Markmaking

Art of Two Germanys

Art of Two Germanys at the L.A. County Museum.

LACMA: exhibition catalog timeline

Previews and Reviews:

Christopher Knight, Culture Monster (LAT)

Eduard Beaucamp, Art Newspaper

Hanno Rauterberg, Die Zeit

Jordan Mejias, FAZ

Jori Finkel, N.Y. Times

Kate Bowen interviews Stephanie Barron, Deutsche Welle

Kerstin Zilm, Deutschlandradio

Marlis Schaum, Deutsche Welle

Suzanne Muchnic, L.A. Times

Ernst Wilhelm Nay at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt

Ernst Wilhelm Nay (1902-1968): late work on view at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt: "E. W. Nay: Bilder der 1960er Jahre."

Reviews: 

Volker Breidecker, Sueddeutsche

Sandra Danicke, FR

"Es sind Bilder von souveräner Schlichtheit und überwältigender Leuchtkraft, die es derzeit in der Schirn zu entdecken gilt."

Reference:

Yule Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject

Max Hastings, Retribution [Nemesis]: The Battle for Japan

Ian Buruma

[Manila] At night, Americans on the line were bemused to hear sounds of chanting and singing, shouts and laughter, as Japanese conducted final carouses. These were sometimes succeeded by grenade explosions, as soldiers killed either themselves or hapless Filipinos.... Twelve members of one family, the Rocha Beeches, were bayoneted and then burned alive, along with their nursemaid. A fifteen-year-old was raped in the street amid gunfire and screaming people. The Japanese responsible then rose and used his bayonet to open her body from groin to chest.

Peter R. Kann

The Japanese had started the war, he reminds us; they had prosecuted it cruelly and had refused to concede defeat when all rational hope was lost. Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the war party in Japan opposed surrender. Emperor Hirohito dithered until finally, in a radio address, he acknowledged that the war had evolved "not necessarily to Japan's advantage."

The revisionists who argue that Japan was ready to surrender before Hiroshima, Mr. Hastings writes, "are peddlers of fantasies." 

Evan Thomas

Sadism by the Japanese was not occasional but institutional. Prisoners of war and civilian internees were starved, bayoneted, beheaded, raped and, in some cases, vivisected.

The Japanese were careless even with the lives of their own troops. The Japanese Navy, unlike the American Navy, had no search and rescue for downed fliers, and so lost hundreds of experienced aviators. Militarists twisted the ancient samurai code of Bushido into a sick cult of death. The Japanese were supposed to wish for death over surrender, and as the war went on, the Americans accommodated them. After Japanese prisoners tried to sabotage American submarines, the subs stopped picking them up, and soon most United States ships refused to rescue Japanese in the water, except to pick up an occasional “intelligence sample.”

Andrew Roberts

With the majority of Japan's losses of two million dead crammed into the last few months of the war, Hastings believes that 'If the conflict had continued for even a few weeks longer, more people of all nations – especially Japan – would have lost their lives than perished at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.'

Without the atomic bombs there can be no doubt that the conflict would have continued for many more weeks and months.

Dan van der Vat

They were dropped, in ignorance of the effects of radiation, not only to avoid huge casualties in an invasion of Japan but also to forestall Soviet intervention in the Far East - which might not have happened had the Japanese surrendered after the first bomb. But they gave in a week too late, enabling Stalin to make his territorial grab.

Laurence Rees

It will be interesting to see the reaction to this book in Japan; especially since I have met a number of intellectuals there who insist that “Hiroshima was a war crime just like Auschwitz”. How will they respond to Hastings’s belief that “when America stood on the brink of absolute victory over a nation which had brought untold grief and misery upon Asia, why should not the enemy bear the burden of acknowledging his condition, and indeed his guilt”?

Jon Latimer

Of the invasion of Okinawa, Hastings notes that the Japanese reasoned that if the US could be made to pay dearly enough for winning a single offshore island, America's leaders would be put off attacking the main ones. "They were correct in their analysis, but utterly deluded about its implications."

Peretz on "refugee" "plight"

Martin Peretz dares to minimize a plight:

They all expected, anticipating an Arab victory by the invading armies, to come back and some hoped to kill their Jewish neighbors on their return. Whatever! As it happens, they found themselves in the great and neighborly Arab homeland of what they called "the one Arab nation," not as tens of other millions cast far away into a hostile environment. A crossing of maybe 25 miles into an abutting province where people speak the same tongue, practice the same religion and purport to be of one ethnic seed is not truly an exile. Forgive me, I am not being harsh.

Now, it is a fact that the Palestinians were not over time truly made welcome. This shows something of the sham of the one Arab nation. The sham of the fraternity of their Arab brothers. But the Palestinians--many thinking themselves South Syrians, others Jordanians, and still others in some way Egyptians--were not exactly thankful guests. In Iraq, they aligned themselves with the tyrant. In Jordan, they stirred up a revolution that brought "Black September" on their heads. In Kuwait, they cheered when Saddam invaded. In Lebanon or, to be more precise, in southern Lebanon they set up a brutal mini-state run by Yassir Arafat and his minions that over-lorded their hosts. The Saudis were canny: they did not allow them in in the first place.

Sixty years on the international dole, with additional cash from the always so-loving Scandinavians, has actually castrated them.

