CLARITY AND MYSTERY

Michael Tucker

I first became aware of Swiss artist Mayo Bucher through the presence of his subtle yet striking art on the front covers of a number of compact disc releases by the world-renowned independent record company ECM. Beginning in 1997 with contributions to covers of releases by Shostakovich, Vasks and Schnittke, Keith Jarrett, Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble and the Rosamunde Quartet, Bucher's distilled imagery - as scrupulously realised as it is psychologically inviting, or open, in its various blends of geometric and painterly elements - has come to distinguish an increasing number of works on the Munich-based label.

Like many, I found Bucher's work very suited to the sort of music which it accompanied on ECM. Even in reproduction, the subtlety with which Bucher was able to work up his surfaces was apparent: surfaces achieved through a combination of plaster, oils and acrylic, sanding down and scratching or scraping back into the MDF board which supplies the base-ground of all his imagery. Equally apparent was Bucher's unforced play with static and dynamic aspects of geometry, a strong yet refined feeling for colour, and the way that he could make a line appear both to float upon and sink back into the enveloping colour field. One might have been tempted to describe the work - which always comes over as intensely disciplined, but with the spirit of intuition rather than calculation at its core - as ascetic, were it not for the quietly enlivening textural variety in the pieces and the spare but telling use of the sort of deep, rich red that can sound a note as sensuous as it is spiritual in impact.

ECM was founded in 1969 by producer Manfred Eicher, an enthusiast of modern jazz with a strong background in classical music. Early on, the company established an unparalleled reputation for both the transparent sound quality of its recordings and the innovative range of European and American (and largely jazz-inflected) music on those recordings. In 1984 Eicher expanded the identity of the catalogue even further with the release of Estonian composer Arvo PŠrt's Tabula Rasa. Featuring superb performances from pianist Keith Jarrett and violinist Gidon Kremer, Tabula Rasa set the tone for a provocative variety of boundary-crossing music on what Eicher called the ECM New Series. Over the years, this side of ECM has grown considerably, with certain releases, like the 1993 Officium and 1998 Mnemosyne - collaborations between Norwegian saxophonist Jan Garbarek and the English early vocal music specialists The Hilliard Ensemble - capturing the imagination of a world-wide audience.

From the beginnings of his collaboration with the company, Mayo Bucher's work has appeared chiefly on ECM New Series covers. In 1999, for example, his meditative, delicately balanced yet conceptually vibrant paintings distinguished releases by contemporary composers Giya Kancheli, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Bent Soerensen, Jean Barraqué and Peter Ruzicka, together with recordings of the trio sonatas of Jan Dismas Zelenka and the piano music of Franz Schubert and Arnold Schoenberg. In November of that year, several aspects of Bucher's work were featured in the University of Brighton exhibition ECM: Selected Signs, an exhibition which was curated on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the company.

Here one could appreciate both the appropriateness of Bucher's spaciously conceived imagery (as reproduced at CD scale) within the overall ethos of the wide-ranging yet integrated cover art and aesthetics of ECM, and the considerable painterly presence and poetic appeal of the work itself: in this instance, various small, flat-board polychrome works, three (40x40x3cm) box-board constructions in black and white, ochre and grey, and one imposing (100x120x10cm) box-board construction in black and white. This last piece featured various diversely angled white diagonals of disparate length, seemingly set both within and upon a saturated black ground. Many of Bucher's works carry simple descriptive titles, such as Red Over Black, Double Black Square or Black and White Horizon. The piece in the Brighton exhibition, however, was part of a series, one of which is called Fugue.

The title would have been entirely appropriate, serving to remind one to what extent the ambition and the achievement of Bucher's largely abstract art partake of that archetypal quest of post-Symbolist Modernist painting to attain to the condition of music. One does not require the prompting of such a title, however, in order to sense what an appropriate parallel or complement Bucher's work is to a good deal of the music that has been recorded recently on ECM.

