Urs Lüthi: Life as an ambivalent Art figure between Eccentricity and Normality.In: Urs Lüthi, ART FOR A BETTER LIFE from Placebos & Surrogates. XLIX BIENNALE DI VENEZIA 2001.
THROUGH THE PINK GLASS OF DESIRE (1)
What now appears as a broadly conceived and coherent, though thematically and formally multifaceted, body of work has not always succeeded in convincing contemporaries of its coherence. Anyone who has followed Urs Lüthi's career so far has suffered successive hot and cold douches of confusion, disorientation and doubt. Not that this highly personal artistic cosmos has ever lost any of its fascination; but at times Lüthi's sheer mental agility and freedom from preconceptions have been breathtaking. He has always kept at least one step ahead; no sooner have you familiarized yourself with one phase of his work than he is off finding new ways to formulate his concerns, and introducing new emphases that then have to be correlated with previous experience. What is more, his preoccupation with 'self-portraiture' has been and remains a constant temptation to identify the artist with the art figure: to treat the artist and his motif as indistinguishable. To do this is to vitiate the understanding of any art. All along, this artist'sundoubtedly charismatic personality has fostered such tendencies to an exceptional degree; all along, too, Lüthi has to some extent played along with this dual image of himself. In itself, this confusion of levels, together with the multiple ambiguities implicit in his work, aids us to discern the underlying structure that he himself described, early on, as follows: 'Perhaps the most significant and creative aspect of my work is ambivalence as such... Objectivity... is not important to me; all is objective just as all could be subjective.' (2) The complexity of Lüthi's work, suggested above, may be studied in concentrated and vivid form in The Complete Life and Work, Seen Trough the Pink Glasses of Desire. (3) Under this title, in 1990, Lüthi collected together a series of 180 photographically reproduced images, all uniformly coloured pink, in chronological sequence, in which private life quite naturally mingles with art. Among them are childhood family snaps, a concise selection of his work since the beginning of his career, and a whole series of private-looking photographs that- like the early family snaps- leave us unsure whether to regard them as works in the strict sense or as biographical documents. (4)The uniform format and monochrome tint, together with title, suggest quite incidentally that a clear distinction between Work and Life is not the artist's prime concern. First of all, the uniformity of presentation implies a disconcerting, and fascinating, visual equivalence among all the chosen works, in which qualitative distinctions of material, genre and medium are held in abeyance and the images reduced to their function as signs or illustration. Photographs, drawings, paintings and sculptures are present merely as citations, abstracted from their original physical and artistic presence, reproduced in a uniform format and subordinated to a single overriding mood. At first sight, this mood suggests an infinite sameness, but the calculated coolness of the presentation sets us up to concentrate all the more intensively on the subject matter, as perceived through the Pink Glasses of Desire. The seeming impassivity of the form turns out to be an effective artistic strategy to reinforce the emotioinal charge of the motifs. Characteristically, Lüthi's individual pieces confront us with an air of understatement that combines exalted intensity with coolness; they mute the emotions invested in the motif with a veiling gesture that serves only to bring out the intense emotion deep within the image. Out of this subtle interaction between effect and perception, many component images of the Complete Life and Work, Seen Through the Pink Glasses of Desire generate a single, complex image that can be appproached and explored in all directions from any one of its constituent images, thus offering a diversity of insights into normal and thematic connections, both obvious and subliminal, within the artist's oeuvre.
Through the Pink Glasses of Deire, we not only discern the artist's subtly subversive working methods: by equating all ist images, this many-layered and serially ambiguous work also affords access to the multiple levels of expression in Lüthi's output as a whole. His work operates through the most diverse media, including photography, painting, sculpture, objects, videos and installations, plus the editions and early performances, and has constantly surprised and baffled the public with its shifts in formal thematic emphasis, which have sometimes been interpreted as breaks in continuity. However, it is unlikely that Lüthi himself ever aimed for a crude surprised effect as such; in any case, he maintains with perfect justification that there is no discontinuity, in the sense of a radical reorientation, anywhere in his work. The disorientation prompted by the startling changes in outward form should surely not be interpreted as an end in itself but, ideally, as a timely cue for reflection and further thought. The scintillating formal variety of Lüthi's work reflects as fundamentally experimental approach, but also an open-mindedness that takes him into marginal realms of form and content where he freely accepts the risk of being grossly misunderstood. In pursuit of his own artistic intentions, I don't think he has ever balked at anything. His works can never be reduced to mere refinements on a specific style or set of imagery, though at times his supreme assurance and dystematic exploration of his chosen media have seemed to suggest this. Here Lüthi toys not only with public expectations but also with the expectations and unwritten laws of the art trade, which, like any marketplace, implicitly craves recognizable, branded products. That is to say, Lüthi has asserted his own freedom to pursue his concerns into new forms and different contexts without reference to commercial considerations. This is done not so much in order to reinvent and reformulate them for their own sake as to expand and clarify them in the light of his own current states of mind. This also has the effect of adapting them to the Zeitgeist, with ist shitfiting fashions and trends, except, that is, when his purpose is to mark a firm contrast with that same Zeitgeist.
