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lf it were possible to fade out memories and to feel completely
unfettered, i.e., freed from the weight of everything that
has happened until now, like a person who, unfoundedly, feels
alienated, then rooms filled with Bruno Gironcoli's works
would simply appear to be a place where the present is concentrated
in strange ways. That these do not exist elsewhere could first
go completely unnoticed. To what extent archaic and futurist
aspects merge cannot be determined. Such ascriptions would
simply make no sense since no questions regarding this can
be posed. Since everything remains immobile, that is apparently
the same, time only appears by way of varying light conditions,
as an illumination of forms. What is visible could take place
anywhere and anytime. All sense of proximity has been eliminated
without the consequence being strangeness and distance. Thinking
and imagery unite in an almost fictive way, driven by their
contradictions, by the counterforces of each and every civilized
state. The objects cannot even be grasped as an intermediate
stage; for this they are too voluminous and have been manufactured
with too much precision. Their smooth surfaces declare them
as something finished, they could be taken for factory-made
products, for which no one has any real use. Their variations
manifest unknown processes that have nothing to do with demand
and supply. These objects create their own, circular, self-interrupting
continuity. One thing leads to the other but does not become
obsolete by this. Visitors and beholders alike are only sporadically
called for. While people do not disturb, they might sense
how superfluous these and other types of reality make them.
They are incorporated at any rate, as soon as these things
preoccupy them. The author does not want to attract attention
- neither by presence nor by special skills. He has time.
He is concerned with something constitutional, as condition
and physical structure. Movernent is the fiction that lies
beyond this. What is produced could just as well survive in
a storage room until it is, some day, taken out.
But this is about everything which could give one hopes for
other states. Gironcoli reacts with every form of intervention
he is capable of - through concentration, waiting and trying
things out. There is analysis and conception without any perspectives
being assumed. This neutrality asserts more than it relates.
The only thing that has to do with the future is, at best,
the impression that artificial intelligence is at work here.
It is not indebted to anyone for more legitimation, it tests
certain possibilities, without hardly worrying about being
accepted. What could result from all this simply emerges step
by step. Impulses serve to reinforce or to vanish, form results
from fragments without there being need for construction plans.
There is something artificial in the sense of a feeling or
emotion that is at work here. Untapped storages set free ideas,
filters are switched on and off, images become clearer or
increasingly blurred. What is diffuse seeks provisional forms,
coherency evolves from transformations. The resulting accesses
to virtual worlds are still material ones, in some way antiquated
but at the same time transformed, artificially cool. The ego
looks on, amazed at its parallel and hypothetic identities,
and at some point says: finished, since it knows that it can
refute it all so as to be able to pur ue sornething for a
while.
Gathering material for discourse and argumentation on Bruno
Gironcoli's work by constructirig faded memories, non-chalantly
accepting alienation and making assumptions on artificial
intelligence can only halfway do justice to the subject and
person if such an approach is immediately interrupted and
enriched by other perspectives. To avoid a simplistic understanding
in the process it makes sense to bring up the subject directly,
as for instance through recourse to an apodictic conclusion
drawn by Max Horkheimer: The way people are today, they understand
each other only all too well. If they would once begin to
not understand each other anymore, neither themselves nor
the others, if the forms of their communication would become
something suspect to them and what is natural would become
unnatural, then the horrible dynamic would at least come to
a stillstand.1 Whether this appears antiquated in view of
meanwhile radically different conditions of communication
or not, this creates a connection between latency and time.
Such demands could also stem from a medieval mystic seeking
other forms of communication as an alternative to an indifferent,
pseudo-active acceptance of the inferno described above -
in prayers, in silence. Cursing as something liberating is
a related counter-impulse, something that frames everyday
phenomena. As such they are repeated, both in the sense that
one becomes used to how difficult it is to convey many things
and in the development of functional, ambiguous, playful,
consistent or less consistent idioms that expand their repertory
of signs, before falling silent again and again. Disturbances
and interruptions are key aspects of any understanding, even
if dissent is no longer central. It has long been clear that
normal communicational distance and apathy are not linked
to the course of the world and its objects, whether Horkheimer's
people or others understand each other or not. Not even what
they experience creates links or something binding. What remains
valid is the refererence to destructive, paradox conditions,
including the ever-recurring preoccupation with autonomous
forms of communicative and non-communicative action, to which
also its negation belongs.
