Beat Streuli Public Works 1996–2011

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Beat Streuli Public Works 1996–2011

p. 11 A Monument to Contemporary Humanity Roberta Valtorta

p. 17 Public Works 1996–2011



p. 129 Movements, Displacements—Democracy Raymond Bellour

p. 143 Pictures in Pictures Jonathan Watkins

p. 154 List of Works

p. 156 Biography

p. 159 Bibliography

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Contents

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A Monument to Contemporary Humanity

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Roberta Valtorta

For many years Beat Streuli has been erecting a unique monumentin-progress to contemporary humanity. The constant motif of this immense, systematic work is the metropolis with its faces in the crowd, the repetition and variation of human figures in the streets: figures of ourselves. Glass fronts of museums, art galleries, and banks, the inside and outside walls of universities, hospitals, stations, airports, and a whole variety of public buildings, long walls, and urban billboards, as well as stretches of landscape all bear his images of people taken as they quite simply walk through the streets. What we see is a set of poses and figures in urban spaces, embodying the existential status of metropolitan man in his twofold guise as a particular individual and a generic, anonymous being immersed in the masses. A being that always moves, constantly migrating and changing. Without the slightest emphasis and with a methodical strategy dictated by his bene­volent obsession, Beat Streuli observes these figures and composes them together in majestic, ethereal works. Without seeking pointless aesthetic variations and without flaunting some deliberately expressive artistic language but, on the contrary, by setting the codes of his tools—photography and video—back to zero, he confers beauty and power upon images of the urban routine that never ceases to move forward in every corner of this globalized world. Over the years he has built a window on humanity, creating a dynamic monument to contemporary life. He neither rebukes nor teaches, nor does he judge or recall but right now, in this age of the death of history, of memory, and of epic narratives, he constructs a highly complicated and intricate global tale from one city to the next. It is actually a tale of tales, an enormous mosaic of human types arranged in groups and captured in the evidence and truth of their passing through the streets, those fascinating places that belong to everyone and no one. How many figures has Beat Streuli photographed so far in the cities of the world? And most of all, how many more will he photograph in the future? This is a working method and a process that are destined to expand further and further with slight, periodical variations; potentially, they have no end. The stream of figures who take part in the construction of this monument create a sort of code that binds them together through the seriality that dominates them, the flow of the sequence, the alternation of solids and voids, and the rhythm and cadence of the projection. Each figure is alone in its solitude and sometimes in its alienation, a fragment of space and time carved from a multitude; yet it is closely linked to others in its similarity, and again in its extraneousness to others (possibly the most distinctive form of metropolitan social interaction), in a sort of script that sustains them all and gives them meaning. Streuli’s work is thus a long chant, a ritual musical score, the trace of 14

Roberta Valtorta

an electrocardiogram sending forth the magic and impromptu poetry of the human face with all its expressions, the surprise of the manwoman animal’s body observed as it lives and moves in the light of days spent in the city. A face-body that appears to us as visible and as clear as ever, unique and extraordinary, despite the fact that the artist’s strategy shows it as one of the many, countless face-bodies in the world; it becomes even all the more significant as it is a small element that forms part of an immeasurable whole.

Roberta Valtorta

The people that Beat Streuli isolates from the urban flow and shows us in his composition-montages are never photographed while doing something particular, nor during some special moment of their lives. In these images there are none of those “events” that would make a reporter’s day, for Beat Streuli does not go out in search of special scenes, nor does he describe them, but simply follows his plan of recording images of people in the crowd. He thus dismantles the decisive moment that constitutes the utopia of classic photog­ raphy: the capacity of the photographer to capture fleeting moments that will never return in terms of the uniqueness of the event and the perfect rendering of the scene, in an instantaneous convergence of the photographer’s expert eye and the click of the camera. Beat Streuli never shows off his skill but, with his egalitarian, democratic vision, he cuts out a whole series of “ordinary” moments, revealing faces, gestures, poses, looks, and clothes dictated by the laws of fashion and consumerism. The same is true of hairstyles, accessories, electronic gadgets and, in the flow of images, also fragments, excerpts, of the urban setting. In most cases, these people do not know they are being photographed and the figures, who are often young, are seen from very close-up, in every detail, thanks to his use of a telephoto lens. The figures are not placed in wide-open settings, rather each is positioned in the exclusive rectangle that frames them, precisely cut to size. These are social figures manifestly captured in public places and yet, at the same time, caught in a fleeting moment of private life, in the intimacy of their thoughts. It is through this convergence of public and private that their truth and disconcerting contemporaneity emerges. Beat Streuli extracts his figures from the moving flesh of the city: they are not just passersby but cells pulsating in the body of the city. They are its structure and the material from which it is made, because a city without crowds simply does not exist. The sense of extraction that predominates makes these figures unstable, how­ever strong and however precisely posed, like sculptures, they may be. This is why fixed images (photographs) and moving images (video or a sequence of images timed by the rhythm of the projector) are very closely allied in Streuli’s work. Indeed, they appear to overlap: thus we A Monument to Contemporary Humanity

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A Monument to Contemporary Humanity

find that the set of figures in a photographic installation is in all respects similar to a film while, conversely, the variations of the figures in a video appear more like a succession of photographic stills.

Roberta Valtorta

But this narrative complexity would not achieve full meaning if Streuli’s images did not have a precise destiny, which is that of being subjected to huge enlargement and being exhibited most conspicuously in public places. They appear in the form of billboards in the streets, large posters stuck on walls, gigantic transparent figures on the windows of buildings, and as immaterial projections on vast screens. Theirs is the destiny of images used by the mass media, from advertising to fashion, to the cinema, television, and the Internet as well. With their essentiality, clarity, and visual presence, they speak directly to the locals, passersby, tourists, and anyone who for any reason goes into the urban spaces and public places where they are installed: people who are simultaneously the subjects of these images. Like a sort of gigantic television reality show, but with serious, elegant, civilized overtones. The circle is closed by a mechanism of mirroring which makes the actors and the spectators one and the same: in the circular nature of Beat Streuli’s project, the people who are photographed are the flesh of the city, but the flesh of the city is also those who view these large images installed in collective spaces. The images themselves have their effect on the architecture and on the image of the city itself. Designed and built by the artist in his silent, solitary project, in the end the monument becomes a public work in the most sensational manner. Beat Streuli gently but resolutely compels us into the labyrinth of an art that takes over the techniques and places of the great, omnipresent communication that embraces everyone and everything. It is an art that wishes to be explicitly public and shared, today. An art that talks to us of beauty, of the possible beauty of us all. And of the identity of contemporary mankind, which is so hard to define.

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A Monument to Contemporary Humanity

Public Works 1996–2011

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Vienna 1996

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Amsterdam 1997

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Enghien 1998

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Barcelona 1998

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Sydney 1998

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Düsseldorf 1999

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Chicago 1999

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Tokyo 1999

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Düsseldorf 2000

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Birmingham 2001

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Paris 2002

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New York City 2003

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Dallas 2005

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Zurich 2005

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Yokohama 2005

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Leipzig 2007

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Wolfsburg 2007

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Grand Hornu 2008

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Helsinki 2008

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Petra 2008

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Geneva 2009

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Singapore 2010

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Ghent 2011

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Movements, Displacements— Democracy

Raymond Bellour

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There are three conventional ways of discovering Beat Streuli’s latest major installation, La Voie publique (2011), and its 35 images more than three meters tall, covering the entire length of more than 100 meters of a tunnel wall in the area of the new train station still under construction in Ghent, Belgium. The first is that of the pedestrian walking along the section of the sidewalk reserved for them near the wall, and as a result practically on top of the images. So much so that if this pedestrian cannot resist taking a step back to contemplate them, they risk ending up on the cycle path, which has a larger section of the sidewalk allotted to it. And bikes do fly past on this path, more or less constantly and at varying speeds, receiving—one would imagine — varying impressions of all these images, as the cyclists can only glance at them distractedly. The third way of seeing them is to go past them in a car, bus, or tram, in a lateral movement too fast to appreciate them, but which may encourage the desire to return and take one’s time with them. The result is one last way of considering La Voie publique: from the perspective of the pensive passerby, trying to find her or his own speed and the right distance for coming and going alongside all these images, in order to see their variety — the groupings, associations, sequences — as the obstinacy of a non-intuitive art of seeing. Ironically, this turns out to be an almost dangerous position, as one ends up caught between the nearly silent incursion of the bicycles and the always too sudden arrivals of other vehicles.