Speaking of the Zeitgeist, we should take a brief look at the version of it that prevailed around 1970, when Urs Lüthi first came to public notice as a photographic self-portaitist. For the situation of revolutionary change that then prevailed in Western art, parallel to, but not necessarily identical with, the political revold of the younger generation, represents a defining moment in the evolution of Lüthi's oeuvre. In applying the word evolution to this artist's work, I have in mind a concept of Modernism that interprets art as work in progress on an intellectual and formal idea, and the artist's self-expression as the reflection of a specific attitude. Hindsight reveals that, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, the revolutinary changes that were then taking place in art, as embodies for example in Harald Szeemann's legendary exhibition at the Bern Kunsthalle in 1969, were not the dawn of a truly new approach to art but rather the last flowering of Modernism as defined down to the 1960s. In that exhibition, a survey of the most advanced and contemporary tendencies in art, under revealing title When Attitudes become Form, it became evident that traditional means of assessment, in terms of hard-and-fast stylistic criteria and definitions of the art work, no longer aplied; this did not, however, mean a free-for-all. All of which did nothing to simplify matters. What had been called in question was not so much the idea of the artwork as its conceptual definition. The exhibition revealed a momentous expanion of the scope of art. In terms of materials and media, but also of content, which now tended to present itself in terms of system and process, with markedly personal and emotionally charged meanings. 'These are 'forms',wrote Szeemann in the catalogue, that have originated not in any preconceived artistic opinions but in the experience of the artistic process. (5)
These advanced approaches introduced new and open-ended definitions of the artwork and gave the artist virtually unlimited creative freedom. At the same time, paradoxically enough, they called for an intensified awareness of qualities of form and expressing, if art was to retain its ability to communicate authoritatively. Greater freedom in relation to the form and content of the work called for a more profound working discipline, and this was now associated with the artist's 'attitude': his or her clearly articulated consciousness. The 'open form'orbited, if you will, around a stable centre of gravity that might be defined as 'creative identity'. From this central vantage point, the whole thing could be called in question at any time, as Lüthi did when he promptly and explicitly mocked the new forms of art in offset prints in which he appeared as Lüthi mit Land-Art , Lüthi als Arte Povera and Lüthi's Concept (all 1970). This is not to deny that, in his own way, he was both fascinated and convinced by the new forms.
I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR
In the context of this dynamic new view of art, it was entirely understandable that in 1969 Lüthi abandoned his first career as a painter and maker of art obects, took up photography and came before the public as a self-portraitist. At the outset of this new career, he produced a series of five photographs taken on the Piazza del Duomo, in Milan, between 11a.m. and 12.15 p.m. on 6 December 1969, in which he appears as outsider, onlooker, passer-by, also-ran and kibitzer. (6) Five times, at intervals of 15 minutes, the artist inserts himself anonymously into the everyday bustle of the Piazza to create a kind of unannounced performance piece. Immersing himself in his surrondings, he becomes part of a social fabric, part of the world's hustle and bustle- from which he simultaneously sets himslef apart, partly through his faintly angelic appearance, but above all through the roles that he assumes. Only in the first role, that of outsider, does he loom into view at the lower edge of the image, clearly marked out as a tragic figure, in the position of a classical repoussoir. Like the identification figure in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, he appears as a youth who gazes vacantly into space and yet is possibly deep in meditation. Caught in an aura of light, he turns aside from the blur of activity, clearly pointing to the blurred, grey backround of the Piazza, the place where his solitude is to be put to the test. Were it not for the eyes, which seem to look both inward and far into the distance, this whit face might remind us of the poker face of Buster Keaton (later specifically quoted), and thus of the clown theme that emerges from this point in Lüthi's career.
Not yet as an over theme, however. In the these images, Lüthi still shows himself as an unworldly creature, mingling with human beings: a surprised observer of their seemingly aimless activity. Seen in the context of this other work of the same period, the artist's intentions seem still to inolve a strong element of playfulness.
