All ego is lost to meaning

“As a painter, Arnold Schönberg was a one-hit wonder. You will find The Red Gaze from 1910 in a lot of modern art primers, despite the fact that it’s a pretty bad painting. (Should you feel in the mood to challenge that verdict: look at the shape of the eyes. They have been carefully drawn by an artist biting his tongue, and they carry no expression all. The superficial energy of the gaze lies solely in the make-up.) Why has this picture become a part of the wider canon? And not one of those that look more interesting to our eyes today, like the clumsy proto-Gustons and the hilarious proto-Condos? (Well, apart from the fact that our painting has come to look like the ghost of Andy Warhol?) . . .”

That’s only a teaser, if you want to read on you have to get issue 6 of Eartrip, a pdf mag on freely improvised and other adventurous musics edited by David Grundy. My article is not about Schönberg, but rather the visual art of two European musicians, Peter Brötzmann and Keith Rowe, explored mostly through what they have put in the gallery of their record covers. Do download, give it a read, then report back.

Thanks. I’ve lately been thinking much about the use of references, how they work or don’t, and if there’s an established way of reading them. Simply because I can’t help doing it myself, even if it doesn’t really interest me: still, you want to pretend you’re doing hard science onto a piece of contemporary art, then you have to sleuth out unconscious forebears and conscious references and write an ersatz art history around them. Is that kind of thing more rampant now than it has been? Since I have neither the authority nor the miles for blanket statements diagnosing trends, I am lucky to have stumbled across a Frieze article by Dan Fox, who thinks the fault is in the art, not in the way I read it. “Confusing the footnote with the essay,” he calls this bad habit: “Sociologists use the term ‘prostheses’ to describe how people use the symbolic value of the clothes they wear or items they own in order to demonstrate their cultural competence or literacy. In contemporary art, we can identify this in the referential turn—‘X work references Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of Dasein and the music of Donna Summer in order to . . .’ etc. As a strategy that has permeated the way much work is made and is signposted for interpretation, it has now entered its mannerist phase. Critical value gets transferred from the formal or conceptual functions of objects and images to the collection and arrangement of impeccably chosen cultural products, events and historical allusions. In many cases (though not all), the auratic value of a well-appointed suite of references creates a smokescreen of illusory scholarship and can falsely imply an historical lineage between the artist doing the referencing and the thing being referenced. It masks the fact that creatively little is being done such sources in the first place.”

I agree with most of that, except for the underlying value system. (And hey, I’m more aggressively highbrow than Fox, since I mention Renaissance hermeticism in my discussion of Rowe’s rich table of connotations, while Fox talks of a “mannerist phase”—these being two currents within the same intellectual movement.) In contrast I enjoyed myself, I had a field day trying to decode the Rowe paintings a little beyond the artist’s remarks published in interviews, and with reasonable success, I flatter myself. The central point here may be that the art doesn’t expect me to be able to read anything out of it, the connotations are in there not for purposes of communication, but because the artist feels that they should be in there. And when I put some effort in, I get the reward of discovering that all is in place for a reason, and I learn to trust the artist even where I’m clueless. Which means from then on I simply dare to enjoy without intellectual remorse. (Trust being a fundamental virtue in contemporary art.) The references don’t seem about establishing an “illusory scholarship,” but rather about the artist placing himself through thoughts and enthusiasms. Now excuse me while I quote Jeff Koons, who seems to have regularly recurring epiphanies in front of his own recent photoshop collage paintings: “When I look at the paintings and realize all the historical references, it’s as if, for a moment, all ego is lost to meaning.” To him, it’s about “the dialog of art,” and I think his approach works very well. While his new paintings are later work that is way past ambition, and while (despite the continuing myth of perfectionism and a workforce of dozens in the studio) the execution has mostly become rather sloppy, when Koons layers a doodle after Courbet’s Origin Of The World with the blow-up of a drawing that his own kid has done, then that is conceptually a beautiful move.

