds gather. One, two, or three pillars provide support.

The seemingly endless repetition—Volker Renner presents altogether around seventy photographs of Floating Frames (2012)—highlights how these structures combine utter simplicity with infinite variation. The artist presents objects at the precarious instant between function and obsolescence. Like some works of minimal art, they bridge the antagonisms between “beginning and ending,” between “abundance and emptiness.” But the pictures are not photographs of Donald Judd’s and Dan Flavin’s works, their steel frames and neon tubes assembled for a collaborative piece. Renner found these lofty constructivist architectures towering above America’s roads: frameworks on which illuminated signs were once mounted that advertised businesses, broadcasting their radiant messages into the night to guide and allure motorists to places that no longer exist: as the venues folded, the signs disappeared as well. The ‘semaphores,’ however, remain, stripped of their semantic attire, pointing to their nature as pure signs; they are non-signs and signs of nothingness at once.

The Framing Floatings are a counterpart that complements Renner’s project A Road Trip Redone (2012), for which he revisited places, buildings, and peoples featured in Stephen Shore’s A Road Trip Journal (1973) and took their pictures. That book took note of what had vanished by leaving blanks where no photograph was available. Renner’s Floating Framings give the void its own photographic place.

Die Fotos der Serie „Schwebende Rahmung“ entstanden auf einer Amerikareise 2012, bei der Volker Renner dreimal das Land von Westen nach Osten durchquerte. Das Buch zeigt ausschließlich leere Verkaufshilfen, schwebende Rahmen ungewisser Bestimmung vor leuchtend blauem Himmel. Es handelt sich dabei genauer um ehemals beleuchtete Werbeschilder aller Größen und Formen. Offenbar ist der Standort der Werbetafel im Laufe der Zeit unattraktiv geworden oder das beworbene Hotel, Einkaufsparadies oder Fitnesscenter selbst verschwunden, da nur noch die Gerippe der Werbetafeln am Straßenrand stehen und sich auf den Fotos keinerlei Zuständigkeit für diese staksigen Gebilde ausmachen lässt. Vereinzelt befinden sich noch die Neonröhren in den Rahmen, bereit, jederzeit wieder anzuleuchten, was dem geschäftstüchtigen Unternehmer geeignet erscheint. So stehen diese Informatoren ohne Information seltsam nackt in der Gegend herum, als Ruinen eines vergangenen Aufmerksamkeitsspektakels.