Manfred Eicher - who initiated Bucher's relation with his company after seeing some of the work in Bucher's Zurich studio - has spoken of wanting his productions at ECM to help stimulate musicians to play in a way which offers a music where any and all padding has been cut away. There are parallels here to the way in which, during the latter half of his life, Alberto Giacometti - a chief elective affinity of Eicher's - stripped the sculptural sign to its naked essence. A deeply thoughtful man who has meditated long and hard on the import of the arts today, Eicher has also spoken of the special empathy he feels for the French poet Paul Valéry's cryptic yet pregnant remark, that nothing is as mysterious as clarity.

A century or so after Valéry, the word "clarity" may well have a different ring to it than it once did. Decade after decade, the ever-more sophisticated worlds of advertising and public communications have pursued the clarity of the sign with a fervour matched only by those theoreticians of semiology who would help us first analyse or decode the systems within which social meaning is mediated to us, and then reconfigure such systems in the light of what is usually conceived to be a more progressive social agenda. The most immediate example here is the search of Umberto Eco for that science of signs that could generate a non-hierarchical "economy of signs", whereby the worlds of art and culture, industry and leisure might come to speak of a more transparent and, from the social point of view, equitably balanced nexus of social exchange, or "meaning". Bucher's initial entry into the professional world was through graphic design, with his early photo-collages (indebted equally to the stimulus of Heartfield and Hoch, Rodchenko and Pop Art) gaining him a significant number of commissions during the late-1980s and early-1990s. The two hundred and fifty-plus illustrations and photo-collages that Bucher produced at this time included work for Vogue: ironically, it was the very scale of such success which would lead Bucher to a radical rethink and critique of such work, and a move into pure painting. Today, Bucher pursues a full-time career as a painter, with a recent, parallel development into various scales of printmaking - involving both traditional and digital technology - at the Zurich studio of the noted printer Bea Spillmann (who editioned all Max Bill's graphic work in his last years). However, he still makes the occasional photo-collage, and responds to a select variety of commissions, including collaborations with architectural partnerships. One of his most recent graphic works was the poster image for the major homage to Toulouse-Lautrec, "Le Nouveau Salon des Cents-Exposition Internationale d'Affiches" held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in autumn 2001, and travelling to Holland and the Lautrec Museum in Albi, France in 2002.

For all his immersion in and knowledge of the field of graphic design, and commitment to the idea of communication, Bucher is an artist whose artistic temperament has long taken the main drive of his work well beyond the realms of the purely functional or the utilitarian: from the direct communication of the transparent sign to what Kierkegaard applauded as the indirect communication of art, the communication that can truly energise and stimulate the searching mind, or soul. At times, as in the recent glazed and boxed Icon series, the play of image, colour and material - which in this case involves industrial paint and masking tape - speaks in ostensibly simple ways of a complex web of issues: of logo branding; of how we have fetishised both the consumer image, or impulse, that drives so much of life today, and those Fine Art images - such as Michelangelo's David or Munch's The Scream - which take on another life in the world(s) of commercial reproduction; but also of how, underneath that fetishising or reproductive process, the aura of more ancient and archetypal impulses may still exert atavistic power. As in all Bucher's work, such large-scale ideas, or issues, are firmly embedded in the fusion of idea and materiality that is the work itself, in a way which neither lectures nor hectors, but simply - coolly, aesthetically, effectively - invites the creative and critical participation of the onlooker.

What took Mayo Bucher from graphic design to painting was simply - but profoundly - the factor of desire. The desire to make paintings; to shape a strongly defined yet multivalent world through the creative intuition of a process which has one of the longest and most deeply established histories one might care to trace - but also a history that admits of countless new beginnings. As we all know today, the invention of photography nearly two centuries ago did not kill painting: on the contrary. It prompted painting to return to some of its oldest and most essential (even conceptual) tasks: to make new the ancient quest to distill the terror and the mystery, the joy and the wonder of life into the sort of marks, or images, that in their very clarity might conjure the sort of mystery of which Valéry spoke. So while Mayo Bucher is an artist who is more than able to function in the social world of the communicative sign, he is also - and I would argue, far more importantly - an artist aware of the need of the human gaze to rest on something more intractable, more mysterious, than any socially engineered economy of the transparent - or "readable" - sign. He is also an artist aware of our culture's seemingly endless ability to cheapen the realm of the symbolic, to turn everything into the sort of sign that must have its meaning. In a culture such as ours, which so privileges talk - whether such talk be the chit-chat which a century and a half ago already disturbed Kierkegaard, or the seemingly endless proliferation of "discourse and deconstruction" that would claim dominance over much of our experience of art today - how much time are we prepared to give to the eloquence of imagery that, at its core, is profoundly silent?