This becomes evident in the roughly contemporaneous Sketches, made in collaboration with David Weiss and the photographer Willy Spiller, in which we witness primal, comic exercises in self-discovery, played out between ego and alter ego, in which subtle manipulations of the symmetry and precision of the choreography contrive to obscure whatever differences there might have been t discover. Here, the level is still that of the zany, acrobatic elegance of Laurel and Hardy, or of the instinctive, value-free play of kittens and puppies. Even though to some extent this early ludic element runs through the whole of Lüthi's career, here always comes a point where play becomes earnest. Burlesque mingles with tradegy, and Lüthi begins to operate with an immense and pitiless space in which jest mingles with irony and profounder meaning. As he once put it, 'The knife edge between laughter and tears is my true field of operation.' (7)
The switch was foreshadowed in 1970 when the exhibition Visuelle Denkprozesse (Visual Thought Processes) was held at the Kunstmuseum Luzern. For this, Lüthi created an installation that incorporated his entire wardrob, clothes and shoes, plus a glass showcase containing all his jewellery, official papers, keys and other personal belongings, and postcard stands with postcards of his own sketches and self-portraits. He thus contrived a highly bizarre, metonymic 'presence of his own absence', which seemded at first sight like refusal to appear, or else like an act of exhibitionism, and which simultaneously brought out the latent voyeur inside the viewer. The viewer was free to imagine that Lüthi, so vulnerable-looking in his pictures, so litterally and symbolically denuded, had taken refuge in one bed or another for the duration of the exhibition, to avoid departing into the wilderness like the existentially homeless person in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema. But, aside from the anecdotal viewer-artist relationship, this surprising form of self-exposure also plainly asked to be seen as the inauguration of Urs Lüthi the art figure, who appeared in his subsequent self-portraits as the incarnate alter ego of Urs Lüthi the artist. Seen thus, by making a quasi-sacrificial offering of his own attributes within an art context, Lüthi had declared his 'civilian' ego to be a persona, a mask for himself.
Very much in the spirit of Arthur Rimbaud's 'je est un autre', the narcissistic component of the undertaking is thus simultaneously reflected and perceived as a discontinuity; by which I mean that the ego knows its mirror image to be virtual and not real. And even though the ego cannot always distinguish between itself and its alter ego, the two recognize each other as mutual projections of perception and knowledge. That, drastically simplified, is how it might be; for the psychological and philosophical implications of Lüthi's self portrayals cannot even be outlined here. And, initially at least, the inherent complexities of these works were not worked out to a high degree of definition, since, with all due respect for the fundamental rationality of the artist's procedures, Lüthi's exemplary exploration of the self and the world through self-portrayal was not primarily based on a rigorous concept but largely guided by artistic intuition. The artists Gilbert& George's art was in any sense less ambitious than Lüthi's. not at all, since their artistic praxis, increasingly ritualized and systematically tied into the reality of everyday life, has led, in conjunction with an increasingly radical policy of self-revelation, to a number of impressive and highly shocking brushes with Art and Life. I mean that, by implicitly blurring the identities of artist and motif, Lüthi's approach laid bare a bottomless gulf of ambivalences and plunged the viewer into a maelstrom of confused emotion. This made his personal appearances so effective that he very soon found himself facing the art-world limelight as a star of Body Art.
THE PERSONAL DISSOLVES SO EASILY IN THE TYPICAL
The black-and-white self-portraits of this earliest phase, from 1969 onwards, show the artist as an engaging young man with a harmless penchant for cross-dressing. The mood, somewhere between the Underground camp aesthetic of Andy Warhol and the tristesse of Michelangelo Antonioni's films, was overlaid with vague reminiscences of the existential figures in the films of Jean Cocteau, with their propensity for shifting between worlds. The atmosphere also evokes something like the adolescent Angel of Death who haunts Gustav von Aschenbach, protagonist of Thomas Mann's novella, Death in Venice , Luchino Visconti's film of the story (1971), steeped in the music of Gustav Mahler, affected a wide public with a vague surge of longing for morbid and to some extent androgynous beauty. Another set of associations arises from the cultural image of the 'dandy', awakened by Lüthi from ist fifty-year slumber (8) to enact the ritualized melancholia and ennui of a consistently aestheticized life. All these elements were no doubt present in Lüthi's work, but they ultimately rested on the interpretation of a few images that have attained iconic status: Lüthi weint auch für Sie (Lüthi Also Cries for You, 1970), the ladylike Selbstportrait (Self-Portraits, 1970), Manon as a Selfportrait by Urs Lüthi (1971), and I'll Be Your Mirror (1972) to name but a few. These works underwent a kind of transfiguration, attracting so many individual and collective projections that they acquired an almost mythical status. When Urs Lüthi integrates some of these icons, digitally refurbished, magnified, and adorned with a red aura, in his present-day oeuvre as Trademarks , he is both reaffirming the lasting vitality of these early self-portraits and asserting the lasting relevance of his latest works. At all events, Urs Lüthi the myth soon threatened to outstrip Urs Lüthi the artist. This was clearly apparent in the aftermath of Jean-Christophe Ammann's close-to-the-Zeitgeist exhibition Transformer- Apekte der Travestie, (9) in which Lüthi's contributions included a prominent sequence of twenty photographs under the title The Numbergirl (1973). This multiple panorama of human expression manifestly overstepped