St. Gallen. As a musician, Wesley Willis (1963-2003) was an underground legend. His Dadaist-style titles, his blue-rock pieces reduced to single chords and noises and his sweaty seated performances were famous in Chicago and were also known in Europe to an insider audience. The fact that he always also brought his own drawings along to sell at his performances has until now been less noted. Now that the Kunsthalle St. Gallen has presented a large bundle of these drawings in an exhibition for the first time, Willis is likely to be seen in a profoundly different light: in the artistic context, the label of eccentric underground hero has had its day, as there are no niches of subculture here, only the one, global market with its universal standards. And, whereas Willis’s drawings may once perhaps have been placed with a wan smile in the »art brut« corner within this market (along with a reference to the diagnosis of schizophrenia made by his doctors), Giovanni Carmine, the new head of the Kunsthalle, happily prevents this manner of categorisation. By presenting Willis together with the Zurich shooting star Ingo Giezendanner (aka GRRRR), Carmine makes it plain that he does not consider Willis to be some kind of oddity, but an artist deserving of serious attention. The juxtaposition of these two artists has to do one the one hand with the fact that Giezendanner also does drawings, and on the other, that both artists are primarily concerned with portraying urban space. This may seem rather simplistic at first glance. But upon closer inspection, the comparison turns out to be extremely fruitful: significant differences between the two oeuvres become apparent, which makes it possible to undertake at least some attempt to establish Willis’s importance in the artistic context.
In Zurich, Giezendanner is loosely associated with the squatter scene, and that ties in with his work. The picture that he draws from the city is dominated by themes such as real estate speculation, gentrification etc.. In this environment, he takes on the function of a flaneur who records scenes that are radically changing and searches out romantic corners. In this regard, his pictures take a melancholy approach. They are attempts to record old things that are in a process of decline. If art has the function of saving the disintegrating city by transforming it into an image, this is redolent of the squatters’ strategy of changing houses or entire blocks into a kind of ruin-like gesamtkunstwerk to save them from being torn down. It is thus no coincidence that Giezendanner’s drawings, as is shown by the St. Gallen exhibition, can also be used in a similar way to the graffiti and wall paintings of the squatters. Because they have an ornamental quality owing to the linear style and the hard black-white contrasts, they are suitable as large frescoes, and these are what Carmine has commissioned. On the other walls, he occasionally hangs the drawings by Willis. And how! Here too, the art sometimes extends right up to the ceiling, as the big sheets of paper that Willis always used are arranged in close-knit patterns over large areas. This emphasises the way that Willis often painted his motifs in kinds of series: the same crossroads with the same buses, the same skyline, again and again – almost identically. This may be called an obsession, and it would certainly be possible to make the connection to »art brut« again from here. But it also naturally reminds us of the question of so-called »technical« reproducibility. Willis’s style also has something robot-like about it in the way he draws: using a ballpoint pen (and sometimes with a second pen that he used as a ruler), he sketched out rudimentary silhouettes that he then coloured in with coloured pencils or felt-tip pens – although colouring-in is not quite the right term, as the surfaces are made up of a large number of short strokes, almost giving the impression that a sewing-machine has been at work with a pencil.
Here, a very different approach to the city is expressed than in Giezendanner’s works. Whereas the latter is in principle looking for a romantic idyll, Willis focuses on the city as a topos of modernity: the grid-like structures, the machine-like method of drawing, the endless repetitions. Here, he of course benefits from the fact that Chicago is an extremely modernistic city. It is easy here to draw mostly skyscrapers and highways … It would thus be possible to say that Willis does not try to intervene as an artist in the urban landscape, as Giezendanner does, but only shows what is already there. To put it differently: his city already seems to have artistic qualities. Or, as the architectural historian Beatriz Colomina says: »Modernistic architecture was always constructed as a visually striking surface that was meant to be disseminated in magazines and newspapers on a mass scale.« Could it be that Chicago has found its perfect chronicler in Wesley Willis, this artist of technical reproducibility?
Translated by Timothy Jones