“There is no solution to the problem because there is no problem.”
Marcel Duchamp, 1913
Joachim Waibel was born in the 20th Century in a country called Germany, which makes him German. He is very German. But he is also an international citizen of a conceptual country without borders.
Due to a fluke of circumstances and a family connection, when Joachim was three years old he had the opportunity to play with a great artist named Dieter Roth. Some of Dieter’s spirit fell out of his ears and into Joachim’s ears. He has never heard anything the same way since. They don’t even have clocks where he lives.
Waibel sees no reason not to do exactly what he wants simply because there’s no one to stop him. Who would want to even try? He takes literally the admonition of Jasper Johns that art is about taking an object and doing something to it, then doing something else to it, until there is nothing left to do. Then he moves on to another object.
He is a firm believer in principles clearly outlined by certain thinkers in 1963, such as the two Georges, Maciunas and Brecht: Purge the world of intellectual, professional and commercialized culture. Purge the world of dead art, imitation art, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art. Promote a revolutionary tide in art, promote living art, anti-art, promote non-art reality, to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals. Fuse the cadres of cultural, social and political revolutionaries into united front and action.
Art is an attitude. It is not a movement or a style.
Art is intermedia. Art creators like to see what happens when different media intersect. Art works are simple. Art is fun. Humor has always been an important and overlooked element in Art.
Joachim has a passport to every imaginary country. It is stamped with passionate smiles. No one takes anything literally anymore, but Waibel does. This means his whole life is a metaphor, but not a metaphor for something else. A metaphor for itself.
In art history there aren’t a thousand formats, there are only four: portrait, still life, landscape and abstract, each having to do with perceptual vantage point. And there aren’t a thousand themes in art history, there are only four: nature, self, society and spirituality, out of which myriad subject matters can be spun like silk. Each of these four zones are like seeds which expand and explode into the universe inside and outside them.
Most artists tend to specialize in one of these formats and one of these themes. But then Joachim Waibel is not most artists. Multiplicity is his middle name and he is spiritually curious enough to want them all, sometimes all at once if possible. He is an interdisciplinary thinker and consequently he tends to explore his ideas in multiple mediums, sifting through their material processes until the right form meets the right content. Intermedia is therefore the most accurate means of accessing what he is aiming for and at in his pop-existential experiments.
He draws, paints, sculpts, photographs and films ideas into being using images, objects and poems as the main currency for his communication projects. Believing that there is no art until there is communication, he naturally espouses an interactive aesthetics which includes the viewer/participant as a willing collaborator in the final production process itself.
Any given work is not finished until the viewer adds their own perspective and internalizes it into their own intimate realm.
Thus what began as an idea, after being transformed via alchemy into a wide range of art practices, also ends as an idea, in the heart and mind of a public. One person, ten million people, the result is the same: a feeling is fleeting but the form it assumes in the three dimensional world is permanent, especially if passion and pleasure are incarnated as art objects.
Although it was used by Dick Higgins in the mid-1960’s to describe an open-ended art domain which included and involved the participating public, strangely enough the term intermedia was first utilized by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who first coined the term as he stood at the nervous borderline between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The romantic poet used the term as a means of bridging the territorial divide between the arts, and as a poetic metaphor for his own personal brand of transcendental idealism.
The transcendent abounds in the uniquely touching and even amusing works of Joachim Waibel, where every attempt has been made to liberate a thought, desire, dream or dread from the bondage of a limited perception and to let it fly away into a sky made of free thinking. One of the ways in which the four themes and four formats in art are permitted to become almost infinite in their variation is the power of recursion, the inspiring process best depicted in the Fibonacci sequence, where each element in a series of forms is built upon by absorbing the preceding element and expanding the series. Thus the engraved invitation to a marriage between the perceptual and the conceptual. A happy co-habitation so to speak.
There is a repeated use of patterns, multiples, clusters, serial sequences, collections, archives and replicas in Waibel’s work. The tongue in cheek ghosts of Duchamp and Warhol whisper in his ear every day. This loosening of boundaries for example, is the reason why Higgins believed that Duchamp was possibly an even more important artist than Picasso.
Higgins pointed out that Duchamp’s objects are perpetually fascinating while Picasso’s voice is fading because the former’s pieces are truly in between media, while the latter’s are merely painted ornaments, as accomplished as they are as such.
Waibel is therefore an inheritor of the Duchampian lineage, after it was first inherited by Fluxus and then bequeathed to Andy Warhol, who then passed it on much in the manner of the child’s game of telephone, with new phrases and meanings being added to the message in each generation, whether by accident or design. But this is a spiritual telephone of the highest order. Accident is design in the end. If there is a fifth art format it must surely be conceptual: that is the wedding gift given by the 20th Century.
Waibel’s portraits are not often of people, they are more often portraits of objects, usually utilitarian and even dislocated in a slightly melancholy way. He gives them life again by playing with them in a respectful but mischievous manner. He is a mischief-maker par excellence, just as Duchamp and Warhol were. That in the end is the job description of the best artists: to make mischief with our hearts and minds.
Waibel’s landscapes are not necessarily outdoor environments, they are more often landscapes of objects, or more accurately described as mindscapes, once the object has been liberated from its former quotidian function. Its new function is fun. Serious fun. The kind of fun Schwitters had when he transformed his own home dwelling into a living museum of hauntingly beautiful merzbau relics. By touching objects with a certain bemused reverence, Waibel turns them into relics, but perhaps relics which will fully reveal themselves only in the very distant future, if there is one.
Waibel’s still life works are not so still. Often they tremble. Everything he assembles on the tabletop of his mind is throbbing with glee. His collections of items, grouped in methodical and even compulsively hermetic orders, show us life as lived, not frozen into the artificial groupings of classical still life. And yet they do perform the same vanitas function:
to demonstrate that we are mortal, that time is fleeting, that it has already flown. Life is fugitive. It cannot be held or grasped or contained or controlled, it must merely be gently caressed as it floats tenderly by. It’s enough to make you cry. In fact, it often does. But our tears, as the song says, will dry on their own, and in fact, our tears are the only real evidence that we were here at all. All art is already abstract since it is all abstracted from nature to one degree or another.
But even more startling is this realization, evoked by physical poetry: the tears that beautiful works of art elicit really are the actual art, not the mere things that cause us to weep in the first place. The tears that dance down our cheeks are the necessary fuel for a new Renaissance. Don’t dry them off. They are magic.
Magic and meaningful coincidence are both a large part of Waibel’s art practice. Mind, matter and meaning all merge and dance together. Mind and matter go on a date with meaning. Combining mixed media and multiple styles and sensibilities, Joachim Waibel allows big ideas to make small but meaningful gestures. Giving what is discarded by practical use a new lease on life in our imagination, he reincarnates mind through material.
The intersection of old and new, and past and present, with a constantly arriving future: here is the territory being explored by a contemporary yet classical artist. At first it appears to be terra incognita, yet suddenly we recognize it as a place where we all live in our dreams. There is no east or west in dreams, and the ink on the map of this territory is always drying, it will never be finished. Synchronicity is a useful word to describe the art practice of a man with multiple histories. A self-made man, he has been an industrialist and has operated in the theatre of business, but he is also a poetic explorer of the language of symbolic forms: images, objects, photographs and films. He dreams with his eyes wide open.
Donald Brackett
Vancouver May 2015