the limits of the exhibition theme, which centred on the seductive fascinations of transsexuality; but it made Lüthi into a leading international figure within what was then a highly topical and fashionable artistic genre. Lüthi well knew how to handle this. There had always been a hard edge to his personal explorations of the meaning of life and of the promises of happiness, and gradually he hardened that edge until the whole undertaking began to relate to the ordinary insanity of everyday life. This was inevitable. As early as 1970 he dislayed the announcement Lüthi Is Tougher Than He Appears to Be on a square slab of rubber, which was placed on the floor alongside an iron girder with a handle (total weight equal to Lüthi's own bodyweight) and beneath a photograph of the artist weeping. The photograph of this arrangement, with the elegant figure of the artist himself standing next to it, strikingly reveals the intended juxtaposition of crude mass with living grace. (10) In short, the endless search for a crum of beauty to still an unstilled inner longing was now pursued with an unsparing relentlessness that was if anything intensified by a latent irony; the eyes tended to mist over, even in Lüthi's intervals of colour. All this is no longer a matter of isolated aperçus and scraps of universal joys and despair; for, aside from those relatively few pieces that were conceived as discrete, single images, Lüthi's creative output demands to be understood in terms of a complex of themes that runs through ist episodic structure. Lüthi's photographic escapades present themselves as sequences charged with anecdotal, contextual or atmospheric content; as series or groups of images; as classical diptychs and triptychs; and at times, from Numbergirl onwards, as images within images, with all the multiple ambiguities that this entails.This sequential or parallel arrangement of images, though it observes no specific linear principle, inevitably involves the dimension of time, which, on another level, is activated by the use of photography. This time dimension is significant in a number of respects, since the work interweaves a multiplicity of times as well as themes. There is photographic time, defined by the moment, and there is fictive or dramatic time, which is motifrelated and internal to the image . Add to this that photography always refers directly to reality. Unlike painting, it is, as Vilém Flusser has suggested, not a 'representation' but a kind of fingerprint, in two dimensions of a subject that operates in space and time. (11) The photograhaphic image thus transports a past moment into the Now, posing fundamental questions concernig the nature of present time. These are the basic theoretical principles of photography that we must bear in mind in dealing with the complex ramifications of Lüthi's artistic enterprise. Every time he sets up a photographic image, as he does in most of his works, he addresses fundamental issues of representation and perception. Here, photography retains its inherent illustrative quality, but not its relevance to a moment in real time or to the implicit truth-content of that moment, because the whole undertaking has flipped into the realm of the absurd. But that flip is paradoxical in itself; it always involves a mirror reflection, so that the antecedent situation is always structurally present as a counterpoint. However many times the clowns falls flat, at the end he is left standing, albeit crumpled.
SOME SILLY JOKES IN A SERIOUS MATTER
Urs Lüthi cocks a snook at us,even physically, with his horned cap and his favourite prop, which is something between phallic outturn and Pinocchio's lie-detector: a cardboard nose, in fact. Not that this should prevent us from giving him our attention; for what he enacts for us is nothing more or less than life itself in all ist copious banalities, its wondrous moments and of course its abundance of miseries and disappointments. Or, as Emil Cioran puts it:'life' the majestic kitsch of matter. (12) This is an endless, Beckettian waiting time, with new games to be invented if we are to avoid the gaze of pitiless solitude and inevitable death. We must take refuge in actions, dreams and longings; we must turn to love to provide a meaning for life, whatever. At all events, best to tackle it all head-on and make 'life's little événements' (13) into the subject of an outrageous spectacular that presents the theme of 'all the world's stage' on a (conceptually, at least) Baroque scale. The resulting image sequences cannot sensibly be decribed in words; of course, each individual episode could be described verbally, but the effect would be to reduce its visual openness and complexity to the status of a mere object-lesson. This could still be done when the philosopher George Chrisoph Lichtenberg wrote his commentries on William Hogarth's A Rake's Progress; but with Lüthi the action cannot be so clearly related to conditions in society at large. All the same, Lüthi's work certainly does bear consideration in the context of Hogarth's satirical image of vice, degeneracy and evil; not least because Hogarth himself was simultaneously working on a curious treatise entitled The Analysis of Beauty, another recurrent theme in Lüthi's work. Asfor Lüthi's metamorphoses, in which the youth becomes a man and husband, who no longer has only to reassure himself of his own identity but must reinvent himself as mirrored by a wife, his partner, these must speak for themselves. As indeed they do: for, in the course of his pilgrimage through life's wilderness, a kind of purgatory that compels him to perform many physical and spiritual exercises, Lüthi 'holds up to us a mirror in which we recognize ourselves', as Wilfried Skreiner well says; for,'as we ourselves think, so we shall understand him'. (14) Lüthi is well aware of this, as his brazen stare from within the image reveals. Like Charles Baudelaire, apostrophizing the reader at the beginning of Les Fleurs du mal, he addreses the viewer as a hypocrite but also as a brother and a kindred spirit: one who is as well acquainted as he himself with lower depth of ennui. Ultimately, Lüthi also knows that 'to paraphrase Cioran' botched life is one of the roads to poetry.
