Walter Pichler
I’d largely forgotten about Pichler until I watched this artist talk by Matthew Ronay where he spends much of it tracing the artists who influenced his practice including Pichler.
What draws me to Pichler is how insistently he worked on his own terms while being more adjacent to the usual artistic canon than anchored to it. I’m embedding the video here starting at the moment Ronay begins discussing Pichler, so you can hear Ronay’s account directly; he does a solid job describing Pichler’s process and what makes it distinct.
I love that Pichler spent his life creating artwork that represented something spiritual. That for each art piece Pichler would build a shrine specifically architected for the work in question.
Thats it. I like Pichler, his weird art, the process he undertook to create the art, how he created a compound of shrines to honor the art… so cool.
I expect it takes a lot of money to live like this. There are other artists like Anselm Kiefer who are building large compounds to house their art. I think as we shift from our current economy to whatever the singularity brings, if there are still humans, a lot of people who want to exist in the world will live life like this.