Manifesta, the European biennial of contemporary art, is held in Western European cities — most recently in Genk, Belgium. This tenth edition, hosted by St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum, was housed in the Winter Palace and New Hermitage, the two main buildings of that institution and, across the enormous Palace Square, the city’s main plaza, in the newly renovated General Staff Building. The Hermitage, an encyclopedic museum celebrating its 250^th anniversary, is devoted to world art, going up to Post-Impressionism and the paintings by Henri Matisse; another collection of Russian art is in the State Russia Museum. Because visas are expensive, Russia is not readily accessible to many Americans and West Europeans, so the primary intended audience was Russian. There were a great many foreign tourists in St. Petersburg when I visited in late July, but relatively few of them focused on Manifesta.

Some of the artists responded to specifically to contemporary issues in Russian society. Alexandra Sukhareva, who is Russian, presented photographs from World War II archives. There is a video of a Russian dance class by Klara Lidén and a video of young dancers by Rineke Dijkstra. Boris Mikhailov presented photographs of a protesters’ camp in Kiev. The late Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe, a gay artist who had been beaten up in the streets, was represented with Tragic Love (1993), a series of photographs of the artist dressed as Marilyn Monroe. Some foreign artists also offered Russian themes. Yasumasa Morimura made photographs based on drawings of the Hermitage when its art was removed during World War II. Marlene Dumas showed portraits of famous gay men including three Russians — Pyotr Tchaikovsky, Sergei Diaghilev and Rudolf Nureyev. Thomas Hirschhorn, whose Abschlag (2014) was designed for “Manifesta 10,” showed a gigantic collapsed building in which works by the revolutionary Russian Constructivists are installed. Erik van Lieshout presented the story of the Hermitage cats, longtime residents of the museum; they perished during the siege, but today are back in the museum basement, controlling invading rodents. And Francis Alÿs, whose boyhood dream was to travel from his native Belgium to the other side of the Iron Curtain, crashed a Russian Lada, a now-obsolete model of car into a tree inside the courtyard of the Winter Palace.

Facing controversy about Russian anti-LGBT laws and, also, about the country’s action in the Crimea, in interviews Manifesta’s curator Kasper König, who described Russia as “a repressive and authoritarian country,” articulated frankly the difficulties he faced. So far as I could see (I was not able to attend the performances or public performances, which were held outside the central exhibition site), much of the art, including most of the art by non-Russians was the kind displayed at such exhibitions in America. Certainly this is true of Olivier Mosset’s large, handsome monochromes; Ann Veronica Janssens’s very beautiful installations of floating liquids; and Vladim Fishkin’s A Speedy Day (2003), which compresses the twenty-four-hour light cycle into two-and-a-half hours, an effect especially evocative in far-North St. Petersburg, where the summer days are so long. The same can be said of Joseph Beuys’s Wirtschaftswerte (“Economic Values,” 1980), a commentary on food shortages in East German stores; Bruce Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage, 2001); Susan Philipsz’s piano recording inspired by James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which was played on the main staircase of the New Hermitage. Lara Favaretto’s installation of concrete blocks in the gallery for ancient Greek sculpture; Tatzu Nishi’s temporary wooden living room built around a chandelier in the Winter Palace, creating a home with the museum; and a painting from 1966 by Gerhard Richter made similarly affecting use of the site.

As the Hermitage’s director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, rightly notes in the catalogue, “Displaying contemporary art alongside the classics is a common occurrence.” The logic of this procedure deserves discussion. In the gallery of the Hermitage devoted to Nicolas Poussin you can see the relationship between his early Joshua’s Victory Over the Amalekites (1625-26); Moses Striking Water from the Rock (1649), painted more than 20 years later; and his Rest on the Flight to Egypt (1655-57), a marvelous example of his late style. Normally we thus find visually connected works in one gallery. When, however, the physically contiguous works are historically distant, imagination is then called upon to identify connections. This is true when Louise Bourgeois’s silver sculpture The Institute (2002) is installed alongside an etching by Piranesi and when Katharina Fritsch’s sculpture Frau mit Hund (“Woman with Dog,” 2004), which alludes to the life of Russia’s historical high society, is displayed in the former emperor’s private quarters. In a challenging variation on this familiar procedure, Maria Lassnig, Dumas and Nicole Eisenman occupied the two rooms of the Winter Palace usually dedicated to Matisse. (His paintings were removed to the General Staff Building.) They too deal with the female body and its sexuality, and so temporarily giving them his privileged place in the Hermitage counted as a political gesture.

