Heidi Bucher

Heidi Bucher
Parasol Unit, London
19.09.18 – 09.12.18

A snake sheds its skin whole; discarded clothing is warped by the body that previously wore it; a building becomes marked over years, the elements wearing the outside, the attrition of footsteps on its corridors – material memories accumulate. Swiss artist Heidi Bucher ( 1926 – 1993 ) is best-known for her Häutungen ( Skinnings ), where she applies a layer of latex to buildings, clothing and bodies before pulling the resulting skins away. The detached skins hold a record of these surfaces, revealing the detail of their forms, carrying imprints of tiles, of window panes, of parquet flooring; and hinting at what might have taken place there, the latex catching the collected debris of dirt and dust, and the various evidences of surfaces become worn.

A snake sheds its skin whole, as the creature below emerges reborn. What once served as protection from the world is now discarded; no longer necessary, it shrivels. Bucher’s Fliegender Hautraum ( Flying Skinroom, 1981 ) does not shrivel and disappear. In the footage shot by Martin Kugler – the Super 8 medium lending it a nostalgic dreamlike feel – the skinroom takes flight. Up in the air ( although raised from the ground by a crane ) this partial cast of a room seems to take on a life of its own. A latex mould of four walls connected, but without floor or ceiling to hold its rectangular form, it morphs in and out of different shapes in nonsensical sequence: a jellyfish, a balloon… this residue of memories reincarnated as a shapeshifter, making a fantastical escape from the past.

Die Abbilder von Gestern sind die Bilder von Morgen.
The imprints of yesterday are the images of tomorrow.
Die Häute sind die Abbilder von Morgen.
The skins are imprints of tomorrow.¹

Skin, a boundary between the hidden and the visible, a mystery to medicine for centuries, offers itself as a material indeterminate and elusive: solid, a snapshot of time, yet also fluid; a time portal, at once the past, the present and future. Bucher’s skinnings are simultaneously precursor and successor: they are imprints of yesterday; already imprints of tomorrow.

Time, with regard to Bucher’s work, is pressing. As these forgotten spaces lay dormant before her intervention, the artist herself has been overlooked for some time. The attention paid to her work in the 1970s and 80s lapsed into a decade of near-silence following her death in 1993. Since her rediscovery in 2004, when a solo exhibition was held at Zurich’s Migros Museum for Contemporary Art, there has been a gradual resurgence of interest and a trickle of international exhibitions and retrospectives. This exhibition at London’s Parasol Unit is the first extensive showing of Bucher’s work in the UK.

The current interest in Bucher follows that in various artists to whom she has been compared. Those who came before: the German-American artist Eva Hesse, who made similar innovations with new materials such as latex in the 1960s, which was profiled in a 2016 documentary; and those who came after: the best-known being Rachel Whiteread. Despite Bucher’s work predating Whiteread’s by almost two decades, the latter’s is far more recognised. Since her Turner Prize nomination for Ghost in 1991 and subsequent win for House in 1993, Whiteread’s cast sculptures of everyday objects and forgotten spaces are never far from the public eye; they were the subject of a large retrospective at Tate Britain in 2017 – 18. The three artists have in common processes with materials that succeed in confusing boundaries and surface. Their sculptures lose the industrial connotations of their materials, their forms seen as ‘other’, organic or feminine, and their minimalism ‘human’.

Beyond the field of art, Bucher’s concern with bodies and space led her to an interest in fashion and architecture. We see something of her legacy in the work of the revered Belgian fashion designer Martin Margiela, whose signature method of working with old garments and historic forms typically involved collating and binding them together with the application of a white surface that still paid tribute to their past existence. Margiela’s material interventions are part-preservation, part-shrouding: garments stiffened and held under a coating of white paint, and buildings ( the brand’s shops, his atelier ) as if frozen in a state of disuse, furniture and surfaces draped in white sheets.

