Comments on Tobias Pils’ works and projects in public space

As an artist who makes all efforts to circumvent or address the precarious uncertainties of the explicit, Tobias Pils prefers to show the variously connotated all at once, layering it to thereby relativise and shift its meanings. He therefore weaves the drawn and graphic elements into his pictures along with the painterly, connecting the materials of his objects and installations with the semantics of linguistic symbols. And last but not least, in collaboration with artists from other disciplines like experimental literature or music, he tries to produce synergies that are capable of expanding the areas of artistic potential. This is particularly visible in the works or projects that Pils has realised for public spaces and buildings. Since reference must be made to public functional buildings, areas characterised by the dynamism and contingencies of a lived-in world, they provide the ideal contexts for Pils’ own intentions. Moreover, they also mirror the artist’s sensitivity for real historical and socio-cultural contexts.

Yellow Line – This proposal for an underpass in Linz that was not realised does not embellish the already existing decor but rather marks it in a sober and unpretentious manner. It becomes inscribed into the structure of his context and thus describes the way it functions. The motif, or the only constitutive element that he takes as his point of departure is a yellow, striped marking along the edges of the steps of two escalators and the stairs flanking them. When the escalator begins to move, the line shifts and is interrupted and, at the same time, divided into moving and stationary segments that periodically complete the yellow line. The movement of the escalator is like an interpretation and the mirroring of its own movements, thus becoming an integral part of a kinetic, pictorial activity in public space. It is as though a minimalistic scaling were taking place because of the motion of the moving masses in which the line breaks and shifts. The monotonous circularity of the line’s movement is reminiscent of an abstract clock projected in a real space, its yellow “arm” showing the interrelated phenomena of continual recurrence and divergence. In the face of this “lapidary” measure as scale, the uninterrupted movement itself proves to be the basic constant in urban mobility.

Drawing – Pils has coupled linearity and circularity, emerging here as complementary motifs, in other groupings: in the form of loops that he proposed for the glass façade of the House of Mercy near St Pölten. Here, the pictograph becomes a symbol of an infinite and closed cycle without the danger of becoming esoteric or eschatological as a sober sign.

Morrow – A play on concrete poetry in the form of a neon text was a proposal Pils made for the Upper Austrian Government Services Centre in Linz. He proposed that the letters of the word MORGEN [in German the word means both morning and tomorrow] begin to rise one by one on the roof of the building at dusk, and then vanish in the same rhythm at daybreak. It was as though the word MORGEN was itself going to bed at dawn in order to become invisible to the viewer. In this architecture and literature related work, Pils presents a definition of time that also physically unfolds before us temporally. This coincidence places the work in the tradition of concrete poetry where language is subjected to self-description with the aim to create an analogy between appearance and the meaning of linguistic signs: it lets the terms “do” what they “mean”. MORGEN is also a visual concept that functions as a transmitter of other and further meanings precisely in the moment of concrete self-referentiality. For, it defines a natural-prosaic, extra-verbal process (dawn) while “executing” the same on the roof of a building, whose meaning rubs off on that of the term. MORGEN, that sleeps during the day and wakes up only at dusk, can certainly be read as ironic play on words about the customary behaviour of bureaucrats, considering that the building is an administrative institution. One is confronted with a work that, because it is only visible by night, engages in the everyday actions and agendas of the day.

Canoe – In the Vornbach Palace Gardens (Bavaria), Pils realised a temporary project in collaboration with Michael Kienzer. The two artists used the most sparing means to connect an artificial lake with the entire compound surrounding it: a canoe tied to a long rope cut across land and water, running through the entire park, even between the works of other artists. Unlike the other exhibits displayed there, it was not a closed sculpture; it was neither raised upon a pedestal, nor removed from its normal context. To the contrary, instead of being placed stably it was a trace of the ephemeral and transformable, whose boundaries are not easily determinable. Literally at a tangent to the rest of the sculptural formations in the park, this sculpture integrated and transformed the entire surroundings. A canoe swaying gently on the reflecting surface of the water, the rope tied to it and the scenic ambiance combined into a poetic constellation, became a metaphor of open relations precisely by explicitly addressing the theme of correlation.

