Until recently, Peter Piller was employed at a Hamburg ad agency, where he was required to comb through a hundred newspapers per day—a gig that gave him ample opportunity to compile the image archives that form the core of his art. In the past year, he has won the Ars Viva Prize and the Rubens Prize and was honored as a local boy made good in his hometown of Siegen, where he had a solo show—so perhaps now he can live off of his art. In any case, his media-related day job brings to mind the young Andy Warhol; but whereas Warhol was exposed to, and inspired by, the glamorous world of high-end commercial art and the highly polished layouts of big-city magazines, Piller’s job immersed him in the washed-out, pixellated banality of German regional papers. His archives consist of thousands of photos, catalogued in grids, which reveal the strangeness of the local everyday: “People standing in a row,” “Murder weapons,” and “Car touching” are the names of some of the groups. And when an archive of more than twenty thousand aerial color photographs of houses fell into his hands—photos taken for the sole purpose of hawking them door-to-door to proud homeowners—the practiced archivist discovered new idiosyncrasies: He noticed, for example, that a number of photos featured houses with red duvet covers hung out of their windows to dry. Grouped together, they become anthropomorphized: a bunch of houses sticking their tongues out at us. Via the images’ birds-eye views, the suburbs are revealed as a monotonous monologue on the theme of “designs for living,” as rhythmic as Ford’s production line. But Piller has set himself the task of finding the endless minor variations in what is always essentially the same; the minute oddities that he reveals amount to a subtle visual Dada.
Translated from German by Emily Speers Mears.