Raymond Bellour

For more than 20 years, Beat Streuli has been scrutinizing humanity. With patience, modesty, and an apparently inexhaustible obsessiveness. A patience that recalls that of the great photographers — both street photographers and photojournalists — through his power to accumulate images. And modesty associated with the lack of individuality of this mass of images: not one ever really becomes a photograph, despite the large format he uses. On the contrary, each image is destined from the start to enter into sequences, series whose ar­range­ments remain, as a rule, more or less variable, each time fit­ ting into the context of the shoot and the exhibition space, or per­ haps the mysterious dictum of some associative inspiration. As if, at that moment, among all these constantly captured faces and bodies of the world — as anonymous as they are singular — the unlikely remembrance of some image called attention to itself as something to be combined with some other image, by an “attraction of montage” that does not impose a meaning so much as the charm of drifting and — depending on the composition’s appeal—a hypothesis offered to the gaze every time. Of course, these sets of images are born first of particular circumstances, this voyage and that commission in some part of the world, for some exhibition in a gallery, museum, or 132

public space. These images in series comprise his reserve of images from which he may always draw. So some images reappear, moving from one time and place to another, relating as need be to other images according to renewed assemblages of human presences, forms, rhythms, colors, and intensities, thus accentuating the diverse character of Streuli’s art, which comes from his preference for the most vibrant corners of contemporary urban spaces. His work thus seems to be the constant editing and re-editing of a humanity moving toward itself, captured more or less frontally or at an angle in the viewfinder of an attracted but distant telephoto lens. In such a way that every image—whether taken close-up or at a distance, with its graduated levels of sharpness and blur barely distinguishing it from everyday perception and finding itself mixed in with other images in varying quantities—presents more than anything a kind of surprised unaffectedness through which a discreet but invaluable parity between art and life is affirmed. Here, Trevor Smith sees Streuli as motivated by the “concern that contemporary art has not delivered the images within which many people can recognize themselves; that the long view of history will probably discern more about our time through pop music, advertising, and film than contemporary art.” He quotes Streuli: “I want to have installations that are big and beautiful just as the movies are, or great billboards, and without selling stupid products.” And he titles his essay “Everyday Arcadias.” 1

1 Trevor Smith, “Everyday Arcadias,” About the World, Beat Streuli — Bondi Beach/Parramatta Road, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hannover 1999 2 Raymond Bellour, “Les morts-vivants” (1996), L’Entre-Images 2, P.O.L, Paris 1999, p. 266–263.

This title, with its promise of utopia, is all the more resonant in that Streuli’s work is not limited to the already quite varied effects of serial photography such as he pursues it. The diversity of movement that seems to flow out of it — through a series of exhibition contexts within which the spectacularity that they offer to the passerby, in often unexpected public spaces, acquires its own mediating value—  is accompanied by two other kinds of actual movement via projection. The first is the slide show, which Streuli took up early on (with Allen Street in 1994, the period in which I discovered his work while I was working on James Coleman’s projected images 2 ). This movement owes a great deal to the detours of montage, as well as to the insistent dissolves that carry the images into time. The second kind of movement involves video, which Streuli has been using regularly since the mid-1990s. With it he finds a position that contrasts with his technique as a photographer immersing himself in crowds, accumulating shots from one glance to the next, working like a seismographer focused on capturing the slightest tremors in his material. Unlike photography, video presupposes a fixed and continuous point of view from a camera that lets this life material come to it: the frame that is chosen — in which this material presents itself, varies, Movements, Displacements — Democracy

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Movements, Displacements — Democracy

and develops with the intangible gentleness of a sustained slowmotion effect — quite simply allows for a greater awareness of that life, and for its incorporation into the sustained variation of its metamorphoses, its constant disappearance and reappearance.

3 Jean-François Chevrier, “Physiologie de l’image,” Beat Streuli. Projektionen und Fotografien. NYC 1991/93, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne/Lars Müller, Baden 1993, n. p.

From photography to the successive presentation of photographs, culminating in video: this is the variation to which Streuli subjects the images of so many inhabitants of the world. In a groundbreaking essay 3— inevitably and copiously rehashed, whether deliberately or not, by many others —Jean-François Chevrier put forth the inescapable cultural references accompanying this act (Poe, Baudelaire, Engels, Vertov, Benjamin, Brecht; others may add Simmel, Canetti, Kracauer, Balázs, Lewis Mumford, Richard Sennett) and their transplantation into a renewed landscape inside of which photography approaches cinema (Chevrier stresses the influence of Godard, which Streuli has acknowledged). “For Streuli, ‘the man with the movie camera’ absorbs ‘the man in the street’ by transforming the flâneur. The observer inserts himself into the movement captured by the recording device. He doesn’t penetrate the crowd to take its portrait. Rather, he tries to grasp its rhythm, its modulation [ … ] His solution hangs on one method: a method of photography and montage that allows his work to fall between the instant of photography and the duration of cinema, by associating the sequential modulations of a movement with the suspension of gestures and attitudes.” Chevrier points out how this leads Streuli to disrupt “the pathos of the fragment by re­ ducing the tension through which a certain discontinuity attempts to constitute itself as unity.” This unity is both the ideal of a selfconsistent photograph and the entirety of a film (as long as one does not break up the virtuality of its constituent images). Consequently, Streuli’s videos, no matter how long they are (from around 20 to 45 minutes, projected in a loop), have neither beginning nor end; they are flows whose unruly continuity is another way of expressing and bringing to life the pure contingency of intervals that inherently assert themselves between photographs. This is why these photographs are themselves interchangeable, and why their intervals are always potentially variable, free in their meaning, rich with forms and forces—a plastic force at work in each image and from one image to the next, bearing witness for humanity to its elementary beauty, its elementary reality, its endless variations. It is also too simple to just compare these lacunae between photographs to the continuities inherent in the video works, since these works are seen on anywhere from one to three screens, thus showing, between their respective continuities, lacunae of a different sort which may, however, seem analogous. In an interview the last section of which is entirely devoted to ideas of 134

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intervals, of “between,” of interventions and intermediaries, Streuli says this about his slide projections: “Above all, they allow me to work on the borderline between the static and the cinematographic image. This pivotal position makes one fully conscious of the structures inherent in the two media; what’s more, the succession of images reveals by indirection the spaces that surround my ‘characters’—the actors of my photographs — and it emphasizes the intervals that slip between two movements, two moments suspended in time.” 4 The effectiveness of such research is that the borderline never stops changing its level of reality or its domain of application depending on the medium adopted in turn, and on the variations in the dispositif  5 that each medium privileges. This is where the complications of Streuli’s work reside, beneath its veneer of apparent simplicity. To such a point that the image that seems the most appropriate for trying to bring together in one place the various aspects of his art would be that of the sea, as it is both inconceivable for the mind’s eye and resistant to the perceiving eye; an image in which each wave forming within other waves would be immobilized in its turn through the use of a freeze-frame, or accompanied in its slow motion so that another wave may come into being, uniformly and indefinitely.

