Art photography in the 1980s traced two separate, only rarely converging paths. On one track were photographers who felt relieved of any obligation to provide visual descriptions of actual events and experimented with what were then new artistic photographic forms. Their “photographers’ photography” was distinguished by a strong design sense but often lacked any connection to the realm of images and critical thinking of the time, a sense of context. On the other track were artists who were becoming increasingly interested in photography as a possible medium. For them photography, initially employed in the style of the 1970s, offered new ways of looking at things, and provided fragments of a first-hand experience of reality. They used photography with little consideration for the image, the artifact itself. This changed dramatically over the course of the decade. Photography and the way it was presented became increasingly “orchestrated,” first exchanging rags for street clothes, then for evening dress. Soon we were seeing sumptuous and elegantly framed pictures of the quality of icons. Yet in many instances the spontaneity photography affords was lost in their self-involvement, their iconic austerity. By the end of the decade, then, one wished that on the one hand photographers might adopt something more of the artists’ feeling for design and context, inasmuch as they had largely abandoned the traditional notion of photography as a finestra aperta, a window open onto reality. On the other hand one wished that artists who made use of photography, for all their conscientious conceptual structuring, might adopt the curious, searching eye of the good photographer, for it is mainly that curiosity that brings new life to our stock of images.
This was as much the situation in Switzerland as it was internationally—though it is important to recognize that each country has developed an appreciation for photography at a different time, depending on its own photographic tradition and the degree to which its photographers have dogmatically adhered to traditional approaches. In 1990 the exhibition Important Pictures—Photography in Switzerland at Zürich’s Museum für Gestaltung, the first comprehensive show of Swiss photography since 1981, occasioned violent criticism, much to my astonishment and that of my fellow curator Martin Heller. Our juxtaposition of exciting and compelling approaches and groups of works from both “camps,” photographers from one and artists from the other, was apparently shocking, and was perceived by any number of viewers as an affront. The artists were pilloried by critics who hold to a classical view of photography: one of them expressed the hope that Peter Fischli and David Weiss would not go down in history with their “banal tourist photos.” From the artists’ side there were complaints that by being mixed in among documentary photographs their approaches were being “watered down.” These are only samples from a whole battery of criticism leveled at the exhibtion. It all illustrated above all how far apart the different demands placed on photography still were in Switzerland, and how sanctimonious the expression of divergent views might be.
The 1990s finally pulverized these high-minded citadels. Ever since Robert Rauschenberg first began incorporating actual photographic images in his paintings in the late 1950s, art had become increasingly photographic, even photorealistic. For one thing, it had abandoned idealism in favor of documenting and commenting on the real world and its workings. For another, it had abandoned any pretense of presenting the “total picture.” Instead it was content with a photographic exploration of the world as a world of signs, with partial discoveries, examining how it is we perceive things in space and time, and with decontextualizing found images from the world of the media. This development appears to have culminated in the 1990s. In this past decade photography came to be employed on a scale that could make one think the medium was a new invention; it was truly the dernier cri. Since then the boundaries have blurred, the strands have begun to unravel. Interest in all forms of photography, whether documentary or digitally produced, whether staged or manipulated, has almost completely rendered accepted notions of a genre hierarchy obsolete. That interest has been supported commercially by a booming market, one that has caused old masters to resurface, seen photographers represented at documenta, and suddenly swept documentary work to the forefront.
Since the nineties Switzerland has experienced this photography boom as well. It would be easy to list a hundred artists who work with the medium of photography either exclusively or on a regular basis, and who have attained local, national, or even international recognition with their work. Not to mention the hundreds more who have not yet made a name for themselves. Just as the use of photography has risen dramatically, it has also fragmented in terms of quality: a wide range of photography is now available, heterogenous both in the way the medium is used and in subject matter. Its quantity and variety makes it difficult to impose any order or structure on it, especially since in their own work a number of artists jump from one thing to another, from one subject to the next, from technique to technique, strategy to strategy. The following presentation hopes to provide an overview of contemporary Swiss art photography by breaking it down into dominant concerns—identity questions, image and medium issues, experience of nature—as well as processes, such as a preference for the staged and theatrical, for example, and pictorial qualities, whether sculptural, painterly, or filmlike.
Fragments of Identity
Over the past thirty years social and economic changes have come so swiftly that at times we seem like tadpoles gasping for air before diving back down into the murk. Life has sped up enormously, moving to an ever shriller sound and faster beat. Surrounded by frenzy, we have become frenzied ourselves. At the same time all our values are slipping away. Whatever we pick up drains through our fingers, whatever we lean on gives way. Things seem clear and solid enough one day, and the next day they no longer even exist. We have distanced ourselves from the testimony of our own senses, transformed ourselves into creatures informed by external media. We have surrendered instinct to knowledge, knowledge to science, science to economics. In the privacy of our homes, husbands and wives are becoming estranged and losing their jobs while watching their children being transformed into aliens. If we stand back and look at our lives in the clear light of day, we find we are as though extras in what is perhaps the zaniest, wildest, most hair-raising movie ever made: La réalité surpasse la fiction. Existence has become shaky, precarious, unfathomable. We all seem to be edging across some dangerous ridge, at any time in danger of plunging into the chasm below.
Thanks to such upheaval in the culture of the West, much of the photography of the 1990s dealt with questions of identity. Photographers in the 1920s took inspiration from the New Vision and the world of objects, those of the 1930s from nature, mountains, plants, animals, and people. The 1940s gave us images of the rhythm of the metropolis, the 1950s the existential subjectivity of the flaneur. The 1960s saw the invasion of advertising in the form of Pop Art, and continuing into the 1970s a preoccupation with perceptual and experiential art, the search for meaning. In the 1980s we saw a revival of the cult of the picture. Photography in the past decade focused on the individual trapped on a carousel spinning out of control, on the loss of continuity and security, on changing roles, free fall, the splintering ego.