The post A Dispatch from “Manifesta 10” appeared first on artcritical.

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010 is on view at MoMA until August 3, 2014

NORA GRIFFIN: Since this exhibition is so vast and far-reaching, I thought it would be interesting to focus on the major polarities embodied in Polke’s work: the personal and the political; the sacred and profane; and the mystic and the materialist. Do others agree with this idea of Polke (which I believe the museum was successful in presenting) — as powerfully doubled in all he does?  I thought the atrium provided a kind of “best of” Polke — from the intimate watercolor/drawings of the 60s to the gigantic, beautifully lush abstract fabric painting Season’s Hottest Trends (2003). But two works in this room really stood out for me as book-ends to his practice. Starry Heavens Cloth (1968), a tactile cotton, cardboard “painting” that functions like a cosmological self-portrait of the artist, and The Hunt for the Taliban and Al Quaeda (2002), a massive digital print on vinyl that looks like an industrial army map or poster.  Are there other pairings of works (or bodies of work) in the exhibition that open up his practice?

SUZANNE JOELSON: The other pairing for me is between the private and the performative. The small journal drawings which are signed way after the fact, often without dates, were a way to think as opposed to the paintings that were clearly made for an audience. I often feel left out of his intimate work because they were not necessarily made to be seen. The bulk of his film projects were not made to be seen either, but there I am an engaged voyeur.

SAUL OSTROW: Funny – beside the weird decisions like the drawings – unlike the Brooklyn Museum show of some years ago where he was presented in an “orderly” manner, I thought the MOMA installation was more in keeping with Polke and his work – the chaos – the scale  – the sense of compression seemed very connected.

JOELSON: While this show might have seemed chaotic it provided a narrative order to Polke’s output that was not in the Brooklyn Museum show. Although there are no wall texts one gets the opening atrium space, then the student work, then the early career. His dots are so much more playful and visually delirious than that programmatic method tends to be. The explosion of the Afghan room and then the settling into a studio practice as a way to travel. A final coming home to alienation as process. What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Robert Rauschenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful. The crankiness of his stance, his refusal to maintain a look, is part of what is important in the work. I came to feel in this show that his alienation was where he knew himself. When he got comfortable in West Germany he had to travel for that sense of horror. Eventually he set up unpredictable situations in his processes to keep the sense of alienation alive at home. That is what we, who like to label, might call his “mature work.”

ERIC GELBER: I have no qualms with the avoidance of strict chronology. It is the lack of depth I mind. But this is a beef with curatorial practice. I wish they had given a large wall strictly to his works on paper. The huge show that the MoMA had in the 1990s of his works on paper was the first and best encounter I had with Polke’s work. The work in that show, almost all of which is missing here, was busy, frantic, truly eye and mind opening from a formal perspective. We also shouldn’t forget the backdrop of Nazism, which haunted almost all of Polke’s work. Not only was Polke anti-capitalist he was also anti-art to a certain extent, always undermining any painterliness by generating and canceling out compositional elements. I wish there were more works from the 70s, busy paintings with stickers and other added material. That is when his anti-capitalist spirit was truly inspired, in my opinion. Talking about dualities, the profane/mystical might be helpful in terms of iconography, but as ideas I think it is kind of silly to crucify his work on those particular crosses. Not unlike Kiefer, he had a morbid fascination with Germany’s Nazi past: the swastika was seared into his consciousness.

OSTROW: I’m not sure if it’s alienation – he reflects a very particular German experience – his work reflects post-war Germany – the period of de-Nazification, the division of East and West, the rapid rebuilding of West Germany, the tension of the Cold War – etc. and then there is also the German tradition of the artist as magician and fool – as such he makes this work against a very different background then his counterparts in the States. One needs to remember that all of Warhol’s celebs are tragic figures – I think that the idea that he is enthralled with is the public role that Warhol plays – likewise I ‘m not sure that Polke is such an outsider – when I lived in Cologne you would see him and his entourage – he was very public – the notion of the magnus is probably more applicable than that of the mystic – peyote, LSD, opium, and mescaline get one to the otherside without necessarily having anything to do with transcendence – therefore I tend to see Polke as trying to produce a type of social realism of the psyche

JOELSON: I am thinking not only of personal alienation associated with his move to West Germany at the age of 12 when most of us feel alienated from our bodies anyway, but of Brechtian alienation, innate in the engagement and denial in the work. Yes, and re: “social realism of the psyche” would you say then, getting back to Nora’s initial dualities- psychic realism and capitalist realism?

