Gabriela Gerber und Lukas Bardill | See How the Land Lies

Transcription

Ausstellung im Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur | 6.10. – 19.11.2006
Textbeitrag für die Publikation See How the Land Lies, Kodoji Press Baden, 2006
See how the Land Lies. About Landscape and Lies in the Work of Gabriela Gerber and
Lukas Bardill
Kathleen Bühler
The title of the exhibition makes one aware of an ambiguity at the root of Gabriela Gerber and
Lukas Bardill’s work. With reference to the English expression “the lie of the land” the proposition
is to both “see how the land is situated” and “how the land can deceive”. Land and lie, expressed
as landscape and optical illusion, are two recurring themes in the oeuvre of the artist duo from
the Prättigau. Their works are landscape images in the broadest sense, whether they are
cityscapes of squares in Paris or views of their native alpine foothills. Gabriela Gerber and Lukas
Bardill work with vistas of entire landscapes as well as with single fragments. In the photo series
‘Schwellen’ (2004) unpretentious looking sheds are at the centre of the picture. In the floor
installation ‘Komatsu’ (2005), in the video installations ‘Stihl’ (2005) and ‘Rapid 101’ (2004) it is
landscaping machinery such as excavators, power mowers, and power saws. Components of
tourist infrastructure, such as a lone chair-lift chair shown in the light box ‘Lift’ (2002), are also
used effectively in their work.
Those works which intentionally include optical illusions, can be understood as deceptions: Thus
a bare, cropped tree silhouette of a larch in the video ‘Laerche’ (2006) proves to be only
seemingly moving. Its restlessness has been generated digitally by stop-motion. In the video
‘Forum’ (2000), the supposedly irritating wasps in the air, turn out, when scrutinised, to be
helicopters in the sky carrying global decision-makers to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
And in the light projection ‘Landmark’ (2005), buildings set in a bleak landscape at dusk, are in
reality wooden toy building blocks.
Nature and Landscape
The landscape motive in combination with a misleading way of representation goes back to the
conflicting and contradictory relationship that western urban man has with nature. Since the
beginning of civilisation nature is tamed, enslaved, exploited, and has to make place for culture
in the form of architecture, agriculture and industry. Nevertheless, ‘untouched nature’ as a
promise of salvation, is a powerful concept and is thus daily made use of in tourist advertising.
The fact that with the appearance of man nature everywhere is no longer untouched, is a
contradiction that is accepted and which expresses a great human longing for something beyond
time that defies human destructiveness and can comfort us in our mortality1. Nature, in the
sense of ‘wilderness’, signifies the ‘other’ in relation to culture and is the counter model to
civilisation. Nature is thus also home for the myth of national identity and a promised cure for the
emptiness of contemporary life2.
Nevertheless, nature does not have to be landscape3. Because landscape is, above all, culture
and a mental construct, which is projected onto woods, water and rocks4. In order that
environment be understood as landscape, a cultural effort must be made, namely an omission
and filtering when it comes to a previously learned type of perception5. It does not surprise that
this achievement in perception is typical for those who live at a distance of landscape6. This
distanced and aesthetic manner of regarding nature as landscape belongs to a tradition that
starts in the 14th century, when nature irrevocably becomes the victim of exploitation as a
consequence of being the object of science and of the technology resulting from it.7
The cultural interpretation of a particular piece of environment as landscape has social and
historical dimensions in as much as the attitude of a specific society toward nature can be read
according to the representational conventions of its era. Despite the constant changes in epochspecific representational conventions of nature as landscape, there is a determinable vocabulary
of signs, which mean landscape. A system of signs, however, whose individual signs are subject
to constant adaptation and reformulation.
