PlayLust

INSTANT MONSTER

MaxJenny recycled PET Kaleidoskope Poncho + Millimeter Milligram Inc. pockets & memory card + Waldraud silk foulard = MONSTER

Playground: Waldraud

© Play Hunter

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NOW & WOW AT WALDRAUD

Today I want to say a special hello to WALDRAUD Furnishings and Fashion in Zurich. The new concept store offers an exquisitely curated selection of limited edition furniture, fashion, design objects and magazines. My secret object of desire and obsession though is their super smart and super informative newsletter which excels in compact features and interviews with their designers or even a travelogue by the owners (I suspect I’m the record holder in their visits ranking). It served as main source of inspiration for my own brand new Playnews-newsletter. I’m therefore super thrilled I’ve just made it into WALDRAUDS’s latest mailing:

I’m particularly pleased to note the book sits happily between a Pols Potten teapot and that 032C copy featuring the controversial Juergen Teller shot of Kristen McMenany…

WALDRAUD Josefstrasse 142, 8005 Zurich Map

© Play Hunter / Waldraud

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SUPER SIGNER

A tour and a talk with Swiss sculptor and living art legend Roman Signer through his new solo show at Aargauer Kunsthaus starring his Super 8 films and photo series Street Pictures which is exhibited for the very first time.

Super 8
I started out in 1975. In the beginning, I set off mostly on my own, by foot, train or postbus, equipped with rucksack, film camera, and tripod. Now and then, a friend would join in, sometimes with a car which gave you more possibilities. I enjoyed the time spent with Super 8: the trips, often combined with a stop at a local tavern, sending in the film, waiting one week for the film, open it, project it, the sound, the smell… It was a good time. It was the best time of my life. I thought it would go on for ever. But I was taken over by technology. I stopped filming on Super 8 around 1993.

The sculptor with the biggest studio in the world (do not call me action artist).
In 1981, I did a film screening for friends at a dinner party. Wunderful! they said, we want to come along. This resulted in actions – events in front of an audience. Nowadays, I prefer to do installations and video. I don’t consider myself an action artist. I am a sculptor. I once wanted to call my work ’small events’. But then, a philosopher friend told me there was no such thing as a small event. An event is always big or it is not an event at all. He was right, of course.

How far would you go for your art?
Far. Eastern Switzerland (laughs). Switzerland is so … crowded. It’s hard to find a quiet place. I would like to do something in the desert. Around 1993/1994 I went to Iceland with the sole purpose of shooting a hotspring in a garden centre up in the north. On Super 8. The water is around 100 C hot. That’s enormous. Underwater filming proved difficult – I lost three Super 8 cameras. But you must dare do it. Twelve years later, I came across an article about a scientist who had, for the very first time, managed to do an underwater shoot in a hotspring. But you know, I was first.

Still from ‘Einsinken im Eis’ Drei Weihern, St. Gallen 1985 Aufnahme Peter Liechti, Super 8 © Roman Signer

You surly do take risks. In one of your Super 8 films, you walk on a frozen pond until the ice breaks and you sink into the water. For the remaining part of the film we watch you struggle to get out of your icy trap. That is a really, really brutal life and death situation. At the same time, there is almost a slapstick moment to it. It makes you laugh. How big a part does humour play in your work?
You are allowed to laugh. Buster Keaton always had the ambition to be a comedian. That has never been my intention. I am not some sort of clown. An art critic once wrote about me: ‘Roman Signer’s art makes one chuckle’. I found that very patronising. Mind you, after the chuckle there comes the shock.

From Street Pictures © Roman Signer

In 2005, Signer travelled through the Carpathians. On his journey across the Ukraine and Romania, wraths in memory of road casualties and tiny market stands locals had set up between their homes and the street to top up their tiny income, caught his eyes. Struck by the formal similarites between the lovingly composed crosses, photographs and flowers for the dead and the makeshift fruit, vegetable and pet-bottle arrangements, the artist started taking pictures of them. The resulting photo series ‘Street Pictures’ is signature Signer, conceptual but colourful, sad, yet slightly absurd – just like life and death. Getting the pictures was challenging, Signer remembers:

I had to get out and get back into the car pretty quickly, imagine the traffic. What is more, people wanted to sell their produce. But I didn’t want any people in the pictures which sometimes made them a bit frustrated. On one occasion I even bought off all the cucumbers from a woman, hoping she would stand away eventually. But she just didn’t. No picture. But that’s life. You have got to deal with it.

Interview done, there is one last question to ask. Roman Signers answers the obligatory photo request with an impromptu performance. Then he is off to his well deserved lunch.

© Play Hunter

Street Pictures and Super 8 Films opens tonight, Friday Jan 27, at 6 pm. Through to April 22, 2012 I Aargauer Kunsthaus

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