And then I think of Stop, Repair, Prepare, a smash hit from 2008 for Allora & Calzadilla, who destroy a grand piano (referencing Fluxus) by sawing a round hole into it (referencing Matta-Clark), preparing the strings (referencing Cage) and sticking a musician through the hole (referencing Andrea Neumann’s inside piano), who plays the “Ode to Joy”—well, that makes Beethoven part of the form of the work, so that’s not a reference, but since the music’s a readymade of course it references Duchamp, and the performance history of the music references Furtwängler’s Dilemma and the whole Erbauungskultur of the Nazis . . . Stop, Repair, Prepare is well crafted, rich with surface text, a pleasing arrangement of meanings behind historical probabilities and performative facts, there is the real-life allegory of the player pushing a piano around the gallery and some music everybody can hum to.

But what have they done to the references? The “Ode to Joy,” I learn from the catalog, was actually played in 1933 at the laying of the foundation stone of the Haus der Kunst in Munich, where official Nazi art would be shown during the Third Reich. That was also the place where Allora & Calzadilla’s piece was first realized, and at that exact spot the choice of music makes real and deep sense. But when the piece is exported to gallery spaces, that sense seems to vanish behind a smokescreen indeed: the artists’ “research” collected in the catalog tells me that “The Ode to Joy” was adopted as the National Anthem of Rhodesia, it served as a soundtrack to a popular japanese anime series, Pope Benedict likes it and so do the Maoist guerilla of Peru, it was played at the official bringing down of the Berlin wall and at the 1938 Reichsmusiktage for a pleased Adolf Hitler . . . it goes on and on, a bit much for a single work of art to handle. It’s often unfair to quote catalog essays, but here we go: Allora & Calzadilla “dismantle Beethoven’s ‘hymn to humanity.’” That’s a brave act. What worked so very well with the very concrete frame of reference at the original place of performance, now has become overblown holier-than-thou scattershot self-importance for easy consumption.

The other two major references don’t fare much better. The circular hole in the piano transforms it into a shell for the player, and the artists have even switched the piano pedals so that they show inwards and can still function. That is all so very useful (despite the Sisyphean note of the player having to push the grand around, it’s still useful for the purpose of performance) and it has nothing to do whatsoever with Matta-Clark ripping up the shells of our cocoons, except an exact quote of the form. Same with Cage: the piano is prepared to somehow distort the music, which is an evergreen through ages and cultures. That’s a most questionable act of having your cake and eating it: taking the most popular music in the world and delighting everybody with the fact that they will recognize it, then incorporating some token strange sounds so it all will appear like serious art. Which has of course nothing to do with experimental music, or music period. In fact I think it’s pretty offensive, pure exploitation of something that has come to signify eternal avant-garde. And the exploitation is what makes the piece so popular, even with the critics, despite the fact it has no more poetry than a table of contents. Oh wait, Roberta Smith says it has poetry.

If only it were really in homage to Andrea Neumann (hey, they’re all part of the Berlin scene, they should know each other). It would simply be called Innenklavier, they would stick her in it and she’d perform funny noises in off-spaces. That would be brilliant, even with the strings attached.

An obsession with innovation

Just a short postscript to my earlier post on Carl Hofer. I have found the kitchen painting I’d been looking for: Girl With Coffee Grinder from 1954. My memory for once hasn’t betrayed me, it’s a touching painting full of worldliness. Stylistically it is obvious that Hofer took his cue mostly from the late efforts of the French old masters of classical modernism, to try and loosen himself up a little. Contentwise, this is oh so literal, right down to the clock: Darn it we’re late already, coffee hour is 4pm sharp in this household. Ah, what is the silly girl dreaming about again.

If one considers the turf battle Hofer was involved in during these years, one might expect every single painting from him would read like a manifesto. He was busy fighting an “obsession with innovation that had taken on the form of a sickly hysteria serving nobody except the vain craving for recognition of the so-called avant-gardists.” (Thoughts On Abstract Art from that same year, 1954.) He viciously (in post-war Germany) equaled being part of the current art movements with blindly following “the party.” In an interview with a glossy, the 75-year old director of the Berlin Art Academy confessed, “When I found out how easy non-figurative painting was, I quickly lost interest in the genre,” which lead to quite a storm in the tea pot with several colleagues leaving the German Künstlerbund in protest. And Hofer backs it all up with a dreamy coffee grinder in a funny nouvelle vague hat, the gratuitous amount of her visible undergarment suggesting that he’s playing a sickly bourgeois and repressedly wanton Greuze to Picasso’s Fragonard. Which is a good thing for one single picture.