Here we return to the correspondence that exists between the art of Mayo Bucher and the music that is ECM. The company once chose to advertise itself through the phrase, "The most beautiful sound next to silence." For silence one might well substitute space: both factors are crucial to Manfred Eicher's understanding of the concept of clarity generating mystery. "Only mystery makes us live. Only mystery" said Lorca. And just as Valéry and Lorca were both concerned, each in their very different way, to bring the most transformative power-to-weight ratio to their practically sculpted use of language, so do the paintings of Mayo Bucher operate. Eschewing illusionistic notions of "picture making" in favour of the creation of an art that would articulate its own object-ness, these are paintings which nonetheless take us beyond any matter of simplistic or reductive formalism.

The stripping away, or abstraction, of various elements of both life and art in pursuit of a resonant core within the work; the mysterious dialectic - what the various mystical traditions have always perceived as the paradoxical fruit of the via negativa, or way of renunciation - whereby such a progressive stripping away or distillation of consciousness leads to that moment of clarity, or illumination, wherein our sense of the ultimate and affirmative mystery of our being-in-the-world is rekindled, refreshed, replenished: such factors lie at the very heart of the correspondence that exists between the music that is ECM and the art of Mayo Bucher.

There is a further and crucial point here. For many years, aesthetic debates in the West have been vitiated by narrow or dogmatic ideas concerning what it means to produce "authentic" art within any particular historical period. The classic example of such ideas is supplied by the Marxist critical thinker Theodor Adorno. In his key 1948 book Philosophy of Modern Music Adorno assessed what he saw as central aspects of the evolution of twentieth-century classical music, focusing on Schoenberg and Stravinsky. As a Marxist committed to the progressive evolution of humanity, Adorno felt he could evaluate the 'historical necessity' of the birth, development and decay of forms of creativity both expressive of and appropriate to their time. Thus, after the "historically inevitable" 12-tone or serialist (non-tonal) music of Schoenberg early in the century, the tonality of the earlier Classical and Romantic periods could no longer function as an authentic part of any music that Adorno was prepared to take seriously. "It is not simply", he suggested, "that these sounds are now antiquated and untimely, but that they are false. They no longer fulfill their [once true, or historically necessary] function."

In contrast to such dogmatism, the productions of Manfred Eicher at ECM have consistently profiled the sort of contemporary, stripped down yet literate music which - whatever its genre - is able to draw upon the resources of the past (such as the tonality of key-centred, tempered Western music) while also refreshing and refiguring those resources (for example, by a scalar/modal rather than chordal/harmonic approach to tonality). And this has had precious little to do with the sort of "cut and paste" eclecticism and ironic veils that have come to mark a good deal of the Post-Modernism of the past thirty years.

Similarly, Mayo Bucher has created a contemporary, stripped down yet literate body of abstract work which is able to access and reference key elements within the relatively recent yet already rich history of abstract painting in the West, while also refreshing and refiguring those elements. In an insightful essay, the Swiss writer and curator Volker Schunck has raised the question of Bucher's relation to Kasimir Malevich, and the extent to which aspects of the Swiss artist's work might be seen as a homage to the famous Black Square of 1913 by the Russian revolutionary. As Schunck says, "Mayo Bucher's work is as much respectful homage to the most radical work of the twentieth century as it is an attempt at testing, at distancing and transformation from the perspective of his own work." Schunck continues: "Bucher's paraphrasing is marginal, but obvious: The format has clearly been expanded, the picture plane has mutated to picture space, the texture appears more pictorial. Still more decisive, the second dimension, the barely visible graphic incision." 13 With their awareness that the history of abstract painting is not a closed book, and that elements of its past can feed the development of innovative work today, Schunck's words are to be welcomed. Furthermore: as T. S. Eliot observed in his seminal 1917 essay "Tradition and The Individual Talent", why should not the past be altered by the present, "as much as the present is directed by the past"? 14