In all this the body has been drawn into the foreground. Roles have been tested, the ego mirrored in images from the media, longings vicariously explored, the bulwark of the family thrown into question.
Behind the works of a Teresa Chen, Marianne Müller, Ugo Rondinone, Pipilotti Rist, Eliane Rutishauser, Franziska Wüsten, Chantal Michel, or Daniele Buetti loom the stagy self-portrais of Urs Lüthi and the body photography of Hannah Villiger. Urs Lüthi’s photographs (illus. 1) circle around the rift running through our modern consciousness—freed from the totality, the whole, we yearn for connection, an end to isolation—and posit melancholy and irony as crucial to our survival, helping us to comprehend and endure such an ambiguous condition. In the 1970s Lüthi expressed this sense of alienation first in black-and-white, then color images of himself as a handsome, often androgenous, highly sexualized young man who became a projection of himself, his mirror. Published as I’ll Be Your Mirror, these works were imbued with a certain scandalousness that allowed us to overlook the fact that Lüthi was only presenting himself as a stylized representative of the yearnings, narratives, and problems we all carry inside ourselves. In Ugo Rondinoni’s extended series I Don’t Live Here Anymore (pp. 104–111), begun in 1995, the photographer digitally plants his own head onto a wide variety of bodies, takes on the look of media figures, tries on clothes and sexes, experiments with poses and forms of behavior. The “I” of the artist splits into divers identities from the fashion glossies, all of them posing the question of how bearable they might be, how much fun, and satisfying a yearning for the fulfillment of every desire for one virtually realized moment. Pipilotti Rist’s staged videos and video stills (illus. 2) likewise have nothing to do with introspection, looking back; her pictures point in the opposite direction, they consistently try on ways of stepping outside of herself, beyond herself—“I want to dance. I want to fly. I want to swim. I want to be here, there, this, that, completely, and with no holding back and no regrets”—until she bumps her nose, at least on the TV screen. Pipilotti is and Pipilotti celebrates it. Claudia di Gallo (illus. 3) seduces us into leaving this world and embarking on a “journey beyond the organized system” into a cosmos of her own creation. Her Voyagers are wholly weightless, white-suited messengers from a better world. Chantal Michel (illus. 4) enters into a zany dialogue with spaces, plopping herself down onto a table like a plucked chicken, standing like a vase on the sideboard, wittily adapting to the shape of a given space so as to “fit the picture.” Ana Axpe and Eliane Rutishauser are two additional photographers who adopt different poses and roles in an effort to explore their female identities.
Daniele Buetti’s “identity questionaires” (pp. 80–87) are somewhat different. They document the points where media blandishments intersect with her own desires. On serpentine cardboard structures lighted from inside to create rectangular lanterns hang magazine photographs of models punched with light holes and decorated with pricked out words and sentences—“What is the most important thing in life?” or “Joy of my Life”—the entire installation illuminating the media’s glittering projections of cravings, reality, and love.
Hannah Villiger’s (illus. 5) painstaking, penetrating Polaroid photographs of her own body stand as a guidepost for all later body photographers. Hers was an almost tortured, searching style, one that seemed to want to get inside the body, roughly caressing it, unwrapping and baring it, dissecting it and in extremely closely cropped images lining up bits of it side by side. In her work she combined elements of painting and sculpture to produce a photo performance that tells of the struggle to create a whole self out of one’s fragmented body, one that is “foreign” but can never be escaped.
In pictures showing parts of the body tied with ribbon, stuck together, or submerged in water—skin, arms, mouths, eyes, pubic hair—Teresa Chen (illus. 6) documents an ambivalent relationship with the body, one that alternates between fascination and disgust, between self-appraisal and reliance on the opinions of others. Like Hanna Villiger, Andrea Loux squeezes her subjects into the picture space, but her bodies are not fragmented. They look as though they have retreated into an embryonic state, all drawn together and closed in. In the series A Part of My Life (illus. 7), Marianne Müller questions her life in the manner of a diary, with pictures of her clothes, her body, objects she encounters, spaces through which she moves. Her self-examination vacillates between the everyday and the poetic or erotic, between introspection and extroversion, switches in amazement between the way she sees herself and the way strangers see her. Miriam Staub’s showcases filled with delicate photographs and sentence fragments puncture the surface of everyday life with the sensitivity of a seismograph. Yolande Schneiter studies her own “I” in mirror images and in pictures of herself with her sister. Franziska Matter and Françoise Caraco reassure themselves about possible fixed points in their lives in the form of the objects that surround them. Franziska Wüsten (illus. 8), finally, hides her body outside of camera range. We see her clothing—teddies, sweaters, socks, jogging pants, slips—lying in tangles on garish imitation grass. Everything stripped off at once. A simple, private movement that all mothers deplore is here performed in public, an autobiographical moment transformed into a colorful, neo-Pop Art sculptural image.
Family photographs can also serve as identity checks, assurance that we exist. Over the past ten years Annelies Strba (illus. 9) has produced a work about her family, more precisely her daughters, which in its balance between fragility and stabilizing warmth, between realism and poetry, speaks of the secret desire to be tucked in bed at night. Ruth Erdt (illus. 10) has been documenting her own life for eighteen years, with photographs of herself, her children, the children’s father, and close friends. Her gaze can be hard and direct, but also warm and sentimental. We are drawn in close, so that we feel a part of this intimacy, sense the tension, the eroticism, the feeling of being lost, the whole range of feelings experienced in a young family—yet we don’t feel like intruders, we simply reflect on our own searching by way of her pictures. Firmly rooted in the tradition of autobiographical photography, Ruth Erdt creates images of urgency, openness and subtle eroticism. Stefan Banz (illus. 11), by contrast, focuses in his pictures of family on the ambiguity beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday private life. Using members of his own family, he presents photographs of “the Family,” how cohabitation works, and turns it into art. Teresa Chen mixes in body pictures with shots of her own family, immigrants from China who are keeping the image of the intact family alive in the United States.