Landscape as Language
Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill’s joint undertaking can be interpreted as an investigation of
these signs and as a contemporary contribution to an understanding of the language system
‘landscape’. Their works isolate those motifs which signal, pars pro toto landscape, and reach
the boundary of that which can still be understood as signalling landscape. The video ‘Rapid
101’ (2004), for example, demonstrates this reduction to what determines the character of
today’s landscape in a veritably programmatic way, by simulating a slow camera ride focused on
a power mower of the make ‘Rapid’ – a common piece of equipment used in agriculture. Without
stopping, the camera approaches to the beat of the stuttering motor and changes from a total
view to a micro shot, in which the outlines of the machine have long gone out of sight and
instead have been replaced by an abstract colour composition. Not only do the artists thus
change a precise and exemplary vector diagram into an abstract picture - which could also be
interpreted as a map - but they simultaneously point to the moment when the sign dissolves and
its previous meaning is transformed. At the same moment in which the micro shot becomes
abstract, the accompanying sound of the motor stops. By entering another picture function the
rooting in reality also seems to have become obsolete.
The isolation of motifs and signs is just one process in their acquisition of a personal landscape
vocabulary. An additional strategy is isolating and centring the objects in order to direct and
concentrate the focus on the image. In this way many of the pictorial works by Gabriela Gerber
and Lukas Bardill excel by having well-balanced compositions with a preference for the classic
profile or frontal view; for example, by placing all the horizons of a photo series at the same
picture-level, or exactly at the centre of the image; or by removing any signs of weather
conditions or traces of wear and tear; or by reducing the parameter of movement in a film, and
by limiting the selection of colours to a few shades. In these ways the artist duo aims to come
close to the scientific ideal of a sober inventory and classification. By this stylised graphic
configuration the individual motif is given the character of a typology and in this way formulates
statements about entire categories of items. A procedure which finds an echo in the categorising
titles and underlines their claim of validity. That is why the individual shed in the 17-part photo
series ‘Schwellen’ - named after the bank which runs along the straightened course of the river
Landquart in the Prätigau - is unpretentious and as a visual event commonplace. However, only
by using the almost exact same order and an arrangement bordering on the monotonous, does it
reveal its character as sign, a sign that literally marks the threshold (in German ‘Schwelle’)
meaning the transition from nature to man-made landscape. A similar effect is achieved with the
faceless houses in the light projection ‘Landmark’. In eleven similar views the artist duo
celebrates by simplest means the moment in which landscape is formed and gives rise to
multiple associations. All it needs is a neutral ground and a somewhat lighter sky zone, cursory
shadows to suggest a light source - and thus a time of day - as well as schematic little house
blocks which as signs mean civilisation. Right away memory is set in motion and similar pictures
appear in the mind’s eye. With this Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill demonstrate how little it
actually takes to activate the signification ‘landscape’, and how great the viewer’s readiness is to
mentally complete landscape. With this they point to the emotional potential of our aesthetic
approach to nature as landscape. Their strategy of aesthetic condensation and visual reduction
can be seen in this light as a counter point to a symbolic diversity of meaning of landscape.
From countless subjective observations and individual memories, which are also a hoard of
strong emotions, every viewer makes this assemblage. The semantic permeability of the
landscape signs is in blatant contrast to the visual sparseness of the landscape motives.
Romantic Grandeur
This is the contradiction which attracts the artists and which they insistently explore. It is no
coincidence that numerous stereotypes of lofty landscape representations appear in their work.
A tradition that wants the portrayal of landscape to arouse emotions; that celebrates unspoilt
landscape; and that shows man exposed face to face with the boundlessness of nature8.
In their early photo series ‘Überland’ (2000) Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill already work by
cross-fading different deserted snow landscapes, with the aim of ‘generating a feeling of
grandeur, or rapture in this landscape, as the case may be’.9 At the same time, however, with
the intention of constructing a new form of landscape. By combining landscape fragments in
order to arouse feelings of grandeur, and by creating fictional landscapes from actually existing
motifs, they join the tradition of Romantic landscape painters. Similar to Caspar David Friedrich,
in whose pictures the metaphysical horror of an enlightened existence is felt, and where in
nature it remains conceivable as desolation. In this way their type of sublime landscape image
orientates itself with the help of a firm realisation that what is reconstructed as landscape is
finally lost. Therefore also the title ‘Überland’, as ‘Über-Land’ in the sense of a heightened
version of landscape.
