Home

Olaf Breuning: the supreme king of mondo retardo brilliance, producer—through a vast body of work that includes photos, videos, installations and live performance—of an iconographic visual language somewhere between absurdist drama and pop anthropology. And now the subject of a shiny new monograph recently published by Swiss upstarts J.R.P. Ringier.

It's called Home, after Breuning's recent film of the same name: a 32-minute miniature epic-in-fragments starring Brian Kertstetter, a seriously weird doofus with albino blue eyes, a thick head of red hair, and a low droning voice in which he discourses on the tragic effects of boredom, the escape from which leads him on a series of ludicrously stupid adventures. In a luxurious Las Vegas hotel room, he's so bored that he calls a hooker to entertain him. But even that's not enough; as the whore rides his cock, he smokes a cigarette and stares at the wall.

In another segment, Kertstetter, dressed like a homeboy, meets up with his peeps and goes for a nice refreshing drive through Pennsylvanian Amish country. When they come upon a nice young Amish lad peacefully making his way down the road, the homies pull over, hop out, and chase the suspendered bloke down. He's eventually captured, stripped and forced to run through the fields—ass-naked except for an E.T. mask on his head—while the posse follows close behind, hoisting hockey sticks in the air.

But what does it all mean?

Nothing. And that's what makes it worthwhile.

Flipping through the Home monograph, one sees instances of this "stupid" esthetic throughout. Comprised of photographs, installations, and film captures, as well as a series of short stories by Kertstetter documenting the "making of" many of Breuning's more well-known pieces (this comes as a pleasant substitution for the sort of artwank that's somehow mandatory for monographs), Home focuses on the last four years of the youngish artist's career.

Owing to the inherent limitations of the monograph format, it's the photographs that best capture the essence of Breuning's glib senseless sensibility. Most are arranged horizontally, in two-page spreads. Like an overgrown child, Breuning has a penchant for dressing up his human models in funny costumes and sticking them in uncanny situations from which they stare forward into the lens with inevitably blank expressions (when their faces aren't hidden behind masks). A row of Vikings in shiny black spandex (or is it leather?) stand in front of the ocean, holding up identical, varnished surfboards. The joke doesn't dawn on you until much later than it should. But what's the punchline?

Turn the page to find a row of black apes, their demonic red eyes glowing out of the darkness. Elsewhere, we see ghosts, skeletons, vampires, other less obvious freaks posed as bearded revolutionaries with machine guns—all denizens of Breuning's feral country (which looks a lot different from his native Switzerland).

Thanks in part to Kertstetter's straightforward accounts, which manage to be naturally funny, without having to rely on the sort of self-conscious irony favored by the McSweeney's set, we learn in Home that despite the stupid façade, Breuning himself isn't stupid. In fact, he's a cranky, virulent hater of stupidity. He doesn't want to escape his own hatred; in fact, his overactive imagination is inevitably filtered through it, churning out absurd subhuman monsters that stare us in the face, confronting us with the emptiness of their expression, which is the blankness of all expression. Without trying to say anything, Breuning's art reflects the shallowness and veiled lunacy of the everyday, and the ease with which it may be disrupted, if only the effort could be made.

—Travis Jeppesen