Processing what could not be known yet
Bruno Gironcoli was born in a time in which non-understanding
was conjured up, a collective, inimical euphoria - one by
no means shared by his immediate surroundings. This movement
had approached a maximum of organized consent, following the
preceding low. As a consequence, this civilisatory rift, which
he, too, experienced, every assertion of continuous progress
has since been linked to an ultimately impossible state of
being able to remember and wanting to forget. With its monstrous
dimensions this rift remains inconceivable and undepictable,
and was also experienced as such. Nothing can be shown in
this connection. Everything general mocks the singular. It
is impossible to liberate oneself from it. Be that as it may,
the presence of signs which he assimulated as a child (in
Carinthia and, in part, in Frankfurt am Main) and pictorial
emotions left such a strong impression on him that traces
of them still surface in his work today. Here we are not confronted
with a reaction to a latent intention to renew happy moments
but to a complexity in which such desires and stereotypes
can no longer be recognized. What is unfathomable in events,
including horrible experiences, is present at any rate, even
if there are no direct references to them. In conversations
and texts, he refers to such impulses only reluctantly, refusing
to feign affliction, to counteract far-reaching references
and an equal status of existential situations. Instead he
emphasizes that perceptions recalled are of the same importance,
as a sculptor coming from the thousand-year past of Chinese
and electric ages - at least - as design.2 Such a statement
is both a defense strategy and a subversive distancing of
onself, a way of protecting larger perspectives and one's
own minimum possibilities. Here it is insinuated that memory
involves such complex, intertwined mechanisms as storage and
processing that it is not possible to make any direct connection
to the concrete work. With regard to suffering (or ist absence)
that is experienced or has otherwise become conscious such
a transposition would not make sense, and at best only simulate
affirmations. Nevertheless, processes of translation do take
place. Thus clear connections to history cannot be deduced
anywhere, if there is not any knowledge at stake. Its relics
and the meanings ascribed to them become an intrinsic, idiosyncratic
assertions on how the general and the individual are forever
in conflict in an obscure, only sometimes accessible way.
Every experience and every object is something unique. Forgetting
and the desire to forget are not confronted with admonitions
but with silent signs. Speaking is left to decide what is
to be the subject of speaking.
That something can appear once cheerful, once desolate, that
something makes sense, no sense and is simply non-sense can
entertain special relationships to something else - not as
opposition or lack (as this was, for instance, actualized
by Gilles Deleuze) 3 - is accepted as a prerequisite of life
and work without too much mitigating irony. Surface and depth
are not dealt with as if they existed separately of each other.
It is clear that there can only be access to non-delimited,
multiple layers if there are differentiations, i. e., when
sornething is identified and related to something else. In
terrns of form and formlessness, separate dependencies of
thinking on action result; causes break away from the original,
reconstructions of such processes would always bring forth
something else. What is signifkant about the selected procedures
is that sacral and political symbols, with their interpenetration
and popular connotations, as trivial and innocent parts resurface
as if they - and the related structures - had been subjected
to a process of demythologization. They are long not needed
anymore, yet they are still there. That is to say, nothing
can be completed. lf they trigger memories, then they do so
challenging the substratum of all mnemonic potential, the
difference of meaning and referent, the exaggeration which
has become debris. However, all of this is a matter for others,
since the object itself no longer asks anything at all. Instead,
it draws its provocative effect from simply waiting.
To suggest that Gironcoli makes a horrible dynamic visible,
as is often done, when he is cited in connection with nature
endangered by technology, machines, power, would unrightly
reduce him to a role of aestheticizing usufruction. His work,
aloof of concepts, seeks other insights. He does not experiment
anymore. He sticks to what he knows, yet he breaks away from
it, working with inaccessible idioms of reality. In any case,
I see no indication of this sort of critical stance which
thrives from its own dubious ideas of harmony. lf at all,
then such ideas are tackled without minimizing what is evident,
but also without lamenting losses or benefits lost, say, of
sensuality, individuality, happiness, which would imply that
it was once better or could ever be better. The metier selected
has its own complexity. And Gironcoli has his own, to boot.
What is created proves what he is capable of. lt has to do
with presence, mental presence would already be too dramatic,
not material enough. Which fields of reference come to bear
is decided in a highly personal way without anything personal
having to become visible. His obstinate, autistic approach
becomes something counteractive, in the early years as timid
revolt, reserved aggression, sporadically interspersed by
sadism, perversion, penetration, but at the same time also
more distanced. lt is based on soft and inconspicuous forms
to express aggression and to combine elements in unforeseeable
ways. Readily available - that is, allegedly poor - materials
have interested him from the beginning. What confusion of
ideas each is based on slowly emerges in a process which takes
the pressure off time and dispels it. Pertinent laws must
again and again prove their worth anew before a codex can
evolve. The individual work is met with skepticism, and what
counts more are the processes. Consummation is no theme. The
parts precede the whole. They determine how they fit together.
What is perceived, what can be perceived is determined by
how the individual parts are assembled. Freedom from disruption,
fear, blocks is more important than a preoccupation with the
final product, with death since every form of life by necessity
remains incomplete. This cannot be shown, only worked out.
The related speechlessness requires form to ake concrete what
cannot be made concrete in any other way, that is, to document
that a lot of things are simply not possible. Contents result
without their specificities having been formulated with sufficient
precision. This also means that accompanying sentences must
come to terms with their dubious nature. Arrogance in the
face of banalities does necessarily make them any more substantial.