This comes out more clearly in the video film ‘Umfrieden’ (2003), in which an abandoned, snowcovered garden on a mountain slope is shown. The emotional tenor is established by the fact
that the title consciously fluctuates between such notions as demarcation, peace, and security.
On the historical sound track of 1977, Lukas Bardill whistles the tune of the Swiss children’s
song ‘Rooti Rösli’, which tells of the withering of roses and lilies-of-the-valley in the wind.
Emptiness, cold, fog, and transitoriness are cited as ingredients of the Romantic landscape
painting and give rise to a melancholic mood.
Again the artist duo makes reference to Caspar David Friedrich, by staging a part of the
exhibition at the Bündner Kunstmuseum, as homage to the Romantic icon ‘Das Eismeer
(Gescheiterte Hoffnung)’ (around 1823/1824). They loosely pile up movable, wooden wall
segments in the upper exhibition hall of the art museum like broken up ice-slabs on top of each
other, and project a life-size larch onto a suspended screen. While the monumental wooden
blocks come to lie at the centre of the hall as an insurmountable obstacle, and remind
overwhelmingly of the famous painting by Friedrich, the almost bodiless silhouette of the larch
floats above. Just as the trees in the paintings by Caspar David Friedrich, it stands lonely as a
cipher for transience and as nature’s governor above the ‘ruins of the museum’. For a short time
the medially generated landscape resides as victor over culture within the realm of art.
Failing Language
While landscape appears as utopia in the citations of lofty landscape pictures, and while it is
assembled out of symbolic individual components and fictionalised, it seems as though the
installation ‘Hasenstand’ – especially conceived for the exhibition – first of all celebrates a further
triumph of nature over culture. ‘Hasenstand’ consists of a practice shooting-stand for small game
hunting in which for once not the hare but man himself is the frightened one. Gabriela Gerber
and Lukas Bardill conduct a metal hare, which shoots out of an opening in the wall along a rail
through the room at irregular intervals. In real life a simulation which is set up outside and which
serves as a preparation for the actual hunt. In the context of art, however, the relationship is
suddenly turned around. The hare seems purposeful and slightly threatening, so that the viewer
feels like seeking protection behind the balustrade of the boardwalk, which separates him from
the ‘Hasenstand’.
By choosing an animal fraught with symbolism – the hare stands for fertility, fearfulness, and
agility – this also alludes to the interrupted communication between man and animal. As early as
1963, Joseph Beuys frequently used hares in his art. For example in ‘Der Unbesiegbare’ a large
plasticine hare stands opposite a shooting tin soldier, and thus changes from the hunted to the
hunter (display case 7.4, Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt). Or a stuffed hare in the
famous performance ‘Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt’ (Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf
1965). Embedded in his specific understanding of art and his shamanistic perception of himself,
he evokes a feeling of being organically interwoven with the world as a whole – man, animal and
plant-life. By including animals, Beuys would like to advance man’s self-awareness as part of a
whole, and at the same time he laments the loss of an understanding between humans and
animals.10 While Beuys is able to overcome the speechlessness between man and animal in his
performance – at least for the duration of the action, by explaining the pictures to the dead hare,
the hare in Gabriela Gerber and Lukas Bardill’s installation remains mute: for he is nothing but a
sign.
(Translated from German by Jane Gillespie-Casparis)
___________________________
1
Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, Vintage Books Edition: New York 1996, p. 15.
This concept was also the motor for the founding of numerous national parks. See Simon Schama 1996 (as note 1),
pp. 6-7.