[ 01–06 ] 

[ 07–12 ] 

[ 13–17 ] 

[ 18–23 ] 

4 Interview with Martine Béguin and Jean-Paul Felley in the catalogue of the exhibition Allen Street (New York 1994), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen/ Le Consortium, Dijon 1994, p. 28. 5 The word “dispositif ” does not have a satisfactory English equivalent, insofar as one must especially avoid the confusion that too often arises when it is translated as “apparatus.” In 1975, when Jean-Louis Baudry used it in a cinema studies context (in his text “Le dispositif: approches métapsychologiques de l’impression de réalité”), his aim was to take into account the cinematic environment as a whole —  from a Freudian perspective, without any critical partiality—an environment that fully incorporates the spectator’s psyche, and that is considered an equivalent of the dream state. In Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir) that same year, Michel Foucault used the word, demonstrating its growing acceptance, to describe the series of machinic systems for which Bentham’s Panopticon was the historical pro­totype. Bellour makes free use of this double meaning and its consequences to designate the cinematic environment as well as visual and audio­ vi­sual installations belonging both to the history of art and that of techniques [translator’s note].

How can one try to accompany and express the effect of this wave of humanity compiled by La Voie publique (where one may recognize at least two characters from an earlier installation, but seen from a slight­ly different angle)? [ 24–30 ] 

The first thing to notice is the length of the composition, and the time it takes for an average gaze to assess its scale: more than 100 meters, which means enough time to forget little by little what one has already seen, enough time to feel the desire to go back and get a better sense of the details. So much so, that the memory of space never stops converting itself into a memory of time. A stratified, confused time, constantly turning back onto itself, for it is above all the flâneur’s time, the work itself having no time of its own, as one can traverse it first in one direction then in the other. This arrangement is typical of Streuli’s work: a series laid out lengthwise. But never, apparently, with such a mixture of purity and excess. Previously, a surprising installation designed in 2008 in the Jordanian desert stretched itself out over 160 meters, but the images, all attached to each other, were also stacked in two layers, giving the confused impression of a crowd more than a procession. Similarly, for an exhibition at the Grand-Hornu in Belgium (2008), one of the installations layered six strata of images from floor to ceiling, on a wall 44 meters long. In all the variety of dispositifs that Streuli has adopted, based

[ 31–35 ] 

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Ghent 2011 (sequence design La Voie publique)

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Movements, Displacements — Democracy

on the site and on his inclinations, none has ever shown such a linearity as that seen in La Voie publique, of a sort comparable to a film: as one walks by the outlines of its frames, one thinks invariably either of train windows or of a strip of film images.

6 Honoré de Balzac, Théorie de la démarche et autres texts, Pandora/Le Milieu, Paris 1978, p. 45, 75.

The second thing that strikes an attentive passerby is precisely that: the distribution of figures inside 57 light boxes, 164 centimeters wide and 326 centimeters high, each outlined by their frame. Their progression is punctuated by the insertion of 12 narrower light boxes (81.5 centimeters wide), uniformly gray, spread out at unequal intervals along the total length of the work (in the station’s architectural scheme, these light boxes are supposed to light up in turn to indicate the presence of a train on the tracks, symbolized by 12 colors.) Conceived in this way, the dispositif makes it possible for the relationship between the 57 light boxes, into which the 35 figures are introduced, to present itself in consistently unexpected ways: one where each of the figure-bodies occupies only one light box, another where it encroaches upon a second, and a third where two figures taken together match up in various ways within two light boxes. Or yet another way, where three light boxes are associated in two sets, one set showing a group of people moving forward, seemingly forming a mass [ 15 ], the other apparently showing a motionless couple [ 16 ]. The succession of these two series thus opens a space that is suddenly more continuous within the overall discontinuity, all the more so in that the direction of the gazes and the positions of the bodies in the first series seem to suggest a fictional acknowledgment by the man in the white shirt [ 15 ] of a young woman in red who seems to be standing before him in a preceding frame [ 14 ]. The third effect is thus due to the carefully arranged variations bet­ ween the bodies. Variations of postures, gestures, gazes, colors, of everything that a particular bearing, in the way that Balzac understood it, conveys of the “physiognomy of the body.” He also wrote: “Every movement has an expression that belongs to it and that comes from the soul.”6 As materialist as Streuli’s art may be, these are unquestionably emanations from body-souls communicating in this way with each other, with their enduring and specific human signature. What is unique to La Voie publique is that these forces are organized, more than usual, according to a kind of mise-en-scène. Take as an exam­ple the first 12 frames. First, the teenager in the white T-shirt [ 1 ] who, behind his glasses, seems to be the only one in the whole series who looks at the camera. But this is an illusion: as in all of these captured portraits, the gaze drifts, at the uncertain frontier between exterior and interior (a softened painting effect; in the most unsettling cases, 138

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an appropriated Manet effect). Then, extending the forward movement of this body, shifting the focus of the gaze to the right, comes the dark-skinned man dressed in blue wearing headphones and holding some kind of white paper [ 2 ]. This is a sharp contrast to the following shot showing a black man from the back, green shirt, turned to the right, with bluish stripes in the background [ 3 ]. The young woman who follows him [ 4 ], her head covered by a headscarf whose gray matches her clothes, shields her eyes with her hand to look to the left, invoking an imaginary reverse shot somewhere beyond the frame. A young man and a young woman walk forward, he in blue, head lowered, she in red, looking straight ahead, their eyes hidden behind their sunglasses [ 5, 6 ]. Then, a sudden change of scene: image 7 presents a fragment of a blue bus framed by two narrow light boxes —  increasingly, Streuli takes care to create spaces between the bodies, spaces for objects, empty spaces, structured breathing room.

7 Chris Marker, Sans soleil; http://www.markertext.com/sans_soleil.htm (September 4, 2011).

What do these bodies that we discover bring us, as we move toward them, as they seem to come to us, some touched by the ambiguous traces of pauses that are internal to the fictive movement that brings them together? Not that “stare of equality” that Chris Marker sought among the women at the Bissau market when, in “the length of a film frame,” the “real glance” manifested itself in the recognition that a photograph was being taken.7 The distance maintained by Streuli’s telephoto lens aims, with unparalleled stubbornness, for something else: a democracy of appearance. To each one’s own image, in the restraint that it imposes, in the time it takes for a glance that one can make last, but that immediately finds itself caught up in the displacement that carries it away toward another image. Another nearby image, that is, for together they give rise to a democracy of the gaze. This is why it is so important for Streuli that his images be always the same format (at least for each series) within each of the chosen dispositifs, and that his large formats be something like the guarantee of that equality, conferring upon the human being a kind of monumentality. In sum, a democracy of beauty, to serve the beauty of a democracy. This is why so many bodies of different nationalities and from diverse ethnic origins inhabit these images: via independent series (the black teenagers of Allen Street); cross-referenced, structured series (the two walls meeting at a right angle and forming two external faces of a cube, designed for the Yokohama Triennale in 2005: on one side, 15 close-ups of men, on the other, 12 — the first group are Asian, the second, Arab); and especially mixed series. Worldsized democracy, through a certain equality within the image and before it.

