Avant / Après

No mindset, method, or medium can fully account for the eclecticism of the characters that populate Peter Wächtler’s narrative studies. Scattered in all directions, these figures often assemble in gangs, series, or groups; like the objects and places they confront or inhabit, they materialize in ever-shifting forms. Whether cast in bronze, ceramic, clay, or papier-mâché, painted on celluloid, limestone, or wood, animated or live-action films, or an array of short stories, poems, and diary entries, these mutations suggest that the works might in fact stem from a multitude of elusive authors who appear and vanish at will.

What binds these characters into such a heterogeneous ensemble is a vague yet persistent sense of familiarity. They carry with them the specter of fables, fantasies, films, and popular stories they once animated—together with the stock emotions these tales produced—only to project them into our present reality. For us, they trigger a swamp of memories; for them, a genuine existential dilemma. When their very reason for being slips away, one question emerges: What was that, exactly? Issues of communication and meaning rush in to fill the void, as though the endless repetition of such stories sustained the illusion that no genuine meaning could ever be generated by them, or exchanged between them. The more they reflect upon this, the further they drift away.

Thus, when in the winter of 2016 a group of cheerful figures appeared in Chicago, sketched in bold lines across a series of knee-high plywood boxes, it quickly became apparent that they were trying to escape—painfully aware of being tasked with enacting yet another sentimental narrative. Icons of postwar English working-class subculture, the Teddy Boys had long embodied coolness through their distinctive style: drape coats, waistcoats, pocket combs, and greased-back quiffs, believing they had found in Edwardian aristocratic fashion a model for a captivating life which, if not lived, could at least be staged.

Although the late 1950s nearly marked the Teddy Boys’ disappearance, their spirit endured. It crossed the Atlantic to the United States, taking on local incarnations—Elvis, James Dean—before spreading worldwide, shaping the identity of countless generic narratives inspired by “postwar social crises,” such as West Side Story (a film that, ironically, recycles every cliché attached to the working classes). That spirit resurfaces in 2016, in cafés, bars, and bike shops populated by mustachioed rockabillies, engaged in the expected banter across a counter.

Sketched both outside and inside four boxes, Wächtler’s Teddy Boys strike poses in scenes reworked, sometimes half-forgotten, drawn from two films—West Side Story (1961) and Love Story (1970), both shameless in their use of class stereotypes and the fantasies of escape they generate. The boxes read like reels of deconstructed stills, presenting “greatest hits” in their most generic form: spying on the rival gang from the attic, the funeral, the kiss, the bed conversation, the medical visit. Yet the sudden appearance of everyday figures disguised as Teddy Boys—such as a doctor—suggests the inevitability of a larger system. Everything is Teddy Boy. An innocent, hyper-stylized detour on the road to self-realization dead-ends in indifference.

Surrounded on all sides, the Teddies seem overtaken by four looming bronze housing towers, relics of the 1950s, their sheer mass on the horizon recalling the difficulty of escaping modest origins.

Since then, the stylized overproduction of Teddy Boys has flooded both fiction and reality, and the cultural products that recycle them invariably reproduce the same behavior. West Side Story, for instance, gained an intellectual sheen thanks to the prestige of its director and composer. Presented as a film created by educated figures and aimed at a similar audience, it was received not only as a sentimental tale evoking compassion for the poor, but also as a critical tool offering them up to anthropological scrutiny. Wächtler’s boxes and their exhibition context likely mirror this very pattern: first reheated and revived by the attention and style of an artist, the fictional characters are then cooled by the chills of “contemporary art” and its exhibition spaces—before being finally frozen under the weight of critical analysis.

Luckily, these boxes are protected by a coating of exaggerated sentimentality that renders them resistant to institutional frost. They are not mere boxes, but toy chests—a container designed for the storage of feelings. Perhaps the Teddy Boys, unconsciously repeating the tidying chores of childhood, have rationalized their identities not only historically but also intimately, through a shared object once filled with stuffed animals. Overwrought though it may be, the chest—called in British English a chest (the torso) and in American English a trunk (the body’s core)—is named after the very part of the body that houses the heart. This inward return, the perpetual quest of Wächtler’s characters, here takes on the guise of noir fiction: in the bottom corner of one box, a teddy-bear-like figure peers into a cavernous container-building to spy on his “rivals,” echoing our own desire to lift the lid and take a look inside.

In Wächtler’s work, animals gaze metaphorically at their own navels while brooding over the past. Though they retain a tenuous link to the history of their animation, it has become a half-repressed memory. They can no longer be tied to any immediately recognizable cartoon lineage, yet they preserve the general look and the scars of bodies exhausted to the last drop. Among the most battered, Orso (2019), a bear dressed as a sailor, seems perpetually unsure whether he descends from Winnie, Yogi, Paddington, or perhaps a local dignitary from Berlin or California.

