Walter Pichler at Contemporary Fine Arts Basel, curated by Cyprien Gaillard
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Installation view: Walter Pichler by Cyprien Gaillard, Die Bleche und ich gehen heim, Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Gina Folly.
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Life is the negentropic process. Coprophagic, it gathers up morsels of its own make already putrid with decay as it takes them to its lips. But Death is coextensive with time. Architecture intends to outlive its inhabitants, such that it reminds of the gentle juggernaut. The mausoleum is the ultimate architectural outcome; the outcome of outcomes.
Walter Pichler’s drawings depict constructions of celestial perfection, terrifying for their absence of immanent destination. Carts with wheels of intimidating dimension are precisely described; doors which insist their handle won’t be turned are transcendently rectified. Yet, far from inhabited by the divine, these manifestations are attended by fairly featureless phantoms, frail and failing to figure.
Machines mock the human aberration; assembling as well out of uncertainty yet embracing and evoking it in ways we could only dream to dream to.
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Walter Pichler, 31.1.1973, 1973. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Gina Folly.
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This exhibition offers two of Pichler’s landscape-format drawings which were performed on doubled portrait-format paper. Those papers were unfolded at Gaillard’s behest and presented in wooden frames of Gaillard’s design, a tribute to Pichler’s own framemaking. By way of ripples inflicted by Pichler’s water work, the unfolding reveals a milky sort of reflecting pool. What lurks in those opaque waters is offered to your own sick imagination.
Nothing is evil of Pichler’s work, unless evil is what proceeds from the elaboration of machines. Pichler reminds me that, though each caress of the earth is an index of my demise, something will stand, still. In the decades preceding his passing, Pichler, shirking the audience and market dynamics of contemporary art, prepared specific environments for his sculptures on his rural east-Austrian property. By the time of his death, seven human-scale buildings had been assembled as the most appropriate homes for his works. Gaillard’s exhibition presents three sculpture orphans of that project in what are, by inference of Pichler’s metric, sub-optimal conditions. Though while this exhibition may not improve on the situation Pichler had himself imagined, it does succeed in bringing CFA’s still nascent outpost nearer to itself than seen before.
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Installation view: Walter Pichler by Cyprien Gaillard, Die Bleche und ich gehen heim, Contemporary Fine Arts, Basel. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Gina Folly.
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Nestled in Basel’s aged, ascending alleyway of Totengässlein (lit. “dead alley”), neighboring the alchemical Pharmacy Museum, the venue’s exterior appearance is consistent with the medieval character of the city’s core. Furthermore, this exhibition comes to us amidst the swelling of Fasnacht, Basel’s holiday of carnival. This festival, now of some 700 years, will soon succeed to unsettle the polite and orderly everyday of Basel into some angelic joke. This yearly ritual of reversal is our most (in-)coherent pronouncement of the Totentanz, the danse macabre, a class equalizer paraded on by Death’s favorite song.
Standing in the gallery I wonder what of Pichler particularly calls on Gaillard’s admiration. The artist-curator, evidently no stranger to coprophagia, once portrayed (in his video “The Lake Arches”) his pals ingesting fountain and blood after diving skull-first into a shallow pool flanked by ruins of an architecture only Empire and its imaginants could have configured. I imagine Gaillard’s tremendous excavator heads to exclaim the majesty of building machines that I find in Pichler’s pieces. His pyramid of beer in Berlin, picked at as ants at a stack of sugar cubes, should produce a Pichlerian glance at human pathos.
From the exhibition text: “We are proud and grateful to have secured Cyprien Gaillard…” That word, secured, rang out in my ears. It carries a gratitude, and an acknowledgement that Gaillard is an artist of some repute, without a public professional relationship to the gallery, and not (to my knowledge) a curator, who could ostensibly make room for such work. It also, however, indicates Gaillard in Pichler’s own indication of the human figure as a wispy gravedigger, rendlessly excavating inexistence.
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Walter Pichler, Der rote Stab, 2003. Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts. Photo: Gina Folly.
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