The American who quit art to discover the odd side of Switzerland

Andrew Norman Wilson at home with American kitsch, and Swiss lore. Andrew Norman Wilson

Fame in the art world doesn’t necessarily lead to fortune, concluded Andrew Norman Wilson as he decided to quit contemporary art to make films instead. The American artist speaks to SWI swissinfo.ch about this career change and his enchantment with Swiss oddities. 

A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable that Andrew Norman Wilson, an American contemporary artist best known for his fascination with American pop culture kitsch would utter words that expressed an intense obsession with the bric-a-brac of Swiss culture.  

“It all started when I was attending a Swiss wrestling [schwingen] festival in 2023. I was there to speak with Samuel Giger, perhaps the greatest schwinger of all time,” says the artist whose most recent claim to fame was a 5,000-word essay about quitting the art world, published in the combative American cultural magazine The BafflerExternal link, that went viral in April last year.  

“I went there because I wanted him to play a part in my next movie.”

Samuel Giger? Swiss wrestling? Switzerland’s greatest schwinger? 

The reasons for Wilson’s attendance at a wrestling festival in Zurich, as well as the reason we are speaking over FaceTime before the premiere of his short film Silvesterchlausen at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), are intertwined.  

Since 2020, Switzerland has captured the artist’s attention in many ways, precipitating a sharp shift in his career trajectory. And Silvesterchlausen, in which we see fragments of the traditional new year festivities in the Swiss tradition stronghold of Appenzell, where the borders of Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Liechtenstein meet, is its latest iteration. 

American kitsch as contemporary art 

When we speak, Wilson is in Los Angeles. He is working on a music video that he’s bankrolled from his own funds with the slim prospect of securing precarious institutional funding. It has been a constant struggle throughout his whole career, much of it detailed in his poison-pen letter bidding adieu to the art world.  

Still, he tells me he is optimistic something can work out. In recent years Wilson has lent his talents to videos made for notable musicians, like the American Oneohtrix Point NeverExternal link, and he learned to speak as a punctilious commercial producer as much as an idiosyncratic artist thinking through the contradictions of his subjects. 

By his own admission, the essay in The Baffler changed his life. He now considers himself more of a filmmaker and less a contemporary artist. Yet he has been making experimental film for years.  

After an early work that doubled both as a document of Google’s underclass and of the mood of 2011 America as a whole (Workers Leaving the GoogleplexExternal link, a film that led to him being fired as Google contractor), Wilson became preoccupied by the American pop landscape’s cultural detritus. His works delve into pop culture and sub-culture icons, such as popstar Phil Collins, Baby SinclairExternal link dino-dolls, Hollywood Boulevard sci-fi impersonators, and even a disintegrating papier-mâché PikachuExternal link that spends its days in the sun on a high-rise balcony. 

His film In the Air Tonight, an urban legend about the Phil Collins hit song inducing an uncanny trip through 1980s LA, ended up in the prestigious Sundance Film Festival. 

“I was totally unprepared for the meetings I took with Amazon, Searchlight, and other studios. I’m not the son of Hollywood royalty, I thought I would never be able to access that world. After those meetings, I wrote a crypto heist film, which they told me was too expensive as a first project. But then I became preoccupied by another idea that I stumbled upon.”

A Swiss epiphany 

In 2020, while stuck in Switzerland in an artist’s residency at the height of the pandemic, Wilson was, like everybody, unable to leave the country. With a planned European tour on ice, he decided to take trips within the country including to Lake Brienz, just north of the Bernese Alps.

There he stumbled upon Jungfrau Park, the infamous amusement park designed by Swiss conspiracy theorist and writer Erich von Däniken, and on the other side of the lake, Ballenberg, an open-air museum of traditional Swiss history. 

As Wilson notes in our conversation, Ballenberg is more of an idyllic presentation of Swiss historical tableaux, whereas von Däniken’s park is an expression of a much more conspiratorial worldview: namely, that of ancient aliens to whom the writer ascribed the genesis of our modern civilisation.  