An allusion can allude to something. For instance, in Gironcoli,
notwithstanding all intwinements of strangeness and familiarity
as reflected in his approach, the following can be noted:
force, even with regard to emotions is never only a matter
of others. We are still dealing with causes and their negation,
with sequences, differences, meanings, only that the ways
in which they appear and interrelate are subject to constant
change.
Since he limits himself to the essential, a lot becomes clearer.
Since he does not excuse himself by saying that he cannot
know what he is doing, there is a vexing openness. The hermetic
and static quality of his forms also is no contraction. lt
protects what is hidden from being encroached on. Yet it also
states that something not immediately visible requires a constant
preoccupation with it, as a potentially subversive activation
of memory. To point to something would exclude one's own perpetrator-victim
potential. To tell a story would bespeak naturalness and artificiality
the effects of which would be subject to the influence of
an agent. To represent something would introduce movement
in a situation calling for consolidation and observation.
All of this is replaced by an approach based on perseverence
which does not speculate with deliberate absurdity but rather
challenges absurdity by enhancing it, making it recognizable
as such by keeping it on kilter. What results is a separate
image of the state of affairs. What cannot be known yet is
processed. Explanations have a rough time since they are supposed
to have a hard time, but does by no means implies that they
are superfluous. An art that seeks to completely evade concepts
and an understanding is not his bag. Nevertheless its substance
resists being transformed into texts. The spheres are different
without such differences requiring a pathetic distance. Lightness
is not regarded as an inferior category. The categories themselves
are lured into traps. What is general becomes special, what
is special becomes general. With the overlappings of commonplace
and universal being seen and acknowledged as family similarities.
Nor can anything definitive or reassuring be derived from
the big words usually employed, either. Since a lot is kept
silent in Gironcoli's work, more casually and without a mise-en-scéne
of a final silence, it becomes part of a reality which cannot
simply be obscured by diverse forms of consensus.
Something that simply sits there, silently vegetating
A lot of what has been said up to here could be delegated
to the realm of overall arguments where precision is constantly
confronted by new revisions. As a generalization this always
holds for something that could not be implied. lf it comes
too close to the special, it makes itself superfluous. Linguistic,
i. e., formal precision can make something become more understandable
but also less understandable. The observation of sequences,
of sequences and cross-references, which provide other accesses
to Gironcoli's silent aesthetic could possibly free us from
this antagonism. My goal was an aesthetic one, he says so
resolutely that glib comments are suddenly left there alone,
and then slowly intensifying his remarks to eruptive categorical
statements he goes on to say: I was always only able to find
an answer to this world by means of the object. / I was only
concerned with something exclusive without a lot of gestures,
with something that was to be as simple and still and unattractive,
so rough and jagged as possible. / I always wanted to find
something that is completely at home in its silent aura and
does not show anything indicating the outside. / I was interested
in finding beauty in something which has its existence without
a lot of articulation. / I was always interested in the phenomenon
of production, this immediate process und not the indirect
one of interpretation. / My consciousness and my aesthetic
desire have created a tendency toward silence, toward things
which lead to silence by virtue of their simple surface. /
I was not after expression. I was interested in the sculptural
idea behind it, that is, a certain silence and rigidity consolidation.
4
The conciseness of such selected statements, however, negates
the nuances of what led up to them, of what else is at work
here. Secondary matters ultimately have the same importance,
for instance, when he indicates how interested he is in the
most ordinary things: In department stores I kept looking
at plastic cups, Vim and A TA bottles, soap dishes, boxes;
that is, all sorts of things that are not indicative of a
luxury world but are used by people in everyday life. I was
touched by all of this. / I tried to find something grand
on a small scale. / I was impressed by how such things construct
their self-awareness in the world with their thin walls. /
Even though this is not interesting design at all, really
the worst, it has something intrinsic and this is what I tried
to unearth. / Children's toys also have such a quality of
the object-like, the selfmade and purchased things. Almost
all things of the world were modelled after them. There are
dolls, cars, planes, Christmas trees. What is available as
something that can be reproduced is reproduced. My silent
world shows instances of this. You simply have to find them
again, to reencounter them in their realization. / Only: at
that time I was not interested in design. In my thoughts,
in my dreams I was much too unbourgeois that I could have
tolerated a restoration of bourgeois demands. This, in a sense,
is strange. Where I hung out everything was withont quality,
that was the crummiest exploitation of an idea, but this I
liked.
