Andreas Jaeggi @ Berliner Kunstprojekt, A SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND MEANING
Agustina O’Farrell and Erica Snow
Andreas Jaeggi
is constantly searching for beauty, harmony and balance in his artmaking. But
more importantly, one might add, he is searching for truth. What would be the
content suggested by these generalizations—often misused and abused terms—is
always a challenge for any artist to articulate much less address in their work.
All the same, through Jaeggi’s exhibition of work at the Berliner Kunstprojekt
he takes on the task of creating a true art of exactly beauty, harmony and balance
while attempting to attain his goal of presenting work which creates a feeling
of “great calmness.”
The way to elicit “calmness” is not obvious. The artist’s description
of the exhibition, taking place during the month of June, belies, it seems, the
sentiment of “great calmness” expressed above. Jaeggi describes the
work as “a floating graveyard of severed heads hanging from the ceiling
at eye level.” Will the severed heads create calm? The viewers will be the
judges.
The head sculptures
have evolved out of many series of figurative works created by the artist. This
project on display in Berlin has developed from an earlier series of sculptural
works of twenty heads as well as from a series of portraits of individuals. Though
working in the long tradition of figurative sculpture Jaeggi uses the head of
a young contemporary male as his model and does not step back into the canon
of art history to find a source.
All of the heads in the installation are made from one mold. The repetition of
the single unidentified male’s head brings the work into the realm of modernist
art production. Air-dried modeling clay is enhanced with oil and acrylic paint
as well as color pigment. The modernist technique of repetition is not the only
cultural reference that comes to mind. Given the physicality of the disembodied
heads, which remains the same from head to head to head, the genres of horror
and science fiction begin to come to mind. Cloning comes to mind as easily as
Marcel Duchamp’s recreations of his ready-mades; Andy Warhol meets Invasion
of the Body Snatchers meets Goya’s the Horrors of War.
In this exhibition
Jaeggi is concerned with different issues than those confronted in his series
“New York Zippers “ or “City Impressions.” “City Impressions,”
for one, not only takes the form of paintings but these paintings offer gently
expressionistic and stylized representations of urban landscapes. Pain and the
dark side of the human condition could perhaps be divined in these works through
careful study but they are certainly not readily apparent on the surface. In
this recent installation Jaeggi is concerned with the realities faced by people
with grave illnesses, severe disfiguring injuries and other physical or mental
or disabilities. His topic extends to other groups of people marginalized by
their physical condition such as the aged. Also included in the discussion are
the professionals whose task it is to care for the aged and the infirm.
These works are
about much more than horror. As the artist states the heads in this exhibition
are “not what would remain in the basket of the guillotine during the French
Revolution.” He emphasizes that in modeling the sculptures he has “kept
the forceful fleshiness of a young man’s head.” The artist’s intention
is for the public to see the possibility of life in death, of strength amidst
the gathering of weakness and the overall diminishing of force. Despite to confrontational
nature of the work it is fundamentally optimistic. He suggests that though dying
may be painful: “death in and of itself is perhaps a peaceful state.”
Jaeggi also leaves the works open for a wide variety of interpretation and hopes
for each visitor to create their own story and based on the reality the work
suggests to them.
Jaeggi has dramatically
changed his style as his concerns have changed and his interests broadened. Early
works came out of what one could call a classical tradition. Other series related
to impressionism as he interpreted street scenes and the urban landmarks of his
surrounding in light of his personal aesthetic. This current work with its complex
themes and difficult subject matter has directed Jaeggi towards more experimental,
even avant-garde, approaches. This illustrative style of some of the street scenes
which could be, as Jaeggi states, “lyrical and impressionistic in the classical
sense” no longer fits the current range of his subject matter.
As “City Impressions”
represented streets scenes in Basel and New York “New York Zippers”
was a series of 24 painted canvas flags about “The Big Apple.” Closer
in spirit to the current sculptural work, but still distant in terms of style,
are the works of Jaeggi’s “Blue Period.” These atmospheric works
depicted nudes, still lifes and exteriors in a highly individualistic manner.
The “Blue Period” works often touch on the difficult in being human—on
sorrow amidst the bloom of youth or of the dark edges of the seemingly idyllic.
As with the heads one felt Jaeggi imbuing the forms with character beyond what
a simple photographic rendering of the subject matter could suggest.
Like all artists
with multifarious approaches Jaeggi is less concerned with constancy than with
finding the appropriate means through which to approach his current concerns.
With his confrontational and forceful head sculptures Jaeggi only asks that the
viewer try to keep up with him.
