source: db-artmagde
Since the 1960s, Walter Pichler has been working in the borderline area between sculpture and architecture, designing models of utopian cities and objects such as his legendary “TV Helmet.” Many of Pichler’s works are owned by the Deutsche Bank Collection. The 1996 exhibition “Joseph Beuys / Walter Pichler. Drawings,” conceived by Deutsche Bank, juxtaposed a significant group of Beuys drawings with paper works by the 1936-born Austrian. Silke Hohmann introduces the inventor of the “Portable Living Room.”

A figure is sitting at a long worktable. Turned three-quarters of the way away from the viewer, it’s darkly shaded, yet transparent. The perspective lines of chair, table, and even the axes of the limbs and spine penetrate it. Extending between the head of the draftsman and his right hand, which is holding a pencil, is a thin shadow. Or is it a different kind of connection alluded to here between the mind and the acting hand, one that is just as immaterial? A kind of data stream, perhaps, that translates thought into visibility? Sitting Draftsman is the laconic title of a 1991 work by Walter Pichler from the Deutsche Bank Collection, as though the artist had sketched one among many possible activities. Yet the internal tension in the figure, the way its body is cut through by construction lines, its unstable, almost cowering pose leave no doubt that this is an existential pose.

Around twenty-five years previously: a person wears a white helmet that is submarine-like in the way it extends to the front and back. His entire head disappears into the futurist capsule; only the title betrays what is happening inside it. The TV Helmet of 1967 is a technical device that isolates the user while imbedding him or her in an endless web of information: closed off against the outside world, the wearer is completely focused on the screen before his or her eyes. This work by Walter Pichler doesn’t merely formally anticipate the cyber glasses developed decades later. He also articulated questions of content in relation to the media experience long before the “virtual world” was even discovered. Pichler called his invention a Portable Living Room, and this is usually interpreted as scathing sarcasm. When at least the tube is on in the living room, then we can easily do without varnished cabinets and potted violets, the title seems to say. But that is not the only way to interpret it.

Even back then, Walter Pichler was probably already a media critic; he’s remained one to this day. But he is also a conceptually thinking artist who explored space early on—beyond the four walls and the structures of cities. His pioneering designs, The Prototypes, are pneumatic plastic living bubbles from the sixties that sought answers to the questions of tomorrow’s individualized life somewhere between the areas of design, architecture, and art. With their reference to space travel and modernist materials, Pichler’s futurist sculptures inspire a desire for the future to this day—even if his messages are said to possess a skeptical undertone.

In the sixties, after studying at the Hochschule für Architektur in Vienna, he worked with his friend, the internationally renowned architect Hans Hollein, on a new concept of architecture. In 1963, the two exhibited together at the Galerie nächst St. Stephan under the title Architecture. Hollein and he explored utopian architectonic designs; they countered the growing subdivision of the city with a larger modernist vision made from cement, declaring architecture “freed from the constraints of building.” This statement can easily be extended to the TV helmet if one were to view it not merely as a blinding device, but conversely as a free-thinking extension of space: who needs four walls when you can have the whole world?

In his media-theoretical standard work Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was published in Germany one year after Pichler exhibited his TV helmet, Marshall McLuhan famously declared that “the medium is the message.” At first, McLuhan was interpreted in just as one-dimensional a way: the culturally pessimistic interpretation of his thesis was that the technical device is so powerful that it even functions without content. Stupidity, social and physical disorders, conformism seemed inevitable. Yet McLuhan was far more the sober observer and affirmative analyzer than a warning Cassandra.

To understand the cultural significance of Pichler’s TV Helmet, it is irrelevant whether or not the work was conceived as a cynical commentary on the social isolation resulting from excessive TV viewing—even while it seems improbable that the studied architect, a perfectionist, would have been satisfied with a work motivated solely by sociological concerns. Whatever his intentions, the work—together with only a very few other works, such as Ivan Sutherland’s Head mounted display of the same year—marks the quantum leap of the physical into the virtual world. It addresses less the individual psyche than it seeks to redefine space.

To this day, Walter Pichler has remained true to the motif of imbedding, even if his means have changed dramatically. Pichler is one of Austria’s most important living artists, although he’d rather not be. “I haven’t wished to be called an artist for a long time now,” he told the newspaper Zeit a few years ago, which visited him on the occasion of a Berlin exhibition at the Contemporary Fine Arts Gallery in his country home in St. Martin in the far reaches of Burgenland. Pichler has been living there since 1972, shortly after the tumultuous late sixties; he deliberately sought distance from the museum and exhibition establishment. “Most people aren’t interested in anything but getting rich and famous.”

But what most concerns Walter Pichler? To try to reduce him to a single position seems impossible—his first pop works from the sixties are too different from his current works. Was he a visionary back then, and retrograde today?

To this day, Walter Pichler’s architectonic drawings and sculptures are characterized by a thought process that crosses the borders between disciplines. For his hominid sculptures of metal and wood, he built his own exhibition spaces that were somewhere between a temple and a container. And they never depart from them: Pichler regards this interplay between space and object as crucial. The one would never be complete without the other. One has to go there to see them. And he, too, for the most part shuns the art establishment public.