The phase of the first exhibitions (1967, Galerie Heide Hildebrand,
Klagenfurt / 1968, Super-Design, Galerie nächst St. Stephan,
Vienna, with Roland Goeschl, Hans Hollein, Oswald Oberhuber,
Walter Pichler) alluded to had been preceded by years of dogged
experimentation. He pursued drawing after nature up to an
extreme point, in constant preoccupation with van Gogh, with
Giacometti, in spite of the fact that figuration was taboo
at that time. After dropping out of school and working as
an apprentice at a metal-processing company in Innsbruck,
he began to paint and to study on and off at the Vienna University
of Applied Arts. Today he describes his dogged study of his
own possibilities as a largely autodidactic process. First
he tried copying things, then he drew mainly heads for years,
yielding to his tendency to the concrete, until this sort
of observation had been sensitized to the extreme that he
was no longer able to bring forth anything else. Finally he
had only been able to come up with drawings which attempted
the concrete in view of the model but at the same time raised
questions of life in an expressive idiom, fairly wild drawings,
as he says, parallel to his work but increasingly detached
from the context of his aesthetic emotions. The head drawn
perhaps one, two hundred times was actually almost my last
drawing, he now claims, as a step to systems of reference
in space and to the sculptural side of drawing, that is, the
attempt to develop what is affable. I am not disputing the
fact that pictorial solutions have remained important to him
as a two-dimensional condensation of multi-dimensionality,
but only bringing them into perspective with the earlier phases
of his work. The experiments in which he skillfully mounted
metal pieces into the pictures like a craftsman encouraged
him to make the step from painting - which I never siicceeded
in, as he states, because he liked the primings much better
than the resulting picture - to sculpture. This then led to
his main preoccupation, namely creating formations. The early
polyester works are Heads (1964/66) as well as the Wire Sculptures
(1960/64, exhibited at the Museum des 20. Jahrhunderts, Vienna,
1970) are caricature-like drawings referring to the head in
which he seeks to conquer an open space and a spatial atmosphere
to surround it. The desire for something simple became increasingly
pronounced for the very reason that what he created always
appeared insufficient, measured against the art views of his
time and his own values as split subject. He discontinued
a number of experiments since repetitions could not have been
pursued, since in such a way too little was said about this
world, if such a thing can he represented at all.
He finally became tired of using the head as a model. Proceeding
to work with forms - those - of others and of himself - he
suddenly saw their assimilation to pieces of furniture. He
then turned to sculpture and the theme of the surface, as
it is addressed in the clothes closet, closer to silence,
to immobility, away from the automatic dynamic of drawing
towards something that rests in itself, that exists without
a lot of articulation. That is to say, it stems neither from
a new expressionism nor from the abstract image, which seemed
moot to him at the time. His statement on this today: If one
looks at the thousand or odd shapes of closets today that
people have developed, there are some that raise the issue
why they, in particular, have become closets. They could have
become something else, for instance: sculpture, vitality,
as he emphasizes, would result from the designed surface with
its surface dynamic, symmetries, in turn, could show how something
vegetates silently before itself: only in this shabby design
does the aesthetic assume its full value.
Waiting for movement
I was looking more for a sound, not abstraction, is a further
comment, I didn't want to make anything what others had already
done; I wanted to hit upon my world and questions that are
still unanswered for me. I will have also wanted to design
the lost image of man without using it for this. That he reflected
a lot on existentialism and the Frankfurt School - this reading
of materialism / the interpretation of the second line of
socialism / this was dear to me / Adorno interested me very
much - is brought up and is also seen as related to his occasional
attempts to add something verbal to his drawings and sculptures
and to provide information on the points of departure for
his action have. Ort a number of occasions, this has prompted
persons writing on him to apply seemingly fitting expressions.
Ultimately, though, as he believes today, the objects protect
themselves, since such a thing is also an expression of the
times and of a certain helplessness of a verbal statement
vis-a-vis the issue of sculpture. Nothing can be changed in
the mental points of departure anymore, only in the way one
relates to them. But nothing more. They simply imply more
than that the collected experiences cannot be detached, just
as the theoretical focus has shifted from politics and economy
to the aesthetic realm and political alternatives have been
deconstructed, first in the highly developed system of the
commodity economy, which has remained more a residual variable
than a winner, then everywhere where its expansion is worthwhile.
From the formal expressive qualities it can be concluded with
a certain logic that an aesthetic serving this rational-irrational
economization is neither provided material in the strict sense
of the word nor with conversation material. Something insular
emerges which wants to remain by itself, without indulging
in such an isolation. Nevertheless the self-defined realm
provides enough space for diversity. As much as a specific
economy is included as a decisive force, he hardly yields
to the general laws of his sculptures and drawings when making
and using them. This he does less out of refractoriness than
out of a disinterest with regard to these mechanisms and their
limited scope.
My judgement is that already early there was a hidden indifference
and humor - a stoic element - shimmering through in the desolate,
tormented dimension of his work. This interplay of exaggeration
and reduction becomes clearly recognizable at the latest when
a change in consciousness is brought on from the outside.