The first commercially released electric coffee grinder hit the German market two years later and was a smashing success right from the start.

Of human ambition

I don’t usually do hilarious, but this is irresistible. A Henry Moore book from 1973 called Energy In Space. If you’re not immediately sure what the above image does to you, let me read you the front flap: “All at once the beholder grasps, in a truly elemental way, the aims of one of the greatest artists of our century and becomes aware of those parallels and affinities which fuse the sculptures with their environment.” All at once, so quit brooding and immerse. See what strength the female figure gains (symbolized by the very determined block of a right forearm) from the mammary dome rising behind her. It mimicks a desert landscape, and immediately the parched skin of the sculpture begins to crack under the dry heat.

The premise of the book actually makes sense. Art in public space seldom gets to fuse with the sublime. See to the right the Moore I’ve grown up with (I took this recent image from wikimedia, I couldn’t find a historical one which shows where it reclined when I was little, it had a spot of grass to itself). Isn’t it sad how inevitably, humorlessly it is displayed now for one-way aesthetic consumption? Which of course works very well, she’s a pro, and she has aged in dignity, growing verdigris wrinkles—but she might as well sit in a cage. When instead she should have a coastline for a Recamier.

There is something I haven’t told you yet. “The photographs included in this volume are the fruits of several years of collaboration between Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe, Head of the Photography Department at the Royal College of Art in London.” Well. Several years of collaboration. Fruits. Hm, at least I guess I can say I had safely filed Moore away and might never have spent a thought on him again if it weren’t for these “photos.” I usually like Moore, because his sculpture engages the eye and mind in a way that makes traditional values of the medium come alive. When I look at the image to my left, I see the challenge of a problem of form. I become part sculptor myself and try to balance the figure over the cliff a little more comfortably. In contrast to the brutalism of, say, Serra and the school of rust, the scope of Moore’s sculpture seems so very human, and the ambition also seems human. At least I thought so . . .

Imagine the frustration eating up the 75-year old shared greatest artist of the century, mother of all art in public space with a reason for existence. He has strategically occupied every district in the world, mankind learns aesthetics through coping with his problems of form, recreation parks are defined by their ability to picturesquely backdrop a Moore. Still, he needs a rough pair of scissors to effectively fuse his works with nature. How sad must it be to be able to envision an artwork that’s on an equal footing with nature, to be able to deliver that work, and then to have to live with the fact that the best habitat it can hope for is a few shrubs on a trampled spot of green where the dogs do their business. Is it any wonder, then, that there is a secret desire he harbors in his cooling heart: to rape a lakeside with two oval shapeshifters in nazi dimensions, two giant golden needle eyes through which a rich man can drive his tanker truck over the dead body of the landscape?

Here’s the image at the heart of Energy In Space which tells it all. If it helps you read it: the work the artist pushes around is Two-Piece Knife-Edge. I think the central light must be in allusion to Moore’s atom pieces. Other than that, I give up.

The most representational monochrome abstractions in human history

The artist Rudolf Reiber (remember, he of the Caromboat) has now put everything he ever did or has heard rumored about him into a comprehensive website, as artists should today, because its plain boring when a name that comes up is not immediately exhaustible at a click of the mouse.

Anyway, Rudolf’s site is eminently visitable, and best of all he has his catalogs for grabs as free pdfs, so if you click Words and then Books on the left, you can download German Skies from 2010 and, should you read German or French, follow my instructions on how to approach the pieces step by step. After that, of course you will want to go to the distributor and purchase a physical copy, since the color plates have been tipped in by the artist’s shaky own hand. (If you do not read German or French, there is still Blast of Silence, the first book we did together.)