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“Democracy is, properly speaking, the symbolic institution of politics in the form of the power of those who are not entitled to exercise power — a rupture in the order of legitimacy and domination. Democracy is the paradoxical power of those who do not count: the count of ‘the unaccounted for.’” 8 This may be one way to better understand the choice of subjects photographed and presented by Streuli for 20 years all over the world, each displaying the discreet pride of his or her own appearance. He has spoken of his predilection for adolescence, that confused time of uncertainty and self-assertion that gives faces and body movements their own distinct aura, one whose image has spread throughout the planet through globalization, an aura caught between the search for individuation and the inevitability of homo­genization.9 It is the power of those who do not yet count, so numerous that they cannot be counted, that Streuli depicts in his portraits. Despite the photographic gloss of these images, their kin­ ship with the masterpieces of painting has been emphasized, especially Renaissance painting with its portraits of those who truly did count. But it would be too simple to reduce so many images to one characteristic, as essential as it may be. With an art of nuance that is itself worthy of consideration, Streuli has been able to maintain his all-inclusive preference for youth while appropriating that choice for a higher level of inclusiveness. He says, for example: “When I see people around my age with a comparable level of presence, I’m more than happy to include them in my ‘album.’” 10 This is true of the man with salt-and-pepper hair focused on his papers in La Voie publique [ 22 ]. And, to a lesser degree, of many others who are identi­ fiably adults [ 11, 30 ]. One could mention several other examples throughout various sets of images and installations. A series such as Torino 02 (2002) even furnishes an exemplary paradigm in the space of four images: old woman/young man/young woman/adult man. Video pushes that tendency further. Of the three motionless women, waiting for something, who are the basis for the essentially unique motif of Praza de Galicia August 03 (2003), those appearing on the left and right screens are worried adults, while in the middle, the woman with large glasses hanging over her flowery blouse betrays an apparent anxiety about growing old. As for the much longer videos, they seem to allow all the young people crowding the streets to pass through the frame endlessly, along with the others who comprise with them an anonymous mass. Such is the democratic art of Beat Streuli, from the intimacy of the gallery to exhibitions in public spaces: between choice and non-choice, an inevitability accorded to the period whose pulse he lets beat — with the shifts that an instinctive passion for composition permits — so as to help himself freely to all the images it offers. 142

8 Jacques Rancière and Davide Panagia, “Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière,” trans. Davide Panagia, diacritics 30.2 (2000), p. 124. 9 Interview quoted by Béguin and Felley, p. 27; interview with Alessandra Pace in the exhibition catalogue Portraits 98–00, La bella estate, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea/ hopefulmonster, Turin 2000. 10 Béguin and Felley, p. 115. Beat Streuli was born in 1957.

Movements, Displacements — Democracy

Pictures in Pictures

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Jonathan Watkins

The hillside is bathed in Middle Eastern sunlight, its rocky earth color set off by a clear azure sky. Low scrubby trees, few and far between, indicate a desert dryness not easily endured. This is a natural habitat for not much, tough especially for those used to the shelter, resources, and the regulation of modern urban life. This is the way to the ancient city of Petra. Or rather, these are photographs of the way to Petra. Taken by Beat Streuli, reproduced in this book, they capture the spirit of this place in all its starkness, its unforgiving atmosphere and dwarfing scale. At the same time, they document an installation of his work there, outdoors, alongside an unsealed road. A huge, long strip of photographs, approximately 6-meters high, two-tiered, and stepped in order to follow the lie of the land.

Jonathan Watkins

Jonathan Watkins

Thriving cities are places of arrivals and departures, of visitors and passersby, and with this in mind the location of Streuli’s work on the outskirts of Petra strikes us as inspired. Petra in its day was a world city, given the extent of the then known world, but it is testament also to the fact that cities themselves come and go. The fate of Visitors and Passers-by, destroyed as it was by a sandstorm two weeks after its erection, is nothing if not poignant.

The road, since the 6th century BC, would have once been taken by caravan traders making their way to and from the city, situated as it was at the intersection of routes through to Gaza in the west, Bosra and Damascus in the north, Aqaba and Leuca Come on the Red Sea, and across the desert to the Persian Gulf. Subsequently it was a means of communication whereby Greek, Egyptian, and Syrian influences were assimilated, and then, during the 2nd century AD, it be­­­came yet another line joining the dots of the Roman Empire. A medieval decline—exacerbated by a devastating earthquake—meant that this road gradually lost its strategic significance, evolving into a less loaded thoroughfare for the traffic of archaeologists and following tourists all intrigued by what Petra had been a long, long time ago.

The new immigration that was effected here, whereby the images of people from all corners of the world converged on Petra, bears a telling comparison with one of Streuli’s earliest projects in public space, Visitors, made in Vienna for the museum in progress in 1996. Nine portraits of tourists in the city center were reproduced to fill 3,000 billboards, located mainly in peripheral suburbs. Besides the translation of geographical location—and, incidentally, a seasonal shift as summer photographs were displayed the following winter —  Streuli was also enjoying a reversal of convention whereby images of marginalized reality were shown in metropolitan exhibition spaces, incidentally tending to exoticize the unremarkable. He was taking pictures of tourists to places they would not normally visit, mak­ing them a spectacle for a predominantly non-art audience.

Petra is dead now, its rock-cut architectural remnants being the bare bones of a complex organism which, like any city, was enlivened by the ambitions and preoccupations of its inhabitants. They once walked up and down those streets, around those open spaces, through those doorways, in and out of those rooms, motivated for the most part by the same everyday concerns that characterize our modern lives. We are left to imagine their vitality, the vanished equivalent of the color and movement we see in Beat Streuli’s pictures, or, here, in his pictures of them.

It cannot be emphasized enough how refreshing it was when Beat Streuli emerged as an artist, internationally, during the 1990s, and the Viennese project epitomizes this. The easy-going nature of his work, its avoidance of self-conscious gesture, its guilelessness, its un­­a­ shamed compatibility with the formats and vocabulary of ad­ver­tising, set it apart from the mass of contemporary artistic output. The attitude that informs it matches well the actions and stances of Streuli’s subjects, for the most part unaware of his presence and the fact that they are to be subsequently drawn into works of art. The over­all effect is one of coolness, and a strange desirability, engendered by the

Entitled Visitors and Passers-by, the installation on the road to Petra was part of the Jordan Festival during the summer of 2008. It brought together a vast array of images from the artist’s travels of the preceding years, a multitude of people photographed by him in cities all over the world, an informal street-wise version of the United Nations. Against the blurred but distinct backdrops of variously built environments we see smart-casual Euro types juxtaposed with Arabic women in hijabs, an Indian woman wrapped in a sari, cool Hispanic guys in 146

T-shirts and caps, an Afro-American girl with braids one up, two across from a man with a Lech Walesa moustache … Everyone is purposeful, talking into mobile phones, waiting at traffic lights or crossing the street, taking photos, carrying stuff, chatting with friends. These are different people in different places, certainly, but it is not unusual in our globalized culture to see such a cosmopolitan mix, for example in world cities such as London, New York, and Tokyo. Against the backdrop of an arid landscape, these images are the pictorial equivalent of an urban oasis, complete with the articulating crisscross geometry— the gridded rectangles that do not occur in nature—ubiquitous in the modern metropolis.

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self-contained nature of who we see, individuals absolutely not concerned with the possibility of having our attention.