He only shares this change to a certain extent, since such
self-analyses were not possible for him. When he was younger,
all of those things happening around us in life scared (him)
much more than now. Since he is now inereasingly often checking
whether what he perceives is right, a sort of serenity becomes
visible which is also reflected in his work, only it, when
related to himself, is usually taken to be a brutal tiredness
which he often shows. The scuIptures and drawings insisting
on waiting, waiting for movement to be halted, for the fulfillment
of desires, for a potential not yet tangible, meets with reserved
approval. Only my waiting - as he says to relativize this
- resembles more the waiting of a snake which is irritated
by a source of light and does not know what it should do;
it stays where it is and is run over by a car. This waiting
is not a well-considered, speculative waiting; with me it
is more a nervous waiting, a helpless gesture. Related to
this is also the fact that electricity or gas is addressed
in a number of works but never actually used. lt is never
sure whether switches, plugs, faucets, pipes and tubes actually
function. The threatening appearance only makes a dilapidated
impression. At the same time it seems to be a waiting for
energy and a fear of unknown consequences. Ultimately, though,
this symbolism is certainly more complex and not just an analogy
for fear of a thunderstorm. Its function as the moral theological
place to remember one's bad conscience, since thunder and
lightning were, for the longest time, regarded as premonitions
of the Last Day has been eliminated through our knowledge
of electricity (and the lightning rod). 5 Yet there are repetitions
of such situations in the sense that we are vulnerable to
existing energies, as such energies are set free. On this,
Gironcoli states laconically that he basically sees himself
as a drive unit, as an operator of mechanical vehicles, which
he activates in the form of an idea. The processes are mechanical
as dependencies in the mind, not as objects themselves. Movement
does not really have to take place, it only has its own multilayered
possibilities. For him, power is thus a flashy metaphor, an
image for many things, as, for instance, weapons, in a figurative
and in a literal sense, since the threats acquired through
expanding fields of activity have made man a hermophrodic
being with a passion for prostheses; his insights are usually
based on the forced confessions of others. Since a lot is
also derived from the realm of eros he cannot, and also does
not want to, touch on this explicitly, since, in his pictures,
he often very much pursues a sort of pornography dribble.
For him, power is also a very primitive process of hypnosis.
To wait for it is like the player waiting who says from the
outset, I won't win anyway, I simply wait to see what happens.
And these plugs do not represent a global connection, they
are not intercommunicative, but rather the forgetting of such
things. I do not plug something in to get a reaction but rather
to state how nice it would be if all of this would happen
but at the same time how dangerous it is ifyou do it.
It does not, however, necessarily follow that waiting, at
some point, will provide a certain relief, that is, that wildness
will go away, nervousness become patience and a compulsive
search for perfection become rampant. Gironcoli subverts the
mania to make everything consummate, by leaving everything
more or less unfinished. A rough and fragmentary streak that
leads to the smooth and closed, and heavy can still be noted.
Matter becomes dense. Volume and weight increase. Whether
we are not really facing hollow bodies does not become clear.
The skin is important. Colors underscore the fact that other
materials would have been desired, conceivable but not necessary.
Their metallic tendency, first with lead, zink, silver tones,
anticipates the later talk of leaden time. 6 The ever-more
dominant bronze layer, that can even become a gold color,
breaks with this, without giving up a shabby impression. Finally,
aluminium is used to bring coldness, heat, light and reflections
to the surface for possible final versions. Associations with
genetic engineering could result, but they are produced by
the observer and his/her biases. The embryonic, doll-like
quality of the figures often mounted in vegetative or technical
formations is closer to the provisional than some unknown
new state. It suffices that still unformed potential rests
in the unfinished. More precision would not yield anything
at the moment. That man might vanish like a face in the sand
on the seashore (Michel Foucault) 7 could be cited as an implicit
counterthesis to this. Claude Lévi-Strauss was not
reluctant to pinpoint it in clear terms: The world began without
man and will end without him. 8 With its dimensions time seems
to provide protection against such a drama. An aesthetization
of the apocalypsis only encourages habituation. Gironcoli
is not interested in this.
His realm of considerations is perforce a feminine one, with
the pale, reactive presence of the male whose phantasies seem
to feel how dependent he is and how aggressive and compensatory
his way of dealing with them is. To what extent an accompanying
madness is genuine or feigned cannot be determined. However,
it does become clear that someone is instinctively working
against so-called self-interests. One can then surmise, even
if only vaguely, variations of a complex, tormented and unknown
eroticism, also of thinking, with hybrid forms whose coherency
is dependent on a outer shell. As a sort of climatic given,
it becomes evident that sexuality is a basic form of misunderstanding
and thus also of understanding, drawing its intensity from
communion and separation, accompanied by emotional excesses,
ersatz acts, concealed secrets, with jealousy, rivalry, exhaustion
and uncontrollable ramifications. For what can be determined,
what allows itself to be determined, becomes negation. This,
alone, brings forth constantly new approaches. The tension
remains since the resulting elementary, combinatorial signs
do not seek to free themselves from analytic rationality and
the real. However, many things can only be expressed in a
provisional manner or in non-verbalized idioms.
This even becomes clear in his approach to things themselves.
In each case, it will depend on the final place of installation
whether the provisional is sufficient or whether aluminium
casts have to be created. Until this point, he lives with
the works lying around in pieces, as in a deserted storage
house, which is full to the brim. Its atmosphere resembles
Rod Steiger's Pawnbroker more than any clear arrangement.