Above are German Skies in front of the studio before an extra sanding session. One can see at a glimpse that they’re the most representational monochrome abstractions in human history ever delivered to an artist’s doorstep . . .

Some degree of beauty

This is something special. A pietà from 1774 by Ignaz Günther in a chapel on the village graveyard of Nenningen in the Swabian countryside. You’re standing in the back of the small room a little to the right of center. It’s amazing how much the picture changes when you shuffle a few feet sideways. The postcard view is from dead center, more harmonious but also sort of undecided around where the figures grow out of the base. From where you now stand the construction lays bare, and the statics of the load that Mary has to bear become tangible (take the load off her, will you). This is the spot from where you can draw the nicest compositional diagram—there are four cavities: the two mouths, opened in pain past and present, Jesus’ gaping wound, and the hands barely holding each other. Together these four form a cross standing on its head. Some limbs of Jesus are sagging mightily, but part of his body seems to work at keeping upright, exploiting the support that rigor mortis offers and the magnetism of bodily affection. Again, shuffle sideways by a few feet and his left hand which rests in his mother’s in a sort of resigned trust becomes a claw frozen in a final cramp.

Wood is the material to strike this balance, rigid with a hint of flexibility, with a weightiness that seems in relation to the human body. The color mounting fits like a tight skin in a perfect shade of pale, and it’s not like in stone sculpture where a successful impression of something soft and vulnerable always is a virtuosic miracle against nature (and this is not at all meant as a nod to the dead boulder that is Michelangelo’s pièta), but somehow warm and human . . . read Michael Baxandall’s wonderful book on the German limewood sculptors of an earlier epoch to learn how humanism lay in their medium of choice already.

Jesus is worn down by exhaustion from insufferable pain and the exertion of saving our souls; Mary’s grief is dynamic, she has ergonomically followed his body’s contortions to always ease the suffering. Their opened mouths bring to mind that Lessing had published his Laocoön only a few years before, in 1766. You have heard this before: “There are passions and degrees of passion whose expression produces the most hideous contortions of the face, and throws the whole body into such unnatural positions as to destroy all the beautiful lines that mark it when in a state of greater repose. These passions the old artists either refrained altogether from representing, or softened into emotions which were capable of being expressed with some degree of beauty.” It’s highly improbable that Günther had read these words, their two worlds were far apart—the first German freelance writer in Berlin (thanks for the introduction of this form of drudgery, dude) and the leading sculptor of catholic Bavarian “rococo”. But they both were concerned with the same issues, and the sculptor clearly took a lot from classicism in his last years to deepen the emotional impact of his work (which is the opposite direction to the schematizing tendencies of high classicism).

Googling the chapel to verify that I didn’t dream it up, I see that it has suffered a prize-winning restoration three years ago and will now work as a distancing instrument between viewer and art. So read me as a voice from the past.

The season’s greetings

Dear stray reader. That’s it for the year, I’m tucked in under the Christmas tree trying to write a dozen or so little texts that must make at least an attempt at coherence, since they will be published in a grab-baggy modern art primer. Here at my place in the new year, expect a slapfight between Lon Chaney and Marina Abramović, a painting by Tim Eitel, some short-circuited thoughts on art referencing art, Keith Rowe’s canned cultural templates, scary German architecture of the Bismarck-Gothic, and the story of my unrequited love for the comics medium. Or maybe none of these. Have a jolly good time.

Nothing can shock you anymore

Karl Hofer is a painter who believes you just have to stand a human figure on a canvas to arrive at humanistic art. And that that’s the only way to do it. In his effort, he’s helped out, but often also hindered by the fact that he paints in a style which renders features simplified until they’re deindividualized. His calm gaze sometimes makes for a low-key tenderness which can be very moving. But it can also develop into a pretty goofy kind of deadpan.