The Ladder – In collaboration with the musician Patrick Pulsinger, Pils made a monumental sculpture with ladders and a backdrop of sound in the middle of the Austrian Sculpture Park near Graz. In 2005, the year commemorating the end of the Second World War, this sculpture entitled Leiter, murmelnde Identität [Ladder, murmuring identity] referred to a past that Austria has in effect not dealt with adequately enough. It is not possible to climb this over-sized ladder, for its bottom-most rungs are missing. While the mound of earth around it makes us think of something concealed or buried, the invisible loudspeakers emit sounds from nature or sounds and excerpts from radio programmes that refer to the history or its stagings by the media. Memories of a dark Third Reich-past as well as today’s wars become a sinister double-edged idyll when they mingle with our perception of nature. However, the insular life and at the same time shady darkness of the small forest in the middle of the park could also be seen as a synonym for Austria’s identity in terms of its international environment. That the ladder protrudes over the treetops and thereby transforms its surroundings into a miniaturised model of the world underscores the symbol of the insidiously and abysmally cute; the sounding ladder perhaps refers to the need to overcome this.

Flags – Pils had two masts with mirrors attached to them set up at a bifurcation in the same sculpture park. “Haufen werfen” [Sling/throw heaps] or: “ZOG [PULLED]. Die Schlafzündung geht weiter [Sleep ignition continues]. Am Strohhalm” [On the last straw] is written on either side of it. These texts that were developed with the writer Ferdinand Schmatz can only be related in the context of the specific site. While the words “Haufen werfen” refers to the artificial hills in the park, the poetic quality of the other texts signifies unfettered thinking. Also the title Zog den Helfer unterm Teppich hervor [Pulled the helper from under the carpet] speaks of a semantic dynamism, or of a tightrope walk between succinct words and their open meanings. The fact that meanings are not a predefined but rather an ephemeral and changeable phenomena is not conveyed by just the written words alone. Also the mirrors, constantly turning in the wind, keep showing and thus comining different texts, thereby changing their content. The two paths, the two mirrors and the two texts symbolise two worlds that make a dialectic reference to each other and even reflect each other, the way one surface mirrors the other. The point of departure for Pils’ metaphorical considerations is a real path and a dream one, that is, two components that differ from each other and are nevertheless mutually interdependent for their respective definition. Openness and directionality, freedom and norm are coupled in this work. Although the mirrors turn, albeit something different is reflected in them each time, their interpretation is based on a precise construction and the mirroring owes strictly to the physics of reflecting light. The fact that the masts for the mirror are reminiscent of flagpoles that on the one hand remind us of fluttering banners, but on the other hand are also the commonly understood symbols of national and ideological collectives and norms, become united in this image of relational contradictions.

Roof – In his proposal for an underground parking garage at the Sparkassenplatz in Graz, Pils transfers the tiled roof, a protected architectural elementin the old city, onto the floor so that roofage and traffic area become one single entity. The underground garage is thus given a roof, so to speak, like all the other houses in the inner city. In this way, it mutates into a sort of sunken house, which consciously, and also ironically, mirrors the mania of protection and conservation of monuments that the City is subjected to. Pils thinks through to the end this mania of protecting monuments in an effort to tip the balance towards absurdity and contradiction. This is why he decided for the paradoxical as the logical basis of his concept in an environment ruled by monument protection-related anachronistic stubbornness, achieving it by consciously over-fulfilling urban requirements as a proposal for innovatively critical town planning.

The floor covering mutated into roof represents a dynamic shift, the reflecting planes of water and glass are the sites and projection screens for alternating phenomena and images, stairs and ladders as metaphors of movement and surmountingthe past, language and sound as expressions of the immaterial-mental as subjected to time, these are the central motifs in the above-mentioned projects of Tobias Pils. They not only serve to help him circumvent a material and semantic predefinition in his art, but to make circumvention itself the overriding and consistent theme of his work.