These animals form a kind of proletarian syndicate, their relation to labor, leisure, and representation fractured. Many have been doubly worn down—through the demands of animation and through the daily grind of human reality. Hunting dogs, before collapsing into swamps or leather folds (Untitled (dogs), 2015; Untitled, 2017), were first used to track humans by scent—an allegory that resonates uncannily with animation itself. The otter still serves today as an emblem for blue-collar workers. And others, skinned and stripped of their fur, appear resigned, while some hide away.

Moles are about to retreat into the seams of their armchairs, while a bat folds into itself in a gesture of apology and retreat—just vigorous enough to fulfill its last professional obligations. Here the etymology of both “animation” and “animals,” anima—to breathe life—appears at the root of such deflation. Yet—ah! there comes the doctor—artist, filmmaker, storyteller, all poised to revive them, to jolt them with the paddles for one final sentimental embrace.

From defeat to resistance, the distance is slight. Once a university mascot accompanying the local team to victory, the otter now embodies a form of opposition. Its costume no longer matches its gaze, which has dimmed, and it seems to ponder the rhetorical question printed on the back of its sweater from a prestigious university: Y? (“Why?”). Its spirit has recently returned to haunt a series of scaffolded stage walls, as in Auditorium (2024). Perfectly reinforced from behind, these walls display an expressive, almost confident exterior. Their surfaces are layered thickly, reminiscent of fur—or of a kitchen wall repainted by a tenant, covering all previous layers of paint, damp stains, dust, air pockets, wiring, outlets, and structural cracks accumulated over decades. Fingerprints overlay this texture, enhancing their resilience.

Against the vanity of an art world that prefers smoothness and seriousness—especially on walls—these childlike marks demystify the work, offering a sense of redemption both for the artist, this cultural mascot, and for the audience, prisoners of a system that necessarily infantilizes them.

The internal and external communication breakdowns of two hermit-like figures unfold (and collapse) in the silent films Untitled (clouds) (2018) and Untitled (Vampire) (2019). In the former, a digitally animated solitary dragon perches above a village planted on a vacant lot, devoid of other elements. It complains about being out of the loop on village gossip—unaware of the fall of the Thunderdome (the club? an empire?)—yet it still speaks the local coded language, asserting that “the dog is in the kennel” without understanding why “the sardines are on the table.”

The second film, shot in live-action, follows a vampire who, like the dragon, observes the city from afar and, despite his best efforts, cannot die. His monotonous days are spent sleeping in a crypt, conversing with a monk, and writing letters he knows will never reach their recipients. The impenetrable silence of these films reinforces their communicative blockage, as does the suppression of every gesture related to speech: messages to the dragon are encrypted, stories told to the monk are muted, the vampire’s letters never arrive, and a mouth is sealed with a kiss. Their paranoia reaches fever pitch. The dragon fears people will overhear him talking in his sleep and mock him, while the vampire suspects his doctor of having disclosed his precious leopard-print blanket to the entire village.

Yet in both films, the fourth wall is broken through aesthetic choices that provide escape routes. The “special effects” here are neither high-tech nor illusory; they are analog and superficial—closer to a backdrop. The live-action film does not hide its theatrical stiffness: the artist positions himself in the frame as if cast in the lead role, while the rest of the cast comprises friends whose sculptural rigidity is forgiven. The suspension of illusion and the presence of a diaphanous, even lacunary dramaturgy are recurrent in Wächtler’s practice—both in the rendering of his images and the patina and finishing of his sculptures, in the frank immediacy of his first-person texts, and in the very themes of vulnerability, codependency, and desire for acceptance that pervade his work without inhibition.

Wächtler’s creative process oscillates between two extremes: on one side, a radical artistic autonomy, independent of avant-garde contemporary art conventions, often met with suspicion; on the other, a refusal to abandon the audience or vanish into nothingness, instead invoking kitsch, cliché, and the banal while openly appealing to empathy.

Exhibitions of Wächtler’s work, where the multiple facets of his practice converge, make this process even more evident. Here, masks fall. Actors gather in a spirit of cooperation rather than camaraderie; burdened by their historical shadows and armed to face the future, with a self-control contradicted by gestures poised to explode, they include the audience in their dramaturgy. A volcanic eruption seems imminent; a storm threatens to break. Yet everyone is in place. Actors bow; the first rose is offered; and eventually, one collapses beneath a gigantic children’s mobile made of oversized cloud-shaped pens taunting the “blank page syndrome.” While dreams of escape orbit around an inexorable narrative pivot, an enunciator steps forward just below to determine what genuine meaning will be produced or exchanged.

— Matthew Hanson