OSTROW: Perhaps what we are seeing in the Polke show is what it means to be a Stateless artist – whereas Gerhard Richter is the work of a refugee who in order to fit in becomes more patriotic than a native born citizen. Polke is like an alien who continues to identify with the old country – though if he goes back he no longer recognizes anyone and all of the places he’s familiar with are gone.

DREW LOWENSTEIN: Polke’s historical and cultural negotiation is more open to play, and wonderment than that of Kiefer or Richter.  Like Kiefer, he experiments with materials and comes to believe in a traditional form of the total artwork.  Pagannini, The Illusionist, and Mrs Autumn and her Two Daughters are examples.  But unlike Kiefer, Polke rejects Beuysian shamanism and does not peddle the idea of recovery or regeneration from the German Nazi past.  Additionally, the painting Constructivist (1968), points out  Polke’s suspicion of adopting international modernist idioms to mask the past and  also reflects a distrust of the art culture market. He is resistant and like Suzanne suggests alienated. His resistance and playfulness is his pathway to creative struggle and freedom. I think it’s important to remember that he doesn’t find this resistance antithetical to historical painting.  He is quoted on the first page of the catalogue as saying, “even if the results look new, as far as I am concerned, as an artist I am following an academic path.  I like tracking down certain pictures, techniques and procedures.  It’s a way of understanding what is largely determined by tradition.”

GRIFFIN: Just to take up the thread of commerce and Pop art as seen in Polke’s work in the early 60s. I kept ruminating on the idea of an “abject” Pop art. Chocolate Painting and Biscuits (both 1964) seem so innocent, almost naively painted, with the gloss and definition of sign painting. The “abstract” paintings from the same era Jewelry,Beans,Silver Break, and Snowdrops seem edgily contemporary to me, perhaps this has to do with the paintings’ surface: colored, or patterned fabric, a recurring material for Polke. Suzanne says: “What distinguishes Polke from his American counterparts is his complete distrust of commerce. Rauschenberg, Ginsberg Warhol et al had some irony in their awe of the abundant market but Polke was entirely distrustful.” I agree here, that his images of marketable “things” are always highly personalized and never about glorifying the objects. The restraint and paint handling reminds me of John Wesley a bit. Especially the seriality of the enamel painting Socks (1963).

GELBER: Polke saying whether or not he feels alienated doesn’t help us get into the work. What artist is allowed to be anything but alienated from the history and politics of their native country? I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by. Supermarkets (1976), Paganini (1981-83) and the “Color Experiments” from (1982-86) were highlights for me. John Wesley is a good call but I think Polke was more interested in the subversive qualities of the comics he stole from rather than their aesthetic qualities. He liked black outlining, like Max Beckmann did, and Polke turned towards allegory in his late work. I find Polke to be a stronger draftsman than a painter. He worked on cloth because it lent itself to collage and staining rather than nuanced layering of tones. The “Color Experiments” series are probably the most purely painterly stuff in the exhibition. In Supermarkets he is mocking consumerism, but clearly he loves the imagery he puts to use as an ideological bludgeon.

OSTROW: Polke’s work can be seen to be discursive in the sense that it is a series of dialogues with and about the very Law he has decided not to partake in – in a manner he stands beside the very traditions that would subsume him and in doing so deploys them as he wishes. I was struck by how Polke seems to engage the notion of the return not only of the repressed but of the desired – he does this by projecting one onto another – his imagery  tends to be metonymic rather than metaphorical. If painting is to be about opticality – he literally paints distortion, if it is to be about process he paints process, if it is about the impossibility of narrative – he paints narratives of self-cancellation, etc. In this way he is literal without being illustrative. I’ve been reading the new translation of Kafka’s The Trial and find a parallel between Kafka’s writing and Polke’s painting in the sense that everything is always itself and its own other. If I understand it, Suzanne’s reference was to Brechtian alienation which is performative – it is a way to engage the audience in such a manner that the illusion of the theater is itself made explicit – they are distanced so that they might watch themselves being manipulated. In this sense the artist Polke may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy, self-doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.