9 The ordinary and the not-so-ordinary relate in such a natural
way since - like at a second-hand dealer - the valences are
equal or have been changed. Only through ideal recycling and
final mounting are suggestions made regarding new nuances
and combinations. Gironcoli is interested in reconstructing
and reformulating requisites and high-flung imagery, not in
the direct use of some found objects. What can be used again
from recognizable objects proves, and assesses from his point
of view, to what extent meanings and concepts change depending
on their function: household objects, buckets, receptacles,
loudspeakers, ears of corn, the edelweis, wine leaves, grapes,
light bulbs, photos, war material, dogs, monkeys, sheep, birds,
plumbing, cutlery, airplanes, death's-heads, machine parts,
grids, a Madonna, pillows, mirror, dolls, the swastika, a
heart, high-heeled shoes. The often appearing squatting man
defines the dimensions, but at the same time it remains completely
unclear what he is up to in this setting. Yet references to
it and its devices exist, precisely because he appears as
a template, shell, silhouette. The observer and what is observed
relate to each other, whether this is intentional or not.
Gironcoli sometimes refers to him as apprentice or Robert,
sometimes also as Murphy, simply like that, with the vague
reference that one can find seemingly exhausted sentences
referring to him in Beckett, such as: There is no Mrs. Murphy
- and elsewhere - The window was not lit, but this did not
reassure them, since they knew how addicted he was to darkness
- with the repetition a few lines further down - No sound
came from Murphy's room but this did not reassure her, since
she knew how addicted he was to silence, so as to remain in
it for a long time. 10
The thing in space, not action
Up to this very day, Bruno Gironcoli sees such persistence
as being completely typical of his approach, his limitation
to formal categories, which means categories belonging to
the object world. Direct human involvement leading up to action
was thus excluded, very much in opposition to the situation
in Vienna at the time with the provocative actionism of Nitsch,
Mühl, Brus. The claim to, and the work with, such simple
possibilities, with dust, blood, red wine, seemed very logical
to him. He himself, though, was more interested in the autistic
quality of an object reference. That an actionist had to step
into life, with self-assurance and sincerity, in which he
rests and bathes his work, in turn made other things possible
for him, namely to also remain timid in his work. He has concentrated
on the object, not on the possibilities of a person or even
of the body. What mainly appeals to him is the spatial representation
of the actionists. This led him to the sculpture which extends
out over the floor, to his openness of sculpture developed
at this time. In the works shown in 1969 at the Galerie nächst
St. Stephan he uses a sort of gymnastic equipment which does
not intervene in postive forms of life to refer to a history
of sadism, but also to gaffes. The situation of exploitation
and being held captive in a household is dealt with by means
of a pair of shoes on a clearly defined floor with scrub brush,
bucket and tiles. A column with a death's head and table and
lamp becomes a dissecting room for the psyche. A radiator
has been built into a model doll of a woman so as to be able
to make her warm or completely hot, as imaginary game. With
this, he is touching upon a primitive brutalism of life, as
he says today, referring to the conceptual models of Marx
and Freud, reactivated at the time, and to later related theories,
in the sense of a differentiated, advanced analysis of the
causes of psychic deformations. For some time he was very
involved with Joseph Beuys' work because of such connections,
only soon he was not able to follow his digressions into mystic
spheres. His remarks on other artistic positions that were
dominant in these formative phases were also rather defensive.
Claes Oldenburg, for instance, he found too ingenious, Edward
Kienholz too superficial, furthermore he concentrated on a
large theme alien to him. Anselm Kiefer did not touch him,
primarily not with his sculptures, more as a painter with
the paintings processing a certain German milieu. Gironcoli
also could not become involved with concept art: This form
was not possible for me, since it requires a social self-consciousness
to represent and propagate this. In Vienna, he felt an affinity
to Walter Pichler, with his blurring of the boundaries between
sculpture and architecture and his permanent self-description,
only that he ultimately could not see it as something exemplary.
He himself, as he emphasizes, always preferred a sort of big
city life as the basis for his own observations, not as partaking
but as an area of experience. Another person might simply
need to be able to take recourse to specific themes for his
art. What he sees as positive refers more to a now, to moments,
he cannot even think of the names just like that, and art
history only interests him as history. The claim that theory
was deserted, in particular, as a shift from literary premises
to philosophical ones took place, is not seen as a shortcoming
that cannot be discussed but more as a specifically local
phenomenon. In spite of the professional skepsis expressed
here he follows everything that I like in other artists and
what is liked in me. What this actually is cannot be stated
so simply, it cannot be expressed either, for it just appears.
Statements made by artists on their own work and on that
of others are based on a different distance than that of analysts
and observers. lt would be more in line with conventions directed
exclusively at facts to completely negate them, to leave conditions
and motives unconsidered, excluding any additional dimensions
regarding the person and his/her work, as connection and detachment.
To not yield to this would simply mean to not yield and to
ascribe the appropriate significance to artistic intention.