Manipulating the Medium
Photography is an instrument for showing, displaying. No sooner had the principle of photography been discovered, the procedure worked out, when people began photographing things in one place so as to be able to show them someplace else. We take photographs out in the world, “abroad,” to show to the folks at home, pictures of other kinds of people to show to our own.
Early on, Maxime du Camp photographed Egypt and brought that legendary country, the Pyramids, even inscriptions to the bourgeois French table in the form of an album of photos. For the most part, these earliest photographs show the world as serene and whole, and from a discreet distance. That serenity was upset with the introduction of smaller cameras, rolled film, flash attachments capable of capturing a single figure. Photography now “discovered” the obscure, the hidden, discovered the snapshot, which reveals things you could not have hoped for: the beggar beside the road, the lovers locked in a kiss, the drop of milk splashing into a bowl, the housewife climbing the stairs, people innocently stretching and exposing parts of their bodies. New types of film, larger telephoto lenses, and electronic night-sight instruments (available-light enhancers) have come to violate the privacy of film stars and the integrity of space.
Electronic gadgetry has made it possible to show anything at all, and simultaneously it has become perfectly clear for the first time that the noble tasks of discovery and research—into things, relationships—are only the dull back side of the coin; the shiny one still has to do with showing and displaying: “Here, look what I have to show you, what we have to offer!” Step by step we have moved from a decent, “discreet” distance from the world, from our chosen subject, to the most indecent, intrusive close-up.
The history of photographic and video techniques is but one facet of our eagerness to move from distance to closeness—to drag what is private out in public, to privatize the public. It is the facet that shows, in which you can read how a whole society has come to engage in pornography. Laurel and Hardy threw pies at each other, today sex organs are shown so close up they nearly adhere to the screen. No more the serenity, integrity, and distance of the nineteenth century; the pornographer’s eye leaps all boundaries, dismembers, extols, all in a feverish rush. Body parts are only one prize. The most intimate thoughts, the most private quarrels, the most embarrassing of disabilities are shown us around the clock, reproduced an infinite number of times twenty-four hours a day. It is always about showing, revealing, exposing, in photographic and electronic images and in words, the deepest, the most private—all in standardized media format.
Erik Steinbrecher’s collection of media images (illus. 12) explores this world of pictures, and by cataloguing it and reinterpreting it gives us a sense of this whole business of exposing. Next to these garish bonbons he places pictures that are fully aware of the mania for showing all and therefore draw back, muttering, discreet images in both large and small format that serve, like a cold shower, to cleanse our minds, restore calm to the chaos of references.
Since the very beginning, photography has been a revolutionary medium, but in the nineties it became piercingly apparent how the medium not only probes the world but wholly recreates it, and together with other mediums weaves a monstrous web from which nothing escapes.
One photographer, Rémy Markowitsch (illus. 13), goes even further. Like Erik Steinbrecher he is a collector. Markowitsch not only caresses and fondles, he x-rays. His cycle From Nature investigates the use of photography in books. He documents what has been documented, and makes transparencies of printed photographs. Markowitsch is fascinated not only with language as used in books but also with our common archive of images, the books that capture the look of the twentieth century, its pictures. He also studies the way pictures are treated—their arrangment on the page, their sequence, the techniques used in printing them. He does not describe the pictures in his archive but simply illuminates them, shines light through them. In a process of visual surgery he makes the opaque page transparent, so that the images on both sides are juxtaposed.
Nicolás Fernández (illus. 14) is also compiling an archive. Pictures taken from newspapers, for example, he crops in such a way that children accompanied by their parents appear to be left to face their everyday fears alone (Children’s Song), and automobile accidents with no people about become images of horror per se. A cynical commentary on the gulf between the reality of the picture and actual truth. Another commentator on the medium itself is Fabrizio Giannini. Giannini’s reality is made up of TV images. He photographs them for his archive, and makes these banal pictures even more banal by arbitrarily cutting into them. He uses the resulting images like building blocks to create new, provisional contexts that leave us puzzled and uneasy.
The Bern photographer Laurent Schmid (illus. 15) is very serious about the medium. He experiments with printing on different surfaces, makes the difficulty itself his subject matter, and turns mistakes into virtues. His main characters are “partisans,” the tiny bits of dust on the plate that in the printing process produce a black dot surrounded by a light aura. Schmid has exhibited a number of works with such professional flaws, for example the work Lichtenbergian Figures, from the series Discharges on Mountains. In extremely dry air, electrostatic discharges can produce lightning-like patterns on film. Schmid layers such flaws on top of images of power plants and cities—the producers and consumers of electricity.
Studer/van der Berg (illus. 16), finally, work with the banalization and exploitation of the image as a piece of merchandise in their Still Life Take Away. On the Internet they created a kind of mail-order catalogue, where visitors can serve themselves and create their own pictures. If they then click on “execute order,” they receive a computer-generated, low-resolution print.
Martin Blum manipulates the medium to create new worlds (illus. 17). In his picture constructions combining found printed images with non-pictorial material, he uses various procedures. He may separate the image from its backing, cut it and bend it, roll it, fold it into a right angle, or simply hang it in space, then with artificial lighting create an illusion of depth. A second look at one of his landscapes and you recognize it for what it is—and happily submit to the illusion.
Cat Toung Nguyen (pp. 112–19) exhibits documentary views of urban life, portraits of women, and pictures of snow-capped mountains next to constructed landscapes in which the horizon is simply the junction of transparent and opaque surfaces, or landscape images whose color comes from looking into artificially lighted showcases. Subject matter becomes secondary; what matters is giving the eye something soothing to look at, until it can seemingly penetrate nothingness. Here the medium itself is the focus, meant to produce a resonance, a sense of harmony in the soul. In the series Walking, Daniele Keiser (illus. 18) focuses on the archetypal subject matter for photography, landscape. But her landscapes are crossed by rifts that darken the cheerful mood. A normal walk in the woods can lead to the scene of a crime, either in reality or in your mind, unfathomable despite the light and color. With her constructed landscape pictures Keiser creates ambiguous perceptual situations. Hervé Graumann’s photographs and Internet productions (illus. 19) show how reality serves as the basis for fiction and how fiction informs all our perceptions of reality. In Pattern (2001), a rhythmic arrangement of small objects with a designer’s touch reads like the picture of a computer chip.