Walter Pichler’s systematic renunciation fits well with his former critical approach; similarly, one could term his lived statement of rootedness a clever spatial concept, because it calls all contemporary givens into question: mobility for all, wireless communication, globalized art world. His timeless Sitting Draftsman of 1991 is a relative of that TV helmet-wearer tuned in to the data streams ahead of his time. Both figures are representative; they ask “what do we want to be, and at what price?” Walter Pichler hasn’t bowed out from answering these questions; he has merely decided more clearly than many other artists.
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source: placebokatzblogspot
he work of the Austrian artist and architect Walter Pichler is not well known, despite the fact that his work had a discernible impact – at an international level – on the course of art and architecture in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This year a recent exhibition in Vienna, at the Generali Foundation, brought together an influential series of works called “Prototypes” that Pichler produced between 1966 and 1969. These works were first shown in Austria in 1967 and were included a year later at Dokumenta 4 in Kassel, Germany, but since then had remained largely unseen until this year.

As the 1960s are revisited – in fashion, film, and design – Pichler’s prototypes, furniture, and architectural proposals form an important body of work. Judged in relation to his Austrian contemporaries Hans Hollein and Raimund Abraham, and in relation to the plug-in architecture experiments of Archigram, Archizoom, and Superstudio, Pichler’s prototypes have a laconic quality that sets them apart from the utopian fervor of his international colleagues.

In an interview conducted in 1997, Pichler distinguished his work from the issue-oriented political work of his colleagues. “It did get on my nerves a bit, the way direct, fashionable references were made to the Vietnam war, to everyday politics. I believed that the critique had to start with the medium and not the political situation.” Reflecting on the visionary or utopian character of the late 1960s, Pichler identified a darker strain in his own Prototypes series: “TV Helmet or Portable Living Room, as it was also called, and Small Room were really cynical, meant to be cynical in a funny way. At the time, television was just appearing on the scene. These works are about isolation cells. The critical thrust consisted in revealing this isolation and expressing it in a very overdrawn way.”
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source: derstandardat
Wien – Raum, Proportionen, Erinnerung, Licht und vor allem Zeit waren die Werkstoffe, aus denen Walter Pichler sein einzigartiges Universum aus Modellen, Skulpturen und Häusern zeichnete und in der Werkstatt baute: “Wenn die Hände beschäftigt sind, ist der Kopf frei. Ich bin kein abstrakter Denker, keiner, der tagelang in sich hineinhorcht. Deshalb arbeite ich gern manuell.” 1971 kaufte der stets in elegantes Tuch gekleidete Künstler ein altes Bauernhaus im burgenländischen St. Martin an der Raab, fünf Hektar Grund für 240.000 Schilling (umgerechnet rund 17.000 Euro), ein Traumgrundstück im Sonderangebot, “das Haus haben sie mir dazugeschenkt. Wenn die Baggerstunde nicht so teuer gewesen wäre, hätten sie es längst weggeschoben”. Noch am selben Tag zog er ins baufällige Haus ein und begann sein Lebenswerk: Heimstätten zu bauen für seine Skulpturen, feierliche Behausungen oder, genauer gesagt, Häuser-Kompositionen in genau ausgeklügelten Proportionen, mit exakt berechneten Lichteinfällen, perfekten Dimensionen und Relationen für den Großen und den Kleinen Bruder beispielsweise, für die Schädeldecken, den Aufpasser und für die Bewegliche Figur. “Es stellt sich ja die Frage: wo beginnt die Plastik. Wo hört sie auf? Alles hier entspricht exakt meinen Vorstellungen. Ich wollte immer Häuser für meine Skulpturen machen, weil es nur konsequent ist, dass sie ihren idealen Platz, optimale Lichtverhältnisse haben. Außerdem muss man dann auch nicht mehr so viel erklären, sondern braucht nur zu zeigen: So schaut es aus.” Geboren am 1. Oktober 1936 in Deutschnofen in Südtirol in eine Handwerkerfamilie, hielt sich Pichler von kleinan gern in der Werkstatt auf, wusste früh um die Bedeutung der Zeichnung: “Ich wundere mich immer über die Genies, die so viele Möglichkeiten haben; das habe ich nicht – aber Ich habe glücklicherweise das erwischt, wo ich am weitesten kommen kann. Ich wäre ein erbärmlicher Dichter und ein noch erbärmlicherer Musiker.” In den 1960er Jahren interessierte ihn vor allemdie Baukunst, in dünnstrichigen Architekturzeichnungen entwickelte er gemeinsam mit Hans Hollein und Raimund Abraham die Visionary Architecture, die 1967 im New Yorker Museum of Modern Art gezeigt wurde; ein Jahr später wurde Pichler zur Documenta in Kassel eingeladen. Er lebte in Paris, New York und Mexiko und vertrat 1982 Österreich auf der Biennale in Venedig. Seine Figuren ließ er nur ungern zu Ausstellungen verreisen – ins Frankfurter Städelmuseum etwa, ins Stedelijk-Museum in Amsterdam oder, 1990, ins Museum für angewandte Kunst in Wien. Immer waren diese Exkursionen mit umfangreichen räumlichen Interventionen in den Museen verbunden; einiges davon blieb als dauerhafte architektnische Verbesserung – etwa das Pichlertor im Mak. Um sich nicht Kunstmarktgesetzen beugen zu müssen, gestaltete Pichler seit den 1960er Jahren Buchcover, zunächst für den Residenzverlag, ab 2000 für Jung und Jung. Auch sein eigenes Werk dokumentierte er lückenlos, fotografiert von seiner Frau, der Architketurfotografin Elfie Tripamer. “Ich weiß genau, was ich will”, sagte er. “Aber sie macht die Fotos, die sie will, ganz anders als meine Vorstellungen. Aber sie hat immer recht, weil sie die Distanz hat. Meins ist Pflicht. Ihres ist Kür.” Gefährlich sei eigentlich nur Routine, meinte er: “Aber ich habe eine gute Methode, mich davor zu schützen:Ich habe viele Pichlers um mich herum stehen, die mir über die Schulter schauen.”
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source: membersiifhu
A későközépkor égbolton túlra kitekintő emberével szemben a későújkori ember saját eszközrendszereinek belvilágába merül. A kozmikus nyitottsággal ellentétben, a benne felhalmozott gigantikus adathalmazok dacára a virtuális világ zárt. Ennek a zárt beltérnek a mibenléte számomra akkor mutatkozott meg, amikor megláttam egy őspéldányát, Walter Pichler osztrák képzőművész Hordozható lakószobáját. Ez a hatvanas években készült mű egy képernyővel egybeépített, fejre, illetve vállra vehető készülékből áll, ami a virtuálvalóba merülő adatsisakját vetíti előre. A Hordozható lakószobával felszerelkezve leginkább egy gumiszobában, vagy – miként készítője tette – legfeljebb egy, az autószereléshez használatos aknában lehetett közlekedni. Ez ugyanis megóvta a valódi élek és kiterjedések iránt érzéketlenné vált használóját a keményebb összeütközésektől. Igaz, mozogni sem feltétlenül kellett, hisz Pichler alkotása a mindenség ígéretét hordozta: az otthonosságot, és a képablakon keresztül a világ végtelen hozzáférhetőségét.