Mayo Bucher was born in Zurich in 1963. Perhaps the most famous or lasting aura that the name of this city has acquired in recent art history concerns the protesting eruption of the (mystical) DADA spirit at the Cabaret Voltaire and the irrational ecstasies of the long-legendary "sound poem invocation" which Hugo Ball performed there on June 23, 1916. No stranger to the spirit of DADA, Bucher once had a studio next to the building, situated in a narrow and steep alley in the centre of the city, which today carries a small blue plaque commemorating the birth of DADA there. Bucher's student years in Zurich in the early and mid-1980s were the time of the Jugendbewegung or Youth Movement, a restless time of protests and riots. A time also of great creativity and fun, and the foundation for much subsequent contemporary Swiss art, projected against what many felt to be the overly staid, if not repressive, atmosphere of the place. In time, life in the city loosened up considerably, as may be inferred from the fact that today, Zurich is host every summer to one of the largest Techno festivals in Europe. In 1999 Bucher looked back across the decades and recorded the twenty-minute, two-part Four-Letter Words poem and music mix. The first part is solo voice, while the second finds Bucher's word-and-sound poem enhanced by some lightly funky, jazz-tinged music for drums, tuba and trumpet - in parts a cool version of latter-day Miles Davis - written and performed by the Zurich-based Damian Zangger. The compositional principle of restricting himself to four-letter words (in German and English) led Bucher to some startling juxtapositions, whose spiritual genesis is unmistakeable. At one point, he acknowledges DADA directly: "Good luck DADA/Rise over Zero." At other moments, an affinity for the MERZBILD world of Kurt Schwitters, something of whose 1931 Ur-Sonata can be sensed throughout, is made equally explicit.

However, if such a performance underlines Bucher's continuing affection for one of the most radical moments in recent European art history, it has to be seen in the context of other, very different but equally formative factors in his background and upbringing. One of the most important of these was the role played by C. P. Braegger, Professor of Art History while Bucher studied at Zurich's Kunstgewerbeschule or Higher School for Arts and Design from 1981 to 1986. Following a Foundation Year, Bucher took a four year course in Graphic Design. In the absence of any opportunity to study at an Academy for the Arts, the five years of study which Bucher undertook with Professor Braegger, in a class of some ten students, were to prove of generative consequence. Braegger was particularly keen on early Modernism, and especially the work of Malevich. However, his survey course also dug far back into art history. To this day, Bucher recalls a week-long study trip to Venice with special affection. It is thanks to the stimulus he took from Braegger that Bucher today is able to declare himself as much an enthusiast of Titian as he is of Piero della Francesca, and of the Renaissance idea of the ideal city as well as the destructive-creative energies of the "chaosmos" to be found in DADA. And it is perhaps this exposure to the Renaissance which first fired Bucher's longstanding interest in architecture and the mysteries of number - an interest which parallels his own musicality, with the music of Arvo PŠrt of special interest to him in recent years.

DADA and Piero della Francesca; Malevich and Titian: such a breadth of elective affinities speaks of an unusually wide, or subtle, sensibility. Long before Bucher studied art history while taking his degree in Graphic Design in Zurich, he had been exposed to a rich variety of artistic influence, courtesy of his parents, both of whom were deeply involved in the world of the arts. Heidi Bucher (1926-1994) studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule, where her teachers included Johannes Itten, perhaps the most mystically inclined of all the Bauhaus artists, and Max Bill, a chief figure in Switzerland's contribution to twentieth-century concrete art. Heidi studied textiles and fashion before travelling in France, England and America. Later in life she would acquire a considerable reputation for the work which she did following the pioneer years of Women's Liberation, a sort of materials-based "soft art" development of Arte Povera.

