New Buildings Collapsing

Lena Friedli
from the book "Mons fractus - Jeroen Geel"
Translation: Catherine Schelbert

Ruin, Middle English ‘collapse of a building’, from Old French ruine, from Latin ruina ‘a collapse, a rushing down, tumbling down’, from ruere ‘to rush headlong, fall violently, collapse’.

In an era of epoxy and polyurethane resins, Plexiglas frames, digital prints and downloadable works of art, it seems astonishingly nostalgic to find someone spending months making marble out of plaster and bone glue in order to end up propping a one-square-meter, reinforced panel of scagliola against the wall after about 12 weeks. And yet there is an undeniable fascination to the effort, which probably applies to traditional craftsmanship per se. On one hand, the making of scagliola is an extremely exacting, precise craft, but it also requires a willingness to accept the vagaries of chance in the resulting design. The artist Jeroen Geel (*1976), at home in Lucerne, is a virtuoso in both respects. So what is scagliola? Also known as polished marble or marble plaster, it is an ancient technique for the manufacture of shiny, colourful surfaces. High-quality plasters, bone glue and pigments are kneaded and shaped into loaves. Repeated relayering yields structures that vary in both colour and form. The loaves are then cut into slices and left to harden, after which their surfaces are sanded, spackled and polished to a glossy sheen, with their structures and colouring changing every step of the way. The volume of the marble plaster determines depth and chromatic intensity.

Speaking of nostalgia, the artist’s conceptual approach – filling sketchbooks, making drawings and holing up to mull over ideas before telling the whole world about them – is probably antiquated as well. Geel doesn’t mind; being fashionable is not one of his goals. He is happily ‘old school’, if you will. Well, not quite: experiment and innovation are not to be underestimated in his art. The band Einstürzende Neubauten (New Buildings Collapsing) – it has given its name to this text and was cofounded in 1980 by Blixa Bargeld – repeatedly impact the electronic music scene in Germany because they never stop trying out new directions in music. Similarly, Geel cannot be tied down to a genre or a specific craft. He spends hours and hours working in his studio; he broods and experiments, draws, makes ceramics, paints watercolours, carves etchings, applies gold-leaf, plasters, moulds and sands. When he is on the road, he visits Romanesque churches in the Grisons or Baroque castles in Bavaria, all the while filling page after page of his sketchbook. He studies volume, structure and architecture until he understands a building from foundation to gable, making it his own and interpreting it for his art.

Jeroen Geel is an architect of ruins. Drawing on venerable techniques, he creates art with unbridled delight. Taking his cue from what has gone before, he produces new work of his own that is as much like pop art as it is nostalgic. His marble plaster, which looks so genuine from afar, proves in close-up to be astonishingly modern, abstract and with a palette that is utterly unlike marble. The artist plays crossover with the material that he kneads, moulds and polishes, lending the finished works the impression of an eclectic mix. Some of them remain true to the original stone; others are humorous imitations of meat; still others look as if he had used a strobe flash. Whatever the case, we are meant to realize that they are deliberately crafted. The imitated product becomes an object in its own right, emancipated from the real marble that served as a model. Further study of the marble plaster reveals marks in the material; we note the traces of energy that formed the whole and follow the meandering colours. We would look at the work, examine it and try to decipher it in our minds. Which stratum lies on top, which one underneath? Which layer came first? What determines the shape? Is it a solid, enduring whole, or is it about to crumble and collapse?

Geel’s works lead a curious in-between existence. With their rectangular cut and high-gloss polish, the panels of marble plaster seem to be hard as stone and indestructible. Using the same technique, Geel has now begun making large-format panels out of his material that look fragile, broken, like found pieces and ruins that are just about to collapse. The English word ‘ruin’ comes from the Latin ruere, which means ‘to fall’. These works thrive on the aesthetics of decay. It is in the nature of ruins to imply the past – something that has gone before or leftovers from another time. Inquiring into the representation of architecture, Max Frisch once mentioned the Acropolis and described the ruin as the only form of executed architecture that is still sketchy.¹ Quoting Frisch, Hermann Burger suggests that sketchy or unfinished buildings probably appealed to the writer – he originally trained as an architect – because they compel viewers to imagine what the ruin might have looked like as a whole. According to Burger, the act of imaginative completion is a more vibrant artistic pleasure than admiring finished buildings. The appeal of the ruin therefore lies in the fact that it was once a whole. But what about ruins that have never been whole, ruins newly created – by Jeroen Geel, for instance? A few examples of architecture from the nineteenth century demonstrate that ruins can indeed be planned, constructed and purposefully invested with an aura of nostalgia as bearers of times gone by. Although they are sometimes dry, dusty and barren (as seen, for example, as a child on holiday in Crete), there is still something magical about them! We are intrigued by the enigma of certain architectural remains. Conjecture joins historical fact. What kind of new buildings collapsing will we leave behind some day?

As a maker of new ruins, Geel loves to experiment and give shape to his materials, so much so that he keeps changing, refining and developing his techniques. Having devoted himself to marble plaster for over four years, he has begun to test a new mode of manufacture using the same ingredients. Like a confectioner, he squeezes his prepared plaster through a cloth pastry bag to make thin, little white sausages. Carefully snaking them around in a spiral, he builds towers that rapidly harden into a solid mass and yet still look extremely fragile. Looking at them in the studio, we talk about Rosendorfer’s ‘Architect of Ruins’² and follow a trail of associations that leads to the music of the Einstürzende Neubauten. The towers actually look extremely crude, almost inept and they are clearly non-functional as vessels. The receptacle as a fundamental sculptural motif lends these white bodies a beauty and charm that is, as mentioned, indebted to a fascination with ancient handicrafts. The technique of making a hollow body out of coiled clay is fundamental to the potter’s craft and is essentially the foundation of all sculptural endeavour.

Origins and elementary beginnings are akin to the act of sketching. When drawing the capital of a column in a church in order to understand its volume, Geel is actually (re)constructing it in his mind with great precision, while at the same time leaving the nature of his materials and the process of production undefined and merely hinting at certain things. Once again, Max Frisch’s thoughts on the Acropolis apply. For him, a sketch has a direction but no end; it is the expression of a worldview that is no longer or not yet closed.³ This lack of closure is appealing, stimulates thought, calls for greater scrutiny and complementary ideas. Anything that is open-ended, in between or unfinished – possibly even collapsed – yields enthralling riddles and creates myths. The stories told by the ‘architect of ruins’ are not boring because there is room for interpretation. Jeroen Geel’s works of art are in a state of becoming and passing. The direction is defined, the destination is not. In between there lies the rigid, immutable shape of a new building, which he blithely ignores.

¹ ³ Hermann Burger, ‘Architektur-Darstellung bei Max Frisch’, in idem, Als Autor auf der Stör, Thomas Beckermann (ed.), Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1987, pp. 214-218. p. 205.
² Herbert Rosendorfer, The Architect of Ruins, Mike Mitchell (transl.), Dedalus, Europe, 2011.German: Der Ruinenbaumeister, Diogenes: Zurich, 1969.