Daniel FUCHS, Geo FUCHS
A principios del año 2004, nos paramos delante del escaparate de una pequeña tienda de diseño berlinesa y nos miraron los primeros robots de juguete que conocimos, de casi medio metro, potentes y provocativos.
Ese contacto nos llevó a la colección Varol, probablemente la colección de juguetes privada más grande de Europa, con más de 10.000 objetos. Nos fascinan los archivos y las colecciones. Su exploración es como un hilo conductor de nuestro trabajo artístico.
Se abrió un nuevo mundo para nosotros -aquí encontramos héroes de nuestra niñez como Batman o Superman junto con fuguras de Sylvester Stallone. Bruce Willis o Quentin Tarantino de 30 cm y figuras de robots que no conociamos de antes, como Jeep o Mazinger. Estas figuras eran personajes que querían que se les tomara en serio, con muchos detalles y hechos a conciencia. Por eso los fotografiamos como si fueran personas. Hasta que descubrimos a Adolf Hitler y otros personajes políticos como Bin Laden y Saddam Husseis -peligrosos personajes de plástico- y mitigamos su poder por la cuestionable naturaleza de que son de plástico. Nuestra asociación con los juguetes cambió -ya no se trataba de la idea principal de hacer que surgiera vida de héroes de plástico, sino que empezamos a "jugar" con ellos y a percibir su función de "juguetes".
Jo-Anne Danzker y Michael Buhrs, comisarios de la exposición Toys del Museum Villa Stuck, (Munich, 2006) escribieron a cerca de lo anterior: "Los artistas Daniel y Geo Fuchs empezaron a trabajar en TOYS con Batman, Superman y Hulk. En la cara de estos personajes se refleja que creen en el progreso, igual que el idealismo que se refleja en los héroes del cómic. Qué distintas son las caras curtidas y cansadas de Willis o Stallone, un soldado de la época de la guerra fría para el que parece no quedar nada que hacer. La frontera entre realidad y ficción desaparece completamente cuando se muestran las figuras de Saddam Hussein u Osama bin Laden... En el centro de la exposición hay preguntas concernientes al poder de la auto-promoción a través de los medios que realizan figuras políticas o actores en un mundo del espectáculo y "juegos de guerra" en red."
En la última parte de nuestra obra, nos concentramos, sobre todo, en vinilos de diseñadores. Nuestro mundo y nuestras tiendas llevan un par de años conquistados por criaturas recién creadas, sin un transfondo de cómic o de película, abiertos a todas las interpretaciones y que desafían las clasificaciones y que se están ganando a los nuevos coleccionistas.
Daniel and Geo Fuchs in Toyland
By Eugen Blume
The photographic images by artist duo Daniel and Geo Fuchs exert their own special attraction. This fascination is particularly noticeable in the large-format framed color photographs on the walls of the exhibition halls, but even in the pictures in the publications initiated by the artists this charisma is in no way diminished. As objects, these lavish volumes – what they actually are is art books – really come closest to the artists’ intentions or rather their passion. Within the confines of a book the viewer can feel more intensely how Daniel and Geo Fuchs use their camera to collect. However, they do not view these extremely disparate collections in a conventional way, instead they see archiving, i.e., ordering certain things that interest them as photogenic landscapes. Their approach is downright scientific and their technical brilliance and meticulousness reinforce their innermost intention, to conserve the world as completely as possible in their attention to detail.
However, these photographic visions are not the products of existing material such as their illuminated animal and human preparations photographed in extreme close-up in "Conserving". Instead, they pursue certain topics, developing independent areas of collection – for example, the carefully orchestrated gazes of famous personalities ("Famous Eyes") or their shots of prison cells and examination rooms belonging to the former GDR's Ministry of State Security ("STASI – Secret Rooms"), now veritable museum pieces.
Taking as their title "Conserving", Daniel and Geo Fuchs have published a series of images consisting of close-ups of conserved animals and people. These photographs of human conservation are removed from the general conventions of seeing objects and instead located in one of tabooed zones of viewing. In society, not everything is revealed to the curious, to those who wish to see. Pictures of dissecting rooms and pathological collections were, for a long time off limits, and, to a certain extent, still are. The wish to be allowed to inspect something taboo, to wrest it away from the eyes of science, so to speak, and to publish it from an artistic perspective, this "democratized" encroachment into taboo zones defined by society – such as death and sexuality – is designed by the artists on a high level, using the example of photographs of preparations of human beings. It is not the fleeting quality (such as that of pornographic images) but a kind of aestheticization, one that is carefully and precisely planned. Re-injecting life into preserved human bodies, some of which are 100 years old, focusing people's gaze on a fine-limbed form of being and, at the same time, not banishing death from their consciousness has led to a complex image of human existence. Here, horror and pleasure in horror are neutralized in works of photographic art, transformed aesthetically and extended into the mysterious dimension of life.
