| Impressions from the Interior was the first exhibition of work in the U.K. by Swiss artists Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg. Consisting of video, painting, installation, and sculptural pieces, made since these two artists began their partnership in 1996, the exhibit was a judicious survey including spectacular new work. Epitomizing Lutz and Guggisberg’s funny melancholy is Man in the Snow (2005). This faint video projection, shown on a lit white wall, loops the image of a silhouetted figure endlessly trudging through a blizzard landscape. | 
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Lutz and Guggisberg: Impressions from the Interior was on view at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, earlier in July.
Lutz and Guggisberg: Impressions from the Interior was on view at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, earlier in July.
Impressions from the Interior was the first exhibition of work in the U.K. by Swiss artists Andres Lutz and Anders Guggisberg. Consisting of video, painting, installation, and sculptural pieces, made since these two artists began their partnership in 1996, the exhibit was a judicious survey including spectacular new work.
Epitomizing Lutz and Guggisberg’s funny melancholy is Man in the Snow (2005). This faint video projection, shown on a lit white wall, loops the image of a silhouetted figure endlessly trudging through a blizzard landscape. There is neither start nor obvious destination to his struggle against the elements. The image is bleached, but then subtly integrated into the wall, as if to suggest an endless effort at this boundary between the space dedicated to art and the world beyond. It is romantic, funny, all-too-familiar, and shows there is no escaping the fact that human life (irrespective of art) is no easy-going.
Lutz and Guggisberg have a light touch on the profoundest truths; they understand absolutely that true words can be spoken in jest. Their video installation, Wash the World (2007), modified according to its location, reveals the story of a mad technician, his laboratory being the place where irreversible phenomena are seen to go backwards. On monitor screens we witness waterfalls un-spilling water whilst a nuclear power station sucks exhausted vapor back into itself. By contradicting the laws of nature, Lutz and Guggisberg are suggesting an ecological concern, and remind us of a probable reality through overemphasized fiction.
Population (2007) likewise conveys a tragic-comic view on the world. Consisting of approximately 200 wooden birds, originally made for the Sharjah Biennial, it is a flock of wooden sculptures, subjected to the searing effects of a blowtorch. Their blackened, dysfunctional appearance signifies post-apocalyptic mutation and distress, but they are also ridiculous. They are, at once, Walt Disney creatures, Hitchcock’s Birds, and harbingers of an envisaged apocalypse.
A new site-specific work involves the modification of gallery spaces on Ikon’s first floor. A permanent feature here, a massive floor-to-ceiling block, is twisted on its axis, seemingly through the efforts of little ceramic creatures. We identify with them easily whilst recognizing an unsettling heroic pointlessness.
Lutz and Guggisberg have an ongoing partnership since 1996, and the nature of their working practice provides a key to the whimsy we encounter here. An observation made by one of the pair will generate an idea for the other, resulting in a to-and-fro that ensures that they are at once producers and critical viewers—their own first audience.
This generative process is particularly evident in Library (2007), an installation that resembles the room of an avid bibliophile. Furniture, standard lamps, and shelves create a familiar atmosphere, whilst a closer scrutiny of the books suggests something absurd. Libraries symbolize thousands of years’ worth of knowledge, accumulated and ordered with a view to some kind of collective heritage. Lutz and Guggisberg have a lightness of touch as they play off such an idea, exchanging real books for cleverly designed wooden dummies. Complete with dust jackets, the authors’ names, and cover blurbs, these are deceptively similar to the products of actual publishers; it is the text that exposes them as fakes. The name of an author on one book makes an appearance elsewhere as a character in a novel; a blurb printed on one spine refers to the title of another and elsewhere. The artists make oblique references to their other works. Our routes of enquiry through this installation are seemingly endless—layer upon layer of meaning creates a maze of possible meanings in which we are able to lose ourselves.