Jonathan Watkins

Streuli knows this. In fact his work overall is steeped in an understated knowingness, like the best kind of impressionism, not overburdened with symbolic motifs, but reflections of real life with all the complexity that can then be brought to bear on them. Concerning Vienna, he stresses that he was not trying to make a point about the way the art world works, pitting high art practice against suburban culture, but simply that it “turned out like that.” He had been a tourist too, after all, but instead of focusing his camera on famous buildings and landmarks, he captured images of other tourists, used them intuitively in response to a public art commission, and then countless possibilities of meaning ensued. Visitors in Vienna was not intended as a critique of anything, but then who could deny it meant something. Context is key, as much to the business of identifying a work of art as it is to meaning, and this makes Streuli’s pictures of his pictures especially interesting.

Jonathan Watkins

Then there was 9/11 and, as the artist acknowledges, airports became loaded with very different meanings, especially with respect to glo­ balization. People move (and are moved) around airports differently now, less optimistically, but much stays the same, as indicated in Streuli’s pictures of his pictures at Schiphol. We see people moving baggage from cars to trolleys, waiting for pick-ups, boarding buses, moving briskly with anticipation and not wanting to be late, all under the gaze of youthful faces. These faces had been encountered by the artist in Vienna and were brought by him to an airport in Amsterdam, where they could be read as reminders of the possibility of being elsewhere through direct flight routes. Chances are that some of those in the car park were departing for or arriving from Vienna. To complement this translating tendency, as seen also in the Viennese suburbs and Petra, Streuli sometimes decides to show his outdoor work in the vicinity of his subject matter. That is to say, the people and places in his photographs are sometimes shown in situ, and so his pictures in pictures become more like mirrors. Shortly after Schiphol, for example, for the 1998 Biennale of Sydney, he showed photographs of activity around the old Town Hall on the vast hoardings above a building site just across the road.

The arid environment on the edge of Petra transforms our ways of seeing Streuli’s portraits, and likewise the streetscape in Vienna. More or less empty except for cars, parked or blurred by their movement, it is a wonderfully humdrum foil for his sun-kissed visitors. Airports, on the other hand, are designed to be especially inviting contexts, marketed as sophisticated and multicultural microcosms —  filmic scenarios for the jet-set — and it was Schiphol, Amsterdam’s hub airport, where in late 1997 many other photographs taken by Streuli in Vienna first saw the light of day. Here there was a two-tiered strip format like that used in Petra, on a hoarding above a car park, with 30 head and shoulders shots of young people; sometimes the same ones appeared consecutively, with split seconds elapsed between exposures, and thus allusion was made to a Warhol-style popism. And young people? They have the simple beauty of youth, a certain energy in their apprehension of the present while embodying the future. The Schiphol project had the resemblance of an airport advertising campaign, but there were no “we are the world” straplines, no promotion of anything except an artistic vision. It was like a Trojan horse, an insinuated artwork, deliberately confused with its surroundings — unlike the Petra and Vienna projects that are remarkable through incongruity — without a jarring note. It avoided naïveté on the one hand and irony on the other, in order to convey a heartfelt optimism. In a recent unpublished conversation, Streuli explained, “I really thought then that the Western world was being under-appreciated. I wanted to emphasize the positive side of our very civilized 148

society … A lot of people were critical of the Western world and Westerners, and instead I was saying that I always found it not so bad.”

More varied in composition, not so tightly cropped, again the imagery played out horizontally in a single row like a filmstrip. There is no narrative, but the images were scanned left to right, right to left, to accumulate a sequence of shots that summarized the place. Pictures were rolled out according to the movement of the people below, walking and in cars, quickly, slowly, erratically, and so they were not only viewers and subjects of the same work, but they were also the mechanism that animated it. They were not so much portraits as examples of human restlessness, in rectangles superimposed on a scene of frantic architectural construction, a scene that was being played out all over Sydney in its sprint toward the opening of the millennial Olympic Games. This city then, a young, vigorous, muscular state capital with glory in its sights, could not have been more unlike the city of Petra—“half as old as time”—encountered by the artist ten years later. Streuli was reflecting Sydney directly, playing his recording of it back to itself. The smartness of this strategy is the same as that which Pictures in Pictures

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leads to this book of pictures in pictures, and, given the nature of his work, Streuli’s decision from the outset to present it in the public realm. By doing so, he is raising fundamental questions about the proper place of art, undoing expectation, and, in the nicest possible way, counteracting an aspiration to preciousness that is too preva­lent in our art world. With deftness Streuli steers clear of any hint of exclusive self-referentiality that might result from his mirroring of situations; on the contrary, his artistic practice could not be more accessible while being completely unpatronizing.

Jonathan Watkins

In this vein, Streuli’s window installations featuring people within their immediate contexts are demystifying two-way mirrors. That is to say they are at once reflective and transparent, metaphorically speaking, caught between interior space and the artist’s outdoor area of interest. And their literal transparency means that viewers see through the photographic imagery to some aspect of its setting. As with Duchamp’s Large Glass, context is inescapable. As with stained glass there is a wonderful difference between effects during the day and at night as relative light levels change on either side. Laminated photographic film, bled over entire window surfaces, suffuses interior space with color during daytime; at night illuminated buildings become light boxes so that the imagery is jewel-like and clearly visible to those out­ side. Unlike the billboards, the window installations are incorporated into architecture, with an outlook onto two worlds; one, inside, usually more institutional; the other, outside, less regulated, less contrived. Streuli has made window installations for banks and other corporate buildings, for an airport—in Dallas, post-9/11, it is almost defiant with smiles—but it is those in museums, galleries, and art centers that are especially pertinent in light of other observations here. For the Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona (MACBA), the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, and Spiral in Tokyo, the artist photographed people in the vicinity who were either on their own or with others, walking or loitering, all at ease or at least seemingly untroubled by their circumstances. The architecture significantly determines the artist’s approach to each project as there is not, as there is with billboards, a pervasive geometry made to suit standard formats. In Tokyo, Japanese faces were tightly cropped as if they were pressed up to the glass, while Chicago, with the museum’s gridded facade, suggested a solution not unlike that for Schiphol, each subject head scaled more or less to the size of the window quarters. The window installation in MACBA, Plaça dels Angels, in the curving glass wall adjacent to the museum entrance, is especially interesting. 150

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Made in the same year, it bore some resemblance to the Sydney billboards in its formal variety; its abstract qualities were evident due to the verticality of the windowpanes. The strips of imagery that they framed cropped the different colors, delineations, and textures of clothing worn by those recently photographed just outside in the Plaça dels Angels. Heads and hands were emotionally expressive, as might be expected from this Latin culture, and elicited an empa­thet­­ic response. So too the larger-than-life scale of this work overall and its embracing arc. Plaça dels Angels was the backdrop here, twice. It was in the images, and through them in actuality, while the museum environment — which provided the point of view for these pictures, of the pictures — was very familiar in its white walled minimalism.

Jonathan Watkins

Streuli’s location of window installations in museums, between dedicated art space and a relatively chaotic (non-art) world, neatly exemplifies an aesthetic proposition that assumes and asserts continuity between them. He plays off the conventional notion whereby a work of art is thought of as a metaphorical window onto another world, trans­cendent somehow, and instead uses real windows that reveal the same real world he represents. By doing so, he is not repudiating the museum, but rather encouraging a proper grasp, an understanding of it as an all-too-human institution that defines this thing called art. Streuli’s work can easily be assimilated into museum strategies for the development of new audiences—and why not?—but clearly he would want to avoid bad faith in the process. Like the window installations, Beat Streuli’s pictures in pictures in this book counteract illusion. His works are his subjects here, as much as they are art objects, as much as the people, the streets, the cars, and the architecture that feature in them. He differentiates between the contexts within which he operates, between the city center and the suburbs, between the museum interior and the desert, but is not applying a hierarchical system that descends from fine, or “high,” art. Indeed, his work anticipates a time when such a system will break down, as it must, and museums will become as empty and as redundant as Petra. Meanwhile, we are where we are, and Streuli is among those most interested, and ready to doc­ument that fact.

