Christian Schoeler_Pussy, King of the Pirates

CHRISTIAN SCHOELER PUSSY, KING OF THE PIRATES untitled #046 (Jordan), 2011, 局部, 混合媒体, 手工纸上彩粉, 83 x 55 cm untitled #046 (Jordan), 2011, detail, mixed media and pastel on handmade paper, 83 x 55 cm

Christian Schoeler: 格格不入 文：Travis Jeppesen

Christian Schoeler（1978 年生于德国哈根，生活和工作在德国杜塞尔多夫）创作的绘画和混合媒体拼贴作品中，一再出现恶棍、社会弃儿、陀思 妥耶夫斯基（Dostoyevsky）笔下的蠢蛋、无辜者和迷失者的身影。这些社会局外人的形象，他们或被社会忽视，或在真实生活中遭受着罪罚，却在 Schoeler 的作品中找到了居身之所。Schoeler 对于驱动世界的社会动力有着敏锐的感知，带着这种意识，他来到绘画的世界。他清醒地知道，对那些 无法伪装着与现实妥协的人来说，并没有什么避难所和容身之地。这样的个体就不得不生活在一种卑微的孤立状态中，与自身的欲望——个人主体 性的核心因素——隔岸相望。这些个体也注定成为思考的对象，接受那陌生的、来自他者的，外部的凝视。Schoeler 说： “我的作品说的就是一场恋 爱，不是我和我的模特之间，而是观众与模特之间的恋爱。” Schoeler 的作品中经常出现年轻男子的形象（虽然这并非唯一的主题），这些形象的面部表情和扭曲的身体从根本上反映了他们被强制脱离于社会 生活的处境。这里没有微笑的面孔，没有虚构的场景，没有他那一代艺术家依仗的某种自动反射式的、沉重而笨手笨脚的“讽刺”。我们在他这里面 对的不是什么花招和玩笑，而是令人惊奇的严肃。那种我们大多数人日常生活中认为理所当然的归属感，显然不存在于他笔下对象的表达中。 众所周知，Schoeler 的作品中有很多被人们断言是同性恋题材的元素。在我看来，这无非是对其绘画非常表面、局限的阅读。近距离的观察后马上就 会发现，Schoeler 选择塑造的对象很少是常规意义的美人。毋宁说，是画家的天赋让他能够在异类人身上发现美，而在这个沉重不堪的现实世界中， 这些人的美最是为人漠视。Schoeler 尊敬他们，把他们从“现实世界”这个背景中抽离出来，为他们的自我孤立高唱赞歌。 然而，这也会让我们产生另一种常见的误解：Schoeler 的作品是一种肖像形式。肖像意指某种记录，得以完成一种物象从物理世界到永久纪念的 转换。也许有人会觉得看Schoeler的画是件很舒服的事情，把它看作别有趣味的小品，献给无辜者的颂歌，对年轻人善意的取乐。然而，事实很少 如此。实际来说，这一诠释的场域就是一个战场，是见证Schoeler的绘画与传统肖像画之间所进行的残酷战争的地方：这场战争可以归结为投映 （projection）与保存（preservation）的矛盾冲突。传统肖像画大体来说以后者为目标，而在 Schoeler 的绘画作品中，一种将存在的内在状态投映于实 在的身体上的动力盈满其创作的核心，从而构成其绘画最引人注目的地方。 那么隐藏在画中人物后的背景又有什么涵义？Schoeler 作品的一大特征是其戏剧性的深度以及绘画的材质。其作品前景中引人注目的形象都因为其 所处的、被画家极力描绘的环境的姿态性而变得丰满。少数有幸亲眼目睹 Schoeler 工作状态的人把他的绘画比作某种行为的呈现。尽管他的图像常 常取自照片或者现场布景，其终极目标还是达到准确表达背景并同时使其朦胧的某种精妙平衡；这样来看，在画布上工作的 Schoeler 就有着表现主 义者的热忱，前臂和手指不知疲倦地在画布表面挥洒，画笔交替地擦掠、点戳、涂抹画布，以求达到预想的视觉效果（这要归功于他以粗鲁而暴力的 方式攻击画布表面，所以他需要在硬木上作画，而非绷好的传统画布）。审视绘画的细节时，你的眼睛会被引导着去比较这些重手笔对待下的表面与 他笔下对象的皮肤和相貌细节。一旦发现两者间的相似点，你会觉得对 Schoeler 来说，身体就是某种风景，反之亦然。 尽管如此，硬木表面并非画家使用的唯一媒介。那些认为 Schoeler“纯粹是个画家”的人现在要改变观点了，因为 Schoeler 已经证明，他的创作有着足 够的灵活性，可以自在地转换到使用其它媒介。2011 年在参加麦勒画廊北京部“旅居艺术家项目”期间，他创作了一组新的纸上系列作品，这足以让 我们更加进一步地深入体会 Schoeler 的绘画实践。他用油彩和水彩作画，进而用可以极度精确细节并进行复制的高端软件在电脑中制作这些作品， 并将作品打印在手工纸上，这种纸捕捉到的颜色仿佛是某种颜料，让人无法分辨出作品到底是水彩绘画还是数字制作。再加上画作表面常常——尽 管并非总是如此——会用蜡笔再度创作一遍，媒介的“真实性”问题就变得更为复杂。绘画一直是 Schoeler 进行艺术实践的核心，尽管如此，他还是 将他的纸上作品称作“拼贴”。这些作品将与一幅新创作的大尺寸油画一起，在 Schoeler 于北京举办的第一次个人展览《Pussy, King of the Pirates》 中呈现。展览的名字取自离经叛道的美国作家凯茜 · 埃克（Kathy Acker）的最后一本小说，这位作家以游戏性的手法重写经典名作，独创性地改编了 包括罗伯特 · 刘易斯 ·史蒂文森（Robert Louis Stevenson)创作的海盗故事《金银岛》（Treasure Island）在内的文学作品，致力于探索存在的极端状 态，恰恰巧妙呼应了Schoeler在绘画中的自我表达。 就像他之前的凯茜·埃克一样，Christian Schoeler 以一个非常新锐的老派艺术家形象出现在人们视野中，他是一位激进的传统主义者，明晰自己的角 色，也不惧怕用塑造英雄的笔触呈现那些与这个世界格格不入的人。他笔下的反英雄回望着我们——甚或转身背向我们观赏风景——激发着我们在 他们身上寻找投映我们最幽暗的恐惧和逝去记忆的踪迹的东西。如果说，个人即政治，Schoeler正是迫使我们去面对社会化进程以及那些被这一进 程排斥出局的人所呈现出的令人不安的真相。

