Taking the Plunge: Sascha Pohle’s Brand of Vacation Marathon
When
work is piling up and the city seems crowded and hectic, then the sun-drenched photos on the glossy
pages of travel catalogues seem to offer a tempting promise of release. For the multi-tasker who spends
most of the day in front of a computer, a package tour to any sandy, waterside tourist destination beckons
like the beacon of a tropical oasis. While most people can only get away to the hotel of their choice
for a week or extended weekend, German artist
Sascha Pohle took a month to test
the waters not of one hotel vacation paradise, but over fifty, and he documented this process in an
inspired video work that will be shown in Berlin at the Sparwasser exhibition space this fall. Based
on the 1968 film classic
The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster, in which a
man attempts to swim home across a veritable waterway of neighboring suburban swimming pools, Pohle’s
video documents his series of brief, bee-line swims across fifty-two hotel pools on the Spanish vacation
island of Tenerife. The artist’s route was not determined by a homeward-bound itinerary, but by the
sequential listing of hotels (and the obligatory photo of their pool) in a Thomas Cook travel catalogue.
Sponsored by the travel company, the action took an entire month during the vacation pre-season - and
long hours of filming and nonchalant plunging.
In the travel brochure
the unusual shapes of the pools, ranging from kidney forms to naturalistic ponds punctuated by islands
and fountain-like plunge baths, glimmer in an intense, unfathomable blue. In Pohle’s version of
The
Swimmer, this exotic allure does not quite play out. One pool has not yet been filled with water,
others are completely unpopulated, and on some days the sky is a blanket of grey. But in every scene,
the undeterred swimmer clad in plain black trunks completes his single lap. Although a marvellous typology
of the island’s most extravagant and more humble pool architecture, the solitary, minute-long sequences
of the artist as swimmer impose a melancholy narrative over the documentary footage of a vacation getaway.
Like in his other work dealing with tourism, travel and, most recently, the phenomenon of celebrity
look-alike conferences, Pohle investigates the plight of the individual, somewhat adrift in the flood
of images and rituals of mainstream popular culture. While dipping into all the delights a sunny locale
can offer, Pohle’s rapid “consumption” of pools suggests a general cultural malaise. Nevertheless, the
tongue-and-cheek perseverance in the artist’s video helps us poke fun at the more extreme manifestations
of our pleasure-seeking follies.
Although Sascha Pohle does not have
a website, he can be found in Amsterdam, where he is a resident at the prestigious Rijksakademie.
Links:
www.sparwasserhq.de/Index/HTMLaug7/know1E.htmwww.rijksakademie.nl/uk_kn_resident_artists.htm
