What is New York? The city that has been variously described as densely populated, full of energy and hectic, and inspirational for art and life. If you have never been there, you absolutely must make the trip.

A grant enabled the artist Anna Amadio to enjoy an extended stay in New York: A year-long residency in 2004/2005 at the invitation of the Swiss Art Commission. If you know Anna Amadio personally, you can easily imagine her in the city: how the subway doors close behind her, how she makes her way through the crush of the crowds after being bounced up to the street by the long escalator ride, enjoying the view from the top of a skyscraper or searching for the just right contact person among the coffee cups and baseball caps in an open-layout office. We’ve all witnessed such scenes in any number of movies. But how did Ms. Amadio, who has never been in a movie, really feel in New York? The city, a myth that embraces worldwide dreams and desires, and, above all, clichés. How does it live within her and what does an artist do with such pre-fabricated images and her own?
Amadio knows that New York is a symbol of a sense of metropolis: hectic and the present. She does not succumb to the temptation to hold on to the city in photos or objects; but she is still able to let her audience participate directly in her New York experience - Ms. Amadio’s three-dimensional works are always direct responses to spaces. Inspired by the colorful brick facades revealing layer upon layer of thickly applied paint, the artist began working with loud-colored PVC-sheets or membranes. She completed “Gizmo’s Kiss” (2005) for the Kunstverein Freiburg im Breisgau and in the work also addressed the institution’s own challenging exhibition space (not as spatial challenge, but rather as something to be experienced in terms of massive, appealing volume). With “Lips, Inc.” Ms. Amadio has found a way to translate the experience of New York that in its details conveys stories from the city in a more narrative manner.

“Lips Inc.” – eight standard cubicles from an open-layout office, completely furnished with personal objects from imaginary workers. This fictive office was covered with colorful PVC membranes and then vacuum-packed. The air beneath the PVC was sucked out so that themembrane, fitting tight against the various office objects, would reproduce or mimic them in every detail. The membrane’s lines, colors, and creases cover the objects beneath and in the process defamiliarize them. The audience tries to decipher the installation’s many colors and ends up drawing associations with chaos, cheerfulness or even favelas. Even monochromatic painting is recognizable in the details exposed by the process of vacuum packing. Due to the degree of colorfulness (incidentally, also in the artist’s graphic work), the audience tends to romanticize Ms. Amadio’s work . However, the artist’s response to the issue of color is that she simply works with any and all available colors, adding that color selection with PVC membranes is, fortunately, quite broad.
Color is rhythm, structure and energy. Vacuum, membrane and color transform the objects into more than their unambiguous function as office objects. In “Lips Inc.”, the artist speaks of the things that surround us in our daily lives, but she does so “colorfully”, thus, dazzlingly and seductively, and endows the objects with something that transcends the every day. The briefcase or the sad, disconsolate bouquet, the sport jacket or the family pictures are not simply enshrouded; rather, they remain completely recognizable, but also gain an expanded field of meaning, their own metaphor.

While the installation is clearly intricate and elaborate and the work of vacuum-packing on this scale required a wide variety of techniques, the work “Lips Inc.” actually appears to be quite simple. When asked about it, the artist referred to Gaston Bachelar’s work The Poetics of Space. Reading this volume provided Ms. Amadio not only with a deeper understanding of but also a vocabulary for her own experience of space as well as for her work. In The Poetics of Space, Bachelard’s focus rests on simple poetic images in poems and novels that are disquieting, that do not release their grip on us. According to Bachelard, the poetic image is primal; the imagination is one of the most profound human capabilities. To support this thesis, Bachelard examines simple, mostly positively connotated images of space that occur frequently in literature: initially, images of intimate spaces: the home, nooks, caves; then the “homes of things”: drawers, chests and nests; and finally, the opposition of inside and outside. In pictorial and highly intelligible language, Bachelard explains his “theory of the reverberation or echo” of literature in the imagination of the reader.

