Mathis Gasser in conversation with Fabrice Stroun and Tenzing Barshee

Fabrice Stroun & Tenzing Barshee: You have been working on your In the Museum project since 2010. It now includes dozens of paintings and prints, as well as two films. Could you describe what it is about and how this body of work came to be?

Mathis Gasser: The initial idea was to have an encounter between Christopher Walken and zombies in a museum. This image subsequently grew into an extended narrative. The museum in the films is understood as an organism that essentially is alive. Some artworks become active players in helping Christopher Walken fight against the threat of zombies, while others have a more ambiguous role and rather help the zombies. The museum here is thought as a highly malleable, liquid institution; a living entity that constantly integrates developments of a larger socio-economical sphere.

The zombies are a perfect fictional vehicle to consider potential large-scale destabilization, chaos and collapse. Their attack is not a literal invasion but an allegorical construct. The zombies act as a metaphor that permits to reflect on dystopian nature of our culture at large. In the Museum suggests that a strong correlation exists between the events that unfold within a museum and a wider political context. The museum becomes a membrane that reacts to changes in the collective psycho-sphere. I would suggest that the museum itself is in essence a place for the living-dead – a place where the lines that separate the dead zone from the plane of the living must constantly be renegotiated. An artwork is an entity that has to be kept alive artificially, through inventorying, displaying, by coating it in an educational and historical discourse, etc. Otherwise it is threatened by real, actual death.

FS & TB: How did you select the artworks present in your museum?

MG: Some were chosen for the position they occupy in recent art history, others according to personal preferences. The whole narrative thus developed quite naturally. Sometimes artworks influenced the development of a scene (for example, the Robert Morris felt piece that traps a zombie), while at other times the room layout or mood of the scene dictated which artworks should be present to advance the storyline.

FS & TB: Why did you choose the figure of Christopher Walken?

MG: At the beginning, I intended to have the real Christopher Walken walk through a real museum. Because of the complexity and costs of such an endeavour, I decided to shoot the film instead with small action figures found on eBay that I customized. Christopher Walken is a famous A-list actor but he does not play the type of roles you would usually attribute to a Hollywood star. In many of his films, he embodies shadowy characters with highly ambiguous and self-destructive tendencies that often die a violent death. Most importantly, his screen persona never changes. He remains, in every film, ‘Christopher Walken’, a serenely hazardous and otherworldly entity. I think of him as a medium; a doorway into an unknown cultural twilight zone. In the films, he leads the viewer through the successive spaces of the museum, like a pop version of Dante, crossing the gates of the Inferno.

It is still my hope to include the real Christopher Walken in the third part of In the Museum. Christopher Walken will sink deeper into the collective cultural unconscious that dwells behind the walls of the museum, where the irrational and the uncanny prevail. If anyone can help me get in touch with him directly, that would be great!

Mathis Gasser was born 1984 in Zürich. Currently he lives and works in London. His work has previously been shown at La Salle de Bains in Lyon; and in Geneva at Hard Hat and Forde.

Kunsthalle Bern and Mathis Gasser would like to thank Cedric Eisenring, Chihiro Matsumura, Jill Gasparina, Hannes Gasser, Balthazar Lovay and Stéphane Ribordy of Ribordy Contemporary, Geneva.
Kunsthalle Bern thanks its partners Kultur Stadt Bern and Burgergemeinde Bern, as well as Kraft E.L.S.