However, on this final mission as a Traveller on Love Business, (15) his dream of the dignity of a rackety life comes to rather an abrupt end. The crockery is all broken, and the dream of the sea runs up aganst a wall. There is still room for a few 'silly jokes', but the situation is serious. The artist has even, in a sense, divested himself of his body: suddently he appears, within a photographic context, as a drawing. A naked male stick-figure, led by a clothed stick female. Lüthi takes a new tack, switches media, and presents the two stick figures as a Happy Couple, pleasurably but not too arousingly copulating, in acrylic on canvas. Thus was launched the Adventure of Painting, which initially caused some head-shaking among admirers of Lüthi's previous work; for this deliberate departure from the métier of the photographic self-portraitist not only compromised the visual lessons that viewers had thus far learned to enjoy but looked very like an irresponsible leap in the dark: a decision to abandon what seemed like an unstoppable advance towards the status of a leading figure on the international art scene. It was equally upsetting that this reversion to painting, no one remembered that Lüthi had started out as a painter, coincided with the heyday of so-called 'Wild Painting', though his paintings were conceived in a way eintirely foreign to ist impulsive spontaneity. The initial, sign-like paintings, with their echoes of graffiti, may have contributed to the misunderstanding of Lüthi's role-shift; but he was no opportunist. For, whereas in the 1970s he had captured the Zeitgeist with hair's-breadth accuracy and helped to shape it, in the 1980s he was just a hair's-breadth apart from it; such was the extravagant liberty that he chose to allow himself.
BAR ADRIATICO
To begin with, Urs Lüthi's new painting was as open as the first phase of photographic self-portraits. Anything and everything could be combined. In their own ways, the paintings quoted a whole range of painterly idioms, and exhibited forms of handling derived from the recent history of art. This procedure was eclectic, in the original sense of that term. Lüthi employed it to take possession of an existing medium in the way a person learns a new language, no doubt very much as he had previously appropriated photography as a means to an end. In this sense, Lüthi is not really a full-blooded painter, one for whom the practice of painting suffices in itself: essentially, he makes use of the traditional medium to provide a well-tried and effective form of image. His priority is to find an appropriate pictorial equivalent for his own artistic concerns. And so the ambivalence of his imagery in general is reflected in the ambivalence of an almost unauthentic use of media. The common denominator of all this painting is a very Italian-seeming aesthetic; here, even the vulgar and banal call for no spezial apology. Lüthi has staked out a territory in which this undertaking, like his former ones, manifests itself through a multitude of motifs and expressive forms: from the horny matchstick man, by way of amorphous, abstract colour fields, geometric compositions and Neoclassical nudes, to Photorealist images. And in some images all these diverse idioms mingle promiscuously, overlie and infiltrate each other, as if the images were trying to create themselves from their own inner resources.
At first Lüthi set out to create serial images, but in the paintings the simultaneous juxtaposition of contradictory, mutually undermining or relativizing aspects of emotion, typical of the photographic pieces, gradually resolved itself into a unitary image. The multiple ambiguities of the photographic motifs were translated into the layered simultaneity of the paintings. Ultimately, this is a form of painting that rests on a conceptual design bringing constructive and deconstructive concepts into play against the backround of a motivic repertoire located on the borderline of the banal. And so this classical pictorial medium becomes the instrument through which to objectify those elusive, grand emotions, those universal human longings that always operate on the borderline of unspeakable kitsch, the emotional world of love and death. Distanced from commonplace illustration by the medium of painting, the statement homes in on a level that permits the artist a critical engagement divorce from illustrative self-portraiture. These images thus show a decided intention of finding a contemporary, sythesizing and analytic form, that is to say, a hard form, impossible to ignore, in which to convey the old longings. Lüthi's Operation Painting ultimately led to a thematic and formal concentration that found supreme expression in a show mounted by the Kunstmuseum Winterhur in 1986. This was a brilliant, and decidedly rhetorical, presentation under the titleSehn-Sucht (Facetten eines Selbstportraits): 'Addiction to Longing (Facets of a Self-Portrait)'. In this, Lüthi displayed the wide range of his work as a painter. It was an intelligently conceived and coherent operation, organized into a number of work groups designed to carry the projects of self-portrayal onto a new plane. The group titles (in translation) were Self-Portraits from the Series of Great Emotions; ...Telephone Drawings; ...Great Adventures; ...Dream Couples; ...Painting for an Italian Bar; ...Flower Pictures; ...Vague Memories; ...Heads;...Misplaced Dreams; ...Pure Devotion. These not only offered a kind of catalogue of his motif repertoire but also developed a rich network of dialectical relationships within the sequence of the exhibition. Within Lüthi's work anything was still possible; but painting triggered an impulse towards an increase artificality of expression, manifested in a keener awareness of form in ist dependence on the precise choice of medium. 'To show emotions, first put them into a form' Lüthi said once,'emotion as such still lacks a form'; and the same goes for 'the much-abused concept of poetry'. (16) It follows that Lüthi's world of highly charged emotions, longings and sensibilities exists precariously on a knife-edge, sustained only by the utmost precision of formulation.