Unlike Margiela’s skins, Bucher’s do not remain adhered to surfaces. In the gallery, whether the skinnings hang from the ceiling or on the wall, or are erected as tent-like three-dimensional structures, they appear as fragile monuments to the past. These stilled forms do not disclose the fervent process of their making, and it is only in watching the film footage that you see the force behind Bucher’s movements. She pulls at the skins with all her weight until they are piled on the floor. The process is emotionally charged throughout. After the skins are removed, in a somewhat ritualistic manner, the artist might afterwards climb under them, as if momentarily needing refuge – one animal sheltering from the wild under another’s hide. Finally, she takes the skins upon her shoulders, dragging their bulk behind her like a cloak. As the title of her work Zieht das Gestern ins Heute ( 1980 ) indicates, Bucher intends to ‘pull yesterday into today’. While doing so, Bucher also drags the inside – domestic, private and institutional spaces – outside, their dirtying, ageing material hung up and their proportions laid out. Holding the past accountable, the skinnings might also serve as a threat to future action: a severed head on a spike, as a warning. The demands of her work do not remain in the past.

Critics have previously remarked on the involved emotional state with which Bucher worked, describing it as personal, and a number of the skinnings drew from her own history. An early work, Borg ( 1976 ), was from her previous studio, a former butcher’s shop, and some were taken from the Ahnenhaus, her ancestral home in Winterthur, Switzerland. A focus on material and memory is often dismissed as feminine rather than universal, considered simply autobiographical. Unfortunately, the London show does not highlight the significance of the various contexts, but I’d argue that Bucher invites us to read the political narratives that spaces hold on both an individual and a collective level. Her skinnings of her family home, including one of the male-only domain of her father’s study, are linked to her dissatisfaction with the domestic setup common in her youth, compared with her ambitions for her life as an artist with young children.

Other skinnings were made elsewhere, such as those of the Bellevue Sanitorium. Housed in a grand nineteenth-century building, this psychiatric clinic served as a luxurious retreat for privileged madmen. A sample of its more renowned residents is telling: ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, historian Aby Warburg, heralded as geniuses in their fields; also ‘Anna O’, a patient of Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, marginalised with the ‘female’ ailment of hysteria. Whereas Bucher starts her reconnaissance of a space simply by looking at floor, ceiling, windows, ‘as an architect’, she then asserts: ‘I must come closer to everything.’ In the 1990 film Bellevue, Kreuzlingen, the artist speaks from within one of the skinrooms. Listing the condition of the skinning as if its symptoms belonged to the patients who inhabited the room from which it was cast, she describes ‘the suppressed, neglected, wasted, lost out, sunken, flattened, deserted, inverted, diluted, forgotten, persecuted, wounded’. She seems thoroughly consumed as she speaks, although we cannot tell to what exactly she refers.

She asks of the skinnings: are they inside or outside? In the two-way direction of frottages, what is it to be influenced, to influence, to make an impression or to be impressed upon? Bucher’s Frottages ( Rubbings ) series suggests a term that could be applied more generally to her work. She records surfaces through fricative action, physical and emotional. The idea of personal narrative seems a short-sell, when her Frottages might reveal the rub of history on both artist and audience.

On the upper floor of the exhibition are works that are more ethereal: minimalist abstracted models of a ‘glue house’ ( Weissleimhaus, 1976 – 1983 ) and imprints of beds and nightdresses, tools for nocturnal dreaming. We see also Bucher’s costume-object, which she wore to perform, becoming a dragonfly, a creature that emerges from water, only for a brief period of their life able to fly. Visions not worn or tarnished, they shine instead under a mother-of-pearl coating with the eerie beauty of trapped specimens, rather than feeling weighed down with specific historic context, unlike the mummified skinnings hanging in the gallery, yellowed and flaking.

Another series in this show includes three sculptures of water pitchers poised in the air; a latex flow of ‘water’ pouring from their spouts – this too, frozen in a single moment. A moment of casting would be impossible, and these jugs serve as symbols rather than signalling specific memories. Wasserkrug ( Water Pitcher ) is undated, whereas another work, dated 1986, bearing the title Heute fliesst das Wasser aus dem Krug ( Water Flows out of the Pitcher Today ) evokes the present. The water flows in a state of constant renewal; it is always flowing, and it is always today. In a third work, Jetzt fliesst das Wasser aus der Vase ( 1987 ), water flows from a jug in the air towards a pond, a real body of water at the back of the gallery. Did that water once flow from the vase? Perhaps, such things can be captured, if, as Bucher believed of her skinning process, we approach ‘at the right moment’.² I find the renewed interest in Bucher’s work an affirmation. A moving forward through these hanging skins and arrested memories. The running water stilled, but of all-time. An image paused, it could be yesterday, it could be tomorrow.

1. From a recording of Heidi Bucher in 1993, quoted in Heidi Bucher, Parasol Unit, London, 2018, p. 15.

2. Ibid.