Pictorial Magic
This leads us right into the middle of a genre that has always held particular fascination for Swiss artists: playing with pictures—experimenting, half in jest, half seriously. We will come to speak of mountains that do not exist, of accidents with sausages and burning papier-mâché, of women’s bodies sawed in two, of lost nature and lost truth, of photography that is drawing, drawing that is photography, of appearances that deceive, and of true appearances, of false and genuine celebrations. If the practitioners of this genre were to issue manifestos, they would proclaim: “Appearances are deceiving, and that is what makes for fun; style is finished, thank God; the world is changing, let’s watch!” Yes, it is a game they play—“In the final years of modernism art once again learned to laugh” (Beat Wyss)—but a serious one. And yes, this is a kind of picture magic, but also fake magic, clowning, pulling our leg. Close, but still not the real thing. Weird cows, fake pigs—and the rabbit, doubled, mirrored, is pulled out of a full book instead of an empty hat. And that aura, that sublime light-filled dome? It is only a plastic salad spinner photographed with a Polaroid camera, also made of plastic, in front of neon light. Here, often enough, the photographer plays with the image and the predominance of form, also with our perception, our gullibility, our yearning for the straight and narrow, our love of formality.
There were sporadic beginnings as early as the much-loved, much-maligned 1950s, the decade of the kidney-shaped coffee table. People were recycling ideas from the Dadaists of the 1920s when a smart-ass young artist managed to hot-wire the whole notion of pictorial structure. With a few batteries and an electric motor, Jean Tinguely set public art in motion. Meta-Malevich was born, a series of black wooden boxes with which the artist not only amused himself but made fun of a whole school. This did not destroy the idea of structure, not right away at least, for it had just found social acceptance, that is the approval of the middle class, under the name “good form.” But a first escape route out of the strictures of formalism had been plotted.
Then in 1964 Peter Knapp hung thirty-six photographs of Swiss flags at the Swiss Expo, and Ben Vautier inscribed the word “toile” on a canvas to confirm that it was indeed canvas. (Three decades later he would produce La Suisse n’existe pas, Switzerland doesn’t exist). In 1967 our eyes were blinded by Samuel Buri’s vicious grid paintings of chalets, and in 1967–69 Jean-Frédéric Schnyder’s record-cover art played the sort of games with illusion and fetishism that Christian Marclay (illus. 20) would take up again with equal success in the 1990s. In fifteen large photo canvases Burkhard/Raetz took up the subject of reproduction as object, blowing up onto canvas black-and-white images of banal, everyday spaces and objects—studio, kitchen, double bed, curtain, sheet of paper—and attaching them to the wall with a pair of brackets. With his work 220V, from 1971, Herbert Distel created an empty, self-illuminating gold frame, and Heinz Brand, finally, occupied himself from 1965 up into the 1980s with photographic works exploring how we see, our idea of reality and actual reality, and how to represent both. To round out this cross section of the period I must also mention Aldo Walker and Rolf Winnewisser’s separate and at times collaborative Stromern im Bild [Translator’s note: I have not been able to learn the meaning of “Stromern”; please query author] and Christian Rotacher’s small installation from 1978—a circuslike scene with a stretched canvas between opposing stools, and the title “Fontana, the tiger, the first to jump through the canvas; we’re left with the rings of fire,” a send-up of Lucio Fontana’s slicing the canvas.
To summaraize, the late sixties and seventies were for many artists a time of turning away: from abstract, pure design approaches aimed at objectivity and their theoretical superstructure; from the work as a closed, absolute entity; from the notion that some subjects are more art-worthy than others; and from all consideration of style. They also repudiated the imposition of form, narrative, overriding truth, absolutes, and instead examined the restrictions on their own activity, the limits to expression. As Theo Kneubühler put it, “rules are no longer accepted as axiomatic, instead they are being examined to see whether they work, whether they are legitimate. Anarchism on the part of the individual is being matched by a “decolonialization” of the individual by outside influences, outside prescriptions, by convention and prejudice.” It was a time of ceaseless exploration, of contemplating the world and one’s relation to it, about perception, about art, about what a picture is and what form it should take.
The resultingworks—mainly small drawings, self-effacing watercolors, curious little objects, and notebooks—were primarily research records. Photography also came to be employed increasingly as a means of making notes, documenting, testing composition, and setting priorities. Also for amusement, with the artists themselves as showpieces. Suddenly the worlds of photography and art were asking very similar questions. Christian Vogt’s time-space sequences, his inquisitive play with the picture frame, and Vladimir Spacek’s studies of light and space show this quite clearly.
In addition to figures like Gérald Minkoff, Hugo Suter, and Markus Raetz, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, especially, have continued to play with pictures. In 1979 they exhibited ten small color photographs that came to be known as the “Wurst Series.” Modest as it seems, that series is filled with the same explosive heresy that would distinguish Fischli/Weiss’s later works, from their world made of clay, Suddenly This Overlook, to the carrot and kitchen-grater Dance in the series Quiet Afternoon, to their true-color aggomerations from 1992. A small (photographed) fire in an oven is called At the Cave Dwellers’, a piece of styrofoam in water The Sinking of the Titanic, dolled up Cervela wursts Vain Pack or Fashion Parade, a tumble of bedclothes around a mirror In the Mountains. Among their other titles are The Accident, The Uster Fire (illus. 21), Pavesi, or In Ano’s Carpet Shop. The heresy has multiple facets: one is the inclusion of narrative, elsewhere so disdained in the twentieth century, another is the play with models, almost like children making play worlds on their parents’ brown mohair carpet, and finally the use of everyday materials—egg cartons or sausages—for “serious” subjects like The Accident or The Uster Fire. The seriousness of all that exploration in the 1970s here gives way to the sheer delight of play, letting oneself go.
