Between perception and sign

Mark Gisbourne

It is evident in historical retrospect that much of the post-war and subsequent history of Western aesthetic culture has been driven by the discourses of existential-phenomenology or various readings derived from the philosophical-semiotic language of signs. Put simply the world perceived as an engaged body-to-space entity, or as chains of signifiers that form the continuous basis of the signs that constitute the nature of our identity and the formed world around us. Expressed by other means as understanding the contemporary world that is read either through the direct immediacy of sensory formations and their experience, or as material performative manifestations of consequential actions of speech; discursive arguments that numerous post-war interdisciplinary theorists have referred to as ‘speech acts’. In the latter the perceived world is often understood to be the material extension of speaking as doing, constituting individual and collective identities through the reading of cultural signs. But just as the speaking act and the written thought are never quite the same thing, similarly it is true of speaking and making as a cognisant sculptor or painter of today knows. The works of Eberhard Bosslet therefore point directly to the creative interstices between what is perceived and expressed in his sculptures, installations, and developed paintings, and exposes a questioning and challenging contrast to the deterministic use of language that attempts to arbitrarily shape his art and its meaning.

From the earliest works of Bosslet in the 1980s we find an investigative turn of mind that focuses as he made clear upon emotional, discursive, functional, intuitive, coincidental and cultural standpoints, towards the material conditions of the world. These in fact were the actual terms he used to describe by manifesto the Material & Effect Group, he co-founded in 1981. What was implicit from the beginning was working with the ready made usually industrial materials and the found situation, which might in turn be that of dereliction or abandonment, or simply a direct intervention into a found and opportune spatial situation. In each situation Bosslet’s interventions were a dialectic between what was either spatially and/or structurally framed and pre-determined, while the artist’s response was to aesthetically re-functionalise a non-functional (at least recognisably so) or underutilised material situation. With regard to sculpture and installation this has always been evident from the outset. The works of this first decade therefore laid the epistemological groundwork for what has subsequently followed.

BOSSLET | TEA | PUEBLO CANARIO

Begleiterscheinung II, 1984 Pintura sobre fachada, 300 x 2000 x 500 cm, El Guincho, Golf del Sur, Tenerife, ES

Throughout the 1980s, and beginning in 1981, he began his lifelong to date involvement in Tenerife and the Canary Islands. This took the form of re-orchestrating derelict or abandoned architectural situations by line-drawing the outlines of the ruins and creating a sense of visibility to something that existed but went unnoticed. Similarly, this was applied to found and rusting car wrecks, or painted debris fragments that were laid out and arranged on the ground and thereby asserted their formerly unrecognised presence. The works were called simply ‘Interventions’, their purpose being to turn the non-specific into the site-specific, to frame and foreground the innocuous and disregarded. These ‘Interventions’ at times were expressed (beyond those using white outlined structures) in intensely colouristic terms that were often being continuously transformed. In his ‘Movables and Immovables’ series in 1982 a scooter becomes a signifying trope through its various stages of coloured transformation and site-specific positioning. (p. 26-31) While the ‘Interventions’ suggest a legacy of sorts of land and environmental art of the 1970s, it has neither the frequent monumental tendency found in Smithson, nor the peripatetic poetic reveries one might associate with Richard Long. Bosslet’s engagement with the open space environment is one of intense adaptation, and one that has an immediate and direct transformative effect. At the same time the photographic record of several of these works such as Concomitant II (Begleiterscheinung II) (p.8) reveal a kinship with Bosslet’s ‘Floor Plan and Supply Grid’ paintings of the years 1985-88. The fact that the paintings are executed in industrial materials with strong architectural associations (plaster, aluminium, asphalt, steel, and copper) only furthers the integrated relationship within Bosslet’s artistic practices. The Canary Islands environmental ‘Interventions’ and the related series called ‘Reformations and Side Effects’, have continued throughout Bosslet’s work to this day. It each instance the engagement with the land environment has created an intentional sense of displacement, the signifier to sign stability of what formerly existed is transformed dramatically and creates new parameters of aesthetic meaning.

BOSSLET | TEA | ROUNDABOUT CANARIAS

BOSSLET | TEA | SOCIEDAD LIMITADA

The dialectical use of architecture and industrially related materials is central to all of Eberhard Bosslet’s artistic undertakings. It forms the intellectual infrastructure of his artistic consciousness, whereby issues of space, structure and matter (as in ‘Material & Effect’) are but a natural extension of his ideas. In 1985, Bosslet began his architectural-spatial interventions which he called simply ‘Supporting Measures ’, and which have continued in ever more sophisticated variation in his practices through today. By utilising adjustable pole props conventionally used to shore up architectural components such as walls and ceilings, the structures deal with a sense of connectedness and support. Aspects of multiple material unit interconnectedness are an important sub-text that runs throughout all of Bosslet’s works. However, unlike the open air ‘Interventions’ which could be said to aesthetically re-functionalise a pre-existing sense of place, the interior ‘Supporting Measures’ (p. 52-69) might be said (in one respect) to de-functionalise it, or at least make the viewer newly aware of its existence as a negotiable and operative space. At times the columnar structures might be considered coercive and containing as in his Stammheim (1986, p. 58/59), whereas in other instances such as in his works Presumptuous I & II (Anmassend I & II, p. 64/65)) created for Documenta 8 (1987), the work poses a question of neutralised necessity. Incorporating elements like a found filing cabinets, a desk or planks and boards, the vertical structures pose utility but then deny it, since we know installed as they are in the Kassel Fridericianum that they serve no actual architectural stress related function being installed to suggest only the ‘presumptuous’ manner of their presentation – a literal intervention. Similarly, the double columnar, dado and palette stacked work Atlas HB (1987, p. 117), installed at the Kunsthalle Bremen served no actual structural purpose save that of interposing its status and as an immediately located presence. Nevertheless the materials used and presented do serve the function of inferred connotation, which is to say pointing (indexically speaking) to the hidden visible processes of construction implicit to architecture. Furthermore in works like UN-ANT Expander (1985), or the Paris installation of Expander I (1990, p.63), through to Expander Bregenz I 90/04 (2004 p. 62), the thrust is horizontally expressed between walls rather than floor to ceiling. In each case, however, the