Anatomy of everyday life

"In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realization through a chain of totally subjective reactions. His struggle toward the realization is a series of efforts, pains, satisfaction, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the esthetic plane."
Marcel Duchamp

A simple table in a room somewhere, penetrated by an electric cable, buckets sealed with skin, watering cans, wire ladles that cannot hold anything, ; in between, any number of objects and arrangements in which we recognise the occasional object of everyday use in the kitchen, in a workshop or by the side of the road.

Things of everyday life, detached from their familiar context – transformed with more or less substantial changes, alienated, recreated, rearranged and structured – compositions of banal objects and materials, so ordinary and familiar as to be rarely perceived in reality. A table is a table, but divorced from its utilitarian significance and viewed from a new perspective it ceases to be an object of everyday use. It assumes a new reality, it becomes an object of art. Barbara Geyer works are reflections on our immediate reality. What the beholder faces is the aesthetic of the simple and evident, the visualisation of habits and rites.

The fact that objects of everyday use were able to become worthy of representation in visual art is indebted to a development in the history of twentieth-century art initiated by Marcel Duchamp. It was he who put the question "Can one make works which are not works of 'art'?", in response creating the ready-made by signing and exhibiting a purchased article of daily use. Although this is first and foremost a critical analysis of the art industry, it also forges the first link between art and everyday life, a link recurrently explored by numerous artists to follow. "Art is life – life is art" was the explicit posit of the Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell, who inserted everyday objects such as television sets, telephones or lipstick into his compositions and embedded cars in concrete. Hardly anyone else embodies this precept as literally as Joseph Beuys when he describes the course of his life as a "work course", postulating that "Everyone is an artist". This statement – although often misinterpreted and misused – holds out the prospect that everyday life offers the opportunity for creative action that anyone can potentially take.
Our everyday life – usually – unfolds in keeping with constantly repeating patterns which lend structure to our waking and sleeping, work and leisure, preservation of life – clothing, cooking, eating – and communication. The regular actions and the familiar objects of everyday life combine subjective factors – of taste, for example, or of individual preferences and influences – with objective conditions such as the existential necessity of eating and sleeping. Barbara Geyer's works are developed in this dynamic context and dependent on the particular living environment.

Linked directly to individual experience, including the observation of her own body as it depends on external factors such as living environment or the course of time, are Barbara Geyer's bread works. During a stay in New York, her perception of the different nature of day-to-day life was manifested in the lack of nutritious bread. Torn between fascination and the feeling of being alien, the yearning for this basic food mingles with reflections on rootedness and origin, existing values and new orientations.
The very act of chewing bread conveys a sense of devotion and intimacy; we associate with it thoughts and sensations which revolve around primal mythical values, the creation of shelter, protection for the body and soul, the preservation of life and authenticity; the concept of "incorporation" immediately comes to mind. The bread-houses, styled after swallow's nests, their shape reminiscent of simple mud buildings, constitute the vessel for subjective states of being. Focusing on the artist's mouth, a video documents the process of chewing in oversized, cropped images. This opens up a realm of the subjective for the viewer, and the private sphere becomes public, offering itself for participation, while states of outwardness and inwardness are placed in a dynamic context. The artist resumes this work for the exhibition, examining the notion of being at home in homelessness, a paradox which is perceived with great sensitivity.

In the same way that this work forges a very immediate link to the artist's physical reality, so too does the work with hair bear a biographical and, in a sense, biomorphic connotation: for Barbara Geyer, her hair – which she allowed to grow for more than seven and a half years, letting it become matted in "Rasta style" – means protection and demarcation, which she produces from within herself like the silkworm produces the thread for its cocoon. For the current exhibition, she cut her hair in a private performance captured on film during a trip to Kyrgyzstan. Instead of making this undertaking public – which has a kind of ritual quality and is marked by profound contemplation – she preserves it as her experienced property. Woven together to make a fifty-one-metre length of rope used for a wide variety of purposes – this time as a skipping-rope – the hair illustrates a period and space of a lifetime; growth intervals – and thus time – are revealed by the different colours of the sections of hair. In this way the work examines the dividing lines between art and life and visualises the fluid transition between the two.
In the regularity of everyday actions, repetition inevitably plays an important role. On the one hand this may be perceived as monotony and ennui, on the other as a sense of security in familiarity. The latter becomes evident in terms of form in Barbara Geyer's serial works. In terms of material, she falls back on unpretentious, simple materials such as wire and sausage casing or hose rubber. Objects of daily use, for example, are dressed in a costume of made-to-measure close-meshed wire, with notions such as "made to measure" – as a conceptual counterpart to ready-made – and "home work" being of great importance to the artist in this context. The daily stint of "wiring" is almost meditative, although the work requires constant vigilance when it comes to deciding the course and density of the wire links and the limits of what is feasible. Against the background of her early interest in ethnology, Barbara Geyer also recalls the gypsy art of tinkering with these works: The act of linking thus equally implies being linked up with history, effected by way of the intellectual reference to age-old manual traditions which have meanwhile vanished from our everyday life.
Disappearance and fading
The skin is our largest, perhaps most sensitive organ. It is the boundary between the physical interior and the outside world. An enclosing shell and permeable membrane in equal measure, it communicates between the inside and the outside, is easily damaged and yet protective. By wrapping objects in Naturin sausage casing, Barbara Geyer explores spatial relationships. The focus on the one hand is on the relationship between the object and the user in the context of space and, on the other, on the space of the object itself. Where this space is normally penetrated or violated by a user, the artist marks the point of contact and penetration. The demarcation, transgression of boundaries, and vulnerability of object space symbolise the vulnerability of the individual human aura and intimate living environment by everyday actions.

The artist draw upon the repository provided by the world of everyday objects. This leads to parallel phenomena and, connected with this, an attention to the banal, the insignificant in daily life. The formulation is nevertheless fundamentally different in each particular case. The exhibition features all works as independent individuals whose artistic journeys have a common point of departure. They encounter each other here in a "shared living environment" that allows them to engage temporarily in a direct dialogue.

Cornelia Wieczorek (2006)