Roman Signer

In his sensitive study Zeit Skulptur (Time Sculpture, 2002), philosopher Paul Good argues that Roman Signer’s event-sculptures should be understood not as relics of past events but as manifestations of differing orders of temporality. Time represented mathematically plays a certain part, but most important, Good proposes, Signer’s work presents the experience of time as “quality rather than quantity, as intensity rather than extension.” Signer’s sculptures “are set back into their coming-to-be” so that future and past flow into one another, making the invisible, inexpressible mutability that’s the essence of time accessible to experience.

Good’s theories hold implications for the idea of a Signer retrospective. To be scrupulous, we should note that this exhibition—comprising fifty sculptures and installations spanning the period 1971 to the present (including twelve new pieces), plus well over three hours of film and video footage, plus two new sculptural events—was billed as a “comprehensive overview” rather than a “retrospective.” Labeling aside, though, one might extrapolate from Good’s essay to suggest that Signer’s exceptionally consistent, focused oeuvre itself needs to be comprehended as a complex continuity—a single vast, cumulative work that challenges the concept of clock or calendar time and actualizes experience of temporality as quality, in a similar spirit to its parts. Thus, a conventionally linear art-historical survey that treated individual works as crystallizations or halts in a creative process—static points in a temporal flow—would reimpose on Signer’s practice the very conception of time it overturns.

This show dispensed with a chronological plan in favor of loose groupings around physical processes: lifting and suspension (as in Shirt, 1995/2003, in which the sleeve of a businessman’s shirt, attached to a helium-filled balloon blown around by a fan, performs a touchingly wavery wave) or pouring and pulling (as in one of the most sheerly understated yet charged of the new works: Four Wheels, 2003, in which four pristine car wheels, wedged against the pull of gravity on a sloping plinth, hint at a miraculously dematerialized vehicle to which they might once have been attached). The exhibition didn’t represent certain projects that Signer aficionados might have hoped to see (for example, Action with a Fuse, 1989, a thirty-five-day event involving the burning of a thirteen-mile fuse alongside the railroad linking St. Gallen and Appenzell, Switzerland, Signer’s birthplace). The Fontana di Piaggio, 1993—a fountain stowed away in the back of a three-wheeled van—was there, bubbling away merrily outdoors. Yet here again, the idea of singling out “major” or “canonical” pieces—that customary task of the art-historical survey—jars with a deeper intuition of what Signer’s art is about. In many cases, the understatement or (apparent) slightness of a work is key to its effect—see here, for instance, Hangar, 2003, in which a model helicopter, grounded on a rotating turntable sunk into the gravel courtyard, desultorily flips a small weed with its tail, comically imitating the pathetic stasis of a pickup arm skipping on a scratched record.

Having argued against the conventional art-historical retrospective as a viable frame for Signer’s work, and given the fascinations present in this rewarding show, it might seem perverse to conclude by pleading for a more comprehensive “comprehensive overview,” somewhere soon. But it would be wonderful, for instance, to consider the artist’s photo-documentation and drawings in relation to his work as a whole. The affordable catalogue promised for the near future would also be a boon (there is already a splendiferous three-volume publication documenting Signer’s work to date, but at a stratospheric price). Perverse or not, that’s what we greedy Signer fans would like.

—Rachel Withers