Since 1984, Fischli/Weiss’s use of the narrative picture composition has been paralleled by Christoph Rütimann (illus. 22). This Lucerne artist is known for his work in a number of different mediums, also for his meticulously thought out and executed works essentially concerned with free-flowing energies—energies that now and again coalesce into currents that rain down on us, leave their mark as weight on a scale, a line on the wall, a curve in space, a seismographic squiggle on paper. Rütimann indulges his poetic side most fully, perhaps, in the Polaroid works he creates in the snow on winter holidays. The series Polaroids 95, with forty-two images—forty-two different scenes or stories in the snow—is more expository, more theatrical than ever. The snow seems to provide him a superb setting, semi-translucent and unobtrusive, for his highly varied pictorial narratives, picture puzzles, visual games. Small scenic pieces, sometimes incorporating his own image or a portrait of his girlfriend, are made up of cutouts from photographs, bits of wood, sticks, and adhesive tape, and have a lovely, puzzling texture. Reversed size relationships, fragments of words and figures, the combination of real objects and photographic images, all produce a creative magic.
Bernard Voïta (illus. 23) is more austere in his photographs. Like Rütimann, he controls everything down to the smallest detail, but his interest is not so much theatrical as sculptural. In his early photographic constructions he played with the picture surface and with depth, with the glossiness of the reproduction and the grid as picture arrangement, but his works from the late 1990s are more architectural. They take us on a stroll through structures and cities, along highways, past a filling station, then pause in front of houses under construction before heading for the outdoor swimming pool. The small photographs, surrounded by a great deal of white space, are like enlarged screen dots, yet when we step closer we find a whole universe opening up in them. There is always a touch of homo ludens in Voïta, but also a love of perfect structure. Fictions with the tang of reality.
With his picture sequences published in the book Gold, Peter Tillessen (pp. 88–95) enjoyed playing with appearances. They are in fact fool’s gold. One series, called Action Artists, shows customers shopping for liquor in a supermarket. Another, Art Under Construction, pictures building materials arranged as if they were installation art. His Degenerative Pictures, not unlike the works of Luigi Ghirri from the 1970s, draw your gaze across front yards to housefronts, through filling stations out into the street, and as a series trace a sort of figure eight through the world of banal, everyday urban images.
Derek Stierli sets up pictures of cigarettes and other mundane things—a bathing suit, a bikini complete with a woman inside—in installations that play with differences in perception virtually to the point of absurdity. In slide shows of photo performances, Heinrich Lüber (illus. 24) causes madcap situations to develop between objects and the author and then fade away again.
Staging and the New Storytelling
Freud writes that mystery feeds on the power of thought and desire, on magic and enchantment, on our relationship to death, on lifeless things coming to life, on unintended, unexpected repetition or behavior, and on the castration complex—and the mystery of an experience comes about either because some impression revives a repressed infantile complex or because primitive convictions long since outgrown appear to be reconfirmed.
Literature, film, and art all employ the frisson of mystery. In horror films it serves solely to give viewers the fright they paid for. In more ambitious contexts, in plays, novels, and works of art, the familiar alternation between fiction and reality, visions and normal life—often in part responsible for creating mystery—is employed to make concrete events seem more imposing or suggest the working of unseen forces. Here mystery serves as a way of heightening our emotional receptivity, of clarifying or refining the message. Again and again, notably in surrealism, reference is made to deep-seated, repressed emotions, to the thin membrane that separates them from conscious, rational thought.
In recent years, interestingly enough, the principle of mystery has been used with increasing frequency and forcefulness. Doubtless not so much as a way of competing with the appeal and power of the entertainment industry as a response to the major social and intellectual uncertainties we faced at the close of the twentieth century. If only we knew what we should eat, how to deal with each other, how to keep our jobs, how to make sense of the new technologies, how to reverse global warming, how to keep from going crazy—if only we had simple, reliable answers to these and hundreds of other such questions, wouldn’t we be more stable, calmer, more assured, more capable of functioning? “No” is the only sure answer in all this uncertainty, and laughing about it is the only thing that is truly liberating.
Many works from the 1990s tend to engage this anxiety, to employ ambiguity to a greater extent, a state of suspense that offers no security, one that lets us float along but without knowing precisely where we are headed or to what purpose. Most of these works are theatrical in nature, stagings, planned photography, often suggestive of film sequences. Since the late 1980s, for example, Istvan Balogh (illus. 25) has been visualizing small everyday scenes as allegories of our time. With either professional actors or ordinary people he sets up narrative tableaus resonant with multiple meanings. Since the 1980s, Olivier Richon, a confessed anti-classicist, has questioned in sumptuous pictures of nature and cultural life the dual structure of photographic representation and reproduction, delighted that in an age that has seen the dissolution of dualities like appearance and reality, everything is revealed as stage-set rhetoric.
In the 1980s these artists stood alone, but that quickly changed in the 1990s. Olaf Breuning (illus. 26), a shooting star on the Swiss art scene, is performance artist, choreographer, set designer, and photographer all in one. In Cross-over, rich with associations and ambiguous in both content and form, he leads us into “enchanted worlds”: to the Forest Festival, into a Bed & Breakfast, to the Woodworld, the Empire, the Apes. He lures us—“Come with me!”—like Till Eulenspiegel or the witch in Hansel and Gretel, into amazing, frightening realms. But he does not lead us in person; using all manner of materials he builds caves, chasms, rooms, illusions into which he entices us with light and sound. Music that is either sweet or shrill, light that switches from soft to cold, even harsh, makes us feel we are being dunked into alternating hot and cold baths. Breuning creates installations you can walk around in. They are not (primarily) intended to appeal to our intellect but to our senses, our feelings, our eyes and ears. We are meant to experience his worlds, to be drawn in and seduced by his fascinating, at times frightening mix of scenes from the real worlds of film, video, music, and fashion. In installations and in photographic stills, art is armed with sensuality, the “lifestyle” industry satirically called into question.
