Bernd and Hilla Becher


 

Liliane Touraine
"Bernd and Hilla Becher the Function doen't make the Form"
Artefactum, Antwerpen, Belgique, avril/mai 1989
p. 6-7

Bernd and Hilla Becher have worked together since 1959. They were brought together by like reflections on the social role of artists and the ultimate aim of artworks. Ber rid was born in 1931 in Siegen, not far from the Ruhr and its steelworks. Ever since his early years, his daily environment was that of an industrial landscape. At that time, the landmarks of his horizon consisted of mine shafts, cooling towers, chimneys and blast furnaces. But during his adolescence, this steelwork-universe vanished into thin air to the point that, today, its traces have completely dissolved and it seems to have never existed. In those post-war years of changes in the economy and society of West Germany, a twofold process of dissolution and recovery took place. Parallel to the wave of amnesia annihilating consciences and driving out any memory of the holocaust, new enterprises created new urban centers, many of which grew to hug the former trade routes. Germany was turning over a new leaf. However, it was militarly and economically occupied - dependent on the United States whose cultural influence was being increasingly felt.
Bernd Becher understood that, due to the circumstances, those ex-palaces of metallurgy which had existed here and there were becoming monuments, memorials to a past epoch, to a history which had received its identity from this region. In order to save these gigantic structures from oblivion, he had at his disposal the means of painting, that is, the capacity to produce images. For three years, Becher painted and drew the mine shafts, the silos, the. cooling towers and even the bunkers, attempting to express all the descriptive details of the models but doing without any decorative gestures. His style approached a figurative technique, a photographic realism which, during the fifties, had been in demand only in the countries of Eastern Europe.
Yet to wager this kind of figurativeness, where the subject matter is foremost, amounts to repudiating the validity of painting. And if, in addition, it has the advantage of reaching the largest number of people, it is tantamount to renouncing several centuries of the pictorial undertaking - something suicidal for the painter.
The impact of this recognition drove Bernd Becher to take recourse to photography, a medium mastered in turn by Hilla, a professional in publicity and industrial reporting. But passing on from canvas to celluloid, Bernd Becher did more than just change mediums. He was changing his horizon and changing from being the nostalgic witness of a past and a place to becoming a teacher - indeed, a teacher of visual lessons. For Bernd Becher, a major consequence of utilising photographic procedures resulted in expanding his initial intentions, namely, by freeing himself from sentimental attachements to the history of a place where his childhood memories had been imprinted. The couple's quest spread out into space and time, extending through the entire Occident and ascending to the present with a series on water towers. In 30 years of selecting, the couple built op a unique repertory of architectural objects: objects rather thin complexes such as factories, refineries, railway stations and their networks or anything else concerning the production and transfer of electrical energy.
The structures photographed by the Bechers protrude from the ground - like isolated blocks detached from the horizon as an autonomous volume. They have environmental ramifications such as tunnels and underground pipelines chich remain hidden. Without any ornament they are nonetheless teeming with details, each relating to a function. Always situated at a certain distance from the roads, they are perceived globally, like the imposed structuring of a space deprived of all habitation. Indeed, what binds the pictures of obsolete constructions to those of contemporary water towers is this absence of humanity. All of these architectural forms, from their conception to their function, are devoid of workers. One understands that the Bechers have unwillingly spoken of «sculpture» all the more since, immobile and silent, these constructions are brutally imprinted upon the horizon in a way reminiscent of works from the minimal art of the 60's. Like the latter, their mass modifies the perception of the space they dominate.
The observer of the photographs is not given a true perceptual view of the object or « sculpture » but rather a coded and partial representation. The object is deprived of its geographical context and its social justification. The object becomes sculpture only through an altering of its appearance, which transfers it to the artworld, thus betraying it. Just as a film is in essence unfaithful to the book it claims to visualize, Becher's frames betray the reality of the objects by transferring their images to places of culture. This nomadism of exposing from one museum to another, from country to continent, relates the images of these firmly-rooted objects to the ready-made of Duchamp as weIl as to the conceptual attitude of Villegle. The latter, at the end of the fifties and accompanied by Raymond Hains, another Nouveau Realiste, transferred street posters to the art-market circuits.

The difference here is that the deplacement affects the representation and not the object itself. For all their neutrality and meticulosity, these photographs
coud easily find a place in the files of a public works engineer. Viewpoint and lighting are standardised, codified. Becher chooses these fundamental elements of photography in such a way as to eliminate all shadows and depth. Differently from an architectural or publicity photograph, the distortion due to the enlarging effect of the lens are corrected, but buildings of differing heights are presented on a full page with the same format. Like in an old mail-order catalog, each frame carries a wealth of informing details. To this wealth is added the inclination of the exhibition, which associates and amasses the frames adcording to themes of similar objects. « We want to offer the audience a point of view, or rather a grammar, to understand and compare the different structures ... Through photography, we try to arrange these shapes and render them comparable. To do so, the objects must be isolated from their context and freed from all association » (Hilla and Bernd Becher, Press File, Grenoble, 1989). All in all, what the couple tries to do is to provide a lesson in formal grammar taken from the social book of humanity - of all humanity, not only of artists. This variety of detail within a unified structure contingently limited by its functions is exemplarily demonstrated with the 300 prints collected at the « Magasin » under the theme of water towers. Even the isolated representations on blank sheets attest to the plurality of ingenious solutions. This plurality results both from the technological advances which have emerged in the course of decades as regards the technical performance of demerit and steel, as well as from the cultural particularities unconciously springing from the regions where these structures are built. These photographs, « neutralised » as far as references to places and people, produce the surprise effect of a distinct kind of cultural manifestation. The water tower of Mantova in Italy, with its bare, flat-stoned facade slightly overhung by the narrow eaves of the roof, belongs to the great Florentine tradition. The colossal castle of Moenchengfadbach, with its repeated corbellirigs, is a survivor of the « baroquisme » of the old German Empire and its army with pointed helmets. The one in Liverpool, all in iron trellis, is exposed to the flurries of the great wilderness. That of Dole, in France, is a collection of remarkable features: its basin expands over a wasp-waisted stone base which takes the shape of a parasol or a large, ribbed mushroom hood - curved towards the sky. The study of these frames refutes the axiom which has dominated the social and modernist architecture of the 20th century: the function makes the loon. Here all finitions are identical, while the forms vary according to the different places and cultures. Just as a painter cannot avoid projecting on his canvas a part of himself - and of his culture and region of origin - the architectural engineers of public works transmit the memory of a place. Just as the « artists of memory » started from mediocre family photographs in order to elaborate plots of incomplete stories to be imagined, the Bechers abstract . in a sort of lesson on things taken from life - a formal dictionary to be followed and discovered. . The fact that, humanly speaking, the subjects are cold and poor models - like water towers or tube alignements is of little Importance. It is a question of learning to look. This seems to be, according to the Bechers, the social Sion of the artwork and the arlist.