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Lot Essay
An extraordinary meditation on the myth of artistic genius, Thomas Schütte’s Memorial for the Unknown Artist is a poignant and personal tribute to the Swiss modernist author Robert Walser. It presents a single bearded figure, who rises from a plinth as if surfacing from the depths of the ocean. His hands are raised to his head, seemingly channelling waves of divine inspiration. Parodying the notion of the artist as a great heroic icon, the sculpture is an homage to those who—like Walser—fell by history’s wayside. Though held in high esteem by fellow writers, musicians and artists, the author failed to achieve the success he deserved during his lifetime, and lived out his final years in isolation. Along with Walser’s Wife (2011, Fondation Beyeler, Basel), Memorial for the Unknown Artist was conceived for the exhibition series In the Spirit of Walser at Donald Young, Chicago in 2012. The present version has since featured in a number of Schütte’s major institutional exhibitions, including at the Serpentine Gallery, the Fondation Beyeler and the Kunsthaus Aargauer.
In the 1970s, a young Schütte devoured everything that Walser had ever written. ‘As a student I think I bought a book every three days’, he recalls, ‘and read it straight away’. He was ‘already interested in the insane’, he explained, and Walser—who he discovered through his readings of Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard—was ‘a very mysterious figure’. Born in 1878, Walser was admired early on by intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka. Despite this, however, he never made enough money to support himself, eventually suffering a breakdown and entering a psychiatric institute. While there he produced his now-celebrated ‘microscripts’—coded texts in tiny handwriting upon scraps of paper—and ultimately died on a snowy walk on Christmas Day 1956. Schütte was drawn to the enigmas of his life and work, both of which were little known at the time. ‘I don’t think there was even a biography back then’, he recalls. ‘… If you go into the largest book store with over five storeys, no one even knows who he is’ (T. Schütte, quoted in conversation with R. Sorg, in Paying No Attention I Notice Everything: Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, exh. cat. Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau 2014, pp. 135-142).
In 2011, the gallerist Donald Young—a fellow Walser enthusiast—invited Schütte to participate in an exhibition series he was planning at his Chicago gallery. A selection of contemporary artists, including Tacita Dean, Fischli and Weiss and Rosemarie Trockel, were asked to make works in response to the author. As well as a series of watercolours, Schütte made Walser’s Wife—an imagined bust of the spouse he never had—and the present work. The sculpture was based on a five-centimetre wax figure with broken arms, which the artist had found and kept in a box for many years. He reattached the arms to the shoulders, and enlarged it to life-size proportions, positioning the torso on a slanted plinth. The figure, he explained, reminded him of Leonardo da Vinci, with his long flowing beard. The bronze’s patina, meanwhile, conjures ancient sculptures of Neptune: the Roman god of sea and water. Lampooning the image of the artist as a crazed, messianic visionary, it towers before the viewer like a relic from another world, excavated from the ravages of time.
Memorial for the Unknown Artist occupies an important position in Schütte’s practice. Major series such as his Frauen, United Enemies and Grosse Geister all sought to topple the grandiose narratives of Western sculpture, asking how we might reframe the medium as a vehicle for open questions rather than bombastic statements. History’s great monuments had celebrated success: few, by contrast, had enshrined failure. Walser, in this regard, became a kind of ‘anti-hero’ for Schütte. In his writings, he told of ‘losers’ rather than ‘winners’. His own life’s story, meanwhile, stood as a beacon for the ‘thousands of people who are doing something and not getting much attention for it’ (T. Schütte, quoted ibid.). The title of Schütte’s work conjures the universal ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’: mass graves across the world dedicated to unidentified war victims. This reference, interestingly, chimes with the work of Anselm Kiefer, who had similarly allegorised these memorial structures in his series Tomb of the Unknown Painter. Schütte, too, pays tribute to the plight of the artist in a ruthless world, cast adrift in a system that leaves little room for obscurity.
In the 1970s, a young Schütte devoured everything that Walser had ever written. ‘As a student I think I bought a book every three days’, he recalls, ‘and read it straight away’. He was ‘already interested in the insane’, he explained, and Walser—who he discovered through his readings of Peter Handke and Thomas Bernhard—was ‘a very mysterious figure’. Born in 1878, Walser was admired early on by intellectuals such as Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Franz Kafka. Despite this, however, he never made enough money to support himself, eventually suffering a breakdown and entering a psychiatric institute. While there he produced his now-celebrated ‘microscripts’—coded texts in tiny handwriting upon scraps of paper—and ultimately died on a snowy walk on Christmas Day 1956. Schütte was drawn to the enigmas of his life and work, both of which were little known at the time. ‘I don’t think there was even a biography back then’, he recalls. ‘… If you go into the largest book store with over five storeys, no one even knows who he is’ (T. Schütte, quoted in conversation with R. Sorg, in Paying No Attention I Notice Everything: Robert Walser and the Visual Arts, exh. cat. Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau 2014, pp. 135-142).
In 2011, the gallerist Donald Young—a fellow Walser enthusiast—invited Schütte to participate in an exhibition series he was planning at his Chicago gallery. A selection of contemporary artists, including Tacita Dean, Fischli and Weiss and Rosemarie Trockel, were asked to make works in response to the author. As well as a series of watercolours, Schütte made Walser’s Wife—an imagined bust of the spouse he never had—and the present work. The sculpture was based on a five-centimetre wax figure with broken arms, which the artist had found and kept in a box for many years. He reattached the arms to the shoulders, and enlarged it to life-size proportions, positioning the torso on a slanted plinth. The figure, he explained, reminded him of Leonardo da Vinci, with his long flowing beard. The bronze’s patina, meanwhile, conjures ancient sculptures of Neptune: the Roman god of sea and water. Lampooning the image of the artist as a crazed, messianic visionary, it towers before the viewer like a relic from another world, excavated from the ravages of time.
Memorial for the Unknown Artist occupies an important position in Schütte’s practice. Major series such as his Frauen, United Enemies and Grosse Geister all sought to topple the grandiose narratives of Western sculpture, asking how we might reframe the medium as a vehicle for open questions rather than bombastic statements. History’s great monuments had celebrated success: few, by contrast, had enshrined failure. Walser, in this regard, became a kind of ‘anti-hero’ for Schütte. In his writings, he told of ‘losers’ rather than ‘winners’. His own life’s story, meanwhile, stood as a beacon for the ‘thousands of people who are doing something and not getting much attention for it’ (T. Schütte, quoted ibid.). The title of Schütte’s work conjures the universal ‘tomb of the unknown soldier’: mass graves across the world dedicated to unidentified war victims. This reference, interestingly, chimes with the work of Anselm Kiefer, who had similarly allegorised these memorial structures in his series Tomb of the Unknown Painter. Schütte, too, pays tribute to the plight of the artist in a ruthless world, cast adrift in a system that leaves little room for obscurity.