He regards his own body as a tool, an instrument or a sculpture, usually presenting it naked or covered in clay and mulch, wrapped up in bandages, laden with stones, or suspended by the feet in self-castigation, like an animal awaiting slaughter. In 1979, when the trained opera singer Dieter Appelt left the Deutsche Oper in Berlin at the age of 44 to devote himself entirely to fine art, he was able to fully develop a main strand in his work: the depiction of human existence as the experience of being racked between extremes, between this world and the afterworld, between rationality and emotion, freedom and constraint. His photographed self-stagings, which are never public – unlike to those of his role model Joseph Beuys – evoke archaic-mythical rituals as well as Christian notions of suffering and salvation. It is very clear indeed that Appelt, who completed studies in experimental photography under Heinz Hajek-Halke parallel to his musical career, employs the medium as more than a means to document short-lived Body Art actions and performances. His black and white photo series conflate into large-scale tableaux, which are the result of tenacious work on the graphic quality of the medium. Appelt’s abstracting treatment of depths and black tones, as well as his approach to light and purely white areas, divests his photos entirely of pathos and lends them a cool, dignified tranquility.

In the 1980s, Appelt completely reassessed his work. He increasingly employed more experimental procedures such as multiple exposure and collage, and shifted the emphasis away from an allegorization of the body and toward the limits of the visible and the memorable. At the Venice Biennale in 1990, he showed the ensemble Tableau-Room: 40 works consisting of photographic shots of scrap metal rotating on a potter’s wheel, exposed up to 50,000 times. As a vehicle of fragmentation, the Mirror Prisms Cinema Sculpture (1997) is quasi the quintessence of Appelt’s work as an artist: the world is whole, the spirit is fragmented.

Dieter Appelt, born in Niemegk/Brandenburg in 1935, is a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts. His films, photographs, and sculptures mirror influences of modern dance and staged photography as well as of literary sources, such as the writings of Ezra Pound.