Of course, Hofer did not invent the slight abstractedness of figure himself. He was rather mainstream in this respect, even if it is always stressed that he was a solitary on the German scene. He was handed down the mask-like face from Ensor through the Brücke painters, and gave it a touch of 1920s social caricature. While in Ensor the mask still had a clear function as the expression of an other self-estranged self, while in Picasso and early Kirchner it energized the figure through primeval forces, somewhere through the Brücke development a mask-like face became more like a batch of the recognizably modern painter, it was the done way to portray the human face, and it no longer held a deeper amount of psychology. 

I tell you this because, if you please, take a look at Hofer’s The Touch Of Death from 1945. This was between the carpet bombings and the Russians, and I’m not sure that I can see it the way the artist intended it, try as I might. Or what kind of comics did he read? There’s a lot of narrative, notice the still full glass of absinthe (ah! Degas, Picasso) vs. the toppled glass, the embrace of death (ah! Baldung Grien e.a.), admire the triangular construction of lines that the gazes describe on the picture plane, from the analytical narrator directed toward his friend, then up and hitting us straight in our safe off-space in front of the image from the skull’s empty sockets, still—what for can all this art-historically informed construction work be? if the players are instructed to act the yokel in mute histrionics.

We’re ahead of ourselves, though, let us go back to the time the Nazis took power. Like many a German artist who thought they were inventing a new and expressly Germanic art, Hofer was very surprised when he was classified degenerate, he thought it was all by mistake, even though he must have been aware that he had been vocal against the Third Reich. This meant from 1933 on he was barred from all exhibitions or public sales. Since he always had one or two patrons, he could continue working, and he wasn’t forced to restrict his subject matter, as e.g. Otto Dix had to, who was only allowed to paint landscapes for years. Still Hofer’s world grew very small indeed, and he’s one of the artists that are often described as staying and working in Germany during the Nazi regime in a kind of “inner emigration.” That’s a loaded term, which was used to defend those who had stayed and therefore secured their sinecures immediately after the war against those who later came back from the US or elsewhere and threw a fit because all profitable positions were already occupied and major talent wanting to come back to Germany was more or less stonewalled. Anyway, however you want to judge the term, Hofer was a near-perfect specimen of a painter in inner emigration. As mentioned above, he felt he and his art were deeply German, so much so that to him it was “a deadly thought” (quote) to consider leaving the country, although his situation was not bound to change for the better, and he had previous experience living abroad, in Rome and Paris, before the first war. What’s keeping him in Germany? His letters show a man who was increasingly loath to even leave his home: “I can no longer stand the bodily presence of those people,” he writes in 1943. By the end of the war, he doesn’t even accept invitations from friends.

Man In Ruins from 1937 is a painting that inevitably often gets read as a premonition of the bombings and destruction to follow, but of course that kind of voodoo isn’t necessary since Hofer had seen the ruins of an earlier war, and it feels more natural to relate the image to the state of his own soul. In a letter from December that year he writes of “the bleak loneliness and hopelessness which is the worst thing that can happen to man. The only preparation against this is to fully understand the abysmal horror in its greatness and its all-destroying power, and then nothing can shock you anymore.” These are sentences that can be easily translated into the deadpan of the painting’s protagonist. (By the way, reading his letters, Hofer seems to have been self-centered to the point where inner emigration probably meant a natural habitat.)

The picture that strikes me as the most emblematic work from a painter in so-called inner emigration and for the concept itself is The Record Player (literally translated simply: Girl with Record) from 1939, the year the war started. It has such touching awkwardness, such a desperate grasping after what may remain of civilization in the sorry staging of a bohemian tableau. Actually, I am not sure if that bohemian aspect was on the mind of the artist at all, I only can’t keep it from mine. Judging from the wall, we’re in simple surroundings, maybe a cellar where you can listen to forbidden music at volume without the neighbors overhearing you. A gramophone and records are on the table. And there’s the girl, in a blue underdress, her right shoulderstrap carefully slipped to appear lifelike, tired eyes, hair still damp after washing. She is holding a record, presenting it like something valuable. The label looks like it could be identified, so I ask Jonathan Ward from the wonderful blog Excavated Shellac what it is, and he says it is an Odeon, a German label that used this design with the gold semi-circle around the bottom half  from the 1920s to the late 1930s. By 1939 they would have been under strict Nazi control. Today an internet search after Odeons that look like the one in our painting throws up that the hands-down most popular recording artist on these is Richard Tauber, the Austrian Kammersänger who had emigrated in 1938 after the Anschluss and was persona non grata in Germany (because of that and of his Jewish ancestry). Would a viewer in 1939 read the record that way? I can’t promise you, but it stands to reason.