Biennale gets Swedish Approval

Eurotopics conveys Jelena Zetterström's appreciation of the present Berlin Biennale:

This time the Berlin-Biennale was neither a big thematic event nor did it have a theoretical superstructure. And it wasn't about the top 100 in contemporary art, either. The Biennale presents itself as a story with many more or less loose plots. It's about Berlin and Europe in the past and present... about personal crises, collective memories and the individual lives of artists. The exhibition stretches along Auguststrasse in what was once East Berlin. It begins at a church and ends at a cemetery. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this street has earned itself a reputation with the city's art scene, but its symbolic value has its roots in the times before the Second World War when a large percentage of the city's Jewish population lived here.

Artforum and the 1980s

The 1980s are still rather foreign territory for art history. (Not for long, I know.) But Artforum makes a great contribution with their special issues. Peter Halley, interviewed by Dan Cameron:

It's interesting, because the '8os were really three different periods: 1980 to 1983 was dominated by the recession and by the emergence of new European painting and neo-expressionism. Then you had the mid-'80s, in which the robust economic recovery spurred the emergence of neo-Conceptualism--which included artists who were showing for the first time, Koons, myself, et cetera, but also marked the first widespread acceptance of artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, who were first shown around 1980. Then you had the end of the '80s. After about '88, the economy was less good, the AIDS crisis emerged, and a more direct form of Conceptualism emerged, which defined itself in terms of a critical opposition.

Yve-Alain Bois in a roundtable on the idea of the death of painting:

The odd thing is that very few people read my essay as a plea for painting-or, at least, as an affirmation that it was at best naive to bury it, since it was not yet a corpse. Some readers saw it as a defense of the artists in the show, such as Halley or Taaffe, even though I called them "manic mourners," a pathological condition that is not particularly enviable (at least in the sense given to it by Melanie Klein). Others thought that I, too, was claiming that "painting was dead." Basically, the argument I was making is very similar to that of Thierry: The death of painting has been on order since Manet, and the task of every modern artist is to try to achieve it. That is what modernism as I know it is all about. This might, actually, bring in another issue, which is not the death but the abortion of so-called postmodernism: Not a single argument has ever convinced me that such a thing actually exists.

Scott Rothkopf on Thomas Lawson (along with architects, poets and Robert Pincus-Witten):

Spurned by the critical camps to both his left and right, Lawson's shrewd position lost ground as the '80s progressed, and his insights are now largely overlooked or remembered as an isolated anomaly rather than as evidence of a sophisticated and pervasive aesthetic theory. Yet in light of recent explorations of the photographic image in the paintings of Luc Tuymans, Thomas Eggerer, and Ulrich Lamsfuss (not to mention the belated recognition of an antecedent such as Gerhard Richter), it's high time for a reappraisal. Today Lawson's writing of the early '80s burns with a kind of urgency no doubt fueled by the friction between his will to paint and his acute sensitivity to the pitfalls inherent in that practice.

ISP Art

Howard Singerman's look over the history of the Whitney Independent Study Program:

The ISP is more international and ethnically diverse than it was in its early years, and as Foster notes, it has "expanded in the academic world as well." But there is a sense in which the program's environs are far more tightly bound. Many of its visiting artists have been coming for decades, since the program's first years: Rainer, Vito Acconci, and Haacke. A number are the program's own graduates: Bordowitz, Green, Holzer, Mark Dion, and Andrea Fraser (all of whom make work that foregrounds the situation of language in the pedagogical scene and that looks skeptically on the voices and texts of authority). The program has arguably grown more insular, more insistent in its focus on what Bordowitz describes as the "general problem of an engaged, socially relevant practice."

In its current incarnation, the ISP's closest ties in the city are not to Chelsea but to Columbia, Cooper Union, NYU, and the Graduate Center. "What gives the Whitney its strength is the way that it addresses the idea of an intellectual community," says Kelly, and "it has shaped an intellectual community" that draws its members from those campuses: Jonathan Crary, Rosalyn Deutsche, David Harvey, Chantal Mouffe, Andrew Ross, Gayatri Spivak, and Anthony Vidler are all regular visitors. Former participants Kwon, Alexander Alberro, and Jennifer Gonzalez are also regular seminar leaders, and one could argue that in the past decade or so it has been critical-studies alumni such as these, along with Baker, Pamela M. Lee, Molesworth, Frazer Ward, and others, who have been the program's most important representatives, and the most characteristic. The New York the ISP situates itself in now is a city mapped and theorized on its syllabi by post-colonial and globalization studies. And the art world and the questions of recent art history that Clark and Foster debate are the objects of an exceptionally well-articulated body of theory on the effectivity of cultural practice. It's not at all coincidental that Alberro, Kwon, Lee, and other ISP historians have been among the most important voices in the project of historicizing and problematizing--or as Clark puts it, honoring and representing--the art of the '60s and '70s, and setting at a distance the moment in which the program emerged.

The Artfacts.net Art Ranking

As determined by the receipt of thousands of little postcards, Artfacts.net publishes the Artist Ranking:

The basis of the A.R thinking is the so-called economy of attention (after a book from Georg Franck). Franck says that attention (fame) in the cultural world is an economy that works with the same mechanisms as capitalism.

