MANUEL BURGENER

Philippe Pirotte, Curator Kunsthalle Bern about Manuel Burgener, 2010

It is complicated to know what Manuel Burgener does when he makes art. Or when we walk through an exhibition that looks like an exhibition. None of the exhibits - tin strips of wood, laths are abundant, some melted and moulded wax, wooden plates, metal chains, an occasional photograph, all in precarious balance - would sustain this idea.
He empties his acts of speci c motives or aims that one could ascribe to them. His very artistic acts refuse any story that would legitimate his praxis or even explain it. It seems as if he wants to liberate a space from (his own) author- ship in order to act without history. He questions through his work in the studio and in the exhibition space in a very serious way what doing whatever precisely is, in order to reveal a kind of stockroom containing all gestures of construction and deconstruction. This not in terms of achievements, but rather as unsuccess- ful realisations, or better non-realisations: futile and ineffective gestures with which one resists the request to realise something, an o en categorically de- mand that would remain unnoticed, if not exposed by an art-praxis that exactly nds the point or moment where the work stops communicating.

Though he decidedly engages the exhibition space, Manuel Burgener is clearly not interested in making an exhibition about exhibitions, diagnostic exhibitions so to say. When a work of art becomes too structural, and merely ex- ists in exposing the strategy and conditions of exhibiting, it only gives rise to a discourse that defeats itself. Ultimately then, the work of art ends up in a purely discursive state, seeking only to reveal the context and conditions of the pres- entation. However Manuel Burgener’s working method, including site-speci c operations, might suggest otherwise he doesn’t believe that it is only the con- text, the discourse and the institution that give the work of art its legitimacy. It is above all the work of art itself. This means among other things that Burgener makes works that clearly relate to an environment but also, simultaneously stop commenting in any way on that environment. He rather repeats certain aspects of the environment. In other words, he seeks to detect the point where a work of art no longer invests in a transfer of meaning but reaches the point where com- munication breaks off, and so begins to function in another way. Then every- thing reveals itself as suffused with possibilities. Here and there we nd things one would not immediately legitimise as sculptures or photographs for example.

Different media are suggested without really engaging with them: only solutions or excerpts seem to appear as if each artistic activity re ects itself in a parody of itself before being effectively put in praxis. Because we nd ourselves at a kind of degree zero of art, some modernist procedures like the use of raw material, the found object, the pure colour etc pass by, but of course without their initial authentic fetishism. Burgener memorises and virtualises all these possible artistic gestures at the same time. This strategy provides for a lightness and insubstantiality of the exhibited, differentiating his work from earlier mini- malist strategies that want to confront us with the evident presence of a work.

This very presence is questioned through all operational strategies in the work of Manuel Burgener, not in the least by the precarious (in)balance charac- terizing all his interventions. The objects or structures are barely touched by the artist, as if they are not hís, and form allegories of dreamed presences, or better the presences desired by art-institutions and their public. Burgener assumes this desire, deciphers it and throws it back into the art-space. He suffuses this space with signs of this deeply rooted desire to make place for the real thing. The pres- ences Burgener organizes, however, do not express but they whisper for atten- tion about possibilities of showing, searching, de-structuring, growing again....