Fabian Marti. Photo Lukas Wassmann. Courtesy of Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Mutterkorn, 2011. Silver gelatine print. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Untitled, 2011. Silver gelatine print. Deutsche Bank Collection. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Exhibition view: “Illuminations. 54. International Art Exhibition“ . Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 2011. Photo: Michele Lamanna. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Exhibition view: Kunstverein Braunschweig, 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Exhibition view: “Time for the monkeys to move into hyperspace”. Kunstmuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland, 2011. Photos: Gunnar Meier Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, White Cube (Color Change), 2011. Glaze, fired clay. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Tenebrae, 2010. Color, resin, plaster. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Exhibition View: “ELM MR CL MYMULW“. Galerie Hans-Trudel-Haus, Baden, Switzerland, 2010. Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, La Femme qui Veut, 2008. Ink jet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Spiritual Me I, 2008, Ink jet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, Hey, now, it's the sun (Amanita Muscaria), 2008, Ink jet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, The Now, 2010, Ink jet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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Fabian Marti, UHU, 2007, Ink jet print on paper. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
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The arms and legs grow cold, the pulse is
barely perceptible; then come confusion and delusion. During the Middle
Ages, entire regions were decimated by “St. Anthony’s Fire”—ergot poisoning caused by rye fields infected with the fungus, which contains a high concentration of toxic alkaloids. Mutterkorn (Ergot) is the title Fabian Marti gave to his large-scale photographic work of 2011 in the Deutsche Bank Collection. The picture’s black and white concentric circles exert a hypnotic effect. Like a spiral, they drag the eye into their depths.
Marti is a rock star among contemporary Swiss artists. His long dark hair and full beard make him look like a double of the late Jim Morrison. Marti shares a deep interest in shamanism and consciousness-expanding experiences with the charismatic singer of The Doors. Break on through to the other side
is the title of one of The Doors’s most famous songs. And it’s just
this breaking through to another reality that is the 1979-born artist’s
theme.
Ergot also opens the doors to another sphere; the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann
discovered this in 1943 while searching for a vascular stimulant for
the pharmaceutical company Sandoz. The substance he isolated from the
fungus, however, stimulated a completely different region of the body.
His lysergic acid diethylamide
turned out to have hallucinogenic effects. In the 1960s, LSD became the
party drug an entire generation took to trip. For Marti, however,
psychoactive substances are primarily a means to gain understanding: “I
believe that the knowledge of past eras—the whole axis of time—is
inscribed in the human being. Not as intellectual knowledge, but more
as an instinct or an emotion. The idea goes back to a vision I had on
magic mushrooms. For me it is a fascinating fact, it opens up a
contemporaneousness that bears the possibility of mental time-travel.”
That sounds a lot like esoterism and New Age. An artist following in the footsteps of Aldous Huxley and Carlos Castaneda,
whose reports on the consciousness-expanding aspects of their drug
experiences once made them counter-culture heroes? In any case, a
glance at Marti’s work makes one thing clear: his photo works, films,
and ceramics, staged as seductive fetishes in elaborate settings, look
extremely good. Their decorative surfaces invite us to follow the
artist on his trip, which not only leads through regions beyond reality
and rationality, but also through the whole of art history. The amazing
thing is that he succeeds in giving images back their original power,
even those that have become reduced to cliché. Thus, the spiral—the
most recurrent form in his work—twirls not only in Duchamp’s film Anémic Cinéma (1926); one also sees it in the eyes of the snake Kaa in Walt Disney’s Jungle Book
(1967) and in thousands of comics. At the same time, the spiral is also
an ancient mythological symbol. Marti’s works draw from these
prehistoric images imbedded deep in the human subconscious.
The five white-glazed boxes he showed in his solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur
in 2011 also point to the subconscious. As objects, they remind one of
the Minimal Art of the 1960s, yet the fingerprints, scratches, and
dents on their surfaces would hardly have pleased Donald Judd,
being diametrically opposed to his flawless, industrially manufactured
metal cubes. In addition, a glance into Marti’s boxes reveals that the
tentacles winding out from inside them belong to an octopus. Like
aliens, the creatures inhabit the ceramic boxes. The title of the work,
White Cube, suggests not only something organic, impure, and
threatening lurking behind Minimal Art’s perfect surfaces, but also
behind the walls—and not only those in modernist, neutral exhibition
spaces. “Basically, insanity is repressed in our society,” explains
Marti. “Despite this, it still bubbles under the surface somewhere and
can break out any time.”