Capitalist, or economic, behaviour is based on property, lending money and charging interest. For Franck, the curator (e.g. the museum director or the gallery owner) acts as a financial investor. The curator/investor lends their property (their exhibition space and their fame) to an artist from whom they expect a return on their investment in the form of more attention (reputation, fame etc).

Therefore, the relationship between gallery owner and artist relates to that between investor and entrepreneur. The investor puts his money into companies from which he expects to gain rewards. This is always a mixed batch, where a few succeed and pay for the misinvestment in the others.

Getty acquires Long Beach video archive

I'll make an exception to the general rule against news-based posts for this:

The Getty has acquired an important video art archive spanning three decades of innovation in this modern medium from the Long Beach Museum of Art and the City of Long Beach. In partnership with the Long Beach Museum of Art, the works will be transferred to the Research Library at the Getty Research Institute (GRI), where they will be preserved and made accessible to researchers for study and presented in public and scholarly programming. With this addition, the GRI will have one of the largest institutional collections of video art in the world, and the most extensive holding of works produced in Southern California.

Rauch, Leipzig & Bourgeoisie

It's not just Angela Merkel. The former East Germany is, contra Schönbohm's "proletariarization" thesis, the new home of conservative bourgeois values on all fronts. As Arthur Lubow in the NY Times reports on the heavily hyped New Leipzig School, being an artist in Leipzig is all about waking up early, working hard all day, then going home to the wife and kids.

Rauch's ramrod-straight posture and the unwavering gaze of his pale blue, almond-shaped eyes give him the appearance of a Prussian soldier. "He is an art soldier," Sighard Gille says. "He has a secret love of the military. You can see it in the painting." Rauch's self-discipline is renowned. He works every weekday from 9 in the morning until 6 at night, with a midday break to prepare lunch for his wife, the painter Rosa Loy, and their 15-year-old son. Taking after Rauch, the young Leipzig painters all pride themselves on their orderly work habits, which they contrast with the dissolute lives led by students in West German art academies. "Being an artist is much more important in Düsseldorf than the art itself," Tim Eitel says. "The old clichés of painting at night with a bottle of wine, taking drugs and being excessive - a lot of people in Düsseldorf think this is what it means to be an artist." In Leipzig, being a painter means working slowly and deliberately, like Rauch, to produce 15 or 20 canvases a year.

Bader on Lichtenstein

In the Oxford Art Journal, Graham Bader on Roy Lichtenstein's Look, Mickey:

It is precisely this tension – between heightened sensation and absolute numbness, bodily exuberance and the deadening of sensory experience – that animates Look Mickey. The painting, finally, is about the movement between just these terms, about the ease with which Marcuse's vision would be transformed into Disney's (or the expansive Narcissus of Marcuse and Brown overwhelmed by the repressed figure of Freud's 1914 essay).

John Cage on Mao

John Cage, in the early 1970s, comments on Mao Zedong, member of the elite club of romantic guerrilla leaders responsible for deaths numbering in the seven figures among his own people in peacetime:

Source: John Cage, "Reflections of a Progressive Composer on a Damaged Society," [1974] October 82 (Autumn 1997).

Emphasis added.

78 "Mao found a solution, so that the people are not divided as they formerly were between the rich and the poor, but they are working together to solve the problems as they see them."

79: [t]he experience of the family has been extended through Mao's influence so that in a sense the nation itself is a family. And I find this very beautiful."

page 81: But I think that when we have more information about the revolution in China that we will see that many individuals in China, other than Mao, were able to make contributions; in other word, much of the activity was original.

page 88: Instead of this struggle for separatist power, we should recognize as Mao did in China that there was a serious problem that required an intelligent solution. Well, he said that it involved power, but the expression of power that I think was the most effective in China on Mao's part was the long retreat which is remarkably like something that Martin Luther King might have proposed or Gandhi.

Jörg Immendorff at the New National Gallery

There is a Jörg Immendorff retrospective on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie (it seems to bear some relationship to the 2004 Philadelphia retrospective). Much of the show is painfully ugly painting from recent years. However, three of the galleries include work from the 1960s when the artist was really struggling with how to reconcile art and politics, art and society, &c. Those galleries are interesting; the others are not.

Also disappointing is that the show is only about painting-and-sculpture, when the drawings and photographs included in the catalog are often quite helpful for understanding the purpose of the art. All in all, it is worth briefly visiting the exhibition, spending most time in the rooms with the earlier work, then spending more time with the catalog.

Perhaps surprising for a foreign observer, Immendorff's recent arrest with seven prostitutes and 21.6 grams -- 21.6 grams -- of cocaine, much less his longtime Maoism, posed no apparent problems for federal Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder who spoke at the exhibition's opening and had earlier commissioned Immendorff to paint his official portrait.

Berlin links

1. Official exhibition information
2. Marcus Woeller, "Die Kunst als Grundnahrungsmittel" TAZ 26-09-05
3. Photos Der Spiegel, 23-09-05
4. Art in Berlin 22-09-05
5. Deutsche Welle 10-10-05
6. State press release: Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder speaks at the opening of the exhibition 30-09-05
7. Catalog Kunstbuchhandlung.de

Philadelphia links

1. Interview with Robert Storr, Art in America 06/07.05
2. Miriam Seidel review, Art in America 01.05
3. James Rosenthal review, inLiquid.com 03.04
4. Philadelphia Weekly 04-02-04
5. Swarthmore Phoenix 05-02-04
6. Artnet.com 08-03-04
7. Catalog artbook.com

Victims?

