Peter Wächtler
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avant / après
Le Consortium, Dijon
No single mood, method or medium defines the motley of characters that populate Peter Wächtler’s narrative studies. They scatter in all directions, often summoned in gangs, series or groups and, like the objects and places they are set against, or installed within, they materialise in everchanging forms. As sculptures made in bronze, ceramic, clay or paper-mâché; as paintings on celluloid, limestone and wood; in live-action films and stop-animations and through a raft of short stories, poems and diary entries. For all the shapeshifting, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was the work of a cabal of disappearing and reappearing authors, each as unreliable as the former.
What unites this motley is our feeling that we know them already—vaguely. They’ve dragged in the spectres of all the fables, fantasies, films and popular stories they once animated, plus the cliché emotions they’ve already performed, and cast them into our reality. It creates a mire of memories for us and a problem of purpose for them. As their raison-d’être bottoms out, an existential ‘what was that all about?’ emerges. Questions about communication and meaning fill the void. Like, if their ceaseless reenactment of these narratives is what encourages the phantasy that no real meaning can ever be produced by, or exchanged within them. Pondering such they further detach.
For example, when a gang of jaunty characters appeared, loosely sketched, on a series of knee-high plywood boxes in the Chicago winter of 2016, you could tell they were half out the door.1 Once icons of a post-war, working-class English subculture, these ‘Teddy Boys’ had, back then, epitomised cool with a not-so-unique style: drape coats, waistcoats, pocket combs and coif haircuts. They had found in the fashion of early 20th Century Edwardian aristocracy a model for better living that could be, if not attained, at least cosplayed. Even if by the late 1950s Teddy Boys were a waning fad, their spirit somehow endured. It travelled to the United States and beyond, morphed into Americana variations (Elvis, James Dean) and provided the identity template for generic ‘post-war-social-crisis’ narratives like West Side Story (where working-class stereotypes were, ironically, worked over again), and by 2016, could still be felt in any given metropolitan cafe, bike shop or bar where moustachioed, rockabilly types were sure to stand, either side of the counter.
Sketched on the interior and exterior of four boxes, Wächtler’s Teddy Boys pose in shuffled, half-remembered scenes that conflate two films: the 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story and the 1970 film adaptation of Love Story, another film that gratuitously amplifies class stereotypes with dreams of escape.2 The boxes read as deconstructed highlight reels, or generic ‘best-of’ scenes: spying on the rival gang from the rafters, a funeral, the kiss, lying in bed, a check-up. But cameos byeveryday characters, like a doctor, as Teddy Boys, suggested an inescapable system. Everything is Teddy Boy. An innocent, hyper-stylized detour on the road to self-realisation has led to a cul-de-sac of indifference. Boxed in on all sides, the Teddys seem to be called home by four bronze 50s-style social housing blocks on the horizon, reminding them, through their formidable mass, that leaving isn’t so easy.3
The Teddy Boy’s over-production of style has since rippled into fiction and reality ad infinitum, and the various cultural products that recycle these characters invariably replicated their behaviour. The West Side Story film, for example, glazed itself with a veneer of intellectualism when appointing esteemed directors and composers. Posing as a film by-and-for the educated, it could be consumed not just as a sentimental tale to pity the poor, but a critical tool with which to anthropologise them.4 Perhaps a similar pattern is today reenacted by Wächtler’s boxes and their context: characters of a fiction are heated up and brought to life through the attention and style of an artist, only to be thawed by the chill of ‘contemporary art’ and gallery, before being totally frozen in a critical analysis.
Fortunately, these boxes come insulated with a sentimentality so exaggerated that they are impervious to any institutional chill. For one, they aren’t just boxes but chests. The type of container where sentimentality is stored. Maybe the Teddy Boys were unconsciously reenacting some childhood ‘cleaning up’ chores when streamlining their identities, not just looking back historically, but within and through a generic teddy-filled object which, if this isn’t already too much, is named in both British English (chest) and American English (trunk), by the body part that stores the heart. That turn within—the perennial quest of Wächtler’s characters—is stylised here as a noirish fiction: on the lower right corner of one box, a silhouetted Teddy Boy protagonist peers into a cavernous container-building to spy in on ‘rivals’, fulfilling our own desire to lift the lid and look in.
The animals in Wächtler’s work also peer, metaphorically, over their shoulders and into their navels. They are tenuously connected to their animation histories, which linger like half repressed memories.5 There is nothing to identify them with specific animations per se, but they have the general semblance of some, and carry the fatigue of bodies that have been wholly exhausted. One of the most tossed around, the pre-industrial sailor bear Orso (2019), appears to be still figuring out if he’s a descendent of Winnie, Yogi or Paddington, or a state representative for Berlin or California.
They are a proletarian syndicate with a broken relationship to labour, entertainment and representation. Many have been worked over twice, not just in animation, but in the everyday reality of the human world. Bloodhounds, before sinking here in swampy marshes or collapsing in leathery folds (Untitled (dogs), 2015; Untitled, 2017), were traditionally used to sniff out fugitive humans (a fitting allegory for animation6), while the logging otter is a standalone emblem for the blue-collar labourer. To say nothing of those that have been skinned and furred. Some resign, others hide.
The moles are on the verge of retiring into the cracks of their armchairs while the bat takes shelter inside itself with a swoop of apology and withdrawal just performative enough to fulfil any last work obligations. Fitting, that the stem for both animation and animals, anima—to breathe life into—should be the basis for the so deflated. But—ah! Here comes the doctor—any artist, director or storyteller ready to resuscitate and defibrillate for one final, sentimental squeeze.
It is not all defeat, there are signs of resistance. If the Otter was once a college mascot hired to carry the team home, he is now a battleship of refusal. His costume no longer matches his gaze, which is far gone, and he appears to be mulling over the rhetorical question sagging off the back of his Ivy League sweater: Y? His spirit has returned recently, in a series of propped stage walls, like Auditorium (2024).
Curated by Stéphanie