Peter Wächtler’s first solo exhibition sold out before its opening, thanks to the enthusiasm of a single buyer: the famous liquor manufacturer Sterkert, which sweetened the deal by giving the artist a lifetime supply of eggnog. At the time, Wächtler was twelve years old. He was already a printmaking prodigy several times over, having played a leading role in the comeback of drypoint and woodcut techniques in West Germany while setting new standards of excellence in lithography and silk screen. He was obliged by long-standing tradition to join the army at a tender age—Wächtler is descended from a noble military family on his father’s side—but his creative development continued. It was in the army that he began to write, and it was there that he learned how to construct complex characters and to lucidly represent spatial relationships. This early period of artistic growth resulted in his first Entwicklungsroman, which was published under the legendary aegis of Suhrkamp Verlag—in fact, it was one of the last books that revered founding publisher Siegfried Unseld oversaw personally. After spending his Wanderjahre in “the former colonies,” he took up his studies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar.
The foregoing, at any rate, is a summary of a portion of an artist’s talk Wächtler gave earlier this year at the Kunstverein Hildesheim in Germany. Though it clearly distorted the facts, the talk could not have been more on point as an exemplar of several key aspects of Wächtler’s practice. The kind of tall tales that characterized his presentation—or, to use his more precise phrasing, the “anecdotes, stories and lies that form around a subject and help to position it someplace”—do constitute Wächtler’s primary material and subject matter, routinely triggering speculations about the work’s autobiographical content. Not to mention that, if one were to follow this line of autobiographical reading, the adolescent artist’s meteoric rise might seem to parallel the steep increase in Wächtler’s own visibility during the past year or so (a period in which his work has appeared in solo shows on both sides of the Atlantic and at sundry fairs and biennials). And the talk’s mannerist rendering of handed-down identity templates—infant prodigy, Junker, Frankfurt School intellectual—and its ironic exaggeration of cultural clichés mirror characteristics of his oeuvre in general.
While Wächtler, who was born in 1979, works in a range of media, including drawing and ceramics as well as animated films and short fiction, his practice is narrative at its core. The objects he produces and his works on paper often seem like snapshots from his short stories, portraying similar personnel in analogous constellations, settings, and scenes. The humanoid animals predominant in Wächtler’s sculptures—for instance, an ensemble of three laboring mammals and one bird (Untitled, 2013), situated somewhere between The Burghers of Calais and the Town Musicians of Bremen, or oversize crabs confronting more agile creatures of the sea (Untitled, 2014)—find their complement in the stories’ animalistic humans. After the loss of his girlfriend, Peter, the protagonist of the story “At the Wiels” (2012), acquires a lobster to satisfy his “deep need of a true friend,” while his rival, Ragnar Pluto, not only shares his surname with a cartoon dog but also has “huge and shiny ivories, which were last seen during the war against the mammoth led by long extinct predators”; a “horse-like penis”; and a similarly equine mane.1 The narrator’s friend in “Come On”(2014), called “the Pig,” grunts instead of speaking and is eventually slaughtered.2 There are correspondences between narrative and object on the structural level, too. For example, the Janus-headed sculpture Untitled, 2014, juxtaposes lethargy and enthusiastic activity (or fiesta and siesta, to drive home the linguistic dimension of the sculptural pun) in a single being—a configuration found in many of the stories. Most important, the technological and aesthetic outmodedness that marks Wächtler’s drawings and sculptures resonates with his time-based work’s emphasis on the literary—at a moment when art discourse is largely defined by concerns that seem to belong to another cultural paradigm altogether: an obsession with anything remotely “post-Internet,” a fascination with the decline of subjectivity and the ever-accelerating rhythm of feedback and affect under a cybernetic regime, and an impulse to historicize the “Anthro-pocene” and the human as such.
