Heinrich Gartentor (b. 1965 in Schafmatt, Switzerland) began his series dedicated to desks in the mid 1990s. “Ziemlich normales Wuchern” was the first publicly exhibited work from the series. The image focuses on football, as well as on a football book project and an actual design by Heinrich Gartentor for a stadium in the city of Thun. Like an aerial view taken from a low height, one looks down onto a studio desk. A wooden board on which the viewer sees a laptop, plans and models for stadium design, notebooks, two editions of the magazine  “Stadionwelt,” the football cult book “Fever Pitch” by Nick Hornby, markers, foot ruler and pencils, all among a croissant, oranges in a net and a glass of coffee – the scene of a project in progress, status 8.3.2005.

The most conspicuous aspect of the perspective-distorted ends of the cardboard roll is that one realizes when looking at them that the image was not shot from a single vantage point. Such conscious “mistakes” disrupt the usual system. As with the other works in this series, this “studio desk” has been constructed on the computer out of as many as 200 individual shots. It is only through the use of image processing software that these excerpts are joined together, once again creating a collective setting. This image has no focus; rather, by means of its photographic strategy in which everything is shifted into the middle, “Ziemlich normales Wuchern” is a tableau of a political problem.

When Michel Foucault published his book, “The Order of Things,” in 1966, he, among other things, disarmed alleged logical thought as something dependent on a prevailing interpretation according to which things ostensibly could be ordered as a matter of course.

The attempt to plumb the depths of structural orders strikes a basic principal of this artistic project, as well as of Heinrich Gartentor as an artistic figure.

Excerpts from the novels, “Schafmatt” and “StartUp” are published on the internet page, www.gartentor.ch