Is it at all possible that Germans were in any way victims during World War II? Reviews of the recent literature:

• Mark M. Anderson in The Nation, 29-09-05
• Noah Isenberg in Bookforum, summer 05

Family Trees of Modern Art

Stammbäume der Kunst. Zur Genealogie der Avantgarde, by Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, is a new book about family trees (genealogies, pedigrees, bloodlines) of modern art.

From the reviews: Diagrams can be simply an instrument of scientific work, or something between instrument, document and artwork. Not for nothing did Charles Rufus Morey's diagrams of the development of medieval art impress his student, Alfred Barr. Later, George Maciunas's mixture of pedantry, mania, and expansionary impulse was as impressive as it was irritating.

1. Stammbäume der Kunst (Akademie Verlag)
2. Reviews: Petra Kipphoff, Die Zeit, 25.08.05; Horst Bredekamp, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, 31.08.05
3. Also by Schmidt-Burkhardt, Maciunas' Learning Machines: From Art History To A Chronology Of Fluxus (Artbook.com, Amazon.com)
4. Gerhard Dirmoser's bibliography on mapping and diagrams

Interviews with Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Buchloh is a provocative interviewer for any artist. The classic interviews with Gabriel Orozco, Martha Rosler and Gerhard Richter interview is not available online. The Julian Schnabel interview is still in the works, I'm told.

1. "Who's Afraid of JK?" Buchloh and Isabelle Graw interview John Knight, Texte zur Kunst (09.05)
2. "An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn," October (summer 2005)

Also: interview with DB about Richter, Eight Grey. And Video Data Bank, 1986.

Maybe My Invitation Was Sent to the Wrong Address

Relational Aesthetics, a term from Nicolas Bourriaud, is a way of giving already-existing social structures a patina of transgressive radicality via terminology. It is extremely zeitgeisty. It is a good term to throw at non-initiates who struggle to understand what this kind of art is all about. See especially the article by Claire Bishop, who finds the liberatory- emancipatory- utopian- redemptive- promesse-de-bonheur capacities of the art to be lacking.

Primary sources:

• Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du Reel)
• Interview of Miroslav Kulchitsky with Nicolas Bourriaud (03.98)
• "Public Relations," Bennet Simpson interviews Nicolas Bourriaud, Artforum (05.01)
• "Nicolas Bourriaud and Karen Moss," (10.02)
• Glossary, from Relational Aesthetics via gairspace.co.uk

Secondary Sources:

• "Relational Art: Is it an Ism?" (07.04)
• Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October (fall 04)
• Susan Kelly, "The Transversal and the Invisible: How do you really make a work of art that is not a work of art?" (01.05)
• David Wilson McLeish, "And for the art snobs: relational aesthetics, please" (16.05.05)
• Anna Dezeuze, "Transfiguration of the Commonplace" (spring 05)
• "Traffic Control: Joe Scanlan on Social Space and Relational Aesthetics" Artforum (summer 05)
• Walead Beshty, "Neo-Avantgarde and Service Industry: Notes on the Brave New World of Relational Aesthetics," Texte zur Kunst (09.05)

Blogs and websites:

• Jean Burgess, "Relational aesthetics" (03.05)
• Rob Myers, "Relational Aesthetics Considered Auratic," 16.08.05
• "Happy to Meet You: An Introduction to Relational Art"

Open Systems (Tate)

Why the c. 1970 shift from art about art, and art about art about art, to art about "reality," "the world," or "life," no matter what those terms are variously and contradictorily held to mean? I hope that the Tate exhibition will shed light. See also the symposium to showcase  up-and-coming young ideas on the topic.

Exhibition: Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970 (Tate Modern, UK)

The featured artists sought to connect with the increasingly urgent political developments of the decade and make their work more responsive to the world around them. Building on the structures of Minimalism and Conceptualism, they reacted against art's traditional focus on the object by adopting experimental aesthetic 'systems...

Graduate Symposium (abbreviated list):

Luke Skrebowski: Jack Burnham
Jonathan Bass: Robert Smithson
Irene Small: Hélio Oiticica
Maja and Reuben Fowkes: Croatia
Sophie Richard: Sculpture
Seth Kim-Cohen: Open Systems
Anna Lovatt: Serial Art
Paula Feldman: the Yellow Pages
Rachel Churner: Hans Haacke
Nicholas Cullinan: Arte Povera
Gloria Hwang Sutton: VALIE EXPORT
William Kaizen: Dan Graham, Radical Software and Gregory Bateson
Kathryn Chiong: Strategic Art Systems

Gerhard Richter, Cultural Conservative?

Gerhard Richter is not boosting his radical cred one bit -- Susanne Beyer and Ulrike Knoefel interview Richter for Der Spiegel.