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INSTALLATIONS p. 19–23 Visitors, 1996 museum in progress, Vienna, 1996 Nine portraits of tourists photographed in Vienna’s city center, distributed randomly on 3,000 commercial billboard surfaces Offset prints on blueback paper, 1.68 x 2.38 m each p. 24–29 Travelers, 1996 Framed Area, Schiphol Airport, Amsterdam, 1997 30 portraits of young people photographed in Vienna and presented on a billboard outside Amsterdam’s airport Digital print on vinyl, 3.6 x 36 m p. 31–35 Tokyo, Shibuya, 1997/Enghien-les-Bains, 1998 In-situ, Biennale d’Art Contemporain, Enghien-les-Bains, 1997 and 1998 In 1997 nine images of people photographed in Tokyo Shibuya, and in 1998 nine portraits from the streets of Enghien-les-Bains, were installed in busshelter advertising light boxes in Enghien-les-Bains C-prints on Kodak Duraclear, 1.76 x 1.2 m each p. 37–39 Plaça dels Angels, 1998 Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, 1998 12 portraits of passersby photographed on the square in front of the MACBA building, placed in the windows of the museum’s entrance C-prints on Kodak Duraclear mounted on acrylic glass, image height 2.68 m Collection of MACBA, Barcelona p. 41–46 Sydney CBD, 1998 11th Biennale of Sydney, 1998 Two billboards of 16 images of passersby installed around a construction site in Sydney’s central business district Digital prints on vinyl, 3.5 x 40 m each p. 48–51 Sydney Tokyo 98, 1999 Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1999 Projected image sequences photographed in Sydney and Tokyo Two medium-format slide projection screens, 6 x 7.5 m each, 20 min., looped p. 53–58 Chicago Portraits July 99, 1999 MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1999 Window installation of 17 portraits of passersby in Chicago’s city center C-prints on Kodak Duraclear mounted on acrylic glass, 3.2 x 3.2 m each Collection of MCA, Chicago p. 59–61 Aoyama-dori 99, 1999 Spiral, Wacoal Art Center, Tokyo, 1999 Eight portraits photographed on Aoyama Street in front of Spiral and installed in the windows of the building C-prints on Kodak Duraclear, image height 2.6 m p. 62–63 Untitled, 2000 Stadtsparkasse, Düsseldorf, 2000, permanent installation Window installation of 45 portraits of Düsseldorf citizens Digital prints on transparent film, image height 3.2 m and 3.79 m Collection of Stadtsparkasse, Düsseldorf

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p. 65–69 Birmingham, 2001 Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 2001 Seven portraits of high-school students in Birmingham installed on the facade of the downtown Bullring building Digital print on vinyl, 4.2 x 22 m

p. 107–112 Travelers and Passersby, 2008 Jordan Festival, Petra, 2008 Fence with 90 images from New York City, Mexico City, Sydney, Brussels, Guangzhou, Cairo, Krakow, New Dehli, São Paulo, Tokyo, Zurich, and Sharjah Digital prints on blueback paper, installation size 4.8 x 163 m

p. 70–75 Portrait, 2002 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2002 Window installation of nine portraits from Turin, Enghien-les-Bains, Chicago, East Jerusalem, Yamaguchi, and Birmingham C-prints on Kodak Duraclear, 5.9 x 2.1 m each Collection of FNAC, Paris

p. 113–115 Untitled, 2009 Banque Pictet, Geneva, 2009, permanent installation 16 street scenes from Zurich, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Cairo, New York, São Paulo, Guanzhou, Mexico City, and Brussels installed as wallpaper in one of the corridors of the bank Digital prints on adhesive film, installation size 2.52 x 51.62 m Collection of Banque Pictet, Geneva

p. 77–81 Strangers, 2003 International Center of Photography, New York, 2003 14 images from Athens, Bangkok, Fort-de-France, Tokyo, Sydney, and London installed on the windows of the ICP Digital prints on transparent film, 4.1 x 2.7 m each p. 82–85 Untitled, 2005 Dallas Fort Worth Airport, Terminal D, 2005, permanent installation Installation on the window front of the immigration and customs hall, 22 portraits of travelers and employees at Dallas Fort Worth Airport Digital prints on transparent film, installation size 5.4 x 90 m p. 87 Students, 2005 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Zurich, 2005, permanent installation Wallpaper of 36 portraits of ETH students Lambda prints mounted on wall, 13.80 x 4.65 m Swiss Federal Art Collection

p. 117–119 Story Lines, 2011 Singapore Biennale, 2011 Three-screen projection of stills and videos shot in Singapore and Queens, NY HD video, 4 x 6 m each, 30 min. looped p. 121–127 La Voie publique, 2011 Gent-Sint-Pieters station, Ghent, 2011, permanent installation 57 international street scenes installed in LED light boxes in a temporary tram and pedestrian tunnel, which will become part of the new station at the end of its construction Digital prints on vinyl, installation size 3.3 x 94.5 m Collection of City of Ghent

Black and white images p. 1 Guangzhou, 2008 p. 2 New York City, 2009 p. 3 New York City, 2002 p. 8 Buenos Aires, 2008 p. 9 St. Petersburg, 2010 p. 133 Sydney, 1998 p. 134 Ghent, 2011 (sequence design La Voie publique) p. 137 New York City, 1993 p. 138 Sydney, 1998 p. 149 Buenos Aires, 2008 p. 153 Cape Town, 2009 p. 158 Brussels, 2007

p. 89–91 Yamashita Pier/Rolla Square, 2005 Yokohama Trienniale, Yamashita Pier, 2005 33 portraits of workers at Yamashita Pier and on Rolla Square, Sharjah, UAE, installed as a two-part wallpaper at Yamashita Pier Warehouse Digital prints on paper, 1.22 x 1.75 m each p. 92–95 Bruxelles Midi 05-07, 2007 Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig, 2007 Wallpaper of five Brussels street scenes Digital prints on blueback paper, image height 3.6 m p. 97 Brussels 05/06, 2007 Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2007 Window installation on the facade of the museum, 12 portraits taken in Brussels city center Digital prints on transparent film, image height 2.5 m Collection of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg p. 99–101 Rue Neuve 08, 2008 Mac’s, Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, 2008 Three-screen projection of images from Rue Neuve, Brussels Three HD projections, 6 x 9 m each, 20 min., looped p. 103–104 Guangzhou Central Station 08, 2008 Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, 2008 Window installation composed of 13 images of travelers in front of Guangzhou Central Station Digital prints on transparent film, 1.5 x 3 m each List of Works

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Biography

Solo Exhibitions (Selection)

Born in 1957 in Switzerland, Beat Streuli studied at the Schule für Gestaltung of Basle and Zurich, as well as the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where he lived between 1981 and 1987.

2011 Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Conrads, Düsseldorf Gent Sint-Pieters Station, Ghent (permanent installation) Heilpädagogisches Zentrum, Altdorf (permanent installation)

In the late 1980s he started his first series of “street photography” during a residency in Rome, after various projects involving montage, narration, and mise-en-scène. In the 1990s he further developed what have become his signature pieces — first using small formats in black and white, then on larger scale, taken in cities such as Paris, Rome, and New York. These works have been exhibited widely and published in various artist’s books and catalogues.