JOELSON: Regarding Eric’s statement, “I think alienation is the default setting we expect all of our important artists to live by.”  As much as I resist seeing “default” or “expect all” in a sentence about art, I do agree. Is this because as a culture we are fixated on adolescence, a time of emergent sexuality and change? This is reflected in our taste for unfinished paintings from Cézanne and Manet to current work which conveys potential rather than certainty.I think it was Ian Buruma in the New York Review of Books who said that the fascination with emigré writing is because anyone who has gone through adolescence knows what it is to be alienated from your childhood. Something about “best offerings” is anathema to enthusiasts of Polke’s high wire act. We are more interested in his near misses. When I saw one watchtower painting 20 years ago I thought it the worst Polke ever because it was didactic and humorless and bound to its over potent image. In this show, seeing six of them I was moved. They evoke Auschwitz but also the idea of purposeful directed looking and the anxiety of being watched. Many towers in a room seem inescapable as opposed to a lone dismissible picture in an art show, or it might be the change in times and a recent predilection toward content. I wanted to see them in a circle.

GELBER: This is a great idea – it would turn the viewer into the viewed in a literal sense. You would become self-conscious in the act of looking by becoming the surrounded object. I know that Polke wanted to conjure up feelings of foreboding with this series. The colors are dark, dreary, anti-humanist. And I did spend a lot of time in this room with them, but I found myself thinking things like, “Oh is that a shower curtain he stuck on there?” I wanted to be moved by them more than I was. I think the way we see has been changed by the computer monitor and handheld device screen. I am not convinced that this will radically alter the painting and drawing process, with regards to how viewers take them in. Certainly painters have been impacted by pixelated imagery, webpage layout, Photoshop filters, etc. Polke’s struggle with pictorial space is one of the most interesting characteristics of his work. If an artist is going to work with traditional formats how can they make something that is genuinely contemporary, or is pastiche or mimicry the only options at this point?

JOELSON: Another Polke polarity is between the barest gesture, the incidental image and the magnum opus. This was also the case in the drawing show years back. A stick of butter on one wall and the whole acid trip covering another. The underwhelming aspect of so much work invites the viewer to complete the picture, to meet it halfway. In “our moment here” everything is going on. There are a lot of little umbrellas outside and within the big tent of the art market. From artists who have to work full time to cover their rent and then have little time in the studio, to artists who imagine extensive labor will fill-in where inspiration ended, from “bring it on” to enough is enough. Ezra Pound’s modernist adage to “make it new” has been replaced by “make it extreme.” Is that a reflection of our national economy? One thing about Germany is they still have an effective middle class and they build things (cars, appliances). How does this affect art in Germany now? I loved how the sausages are simple flat foot food, and yet essentialist in form. I think we have an internally informed, biological response to that linkage.

GRIFFIN: Saul made this comparison of Polke to Johns which I find illuminating: “In this sense the artist he may be most like is early Jasper Johns in which behind his dumb literal surfaces lurks philosophy – self doubt and the desire to paint a figure, rather than a picture of one.”  Of the many personas and alibis that were presented for the artist in the show, the one I was most moved by was the figure of Polke as a painter, confined to the rectangle, pigment, and fabric. The compactness and formalism of his paintings is breathtaking and really (to me) makes the performances, film footages, photographs, and even the drawings, seem lightweight and inconsequential. I understand that the show was presenting a full-blown portrait of Polke as an artist here, but I did yearn for a show that just displayed the paintings so we might focus on the most masterful aspect of his work. Llyn Foulkes, Chris Martin, and Paul Thek are three American artists I couldn’t stop thinking about as I went through the rooms. The high and low aspects of the sex and drug culture of the 60s and 70s meets the sacred temple of Modernist painting. The urge to bring painting into space itself, to have a painting transcend its physical limits, whether by alchemy (with silver nitrate crystals and meteorite resin), sheer silliness (like the Alice in Wonderland painting), or the horror of history (the watchtower series), seems to be a noble even heroic venture that few artists are involved with today.

OSTROW: Seemingly Polke offers us an alternative to pastiche or mimicry – what he offers us in place of pictures of things is an assemblage (in which each part retains its own identity while offering some aspect of itself to the whole). The effect of this is to force our minds to wander – or to multi-task – in this sense these works emphasize painting as an analog – a means to present information not only  through  its ability to depict things but also by means of  its physical quantities.  Polke demonstrates how the media continuously affects our reading of that information.  There is also a persistent effort by Polke to use a single signifier to reference multiple signified – as such his images exist in a shifting “framework.” These shifts are not a function of the viewer (ie, associations) but the work’s materiality or lack of it – in this we might think of Polke’s work as functioning under the sign of Hermes – whose name is the root for hermeneutics.