Alexia Walther (illus. 27) also abandons the real world and recreates the smells, spaces, and movements of her childhood. She recalls in pictures the family room that stood for both freedom and restraint, play and decorum. Her pictures come alive thanks to her painstaking attention to detail, and to the tensions and inconsistencies that upset their harmony. As in movie stills, the seeming innocence of the frozen scene can be deceptive. Ulrike Meyer Stump has written that Walther’s staged photographs “are marked by either a latent eroticism or a sense of imminent drama.”
The work of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler (illus. 28), a Swiss-American artist team, all seems to target a mood of ominous portent: transition states in the photographs of Falling Down, tentative glances in Holes, and also suspenseful situations in their newest videos, Detached Buildings and Eight. Their photographs borrow from the medium of film, their videos from photography. The videos are like slowly fading tableaux vivants, with multiple references to art history and the history of film. In works that are visually compelling, they attempt to undermine certainty and order, mingle the external and the internal. They even seem to be able to lump past, present, and future in a kind of vacuum of uncertainty.
Many of the positions that are presented in the exhibition and in the following plate section can be gathered under the heading “fragile constellations.” Katrin Freisager’s puzzling young women from the group To Be Like You (pp. 120–27), seemingly in suspense, lost, are representative of the genre. With her large seven-part frieze, she has committed herself to the hybrid, to toying with the boundaries of artifice. Living Dolls presents lovely, flawless models who appear to float—almost float away—above a light, napped base of foam. Their skimpy, semi-transparent, skin-tone garments soften the nudity, neutralize the sexuality. We feel that we are confronting new creatures of the media, biologically enhanced cyborgs, with one black creature in their midst that appears equally alien, though it does give the eye something to hold on to in this circle of artificial humanity. In her newest work, To Be Like You, she tackles a complex subject that oscillates between affiliation, isolation, and uniqueness.
Emmanuelle Antille (illus. 29) plays in narrative form with ambivalent feelings about authority and loneliness, with interactions between individuals and groups. In stills from the videos Introducing My Blood Sister I, II, and III we see a suited woman through a surveillance camera. At first we are puzzled about what it is we are actually witnessing, but in time we sense that the woman is trapped by outward and internalized “rules.” The videos Reflecting Home (1998), Wouldn’t It Be Nice (1999), and Night for Day (2000), generally shown as part of complex installations and projections, successfully continue to explore these themes.
The artist duo Lang/Baumann (illus. 30)—Sabine Lang and Daniel Bauman—recycles in lavish, colorful settings the taste and euphoria of the sixties and seventies. In their photographic works—Beach (1997), On the Bed (1997), Vitality Course (1998), and Wellness (1999)—they stage scenes from daily life filled with the optimistic conviction that everything has its own rightness.
Many of these photographs are either produced in combination with video works or influenced by the structures and point of view of film. The photographs of Frédéric Moser and Philippe Schwinger (illus. 31) are direct by-products of their stark and slow-moving videos. In one, two men seated across from each other in a boat exchange lines like “I get the impression that I don’t matter” or “You are not being honest.” The pictures extract almost archetypical situations from these stylized, set-piece videos, scenes that we happen upon and that then take possession of our dreams. Marco Poloni’s fifty-four-part photo work Shadowing the Invisible Man (pp. 72–79) presents itself as the script for a short film that was never made. In fifty-four photographs and fifty-four sets of instructions for the cameraman, for the actors, he unfolds the supposedly true story of a man who lands in Bari, Italy, seeking asylum, and from there tries to make his way to the Swiss border. We never see the man himself, but we see with his eyes, and we see the “locations,” the places where he stops before moving on. Here the tendency of many artists today to produce short films or videos is reversed, with the aim of developing out of the language of film a new kind of narrative for photographic sequences and documentaries. Finally, COM & COM (illus. 32), the madcap Swiss duo composed of Johannes M. Hedinger and Marcus Gosselt, make use of all mediums and platforms. They slip into roles in a Barclay commercial, catapult themselves into the promotions for major galleries, find themselves referred to in fictitious gossip columns, and in C-Files: The Tell Saga they make fun of both the entertainment industry and the myth of William Tell. Or they may serve as Consultants for the Future. They are high-profile put-down artists who themselves create each new event in which they appear.
Catastrophes
Staged moments also dominate Christoph Draeger’s work in Catastrophe Zones (illus. 33). He reconstructs, directs, and documents catastrophes: real-life catastrophes that Draeger witnesses and photographs, and that alter his perception of of their settings forever; staged catastrophes; and video documentation of tragedies like the Kobe earthquake. Apparently Draeger is intent on coming to terms with the forces responsible, the power to destroy as well as the power of a catastrophe to change everything from the ground up. Patrick Weidmann (illus. 34) became known in the 1980s for works that literally dealt with frame limitations and reflections—frames of pictures, the lighting and decoration of spaces. For the past few years he has continued his preoccupation with pretty reflections with a somewhat different slant, juxtaposing pictures of highly polished, factory-new automobiles and body sections with totally demolished wrecks—the ultimate catastrophes to all lovers of cars. Annelies Strba’s new video stills (pp. 56–63) show urban landscapes—Berlin, New York—from the air, working with alienating effects that present cities as though seen through x-ray eyes. It is as if the city has been reduced to rubble, to its skeleton, its nervous system. Berlin seems unreal and drab, as though its past had bled through into its present-day image.
