Distant Riders • ROBERT ESTERMANN

Distant Riders, 2007
installation
9 black-and-white digital prints, wood and steel construction
each print 260 × 150 cm
overall dimensions 260 × 580 × 580 cm

Distant Riders takes the zoetrope as its model without attempting to reproduce its optical effect. Nine large black-and-white photographs form a circular structure that can be entered. Where a conventional zoetrope uses successive phases of the same moving body, these nine images repeatedly break continuity: another rider, another horse, another horizon. Their predominantly leftward orientation is enough for the imagination to keep the ride going. One rider continues in another, one coastline in the next. The sequence is made from these breaks; its cinema takes place primarily in the mind.

Estermann photographed the riders on secluded beaches in Thailand, yet the particular locations recede into a more diffuse beach-likeness: a remote coastal zone, sensuous and slightly unreal, removed from ordinary time. The images carry something of the hallucinatory atmosphere of 1970s glamour photography—youth, eroticism, freedom, departure. The circular sequence keeps one promise in suspension: riding, and riding on.

The structure admits the viewer into this coastal elsewhere. The nearly life-size riders surround the space without addressing the camera; they appear in profile or from behind, already moving past. A further distance has been worked into the photographs themselves. The original digital images were printed with an inkjet printer, then scanned again at high resolution before being enlarged to their final scale. This actual non-digital gap in the image chain gives the photographs something of the granular surface and temporal remove of older analog photography without illustrating any specific historical style. The effect is produced procedurally rather than simulated digitally: ink droplets, paper grain, stray hairs and other traces of the intermediate print remain visible across the final image.

Riding repeatedly reorganizes posture, weight and direction across two bodies. Bare feet and spurs, saddles and bareback riding, hands, legs, flanks and necks enter shifting physical configurations from one image to the next. Horse and rider remain distinct, while each ride produces a form that belongs to neither body alone. From inside the ring, the viewer stands within the imagined continuity of this distant coast while rider after rider rides on.

In this larger-than-life zoetrope, the individual riders merge, so to speak, into a single rider. The landscape in the background of the nine photographs also seems to coalesce into a hyper-landscape. The background does not refer to a concrete geography more closely defined in temporal and spatial terms, but is rather the visual correspondence of a more diffuse kind of “beach-likeness” with a heavily metaphorical element: distance, culturally protected zone, state of emergency. Once again we are dealing not with a literally political discourse – for which read sexually reformist, generally “liberationist” – although it is also possible to discern an atmosphere of this kind in Distant Riders. This atmosphere is produced by the hallucinatory effect of the signifiers of the 1970s which Estermann is quoting here, apparent in the slightly voyeuristic gaze with which the riders enter the field of vision. One consequence of this hallucinatory treatment of signs may be that another context interposes itself over the sexually reformist and generally “liberationist” discourse of the 1970s: the question of the economic, political or even erotic relationship between humans and animals. But how does this theme arise, when it is neither formulated as an ethical programme nor idealised as a mythical unity from the past? As has already been discussed, the slight sexualisation of the motif of the girl rider is too faint to locate the sequence of images in the sphere of the obscene, let alone the perverse. And the atmosphere of the images, with their location in a distant, undefined coastal zone is too restrained to be subjected to a moral discourse. One key may be the landscape. Its significance as a trope may be better understood if we compare it with the function of the scenic refuge zone commonly featured in dystopias: usually this is portrayed as a zone contrasting with the civilised space, which is why it is depicted alternately as an inaccessible desert far from city life, as in Brave New World, as a hidden, protected forest at the end of the last railway line as in Fahrenheit 451, or as a distant coastal zone as in Distant Riders. This counter-world is rich in sensations and full of sensual freshness (in Fahrenheit 451, this is represented by the constant light snowfall in the protected zone of the forest). But as it is freed from the everyday, and its inhabitants are often in a kind of temporally and/or culturally exceptional condition, there is always something unreal – phantasmatic – about the counter-world. This makes its psychological function all the more important: it allows the citizens to experience sensomotoric renewal or even awakening (as opposed to social anaesthesia), psychical continuity (as opposed to schizoid fragmentation), and develop ethical care (as opposed to moral cynicism).

excerpt from Improper Thinking by Daniel Kurjakovic in Robert Estermann. Pleasure, Habeas Corpus, Motoricity. The Great Western Possible, ed. Susanne Neubauer, Kunstmuseum Luzern / edition fink, Zurich, 2007

shown in:
“Robert Estermann. Manor Kunstpreis Luzern 2007”, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (2007, solo show)
“Swiss Art Awards 2007”, Basel, Switzerland (2007)

bibliography:
Federal Office of Culture, Swiss Art Awards 2007, exhibition catalogue, Bern, 2007, pp. 61–64
Robert Estermann. Pleasure, Habeas Corpus, Motoricity. The Great Western Possible, ed. Susanne Neubauer, Kunstmuseum Luzern / edition fink, Zurich, 2007, ISBN 978-3-03746-105-1
Daniel Kurjakovic, Improper Thinking (EN) / Uneigentliche Politik (DE), 2007
Elisabeth Lebovici, Robert Estermann, Blue Rider (EN) / Robert Estermann, Blue Rider (FR), 2007
Susanne Neubauer, Robert Estermann, an Introduction (EN) / Robert Estermann zur Einführung (DE), 2007
Adrian Lucas, Drawing Desire, or How I Feel Much Better Today Than Tomorrow (EN) / Drawing Desire, oder wie ich mich heute viel besser fühle als morgen (DE), 2007
Niklaus Oberholzer, “Luzern: Robert Estermann im Kunstmuseum”, Kunst-Bulletin, May 2007, Zurich, p. 71
sba., “In der Mausefalle”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, March 31, 2007, Zurich, p. 52
Urs Bugmann, “Ich biete Reibungsflächen”, Neue Luzerner Zeitung, March 21, 2007, Lucerne, p. 43