Art in a ga­ra­ge

Testo in italiano al seguente link

The visit to an underground parking garage is not exactly what one might see as a very stimulating cultural experience. Underground parking facilities respond above all to practical necessities, connected with the need to avoid long searches for a parking place in crowded cities. One approaches the barrier, lowers the car window, takes a ticket and drives until an empty space is found. Then the motorist follows the signs to the exit, and takes a deep breath, drawing fresh air into the lungs.
In the parking garage of the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), things take another turn. The facility also welcomes people without cars, and it has even become a recommended destination for art lovers. The garage, in fact, contains an impressive series of spray paint drawings by an artist from Zurich, a pioneer of street art by the name of Harald Naegeli (*1939). The graffiti, made from 1979 to 2019, without being commissioned by anyone and without official authorization, constitute the largest collection of spray works by Naegeli in Zurich. While at the start of the 1980s Naegeli was still the target of legal proceedings, after which he was sentenced to six months in jail for making unauthorized artworks in public spaces of various kinds, today he is an acclaimed artist whose work is valued, protected and conserved for the future. One recent example of this radical change of perspective regarding his creations is the renovation of the parking garage of ETHZ, implemented in 2021-22, where the conservation of the graffiti has been a particularly important aspect.
How is it possible that these works have survived for over 40 years, and are now part of the holdings of artistic assets of the Federal Institute of Technology?
The garage in question is located below the plaza of the main building of the school, on Rämistrasse, in the center of Zurich. It was built in 1972 by Charles Edouard Geisendorf to allow the school to host about 150 vehicles, organized on two levels. At that time in the city, over a span of a few years, many parking facilities were built to respond to needs connected with the growing number of private vehicles. The resulting architecture in concrete, in the spirit of economic functionalism widespread in the 1960s and 1970s, gradually changed the urban image of Zurich.
In 1977 a man from Zurich had the idea of defying the monotony of his city, «the bareness of the fair-face concrete, its omnipresence and brutality,¹ so alone in the darkness of the night, armed only with a can of spray paint, he transformed the empty surfaces and grayness of the city into canvases that resonated with his form of political protest. Instead of defacing walls with generic slogans and tags, however, he made slender stylized figures. His drawings depicted dancing mythical creatures, crouching imps, fish with paws and eyes resembling those of Argus, who jumped down the staircases or perched at the corners of buildings. Objects like street signs or mailboxes came to life, with long arms and legs. The figures were drawn using a few lines and points, mostly in black, and were sprayed onto any type of surface in a few seconds. Though they have never been counted, we can be certain that from 1977 to 1979 in the center of the city, especially on the concrete façades of public buildings, hundreds of these figures were made. Thanks to the speed with which he drew, the sprayer was able to work in very exposed public places, though he also retreated into sheltered contexts like garages or underpasses. The newspapers reported on a ghost, the «Sprayer of Zurich». The police received complaints of damage to many properties, and a reward of 3000 Swiss francs was offered for information leading to arrest. In June 1979 the artist was captured and then sentenced to six months in prison.

Draftsman and collagist

Behind the so-called «Sprayer of Zurich» was hidden no less than Harald Naegeli. Born in Zurich in 1939, from an early age he demonstrated a great talent for drawing, and towards the end of the 1950s he attended the School of Applied Arts of Zurich. He studied technical drawing, but his fascination with the Dada movement soon led him to work on images using the technique of collage. In the 1970s Naegeli replaced his glue and scissors with pencil and paper: turning to notebooks in small format – after having purchased 500 of them all at once – he carried them with him for over four years during his daily trips around the city. With just a few marks, he recorded his fleeting observations and took note of every type of sensory impression related to people, animals or landscapes, building that visual world that was to become the subject of his sprayed drawings. The countless sketches and notes have survived to the present day, unlike most of his graffiti, painted over or erased by the wind, weather and pollution. Luckily there are still many photographs, enabling us to see his works in their original locations.