Marti doesn’t only use the formal
language of the Minimalists; he works with a wide variety of visual
materials: Minoan vases, Old Netherlandish painting, the covers of
trashy science fiction novels. African masks whose “primitivism”
already inspired Picasso
turn up in Marti’s work as white resin objects based on 3-D models
downloaded from the Internet, which he then crosses with geometric
forms. These, in turn, are based on a late painting by Picabia—the
quote of a quote of a quote. This can be understood either as a
criticism of modernism, or as the result of a trophy hunt in which the
loot is sampled together to produce desirable artifacts. “Marti’s art
appears to follow in the wake of great traditions with the aplomb of
exaggerated self-confidence,” writes critic Daniel Baumann
in Marti’s first catalogue. “In reality, it's probably meant to be a
repository for whatever anybody wants to see in it, and nothing could
be better suited to that purpose than the art world's ancient and
latest traditions.”
The fact that such appropriations can also be problematic can be seen in the work Spiritual Me
(2008), which exists in five versions. Marti used black tape to distort
the photograph of a bare-breasted African woman dancing with eyes
closed, as though in a trance. “This dancer, that’s me. I feel related
to her in her naivety or blindness to the world,” explains Marti in an
interview with the gallerist Karolina Dankow. For him, the woman is “a
kind of metaphor for artistic identity.” Yet he is thoroughly “aware
that that is a presumptuous claim, in a certain sense.” But it still
remains questionable whether in this day and age Marti still needs to
use a naked tribal woman from Africa to signalize “naivety” and the
“path to an ‘original’ creative act.”
The Zurich-based artist
became known for his large-scale black and white photograms, in which
he incorporated references to ancient Christian and esoteric symbols:
crosses, owls, crystals, skulls, often mirrored or superimposed—images
that look as though Moholy-Nagy
had taken over the cover design for the album of a gothic band. He
makes these by placing various objects on the glass plate of a scanner.
Hey, now, it’s the sun (Amanita Muscaria) from 2008, for example, depicts the lamellae of a fly agaric mushroom—the image resembles a huge pupil hovering before a dark universe.
References
to mushrooms carry throughout Marti’s work. This is due to their
psychoactive effects, which is why they play a key role in shamanist
rituals. For thousands of years, these spiritual “psychonauts” have
been moving in spheres the artist also seeks to explore: “Shamans are
the true masters of consciousness,” Marti asserts. “They have access to
other realities and can teach us to question our belief system. Since
everything we perceive, think or do is based on our consciousness, and
shamans show us that consciousness can be altered, one comes to the
conclusion that our reality, culture, and even science is standing on
an unstable base.”
How serious is he about these references to
the esoteric, occultism, and consciousness expansion? Is he juggling
with these meanings just as he juggles with his visual material? The
intensity with which Marti scrutinizes these themes in his work is
impressive in its continuity. But when he stylizes himself for a
catalogue cover as a dreamy bohemian on a sofa, the book Der Geheimkult des heiligen Pilzes (Sacred Mushroom and the Cross) slipping
out of his fingers, there is also a hint at an ironic game—at least
with the image of the artist as a genius driven by visions.
Marti’s
longing for authenticity becomes clear when he explains that he began
his ceramic sculptures “to work in a more direct way, with my hands. I
see it as a very archaic thing: creating something out of earth.”
That’s true, of course. But it’s also a statement that sounds a lot
like what you’d hear in a pottery class or self-encounter group, as the
artist knows perfectly well. For him, it’s clear that this form of
expression and authenticity, much like the spiral, has long since been
reduced to a cliché. Despite this, Marti does the work anyway—and the
results vindicate him.
In terms of the difficult subject of
esoterism: it’s not only for Marti that a sphere exists beyond the
White Cube, beyond reality, one that eludes our rational image of the
world. Shamans have known this since time immemorial. Even the Nobel
Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg
was clear on this: “Existing scientific concepts cover always only a
very limited part of reality, and the other part that has not yet been
understood is infinite.” On their new record, the Pet Shop Boys say the same thing in simpler words: “There is a place beyond this world.”
Current Exhibitions:
Armin Boehm / Fabian Marti / Erika Verzutti
8/31 – 10/20/2012
Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
La jeunesse es un art
Jubiläum Manor Kunstpreis 2012
Aargauer Kunsthaus
9/1 – 11/18/2012
COSMIC LAUGHTER
timewave zero, then what?
9/9 – 10/14/2012
Curated by Fabian Marti and Cristina Ricupero
Ursula Blickle Foundation, Kraichtal
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