翻译：苏伟

Christian Schoeler: The Misfit

by Travis Jeppesen

The miscreant, the social outcast, the Dostoevskiian idiot, the innocent and the lost – it is the perennial outsiders, those figures that are either ignored or serve as objects of punishment in real life, that appear most at home in the universe of Christian Schoeler (*1978 in Hagen, Germany; lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany). For Schoeler comes to painting with an acute awareness of the social dynamics of the world, a conscious belief that there is no outside, and thus, no place of refuge for those unable to forge a compromise with the real. Such individuals must thus live in a state of abject isolation, alienated from their own desire – the core of one’s subjectivity – and are thus destined to serve as objects of contemplation by a gaze that is always foreign, other, outside. In Schoeler’s words, “My work is about a sort of love affair – not between me and the model, but between the viewer and the model.”

Typically (though not exclusively) young men, Schoeler’s subjects’ facial expressions and bodily contortions ultimately reflect their profound situation of enforced detachment. There are no smiling faces here, no contrived scenarios, none of the loaded, heavy-handed “irony” that artists of his generation have come to rely on as a sort of automatic reflex. Rather than gimmickry and gags, we are confronted with a seriousness that startles. The sense of belonging that most of us take for granted in our daily lives is noticeably absent in his subjects’ expressions.

Much has been made of the alleged homoerotic motifs in Schoeler’s work. This, I believe, is confined to a very surface reading of the paintings.

Upon closer inspection, one readily determines that the subjects Schoeler chooses to depict are rarely conventional beauties. It is rather the painter’s gift that he is able to find the beauty in anomalous beings that would typically escape one’s notice in this burdensome real world. So Schoeler honors them, removes them from that “real world” context, paying homage to self-isolation.