Richter: Warum sollten die per se klüger sein als andere Kunstinteressierte? Sie haben nur das schwierige Los, sofort formulieren zu müssen, was die Bilder meinen. Da kommt es dann zu Behauptungen wie der, dass es sich bei meinen Gemälden um Malerei Über Malerei handelt, dass das also gemalte Konzeptkunst sei, distanziertes Virtuosentum, Verweigerung, Verschleierung und was weiß ich.
Why should [the critics] be cleverer, per se, than others interested in art? They only have the difficult lot of needing to immediately formulate what the pictures mean. Then you get assertions such as, for instance, that my work is painting about painting, i.e. painted Conceptual Art, distanced virtuosity, denial, blur/deception/veiling [Verschleierung] and whatnot.

SPIEGEL: Das sind Begriffe, mit denen Ihre Kunst seit 30, 40 Jahren beschrieben wird. Alles falsch?
Those are concepts with which your art has been described for 30 or 40 years. All false?

Richter: Ja. Denn die Sache ist viel einfacher, meine Bilder sind viel mitteilsamer als die der meisten meiner Kollegen. Ich verschleiere doch kaum etwas. Im Gegenteil: Mir ist das fast peinlich, dass ich mich, mein Leben in den Bildern so ablesbar zeige.
Yes. The thing is much simpler; my pictures are much more communicative/expansive than those of most of my colleagues. I obscure/disguise/blur scarcely anything. On the contrary: for me it's almost painful, that my life is so legibly displayed in my paintings.

* * *

Richter: Diese Art der Berichterstattung führt von den Bildern weg, da wird ein ganz anderer Bedarf gedeckt, der nach Klatsch. Ich kann das auch verstehen. Wenn ich beim Zahnarzt in der "Bunten" blättere, unterhält mich Klatsch ja auch. Zum Werkverständnis können biografische Details nur bedingt beitragen, und natürlich muss man erst einmal das Bild kennen. Man glaubt halt gern, dass man Francis Bacons Bilder deshalb so viel besser versteht, weil man erfahren hat, dass er schwul ist.
This type of reportage leads away from the pictures; it supplies another need, that for gossip. I can understand that too. If I'm at the dentist leafing through the tabloids, gossip entertains me too. For understanding the work, biographical details can only conditionally help, and naturally must one first be familiar with the picture. One would gladly hold to the belief [?] that one understands Francis Bacon's paintings so much better, because one has found out that he is gay.*

* * *

SPIEGEL: War das schwierige Verhältnis zu Ihren Eltern ein Grund dafür, 1961 in Ost-Berlin in die S-Bahn zu steigen und in den Westen zu fliehen?
Was that difficult relationship with your parents a reason for getting on the S-Bahn in East Berlin in 1961 and fleeing to the West?

Richter: Nein, mit den Eltern hatte das nichts zu tun, dann schon eher mit den Schwiegereltern, die bereits im Westen wohnten und so den Ãœbergang etwas erleichterten. Aber das Abbrechen von allen vertrauten Bindungen, freundschaftlichen, beruflichen, das war für mich ausgesprochen hart. Und es gab nur einen Grund dafür: diesen alles erstickenden Staat.
No, that had nothing to do with the parents, rather with the parents-in-law, who already lived in the West and so eased the transition somewhat. But the breaking off of all intimate relationships -- friendship, professional -- that was a pronounced hardship. And there was only one reason for that: this all-asphyxiating State.

* * *

SPIEGEL: Im Westen wurden Sie dann 1966 zum ersten Mal selbst Vater. Bringt einen diese Erfahrung den eigenen Eltern näher?
In the West in 1966 you became a father for the first time yourself. Did this bring you closer to the experience of your own parents[??]?

Richter: Das kann ich gar nicht sagen. In den späten sechziger Jahren hatte doch die ganze Gesellschaft wenig Sinn für Familie und für Väter schon gar keinen. Zurückblickend empfinde ich das Gehabe der Progressiven in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren nur als lächerlich; trunken von haltlosen Illusionen über Wohlstand und Gesellschafts-veränderung war man doch mit der Betonung des Antiautoritären nur fahrlässig. Man hat die Kinder sich selbst überlassen. Ich war nicht viel besser, hatte nur mehr Skrupel. In meinem viel später gemalten Bild meiner Tochter Betty, die ihr Gesicht abwendet, mag etwas von der Trauer darüber anklingen.
That I can't say at all. In the late '60s the whole society had little sense for family and for fathers, none at all. Looking back, I feel the affectations of the progressives in the '60s and '70s to be only laughable;  drunk on untenable illusions about affluence and social change, the emphasis of the anti-authoritarians was just negligent. One left the kids to themselves. I wasn't much better, I only had more scruples. I wanted something of this grief to resonate in my picture, painted much later, of my daughter Betty in which her face is averted.

* * *

SPIEGEL: Sie hatten Probleme mit dem Vater - und deshalb auch Probleme mit dem eigenen Vaterdasein?
You had problems with the father - and for that reason also problems with being a father yourself?