By firmly concentrating attention on the central importance of form, Lüthi's painterly phase functions as pivotal point in his work; it looks back to the photographic pieces, redoubling their emphasis on composition and art-historical context, and forward to the Universelle Ordnungen (Universal Orderings), whose apparent hardness it serves to relativize. At the same time, the paintings offer a new interpretation of the concept of self-portraiture. There is now more to this than a work in which the artist appears as both author and subject matter and raises questions about the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity and between subject and object. The situation in the paintings is more intricate than that: we except the artist of genius, and that is still our internalized notion of the artist, to transfer the subjective representation of an outer or inner reality into the real world of the image, expending himself in the creative process and becoming subsumed within his own work. We want to see not the artist but his vision. On the other hand, because the self-portrait involves an overlap between the object-realitity that is to be represented and subject who represents it, this ideally seems to promise us an especially intensive reflection of and on the artist's own reality, conveying to us deeper insights into his character, attitudes and intentions. This is an illusion: even when portraying himself, the artist is purveying an image, a simulacrum, invariably fictive by nature. Whether in Egon Schiele's ecstatic self-exaltations or in Rembrandt's self-portraits, from the early one with the eyes meaningfully shaded (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) to the finely distilled late images (Kenwood House, London), the artist's encounter with his won personality invariably tends towards theatrical self-presentation: role-playing. That is to say, self-portrait, though always solipistic, refers to something general; and this is exactly how Lüthi himself has always interpreted his own role as a self-portraitist. While reading Mies van der Rohe, he found a formulation that corresponded accurately to his own intentions, quoted from the philosopher of religion Romano Guardini:'There is a twofold path to the essence of things: one by way of the unique and specific; the other by way of the enduring and universal. We cannot take the one path without the other. We find the essential in the specific only if we are simultaneously receptive to it in the universal. And in the universal we see the essential only if we also behold it in the specific, unrepeatable detail.' (17) It is this intuitive reciprocity between individual and universal that Lüthi addresses in his self-portraits; for subjective experience is and remains the basis of the objective experience of the world, not necessarily the measure of it, but always the guiding thread. The self-image can be truly appreciated only against the background of its possible antitheses.
SPIRIT, FORM, REASON
With Stolz der Väter (Pride of the Fathers, 1988), Lüthi's creative career once more took a surprisng turn. These five panels confront us with a rigorously geometric form of painting, in elemental compositions named after concepts: Strategy, Discipline, Energy, Success and Progress . The subsequent evolution of the work towards Universelle Ordnungen relfected a new and more rigorous idiom, with a formal tendency towards sign-like forms and also, quite deliberately, towards representation. Painting and photography now made common cause. The idea, Lüthi has said, was 'to pare down the formal language of both media equally, and to bring them closer together. To the point where, for instance, all that remains of paintings an ornament. Photography, too, had to be pared down in relation to subject matter. This led me to paint on the reverse of a sheet of glass, so that the surface was deprived of all the subtleties of a 'beautiful', painterly handling and approximated to the high gloss of a photo behind glass. (18)
Presented in monochrome, with the dry fragility of cracked glass, these critical encounters, with a global sense of the world, with the latent purity of ornament, with the sciences, with the 'inanimate Nature' of money, with death, with love with interiors and not least, of course, with the beauty of women, had a sustained seriousness and a poise that was matched by the artist's return to self-portraiture. Lüthi now presented in the form of dignified bronze busts on classical plinths, thus automatically invoking associations with effigies of monarchs, cardinals of great thinkers. But the pose of power and dignity is relativized as soon as we see that the bust, contrary to their implicit claimto transfigure individual identity and promote it to the level of permanently valid human truth, are formulations of individuality as such. For each of them eternalizes a fleeting facial expression, with an effect of suspended animation that injects a subtle irony into the whole enterprise. These busts are closer to the bizarre 'character heads' of Franz Xaver Messerschmidt than to their antique prototypes, not to speak of the grimaces of Lüthi's earlier years. There is even a distant hint of Bernini, with his unerring feel for momentary expression, or of the precisely drawn heads of Dürer's Apostles in the Alte Pinakothek.
The bronze portrait busts do more than testify to Lüthi's old sense of mischief and his uninhibited taste for absurdity: the ambivalence of this self-presentation may also tell us that the dominant impression of earnestness and rigour is not so much a central theme as a mode of representation adapted to the motif. Faithful to the scintillating multiple ambiguities of his previous work, the artist has simply donned a new costume and adopted a new role. This procedure is repeated in Lüthi's latest complex of work, Placebos & Surrogates, in which he takes up the contemporary visual and psychological culture of brand names, advertising, and promises of phyical and mental well-being, and applies its rhetoric to the inexhaustible theme of contemporary Promised Lands. For all his most daring utopian dreams are now on offer everywhere, day after day, ever more accessible, ever more shamelessly smiling out at us from billboards, glossy magazines and brochures, seductively soothing us from the TV screen. Happiness is not a vague notion any more: it now has a face and a name, a product design and a trademark. Blissful self-realization, the fulfilment of all our longings for total freedom, for beauty and success, for sexuality and love, for fitness and health, and not least also for security, all this seems to be within our grasp at last. All of us are now entitled to clutch at a crumb of the great store of happiness. And if this doesn't work straight away, a growing product and consciousness industry is there to bring us closer to our dream, at least in our leisure hours. We train the body with all manner of machines, comfort the soul with psychotropic drugs and aromatherapy, have treatments for this or against that; or we plunge into esoteric realms in search of self-discovery and the meaning of life. It is always possible to find a placebo (Latin for 'I will please'), a medicament without active ingredients, ist healing power entirely dependent on the user's imagination; or else to find a surrogate, a substitute for the real thing. There must be a solution somewhere: not that we had ever expected to be told so with such precision.