Art doesn’t dwell in parlors

Unlike what we might expect, the most important source of documentation of this period of activity is not the result of the efforts of fans and admirers, but the Department of Criminal Investigation of Zurich, whose «collection» includes about 700 photographs taken in the period from 1977 to 1979. Every image, carefully catalogued and filed away, was made as evidence when a complaint was lodged. Advanced by 192 different plaintiffs, more than half the accusations were forwarded by the administrators of public buildings. Thirteen of them had to do with buildings of the Federal Institute of Technology, located in the university district, including the parking facility whose «damages» were documented in April 1979. Shortly after Naegeli’s arrest, in June 1979, the ETH had the graffiti on its façades removed, while the works made in the parking garage were left intact. Why?
In April 1979, two months before the identity of the «Sprayer of Zurich» was revealed, the first photography exhibition of his spray drawings was held in the city. At the Gaby Arrigo Gallery, Margrit Etter showed the photographs she had taken in the university district, accompanied by a psychological study she had written about the anonymous artist. When Harald Naegeli was apprehended in June 1979, Gaby Arrigo and Margrit Etter, together with others, impressed by the «artistic quality and the choice of site»² of the spray drawings, organized a petition calling for their conservation.
Over 4000 signatures were gathered in a few weeks. Arrigo then wrote a letter requesting that the graffiti be conserved, sending the missive to three pertinent institutional recipients: the municipality, the canton and the federal government. For more than a year and a half Arrigo remained in contact with the authorities, sending many letters urging those in charge to take a position regarding the petition, and to address the issue of the removal (or not) of the spray drawings. In December 1979 a reply finally arrived from the Director of the Federal Office of Buildings and Logistics, Prof. J.-W. Huber, who for the first time issued a statement regarding the spray drawings, reporting that after having received the petition in August, he had decided that «the approximately 50 spray drawings in the Rämihof parking garage [would be] left in place on a temporary basis»,³ emphasizing that a decision on how to proceed could be made only after the conclusion of the legal procedures against the artist. The drawings above ground had already been removed before the petition was able to reach the proper authorities, with an expenditure of 42’300 francs. The statement in question was published several months later in the Bulletin of the ETH.⁴ No documentation exists, however, as to whether the matter was newly discussed after the conclusion of the court case.
The next traces regarding the presence of the works by Naegeli dates back to 2002, when a student from Fribourg, conducting research on the «Sprayer of Zurich», found that in the underground parking facility the yellow signage had been done over, and that the spray drawings had not simply been covered, but repainted using black paint. The discovery was immediately communicated in a letter to the Department of Bauten und Betrieb, asking for an explanation of the effective position of the ETH regarding Naegeli’s work and the surprising «conservation» measures that had been implemented.
Peter Hoch, in charge of the project for the main ETH building, responded that he was aware of the works of Harald Naegeli in the parking garage, ever since he began to work at the school in 1988, and that he had intentionally left them in place: «The reason was not an order received from above, but a sign of appreciation for the artist on the part of experts, as reported in the press».⁵ Nevertheless, in the garage there had been repeated damage caused by water, which made it necessary to partially repaint the walls. Based on Hoch’s remarks, there had been clear instructions not to damage the sprayed images, but unfortunately this had not always been possible. During the last renovations, dating back to 1997 and 1999, a wall painter had retouched two figures without authorization; regarding this, Hoch himself recognized that «from the viewpoint of an art historian this was sacrilege», but he also emphasized that the maintenance of the building took priority, and that the conservation of the spray figures was secondary in importance as far as his department was concerned.
As often happens, again in this case the artist let the images take the place of words: after the ill-advised «conservation measures» of the wall painter, Harald Naegeli again brandished his spray can and applied five points of paint at the extremities of the rear fins and the leg of the figure that had been heedlessly altered. With additional lines, Naegeli then corrected the interference of the unknown workman, clearly identifiable due to the use of acrylic paint.

