Classified Information

After laying out on a coffee table half a dozen downloaded pictures of vintage artillery shells, bombs and bullets photographed by private vendors in suburbia, Peter Piller quipped: ‘Now that is damned explosive Gemütlichkeit!’ All kinds of people seem to have cleaned-up munitions in their homes. Unwittingly absurd and macabre, some of the photographs are cropped like family portraits, the gleaming metal subject resting in an armchair or standing in a corridor. Some have a packet of cigarettes or a mobile phone next to them for scale. And then, around the edges, are random useless details – a view of a featureless backyard, a tired CD collection, a metal bloom in a brass vase – the Internet caters perfectly to a bit of misanthropic voyeurism.

The series ‘Deko + Munition’ (Décor + Munition, 2000–3) is just one of hundreds of groups of images that Piller has devoted himself to compiling. A hoarder of the anecdotal, Piller has found a way of approaching and describing something like ‘the big picture’ through ordering and reclassifying samples from a nearly infinite supply of small ones – unspectacular photographs produced by lowbrow media, published on the net, printed on old postcards or rescued from obscure abandoned archives, to which he has added some snapped with his own camera. His collection already numbers in the tens of thousands, its compilation the result of an inordinate amount of patient observation and reflection.

Perhaps this is one reason why, at the age of 38, he can be considered something of a late starter. In Germany a decade ago it was still common to study until you were old enough to know better, and then to hang around doing your own thing on an independent basis for as long as possible. To make ends meet, Piller worked for about eight years at a Hamburg advertising agency as a kind of media controller. His task was to check that the agency’s advertisements were placed on the right pages and in the right place in regional newspapers. While an artist’s day job is not a completely taboo subject, it is something seldom talked about, considered separate from his or her true career. But Piller found a way to reconcile the two. For it was at his workplace, during work hours (no doubt in a semi-illicit fashion), that two of the main focuses of his practice became clear: collating images for his photography archive, and drawing. He produced a series of cartoons and sketches on the firm’s stationery.

The drawings fall into several categories: psychological maps of ‘places, spaces and paths’ in his immediate surroundings; notes about office life, rules and conversations; and what Piller calls drolly ‘reports based on years of experience working for a wage’. There is something pitiful, fugitive, secretive about them, perhaps because they were made not in the safety of a well-lit studio but in the relatively public arena of an office, in someone else’s time, on someone else’s paper and with someone else’s pens. Every office harbours unsung workstation installation artists, stand-up comedians, wannabe musicians, novelists and filmmakers. The drawings speak volumes about creative subjectivities squeezed into corporate microclimates with a few unstable lines and blank spaces. For instance, one drawing depicts a fellow employee as a scribble sitting at a spatially deconstructed desk with the caption and title Komplexe Psyche des Langweiligen Kollegen (Complex Psyche of the Boring Colleague, 2003). A blank page bears the caption: ‘Manche sagen die Wohnung unseres Chefs sei ganz in weiß eingerichtet’ (‘Some say our boss’ apartment is decorated entirely in white’). Entwurf für Franz Kafkas bitte um Gehalts-erhöhung im Jahr 2003 (Draft for Franz Kafka’s Request for a Wage Raise in the Year 2003, 2003) is a hand-typed letter that opens with a sentence that translates along the lines of: ‘Down there, where I leaf through newspapers and my finger turns black and my shoulder hurts from making the same movement all day, down there on the 17th floor with its lovely view, down there I am very happy.’ Piller had the cheek to present his literary work to a bemused boss, and he got his raise.

Scanning countless newspapers got Piller thinking about lowest-common-denominator photojournalism in an existential way, tempered by his resilient sense of humour. The vast majority of the photographs he perused were barely worth a moment’s thought. Piller remarked in conversation that they were ‘the kind of photographs that the photographer who took them can’t even remember. They’re shot one day, printed the next, and garbage the morning after.’ The breakthrough came with the realization that, regardless of how formulaic or prosaic these images might at first seem, it was still possible to glean instances of aesthetic surplus, to pick out oddball, grainy gems of unintended meaning. Piller terms his method of looking and sorting as an exercise in ‘productive misunderstanding’. Dullness plays a large part, but for the artist ‘boredom is just an undercoat that allows the startlingly interesting and improbable to emerge’.

From 1998 Piller routinely cut out images that caught his eye and gradually began to sort into categories the thousands and thousands of clippings that now constitute his very own ‘Archiv Peter Piller’. Despite its formal-sounding name, the archive is no historically correct record. It is more a kind of artistic folly nurtured with such time-honoured methods as intuition, luck, whim, pointless doggedness, randomness and the quixotic. The archive’s 100-odd categories – including ‘Dancing in front of logos’, ‘People in a row’, ‘Shooting girls’, ‘Looking in holes’, ‘Showing money’, ‘Thumbs up’ and ‘Family propaganda’ – are almost a work in themselves. Reading them summons up a weird microcosm of provincial community life.

