PETER WÄCHTLER - SUSTAINABILITY
20 NOV 2009 - 10 JAN 2010
The Idea of a (Secret) Society
By and large a thing of the past, the idea of a secret society is now but a confused model for many kinds of groupings. In the past, these secret societies took many forms, both formally and politically, and were spread across political and religious spectra. Masonic groups, revolutionary groups, and, of course, the famous resistances, have contributed to the mythologies that accompany these gatherings. Yet, the banality of their present forms of engagement quickly dissipates the urgency that this idea once had.
In Peter Wächtler’s (°1979) video Les Ailes des Anges, the artist participates in a networking evening called “Soirée Internationale” held at a Vientamese restaurant in Brussels once a month for the past eighteen years, and organized by a man named Frank, who is also one of the founders of the German Green Party. This kind of networking is a model of professional engagement, invented by a post-social business world that presumes that people have little time to establish meaningful inter-personal relationships (thus, this system replaces meaningful, free-flowing interactions with vapid, ad-hoc public relations in which conversations must remain within the specified criteria, in this case environmental politics). During these ‘speed-networking’ sessions, people are required to sit together and strike conversations for 30 minutes, after which they must move to different seats and sit with new people, intermittently, every thirty minutes, for the duration of the event. This ensures that each person meets as many people as possible, chatting and exchanging numbers, opinions and apparently also exchanging flats. One must go alone. Wächtler participated in two of these evenings, one in which he wrote the text and another in which he recorded the video, so that the images in the video do not correspond to the people and situation being mentioned.
Peter Wächtler’s video takes its title from a Vietnamese restaurant in Brussels, Les Ailes des Anges. Housed in the former clubhouse of the Belgian Air-force, which opened in the 1930s, this restaurant kept the place as it was, as well as the original name. On the walls of the interior of this restaurant one still finds photographs of famous pilots, of bombers of both the First and Second World Wars, and of humanitarian aid delivered to Africa by the planes of the Red Cross. Such repurposing of old buildings and spaces is a very ancient practice, but the encounter between Vietnamese food, old Belgian colonial memorabilia, and these “Soirees Internationales” still bemuses the mind.
In another video (not presented in this show) titled Tulderon III - Kastors Return (2006), Wächtler presents an “inside” view of a roleplay game set in Tulderon in Germany over a weekend. The video shows the rather haphazard and sadly mediocre set-up of the playground, and it engages with different characters that take part in the game. Wächtler is cast as a paperboy, selling a daily called “Stimme des Herolds.” Also a network situation of sorts, in this case people are brought together because of their desire to escape into an arcane reality, filled with medieval fantasies and aesthetic representations of an other time.
In a way, these two videos show two sides of contemporary micropolitics: a modal side and an aesthetic side. Today, micropolitical formations or “secret societies” form a very noticeable part of our everyday lives. They have become banal and conspicuous. Or, to put it differently, they have become less “secret”. Peter Wächtler’s videos and works engage with these strange, ad-hoc groups whose purpose seems at once clear and peculiarly entrenched. Their banality is best expressed in the following sentence, which the artist wrote in an email correspondence with me:
“The interest in the topic of the ecological movement comes from the ambiguous and influential position it had between self-realization, silky visions of new expressions and free creativity, and a sinister perspective on "the whole humanity", the end of it all and the constant thread: separating your garbage in the right way. This strictness went through different stages, to cool off in the organic food stores and to combine the new definitions of quality, health and regionalisms/nationalisms.”
Juan A. Gaitán
Juan A. Gaitán (1973, Toronto, Canada) is a writer, curator and art historian. Has curated exhibitions internationally, especially in Canada, Colombia and The Netherlands. He is currently writing on freedom of expression and post-democratic politics, and has written several texts on the contemporary status of the image, and on photography. His art historical dissertation is on the utopian hypothesis in the 1960s. Has published monographic texts on several contemporary artists. He is currently curator at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, where he is developing five exhibitions under the general theme of Morality. He is also developing an exhibition titled Diary of a Bad Year, in collaboration with Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Egypt. He is interested in collaborative curatorial practices, but not in curatorial collectives.