Announcements • ROBERT ESTERMANN

Announcements, 2010
room installation / performance
wood, metal, 100 inkjet prints on paper, bleach
1200 × 1200 × 240 cm

Announcements consists of twelve wooden boards on stilts, arranged in a zigzagging U through the room. About one hundred 1:1 inkjet reproductions of roughly fifty drawings are permanently pasted to both sides. The original drawings are absent. Most images recur two or more times; each appears from the outset as a copy among copies.

The installation was made for (les halles) espace d’art contemporain, located in the same building as the town hall of Porrentruy. Its wooden structure recalls municipal announcement boards, event notices and, most insistently, the repeated portraits of political candidates before an election. Heads recur throughout the installation. One portrait appears eight times—more often than any other drawing—and is sometimes pasted twice, or even three times, side by side. Repetition does not reveal an identity; it produces recognizability. A face becomes familiar through recurrence until familiarity itself begins to stand in for identity.

The drawings were made quickly, with a line even faster than usual and a deliberately loosened, slightly errant movement of the hand. For this series, Estermann shifted the way he guided his hand and attention, allowing greater speed and a certain instability into the line. Its awkwardness keeps it from settling comfortably into the registers through which drawing is recognized as skill, style, symbol or value.

This is also where the work’s “minor” language resides. Faces, signatures, fragments of writing, flowers and other forms do not wait to be translated into a clearer, official meaning. They already announce. Announcements is a display-machine in which the apparatus of public address has been occupied by a language that does not quite submit to the systems—political, linguistic or artistic—that would authorize it. An announcement is already there before official language takes possession of it.

Before the exhibition opened, the floor was mopped with bleach. Once during the exhibition, a young man hired for the task repeated the action in public. As in Last Space (Documenta 11), bleach functions as a recurring marker: its sharp smell brings purification and contamination, suppression and something faintly lethal into the room. The cleaning is real; so is what it leaves in the air.

shown in:
“Totally German!”, Kim Kim Gallery @ Good Hands! @ Ggooll Pool, Seoul, South Korea (2012)
“This is Perfect”, Art Public, Collins Park, South Beach, Miami, USA (2011, solo show)
art:gwangju:11, with Kim Kim Gallery, Gwangju, South Korea (2011)
“Announcements Annonces Ankündigungen”, ( les halles ) espace d’art contemporain, Porrentruy, Switzerland (2010, solo show)

bibliography:
Annelise Zwez, “Robert Estermann”, Kunst-Bulletin, 7–8/2010, Zurich, p. 56