LOWENSTEIN: I was not moved by the watchtower paintings. I don’t think Polke does gravitas. Suddenly Germany was thrust into an absurdist geopolitical “role” that created a new narrative that obscured German atrocities.  Germany became a buffer for freedom and commerce against Soviet tyranny.  It’s a mind-blowing free pass.  Soviet/US tension is a gift that fell into Germany’s lap. No wonder the German public was shocked when Polke, Kiefer and others touched on the Holocaust years later.  Polke’s split sense of self manifests in his acute awareness of his “role” as an Adenauer-generation artist.  In a sense, he and his peers were stepping onto the world’s cultural stage as Germany’s representatives in the aftermath of German atrocities. Is the artist’s “role” one of action, escape, cynicism or dreaded consensus?  Polke’s dancing between the raindrops as he plays the role of the art prankster, philosopher, and magician-escapist. This is reflected in the ambiguity, possibility, and cancellation we sense in the work. The split self, the doubling, just spills out.  But he finds a new pictorial space to work in. He discovers an expanded space of transparency when he works both sides of the support and opens up a space for more light by using plastic in the late period lenticular paintings.

OSTROW: We haven’t even touched on Polke’s approach to self-referentiality in the sense of his use of analogy rather than metaphor, for instance the notion of the watch tower is not only a question of the Holocaust, but also that of guarding of borders (the east west divide)- it is also  a platform from which to observe – it represents the vertical view – the overview – which is a view that unlike the horizontal view is disengaged.

GELBER: I believe this was touched on earlier by Suzanne, the act of viewing and being viewed by the watchtowers. She had in mind a Panopticon, the go-to historical reference, thanks to Foucault. I think you are absolutely right about how the vertical orientation makes the watchtowers even more object-like, mimicking the real, in the way a real watchtower sticks out on the horizon in order to assume a position of power over those standing below it. There is a black ominous doorway shape in the painting Paganini that mimics a real doorway, as if we are invited to step into the painting.

JOELSON: I always like paintings of sailboats because there is a built vessel, a soft sail and the linear structure of the rigging. Polke’s watchtowers have that formal appeal as well as much else that has been said. They engage his antagonism to modern visuality as well as to seeing and being seen. It is not just the “gravitas” of the subject but its readiness for interpretation that weights this group. They emerge indelible, an intangible memory or the defining liminal image, a jewel that won’t melt away. The various means lets them flicker in and out of the material of this world. Their appearance as memory is innate to the stencil process. Eric, beside the fact that I think you and I are switching positions, I am confused, do you think Polke was always more accessible than Rauschenberg? Rauschenberg is my first great love. A decade later when I saw Polke he seemed like a shabby dissonant response to Rauschenberg’s innate enthusiasm and harmony with the world. But I came around,  just as after years of John Coltrane I came to love Ornette Coleman.

OSTROW: Another subject that I think needs to be taken up is the photograph and its reproduction. Polke comes back to the Ben-Day dots pattern over and over through his long career, like Warhol he wishes to render photography transparent and mutable.

GELBER: I think Polke’s (and Richter’s and Kiefer’s) need to break down the barriers between photography and painting/drawing goes hand-in-hand with Polke’s breaking down the barrier between drawing and painting in many works. The breaking down of compositional elements, combining different types of media, the flattening out collage effect, things discovered during Braque’s and Picasso’s analytical cubist phase, are deeply explored by Polke.

LOWENSTEIN: I think it’s a given that Polke and his peers were displaced from the Western narrative of how Modernism unfolded. Polke fell in love with Dada and Surrealism and stayed in love unconditionally. Sure, he misunderstood Pop, and merged it with Modernist-utopian ideas of art as agitation for change. But happily, dislocation and misunderstanding turned into the mother of invention and we get this wonderful art. It reminds me of a story about how the Marx Brothers were trying to steal a look at a baseball game but from their vantage point outside the stadium, they could only see action in a slice of left field. From that bit of information, they speculated and filled in the plays that they missed. Needless to say it was a more interesting version than what occurred on the field.

The post A Critics’ Roundtable on Sigmar Polke at MoMA appeared first on artcritical.