Walter Pichler
Hordozható lakószoba
Ez a magántérbe zárkózás, melyet a médium segít elő s amelyet az őspéldány esetében még a metsző irónia aurája övez, ma, fejlettebb utódai esetében jellegváltozást mutat: A MUD-ok (Multi-User Dungeons vagy Dimensions) alapmetaforája a szoba – írja a Turing-Galaxisról szóló tanulmányában Volker R. Grassmuck – A MUD-ok alkotják a cybervilágok polgárainak antropomorf életterét. A mindenütt jelenlévő médium elidegenítő helynélkülisége révén alkalmat nyújtanak arra, hogy be lehessen rendezni egy otthonos helyet, egy lakószobát a mátrixban.
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source: db-artmagde

Austrian sculptor, illustrator and architect Walter Pichler passed away Monday evening in his home at the age of 76. Known for his elaborate drawings of sculptures housed within sanctuary-like structures, Pichler used his work to marry elements of architecture and design.

Born in Deutschnofen, Italy, in 1936, Pichler began his career as an architect in Vienna in the 1950s, designing models for utopian cities alongside fellow Austrian architect Hans Hollein. Through this collaboration he developed an interest in sculpture and its relationship with architecture that would come to define his work throughout the rest of his career.

For his 1967 “Prototypes” series, Pichler created pieces employing a unique hybrid of sculpture, furniture and architecture. When worn, the works, such as TV Helmet/Portable Living Room (1967) became both an extension of the human body and an unsettling isolation cell. In 1971, Pichler bought a hillside farm in Burgenland, Austria. There, over the past 40 years, he was able to construct full-sized versions of many of his drawings and plans.

Pichler had solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Stadelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. He represented Austria in the 1982 Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 4 and the fifth Paris Bienniale, both in 1968.
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source: residenzverlagat

Walter Pichler, geboren 1936, verstorben 2012. Zuletzt lebte und arbeitete er in St. Martin im Burgenland. 1955 Abschluss an der Hochschule für angewandte Kunst Wien, ab 1960 längere Auslandsaufenthalte in Paris und New York. Einzelausstellungen im Museum of Modern Art New York, 1968 Teilnahme an der documenta in Kassel und 1982 an der Biennale in Venedig. 1998 fand eine große Retrospektive im Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam statt. 1972 siedelte sich Walter Pichler in St. Martin an, wo er gute Bedingungen für seine bildhauerische Arbeit vorfand.
Walter Pichler prägte mit seinen Umschlaggestaltungen, die er von 1961 bis 2000 für den Residenz Verlag machte, nachhaltig das Erscheinungsbild des Verlags. Von ihm stammt auch das Verlagslogo mit den Buchstaben RV in einem Oval (intern RV-Ei genannt).