Vernissage Maria Zgraggen, Collegium Budapest, 12.11.05
Excellency,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It's a pleasure for me to welcome you to this Vernissage of the
Swiss Artist Maria Zgraggen, and I would like to make a few remarks
about her biography and some reflections upon her oeuvre.
Maria was born in Schattdorf, in Kanton Uri, Switzerland. Her main
studies as an Artist took place in Britain at the Bath Academy of
Fine Art, Corsham, where she studied Painting and Printmaking, and
at Chelsea College of Art, London (M.A. in Painting). Further
working scholarships have included Rome, London and New York, and
for the last 9 months she has been Fellow of the Landis & Gyr
Foundation at Collegium Budapest. When she is not abroad like now,
she lives together with her husband Bill Hodgkinson in a remote
house in Kanton Uri in a village called Bürglen.
Now, when I approached the oeuvre of Maria Zgraggen, I came across
the initial mystery that always shows up when we try to understand
people that are drawn into something with some sincerity. When I
asked Maria for her inner drive or motivation, part of her answer
was: "I paint what I see!" (Which is, after a short contact with
her oeuvre, not at all an obvious, or tautological answer.) She
also said that she was interested in Form and
Structure as early as at the age of three. (Of course it
sounds pretty incredible that somebody remembers her interests at
that age, but when you know Maria for a while you can believe it
without hesitation.)
This basic interest in a kind of detached Form and Structure is
encountered in her work everywhere. She furthermore spoke of two
things: of a certain non-verbal or visual thinking, a kind of
research while painting, and of an accompanying special
state, where she is no longer confined to the narrow perspective of
herself but gets, as she puts it, "rid of herself", "wo ich
mich los bin ". Paradoxically she qualified this special state
as a situation of being more alive - a condition that she
doesn't want to miss.
Now, I would like you to join me for a moment in considering these
remarks from a slightly different angle - by quoting two eminent
thinkers who are very remote from each other and both very remote
from painting.
Two days ago, the American historian Hayden White from the
University of California was given an honorary doctorate here in
Budapest at the CEU. In his reply during the ceremony, Hayden White
started with the confession, that he is continually asking himself
why he does what he does - and what the use for this might be.
Especially if, as in his case, he is not dealing with natural
sciences, where proofs and experiments are given to validate the
results.
One could now put this basic problem he refers to - "what am I
doing and why?" - into a more general framework by considering a
remark of the logician George Spencer Brown, who in his book "Laws
of form" from 1969, puts the problem this way. - (And think of
Maria's "I paint what I see.")
"We cannot escape the fact that the world we know is
constructed in order … to see itself. […] But in
order to do so, evidently it must first cut itself up into at
least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is
seen. In this severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is
only partially itself. […] In this condition it
will always partially elude itself. It seems hard to find an
acceptable answer to the question of how or why the world conceives
a desire, to see itself and […] to suffer the
process."
So, why does the world suffer this process of self-mutilation, in
order to see - even if huge parts of it always elude itself?
We not only learn from this that the price of inquiry is partial
blindness, we also see, that our initial, and never ending task in
order to do so is to really cut ourselves out of the rest of the
universe - always anew.
Now, seen in the light of George Spencer Brown we are prompted to
conceive Maria Zgraggen as part of the universe that has cut itself
into at least one state which sees - her - and at least one other
state which is seen - us - Budapest, and above all the things she
paints. And now, her answer to the original question - what
drives her - gets another shape. Her answer is now to be read
as: when I see the world (by) painting it, it is no longer my own
particular subjectivity, I am part of the universe that is
about to split itself - into at least one state that sees and at
least one other state that is seen.
You might infer that this - one could say - "space-mission" of
self-awareness is not only a condition of being that one doesn't
want to miss for long, once one has experienced it - (a kind of joy
or addiction- becoming MORE oneself in becoming less oneself - that
also scientists experience in their inquiries, for sure many of
those here in the Collegium), it is above all a highly non-trivial
task.
Lets see now why this is non-trivial - by having a closer look at
Maria's Oeuvre.
An interesting question - and maybe a key one - is to find out, how
this place, Budapest, has influenced her work. And as far as I
understood it was in at least a threefold way. First, it influenced
her technically. The acrylic colours that she found here showed a
completely different behaviour from the ones she had worked with
before. So she found herself in the situation of a chemist coming
to Hungary, making the same experiments as in his home country,
and, to his joy and irritation, coming across entirely different
chemical laws! So she did the obvious and changed the settings of
her experiments, in switching technically from putting several
layers of colour on paper - to now working more with monochrome
painted surfaces, on board for example, and combining them into a
kind of multi-dimensional plane. The result - you can see them here
- was a kind of mixture between picture and object, between two and
three dimensions, and a more collage-oriented style, The second
influence of Hungary to her art was even more fundamental. She,
who, by her own account, could not even write emails (not quite
sure whether that is to be taken seriously), switched to a
completely new medium: the digital camera, and learned to post-edit
these photographs on the computer.
And that leads to the third, most direct influence. The subjects of
these pictures are largely chosen from Budapest. So her oeuvre has
been enriched here with a completely new kind or species of
artwork!
Let me close my remarks by adding my hypothesis, that these
photograph-based pictures are likely to build a bridge to her
entire oeuvre. You might remember that Maria referred to her very
early interest in form and structure. Yesterday here in the
Collegium we made a little experiment. We took one of these
photographs, all of them depicting perfectly familiar objects from
the City of Budapest, and asked the fellows who happened to pass by
whether they recognized the object in it.
No one recognized it - but all of them said when they heard what it
was - oh yes, of course!!! - One fellow made the interesting
remark: "well, I am not used to abstract looking!" - And
this seems to me to be the key.
I think that what Maria Zgraggen's pictures - not only the
photographs - intend and convey - is an awareness of the relations
of forms, colours and structures to each other - in the encounter
with the concrete object. It is indeed a special way of seeing! So,
her inquiry aims at the same generalization within the
particular individual item - as the inquiry of a scientist
would do. In this respect, the interaction between
sciences and arts, that is promoted here at the Collegium, seems a
particularly reasonable arrangement: in fruitful and satisfying
world-cutting!
Thus I would like to encourage you to engage in the special kind of
worldly self-examination that Maria Zgraggen proposes - and to
enjoy the champagne.
Thank you!