Marc-Olivier Wahler profiles the work of Werner Reiterer
Let’s begin with a comparison: Vaporization (2002) by Teresa Margolles and Untitled (1999) by Werner Reiterer. Margolles fills a gallery with a foggy mist composed of water used to wash corpses at the Mexico morgue where the artist works. Before entering the space, the visitor must sign a waiver, which informs of the nature and content of the work. The viewer is then immersed in a space where each molecule of vapour contains the implication of death. Similarly, Reiterer creates a space where the visitor is immersed in a room saturated with water vapour, thanks to a simple humidifier placed in the middle of the floor. Pinned to the wall there is a cardboard sign with the words: This humidifier evaporates my sperm.
As both artists are dealing with the same material, the gap that separates the works seems more pronounced. Margolles imposes a fact upon us, while Reiterer asks that we believe in fact. This difference is enormous and highlights two dominant tendencies in art today. One was at its height during the last Documenta, where anthropologically flavoured work answered a need for an art that offered precise and direct answers to specific problems. The other finds its roots in an art that cultivates the dodge, where interpretation of what is given or seen is not imposed but is constantly scrambled and re-launched along new paths. Here the visitor is not considered a subject to convince, but a tireless voyager, insatiable and fascinated by that which escapes our immediate perception.
It is interesting to note that visitors, when confronted with a work by Reiterer, very often let out a little nervous laugh. Let’s take the example The Beginning of Space Travel (2002): a cat finds itself stuck to the ceiling after having a tube, attached to a helium tank, stuck up its rectum. ‘Oh no … It’s not possible!’ the visitor might at first say. Then, it is apparent that it is in fact a real cat. ‘Why, yes, he did do it…’ But is this scene a staged event with a taxidermied cat or the result of a pre-vernissage experiment? It is impossible to know. There is definitely a helium tank and the cat seems to be in a state of weightlesseness. The animal’s eyes betray him, giving away his feeling of surprise, disbelief at what has befallen him.
Reiterer has a big project for New York, involving the tubes that are normally used to direct steam out of underground construction sites. He has a checklist with four points for his viewers, who he asks to participate by sticking the words ‘Laughing Gas’ at the top of these tubes. The final item on the checklist is very important: ‘Laugh’. Usually, when we are asked to laugh on command, it almost never works. Therefore, the condition that would enable us to properly participate in the project and, in fact, laugh, is that the gas in question really is laughing gas.
The gaseous element, in the form of laughing gas, helium or evaporated semen, is a central component in the Reiterer’s work. It is not that the artist has some sort of new-age conviction about a unifying element that connects all objects. A gaseous element is immaterial, often invisible. For the artist, this is the precise nature of art. What is given to be seen is one thing, but what we believe, the story that we recount, is just as important. His works are hence defined by a force of contingency. What is given to be seen is ‘possible but not necessary’. And, as Sartre noted in Nausea, ‘contingency is not a delusion, an appearance which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, and consequently, the perfect free gift. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down, and everything begins to float.’
At the heart of contingency, we always find the seeds of the absurd. Absurdity cannot be developed outside of what is not necessary, and Reiterer is on the watch for it to reach its full potential. For a project in a public space in Salzburg, the artist used a lamppost installed in front of a public building and adapted it so that it would rotate whenever a person approached. The rest of the time it was still, unremarkable, just a common lamppost. Also, a flag was installed on the roof of the building. When someone inside used the elevator, the flag too would move up and down its pole. Without human activity, the work was dormant, a phantom; invisible, possible, but not necessary. It contained this haunting potentiality of the ‘perfect free gift’.
Marc-Olivier Wahler is Director of the Swiss
Institute
in New York
Translated from French by Gabrielle Giattino