Roman Signer :
Stiefel

The Swiss artist Roman Signer devised a kind of fountain for the fire-water pond in Kleingöpfritz. The piece is a temporal sculpture. It adopts a particular form for a specific duration, for a specified time span. Mounted on a pole in the middle of the pond are a swivel head, a tube and a black gumboot. The interesting detail here is a valve in the heel. When water is pumped into the shaft of the boot, it starts to move, and centrifugal force makes it rotate. The boot turns merrily in circles while water squirts out of a hole in the heel in a high arch. Regardless of whether raw materials like a rubber boot and water are an allusion to the fire fighters of Kleingöpfritz, who commissioned the artwork, Signer is being true to form as an artist with the piece. He employs simple items that are to be understood as having neither any elevated symbolic nor semantic significance. He explores their energies and their intrinsic elementary forces. The resulting time-sculptures are "events", the force of which first unfolds in Signer's method of arrangement in a temporal sequence. The artwork is then the entire process of change and so more than conventional form, volume and space. It is action and experience. The uniqueness of Roman Signer's unusual and exceptionally inventive artwork lies between the emergence of this activity and its passing.
(Brigitte Huck)

Assistance:
Erich Sidler, technical assistance
Bruno Rey, metalwork
Martin Haferl, statics