This is where Lüthi the artist takes a hand, and who better, after the purgatory through which he put himself in his early works? Having been trapped all his life in the complex that he calls 'Sehn-Sucht' (an addiction to longing), he is perfectly placed to put today's deluded pursuit of happiness on the right track, and he does this as an artist who is always involved in intricate ways with his own worlds of subject matter. His is an affirmative strategy, approaching matters from the inside. This was already so in his early work: the unmistakable element of narcissism in his work partly arose from a critical self-scrutiny undertaken with the long-term goal of understanding prevailing reality. In other words, the condition humaine needed to be experienced at first hand, in person, before anything could be said about it. The ultimate arbiter, filter and regulatory mechanism of perception is the individual. Since then, this approach has led him to an increasingly conscious attitude that displaces the perspective of portrayal from the particular to the universal and, in the relflective stage of process, refers the universal back to the particular. Lüthi's method bears a decided affinity to that used by Gustave Flaubert's in his witty response to the world's stupidity, both in Bouvard et Pécuchet and in the projected Dictionnaire des idées reçus (Dictionary of Platitudes). Of the latter, Flaubert observed in a letter to Louise Colet:' It would be the historic apotheosis of the accepted. I would show that the majority has always been right and the minority always wrong ... In connection with literature, I would have no difficulty in showing that mediocrity alone, being comprehensible to all, is legitimate; and that originality of any kind is dangerous, absurd, to be pilloried, etc. This apologia for human infamy in all ist guises has the aim, I would say, of putting paid to eccentricities of all kinds, once and for all. (19) This is an ironic and paradoxical strategy for waging war against the platitude; for, in the last resort, as Jean-Paul Sartre points out apropos of Flaubert, the only means available is to enlist the platitude in the service of thought. Even then, stupidity itself passes all understanding.
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE
For his latest projects, Urs Lüthi has provided himself with a 'corporate identity' by adopting a brand label with the sloganART FOR A BETTER LIFE , authenticated by the image of his own head in profile. In this age of total anonymity, he has an artist is prepared to commit to his product. The product in question takes the form of digitally generated, industrially manufactured, gloss-sealed images, which are nevertheless unmistakably artworks: hanging on the wall, they seem suspended in space, bathed in a red aura. They include offbeat panoramas of scenes from the modern leisure industry, seaside resorts devoted to the joys of beach life, or the dizzy delights of winter sports, or the boy-scout wish-fulfilment of vast caravanserais of campers, or the uninhibited conviviality of an Oktoberfest, because happiness has ist own specific place that does not necessarily have anything to do with beauty. Then there are sombre images connected with telecommunications and with the omnipresent machinery of surveillance; these readily combined with images that advertise every conceivable sexual service, but also (in Health) with pharmaceutical remedies presented in a neo-geometric style of imagery, or (in Beauty) with cosmetic colour cards. Not forgetting, of course, the Therapy series, with images captionedSexmachine, Freedom, Happiness, and the like, each announcing its own form of self-fulfilment through a multi-layered grid pattern of colour and text. In the centre of each is a white dot on which, according to the integrated 'legend', we are to concentrate for five minutes every day. All these tableaux are accompanied by the texts of Lüthi's Exercises , such as 'Sit by the seaside and feel like being a wave'; or 'Look at an object as if you would see it for the first time'; or 'Waste your feelings', self-therapy prescriptions or mantras of a highly ambivalent kind, using new banalities to put the images on an extra loop and plug them straight back into the insane pursuit of happiness that is their subject. The artist further underscores the insanity of that pursuit by taking it easy and applying himself, with stoical casualness, to Low Action Games.All the various motifs of the thematic complex ART FOR A BETTER LIFE have ultimately found their way, together with allusions to earlier works and to the vague realm of the artist's private life, plus the aphoristic injunctions of Exercises, onto 150 decorated drinking mugs. Exhibited as part of a huge 'showcases sculpture', these constitute a placebo artwork, in which the split between High and Low, between esotericism and conceptual art, between goodness and truth, if you will, presents itself with a mad perversity that puts any Museum Shop well in the shade. The great emotions are transformed into a commonplace souvenir, which nevertheless still retains something of the magic of a holy relic: an object charged with an idea or a sentiment, a repository of our valuable memories, i.e., ideally, of the impressions of individual experience, which we can pick up at any time as tangible proof of our own past participation in the mystery of Art or Beauty or Happiness. Lüthi's way to a better life through art does not maifest itself in meditative contemplation alone. The aid to living supplied by the visual and linguistic 'exercises' of his work always also has a fundamentally active and communicative aspect that reveals itself metaphorically, with particular clarity, in the many colourful Frisbees on which Lüthi has marked his own therapeutic instructions. First and foremost, of course, these are artworks, which can be viewed as Minimalist sculpture; but each can also function as an image or as an interpretative system, carrying the artist's implicit message into art and thus into the world. So it is not inappropriate to be reminded by the Frisbees of some fugitive moment of hapiness and self-forgetfulness in our own lives, when we were playing on a beach, lost to the world and yet caught in suspension for an eternity.