In the zones where meanings, values and sense are constructed,
changed, destroyed, where degrees of senselessness are posited,
where a lot emerged contrary to the low effectiveness of education
and information and wherever a decoding in opposition to culture
must defend its field, the statements and models no matter
how desperate they are, are - in any case - again and again
the only forces that do not succumb to the non-contradictory
sum total of competent or lesser competent views. To describe
something like that as vital places everything else in opposition
to it. Gironcoli, however, sees his position in such theory-formative
processes in a provocatively unflustered way: The sculptor
always is in the happy situation of putting something that
is called into question in a room. It is questioned by society,
questioned in terms of form, it is accepted or it is not accepted,
looked at or not looked at. A sculptor has this old-fashioned
edge. A so-called modern sculptor, however, goes further,
he makes his personal reality converge with those of society,
by offering something for consultation and consumption. Thus
the matter is not brought to fruition in its way but by becoming
dissolved. Since I did not feel the strength in myself to
act beyond my sculpture, I was only able take recourse to
an old-fashioned understanding of the artist, with a relatively
conventional form of sculpture. Nevertheless, his notion of
sculpture had soon become detached from a single coherent
piece. For him sculpture was no longer a bundle of energies
but a surface of considerations spread out over a room, that
is to say, an architecture of reflections. Thus he contributed
to defining contemporary art, be it the thematization of the
artwork in a spatial setting and the elimination of the boundary
with architecture, the question of authorship and related
skills, destruction and reconstruction, the heterogenous and
hybrid, the interest in direct intervention (but in one's
own reservedness vis-a-vis this), the differentiation of object-like
corporeality and the exploration of the mechanisms of memory
and remembrance.11 Instead of constant progression a circular
movement has again and again appeared more consistent to him.
He responded to the elaboration of his notion of open sculpture
with a new condensation. Further production of similar objects,
as he describes this turn, would have led to a series of moves,
which, in a contemporaneous extension into the surrounding
space through offensive positioning and distribution would
have made impossible demands on him. He also did not want
to work on his own retrospective. To be able to integrate
all of his capabilities he, in a sense, made use of the old
static principle of sculpture. He also used something that
he could load with things preoccupying him. In this sense,
he concentrated increasingly on figures, like the ones he
makes now, obsessed with them to varying degrees, that they
should be modern, a contribution to modernity, that is, more
objective. However, the result was again and again, scuIptures
with a completely normal form, their otherness, as he emphasizes,
is probably what no other person can transcend, his personal
emotion in this period. Their size and unwieldiness resulted,
in part, from a revolt against the otherwise so ingratiating
quality of his forms, in part from the spatial possibilities
at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna where he had been asked
to succeed Wotruba in 1977. A new precision and statics, however,
also resulted from the fact that a reconstruction of sculpture
had become possible. The need for further variations vanished,
since the focus on certain basic, archaic themes, not as an
orientation in the past but because of their presence and
recurrence had proven to be exhaustive. For similar reasons,
there was a preoccupation with the ever-same. It always has
to do with a slowing down, with distance. The alarm he felt
over repetitions everywhere motivated him to apply himself
even more. What could not be overcome had to be processed
in references as complex as possible. In such perspectives,
Walter Benjamin's scenario is confirmed: With the rapid speed
of technology, to which an equally rapid decline of tradition
corresponds, the part of collective unconscious, the archaic
face of an epoch comes to light much faster... 12 Thus the
space for memory had to be expanded to provide an opportunity
for perception and reactions. Yet such a gaze also activates
self-examination, in the sense of Bazon Brock's statement:
Not a fascist is only someone who knows that he himself could
have been one himelf. 13
More specifically, the contents result largely from the working
process itself. The preoccupation with an emerging figure,
of which no image exists even in the mind, only brings forth
something through sustained effort - something which defies
any arbitrary predestination. Increasing resolution is dependent
on wilful repetitions, as he emphasizes, and on a constantly
renewed process of having to relinquish oneself as personality.
Which formal wealth is still possible is something which continues
to preoccupy him, for instance, in the interaction of metal
and the comparably more important soft parts supported by
it. Body and software remain visible material, but their transformations
into language, as a matrix for world models, seem tangible.
A short summary of this: I do not make any machines. Especially
the huge sculptures of recent years, those made of steel,
wood and polyester, are often referred to as Untitled. The
artist also sometimes uses simple words or word sequences
such as Large Figure, Maternal Figure, Uterus, Paternal-Maternal
a Fictive Model Idea, The Parents with Two Centerpieces as
titles. The bleakness that can be sensed throughout his early
works where everything which could serve as protection against
forlornness, against fright, against an agonizing normalcy
is absent, has gradually given way - at least this is something
that one could claim - to an attempt to provide himself consolation.
Sometimes he even speaks of a utopia ofself-consolation. 14
The smooth forms, which have been robbed of all meaning, of
the first polyester works resurface, juxtaposing something
to the figural forms. This mix brings forth something that
could be likened to unknown sound structures. These pulsating
blends have consolidated in their visualization, forming complex
surfaces creating bodies, perhaps, as it seems, only temporarily.
