Korean Art World 1997
Art World Korea Cover Artist/ Marc Hungerbuehler
Marc Hungerbuehler' s Plein Air Sublime
Vadim Erent
The body of work collected in Marc Hungerbuehler's series, Rain Drawings, was created by exposing prepared paper to precipitation. Repeating this operation in various geographical locations under diverse meteorological conditions, each of these Drawings records the impact of a particular rain on a particular terrain. As the sheet of paper is implanted into the earth, it becomes the earth's crust, a section of the topography of the region. Rain water, falling and flowing over the land, marks it with drops, traces of runnels, washes of accumulated water. The water works over the pigment of the paper by the very same process as it works over the face of the earth, charting it with streams, daubs of puddles, calligraphic crevices of gulches, covering it with alluvium and debris. Having been a part of the landscape, the exposed sheet of paper becomes a landscape of that part, a full-scale topographic documentation of the meteorological event in its impact on the chosen site.
The Rain Drawings are not only 'topographies' they are 'meteorologies' . The earth serves as the ground, the support, a receiving surface on which the rain fall leaves its mark. But, in turn, this mark charts the land, brings it forth into the realm of representation and presents it as a work of art.
Similarly, the title of the series "Rain Drawings" carries two semantic possibilities; the first identifies rain as the subject of drawing (drawings of rain), the second identifies the rain as an agency that draws (drawings by rain). The first possibility refers to the mythical origin of painting, the unrepresentable sublime of the storm painted by Apelles. The second possibility refers, and this amounts to a scandal succinctly formulated by Roland Barthes in his article “The Death of the Author” to the absence of a human authorial agency. For if these works have been created by rain, by the storm itself, where is the painter and his soul? What is the painting representing, if anything?
And who or what is representing it ? The preparation and pigmentation of the host sheet, the choice of the work’s dimensions, as well as the chosen site ( like Duchamp’s ‘found object’) are still determined by a certain creative subjectivity, but the execution of the work itself " the painting " is left to an inhuman process, a force of nature.
Hungerbuehler creates the conditions of possibility in which one sublime 'thing' bears witness to another. In a chiasma of representation, the storm brings forth the earth, the earth the storm. This chain of infinite substitution and the ultimate indeterminacy of the sublime thing is most clearly illustrated in the Spain series of Rain Drawings. In these works, a rectangular shape appears as a frame within a frame structure. Hungerbuehler writes that: "The inner space is technically created through layers of drawings on top of other drawings. This means, that the support of the upper piece prevents direct contact with the rain, but the upper pigments and uncovered space will bleed into the covered area. In a sense, every new drawing which is placed on an older one, will slow down the process of the 'hosting' drawing, but still affect the older piece with fresh pigment and new rain fall."
