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.