This leads us, however, to another common misperception: that Schoeler’s work is a form of portraiture. Portraiture implies a sort of recording, a transmission from a physicalized state to a memorialized one. There are perhaps some who are comforted by viewing Schoeler’s paintings as quaint vignettes, odes to innocence, the innocuous pleasures of youth. This is hardly the case, however. If anything, this site of interpretation is the battlefield, the witness to a violent war going on between Schoeler’s paintings and traditional portraiture. This battle can be summarized as a conflict between projection and preservation. While traditional portraiture, by and large, aims for the latter, Schoeler’s practice is centered on the impulse to project an internal state of being onto the physical bodies that form the foreground of his paintings.

But what about the backgrounds? For the dramatic depth that Schoeler attains is one of the hallmarks of his work, and the materiality of the painting and the figures in the foreground that form the focus are enriched by the gestural nature of their depicted environs. Those few who have been fortunate enough to witness Schoeler at work have likened his painting to a sort of performance. Though his images are often taken from photographs or live settings, the ultimate goal is to attain a delicate balance of expressing while also obscuring the backgrounds; as such, Schoeler works at the canvas with an expressionistic fervor, often using his forearms and fingers to grind away at the surface, his brush alternately stroking, stabbing and lathering to attain the desired visual effect. (It is owing to the harshness and violence with which he attacks the surface that necessitates the heavy wood he paints on, rather than traditional stretched canvas.) Examined in detail, one’s eye is led to compare these heavily worked surfaces to the details on his subjects’ skin and features. In noting the similarities, one concludes that for Schoeler, the body is a sort of landscape – and vice versa.

But a hard wooden surface isn’t the painter’s restricted domain. Those who tend to think of Schoeler as a “pure painter” now have to revise their opinion, as he has proven that his process is flexible enough to shift into alternative domains of media. A new series of works on paper, made during the artist’s 2011 residency at Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, gives us further insight into Schoeler’s overall painterly practice.

Made using highly advanced computer software that is capable of replicating, in detailed exactitude, painting with oils or watercolors, the works are printed on handmade paper that captures the color as a sort of stain, making it virtually impossible to determine whether the works are in fact watercolors or digital creations. Given that the surfaces are often – though not always – re-worked with the aid of crayon, the question of the “authenticity” of the medium is further complicated. Schoeler thus refers to his works on paper as “collages”, although it should be noted that painting is always at the core of the artist’s practice. These works, alongside a new large-scale oil painting, comprise the core of Schoeler’s first solo exhibition in China, “Pussy, King of the Pirates”. The exhibition takes its name from the last novel of renegade American author Kathy Acker, whose exploration of extreme states of being through playful and inventive re-writes of classics, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s pirate story Treasure Island , forms an intriguing parallel to Schoeler’s own project in painting.

And so, like Acker before him, Christian Schoeler emerges on the scene as a very new-old type of artist, a radical traditionalist, conscious of his role and unafraid of heroizing the misfit. His anti-heroes stare back at us – or else turn their backs on us completely to observe the landscape – daring us to find in them projections of our own darkest fears and traces of lost memories. If, as the saying goes, the personal is always political, Schoeler forces us to face uncomfortable truths about the socializing process and those that it excludes.

untitled # 038 (Niki), 2011 混合媒体, 布面油画, 木框装裱 60 x 40 cm

untitled # 038 (Niki), 2011 mixed media, oil on canvas mounted on wood 60 x 40 cm

“Pussy, King of the Pirates”, 麦勒画廊 北京-卢森, 中国北京, 2011

“Pussy, King of the Pirates”, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, China, 2011

untitled # 037 (Sylvester), 2011 混合媒体, 布面油画, 木框装裱 75 x 50 cm

untitled # 037 (Sylvester), 2011 mixed media, oil on canvas mounted on wood 75 x 50 cm

Christian Schoeler 1978

born in Hagen, Germany

lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany

2000-2003 Studied Philosophy and the History of Art, University of Essen 2003-2007 Munich Academy of Fine Arts (with Prof. Günther Förg)

Selected Solo Exhibitions 2011

“Pussy, King of the Pirates”, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Beijing, China

