• Issue
  • Jan 01, 2023

Inside Burger Collection: I don’t make art – to call what I do art is already a mistake!

Photo of HEIDI BUCHER‘s skinning process of the Herrenzimmer (gentlemen’s room) in her family home in Winterthur, 1978. Courtesy the Estate of Heidi Bucher.

Johannes Hoerning How should we think about Heidi Bucher’s art? We know from interviews that she rejected calling her work “art,” a familiar sentiment that returns to Duchamp and was loudly stylized by the postwar neo-avant-garde. We also know that she wrote a dictionary to introduce new words—usually hard to translate, with strong onomatopoetic qualities, such as Vermöbeln, Verquappeln, Entquappeln—to describe her practice, which is in itself a rejection of a conventional understanding of art practices. How would you situate Bucher’s Kunstbegriff (notion of art) and her negations?