Door to the Clay Class • ROBERT ESTERMANN

Door to the Clay Class, 2011
environment / installation
existing building, door, school furniture, unfired clay figures, packaged clay, air humidifiers, mold
dimensions variable

Door to the Clay Class was made for Môtiers 2011 – Art en plein air. In deliberate refusal of the exhibition’s open-air premise, Estermann made an emphatically indoor work inside a former police interrogation room. A door announced a fictitious “clay class”; beyond it, the room had been turned into a classroom and kept at stifling humidity by humidifiers running continuously.

But no class is about to begin. The installation presents its aftermath. Unfired clay figures lie on school desks as if left where they had been made. Within days and weeks, the saturated air covers them and their surroundings with vivid, multicolored mold. The future survives only in the announcement on the door. Once the threshold is crossed, one enters what remains after the class.

The figures had been made earlier by architecture students in Estermann’s actual clay classes at ETH Zurich and are used here as readymades. He called these sessions Formen ohne Schuld — “forming without guilt”: a protected interval in which something could be imagined and given form by hand without being corrected or censored by the artist. In Môtiers, the figures stand in for the imagined young pupils of the fictitious classroom; their actual makers remain absent.

The clay class is a utopia, but one encountered after the fact. Its presumed innocence is already precarious. The mold does not merely signal decay; its luxuriant color and growth make palpable a transience already contained in youth itself. In the middle of a summer exhibition outdoors, the work withdraws into an almost excessive interior: enclosed, humid, unhealthy, and strangely beautiful, with something of the permanent sultriness of Kafka’s Der Verschollene.

reference:

“All welcome! Anyone who wants to be an artist, step forward! We are the theatre that has a place for everyone, everyone in his place!”

Franz Kafka, Der Verschollene (The Man Who Disappeared), posthumously published as Amerika

shown in:
“Môtiers 2011 – Art en plein air”, Môtiers, Switzerland (2011)

bibliography:
Môtiers 2011 – Art en plein air, exhibition catalogue, Val-de-Travers, 2011, with texts by Pierre-André Delachaux, Jacques Hainard and Didier Burkhalter
Dominik Imhof, “Gesehen von”, artensuite – Kulturmagazin, May 2011, Bern, p. 7
Jacques Sterchi, “Val-de-Travers: en plein air”, La Liberté, July 16, 2011, Fribourg, p. 27