Nature of the First, Second, and Third Order
A striking pictorial revolution began in the United States in the late 1960s. Suddenly the notion of the American landscape as vast, magnificent, untouched, and sacred—idealized for more than a hundred years in landscape photographs from Carlton Watkins to Edward Weston to Ansel Adams and Minor White, stylized so as to embody the eternal, permanence, the divine, challenged only by its own forces of sun, rain, snow, and wind—was confonted with the idea of a changing landscape, one that was inhabited. Nature was transformed into something that could be owned and occupied. Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Stephen Shore, and other young photographers of those years countered standard, ravishingly beautiful views with a realistic look of banal concrete, everyday surroundings. With the exhibition New Topographics (1975), this new generation of photographers vandalized the gorgeous, existential view of landscape. The “divine” landscape had become instead a factual one and an artistic concept.
This break in our understanding of and relation to nature is seen especially clearly in American photography. The “new topographer” of the Swiss landscape and Swiss photography is Nicolas Faure (illus. 35). It was he who affected the change in the paradigm in this country. For roughly fifteen years he has been producing groups of works with pictures of the true Switerland—most of them landscape photographs. From the beginning, his color photography has avoided glamorizing idealization, has simply “seen” what was really there, perfectly obvious, and made it worth showing: the new, unprettified Switzerland, Switzerland as seen from the autobahn, full of front yards, parking lots, warehouses, and power lines.
Our relationship with nature has meanwhile been reversed repeatedly, not least owing to our unquestioning faith in science. Hans Danuser (pp. 64–71) has been occupied for twenty years with precisely this question. In the 1980s it was gold refining, atomic research, animal testing, genetic engineering, and pathology that captivated him. He seemed to be attracted by the sciences above all, by Mephistophelian haunts where at great expense strange new energies, new profits, and new knowledge were being created—knowledge about how our bodies work, about the earth’s makeup—knowledge that could be used, could give us greater control, no matter what the cost. These works stayed within the classical form of the photograph, formed concentrated little essays that were then “enhanced” in the lab so that we might reexperience emotionally what went on in such off-limits regions.
His new works—the Frozen Embryo Series, Strangled Bodies, and Erosion I + II—open up photography, let it expand into image fields, image landscapes: photography as document and picture. Ever questioning, Danuser continues to focus on marginal situations: his eye is drawn to the prenatal or post mortem or washed away. He looks at the landscape of ice used by science, the landscape of eroded and flooded ground, the landscape of the flayed body. And in these large Baryt sheets we discover faulting, rigidity, and chills.
In photographs and installations, Hannes Rickli (illus. 36) also probes a subject closely related to natural science. Years ago he transformed a scientific apparatus for the study of bees into a kind of picture-generating machine that created planets and satellites by projecting its tiny, electrically driven spheres. In more recent works he replaces photography with computer monitors on which various processes can be seen in extreme slow motion. The work Green Amber reverses the use of the old green and gold monitors in that it assigns these colors to the nature depicted: the moon, sweetgrass, grapevines, giant horse-tails.
Roman Signer’s photo documentations of self-induced eruptions (illus. 37) and Pascale Wiedemann and Jules Spinatsch’s pictures of animals in natural history museums also focus on the interplay between science and nature. For more than twenty years, Andreas Züst (illus. 38) photographed atmospheric phenomena and colors, including lightning, the so-called Brocken ghost, dawns and sunsets, Föhn windows, haloes, rainbows, cloud bows, fog bows, nighttime fog seas, parhelia, the aurora borealis, purple light, sun columns, rays of sunlight and shadow, weather fronts, and starlight. He died in 2000. In his photographs he walked the boundary between art and science; he was a poetic scientist, a scientific artist.
Nature, despite all the changes, continues to be a rich hoard, offering vast space, release, the chance to recapture one’s rhythm. Thomas Flechtner and Cécile Wick are, on second glance at least, the Hamish Fultons of Switzerland. Cécile Wick (illus. 39) is an artist who subscribes to simplicity: a simple camera—that it is a pinhole camera is neither here nor there—simple approaches, simple pictures. She makes photographs of landscapes—lakes, seas, mountains, waterfalls—and self-portraits, pictures of her head. Single pictures that are almost modular, easily multiplied into groups. Exterior and interior worlds together in rich black and white, concentrated images. Four pictures of the horizon, for example, in which the impression of space almost completely disappears. In fact they are only the intersections of two planes, nothing more. Even so, when viewing them we automatically begin to infuse this potent, deceptive nothingness with poetry. Thomas Flechtner (illus. 40) goes out into the snow: into the snowed-in town of La-Chaux-de-Fonds, onto snow-covered mountain slopes, or on treks across Greenland’s ice. Last fall he was able to turn his “snow obsession” into a book, one that shows him to be an intriguing, creative land-art artist. In Flechtner’s photographs the snow becomes a mirror for inner states, changing moods and feelings, a landscape of the soul. Andrea Good’s pinhole camera is a classic transport container six meters long. She will park it in a city (illus. 41), in the break-down lane of a highway, or in the woods, and simply let the time pass, let the light have its way, movement come and go, so as to produce dazzling pictures of extended time. Thomas Popp (illus. 42) makes landscape pictures that are both simple and concentrated. At first glance his small pictures seem bland, and cause you to suspect that he comes from the Becher school. But they seduce you into studying them more closely, exploring them. Produced with great care, these pictures effect a balance between relaxed, open (disinterested) views and very precise, concentrated ones.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss are creating themselves a kind of registry map of the “visible world,” and maintain with dry humor that their industrious collecting also permits them qualitative statements. Gardens, flowers, mushrooms, housing developments, airports, kittens, home, foreign parts, sunsets. Just as if they were collecting the lids off milk bottles, they are assembling an archive of pictures, whether banal or beautiful, gripping or kitschy.
