LORI HERSBERGER

The work of Swiss artist Lori Hersberger is radically eclectic and draws it’s inspiration from an expanded and inclusive vision of culture. The artist has made work using media as diverse as video, sculpture, performance, painting, and neon.

Hersberger’s video installations combine tumultuous visuals - usually radically re-edited excerpts from movies with thunderous rock soundtracks - presented within disorienting settings lit with colored spotlights and scattered with elements as diverse as smashed-up cars, hay bales, electric guitars, and shattered mirrors. The videos often string together ‘edited highlights’ of Hollywood mayhem such as car chases, shoot-outs, and explosions. By lifting these excerpts out of the context of the film’s storyline, the artist pushes to the forefront the narrative of pure nihilism that keeps us glued to the silver screen. We are reminded of Freud’s ‘death drive’ the contradictory attraction toward violence and destruction that only increases as culture ‘progresses’.

Alongside his video works, Hersberger originally became know within an international art context for his carpet installations, most familiarly the floating platform ‘Archaic Modern Suite’ at the Arsenale during the 1999 Venice Biennale. These pieces are made up of an accumulation of different colored, sized and patterned carpets, laid out on the ground over an expanse in overlapping, semi-geometric formations.

The installations operate on a number of different levels. Formally stunning, they resemble a cross between a thrift store sale, an hallucinogenic vision of ‘The Orient’, and a 50’s-modern fabric design. At the same time, having been sited in often marginalized or transitional public areas, such as the water shed in Venice and the courtyard at the Academie der Kunste in Berlin, the pieces do create genuine communal spaces that invite visitors to walk on, sit down and chill for a while. What separates the pieces from similar attempts to draw viewers into a sense of their own sociality (by artists like Dan Graham or Liam Gillick) is Hersberger’s sense of humor. The ‘social spaces’ his carpet installations create is shot through with a high degree of self-consciousness - a wistful look over the shoulder toward the utopian 1960’s of love-ins, communes, and hashish-fueled fantasies of Marrakech.

Hersberger’s painting installations also manage to self-consciously - yet enthusiastically - embody a position our sometimes jaundiced cultural climate doesn’t allow. Their coloring of fluorescent oranges, greens and pinks, their light-handed, almost dilettante use of gestural marks, their stoned ‘refusals’ of the limits of the canvas all represent a rediscovery of painterly freedom as channeled through a very utopian narrative of the free. Their melodramatic and often humorous titles (“Bohemian Rhapsody”; “Behind The Nylon Curtain”; “Time was an Idiot”) emphasize this, riffing as they do on the theatrical freedoms of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not that Hersberger intends to ironize the notion of unmediated expression, rather his aim is to be upfront about the myths threaded through a construct such as painterly freedom, and yet continue to celebrate that liberty, myths and all - celebrate it anew.

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