GRR 49: RUNDHERUNDHERUNDHERUM
INGO GIEZENDANNER IM THUN PANORAMA
Thun’s Schadaupark is home to the world’s oldest surviving panorama, the Thun Panorama. Painted by Marquard Wocher between 1809 and 1814, it depicts everyday life in the small town of Thun and its surroundings across an area of 285 square meters. In his exhibition “rundherundherundherum” in the Thun Panorama building, Ingo Giezendanner juxtaposes this circular painting with a panorama approximately 2 meters high and over 50 meters long, which he designed specifically for the exhibition. As interesting as the individual viewing of the two circular panoramas may be—the juxtaposition of the oldest with what is currently at least the youngest panorama in the world brings out exciting peculiarities and characteristics of the genre, but it also makes clear how strongly the “city panorama” type reflects the conditions of the time and the needs of society.
On his return journey from the Unspunnen Shepherds’ Festival in 1808, the artist Marquard Wocher—born in Mimmenhausen in 1760—sketched his panorama in Thun. He created it between 1809 and 1814 in Basel, where it was ultimately exhibited. More than 30 years before the opening of Switzerland’s first railway line, it was intended to showcase the beauty of the small town in the Bernese Oberland to the people of Basel. The fact that Wocher chose the view from a rooftop in Thun’s old town—from which the town’s most prominent landmarks are visible in a panoramic view—is programmatic, as is the artist’s desire to depict the town as faithfully as possible. With the utmost attention to detail, the panorama offers a glimpse into the daily life of the small town of Thun on a summer morning and gives a sense of what life might have been like back then. More than 200 years later, Ingo Giezendanner (*1975, lives and works in Zurich) juxtaposes this historical monument with an almost equally large 360-degree image created specifically for the exhibition.
Ingo Giezendanner is a flâneur who has made a name for himself as a chronicler of his surroundings, even beyond national borders. Wherever he happens to be—whether in Berlin, Belgrade, or Baku; in Kampala, Kassel, or Karachi—he captures his surroundings on paper with a confident stroke. He is less concerned with the spectacular, the historically or touristically interesting, and more with the places where everyday life unfolds and leaves its mark. The starting point for rundherundherundherum (much like in Wocher’s work) is a journey—in this case, to the city of Tunis, which sounds very similar and lies almost on the same longitude as Thun. Sitting in a public square somewhat off the beaten path, he documented the goings-on around him in a 360-degree drawing.
While Wochers’ Thun Panorama focused on rendering the location as faithfully as possible, this is only partially the case with the “Tunis Panorama.” In his panoramic painting, Giezendanner is primarily interested in the concept of the “city” at a higher level and, in particular, in the visual consequences of the clash between diverse needs in a densely populated urban environment. His 360-degree view, rendered entirely in black and white, offers a fragmentary glimpse of an urban scene whose main elements—busy streets, unremarkable rows of houses, crumbling wall fragments, and spreading undergrowth—can be found in very similar forms in a wide variety of places. In fact, the artist has interwoven the Tunis drawing with detailed depictions documented in other corners of the globe, thereby presenting, first and foremost, a portrait of the city in today’s globalized world.
Giezendanner also applies this interweaving of different perspectives to the formal construction of the circular painting. Rather than being displayed flat against the slightly curved wall, it is folded like an accordion, so that a different section of the panorama unfolds depending on the viewer’s perspective. In contrast to the classical circular painting, which is designed entirely for an illusionistic effect, the artist plays with optics here by having the audience walk through the image meter by meter and work their way through it. Giezendanner’s panorama is characterized by a network of wildly proliferating black lines. Bordering almost on a horror vacui, the depiction is filled with visual information right up to the outermost edges, yet without any discernible judgment.
There are the tags and graffiti that cover walls and building facades like a second skin; there are the crammed storefronts with which shopkeepers advertise their wares; there are the lines of cars moving slowly through the narrow streets — Giezendanner’s panorama reads like an inventory of the elements that make up urban life and that, due to their everyday nature, we have long since ceased to notice. It is precisely this indexical claim to completeness that lends the depiction an enormous narrative power, allowing it to tell of the daily joys and tribulations, the struggle for survival, or the speed with which our environment is changing.
An exhibition catalog (German/English) was published by Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg to accompany the exhibition, edited by the Kunstmuseum Thun, Petra Giezendanner, and Siri Peyer.