They are structures where there could be movement again, they
resemble more independent, self-contained objects. Their static
is necessary, because they comprise the mobility and immobility
of the considerations they are based on so as to gain time,
time also to look closer, to listen attentively, to undertake
further explorations. His persevering presence in the room
is an interruption of processes, a confrontation with silence.
A hardly noticeable, indifferent laughter, awkward, inquisitive
moves, seeking protection - all of this seems to be present.
An increasing number of ornaments allude to a little bit of
generally accessible happiness - one would hardly be able
to grasp one that is greater. At the same time, the drama
of dimensions opposes such a self-sufficiency, without pleasant
details becoming secondary for this reason.
His professional activity as a teacher, bis interest in following
the work of others in bis own thoughts, can be seen as an
enrichment. Franz West, for instance, often cited as one of
his most outstanding students, is thus for him some phenomenon
in this sum of people. He is interested in the open form of
possibility with uncoordinated references to an unlimited,
changing image of contemporary art manifestations which can
contradict, defy each other, but sometimes also do result
in something together. Any indirect, cautious communication,
including observation, is more important to him than interfering
remarks. Resoluteness still results. Even with regard to himself
he claims that he has hardly made any public statements on
his art in the past ten years. As exaggeration he states:
Since then I have never thought about art anymore. The last
thing that preoccupied him had, by contrast, been the question
to what extent a form is not only completely external, i.e.,
everything has to be understood as a surface or from the surface
and under what circumstances and at what boundaries something
exemplary emerges, not just as a controversy between gestalt
and structure or sign or between the everyday in an art context
and art as continuum related to everyday life, but in a much
more ramified sense, as Wittgenstein understood it, from a
diversity of points of departure15 or as Duchamp who wanted
to create something which is neither an artwork nor a functional
object16 or Malevich, Tatlin, Rodchenko with their notion
of the artwork as a thing meaning nothing and having no reality
outside of art17. Or, more recently, Donald Judd could be
named, with bis Specific Objects, for whom a form that's neither
geometric nor organic would be a great discovery, and for
whom a shape, a volume, a color, a surface is something itself.
It shouldn't be concealed as part of fairly different whole.
The shapes and materials shouldn't be altered by their context.
18 Or Bruce Nauman who explicitly stated: what I mean is that
everything ultimately is self-contained, and nothing touches
itself19 or Vito Acconci with his notion of art as an area
which, apart from the name, really has no inherent characteristics20
or ... or ... This could be seen this way, as a reformulation
or accentuation of such intellectual positions, even if ultimately
the opposite, or a mix, emerges, Gironcoli states, with an
interested skepticism vis-á-vis the classification
of his own doing. Rules are not enough, one needs examples.
They are the models for theoretical reflection. In general,
however, the compulsion to ask questions has been driven ad
absurdum for him - especially to introduce questions as themes
in art, in sculpture which have perhaps long been answered
in a valid way. Since I do not see an edge, I also cannot
see beyond it.
Given his reserved attitude he often finds texts on his own
work too pompuous, unnecessarily heroizing. They do not capture
the simplicity of his work (thus this desideratum is at least
documented here). Nothing, not even he himself, could be captured
in a sort of coherent way, with this or that complete oeuvre.
He is totally lacking such a romantic view of totality. Thus,
there are only sequences of what happens in the course of
a lifetime, what can emerge from intransparent situations.
Thus he can only see himself as a fractual being subject to
structure, a being which can, under certain circumstances,
live up to expectations, and under other circumstances, experience
total failures. A notion such as a life's work thus has, for
him, too much humanistic connotation and is oriented to a
fictive salvation and closedness. The only space in which
some things can still be brought together thus lies inside
the cranium, since it is from here that thinking is deployed
in images, and spaces emerges if being incorporated in sensual
sensations of the body is also accepted. To make at least
some of this visible has to yield to a constant urge to attempt
this. In his case, this again and again leads to structures
formed by considerations based on the craft, structures which
become concrete in the elaborate conglomerations of things
he has conceived of and made. They mark a sort of intermediate
state, as fragments, as an expression of ideas and reactions,
with the tension between the final product and the unfinished,
between the consolidated and the still-evolving becoming evident
in a very specific way as the presense of a diversity of intensities.
When Bruno Gironcoli goes public with his works, then he does
not, as he sums it up, present anything greatly different
from what has already been prepared, simply sculptures with
a certain appearance, with specific themes, which are not
just intrinsic to these sculptures - and there is not more
to it than that.
An alleged hermeneutics proves to be a complex openness.
Mass and size bear something fragile in them. Something smooth
can also be unsymmetric and appealing. Which recalls intimacy.
A nylon bag is form enough for many. The object present in
the room makes something else invisible. Mere contradictions
have become something natural so as to not be dependent on
aspects of non-verbal thinking.
|
Bruno Gironcoli: Ohne Titel, 1994
- 1995/97 |
Bruno Gironcoli: Entwurf zu Polyesterfigur,
1965 |
Bruno Gironcoli: Entwurf zur Veränderung
von Säule mit Totenkopf, 1971 |
|