2010

“Adam Likes Apples”, Schuebbe Projects, Düsseldorf, Germany

2009

“Si le grain ne meurt”, Don’t Projects, Paris, France

“Christian Schoeler”, presented by AnOtherMan magazine, London, UK

The Volta Show, New York, USA

2008

“Studies For A Boy Book”, Schuebbe Projects, Düsseldorf, Germany

2007

“Kalte Sterne”, Open Studios Ehrengutstrasse, Munich, Germany

2006

“Mein Tod in Swan Lake City”, with Mélina Avouac, Akademiegalerie, Munich, Germany

Selected Group Exhibitions 2011

“Portraits of Ambiguity”, Ana Cristea Gallery, New York, USA

(with Razvan Boar, Alexander Tinei, George Young)

“Apopcalypse Now”, Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam, Netherlands

(with Hernan Bas, Tim Eitel, Thomas Hirschhorn, Elizabeth Peyton, Billy Sullivan, et al.)

2010

“Summer 2010” Weinstein Gallery, Minneapolis, USA

(with Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray, Joseph Beuys, Richard Hamilton, August Sander, et al.)

“FATHER”, Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo, Brazil

(with Bruce LaBruce, Dean Sameshima, Hernan Bas, Terence Koh, et al.)

“High Drama: Works from the Collection of Hugo & Carla Brown”, NL – The Dutch Cultural Pop-Up Space, London, UK

(with Hernan Bas, Martin Eder, Anthony Goicolea, Hans Op de Beeck, et.al.)

2009

“Boy Oh Boy”, Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami, USA

(with Hernan Bas, Paul P., Jonathan Meese, Dash Snow, et al.)

“Art Fair – Art from Art Fairs”, Aura Gallery, Beijing, China

(with Matthew Barney, Kasuhiro Ito, Masahi Hattori, et al.)

“The Franks-Suss Collection”, Phillips de Pury & Company at The Saatchi Gallery, London, UK

“Le souci de soi”, Don’t Projects, Paris, France

(with Rainer Fetting, Spencer Sweeney, Benjamin A. Huseby, Cecile B. Evans, Mélina Avouac)

“Works from the Franks-Suss Collection”, London, UK

(with Daniel Arsham, Hernan Bas, Frank Nitsche, Michael Sailstorfer, Michael Vasquez, Zeng Fanzhi, et al.)

“Esquire’s Singular Suit”, Somerset House, London, UK

(with Antony Gormly, Terence Koh, Spencer Tunick, Jeremy Deller, et al.)

“The Blueberry Show”, Terri & Donna, Miami, USA

(with Lee Anderson, Will Graper, Nic Xedro)

2008

“Auf der Suche nach …”, Galerie Carla Stützer, Cologne, Germany

(with Joseph Beuys, Katharina Sieverding, Walter Dahn)

出版：麦勒画廊 北京-卢森为Christian Schoeler 个展 “Pussy, King of the Pirates” 而出版, 展出于中国北京麦勒画廊 北京-卢森 2011年 9月3日至 10月 23日 编辑：麦勒画廊 北京-卢森; 文章：Travis Jeppesen; 翻译：苏伟（中文）; 设计：李建辉; 摄影：Eric Gregory Powell © 2011 麦勒画廊 北京-卢森, Christian Schoeler 未经出版人的书面许可, 本书所有内容不可用于任何形式及目的, 包括但不限于图片复印、抄录或其他信息存储及文字转换的复制及传播。 印刷：中国北京 Publisher: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne on the occasion of Christian Schoeler’s solo exhibition “Pussy, King of the Pirates” at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing, China, from September 3 to October 23, 2011 Editor: Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne; Text: Travis Jeppesen; Translator: Su Wei (C); Designer: Li Jianhui; Photography: Eric Gregory Powell © 2011 Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing-Lucerne, Christian Schoeler All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including but not limited to photocopying, transcribing or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in China 麦勒画廊, 北京市朝阳区草场地104号, 邮编 100015, 电话 + 86 10 643 333 93 Galerie Urs Meile, No. 104, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, PRC -100015 Beijing, China, T + 86 10 643 333 93 Galerie Urs Meile, Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne, Switzerland, T + 41 41 420 33 18 galerie@galerieursmeile.com, www.galerieursmeile.com

untitled #049 (Jordan), 2011, 局部, 混合媒体, 手工纸上彩粉, 83 x 55 cm untitled #049 (Jordan), 2011, detail, mixed media and pastel on handmade paper, 83 x 55 cm