3
The German philosopher Joachim Ritter fixes the moment when the ‘esteem for nature as landscape arises’ on the
description by Petrarca of a mountain ascent in the 14th century. Joachim Ritter, ‘Landschaft. Zur Funktion des
Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft’ (1963), in: Joachim Ritter, Subjektivität. Sechs Aufsätze, Band 379
Bibliothek Suhrkamp, Suhrkamp: Frankfurt 1989, pp. 143-144.
4
Simon Schama1996 (as note 1), p. 61.
5
Lucius Burckhardt, ‘Warum ist Landschaft schön?’ (1979), in: Lucius Burchhardt, Warum ist Landschaft schön?
Die Spaziergangswissenschaft, ed. by Markus Ritter and Martin Schmitz, Martin Schmitz Verlag: Basel 1980, p.
33. As well as Joachim Ritter: "Nature as landscape is effect and product of the theoretical mind" (Natur als
Landschaft ist Frucht und Erzeugnis des theoretischen Geistes), in: Joachim Ritter 1989 (as note 3), p. 146.
6
The sociologist and planner Lucius Burckhardt emphasises: ‘it is the city dweller that experiences cultivated nature
as landscape. Only the distance from nature and production creates a condition in which agricultural production as
well as natural growth is seen in a picture of landscape’, (‘Es ist der Städter, der die bewirtschaftete Natur als
Landschaft erlebt. Nur die Distanz zur Natur und zur Produktion schafft jenes Verhältnis, unter welchem
landwirtschaftliche Produktion sowie natürliches Wachstum in einem Bild der Landschaft gesehen wird’,) compare
Lucius Burckhardt, ‘Warum ist Landschaft schön?’ (1979), in: Lucius Burckhardt 1980 (as note 5), p. 36.
7
‘In the history of aesthetic theory there is a continuing and surprising necessity for aesthetic communication. It is
related to and justified by the emergence of new science and its hypostatisation and objectification of nature’, (‘In
einer Kontinuität, die erstaunlich ist, wird diese Notwendigkeit ästhetischer Vermittlung in der Geschichte er
ästhetischen Theorie mit dem Aufkommen der neuen Wissenschaft und ihrer Verdinglichung und Objektivierung der
Natur in Verbindung gebracht und aus ihr begründet’), Joachim Ritter 1989 (as note 3), p. 155.
8
In the 18th century the term grandeur – seen as horrific and as over-stressing the imagination – was defined as an
aesthetic experience which resulted in a new source of pleasure. This is based on the fact that the threat – which is
merely depicted – can be overcome and that the self-esteem of the viewer ultimately emerges invigorated. For further
views on grandeur compare Christine Pries (ed.), Das Erhabene. Zwischen Grenzerfahrung und Gössenwahn,
Weinheim 1988.
9
‘We tried to evoke memories of landscape. We assemble new landscapes from shreds of landscapes. [...] By this
assembling and combining, the pictures become somewhat unfocussed, which may formally expresses itself as
ambivalent and ambiguous with respect to content’. (‘Ein Kriterium war, ein Gefühl der Erhabenheit bzw.
Entrücktheit in diesen Landschaften zu erzeugen. […] Wir versuchten Erinnerungen an Landschaften zu evozieren.
Es sind Fetzen von Landschaften, welche wir zu neuen Landschaften zusammensetzten. […] Durch das
Ineinanderfügen erhalten die Bilder eine gewisse Unschärfe, welche sich formal als Mehrschichtigkeit und inhaltlich
als Mehrdeutigkeit äussern mag’,) e-mail from the artists to the author, July 25, 2006.
10
Martin Müller, Wie man dem toten Hasen die Bilder erklärt. Schamanismus und Erkenntnis im Werk von Joseph
Beuys, Alfter: Verlag und Datenbank für Geistes wissenschaften 1993, p. 88.
2

Gabriela Gerber und Lukas Bardill | See How the Land Lies

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