With Unser Mann (Our Man), Gottfried Bechtold presented an artwork for the postideological age, a reflection on the stances that politicians take on issues, their campaign positioning, as well as advertising and power strategies.

The piece introduced the artist as a man in the prime of his life, in suit and tie, trust-inspiring, forward-looking, with a friendly smile on his face. A statesman who can be trusted to solve the problems of his time. But twice a week the logo of a different campaigning political party was copied into the photo which otherwise stayed the same. This unfolded the symbolic space of an enucleated one-for-all politician, a quintessential figure that unfolds the same effect at any given point of the political spectrum – the point being not issues, but affective stimulation, not action, but representation, not serving the common good, but the hollow consummation of an emptiness masked as power. The artist became the exemplary enjoyer in this project, the virtual critic of an emblematic order committed to a “knowledge that does not know itself” (Jacques Lacan).