ABOUT TREES

Peter Fischer and his team have brought together more than 100 works for the exhibition and the volume ABOUT TREES. Whether it be Berlinde De Bruyckere’s waxily gleaming tree stumps wrapped in enormous rags, Peter Doig’s oil painting of a light-filled patch of woodland with fragments of a Corbusier building in the background, Rodney Graham’s mighty upside-down black-and-white photograph of an oak or Michael Sailstorfer’s photograph of a fruit tree blown into the air, in every case the works depict the tree as a motif open to manifold interpretation. Specifically, what is at issue is how the subject of the tree can “emblematically raise fundamental questions of existence”. Here art has the advantage over the natural sciences and religion: its task is to raise questions, not to give answers. It can thus present the tree as an “emblem, mirror and object of projection”, showing how it stands for life and/or death. But the tree also lends itself as a subject for “clashes and inspirations”, since the history of humankind’s dealings with nature can be traced through it in exemplary fashion – which at the same time underlines that the dichotomy of nature and culture need not inevitably end in destruction. For, as Robert Macfarlane writes in his contribution “Buchenhain”, from a branch or a crown a person not only looks out upon the world with a sense of liberation but may even feel sheltered within it, as a kind of hybrid of “tree and human”. Accordingly, as the volume’s editor Peter Fischer puts it, the tree is also admirably suited to serve as an “image for imaginary worlds and the embodiment of real ones”, for instance when, as in a fairy tale, it begins to speak and formulates laws of its own; and “long-lived and enduring as it is, the tree possesses the ability to lend identity to the place in which it stands. As a striking object it contributes to the individual image of a place. It is the witness to the history of its site. Beneath a tree justice was pronounced and carried out; beneath a tree people celebrate and hold their feasts.”

Artists:
Carlos Amorales, Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares, Merijn Bolink, Louise Bourgeois, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Mark Dion, Peter Doig, Valérie Favre, Anya Gallaccio, Rodney Graham, Katie Holten, John Isaacs, Naoko Ito, Wiliam Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Klee, Rosemary Laing, Žilvinas Landzbergas, Ndary Lo, Paul McCarthy, Ana Mendieta, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, Paul Morrison, Shirin Neshat, Jill Orr, Renzo Piano, Pipilotti Rist, Ugo Rondinone, Julian Rosefeldt, Michael Sailstorfer, George Steinmann, Wolfgang Tillmans, Su-Mei Tse, Shinji Turner-Yamamoto

Exhibition:
Zentrum Paul Klee Bern, 17/10/2015 – 24/1/2016