Roman Signer: A Careful, Clumsy Grace

Given the topsy-turvy nature of Roman Signer‘s oeuvre, where chaos is an attentively courted guest and disaster is never far away, the immaculate ETH Graphische Sammlung in Zurich’s Swiss Federal Institute of Technology was a strangely incongruous location for “Skizzen und Modelle,” an exhibition of ephemera, models and drawings from the Swiss artist’s career. The show constituted the latest iteration of a sporadic participatory venture that began in the 1960s when Signer began to work with ETH’s hydraulics lab. On the day that I happened upon the exhibition, a soft light was filtering through drawn curtains, intermittently illuminating and shading the gallery’s regal wood panelling.

While the walls of this space were adorned with a selection of loose pencil drawings on paper, a long central table was spread with a plethora of small models. There, I found a tiny suitcase hanging by a rope from a simple apparatus reminiscent of a hangman’s gallows; a small wooden kayak resting on a long, rectangular base, pulled taut at either end by ropes; and a miniature red van waiting precariously at the top of a wooden ramp. The last of these referred to the 2008 performance Rampe, in which a real van loaded with six barrels full of water was freed from its perch when the flame of a strategically placed candle burnt through the small rope holding the apparatus in place. Naturally, the vehicle proceeded to launch itself into an awkward backward-somersault-half-twist before crashing to the floor in a loud mess of water and steel.

This model also recalled other Signer performances: a weight thrown over the side of a tall bridge with a suitcase (attached via rope) quickly following the plunge; the artist skidding along country-road gravel in a kayak roped to the back end of a pickup truck. Through slight shifts of context and strategically deployed doses of nonsense, Signer’s actions breathe exuberant, effortless energy into the everyday, drawing close attention to the expansive physical and metaphysical qualities of otherwise banal situations.

Unsure of whether these drawings and models prefaced the performance works or operated as posthumous allusions to same, my attention was drawn to the persistent complexity of Signer’s process, where deliberate planning and careful execution rub up against clumsy grace. Without losing touch with the energy of Signer’s unapologetic fascination with the world, I felt privy to the connective region between his apparently chaotic gestures and the complex supportive apparatuses that necessarily underpin them.

As with most exhibitions that see process work and promotional material presented in close company with the things that we conventionally think of as works of art, “Skizzen und Modelle” confused the borders between fetishistic consumption of ephemera, interested anthropological presentation, and appreciation of historic items as intriguing artworks in and of themselves. The intense relationship between Signer’s models and the life work in which they are embedded, enhanced by the context of this extraordinary space, afforded the works a manifold phenomenological presence.

www.gs.ethz.ch