Another series of photographs is devoted to the secret places of the exercise of power, to total surveillance and punishment. Daniel and Geo Fuchs did not photograph these meager rooms from reported locations of totalitarian violence, these penitentiaries for the political prisoners of an autocratic regime, until 15 years after the end of the GDR. The camera looks into rooms that will never be "occupied" again, neither by perpetrators nor by victims. Nevertheless, the details that have been preserved record the dull thinking, the brutal and insensitive order in a frightening way. The inhuman "minimalism" of these rooms exudes a great coldness. The photographs succeed in recording this coldness without comment. They are not aesthetic images in search of formal principles within this bleak environment but clear, almost cold prints from a dead world.
In "Famous Eyes", their notable series of portraits, Daniel and Geo Fuchs used a special Polaroid camera and initially photographed only the eyes, i.e., what unmistakably characterizes a face: the gaze that it bestows on other people. The eyes reach down into the depths of the soul, a person's whole history can be discovered in them. Only the eloquent eyes of famous people were captured on the Polaroids. In the final analysis, the artists were looking for an idea, together with the subjects of their portraits, concerning where these eye pictures could be placed in their likenesses. By means of this unusual technique whereby subjects were involved in the design of their own photographic image, the artists created a special psycho-social relationship between their "subjects" and the camera. They used the picture within the picture to tell a story that threw light on the nature of the person portrayed, on a kind of second level. The question was, what kind of attitude do people have to their eyes, a part of their body that is used to having other people resting on it, to being seen and which has elevated seeing to its profession as an artist.
Through Düsseldorf-based collector Selim Varol Daniel and Geo Fuchs have discovered the world of toys, plastic figures, most of them produced in Asia, which reproduce modern western existence right down to the details of its fantasy worlds.
Toys, Spielzeug, as they are interestingly called in the German language, have always represented a second, artificial world. In etymological terms, the word "Zeug" includes not only the idea of “stuff” or “equipment” but also of producing or engendering something. However, the prefix “Spiel” (play), with its unclear origins, diminishes or trivializes this process, rendering it something childish. At the same time, it does involve serious preparations: in play, the future rules of adulthood are practiced. If it was to be efficient in educational terms, a toy needed to realistically recreate the real world. Doll’s houses, railways, war machines, cars etc. were produced in miniature by adults for children. The utopian objective of this kind of production was to prepare for the world with a model of the world. Such models accompanied the first years of our lives with the intention of having done their job by the time we reached adulthood. Playing not only recreated social hierarchies but also assigned the relevant roles to the different sexes. Boys were usually given war toys, railways, airplanes, technical things such as cranes and cars and building blocks. In other words, the appropriate male professions were allowed to enter their still entirely anarchic children's imaginations. Conversely, girls felt at home in doll's houses with their miniature living rooms and their tiny kitchens; they played with dolls, anticipating their future roles as mothers.
By contrast, the toys that we are writing about here and that Daniel and Geo Fuchs are including in their series of photographic collections as their latest project, are different in character. Plastic toys have been in existence since the invention of plastics. They have replaced other, less easy to handle materials, as well as lasting longer. However, the kind of toys that are illustrated in the book take their inspiration mainly from the marketing strategies of the film industry. Favorite figures from globally successful flicks have been realistically recreated in plastic and "born" as fetishes from the temporality of non-materialized images. Superman who could fly throughout the duration of the film and who simply disappeared when the lights went back on now stood at home as a "real" figure, tangible, ready for action. The banal dreams of many millions of people of just once defying the laws of the everyday world were glamorously realized in the Hollywood superheroes. The plastic sculptures produced by this industry are not toys in the traditional sense, they are figures charged with meaning and predefined by the movie narrative. Playing at being Superman, Batdman or Rambo by no stretch of imagination means practicing roles predetermined by society. Their maleness has been hypertrophied, degenerated, so to speak, into a special role that transcends everyday affairs. The dream of supremacy is a sub-cultural dream dreamt by the underclasses, the masses who are not in a position to enjoy a share in power. Superman is the hero of the disenfranchised, someone who can restore order in the face of all evil forces, if necessary, by even overturning natural laws. The ideology of the superheroes is that of the lone warrior, not that of the collectives of the left-wing class solidarity feared in the west. He comes as a savior from somewhere or other. This figure of a leader with teleological qualities is to be found in all social systems, both in the west and in the east. It is the secular version of religious superstars such as Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Buddha etc., all of