March 5 to April 10, 2010
534 West 25th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 929 7000

It has been decades since Joseph Beuys was the subject of a major New York exhibition, including the Guggenheim’s retrospective in 1979. Considering this lack of recent coverage, one cannot help but wonder why this effort has now been made by a gallery rather than by a museum. After all, the impact of Beuys’ oeuvre on contemporary art could not be more evident and many of the currently celebrated talents, such as Urs Fischer or Thomas Hirschhorn, openly owe a great deal to their predecessor.

Though by no means a retrospective, this exhibition still manages to provide an excellent introduction. In that respect, it is targeted especially at those fairly new to Beuys. Besides incorporating twelve rare sculptures that date from the 1950s to the mid-1980s, the exhibition primarily focuses on contextualization. As Beuys’ oeuvre entails sculptures that relate to the artist’s staged happenings called Aktionen, thorough documentation of the latter is in fact a much-appreciated feature here. Over ninety black and white photographs by Ute Klophaus – who was one of only a selected few allowed to capture these legendary events – are on display and succeed in telling a vivid story in frozen frames. In addition, four Aktionen can be watched in full length on film in a separate screening room, which showcases rare footage and interviews, and also functions as a true study center.

In life, Beuys was a force and even in death, his work seems to remain inseparable from the shamanistic persona he created. His medium of expression and his message might have differed from that of a Jim Morrison, yet Beuys did and still does enjoy somewhat of a rock star status. He was mysterious, nurtured a touch of darkness, and was constantly courted by followers, many of whom were art students. Beuys’ teaching were a large part of the draw and one of his key beliefs is embodied in a mixed media work from 1977 entitled “Jeder Mensch ist ein Künstler (Make the Secrets Productive),” which fuses text and sculptural elements. Beuys was convinced that everyone was an artist and that everyone possessed the ability to access their unconscious mind and deepest secrets to create powerful works of art. But this particular work spells it out more specifically in Beuys’ own handwriting, proclaiming the art of creation as the most potent vehicle for both social evolution and cultural revolution.

It was not until 1962 when Beuys encountered the Fluxus movement that he began to engage in performance art. Until 1986, the year he died, he staged seventy happenings. In the exhibition, the films and photographs of the Aktionen expose Beuys’ confidence in himself as a teacher and crucial political activist, whose mission it was to educate and enlighten his audience. Performance art offered him the tool to engage with the audience directly, and yet it also allowed him to stand apart from the masses. Within this structure, he was as concerned with the moment as he was focused on the future. On of his most famous works, created for Documenta VII in 1982 (he was invited to five Documentas during his lifetime), reveals Beuys’ consideration of time as a significant factor. For Documenta VII, he had arranged a large arrow made of basalt stones that pointed to an oak tree he had planted. He then requested that the stones should not be removed unless an oak tree was put in their place, leading to the planting of 7000 oak trees in Kassel. Despite addressing ecological concerns, “7000 Oaks” was also a monumental social sculpture, which while created by Beuys, was realized by many people for the people, in order to be enjoyed in everyone’s daily lives and for generations to come.

Ultimately, the capturing, preservation, and recycling of life energy might have been Beuys’ strongest concern and along these lines the sculpture “Tisch mit Aggregat,” 1958/1985, serves as an interesting metaphor. The energy source here is depicted literally as a large battery that is sitting on a table. Rather than being presented on a silver platter it is placed on a table that brings to mind everyday activities, family gatherings or the rituals of breakfast, lunch and dinner. Just like food, energy is offered for consumption. But rather than spending and losing energy, two long electric cables that connect the battery with two bronze balls on the ground, assure that it is stored. The balls are energy depots, anchored to the ground through gravity. But what are they really? One cannot shake the impression of cannon balls or some kind of explosive devices. Thinking of Beuys’ teachings, they might signify exactly that: if enough of life’s creative energy, which comes from all people, is accumulated and concentrated, it will explode the status quo and give way to the cultural revolution.

The post Revolution in Felt and Fat: Joseph Beuys’s New York comeback appeared first on artcritical.

Gagosian Gallery
980 Madison Avenue
New York City, 212 744 2313

March 18 – April 26, 2008

When asked about his interest in bodily functions, the scatological in particular, Franz West replies: “This seems to be a misunderstanding, I am not interested in the body. I am not sure that I have a body. (I am interested in philosophy!)”  West revives the age-old divide between body and philosophy, or mind and body, as a tongue-in-cheek rejection of this single (and dangerously singular) reading of his work.  Less interested in functions of the body than in the functioning of bodies in social space, he creates objects and furniture for direct contact with, and use by, human beings.  His latest two-level exhibition at Gagosian Gallery’s Madison Avenue location includes objects; videos and paintings of objects in use; and a series of collages.