Erich von Däniken celebrating his 75th birthday in 2010. The Swiss author became a bestseller in 1968 with his book “Chariots of the Gods?”, that claimed that aliens were behind the great constructions of the ancient world. His theories were all debunked since then. Keystone/Karl-Heinz Hug

Finally, Wilson stumbled upon something he could relate to. “Right away I was just struck by how they both seemed like expressions of the same right-wing ideologies that I was obsessed with in America at the time,” Wilson says. “Ballenburg is TradCathExternal link (traditional catholic), offering a retreat into a simpler past, while von Däniken’s vision is clearly much closer to (far right movement) QAnonExternal link.”

The encounter inspired Wilson’s first foray into feature filmmaking. Interlaken, in reference to the touristic town, is scheduled to shoot with a star crew and a $2 million budget in 2025 or 2026.

“I knew that I wanted it to revel in the Swiss kitsch that I was drawn to. I wanted the movie to play with these two ideologies and how they relate to each other,” Wilson explains. “I’ve spent a lot of time [in Switzerland], so I hope it can be considered ‘Swiss’, but of course I’m also coming to Swiss culture through American mass culture, like Disney. And therefore, I approach it as an alien.” 

The allure of Silvesterchlausen 

It was for this reason that Wilson attended the Zurich Swiss wrestling festival this winter featuring Samuel Giger, hoping that the famous sportsman could play a major role in his film. “The movie’s still being developed so I can’t say for sure, but if it works out, I have a very good feeling about him being able to rise to the role I have in mind,” he says.  

“But while I was there, I stumbled upon this other subject. [In the middle of a bout], a bunch of men ran onto the stage in these strange costumes and started yodelling and dancing. I had no idea what was going on and had nobody to ask.” 

The scene was like a hallucination, he said. “For everybody else, this seemed to make some sense, but to me it was an insane rupture in what was otherwise a very macho spectacle. Remember, wrestling in Switzerland is not known as a cosmopolitan sport; it’s something closer to NASCAR in the United States. Then, when I met Giger the next day, he told me that this ritual – Silvesterchlausen – comes from his region, the Appenzell, and only usually occurs at New Year’s. My interest was piqued.”

Very quickly, he was obsessed with the ritual. He started to research and soon set about making a short film on one of the New Year’s celebrations, Silvesterchlausen. “I was drawn to [the performers’] extreme attention to craft. This tradition comes from the most conservative part of Switzerland,” he says.  

“These are men who work in farms and factories, and who spend years making and designing these costumes. And they only use them twice a year, unless they’re invited to a wrestling festival, which is a very rare occurrence. But the bonds between them, through this shared craft, can last decades.” 

“Silvesterchlausen is about an investment of time and labour,” he says. “The beauty of these very macho conservative men making these very ornate costumes. To me, that struck me immediately as a great recipe for a film of some kind.”

“Silvesterchlaeuse” (New Years Claus) get ready in Schwellbrunn, Switzerland, to offer their best wishes for the New Year (following the Julian calendar) to the farmers in the region. Keystone / Gian Ehrenzeller

The Swiss DNA

Wilson’s film is short, just 12 minutes-long, but unfolds like a warbling transmission from another dimension. It shows the ceremonies unfolding in fragments, sometimes filmed with infrared, sometimes in slow motion, and captured almost entirely in close-up shots that emphasise details and movement over an objective view.

Swiss artists and producers are taking note of this American artist committed to bringing an outsider’s view to Switzerland’s more eccentric and canton-specific cultural traditions. “Several people have said the same thing, such as, ‘I don’t look at Switzerland this way’,” he notes. Wilson tells of a Swiss acquaintance who said that his (Wilson’s) outsider outlook brought home how strange these Swiss customs might seem to non-locals.

But Wilson may not be such an outsider in Switzerland after all.

Last year my mom did a genetic test, and it came out that we are very German and Swiss in a way that we previously did not understand,” Wilson reveals. “I don’t know, maybe my attraction to these Swiss cultural expressions is in my DNA.”

Edited by Virginie Mangin & Eduardo Simantob/ac