The record and the carefully bared breast, yes, they dream of Bohemia.

There is unfortunately another version painted two years later, and this time Hofer gets it all wrong. Everything allows a little more of the concrete: more room in a wider frame, more carefully fleshed-out face with eyes that annoyingly want to connect, more pout, too languid a pose, too firm a body. And, worst of all, I can’t read the record label. This painting has nothing going for it really except still a slight awkwardness.

Thankfully, things look up. Germany loses the war, Hofer helps reform a Berlin academy, becomes director in 1949. He bickers with the abstractionists. Or, both parties stick burning needles into screaming dolls of each other. 

In 1954, the year before his death, Hofer paints a girl with a record again. This time around, it seems like the topic does not really register with him, the painting is about circular forms, I guess, so the records come in handy. The artist had to be occupied mostly with questions of style, since this is really the first time that his paintings change. Hofer’s mature work had switched between the two closely related modes that the works shown above illustrate, sometimes a little more flat and somber, sometimes more rounded and anecdotal—but essentially from the 1920s to the 1940s he consistently and gracefully dulled down from hints of caricature to a resigned deadpan. Then suddenly, after the war, his work becomes directionless and very uneven, but open again for the times that he lives in. This girl looks so German 1950s it’s amazing—I know what her kitchen looks like (actually, there is another girl from the same period who I seem to remember grinds coffee in that kitchen, I’d show her if I could find an image, somebody out there, please? Edit: never mind, I found her). I watch the girl until I suspect she is solving the puzzle of how to open up the record, and her strength of forearm suggests that she will succeed.

Outside, they clear away the ruins, the happiest beings Hofer ever painted.

Beer under palm trees

I don’t remember anything. Which is okay, since this is a shout-out to a largely unknown painter.

We’re in Paris, I guess it’s 2004. We’ve done honest tourist work somewhere on the fringes of sightseeing, now we’re sitting in a café, relaxing. There’s a flyer on the table which says that exactly this afternoon the arrondissement we’re in will open its artist studios for anyone to visit. That’s great. Of course we don’t go for the art, we’re voyeurs who want to see how people live.

We get to see students’ dumps and garden houses hidden within city blocks where people have too much money and too much time. A maghrebian joint serves spice tea with the art. I have a vague recollection of walking into the particularly promising back entrance of a pretty ramshackle historicist building, wide stairs, plaster dripping from the vaults. We have to go all the way up, and there, behind an inconspicuous door that should lead to the attic, is paradise.

I mean, like I said, I don’t really remember this. Also you can’t separate the rooms from the fact that they’re in Paris, and no sane person should be able to afford them, but anyway, this must have been the most beautiful studio I’ve ever seen. Rather irregular, high windows following the roof slope to the back. A rather dark partition to the left (but then it’s getting night and we can see the city turn electric over the rooftops) where paintings are hung.

How were the paintings? Well, not great, but worthwhile. Figurative but with a twist to it that I can’t find a description of in my brain files. They looked rather like the work of a young man who’s just a little step away from hitting on something really good. So we were somewhat surprised when we met the artist himself, a very interesting looking seventyish man who still had the air of somebody with a motorcycle in his life. We didn’t really talk to him, because, well the art was not quite marvellous enough for the slow-burning ecstasy we felt at the fact of his existence. So we nicked a small catalog from 1976 and an invitation card from 1985, which is all he had to his name, and took our leave.