whom performed miracles thanks to their supernatural powers. The whole arsenal of these larger-than-life figures with all their special privileges is impressively marshaled by Daniel and Geo Fuchs in large-format portraits of the plastic reproductions. Strangely, the large format abstracts itself from Toyland although with all the knocks they have sustained in everyday use they are more clearly delineated than the naked eye can recognize. The clever use of lighting on what remains primitive plastic faces allows them to become real portraits. However, this overstepping of boundaries, this alternation between reality and actual fact is also provoked by the toy industry itself. Alongside Batman, Superman, and Rambo figures of good and evil from historical reality also put in appearances, characters such as Che Guevara or Bin Laden. Evil figures such as Hitler, Saddam Hussein and other 20th-century personalities are very much in the majority. As members of the toy circus, of the unreal world of plastic reproductions, however, these villains are subject to other laws and have to be prepared for anything, amongst other things, and in particular, Batman, with his faith in intelligence and science, as we know from Tim Burton's films. In the toy department of evil figures from our real-world Daniel and Geo Fuchs have arranged absurd groups that impressively invoke the forces of Fantasia. Adolf Hitler, one of the most popular rogues(if you mean the most popular rogue of our time, yes) is finally annihilated by the militant combination of a crocodile and a guerrilla fighter. His ballet of pain in the jaws of a Godzilla is a successful metaphor for the madness of the historically authenticated figure in this role. Within the kingdom of re-enacted nightmares the figure becomes a helpless ghost that is overcome by evil, by the kingdom of nature symbolized by Godzilla. The meticulous reproduction of the incarnation of an historically evil figure even down to the clothes and the furrowed brow, the Hitler uniform and the mask are fetishes of negative reverence, apotropaically expelled in Toyland. Like all his successors, Hitler is subject to the anarchic laws of play, his power definitively quashed by this plastic reproduction.
Another western leader and politician, George Bush, who wishes to violently impose democracy on the empires of evil, has been reduced to the status of an insignificant doll in the photographic image of a full-figure plastic portrait within the ordered environment of its packaging container, become a collector's item whose fascination is due entirely to its attention to detail. The double quantity of gloved hands, explained by the play aspect, including the famous raised thumb as a simple gesture of victory on the aircraft carrier, trivialize political power, reducing it to a short period piece. It is these large-format color pictures of this world of play that concede to the latter the importance of a real-world. Daniel and Geo Fuchs have photographed the toys as if they had reached Toyland in some strange way which, to a certain extent, does correspond to the truth. The meeting with collector Selim Varol and his some 10,000 figures laid out before them the magical power of this fairytale utopia. The best way to become a member of this nation of figures is via the Internet; the manufacturers, mainly Asian, make use of this rapid information channel in order to get their entire production out to the collectors as quickly as possible. The figures range from the well-known timeless Barbie dolls to Star Wars heroes and beyond, to new heroes that come out of the Japanese Manga, from TV series, horror films or other artificial pictorial worlds. Everything is made of hard and soft plastic, which is successful in the real/unreal dream world of the pop industry. And then there are the figures that no one has seen yet, pure designer inventions, brainchildren of the imagination, that are as capable of conquering hearts as the copies of real people.
However, in this case, we can only talk about toys in a qualified sense. Adults buy up the entire production runs even before a single child can lay his hands on one of the figures. For a long time now, catalogues have been circulating, highlighting the price hikes for certain rare figures. They have developed into a sub-cultural art form today, when even the names of their creators are well-known and essentially collectors of them do not really differ from art collectors. Notwithstanding this, they do constitute their own species and have nothing to do with lovers of Steiff teddy-bears or Käthe-Kruse dolls. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the figures crop up, arranged like art installations, in the rooms and window displays of designer and fashion shops. They have long become part of the truly commercial world of young people, people who are, superficially, strangely similar to their plastic doubles. Their clothes and indeed their entire outfits are based on their fictitious role models created by successful stars from the entertainment industry. The plastic figures are vivid reminders of these roles, as three-dimensional miniatures, as fetishes of a decorative form of self-discovery. With the exception of the Barbie dolls, the women are martial, highly sexualized fighting machines. They are very similar to the muscle-packed males. The models in the over-designed glossy portfolios of the fashion industry are almost indistinguishable from the most sophisticated of these toys. For a long time now, they have been living in a Toyland where the ageing process, death and all other imperfections of real life appear to have been overcome. In their pictures, Daniel and Geo Fuchs report from the special zone in a second world that has already successfully established itself within the original world.