Richter: So erging es einer ganzen Generation. Ich hatte, wie viele in meinem Alter, die Erfahrung eines vorbildhaften Vaters nie gehabt. Die meisten unserer Väter waren lange im Krieg und kamen entweder gar nicht zurück oder als Beschädigte und Gebrochene und als Schuldige. Diese Problematik einer vatergeschädigten Generation setzt sich bis heute fort. Der Terrorismus hatte vielleicht deshalb in diesem Land eine andere Form als andernorts. Er war hier in den siebziger Jahren auch mehr ein Ausdruck der Ablehnung der Väter, die eben in jeder Hinsicht versagt hatten.
So fared a whole generation. I, like many in my age, didn't have the experience of an exemplary/paradigmatic father. Most of our fathers were at war for a long time and either didn't come back at all, or as damaged/injured and broken, and as guilty. This problematic, of a father-impaired generation, I pursue to this day. Perhaps this is why terrorism had a different form in this country as in others. It was here in the 1970s more an expression of refusal/denial/rejection of the fathers, who had failed in every respect.

* * *

SPIEGEL: Gerade von Beuys unterscheiden Sie sich diametral. Beuys stand für eine provokante Anti-Ästhetik. Ihre Bilder aber, ob abstrakt oder gegenständlich, feiern trotz der oft heiklen Motive die Schönheit.
You differentiate yourself diametrically from Beuys. He stood for a provocative anti-aesthetic. However, your pictures, whether abstract or representational, revel, in spite of their often subtle motifs, in beauty.

Richter: Es ist schwierig mit der Schönheit, wir sind uns nicht mehr einig, was darunter zu verstehen sein sollte. Sicher liegt es auch daran, dass der Begriff Schönheit so abgedroschen ist oder klingt. So wie "das Gute" und "das Wahre". Aber das ändert nichts am Wert solcher idealen Eigenschaften und daran, dass die Menschen Schönheit brauchen. Für mich war Schönheit immer ein Kriterium für die Qualität von Kunstwerken, gleich welcher Art und aus welcher Zeit.
It's difficult with beauty; we are no longer in agreement what should be understood by the term. Surely it's also owing to the fact that the concept of beauty is or appears so often ranted/canted[??]. Also with Goodness and Truth. But that doesn't change the value of such ideal properties, and that people need beauty. For me beauty was always a criterion for the value of artworks, of whatever sort and from whatever period.

* Cf. Lee Siegel's statement that "You cannot fully understand Cy Twombly's art unless you know that he is gay," in Slate, vigorously denounced by Tyler Green.

Links: Lee Siegel on Twombly, Tyler Green response.

Painting Today: The New Leipzig School

Christian Schüle, "A Sight for sore eyes"
(Die Zeit, 21.07.05; English translation at signandsight.com, 01.08.05.)

So what's the secret of this success? Why all the frothing enthusiasm? What exactly is so fascinating about the work of someone like Matthias Weischer, born 1973 in Westphalia, who paints clammy, functionless, viewless rooms, metaphysically emptied in matt retro colours, faded sandy yellow, shabby brown, lacklustre mauve, the sort of colours you find in the stairwells of Leipzig's old community centres? Or the work of Christoph Ruckhaeberle from Bavaria, born 1972? Why do these collectors feel so drawn to his silent creatures, his enfeebled, morbid youths, veiled in melancholy, like bystanders at a general depression in the prime of their lives? The paintings of Weischer and Ruckhaeberle offer as little escape as dynamism. We're talking fin-de-siecle ennui in the flesh.

Abstraction/Design: Richard Artschwager

Richard Artschwager makes objects that probe the art-design boundary, as have a great number of artists in the twentieth century. But unlike Kandinsky’s work, Artschwager’s is not motivated by an inner necessity, and unlike Abstract Expressionism does not give form to the hopeless subjective aspirations of the petty bourgeois class, but instead shares the no doubt historically determined hermeticism of art in the 1960s after Jasper Johns—objects that stare back mutely rather than opening windows into the subjective. Unlike the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism and De Stijl, it is not propelled by a desire to move art out into the productive sphere and to redesign society. Unlike Popova, Stepanova or Anni Albers, his work does not revalue a patriarchally diminished sphere of creative activity.

Instead, Artschwager belongs to the linguistic turn—an orientation according to which categories—verbal categories—shape, define, and ultimately deform our phenomenal experience. This is evident in his expressed interest in pre-literate experience, as well as in a recent statement of his:

If we didn't have language... everything would come streaming in, we would take in everything, and only make a choice if it were a matter of life or death, starving or eating, those places where language first made itself happen. Language is a limiter, language is abridgement. It makes the event fit the vehicle, the vehicle being language. But if you can relax about the language and go straight to the art, you have a better chance of getting it.

--Artschwager in David Frankel, ”Curtain Call,“ Artforum (Nov. 2000)

As a hypothesis, then, we could propose that Artschwager’s work means to unsettle us into momentarily seeing as if we didn’t have language. But the differences between Artschwager and his 1960s peers are important. Unlike a Judd, Morris or Nauman, Artschwager does not present geometrically primary objects that announce themselves simply as objects—as presences in the room. Artschwager rather presents objects that announce themselves as, for instance,  chairs—making use of the very kind of conceptual category which Artschwager mistrusts, in order to unsettle it.  Contrast Bruce Nauman’s Cast of the Space under my Chair (1965-68; sorry for the bad reproduction) which takes the opposite tack—it announces itself as a strange, indeterminate shape whose reference is stabilized by a look at the caption, whereas Artschwager’s Chair has the shape of a chair but dissolves into geometric elements.