Carl Bucher (born 1935) came to art indirectly, with an early academic background in law. Today he is well known as a sculptor and painter, whose particular figurative conception - as manifest in a recent piece at The International Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg - may often contain a strong social or political element. He and Heidi met and married around the turn of the 1950s and 1960s, with sons Indigo and Mayo being born in 1961 and 1963 respectively. By the end of the 1960s, both Heidi and Carl were very much part of the Zurich art establishment. Following the award of an eighteen-month grant from the Canada Arts Council and the invitation to exhibit work at the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal, the Museum of Contemporary Craft in New York and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, they decided to emigrate with their sons, first to Canada (Montreal and Toronto) and then to America (Los Angeles, the Hollywood Hills). The family stayed abroad until Mayo was ten years old, then returned to Switzerland.17

From the ages of six to ten, then, Mayo Bucher lived in the so-called New World. The experience made a great impression on him, one that he can still recall vividly today. The variety of the landscapes the family travelled through; the impact of billboards and TV, harbingers of the sort of mass culture of which Bucher is intensely suspicious today; above all, the sheer scale of the experience, which left the young Bucher without the German language at his command when the family first returned to live in Zurich: all such are factors which the mature Bucher counts as being of major significance in the early formation of his outlook on life - more so than his later (and sometimes somewhat distanced) awareness of the sublimity of Alpine landscape or the Swiss intellectual and artistic traditions signalled by such names as Ferdinand Hodler and Paul Klee, Alberto Giacometti and Richard P. Lohse.18

Mayo Bucher came to painting through a gradual, quietly but firmly growing - and increasingly widely informed - love of that practice. Apart from his parents, certain contemporary artists have been of various importance to him here: Seraina Feuerstein, an accomplished abstract painter whom he met in the late-1980s and married in 1989; Peter Kogler, whom Bucher met when the so-called Neo-Geo movement was strong in Vienna, where Bucher lived for an important, fructifying year in the mid-1980s, and the Swiss artist Andreas Hofer, a long-time friend and someone with whom Mayo has spent many hours discussing the possibilities of painting.19 Jean Arp, Kasimir Malevich and Kurt Schwitters; Ben Nicholson and Mark Rothko; Cy Twombly, Sean Scully, Blinky Palermo and Robert Mangold: such names indicate the variety of European and American elective affinities which have fed Bucher's hunger for a contemporary art that might build on those qualities of shaping or making paintings which were established and developed in the era of Modernism. One artist and thinker in particular has been of special importance to him: the American, Donald Judd (1928-1994). Apart from the quality of the work itself, and Judd's interest in the relation of art to architecture and design, Bucher admires what he sees as the very particular spiritual quality in an artist so often associated with the so-called "art of the real" of the late-1950s and beyond.

In a June 1971 Art Forum interview, Judd was asked about the genesis of aspects of his early work. Focusing on the question of geometry, he replied: "I always liked Mondrian, and I liked Frank Stella's black paintings when I saw them. But, on the whole, I disliked the quality of geometric art. I guess I didn't understand Newman's work until later [...] But with geometry, one important idea was available: it could be used in a non-Neo-Plastic way, an impure way, without the purity that geometric art seemed to have. Mondrian, though really great, is too ideal and clean." If one were to substitute Max Bill for Mondrian here, one would get some indication of why, although Bucher admires the way in which Bill fashioned not just an aesthetic but also a cosmology of concrete art, that aesthetic and cosmology have always been some considerable distance from Bucher's own concerns. Nevertheless, it is by considering some of Bill's more "cosmic" utterances that we may begin to move towards a summarising attempt to indicate the value of Bucher's work today.

In his well-known essay "the mathematical approach in contemporary art", first published in the review WERK in Winterthur in 1949, Bill spoke of the visionary nature of those essentially Modernist (post-Kandinsky, post-Mondrian, post-Malevich) elements of contemporary art that could "help to furnish art with a fresh content. far from creating a new formalism, as is often erroneously asserted, what these can yield us is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance". Bill ended his essay with the ringing assertion that the dynamic content of the new art might yet launch us on "astral flights which soar into unknown and still uncharted regions of the imagination".

