potential of a world where homeland security has taken control
Every day we come across roadblocks. Although
we hardly notice them anymore, they have become part of modern
infrastructure. They prevent people from entering restricted areas and
forestall free access and, whether simple roadblocks or massive anti-tank
obstacles or barbed wire, thanks to the ever-present media they have become
part of today’s visual landscape. Be it the meetings of world leaders in New
York, Seattle or Evian, or the World Economic Forum in Davos, the locations
change yet the scenery remains the same. On one side of the fence, secured
by security locks, are smiling politicians who propagate their political and
ecological agenda and use summits as visual demonstrations of their
institutional power; on the other side, the mass of people who oppose this
very same agenda – sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent. As a visual
by-product, so to speak, security and surveillance systems have created a
visual language of their own, an aesthetic of control and separation, but
also of potential suppression. It is this unexpected visual potential that
is fascinating contemporary artists – among them Fabrice Gygi, who cunningly
manages to transform even an ordinary roadblock into powerful art.
Such transformations do not come as a surprise in the work of an artist born
in Geneva in 1965. Gygi’s socialisation happened in the 1980s during the
squatting movement of the rich business centre, at a time when Swiss youth
riots started and the authorities’ sole reaction was desperate suppression.
Consequently, in his later work Gygi expanded the radical sculptural
traditions of the 1960s and ’70s by raising fundamental social and political
issues. This became evident early in his career when he graduated from the
École supérieure d’art visuel in Geneva (1990) and recreated Hamish Fulton’s
Camp Fire (1985), which turned the experience of walking into a series of
photographs. Following Fulton’s path through northern Canada, Gygi also
included statistical and political information in order to connect the
experience of the landscape with real life. Although his formal roots are
clearly visible within the generation of artists from that period,
especially the traditions of post-minimal sculpture, body and performance
art, he managed to charge them with the political and social issues of
today. Having participated in a number of major group exhibitions – for
example at the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Frankfurter Kunstverein, the Villa
Arson in Nice and the biennial in São Paulo – his 2004–5 solo shows at Musée
d’art moderne et contemporain (Mamco) in Geneva, Villa Merkel in Esslingen,
Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Orange County Museum in Los Angeles and Magasin 3,
Stockholm Konsthall, mark his rank among contemporary sculptors.
Although kept as neutral as possible, Gygi’s titles allude to the potential
of content and open a field of references that foster a distinct reading of
the work. Roadblock (1997), for example, is situated at the entry to the
exhibition at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen. It consists of heavy metal barrier
and signal-red elements, with a rotating flashlight that issues a
penetrating noise. Visitors are warned they are about to leave the secure
grounds of traditional art and enter a zone where modes of security and
signs of authority are tested for their visual potential, as they pass by
another high-security fence that blocks off the lavish lobby transformed
into a jail. His most recent series of objects (2004–5) made of wood and
metal expands on this imagery. With the reports of Abu Ghraib still fresh in
our minds, their physical presence relates to the human body, taking on the
appearance of twisted figurines undergoing strenuous physical exercise or
torture. In a strange way, however, the objects are constructed with
frightening perfection and have a tendency to modernist ‘good form’. They
oscillate between sport, lifestyle and the brutalities that we try to
repress while the global media keeps them present. As a matter of course,
Gygi is fully aware of this media context and by adding a Tower (2000) and a
grandstand to the ensemble, as it was shown in St Gallen, he has turned the
space into a Roman amphitheatre – in which visitors can sit comfortably to
watch his spectacle of cruelties.
Other, almost fragile-looking installations are made to fit our mobile,
multi-optional society: Podium (1997), Tent Bar (1997) or Clean Point (1998)
seem to deal with places of interaction – the public space that, centuries
ago, was at the centre of social life. In the case of Polling Station
(2001), the artist turns a democratic institution into a sculptural ensemble
full of contradictory references, with mobile elements that are
characteristic of a world of permanent migration. In St Gallen the work is
shown as an open location, whereas in Geneva it was put together as if
waiting for its next use. Depending on the setting and context of the
exhibition, the work can be interpreted in different ways. In its first
presentation at the Swiss Institute in New York in 2001 it was read as the
artist’s comment on George W Bush’s ‘stolen election’, while the other
version ironically reflects Swiss democracy. Put together in Geneva, it
becomes an image for a temporarily dysfunctional democratic system.
Gygi’s open structures are open to different readings, but still remain
powerful symbols in a world in which democracy is regularly suspended. In
their physical and metaphorical potential they reflect the precarious state
of a world where, despite massive security systems, fundamental insecurity
has become a permanent factor of human life.
Konrad Bitterli is curator at the Kunstmuseum St Gallen, where he has
organised major exhibitions of artists such as Roman Signer, Pipilotti Rist,
David Reed, Matt Mullican, Hubbard / Birchler, Luc Tuymans and, most
recently, Fabrice Gygi