Like Nauman, Artschwager is interested in the material reality that is both formed and obscured by categories, but Artschwager takes the approach of ironically loosening the attachment of these categories to matter, rather than eliminating them from the formal process. This is true even to the point of using depiction, pictorial representation—which would be anathema to his minimalist peers. For instance, the appearance of table legs on the edges of the rectangular box, and the immaterial appearance of a tablecloth draped across another box.

Artschwager commonly takes a familiar object as the model for a work and reduces it to a simplified geometrical version, while leaving it to retain these referential clues that attach it to a category of useful object. See, for instance, Gorilla from 1962, and Double Speaker from 1966. Step ‘n’ See from 1966 seems almost to depart from this referentiality, unless we imagine a stepladder, but the contrast with more properly Minimalist work is clear if we compare it to a John McCracken.

Questions of referentiality and depiction lead us directly to the issue of surface, which comes to the fore in Triptych 3 of 1967. Kurt Forster takes Artschwager’s use of Formica, as an industrially produced fake wood surface, as being emblematic of Artschwager’s approach to objects and artifice. As a layer of decoration that covers an already decorative object, the Formica challenges our thinking about materials. Is the fakeness of Formica exactly opposite to the industrial integrity of Judd’s anodized aluminum, or do they both rather share a shine, a flash that attracts and enchants a viewer, illusionistically? Is the Formica exactly opposite to an idea of truth to materials epitomized by the grain of worked wood, or is it on the contrary, exactly truth to the proper materials of this era of customizable consumer-centered experience?

Finally, we can develop our understanding of these questions of categories, phenomenal experience, and surfaces, by comparing a superficially distinct, non-objective class of Artschwager’s work, the blp. In his text, “Art and Design,” from 1993, he described the blp as “a mindless invasion of the social space by a logo-like, totally useless art element. It is small, has high visibility, relentlessly refuses to give up its uselessness. It is an instrument for useless looking. Being of small size and high visibility it converts the immediate surround over to The Useless… It gets as close to pure art as one can get.” 

We could compare the blp installed on the Turtle Bay Steam Plant to the chair that we first considered. These artworks use different strategies to transfer useful objects into what Artschwager called “The Useless,” which we can equate with the kind of pre-linguistic, a-categorical experience that he values.  But the vast differences between the two works suggest a range of possibilities—to whom is this kind of experience allotted and what does it ultimately, pace Artschwager, signify—that may return our thoughts to certain recently discussed earlier moments in history.

Dissent Magazine Winter 2005

Andrei Markovits.

Concretely, these changes were anchored in two major struggles that informed American politics at the time: the civil rights movement at home and the Vietnam War abroad. Both of these developed into absolute icons for all lefts in the world. Mainly carried by students and not by the traditional subject of the left-that is, the industrial working class-this massive transformation of the discourse of the left was deeply anchored in the cultural climate of the United States, which the rest of the world, particularly Europe's students and its young generally, embraced with enthusiasm. One cannot understand the rise of the New Left in Paris, Berlin, Milan, and London without understanding the massive influence of American rock 'n' roll, folk music, protest songs and poetry, and the civil rights movement's tactic of the "sit in." Posters of Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Jerry Garcia, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Allen Ginsberg adorned the homes of thousands of European New Leftists alongside such other icons as Che Guevara and, of course, Ho Chi Minh. On both sides of the Atlantic, this generation was equally formed by the first seemingly democratic and impromptu rock festival held in the muddy fields near Woodstock, New York, and by one of Europe's foremost intellectual emigres who, unlike others in his immediate milieu, proudly remained in America while becoming one of this country's most challenging critics. I am talking about Herbert Marcuse, whom many have-quite rightly-called the New Left's most influential thinker. The deep American roots of the New Left in Europe, both in form and substance, are beyond debate.

Media Art - Dieter Daniels

Dieter Daniels: short CV, texts online, bibliography (deutsch) ; "Television: Art or Anti-Art? : Conflict and cooperation between the avant-garde and the mass media in the 1960s and 1970s"

Rudolf Frieling, "Reality/Mediality: Hybrid Processes Between Art and Life"

Media Art Net

Book reviews: 

• Fondation Langlois (Media Art Net ISBN 32110 05706)
• Review for Convergence (Media Art Action ISBN 32118 29962)
• Rhizome.org (Media Art Interaction ISBN 32118 34222)

The Gates

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, The Gates.

I can't get anything more than light entertainment out of The Gates. I do not experience them as sublime or beautiful, or anything more than light entertainment.  I thought that being able to walk through and be inside the gates, rather than just gawk at a distance, would make a difference, but no. I don't see the "pure joy...good will...simple eloquence" (Michael Kimmelman, NY Times). For some reason, the gates seem to glow more in photographs than they do in person. I was there from 2:00 to 6:00pm, and I didn't see them glowing, even during the 'magic hour.'  There were uncanny echoes of Daniel Buren, somehow. I didn't find that they made me more sensitive to the nuances of Olmsted and Vaux's winding paths, as Kimmelman proposed.  At least the gates aren't actually bad. I would merely say that they are not good. However:

cf. Composition-construction

and cf. Abstraction-decoration

HSAR 692B Abstraction and Decoration
Christine Mehring
M 3:30-5:20
267 ST

This seminar considers the relationship between decoration and abstract art produced in Western art in the course of the 20th century. Many modern artists felt ambivalent about decoration, ornament, the applied arts, and design. Abstract artists were often apprehensive about their painting and sculpture approaching "mere" decoration, superficial and superfluous. Any suggestion of decoration threatened to undermine abstraction's very identity as art and its new rationales of autonomy and self-reflexivity, of complexity and deep meaning. Yet some of these very same artists embraced these practices. Staples taken from decoration such as repetition, flatness, an bold color facilitated abstraction's departure from mimetic modes of representation. Moreover the connection of decorative work to the world at large appealed to abstract artists searching for a new motivation and social relevance. Materials and techniques of the decorative arts, such as textiles and weaving, were also appropriated for abstract art. Class discussions will revolve around these constantly changing attitudes at different historical moments as well as around various foundational, theoretical texts.
Students' research may focus on individuals or groups of artists, themes or theoretical concepts beyond the ones specifically addressed but should relate to the main questions in class.

Robert Ryman

Paintings by Robert Ryman: Untitled (1965), Classico IV (1968), Surface Veil I (1970), Surface Veil II (1971), Surface Veil III (1971), Case (1993)

Ryman's paintings are a useful rebuttal to those who tend to think that all-white paintings are instances of a corrupt and decadent art world putting one over on an ignorant or masochistic public. As has been noted, a lot of pleasure in looking can go along with a drastic reduction in expressive means.

I found the mark of the world on the most hallowed modernist corpus. For the white quadrilaterals in Mondrian are cracked all over, and far from pure white. His paint layers age, and they get dirty. But in their very distance from hygienic white they are the emblems of what it means to be white in the world....

In Meyer Schapiro's paradoxical formulation, realism itself re-created the world by a "series of abstract calculations of perspective and gradations of color." Ryman's paintings are asking the opposite: they are suggesting we collapse abstraction back into the rest of painting. Abstraction, it appears, was never anything more than a refinement or a mannered distortion of the components of painted art, totally consistent with the previous history of painting, and capable of very many of its effects....

Like Alberti, Ryman sooner or later reveals his true colors. He has said in interviews that his work is supposed to yield sensations of "well being and rightness," or an experience of "enlightenment."(7) These are esthetic criteria, rooted no doubt in simple empathetic responses, but they carry powerful ethical and spiritual connotations. So much for "paint is paint."

--Christopher S. Wood, "Ryman's Poetics," Art in America 82:1 (Jan. 1994), pp. 62ff.

The renunciation of pleasure has had such a hold on art and culture theory for such a long time. Granted, there are plenty of situations in which one's suspicion of pleasure is rewarded. Yet, how long can a person go on continuously renouncing pleasure, without bearing a psychic cost?

On the other hand:

A good illustration of the way the 'totalitarian' master operates is provided by the logo on the wrapper around German fat-free salami. 'Du darfst!' it says - 'You may!'... Far from imposing on us a firm set of standards to be complied with, the totalitarian master suspends (moral) punishment. His secret injunction is: 'You may.' He tells us that the prohibitions which regulate social life and guarantee a minimum of decency are worthless, just a device to keep the common people at bay - we, on the other hand, are free to let ourselves go, to kill, rape, plunder, but only insofar as we follow the master. (The Frankfurt School discerned this key feature of totalitarianism in its theory of repressive desublimation.) Obedience to the master allows you to transgress everyday moral rules: all the dirty things you were dreaming of, everything you had to renounce when you subordinated yourself to the traditional, patriarchal, symbolic Law you are now allowed to indulge in without punishment, just as you may eat fat-free salami without any risk to your health.

--Slavoj Žižek, "You May!" London Review of Books 21:6 (Mar. 18, 1999)

The link between pleasure and compulsion: how necessary, how contingent? I'm not suggesting that pleasurable painting and totalitarianism have anything substantial in common.  But rather, is the ethical impulse to renounce pleasure too crude, if it encompasses both painting and totalitarianism in its sweep? How about renouncing totalitarianism, but not painting, for instance.

Rachel Harrison at San Francisco MoMA

I don't understand the principle at work in New Work: Rachel Harrison. What makes it motivated or arbitrary? Is it the sculptural object as a nexus or node in a field of forces and desires that produce value? As Jill Dawsey states in her accompanying text, "the extent to which value is not inherent but projected"? The object as screen, and screen as object? The monumentalization of the commodity, and the commodification of the monument? The arrest of chaos into order, or the disintegration of order into chaos? All possible, none definite. More exhibitions needed. (cf. the images at Greene Naftali gallery)

EDIT: More on Rachel Harrison: Brian Sholis; Mia Fineman.

Roy Lichtenstein at the San Francisco MOMA

Despite the drastic formal differences between the two, it's noteworthy to see a Roy Lichtenstein retrospective hanging in the same building where I saw a Gerhard Richter retrospective a couple of years ago. Both artists use skeptical, deconstructive means as a way of investigating what painting is capable of -- what painting can do for us these days. Those who view them as cynical about painting are wrong. They're cynical about false piety, exhausted conventions, and received wisdom. They wouldn't be painting if they didn't think it was worth doing.