Peter Suchin
Peter Suchin in Frieze, No 84, June/July/August 2004
EvaWeinmayr's 'Roadsigns' (2003 - 2004), a series of works first shown atVTO in London before being presented, with some revisions, in Munich,consists of a number of found standard British road signs that havebeen collected by the artist and subjected to an act of reclamation or,more accurately, redesignation. Weinmayr takes abandoned, badly damagedsigns and coats one side of them, with the assistance of a garagenormally employed preparing racing cars, in layers of high-qualitylacquer. The signs' imagery and text are thus obliterated and replacedwith an intense, iridescent surface, an act of transformation aptlydescribed by the title used for the London showing of these pieces:'Alchemic Dross'. The base metal of the utilitarian sign becomes thesupport for a complicated chain of allusions and playful, intelligentconceits. Concise, practical information has here been replaced bysomething altogether more ambiguous, resonant and seductive in itsmaterials and effects.
Wrinkled and warped, scratched,pockmarked and in some cases actually torn right through, theseindustrially produced message-boards bear the explicit traces of theirhistories as abandoned objects. Pebbles and dirt pressed into the metalby the weight of vehicles running over the disused signs have leftgenerously complicated patterns and tracks; sealed beneath the layersof paint applied by Weinmayr, these stigmata collectively recall NASAphotographs of the moon's surface or ancient, elaborate maps. Eachpiece having been finished in a single colour, what one might call thesingularity of each reworked sign is interestingly disturbed by itsnew, highly reflective surface. As one moved about the gallery, thecolour of each work accordingly shifted too, an effect triggered by thebends and folds of the battered metal throwing back, like distortingmirrors, the light from the gallery windows. Substantial changes in theweather, in the amount and pitch of available daylight, furtheraffected the mood of the pieces displayed. One was reminded of BrianEno's video installations in which light is manipulated electronicallyto produce slow drifts of atmospheric transitions – Weinmayr's worksare more like pools of shimmering, tinted water, but the changes inambience seem equally serene and certainly as rich.
Thesereconditioned signs in part fit into the tradition of the found object.As such, they are particularly close to what Marcel Duchamp describedas 'assisted ready-mades'; that is, they are simultaneously chancefinds and deliberately manipulated devices. The random markingsimpressed on them after they have literally fallen from use haveproduced elaborate automatic drawings, which the artist has thenmodified. The beautiful, concentrated colours – red, pink, blue,bronze, silver, black, grey and several shades of white – recall bothAndy Warhol's early silkscreens and the painterly Colour Fieldexperiments of the 1960s and 1970s, while not really looking like anyof them. The use of metal calls to mind Frank Stella, but again suchreference points are triggers for extended consideration rather thandirectly allusive motifs.
Weinmayr has emphasized the highlyattractive surfaces of the 'Roadsigns' by making it possible to see, tosome small degree at least, their reverse. With the works held in placeby a series of magnets and metal rods that positioned the metal someway out from the wall, it was easily possible to inspect parts of theuntreated side of the sign, or a zealous viewer could easily haveflipped them over and returned them to what was in effect an earlierstage of their life. The rough condition of the pieces' obverse sidesrevealed just how knocked about these objects had been by the timeWeinmayr collected them. When mounted on the gallery wall, these piecesoperated somewhere between painting and relief sculpture, giving a newtwist to Clement Greenberg's celebrated but incorrect notion that theessence of the medium of painting is the uncompromising physicalflatness of the surface of the support.
Except in the case ofthe one triangular shape in the show, the works in 'Roadsigns' would –had that title not been employed – perhaps not be easily recognizableas formerly functioning signs. However, since Weinmayr did use theword, it left the viewer wondering what exactly such highlyindividuated surfaces might mean if returned to the city streets inwhich they had been found. This thought in turn pointed to therecognition that works of art reiterate, but also brazenly shatter, thecodes on which they are based.
ROAD SIGNS, 06 Feb - 18 Mar 2004 at Nusser & Baumgart Contemporary, Munich
To download a pdf click here.