“Agony Hall,” “Big Gender Junction,” and “Sentimental Library” are just a few of the sites to see in Ueli Etter’s The Park/Der Park, 1997–2001. The Swiss artist, who splits his time between Berlin and Tel Aviv, has been refining the project through exhibitions over the past two years, continually transforming its appearance with an array of multimedia installations, graphics, and drawings. A truly utopian undertaking, the park exists nowhere beyond the elaborate planning stage; its landscape is filled, not with greenery, but with a wealth of fantasy monuments, roads, and buildings, rendered in styles ranging from neo-geo to Surrealist and given witty names that reflect an innocence soured by cynicism. The freedom and happiness promised by the uniquely American topography of wide open roads and amusement parks is tainted by a certain Euro-trash tristesse and dusted with a fine layer of the weary nobility exuded by aging drag queens. “Desperado Drive” joins the “Compulsive Viaduct”; the “Tunnel of Love” leads to the “Well of Tears”; and the drug of choice is not Ecstasy but “Agony.” It’s as if Rainer Werner Fassbinder had taken over Disney World.
With the park’s latest incarnation, “Impressionen aus dem Park” (Impressions from the park), Etter gets historical, offering an iconographic genealogy of twelve offset and silk-screen prints produced between 1997 and 2000 as well as one study. The 100-plus drawings, prints, and watercolors show the evolution of each finished print, which seems to develop not gradually, but exponentially. Etter transforms small details into architectural monuments, precisely in the way the unconscious uses seemingly trivial events from the day to create the rich landscapes of dreams and nightmares. Thus, the massive coliseum T4, 1/2 Albino Inn, 1999, finds its origin in the image of the back of a woman whose hair is tightly braided across her head. Etter’s hairdo hotel goes far beyond the exaggerations of the female body in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or even Hans Bellmer’s photographs, embracing its mechanization to the point where organic features may comfortably disappear into architectural forms. Another element in the same print—a wall with a hole—proves to be the end product of images of a guillotine, a glory hole, and a mechanism for cutting the filters off cigarettes. Here, Etter creates a visual metaphor that fuses execution, blow jobs, and smoking while projecting the psychologically invested acts into built space. One could link these figures to the artist’s psyche, but Etter’s project resists such reductive readings by reflecting the topography of a collective amusement park where everyone can experience the thrill—and pain—of pleasure.
In addition to these diversions, the exhibition also offered a publication, The Park/Der Park: Your Final Entertainment (Vice Versa Verlag, 2001), which gives an overview, however incomplete, of the park as well as rules for visitors. While the project will never be built, Etter suggests that architecture can hold not only organic forms but also the fantastic and seemingly improbable figures produced by the imagination and the unconscious. Who knows? The turbulent shapes of Frank Gehry’s buildings may soon end up looking like the timid forays of a too-well-adjusted mind.
—Jennifer Allen