Christoph Schreiber, Bohdan Stehlik, and Studer/van der Berg are more manipulative. Christoph Schreiber subtly alters his landscape pictures with digital retouching so as to produce ambiguous images with what he calls “this ineffable power to blow you away.” Bohdan Stehlik (illus. 43) also rearranges and intensifies his pictures of housing developments, dream landscapes, woodlands, and interiors by digital means to give them a disconcerting, evocative force. On their Web site, www.vuedesalpes.com, Studer/van der Berg have created the Hotel Vue des Alpes, a digital paradise with bits of forest, mountain landscapes, mountain restaurants, and aerial tramways, and a panoramic view that shows the building site in addition to the landscape. Visitors to the site can either stroll through the hotel for a quick orientation tor check in for a five-day stay.
We and the World Around Us
Claudio Moser (pp. 96–103) drives around his neighborhood, drives and walks, looking up at the bland, dark gray buildings that block the view or off into the distance, checking the horizon for meanings. Rhythm, the filmic pace, is important for his cityscapes, but equally important is their ambiguity; nothing is clearly formulated, nowhere is there anything altogether recognizable and understandable. Instead, we find ourselves groping around in a gray area that seems to have nothing to say to us, a thicket that will not let us pass. We are confronted with gates that block our entry, that divide the world into an inside and an outside. A single shattered shop window “speaks” of some act, but it has already taken place, and we cannot know the cause, the circumstances. The absence of communication draws us in, we become a part of these fumbling attempts to see the world, to recognize it and understand it.
From the beginning, the works of Felix Stephan Huber (illus. 44) have documented his changing residences, this travels, the hotels in which he has stayed. He always shows his surroundings, his bed, the walls, the architecture, the bushes alongside the road. His newest work is called Reality Check. These are pictures of urban scenes with cold, concrete buildings, slab housing, and a nature that has been pruned and potted. They are meant to reassure him that this is what he saw. He shows them in radiant installations that create a whole environment. In all his works one has the impression of being on a critical divide: on the one hand the pictures mirror the psychic state of their creator, on the other they reflect the architectural and sociological constraints of present-day existence.
Balthasar Burkhard (illus. 45) photographs the world around us from the air. His large-format aerial photographs of cities all over the world—Mexico City, Los Angeles, Tokyo—impressively display the essential structures of today’s cities, examining the question of center versus periphery as well as the all-over pattern of a city like Los Angeles. Using details from urban architecture as building blocks, Renate Buser creates her own city, a personal sculpture.
Photography that shows people “outdoors” in urban surroundings virtually creates inhabited invironments. For that reason Christa Ziegler calls her “film,” the pictures she takes among strangers, Public Scene. The chief exponent of this genre is surely Beat Streuli (illus. 46). He once told me in conversation: “In the pictures of passersby there are two things that interest me that can hardly be separated. One is a poetic, almost literary survey of types of beauty, the other has to do with the social, political, and ethnic problems of my time. The split reality of minorities, their problems and their strength, the threats they face and their style. The pictures I finally select are the ones in which people are self-absorbed. When the ‘public’ face feels unobserved, it forgets itself, and something becomes visible that has nothing at all to do with the concrete surroundings but rather with aspects of modern life in general . . .” Let me only add that Beat Streuli has recently revived his interest in the moving image in a kind of spatial cinema, placing us among people greeting each other and moving away, standing still and strolling about, looking and being looked at. In the museum gallery we then experience the urban landscape as a matter of rhythm.
Shirana Shahbazi (illus. 47), born in Teheran, completed her study of photography in Zürich only a year ago, but already enjoys international recognition. One reason for this is surely the fact that she takes pictures of a part of the world from which we receive but few images. More important, perhaps, is her extremely painstaking, highly pictorial way of documenting the entity that is Iran. Her ongoing series of portraits of people there, ordinary objects, and locations presents a penetrating and attractive image of the country—virtually the opposite of the pictures we see in the media.
Painterly or Sculptural?
Let me end this survey of Swiss art photography of the last ten years with two artists who seemingly operate in a classical manner within the standard realms of the painterly and sculptural but whose works are quite radical. Gaudenz Signorell’s pictures (illus. 48) move us physically. Flat, unhaptic, and frequently blurred and unclear though they are, his photographs create picture spaces to which viewers have a physical reaction, that cause them to shudder. A shuddering in the face of reality. One stands in front of these pictures, hesitates, then enters into them—suggestions of lights, of stockpiles, of gates—only to be thrust back again. One’s gaze responds to the portents, to the light-dark contrasts, the chasms, the space, the sense of emptiness, to rebounding off of the picture plane. It is not carefully guided. As soon as the light has gone out it is lost, and has to keep finding its point of view and direction anew. The photographs run through various abstractions, they are recognizable depictions of actual spaces, abstract, informal worlds of light and shadow, model worlds or real ones, but always they appeal to the body; for all their abstraction they require our direct involvement. They function as sculpture. Adrian Schiess, primarily a painter, does away with photographic, perspective representation in his small color photographs, often only 30 by 50 cm. There was once something in front of the camera, to be sure, a floor, a TV screen, but the way the picture was taken, and especially the degree of blurring, changes the prosaic subject, the motif as it were, into an abstraction, into delicate transitions of color or bright spots—into simply beautiful, celebratory visions.
I close with a reference to where I began. The quantity of photographic art in Switzerland is great, its quality high, and its variety enormous. Accordingly, I was unable to discuss in these observations the readymades of Stöckerselig, for example (illus. 49); Susanne Walder’s expansive, eccentric play with words and images; Ursula Mumenthaler’s painterly invasions of space from a photographer’s point of view; Alan Humerose’s playful studies of picture language; the allegorical toy-theater stagings of Esther van der Bie (illus. 50); the laid-back environment portraits of Laurence Bonvin (illus. 51); the photographic works of the video artists Muda Mathis and Marie José Bürki; or the amazing diversity of the photographer, artist, and disk jockey Stefan Altenburger (illus. 52), who relentlessly catalogues aspects of urban life from raves to woodland quiet.