The title Paßstück, which has translations ranging from “adaptive” (as a noun) to “fitting pieces” to “parts that fit into each other,” is used to describe a series of work that West has been exploring since the early 1970s.  Assembled from found materials and coated in plaster and paint, they assume the double identity of props or playthings (when the gallery permits us to handle them) and sculpture (when it doesn’t).  As West—and Gagosian—have it both ways, the show becomes a kind of Choose Your Own Adventure: those that prefer the more traditional (passive) experience of circling objects on pedestals will find their home on the sixth floor; while those that prefer an interactive experience will be satisfied on the fifth.  We are told in various ways by the gallery literature (and by West’s illustrations) that this artwork “needs to be held, adapted and moved against the human body.”  So why is this permitted for some Paßstück and not others?

From Joseph Beuys to Matthew Barney, we have seen objects in galleries and museums that derive meaning not simply from their presence in the space, but from their role in events already taken place.  West’s Paßstück are not just idle things, but instruments of action, just as sculpture and installation on view in a Barney exhibition are actually props and film sets.  Yet there seems to be a disconnect between Paßstück as sculpture and Paßstück as object for play.  A Beuys vitrine or felt suit tells a similar story in the gallery as it would in a performance, while the objects at Gagosian demand an entirely different (and potentially conflicting) set of eyes, mind and body from one floor to the next.  On the sixth, we are looking at abstract assemblages that fall somewhere between Rauschenberg, Eva Hesse and Sterling Ruby.  On the 5th, we are confronted with the highly distinct tradition of works based in performance and participation.   Perhaps this is why fooling around with Paßstück feels something like role-play.  We take our cues from instructional video footage—smiling men and women balancing objects on their arms and around their necks, contorting bodies to accommodate the very fixtures we see before us.  I hear a gallery representative announce, in case we didn’t know, “This is a unique uptown experience—being allowed to touch the art!”

Between West’s lively poster-paintings depicting people engaging with Paßstück, and the chunky catalogue (more like an artists’ book) with full-bleed photographs, the intended experience is so over-articulated that the live experience is bound to fall short.  Fumbling briefly with the objects in front of me, I feel I am going through the motions without channeling the energy of the original event.  But what is the source of this energy?  Is it some pure union between man and thing, a conversation between the animate and inanimate?  No—West is far too playful for such heavy-handedness.  We are told that Paßstück is a response to the Vienna Actionist spectacles of the 1960s, which West observed as a teenager.  But dangling plaster rings from one’s arms (while struggling to keep a straight face) is a far cry from sacrifice and mutilation.  Paßstück are like toys, and the people handling them like overgrown children.  West replaces violence on bodies with bodies at play, but playing is unnatural and uncomfortable for modern adults: this is an art gallery, not a sandbox, and Paßstück can be awkward, even hostile, to the human form.  West responds to the extremity of Vienna Actionism with a more subtle, psychological investigation; his aim, as he states, is to make “neurosis become visible.”  And to a certain extent, he succeeds.  But Paßstück is weakened by its two-faced nature—until its double life is reconciled, both sides suffer.

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“Georg Baselitz: Recent Paintings”
Michael Werner until February 7 (4 East 77th Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, 212-988-1623).

Does this career sound familiar? A decorated German ex-serviceman dreams of becoming an artist and ends up in politics. Inspired by folk myths of the artist as a hero who will save his nation, he becomes the subject of a cult following, speaking to the faithful at interminable length. While few follow his labyrinthine thought, charismatic delivery carries the day: Women adore him, in his gray uniform, and he has his image plastered everywhere.

Naturally, I am talking about the artist, Joseph Beuys. But if this résumé reads like that of a more notorious example of German romanticism gone awry, it is not entirely coincidental. Beuys set himself up as a kind holy fool of art, at once prankster and prophet, showman and shaman. The nation he sought to save was both in denial of its own legacy and in the grip of crass consumerism. Beuys was the trailblazer of postwar artists as diverse as Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter, and Georg Baselitz: each in their way would remind the newly afluent, liberal German public of their uncomfortable past.