Applied to Ms. Amadio’s work – and such an application here is not inappropriate – it means that the artist also creates a reverberation, an echo, in a language understandable to all and rich in metaphor. Ms. Amadio also tells of primal spaces, of inside and outside, cities, streets, houses or offices as we know them. She, however, does so in the visual arts and not in literature.

Knowing that Anna Amadio does not avoid, but rather seeks metaphor, Lips Inc. grows in complexity: The vacuum can be understood psychologically, with a broad array of associations including claustrophobia in the open-layout office. Also, the inner, emotional pressure that the artist must have experienced in New York (pressure from expectations, to achieve, from the crowds, confined living spaces, and perhaps loneliness) can be recognized as metaphor in Lips Inc. The air removed by the vacuum-packing process is philosophical, metaphysical, and metaphorical and, where the colors were previously interpreted as cheerful, there emerges the unbeautiful and unaesthetic. “Lips Inc.” does not seek to preserve, to enwrap up, nor to store something safely somewhere; instead, in “Lips Inc.”, the artist brings together her interior state and the exterior events in the metropolis. The metaphors created in “Lips Inc.” illustrate and delicately enhance the sensitivity of the observer, awaken in us Bachelard’s “reverberation” for spaces. With this work, Ms. Amadio succeeds in creating a picture of human existence in the big city that is both accessible to and interpretable for all. The cubicle can be an office as easily as a city block; the objects recognizable under the PVC veneer tell of both our own uniformity as well as our individuality.

On a visual level, “Lips Inc.” offers simple and intuitively decipherable metaphors. At the same time, the title represents a combination of metaphors: The title, in which Ms. Amadio combines the standard physical meaning of “lips” with the English reference to edge or border, is related to Inc., which references a registered organization. “Lips Inc.” is a narrative work that tells of the borders of our perception and that translates the tales from the metropolis and our attitude toward and sense of life. While this narrative characteristic pervades Ms. Amadio’s entire body of work, it is nonetheless often ignored. The question of what something is made of (the vacuum-packing in the special works, the bundles of lines in the drawings) is pushed to the fore, ahead of the contentual, associate reading of her works. How is it made? Apart from the technical aspects (with respect to vacuum-packing, numerous hoses and cables; with respect to her drawings, a rake-like device holding several colored pencils to create parallel lines), accumulation is important to Ms. Amadio. It is not individual lines that move across the paper; it is not an individual cubicle from which the air is drawn out under the membrane; rather, the cluster of lines of drawings and, in similar fashion, the membrane sheets that run parallel and cover the open-layout office generate the intensity that Anna Amadio seeks.
The artist also underlines this analogy between drawings and “Lips Inc.” through their presentation in the same exhibition space. The special dimensions of the works make it impossible to consider one without the others. In the installation as well as the drawings, the same gestures suddenly become recognizable: momentum, pressure and movement. Randomness in the physical vacuum or in the expressive drawing is always something that Ms. Amadio wants and is, according to the artist’s own statements, an integral part of her works. The artist delegates control of the last steps in the production of the installation “Lips Inc.” to technique and seems almost unburdened by it.

Imitating the artist and giving up final control means, for the observer, giving echoes space. If we follow Bachelard’s theory of primal imagination, „Lips Inc.“ is then not merely a symbol of New York. In the installation we can discover our own living situation: the stress of the working world, leisure culture as an attempt to provide balance, social mobility as well as the disciplining structures of our everyday life. If the office cubicles are no longer perceived in a 1:1 frame of reference, then the cubicles generate corresponding echoes of entire city grids, city blocks and perhaps even reverberations of the haze of smog over a metropolitan area. Just as New York is a symbol for our urban everyday life, only larger, more hectic, and more extreme, „Lips Inc.“ also offers metaphors for our civilized life. And therein lies the attraction of both: of the city and of the installation –and within us, everything finds its echo.

Text Fanni Fetzer

Translation Barbara Heck

Exhibition "NB" New York-Berlin: Anna Amadio / Vittorio Santoro

Grants Swiss Federal Cultural Office

Photos a.o. David Aebi