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20/5/2014

Daniele Buetti

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

curated by Matthias Ulrich

Hypnosis as an artistic action: Daniele Buetti (b. 1955) invites visitors of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt to participate in collective meditative hypnosis. The prominent contemporary Swiss artist has developed, for the first time, a sound installation for the freely accessible Schirn Rotunda: It's all in the mind. It is based on an audio experience (a 28-minute-loop) in which the public is directly included by means of hypnosis. The installation focuses on a so-called "color cleansing," a guided meditation technique that can be traced back to Dr. Arno Müller, a retired psychology professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Frankfurt am Main. While relaxing on cushions in the Rotunda, visitors will be asked to visualize the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. In this ceremony, each color operates as a representative or thing. Bringing the colors to mind is believed to liberate participants from burdensome feelings or negative thought patterns. Most decisive is the effect that the professor's hypnotic speech act—emphatic and clear—as on the listener's body.

The "color cleansing" is intended to help each participant recharge his mental and emotional resources. By transferring hypnosis into the public space of the Schirn Rotunda and into the context of an artwork, Daniele Buetti breaks with intimacy, one of the basic conditions of hypnosis sessions. At the same time, the artist addresses the fascination that radiates from hypnotic states, mind-expanding rites, esotericism, and spirituality. In a day and age in which youths meet at so-called Holi festivals to celebrate explosions of color, Daniele Buetti artistically extends the question of how colors take effect and what they can bring about. Visitors and passersby not only participate, they are an essential part of an art action that focuses on the hypnotic experience, self-examination, and transforming the human psyche. Any visible colors have been removed from the space of the Rotunda. As the title indicates, color suggestion and "color cleansing" take place in the visitors' mind. The boundaries between happening and serious science become blurred. Daniele Buetti's installation occupies the seemingly unprotected and soulless Schirn Rotunda and lends it new meaning; it becomes a place where people can examine themselves.

Daniele Buetti, born in 1955 in Fribourg, is one of the most important contemporary Swiss artists with an international reputation. He lives and works in Zurich; he has also been a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Münster since 2004. His early actions entitled Flügelkreuz, reminiscent of the Dada movement in Zurich, testify to a form of energy that can be transferred with the aid of artistic means. Buetti became an ambassador for his Flügelkreuz brand, and he developed it with a variety of content, whether as a manifesto ("Das Flügelkreuz tragen" [Dir zuliebe], 1990) or as a label for a pair of socks on sale (A Man Is His Job, 1993/94). The artist achieved international recognition in the nineties for his manipulation of fashion photographs from commercial, fashion, and lifestyle magazines by means of brand names or ornamental scribbling (Looking for Love, 1994–98). His interventions on the back of the images caused the faces and bodies of the models on the front to look scarred, wounded, maltreated, and burned. The ruined icons of the obsession with beauty are not only part of the canon of contemporary art, unlike almost any other images they tell of the credible and addictive promises of a consumer- and brand-name-oriented society. Buetti addresses the superficiality and power of the advertising industry by availing himself of its aesthetics. His interest in the aura of images and the people they depict as well as his concern with the auratic in religion or spirituality are discernible in his entire oeuvre.

Director: Max Hollein

Press contact: Axel Braun (Head of Press/Public Relations):
T (+49 69) 29 98 82 153 / F (+49 69) 29 98 82 240 / presse@schirn.de / www.schirn.de (texts, images, and films for download under PRESS)

Press preview: Wednesday, May 21, 11am

Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
Römerberg
D-60311 Frankfurt
Germany

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