Coney Island - Yves Scherer

Coney Island
6 April - 21 May 2014
Yves Scherer, S.A.L.T.S. Basel
Yves Scherer‘s practice revolves around the various forms that communication can be channeled through.
By means of texts, designs, cyber and internet tactics, the way technology at large influences our everyday life, the artist explores not merely the meaning of the message itself but moreover how this message can be captured and thus displayed in alternate settings. What container carries which image or
which image in turn gets projected or inscribed onto what surface, Scherer is vividly changing the interface of all his surfaces, their (sur)face becomes content and thus the display-strategy for each new environment. Film works, sound-installations, objects which are haphazardly set against theatrical settings
shift from “virtual” interiors, the insides of PCs, their housings to a real encounter. Large perspex boxes that normally serve to protect an artwork become the protagonist in Scherer‘s work, the perspex as
transparent housing for nothing but volume, or rather the idea of the potential. Sometimes these boxes
are scratched, written or sprayed on, they can serve as screen for a recorded Skype conversation that is
projected against them or one the other hand hold an artwork inside them, such a fake piece of grass, old
carpets, et al, heralded (or poked fun at?), as another form of new painting. These large boxes of perspex
can hang, stand or lean against the wall and become sort of mirrors for the audience; they leave enough
space for interpretation and simultaneously they allude to the desire that Scherer insists of capturing, one
of transcendental omnipresence if one permits to mix philosophical ideas with the mundane and virtual “all-knowing” web content. This strategy is repeated in other works by him such an empty computer
tower, with its side open, but stuffed with a winter‘s down-jacket. The computer tower can also become a source of light, hanging from the ceiling, a “tattoo” like form is stenciled out through the metal siding, the light emits from there. A nice parable to the knowledge and importance of this construct which
processes and channels all the information we come across in the web, our source of information today.
For this exhibition, Yves Scherer has taken the former garages outside at SALTS, closed them almost entirely and created a self-sufficient story-cycle within this now window-less cubicles. The two rooms are an
attempt to bring the virtual, the digital information he collected from the net, the hypothetical and the
obsessive elements from the world of glamour, stars, communication and longing into the physical space,
a sort of three dimensional rendition of a two dimensional sourcing process, a personal adaption of what it
could feel like if we were to find ourselves inside a computer filled with various thoughts, feelings and physically felt confrontations. Its a long shot from the vision of the hollywood film Tron, the 1982 film where the
protagonist gets caught inside a video-game and ends up having to fight for his life but in fact, if he dies in
the game he dies in real life. Here we find ourselves in less violent and more surreal setting, two rooms, one
dominated by white day like setting, the other by a dark, more night setting tell the story of a young woman
who is trying to find herself. A set of perspex boxes, inscribed with a poem, a small Manga Style drawing, a
portrait, is taped to the wall, the recorded sound of a ventilator hissing, emits from a loudspeaker sitting on
the floor – the other room, adjacent emits an even louder sound, the room is insolated, hardly lit - a woman
is standing in the space, with her back turned the entrance, the viewer. The hyperreal encounter makes
these living quarters bizarrely a sad place, a gritty room, a dream like, isolated space which seems to be missing some information, which is lacking some details, a rendering not complete. Welcome to Coney Island.
Samuel Leuenberger
Alienware, 2014; Bricks, Plaster; 230 x 260 cm
Tatami, 2014
Inkjet Print on Canvas
170 x 85 x 4 cm
More than distance between us, 2014
Perspex, Fake Flowers, Marker Pen, Smear, LED-Strip, Tape
Diptych, 210 x 140 x 5 cm (each)
More than distance between us
the wind of Mt. Fuji
I‘ve brought on my fan!
a gift from Edo
Have you never met a woman who inspires you to love? Until your every sense is filled with her? You inhale
her. You taste her. You see your unborn children in her eyes and know that your heart has at last found a home.
Your life begins with her, and without her it must surely end. Perhaps as an old man I will take great comfort in
pottering around in a lab and gently talking to students in the summer evening and will accept suffering with
insouciance. But not now; men in their prime, if they have convictions they are tasked to act on them.
Some have accused me of strange design,
Against the creed and morals of this land,
And trace is in this poem every line:
I don‘t pretend that I quite understand
My meaning when I would be very fine;
But the fact is that I had noting planned.
You’ve asked me to stop writing these letters. You’ve told me they will never change things between us. But
I feel that a deep problem in perception is that if you want something to improve, you have a tendency to be
bothered by the status quo and to think that it’s much worse than it is. And that can be beneficial because you
don’t like, say, the level of violence in the world, the level of poverty, the level of — number of kids dying. But if
you divorce yourself from the true facts of improvement and look at the exemplars, look at what’s worked — if
you get sort of a general despair about is the world improving, then you won’t latch on to those examples. My
heart’s in my hand E., and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and the bag is shut, and my heart is
caught. How can I be depressed when deep down inside I know I am a happiness machine?
Nice of you to say, but you of all people should know, there’s plenty wrong with me. I wanted to swallow
myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body,
and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little
would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.
But such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is
forgotten. Should the voice alter then, should the unwanted appear in the score of the dialogue, or, on the
contrary, should a response respond too well to what I thought without having really said it - suddenly this
evidence breaks forth. that out there also minute by minute life is being lived: somewhere behind those eyes,
behind those gestures, or rather before them, or again about them, coming from I know not what double
ground of space, another private world shows through, through the fabric of my own, and for a moment I live
in it..
I may be a chauvinist pig of some sort, but I’m no rapist. A man must dream a long time in order to act with
grandeur, and dreaming is nursed in darkness. Perhaps in many moments of my life the other is for me reduced
to this spectacle, which can be a charm. At least my proved world has ceased to be mine only: it is now the
instrument which another plays, the dimension of a generalized life which is grafted onto my own. But if we
can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types
whos hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their
ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes. The whole universe or the structure that perceives it is
a worthy opponent, but try as I may I can not escape the sound of suffering.
Yours Truly, Y.
Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the
arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport, 2014
Steamed Beech, Necklace
165 x 48 x 35 cm
Coolermaster Silencio III, 2014; Industrial Fan, Foam; Dimensions Variable
Premises, 2014
Pencil and Inkjet Print on Paper
21 x 29.7 cm
Coolermaster Silencio III, 2014
Industrial Fan, Foam
Dimensions Variable
www.yvesscherer.com