2.
The Lowenbraü building is the heart of Zuriwest’s art scene, home to several major institutions and the Migros Museum which is the contemporary art collection of a fund genrerated by 1% of the profits from Migros, Switzerland’s equivalent of Tesco’s. Inside however, there’s Susan Hiller, there’s Jospeh Beuys, and a myriad collection of other seminal 20th century artists. It made me wonder who Tesco’s would choose to buy if they ever found the capacity to be so generous.
Later on I met Catherine Munger from Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, outside the Landesmuseum wherein there are a series of exhibits on what it means to be Swiss, or perhaps on how to generate a cultural identity, and how to retain it over time. It is perhaps this attempt that is fascinating, something eerie about trying to protect and conserve that which has forever been fluid, a collection of people, living in a place, a fluid myth, an identity crisis. An autoethnographic pursuit. We are told of William Tell, a myth about an apple and an arrow, and Henry Dufour, a cartographic genius, others. There are books there, photographs and the development of the grand tour across Switzerland, endless, neat, tidy, everything here is neat, tidy, polished, stacks of books lined up, neatly efficient cloakrooms, lockers, escalators and trams. There is a piece of paper I wish I had taken from my meeting in the Lowenbraü building, it is probably still there, piled high in multiple. A t-shirt I bought from the Holzer show reads WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE, she describes some the things in her own show so eloquently, economically: the cold dry descriptions of torture, the categorization of war and exploitation.
Switzerland is nice though isn’t it? A pleasant land of cattle and chocolate, mountains draped in rare flowers and hikers, mountain bikes. But there is something beneath all that, and I mean beneath the flow of daily life and even beneath the country’s extensive collection of nuclear bunkers – Switzerland’s policy until 2006 was to have enough Nuclear bunker accommodation for its entire population, each newly built block of flats was required to be serviced by a nuclear bunker capable of housing all its residents, each bunker is accompanied by a collection of models in miniature of the nearby architectural highlights, supposedly for their post-apocalyptic reconstruction – so beneath this, and beneath all the veneer and all the real wood – everything is real wood – there is something I can’t quite describe because it demands more time of me still to comprehend and get across. A disquiet, a dis-ease, the suicide rates are high, the drug use, extensive, an apathy spreads, a platitudinous nature, common parlance and polite restraint, like you can’t quite say anything too real, because this is a neutral country in a time of perpetual global conflict and the place seems to be doing rather well for itself, not so much out of manufacturing warfare, but out of quietly enabling it, with discretion. In the Landesmuseum again there is a room dedicated to the countries proud history of anonymous banking and financial disposition, and there is a video of a stern but honest looking man stating “Switzerland’s anonymous banking system grew out of a wish to enable people who were under threat to hide their resources” and you can almost hear him say “but”, or imagine him doing so, but he doesn’t, it hangs there instead, half a sentence, like a silent concession.
