Escape Architecture. Inkjet Prints, 111×80 cm, 2016

 

 

 

 

Installation view. Escape Architecture, 2016. Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich

Installation view. Escape Architecture, 2016. Kunsthalle Luzern

Escape Architecture

 

The pieces bear sentimental titles – Everybody Wins, Things Change, Kiss Me Goodbye – titles of films from the eighties and nineties, hardly known in their time and even less familiar today. Jürgen Beck’s recent work Escape Architecture revives these titles in a series of nine large-format photographs. But these prints do not act as promotional posters nor do they display stills from a cult film. They bear no references to any specific film. Rather, they recall the front page of a press kit, which has been photographed in the studio. Typically, film studios and producers use these objects to promote their films through a distributor or at the cinema; they are documents of this very undertaking, that is, of profitable marketing, which in the case of these films may not have proved very successful. Judging by the individualized typography of the film titles, they appear clean and uniform. And the shadows make it clear that the work deals with objects of a certain depth. Still it remains difficult at times to determine where the press kit ends and the background begins. Furthermore, the specific format of these photographs always mimics the smaller and fixed format of the press kits, so that they can no longer be considered found objects, but rather photographs of objects. Folds and bends in the material index their former circulation, hinting at the fact that the press books were once in use. Yet there are no further signs that a cinema or an individual may actually have taken a look at the folder – no telephone numbers, no notes scribbled in the sidelines.

 

A small glass cabinet accompanies the series. It is custom made for this work and displays the same white finish as the photographs’ frames. The cabinet’s unique way of opening on one and a half sides calls to mind one of Eileen Gray’s side tables from the thirties – a carefully chosen reference, which finds its counterpart in a photograph of the Odeon Theater from 1937. This photograph is surrounded by the titles of the wall photographs. Even here the theme remains the cinema, albeit in an entirely different way; the image is documentary, even somewhat elegiac.

 

It shows the typical architecture of a specific period, in which the promise of the cinema, a partial promise for and from the Modern age, may still have held some validity. The cinema was meant to provide an escape from the world’s exponential acceleration, and the anonymous intimacy of a cinema auditorium a structured and spectacular syncope in the day to day of the visitors. This promise was also meant to be architecturally manifest through the construction of new buildings, which have either already disappeared or are vanishing. The opening of the glass cabinet, reminiscent of the side table on which we place and swap out newspapers and magazines, signifies interchangeability. The angular brackets beneath the photograph appear to be left for the inventory number of the cinema, but the slot has been left blank. The object is there yet at the same time lost, untraceable in the very moment that it should be exchanged.

 

Jürgen Beck’s work plays with a nostalgia for a future past without succumbing to its sentimentality. The promise evoked by the cinemas, and to a certain extent also by the film titles, is confronted with the recurring influence of this nostalgia, its serial production and with that also its interchangeability. In other words, the sentimentality of nostalgia is drained into the cool waters of capitalism where it belongs.

 

David Misteli