Inventory and restoration

After the discovery made by the student from Fribourg, 13 years passed before the spray drawings by Naegeli in the parking garage were finally documented in a complete manner by the school. The cause was the annexation, dating back to 2015, on the part of the university of its collection of cultural assets to the holdings of the library, producing a new inventory that would include all the works of art owned by the Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich. Approximately 40 graffiti works by Harald Naegeli existing in the parking garage were photographed, catalogued and published online. Agnese Quadri, of the Collections and Archives Department of the institute’s library, was in charge of the project. At the time, she was in contact with Naegeli and asked him about the title of the images in the parking garage. His reply, sent by email, was as follows: «Residents with recognized Swiss passport», referring to the referendum that would soon be organized by the SVP calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals. In that moment, finally, after 36 years, Naegeli’s «garage dwellers», involved in so many controversies, were officially acknowledged on a federal level.
In 2019 ETH commissioned Ruggero Tropeano to refurbish the parking garage, while conserving Naegeli’s graffiti. It was essential to comply with new fire prevention regulations, to reinforce the structure of the upper level and to repair the damage caused by rain, which had hampered the use of the facility as parking, and had also «washed away» some of the spray drawings. The Kunst am Bau commission of the school had formulated the clear objective in advance of «conserving and restoring the largest possible number of works of art, to the extent that this would be compatible with the project». An overview of the 37 remaining figures served as a guideline for the conservation, and demonstrated that most of the works on the lower level of the garage could remain unchanged. The ETH hired TH-Conservations GmbH to safeguard the works during the renovation. Some works had been hidden by the new technical infrastructures, such as the ventilation conduits, but they were left in place, permitting their «re-discovery» during subsequent refurbishing initiatives. Unfortunately most of the works on the upper level had to yield to measures of structural renovation; for this reason, ETH decided to experimentally conserve three of the seven works on the walls, in blocks of stucco-faced concrete. The conservator Tobias Hotz chose the «stacco» technique, a method utilized in 16th-century Florence to save frescoes damage caused by flooding. This was the first time this method had been applied to graffiti. In this complex process the pigments are removed from the wall together with the upper layer of plaster and applied to a new support. In this case, the thin layer of plaster has been applied to a layer of fiber-reinforced concrete with a thickness of five-to-ten cm, creating a transportable object. Unlike the graffiti remaining in the garage, these items are not part of the art inventory of the university, but are conserved in the holdings of the Bestände der Baukultur  ETH Zürich.
This collection contains about 700 objects, including components and furnishings, that had to be removed from the ETH buildings after refurbishing projects to comply with new requirements and regulations, though they are under protection as assets of historical value. The three salvaged spray drawings are now also visible online, provided with photographic documentation that illustrates their original spatial context. In 2022 they were granted on loan for display in the exhibition Graffiti im Museum?! at the Musée Visionnaire in Zurich. Thanks to the unusual presentation and the guided visits to the parking garage, an interesting debate has developed around the various ways of conserving this ephemeral artform.

An underground parking garage as a museum?

In conclusion, let’s go back to where it all began: the parking garage. After the renovation, 27 spray drawings have been conserved and profiled, with an inventory number. We might almost think that the garage is the underground Naegeli museum; certainly it is one of the few sites in which you can experience the gestural, physical art of Harald Naegeli, admiring the drawings that seem to move from the surface into space, occupying and inhabiting it. But this location is also much more: it tells the story of many people who have focused on the art with great dedication, without any sort of assignment and without seeking personal renown. This is the place of the draftsman, the sprayer and utopian Harald Naegeli, an ancient cave painter born at the end of the 1930s, whose style reminds us of the prehistoric paintings of 30’000 years ago. This place not only conserves the art, but also the spirit of resistance that drove Naegeli’s work, reminding us that true art always brings with it a piece of utopia, inspiring us to look beyond the visible.

1. H. Naegeli, Mein Revoltieren, mein Sprayen: Dokumentation von Fotos, Zeichnungen und Texten, Benteli, Bern 1979.

2. G. Arrigo, Petition: Die Kunst findet nicht im Saale statt, Archiv Harald Naegeli, Zürich 1979.

3. J.-W.Huber, G. Arrigo, Werke des Wand-Sprayers, in S. Wegmüller, Perception de l’art contemporain dans l’espace public suisse : les réactions aux œuvres du sprayer de Zurich, Harald Naegeli (1977-1984), Wegmüller, Murten 2002.

4. Nichts neues vom Sprayer, Bulletin der Eidgenössischen Technischen Hochschule Zürich, n. 153, Zürich 1980.

5. P. Hoch, S. Wegmüller, ETH Zürich, Hauptgebäude HG, Rämistrasse 101, 8001 Zürich Harald Nägeli Sprayfiguren, 27.03.2002, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, 2002.