2010 Dogenhaus, Leipzig Erna Hecey, Brussels Murray Guy, New York Oeconomicum, Düsseldorf (permanent installation)

Since 1992 Beat Streuli has used monumental slide projection and, since 1994, video projection. The first billboards and other forms of public installations appeared in the mid-1990s. Transparent prints on glass facades in such contexts remain one of his preferred mediums.

2009 MKgalerie, Rotterdam Banque Pictet, Geneva (permanent installation) AON, Hamburg (permanent installation)

From 1996 a new attention to the portrait was noticeable. His work was in­­creasingly globally exhibited, with participation in biennials in Sydney, Johannesburg, and Kwangju; these coincided with solo exhibitions in museums and extended stays in cities such as New York, Sydney, and Tokyo.

2008 Mac’s, Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu Jordan Festival, Petra BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art/The Sage Gateshead, Gateshead

Until the beginning of the new millennium, Streuli’s work focused on the everyday of the Western metropolis and its inhabitants; his work then became more complex, perhaps as a reflection on globalization and crisis, and demonstrated a growing attention to the presence of non-Western cultures in the social fabric. His participation in the Jordan Festival in Petra, with a monumental fence of images, as well as his publication BXL (for the city of Brussels where he has been living part-time since 2005), in which he confronted the Other as his neighbor, illustrate this development in his work in the 2000s. This decade was also marked by several large-scale exhibitions and commissions, as well as by participation in biennials in Sharjah, Yokohama, and Singapore.

2007 Eva Presenhuber, Zurich Museum der bildenden Künste, Leipzig

Streuli’s current work is shifting to a less documentary and a more pictorial and abstract approach, as was demonstrated by his exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2011.

2005 Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Zurich (permanent installation) Dallas/Fort Worth Airport (permanent installation)

2006 Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow University Gallery, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst Erna Hecey, Brussels Galerie Wilma Tolksdorf, Berlin The Haagse Hogeschool, The Hague (permanent installation) Lufthansa Aviation Center, Frankfurt Airport (permanent installation)

1998 Rencontres d’Arles, Arles Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum, Yamaguchi MACBA, Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona Jablonka, Cologne 1997 Tate Gallery, London Berner Versicherung Allianz Suisse, Bern (permanent installation) 1996 Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris New York Kunsthalle, New York 1995 Centre d’Art Contemporain/attitudes, Geneva Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Stuttgart Le Consortium, Dijon Daniel Buchholz, Cologne Anne de Villepoix, Paris 1994 Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen Gesellschaft für Aktuelle Kunst, Bremen Galerie Monica de Cardenas, Milan 1993 Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne 1992 Conrads, Düsseldorf Kunstraum Walcheturm, Zurich 1990 Helmhaus, Zurich 1986 Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau

Group Exhibitions (Selection) 2003 Conrads, Düsseldorf Style Building, Osaka (permanent installation) 2002 Palais de Tokyo, Paris Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France, Pontault-Combault Murray Guy, New York Meyer Kainer, Vienna 2001 Dogenhaus, Leipzig Wilma Tolksdorf, Frankfurt Massimo Minini, Brescia 2000 Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin Stadtsparkasse, Düsseldorf (permanent installation) 1999 Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hannover Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, East Jerusalem MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago

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2011 Open House, Singapore Biennale 2011, Singapore The MOCAK Collection, MOCAK Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Krakow Welt-Bilder 4, Helmhaus, Zurich The Eye is a Lonely Hunter: Images of Humankind, 4. Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg, Mannheim 2010 Lucid Evidence, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt Guia secreta de la Rambla, La Virreina, Barcelona 2009 Les Espaces de l’image, Le Mois de la Photo à Montréal, 11th edition, Montreal Das Porträt. Photographie als Bühne, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2008 Fluid Street, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki Street and Studio, An Urban History of Photography, Tate Modern, London Objectivités, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris Sichtbarwerden. Fotografische Werke aus der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin 2007 Swiss Made 2: Präzision und Wahnsinn, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg Guggenheim Collection: 1940s to Now, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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2006 con sens, AR/GE Kunst, Bolzano Projektion, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne 2005 Belonging, 7th Sharjah Biennial, Sharjah Art Circus, Yokohama 2005, International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Yokohama 2004 Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela 2003 Outlook, International Art Exhibition Athens, Athens Strangers, The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York 2002 Open City: Street Photography Since 1950, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC/Museum of Modern Art, Oxford heute bis jetzt, Zeitgenössische Fotografie aus Düsseldorf, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf Wallflowers, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich 2001 Restaging the Everyday: Recent Work by Beat Streuli and Fischli/Weiss, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Birmingham, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham 2000 The Gift of Hope, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Le Désert, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris Szenenwechsel, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt 1998 every day, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney Freie Sicht aufs Mittelmeer, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich/Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt 1997 Trade Routes: History, Geography, and Culture, 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, Johannesburg Absolute Landscape, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama 1996 Im Kunstlicht, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zurich Prospect: Photography in Contemporary Art, Frankfurter Kunstverein/ Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt Propositions, Musée départemental de Rochechouart, Rochechouart Views from Abroad: European Perspectives on American Art 2, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 1995 Beyond the Borders, 1st Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju 1994 Soggetto-soggetto, Castello di Rivoli, Rivoli Et passim, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern 1993 New Photography, The Museum of Modern Art, New York In their own image, P.S. 1 Museum, New York 1991 Lieux communs, figures singulières, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris

Biography

Solo Publications (Selection)

Group Publications (Selection)

2008 BXL, JRP|Ringier, Zurich/Mac’s, Grand-Hornu (Texts: Katerina Gregos, Laurent Busine)

2011 Open House, Singapore Biennale 2011/Singapore Art Museum, Singapore (Text: Trevor Smith) Welt-Bilder 4, Helmhaus, Zurich/Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg (Text: Andreas Fiedler) The Eye is a Lonely Hunter: Images of Humankind, 4. Fotofestival Mannheim Ludwigshafen Heidelberg/Kehrer, Heidelberg & Berlin (Texts: Katerina Gregos, Solvej Helweg Ovesen)

2006 Bruxelles Midi, Atopia Projects/University Gallery, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst Kraków October 2005/Cities 2001–2006, Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow (Texts: Maria Anna Potocka, Rita Kersting) 2004 Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (Texts: Gregory Volk and Miguel Fernández-Cid) 2003 New York City 2000–02, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern (Text: Vincent Catz) 2001 04–23–01, onestar press, Paris 2000 Portraits 98 – 00, La bella estate, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea/hopefulmonster, Turin (Texts: Roberta Valtorta, Alessandra Pace) Urban Views, with Gabriele Basilico, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam/ NAi Uitgevers, Rotterdam (Texts: Hrispimé Visser, René Boomkens) 1999 Bondi Beach/Parramatta Road, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hannover (Text: Trevor Smith) CITY, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf/Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich/Cantz, Ost­fildern (Texts: Rupert Pfab and Boris Groys) Marseille, Actes Sud, Arles (Text: Catherine Grout) 1996 retrats, Tarragona 1996, Tinglado 2, Moll de Costa, Tarragona (Text: Jorge Ribalta) Portrait Tarragone, Copenhague 1996, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris (Texts: Ulrich Loock, Jean-Christophe Royoux, Laurence Bossé) 1995 St. Jean/La Chancellerie, La Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations, Paris/ Editions ZYX, Orléans (Text: Marie-Ange Brayer) USA 95, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Stuttgart/Cantz, Ostfildern (Texts: Martin Hentschel and Adrian Dannatt) projections, Ateliers d’Artistes de la Ville de Marseille, Marseille (Text: Jean-Christophe Royoux) 1994 Allen Street (New York 1994), Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen/ Le Consortium, Dijon (Texts: Jean-Christophe Ammann, Jean-Paul Felley, Martine Béguin) 1993 Projektionen und Fotografien NYC 1991/93, Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Lars Müller, Baden (Text: Jean-François Chevrier) 1990 Rom Paris Fotografien, Lars Müller, Baden (Text: Jacqueline Burckhardt) 1989 Fotografien. Rom 1989/I, Istituto Svizzero di Roma, Rome 1986 Photographie, Aargauer Kunsthaus, with Felix Stephan Huber, Aarau (Texts: Jacqueline Burckhardt and Beat Wismer)

