Roman Signer's Acts of Wonder

Art in America, June, 2001 by Gregory Volk

Though little known in the U.S., Swiss artist Roman Signer has been making his "temporary sculptures"--actions that he documents with film and video since the 1970s. These events, which can involve anything from amplified snoring to small rockets, are usually short-lived, often funny and always cathartic.

Outside St. Gallen, Switzerland, in the Rheintal district at the edge of the Alps, a dirt road runs alongside a small canal that leads through rolling pastures and herds of grazing cows. This bucolic locale is a prime site for Swiss artist Roman Signer, one of several in the area that he visits for what he likes to call his "experiments," essentially actions that he considers to be temporary sculptures and which eventually come to his audience through documentation in videos, Super-8 films and photographs. Recently, Signer undertook a new experiment. It was a brief kayak trip, not in the canal, as you'd expect, but directly on the road (Kayak, 2000). The kayak was attached to a small van via a towline. In the video, taken from the back of the van, you see Signer wearing a leather jacket and strapping on his motorcycle helmet. He climbs into the kayak, gives the thumbs-up signal, and takes off, to start careening down the road at about 20 miles per hour. The noise is frightful, and you think that the kayak is about to veer off into the trees, tumble headlong into the canal or break into smithereens. Hunched there, hurtling along, Signer reminds you of some lonely astronaut navigating an alien planet.

At one point, Signer passes some wide-eyed cows which, inexplicably, do not scatter, but instead start frantically galloping beside him at the edge of the road, as if they can't get enough of this astonishing rift in their routine. Finally, Signer reaches his destination down the road; he slows, then stops. In the kayak, he is up to his waist in gravel and dirt, for a gaping hole has been ripped in the bottom. He gets out, dusts himself off, turns the kayak over and inspects it; it's almost ruined, but not quite.

After you stop laughing--and many of Signer's works can be downright hilarious--the complex power of this piece begins to sink in. For one thing, Signer himself, kayak, curving towline, accidental cows, country lane and quiet Swiss countryside add up to a luscious ensemble that rivets your attention. In general, Signer's idiosyncratic events-as-sculptures are strikingly, at times dazzlingly, visual. For another, there is the work's poetic resonance, involving multiple associations and layers of meaning. It juxtaposes speed and stasis, exuberance and danger, accident and precision, and there is more than a hint of mortality in its imagery--someone rushing through a life as the body wears down. It also takes a perfectly normal activity and transforms it radically; a pleasant excursion on a sunny afternoon near the Alps was never quite like this. Moreover, for all this work's verve, there is something unnervingly lonely about it, too: a single person making his eccentric way through a local environment that also serves as a stand-in for the cosmos.

If you wanted to make a list of major contemporary artists who, for whatever reason, are comparatively little known in the U.S., Roman Signer should be right near the top. During the past few years there has been a surge of interest in his work in Europe, but he has exhibited rarely in the U.S., and his work has been written about even less. This neglect is unfortunate, because since the early 1970s, Signer, now 62 years old, has been developing an extraordinary body of work, consisting of brief, transitory pieces and durable sculptures that are evidence of a process as well as an event, along with drawings and endless documentation. Many of his projects mix an air of quasi-scientific research (although of a decidedly homemade variety) with an impish, pranksterish humor. Sometimes this "research," this desire to see what happens if a brief chain of events is set into motion, can be wildly funny, with slapstick mishaps, moments when things break down or veer off unexpectedly into mini-disasters. For Sink (1986), a table, each of its legs in a metal pail, sailed forth on a precarious voyage into a river, only to tilt and sink two minutes later in a kind of tragicomic denouement--certainly among the most short-lived, fragile and awkward outdoor sculptures that you are ever likely to see. At other times, Signer's events-as-sculptures yield images so beguiling that it's easy to forget that they were more or less instantaneous and not painstakingly made over weeks or months. For Falling Barrel (1996), a metal barrel filled with water was dropped from the ceiling to the floor. As the barrel plummeted, silvery water flew up in a ragged column, and at the point of impact more water jetted from the barrel's punctured side. The whole ensemble, including a rising and falling spray of droplets and the thudding impact that contorted the barrel, is heartbreakingly beautiful--and it also took about one second to execute, tops. That's Signer at his best: a sculptor whose works embody pure transformation. Using a variety of means, he constantly seeks out the exact volatile moment when one body or form abruptly changes into another, in the process fusing creation and destruction.