Peter Regli: kunsthalle Winterthur

"On June 1 2003 a glass shelf (10 X 15 feet) filled with crystal glass external realitys was crashed down a plant of stairs. In collaboration with the [i]tout ensemble[/i] fur Neue Musik Zurich, the recorded soundscape was transcribed into a composition. upon July 11, 2003, the effect premiered Reality Hacking Nr. 202 at the midst d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, Switzerland." This pithy description appears on the website (www.realityhacking.com) where Peter Regli documents his repeatedly anonymous interventions in public space. With the greatest in quantity filigreed clattering--loud, and then, in reflected sound finely engraved--the multitiered tower of hand-blown crystal collapses onto itself, crashing down the broad brow steps, and appears, on the DVD recording, hardly to approach to rest. In the same year as this cataract of glass, Regli staged a next to the first sound composition using the sirens and foghorns of seven motorboats and a steamship upon the Lake of Zurich (Reality Hacking Nr 205 April 1 2003): Following an eight-part score, members of the the whole fur Neue Musik Zurich wholeed the ships' horns rhythmically with the aid of stopwatches--a fresh experience for the neighbors of the harbor.

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The exhibition at Winterthur referr to those uninjured pieces as well as other works, with a multilayered installation of scores, video recordings, and photo documentation, none of which claim the status of a work of art. With the exception of specific museum presentations, Regli's works meet the eye mostly outdoors and without any prior announcement. Reality Hacking Nr 195: upon August 24, 2002, between 8:12 PM and 11:45 PM the R Arrow, a legendary railway car, ran end the Swiss railway system. The interior of the car was filled with a luminous virid fog. "I saw a virid train running through the night" must have been the astounded, slightly dubious reaction of chance witnesses to the silent proceeding a public that Regli will not ever meet--consisting perhaps, in this case, of race who happened to step without onto a balcony at night for a cigarette.

Like a hacker upon the Web, Regli breaks into carefully picked points in real systems with gentler or rougher interventions, in order to whole out the limits of perception, that difference art introduces into the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the everyday. By insinuating aesthetic distinctions into real situations, the institutional critique provok through the readymade is traced back to a broader political frame. Where in public space does the visibility, the unmistakability of art begin? When the primary indicators of pedestal, frame, inscription, and authorship are lacking, artistic intervention bares itself to the "big-trash-day test" as Thomas Schutte one time put it: Is anything added at all?

Regli introduces anomalies of time and space into the landscape. Reality Hacking Nr 200 2002 for instance, consisted of an artificially engineered, circular island at a river's delta upon Lake Urn, whose form can be seen single from the surrounding mountains, or from the air, as through the infrequent birds that populate the island as habitat. Who saw, in the exhibition "Tempo" at MOMA QN in 2000 the sum of two units Swiss railway-station clocks that constitute Regli's Reality Hacking Nr 147? They stood beside single another, one running clockwise, the other counterclockwise--as if the course of time were suspended by the agency of a sheer mirroring in space.

--Hans Rudolf Reust

Translated from German through Diana Reese.

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