Like most artists who have lived through the last thirty or so years of Post-Modernism - years when the sort of grand narrative explicit in Bill's words (and earlier, those of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich) has come to be abandoned in favour of a far less sweeping, more provisional and pluralistic approach to the potentiality of art - Mayo Bucher is aware of the dangers inherent in too strict or totalising a version of the Modernist project to transform society through the disciplined, if not revolutionary praxis of art. However, that has not prevented Bucher (an artist aware of both the sublime and the social sides of Modernism) from developing a body of work which, in the classic Modernist manner, projects the sort of resonance that can carry far beyond the world of the studio and the private collector.

While his work for ECM has simultaneously underlined the implicit musicality of the nuanced abstraction of that work and confirmed his ability to function in the worlds of design and communications, a recent variety of collaborative projects with, for example, Swiss architectural partners Lussi & Halter and Burkhalter & Sumi has indicated how successfully Bucher is able to "scale up" his command of sign and surface, geometry and plane, and participate - in the classic Modernist manner, once again - in the articulation of large public surfaces and spaces. What I would emphasise here is how refreshing I find it that a relatively young artist such as Bucher is both willing and able to develop the distilled yet open aura(s) of his art on such a diverse yet integrated variety of levels.

In an age when we are able to celebrate some of the genuine fruits of recent trends in philosophical deconstruction in the exuberant negotiation of fresh perceptual space - somewhere between painting, sculpture and architecture - that is the work of the Canadian Jessica Stockholder (born 1959), or enjoy the combination of Pop surface and literate, gendered critique in the luscious videos of Bucher's compatriot, Pipilotti Rist (born 1962), why should we not celebrate also the potentiality of pluralism to give us an art of very different measure? It is hard to think of a better stimulus to examine the positive legacy of (a diverse, non-monolithic) Modernism today than the work of Mayo Bucher. For Bucher is an artist for whom that legacy exists, not as some theoretical problem tied in to any restrictive, Adorno-like notion of authenticity, but rather as an open field of potential inspiration. Aware of the idea of the sublime which lies within much of Modernism's fundamental engagement with abstraction, Bucher is yet able to keep his feet very much on the ground. He is thus all the better equipped to develop the sort of work in which essentially Modernist qualities of concentration and refinement are refreshed, refigured and developed, as much by the range of techniques which he is willing and able to explore as by a joint command of painterly surface and conceptual idea.

At a time when, again and again, painters have had to hear the ridiculous assertion that "painting is dead", here is an artist who has quietly but firmly followed the impulses of his heart, and come to create a practice of both singular integrity and wide-ranging practical application. Mayo Bucher is an artist in whose work many elements, many elective affinities, combine and commingle: not through any magpie-like inclusiveness, but rather through the sort of intuitive and genuinely creative process of discrimination and synthesis, distillation and expansion which can bring a new and welcome resonance to that chief article of faith of Modernism, as defined by the architect Mies van der Rohe, that "less is more".29 Here is work which is able to negotiate, or conjure, fresh perceptual and visionary space across and within the disciplines of painting, graphic design and architecture. To enter the essentially poetic world of Mayo Bucher is to enter a world where European and American sensibilities can combine as the historical and the contemporary; the geometric and the painterly, drawing and colour, visible structure and esoteric meaning; the digital and the hand-made; the singular aesthetic object and the mass-distributed communicative sign; the integrity of the picture plane and the sort of spatial ambivalence that can body forth resonant pictorial space. The measured yet intense work of Mayo Bucher is thus art which, while thoroughly contemporary, is simultaneously expressive of and appropriate to something much larger than any supposed spirit of the times. It is art that speaks clearly and deeply of our compulsion both to construct and question meaning: of the endless quest of human consciousness for clarity of expression and understanding - and of our saving need of mystery.