The internet doesn’t know much more about him than that old catalog. Werner Ritter, born 1933 in Basel, Switzerland, has a secure footnote in art history as one of the first generation of Swiss pop and a member of the Farnsburggruppe, a kind of smalltime secession that formed 1967 in his hometown (they have an archival website, in case you read German). By the mid-1970s, his style had arrived at something close to photo-realism filtered through a kind of heavy fuzz that seems informed by Gerhard Richter’s black and white work and today again looks pretty young, if not massively original.

The catalog (really just a brochure) is called Automobile, that’s German for cars, and it comes with a motto by writer Christoph Mangold, which roughly translated reads: “At home cars were parked even in the marmalade, under the pillow, in the fridge. The kids could not talk in complete sentences yet, but they already knew the names of the race drivers and the car brands.” There are only two color illustrations in here, but these seem to show a use of mauve and beige and pastel blue in these car pictures that chimes very well with the domestic motto. (Girl colors, as my own kid would have it, and which he would never use except to paint a present for his mother or some other girl. The artist is much freer.) I’ve selected a black-and-white image of an accident painting called Spalenring, though, which I much like because here real life has done its best to emulate an artistic translation of facts into aesthetic forms, and the painter just had to record life’s poetic license with the integrity of things in a realistic manner.

The only other evidence I carried from the studio was the invitation card from 1985 you see on top. I must admit, at first view I thought this was pretty gruesome stuff. But hey, the title of this is Beer Under Palm Trees, so it can’t be all bad. See how subtly these four folks trying to look purposefully businesslike are undermined (the blurry faces, the beer bottles on the floor), and how with very sparse means—just a few stray palm leaves and some girl-colored light on a shutter—their self-perception as extras from a Miami Vice episode is suggested . . . I think I do get what it’s about and why it needed to be painted, so it gives me pleasure.

I’ve found one newer image on the net. This is called Bunkoman and is from 2000 and looks like a transitory jumble of all kinds of motifs and styles (now I wonder why I seem to mention Picasso in almost every post here, but the old trickster seems clearly referenced through that). I think if I really strained I could read something allegorical into it, but frankly I don’t care for the thing, so I won’t. Now if only I could tell you what the 2004 paintings were like that we saw in the studio. Not like that, but they also were of people, not cars. And they were good enough to make us feel glad that here was a man who had his work cut out for him, who seemed to do his thing regardless of a lack of public recognition, and who stood in the most beautiful studio in the world and managed to make sense there and have deserved it all.

It says on the internet that now he’s back in Basel. That’s not something I would have wanted to know.

All stays in the family

I guess I can’t very well expect you to scroll through several generations of bourgeois ancestral back story for a work of art, which I would tell in the uninvolved mock-genealogist style best mastered by Balzac spreading boredom for a hundred pages before he cuts to the meat of his story—still, since Alexej Meschtschanow has answered my request for an image with the most unassuming piece I’ve ever seen from him (in Balzacian terms: the poor country cousin), I think we can’t avoid throwing a quick glance at its forebears if we want to understand what this family of fettered furniture stands for, or better, carries on its upholstered backs.

The forebear nearest to my heart (for sentimental reasons) is this club chair from 2004, from the second year of sculptural works in this mode, which has become a sort of trademark for Alexej. Here is a piece of furniture with much higher pretensions than the footstool above, one that I suspect would care whom it’d be seen with. Not that this lies completely within its own choosing, because it must live with—depending on how you judge the situation—a support to put its broken bones upright, or a structure of shackles to keep it in place. Of course it is both at the same time, and the balance varies from model to model, since Alexej builds an individual tubular steel support for each piece, subtly reacting on the character traits of the furniture it carries, until it’s like an externalized ornament determined to hold its own. Here, the front legs of the club chair are held in the firm grip of a steely echo of leather cuffs, and its tiny wheels dangle in the air helplessly. The white tubular steel frame with its hospital bed wheels and the very practical handle in the back overpower the club chair and force an added efficiency on it that, as added efficiency will do, puts us in a wistful mood (even if we welcome progress in real life).