Unusually, and enviably, Piller’s career began in earnest not so much with exhibitions as through the enthusiasm of Christoph Keller, then at the independent German art publisher Revolver, who, fascinated by the archive, suggested doing a series of no fewer than 20 artist publications. The first four volumes were published in 2002, each containing a selection of images from one of Piller’s categories: Durchsucht und Versiegelt (Searched and Sealed), Diese Unbekannten (These Unknown), Die Verantwortlichen sind einstimmig (Those Responsible are unanimous) and Noch ist nichts zu sehen (There is nothing to see yet). Since then the collaboration has continued with collections such as the particularly grim and hilarious eighth volume, Auto Berühren (Touching Car, 2004), a study of intimacy between man and machine, hands steadying egos on bonnets.

Some of the photographs that captured Piller’s attention eluded categorization, broad-brush though those categories are. These distinct visual outsiders became Ungeklärte Fälle (Unresolved Cases, 2000–6), a series of what the artist describes as ‘unintentionally special and inadvertently aesthetic pictures […] autonomous images filled with melancholy and wit, and eccentric beauty’. Among them are a group of girls sleeping in formation in a car showroom, a tag sprayed on a hedge, a car buried in a grassy field and two firemen up a ladder doing something with a crucifix on a church façade. It was these that Piller exhibited at an ‘Art Statements’ booth at this year’s Art Basel. There he constructed a kind of passageway in which it was impossible to get a distance on things, and lined it with pinned-up inkjet print-outs from the series. Looking and recognizing the glitch in the commonplace, the quirky detail in the staid genre or subject, the stray component that makes a difference – for Piller it is these things that bring his pictures into a dialogue with art.

In terms of method Piller also acknowledges that Conceptual artists such as Hans-Peter Feldman, who is a generation older and with whom he is often compared, prepared the way for his practice. Across the Atlantic, Ed Ruscha’s textless photo books (made between 1963 and 1978) and Robert Smithson’s much referenced Hotel Palenque (1969) also come to mind, the latter mainly because Piller, who studied geography before going to art school and is a cartography enthusiast, has likewise embarked on exploratory walks and photo-survey projects. These include Peripherie Wanderung (Periphery Walk, 1996) – everyday scenes of the Ruhr valley punctuated with notable moments such as the sculptural form of a motor bike covered in a synthetic purple weather protector – and Materialien (A) Dauerhaftigkeit/Duuzaamheid (Materials (A) Permanence/Duuzaamheid, 2005), which provides a documentary portrait of a community. This latter work is based on an archive of 15,000 photographic negatives, almost none of which had ever been printed, taken between the 1950s and the 1970s by an anonymous photographer commissioned to capture the life of a now defunct textile manufacturing firm. Piller selected a small group of eccentric frames from among the more predictable subjects, the photographer having occasionally used a little artistic licence to take shots of subjects such as the shoes of a cross-legged man, a branch in the mist or a splendid white peacock.

In exhibitions such as his 2005–6 show at Witte de With in Rotterdam, Piller tends to mix and match selections from his archive. Sometimes the images are reprinted in different sizes and colours or framed in different
ways (to emphasize his divergent sources) and then arranged in clusters or like a visual crossword puzzle. The logic of these installations relates to ideas developed by Aby Warburg for his Mnemosyne Atlas (1924–9), such as his ‘good neighbour’ principle. For Piller the result is something between a sparse mosaic and an abstract storyboard that works associatively. His collection invites thousands of narrative fragments into the room, but there are always ruptures and breaks between images too.

Piller’s archive has continued to grow and is occasionally fed unsystematically by well-wishers who seek to be relieved of the burden of their own archives and the histories (with a lower-case ‘h’) that they represent. The irony is not lost on Piller that the digitization of information has led not only to an exponential growth in records and information of all kinds but also to the simultaneous destruction of vast amounts of material in old or increasingly obsolete media: photographic prints arguably among them. In fact, Piller’s most frequently reproduced series was saved from just such a fate when the artist was given about 12,000 aerial pictures of suburban family homes in West Germany, all taken in the early 1980s and all enjoying that murky-green caramelized hue so typical of the period. The firm that took them (which has subsequently closed down) would hawk poster prints door to door in an attempt to sell them to the proud new homeowners whose houses were featured. It’s hardly surprising that these recycled works, which were published in the glossy book Von Erde Schöner (More Beautiful from the Ground, 2004), are Piller’s best-known, encapsulating, as they do, the artist’s way of thinking, looking and organizing. The overview and the relentless sameness of the pictures co-exist with endless variations in the details. Piller draws attention to both, grouping the images according to coincidental characteristics such as closed blinds, red bedding hanging from the windows, tents in the backyard, the same square paving stones dotting across green lawns, or water flowing from washed cars. Leaving us yearning to know what was going on inside.

Dominic Eichler is a writer, musician and artist living in Berlin.