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2008 Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, Yale University Press, New Haven & London Objectivités, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ARC, Paris (Text: Doris Krystof) Street and Studio, An Urban History of Photography, Tate, London (Text: Ute Eskildsen) Fluid street, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (Text: Jonathan Watkins) 2005 Art Circus, Yokohama 2005, International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Yokohama (Text: Taro Amano) Photosuisse, Lars Müller, Baden (Text: Christian Eggenberger) 2003 Strangers, The First ICP Triennial of Photography and Video, International Center of Photography, New York/Steidl, Göttingen (Text: Gregory Volk) 2002 heute bis jetzt, Zeitgenössische Fotografie aus Düsseldorf, Museum Kunst­palast, Düsseldorf/Schirmer/Mosel, Munich (Text: Barbara Hofmann) Norman Foster, Architecture Is About People, Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln, Cologne (Text: Jeremy Millar) 2001 Open City: Street Photography Since 1950, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford/Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern (Texts: Kerry Brougher and Russell Ferguson) 2000 The Gift of Hope, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (Text: Yusuke Minami) A. Braun, B. Streuli, E. Wurm; Videos und Gespräche, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg (Text: Alexander Braun) Le Désert, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris/Actes Sud, Arles (Text: Hélène Kelmachter) 1998 Parkett, no. 54, 1998/99, Zurich (Texts: José Lebrero Stals, Arthur C. Danto, Taro Amano, Trevor Smith) every day, 11th Biennale of Sydney, Sydney (Text: Simon Grant) Un Nouveau Paysage Humain, Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie/ Actes Sud, Arles (Text: Bernard Millet) 1997 Absolute Landscape, Contemporary Photography Between Illusion and Reality, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama (Texts: Taro Amano, Catherine Grout) 1996 Propositions, Musée départemental de Rochechouart, Rochechouart (Texts: Jean-Christophe Royoux) Prospect 96, Photographie in der Gegenwartskunst, Frankfurter Kunstverein/ Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt/Stemmle, Zurich 1994 Et passim, Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (Texts: Hans Rudolf Reust, Ulrich Loock) 1991 Lieux communs, figures singulières, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris/ ARC, Paris (Text: Jean-François Chevrier) Bibliography

This book was published on oc­casion of the exhibitions Beat Streuli at Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo, April 22–October 12, 2012, and at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, November 20, 2012– February 4, 2013.

EXHIBITIONS

Publication

Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea Villa Ghirlanda, via Frova 10 Cinisello Balsamo/Milano T +39 02 660 56 61 F +39 02 618 12 01 [email protected] www.mufoco.org

Editorial Coordination Salome Schnetz Editing and Proofreading Clare Manchester Translations Simon Turner (Italian–English: Roberta Valtorta) Allyn Hardyck (French–English: Raymond Bellour) Design Benedikt Reichenbach Typeface Theinhardt Front Cover Sydney CBD, 1998 The Biennale of Sydney, 1998 Back Cover Strangers, 2003 International Center of Photography, New York, 2003 Photo Credits Quentin Berthoux (p. 31), Steve Gould (p. 82), James Isberner (p. 58), Marie Le Mounier (p. 121, 122–123), Bernard Schaub (p. 62 left) Color Separation and Print Musumeci S.p.A., Quart (Aosta)

Chairman Daniela Gasparini Deputy Chairman Guido Podestà Scientific Director Roberta Valtorta Managing and Production Director Gabriella Guerci Archives Arianna Bianchi, Barbara Chiarini, Maura Dettoni Curatorial and Communication Department Matteo Balduzzi, Chiara Buzzi Library Carole Simonetti, Edoardo Visentin Education Department Diletta Zannelli, Silvia Mascheroni, Francesca Minetto Publication Department Francesca Prina Administration Alessandra Tota Press Office Fiorenza Melani External Affairs Silvia Marucci General Information/ Technical Services Elvio Manuzzi, Tommaso Perfetti, Marta Tagliabue Web and IT Diego Ronzio

Ikon Gallery 1 Oozells Square Brindleyplace UK–Birmingham B1 2HS T +44 (0) 121 248 07 08 F +44 (0) 121 248 07 08 www.ikon-gallery.co.uk Director Jonathan Watkins Deputy Director Deborah Kermode Curator Tyler Cann Exhibitions Assistant Jenine McGaughran

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Beat Streuli would like to thank everyone who contributed to the realization of this publication and the installations it presents, particularly: Helge Achenbach, Taro Amano, Matteo Balduzzi, Raymond Bellour, Francesco Bonami, Lionel Bovier, Markus Brüderlin, Ellen de Bruijne, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bernhard Bürgi, Laurent Busine, Chiara Buzzi, Yumiko Chiba, Helga and Walter Conrads, Aurelia Gressel, Catherine Grout, Gabriella Guerci, Janice Guy, Lukas Haller, Jochen Hempel, Erna Hecey, Christoph Ingenhoven, Maaretta Jaukkuri, José Lebrero Stals, Marie Le Mounier, Kathrin Messner, Margaret Murray, Rupert Pfab, Christopher Phillips, Loa Pictet, Eva Presenhuber, Benedikt Reichenbach, Markus Rischgasser, Jérôme Sans, Trevor Smith, Salome Schnetz, Roberta Valtorta, Philippe Van Cauteren, Jonathan Watkins, Suzanne Weaver This publication has been made possible by the generous support of Pro Helvetia, Kanton Zürich Fachstelle Kultur, and Stadt Zürich Kultur.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Any copyright holder we have been unable to reach or to whom inacurate acknowledgement has been made is invited to contact the publisher. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval sys­tem, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without prior permission in writing from the publisher. © 2012, the artist, the authors, the photographers, Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Ikon Gallery, and JRP|Ringier Kunstverlag AG Printed in Europe Published by JRP|Ringier Letzigraben 134 CH–8047 Zurich T +41 (0) 43 311 27 50 F +41 (0) 43 311 27 51 [email protected] www.jrp-ringier.com ISBN 978-3-03764-206-1 JRP|Ringier books are available internationally at selected bookstores and from the following distribution partners: Switzerland AVA Verlagsauslieferung AG, Centralweg 16, CH–8910 Affoltern a.A., [email protected], www.ava.ch France Les presses du réel, 35 rue Colson, F–21000 Dijon, [email protected], www.lespressesdureel.com Germany and Austria Vice Versa Vertrieb, Immanuelkirchstrasse 12, D–10405 Berlin, [email protected], www.vice-versa-vertrieb.de UK and other European countries Cornerhouse Publications, 70 Oxford Street, UK–Manchester M1 5NH, [email protected], www.cornerhouse.org/books USA, Canada, Asia, and Australia ARTBOOK | D.A.P., 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor, USA–New York, NY 10013, [email protected], www.artbook.com For a list of our partner bookshops or for any general questions, please contact JRP|Ringier directly at [email protected], or visit our home­page www.jrp-ringier.com for further information about our program.

Imprint

Museo di Fotografia Contemporanea, Cinisello Balsamo Ikon Gallery, Birmingham