Beuys had a personal myth to rival any Wagnerian hero’s. Shot down as a young Luftwaffe pilot over the Russian Steppes, he claimed to have been saved by a friendly tribe of Tartars who covered his burnt body in fat and wrapped him in layers of felt. Thus fat and felt became symbol-laden materials in his art: Installations, performances, objects produced in multiple revelled in these drab, sinister substances, his tragic trademarks.

For generations of German museumgoers, art history officially culminated in Beuys’s lugubrious Wehrmacht grayness and ominious accumulations of lard- making the kunsthalle a kind of aesthetic death camp. His performances often entailed rambling lectures, and the chalkboard at which he detailed his anthroposophical-cum-ecological meanderings would be preserved as a drawing. Beuys’s subversive objects and inscrutable scribblings would be packaged obsessively, in, prissy vitrines, at once fetishizing these objects and debunking the logic and orderliness of their presentation .

Beuys’s international reputation was phenomenal, but outside his specifically German context the occultism and counter-cultural preaching were taken at face value, and the iconoclastic dimension lost its edge. Really, he was the flip side of Andy Warhol: Where the consumerist banalities of his American friend were ultimately nihilist, his own drabness was, in an odd way, cathartic.

It is hard to know whether future generations, unversed in the myth and ideology that coat the Beuys pill, will swallow it. You certainly have to accept a lot of dogma to make Beuys part of your art creed. His objects and installations rarely have much by way of intrinsic aesthetic interest beyond stylish poverty and self-conscious obscurantism. That said, the collection of Dr. Reiner Speck, on view at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue space, is a palatable introduction. In fact, you’ll never see Beuys looking prettier.

Dr. Speck, a physician, collector, and literary scholar from Cologne, supported Beuy’s work from the 1960s to the artist’s death in 1986. His collection has its share of dada agitprop, including a pair of placards which together read “Dürer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Documenta V,” as well as chalkboards and table drawings. But it includes many quirky, erotic, or touchingly enigmatic pieces.

A selection of the fabulous early figurines and drawings show a less portentous side of the Beuysian imagination. These drawings, looking to Klimt and Schiele in their kinkiness but to Bellmer and Wols in their spindly, warped forms, could almost have been made to illustrate the degeneracy theories of Max Nordau: They are knowingly feeble and febrile. “Virgin” (1952), a little doll-like torso wrapped in bandage, exposing a wax vagina, and placed coyly on a cushion, is deliciously perverse.

Actually, orifices abound in this collection (the good doctor was obviously unfazed by anatomy), appearing in a bagel-like mandala made from a rubber disk mounted on paper, and in a richly suggestive felt disk, smeared with fat and sporting two fingernail clippings. Ah well, boys will be Beuys.

A band of painters who came to international prominence in the 1980s looked afresh at expressionism, the very style and movement labelled “degenerate” in the 1930s. They courted disaster in a culture still uneasy with the legacy of fascism by revisiting myth, the primitive, and the irrational in art.

The chief representative of this school was Georg Baselitz, a painter originally from East Germany who made his career in the West. His oversized figurative canvases set a high standard of bombast and bravura. His trademark quirk was to place the figures upside-down, or at 90 degrees. His handling and depiction were deliberately slovenly and inaccurate, but all the more richly expressive for being so.

Now about to turn 66, Mr. Baselitz is showing a group of 10 paintings from 2000 at Michael Werner’s elegant New York space, around the corner from the Beuys show (Werner is a German gallerist based in Cologne). These works are the strongest and most engaging seen from this artist for some years.

All take as their starting point a set of drawings the artist had made as a teenager in the early 1950s: rather traditional watercolors of eagles flying among mountain peaks. The year of the original drawing is emblazoned in dots that read like lights, but also recall the obsessive, enigmatic dot motifs familiar elsewhere in Mr. Baselitz’s work. The subject and style of the boy artist’s drawings (reproduced in the catalogue) are sinisterly uninnocent in view of the role of eagles and eeries in Nazi iconography. The reworkings seem to acknowledge this.

Mr. Baselitz brings out the vulnerability of his appropriated motifs through repetition and fracture – not so much in the sense of doing violence to the motif as of exploring and abstracting it in a painterly way. The beefy bombast of earlier Baselitz gives way here to linear variety, painterly delicacy, and luxuriance of color that all suggest an emotional investment that transcends the theatrical. Contemplating the products of his own youth has brought out a new tenderness of touch. These results still acknowledge the troubled nature of history and memory, , but offers beauty as the means of healing.

A version of this article first appeared in the New York Sun, January 15, 2004

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