What is remarkable about this chair and all the others, the buffet and the children’s bed, is that they all have their thing so tightly together. As a viewer you needn’t bring much, you needn’t know what it’s called or what the secret intention is; the art draws on your powers of empathy and proportionally rewards them. Because of their communication skills, some of these pieces have almost iconic potential, well, as long as all stays in the family. A family that still grows, and I for one do not tire of their growing numbers, since each is an utter individual.

So the artist has sent me the poor country cousin, which I guess needs some extra love, because people tend to overlook it. The photo above helps, it is taken roughly from the perspective of a small child just able to stand on its own feet and to whom every object still has an inherent monumentality. Also, to whom the fettered footstool has a droll face, with beady eyes and a mustachioed lower edge. This perspective we wouldn’t share as normal exhibition goers; our gaze from lofty elevation down to that humble piece of furniture would rather try to see something useful in it, despite of its art status. And succeed. (I see my kids brushing their teeth when I look at the work. Seems safe enough if too narrow for the both of them at once. Only, the material is not suited for bathroom tiles, you’d always have to place it on a mat or some such nuisance.) Also, the forms seem quite happy in their easy encounter: the tubular steel lovingly repeats the funny keyhole that adorns the top of the stool. Yes, I think this country cousin of our sadly optimized club chair seems to be a rather happy-go-lucky fellow, his supporting structure uplifting in all senses of the word. The simple and open relationship between the two borders on the symbiotic, improving chances of survival . . .

All of this plays so directly into my habit of reading artworks for their psychology (which of course is the correct approach) instead of asking what the hell they mean, that I almost might overlook the obvious fact that these objects are hybrid beings sawn together by some mad Frankensteinian genius in his sleepless nights, impotent monsters that carry their self-defeating functional enhancements on their sleeves for us to ponder. Which is one thing that we need from art: monsters, I think I said that before.

After Alexej had created such varied cast of characters, they stood around in galleries waiting to be assigned roles, and since 2006 this is what he has given them. His exhibitions have become quasi-narratives acted out by sculptures, like in the recent Feierabend show at Klemm’s in Berlin, where the lone chair, a tubular-steel Breuer descendant held matter-of-factly in almost balletic grip by its support, pores over the floor plan of the exhibition, masterminding the whole scene.

Again, pretending it’s all between the artwork and the viewer.

Our eyes above each other

So, following on the Magritte post somewhere upstream, this could be the second part of a new series called: artists that don’t speak to me at all, except they’ve done the one single piece which absolutely floors me, should floor anybody, and deserves top entry in the canon. And again, I remember slouching into a gallery room (this one in Bietigheim-Bissingen, if you really need to know), and being hit by the thing—most squarely against the eyeball not least because everything around from that same guy, Max Pechstein, was run-of-the-mill Brücke expressionism that could be categorized into its leanings to more idiosyncratic colleagues work by work (and I’m not exactly a sucker for German expressionism in the first place, most of it seems to have yellowed before its time, read: instantly).

There’s not a lot science I can do here really. Just register the love with which the indecision of the boy’s pose between defiance, or maybe just being cold, or maybe just having to squat has been rendered. And yes, his eyes are blank pits of the deepest deadest darkness, this is not just because I scanned a postcard. I didn’t even have a kid when I first met the painting, so the resonance was mostly with my own boyhood. I’m not sure how far out of Germany this really translates, but I played with houses like that that came down from my father, and all of the forms are related to a history that to me included the mysterious unspeakability of the Nazi past, but of course to Pechstein in 1916 they did not. Boy With Playthings this is called. They surround him like twelve dolors in almost military formation.

For some reason (mostly colorful), the sobriety, dignity, and all-around humanity of that little fellow (only three years old when he was painted, at least that was the age of the artist’s own son then), to me goes so very well with a late Picasso painting from 1969, sort of a self-portrait as a spoilt child with a rapier and flower as his own playthings . . . While the Pechstein is much greater art, these two offset each other’s charms so very well.

(I really don’t know what to do with verticals on this blog, they look so bad. I mean, what’s the idea anyway, why would anyone do verticals in the first place, it’s not like our eyes were set above each other, is it?)