Tobias Kaspar: Personal Shopper

Galerie Peter Kilchmann

Zahnradstrasse, Zurich

A personal shopper is someone who shops for others for a living. And that is precisely what Tobias Kaspar's works are repeatedly about - our consumer behavior: what are we prepared to spend or even give up something for? And what are the consequences of our actions?

 

Like many of us, Tobias Kaspar has increasingly moved his shopping to the online realm and since, as Kaspar's last year's project and exhibition Rented Life at the MAMCO Musée d'art moderne et contemporain in Geneva showed, art and life are closely intertwined; so it is only logical that the new series Personal Shopper explores the various "high-end luxury fashion online retail platforms". How are clothes presented and sold online, what kind of language is used? What kind of models are visible? How is the selecting and structuring done? Which images are meant to seduce us, encourage us to buy, and at the same time suggest a closeness so that we recognise ourselves in the photographs?

 

The motifs that Tobias Kaspar adopts replace, to a certain extent, the mirror of a physical changing cabin and are meant to convince the viewer to take the last step and click on the BUY button. In the process, most models still conform to an allegedly prevailing beauty norm and only partially fulfil the claim of diversity or body positivity.

 

For the Personal Shopper series, Kaspar collaborated with a textile printing company in eastern Switzerland known for its haute couture fabrics. After the series Reflector Paintings (2015-2018) and the Japan Collection (2018-2020), this is the third and for now last series in which Tobias Kaspar uses fashion production sites as a place for art production.

 

The starting point for the new works, are screenshots of various online fashion stores such as Farfetch, Moda Operandi, My Theresa or MR PORTER.

 

The low-resolution screenshots were enlarged and printed on canvas, and then, in a further step, screen-printed and painted by hand. For the silkscreen motifs, it was drawn on the manufacturer’s existing textile pattern archive and tied in with their running production, as well as newly experimented.

In the work The Balenciaga Revenge (Artist Pants), the fashion trend of the so-called "studio pants", with authentic colour splashes, is cited, which has now found its way from the catwalk into the exhibition space.

 

The installation is based on Chekhov's eponymous play from 1903 and retells it in an imaginary scene. The original play, which centers on the country estate and its beautiful cherry orchard of the impoverished landowner Ranevskaya and her grown-up children, paints a socially critical portrait of the Russian aristocracy at the beginning of the 20th century. Society is undergoing changes. To pay off the family's debts, the cherry orchard has to be auctioned off.

 

In a quiet reference to Martin Kippenberger's installation The Happy End of Franz Kafka's Amerika (1994), Tobias Kaspar's imaginary scene picks up where Chekhov's original play ends: after a failed building project, the estate and garden are left neglected. Apocalypse. The windows of the unfinished holiday bungalows are left open, a curtain is blowing back and forth. Almost as a counterpoint to the brightly coloured patterns and aesthetically appealing motifs from the online shopping world, an accumulation of scattered scraps of take-away food and their reproduction in bronze can be found on the floor. Despite the Cyrillic lettering, the partially crumpled cardboard boxes and beverage cups are associated with fast food products such as pizza, burgers and the like through globally familiar shapes and logos. The last blossoms of the deforested cherry orchard are scattered between and over the waste products. Like a mantra, a voice[2] from the installation can be heard reading text elements from the play, which address the sale of the estate and the cherry orchard.

 

The use of theatre, film sets and props is nothing new: in 2016, Tobias Kaspar staged The Street - a 24h happening in the film set ruins of Scorsese's Gangs of New York at the Cinecittà Film Studios in Rome. In 2018, he took over the set design of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest from an amateur theatre for his survey exhibition Independence at the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Bonnie and Clyde car shot to pieces, also from an amateur theatre, served as the main piece for his Why Love Hurts exhibition in Berlin in 2019.