Lüthi once combined a heart and a brain in a cast-concrete sculpture entitled Portrait Study of a Complete Man : but in this rock-hard comibation of reason and emotion there is no sentiment to be expected or detected. Sentiment, as the sustaining force in his art, proves to be a dynamic factor with ist roots in the in-between realm of ambivalence where Lüthi's work finds ist most authentic realization: somewhere between Hope + Dispair , between Reason + Desire . Perhaps the essential sentiment lies in the elusive and volatile space between images, which for Lüthi often signifies the path between life and death. In RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, we see how the artist is literally kept running between these polar absolutes, albeit only on an exercise machine. His goal is certinly not Death. Unless, that is, the little death ( la petite mort ) of love, as suggested to him by the cover girl, might be the encounter towards which he unstoppably runs on the spot.
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1) All headings in the text are the titles fo works by Urs Lüthi.
2) Lea Vergine, Il cormpo come linguaggioi (La 'Boy-Art' e storie simili) (Milano: Giampaolo Preardo, 1974), n.p.
3) Urs Lüthi, The Complete Life and Work, Seen Trough the Pink Glasses of Desire , exh cat. (Galerie Blancpain-Stepcynski, Genève, Kunstraum im politischen Club Colonia, Köln, Centre d'arts plastiques, Saint-Fonds, München, 1993). The work itself is in the collection of the Lenbachhaus München.
4) Even more fascinating and bewildering is the blend of Art and Life in Lüthi's latest catalogue book: Urs Lüthi, Run for your Life (Placebos & Surrogates) (Lenbachhaus München and Swiss Institute New York, Published by Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2000).
5) When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations, Information, exh. cat. (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969), n.p.
6) Urs Lüthi, in Visulisierte Denkprozesse , exh. cat. (Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1970), n.p.
7) Annelie Pohlen, Fragen an Urs Lüthi, in: Kunstforum International , 63/64 (July-August 1983), p. 99.
8) On this see Beat Wyss, Dandy's Trauerarbeit, in: Urs Lüthi 1990 , exh. cat. (Helmhaus Zürich, 1990), pp. 38-53.
9) Transformer, Aspekte der Travestie, exh.cat. (Kunstmuseum Luzern, 1974). This exhibition was subsequently shown in the Neue Galerie andesmuseum Johanneum, Graz, and the Museum Bochum.
10) Exhibition at Galerie Toni Gerber, Bern, 1970.
11) Vilém Flusser, Gestern. Versuch einer Phänomenologie, (Düsseldorf and Bernsheim: Bollmann, 1997), p. 127.
12) E.M. Cioran, Syllogismes de l'Amertume (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), p.69.
13) Patrick Frey, Gespräch mit Urs Lüthi im Mai 1984, in. Urs Lüthi 'Tableaux 1970', 1984 , exh.cat. (Fontevraud: Abbaye Royale de Fontevraud, F.R.A.C. de Pays de Loire, 1984). This exhibition was subsequently shown at the Maison des Arts, Genas, Maison de la Culture, Saint-Etienne and Centre d'art contemporain, Genève.
14) Wilfried Skreiner, Zur Ausstellung, in: Urs Lüthi 'Bilder 1977' 1980 , exh. cat. (Graz: Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Johanneum, 1980), n.p. This exhibition was also shown at the Kunstmueum Bern.
15) Reisender in Sachen Liebe (1980), the title of one of the last of the Photographic series of the 1970s.
16) Tiefe zeigt sich oft am besten an der Oberfläche: Ausschnitte aus einem Gespräch zwischen Urs Lüthi und Patrick Frey vom 12.Feb. 1991, in Urs Lüthi , exh. cat. (Glarus: Kunsthaus, 1991), p.48.
17) Romano Guardini, Briefe vom Comer See , (Mainz, 1927), quoted from Fritz Neumeyer, Mies van der Rohe, Das kunstlose Wort: Gedanken zur Baukunst (Berlin: Siedler, 1986), p.344.
18) Lüthi and Frey (as not 16), p.50.
19) Gustave Flaubert, Letter to Louise Colet , 16 December 1852, cited from Flaubert, Die Briefe an Louise Colet (Zürich: Haffmans, 1991), p.563.