22 July to 18 October, 2015
Schaumainkai 63 60596 (at Dürerstraße)
Frankfurt am Main, Germany +49 69 6050980

Frankfurt’s 200-year-old Städel Museum used its impressive 2012 extension to revisit the somewhat unfashionable work of the last generation of artists to come to prominence in the west of a divided Germany. 97 mostly large works by painters born shortly after the war are set out in a mixture of geographic and thematic groupings, which keeps the flow healthily unpredictable: Berlin, Cologne and Hamburg as the main centers, and self-portraits, the body and politics as subject orientations. As in the US and Italy, this era’s expressive figurative painters — dubbed the Junge Wilde (“Wild Youth”) — were seen as an antidote to Minimalism and Conceptualism, and had their moment in the market before the crash of 1987.

Many of these works haven’t been exhibited since then, and only Martin Kippenberger (who died in 1997) and maybe Albert Oehlen have maintained comparable profiles. Otherwise, the mantle of figurative significance has reverted to generations before (Georg Baselitz, Sigmar Polke, Anselm Kiefer, Gerhard Richter) and after (Neo Rauch and the Leipzig school). This show demonstrated that the work, though diverse, benefits from being seen together; that there are more connections than might be assumed with the preceding and succeeding generations; and that it’s worth looking again at a wider spread of the 27 artists included.

How coherent are these paintings, seen as a group? The majority can be described as loosely and somewhat aggressively painted, trading on the apparent speed of execution, with plenty of ambiguity. Maybe it’s me reading backwards to the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ended the period covered, but I also found myself drawn into the frequency with which apparent contradictions — of visual languages or content — are brought together in the same painting, as if reflecting the divided nation. That’s to be expected in the section labelled “The Political Collage.” But other rooms feature the phenomenon as well, as in works such as Volker Tannert’s Small Ceremony for the Modern (1982), in which Albert-Speer-like floodlights illuminate a post-war skyscraper, and Gerard Kever’s Untitled (1982), which combines “televised” clouds with “real” ones. A particularly striking example is KaDaWe (1981), a vast (340 x 483 cm) collaboration by Salomé and Luciano Castelli, which adopts and subverts capitalist modes of display by depicting the artists in performance, mimicking the “poses” of meat hanging over a department store butcher’s counter. Kippenberger is the master of this mode, and all four of his works here conjoin disparate elements: Two Proletarian Women Inventors on their Way to the Inventors’ Congress (1984) shows the pair on their way to collect an “innovation award” — which was probably for something already well-established in the West — set against both a Malevichian monochrome and a swirling Abstract Expressionist background, mocking all ideologies equally.

The break from preceding modes doesn’t seem extreme in retrospect. Most of the subjects are straight from the lives of the artists: punk music, sex, the city, painting itself. When the Mülheimer Freiheit group (named for the address of a Cologne studio shared by Hans Peter Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, Gerard Kever and Gerhard Naschberger) give things a kitchily surreal twist, it’s to no radical effect.

The precedents of the Expressionist generation are often explicit: Rainer Fetting’s Large Shower (1981) puts Ernst Ludwig Kirchner figures into a gay sauna; and Egon Schiele is summoned by the quintessentially 1980s pre-VCR action of Werner Büttner’s Self-Portrait Masturbating in a Cinema, which neatly inverts the “paintbrush as penis” trope. A landscape by Berndt Zimmer, Field, Rape (1979), is close to color field abstraction. Walter Dahn’s Double Self (1982) reminded me of David Hockney’s early ‘60s work, when what would become Pop was still messy. And Milan Kunc is close to later mainstream Pop. Looking forward, the artists of the Leipzig school have continuities with their ‘80s forebears, many of whom taught them, though they generally paint with more clarity and a different historical awareness: more a unification of previously competing tendencies, less a tendency to accept clashes within a painting.

Who deserves more attention? There’s nothing here to challenge the primacy of the group who studied together in Hamburg, where Sigmar Polke taught Georg Herold, Werner Büttner, the Oehlen brothers and, of course, Kippenberger; but the geographic picture is complicated by Kippenberger’s move to Berlin in 1978. Bettina Semmer was in that circle, too, and she (along with G.L. Gabriel) emerged as the most substantial female presence in a rather male scene. Each of Semmer’s three contributions are striking in different ways, and though this show doesn’t look at what these artists — most of them still practicing — did next, her subsequent work is also varied and interesting. Tannert (a student of Richter) and Andreas Schulze impress, too, though the latter’s paintings have a monumental stillness rather at odds with the tenor of the show.

The prevailing intensity edges into the histrionic in the weaker works, and the free markmaking becomes more vague than dynamising. Can the so-called 80ers, as a whole, be defended as deliberately practicing “Bad Painting,” which opposes the idea of harmonious art, whether traditional or avant-garde? Kippenberger, as with a naïvely conventional portrait sharpened by the title Mother of Joseph Beuys (1984), delivers persuasively to that agenda. So does Oehlen: two of his works here allow mirrors to disrupt the illusionistic space of the painting, knowingly undermining the established codes. And in Moonlight Falling into the Fuehrer’s Headquarters (1982), they also reflect his viewers back into a space containing a swastika. As the show’s curator, Martin Engler, says, “Contexts are consciously ruptured. The moment of dissolution becomes the content of the image.” I don’t sense the same analytic justification for the apparent badness in all cases, so that I can’t see this show bringing the likes of Helmut Middendorf and Salomé back to international attention. Indeed, perhaps the museum implicitly acknowledges a more national audience by not translating the catalogue into English — as it does those for most shows. None of that, though, detracts from a fascinating and superbly presented time capsule of a survey.

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“Nothing is usually opposed to something; but the being of something is already determinate and is distinguished from another something; and so therefore the nothing which is opposed to the something is also the nothing of a particular something, a determinate nothing.”
-G. F. W. Hegel

“Occasionally a painting calls out from beyond its surface and asks us for our attention. The asking is polite enough, like a meeting between two strangers.”
-Eric Sutphin

Hegel is not necessarily the kind of philosopher that comes to my mind when I look at or think about art, nor have I ever heard his arguments used as the subject of a conversation during an exhibition opening. However, at the opening of “Null Komma Null” — the German painter Detlef E. Aderhold’s first solo show in New York — the term “aesthetic” circled within the gallery space. When used in more common, quotidian sense, “aesthetic” usually applies to a statement that is “concerned with beauty, art and the understanding of beautiful things,” or describes something that is “made in an artistic way and beautiful to look at.”[1] The notion of “aesthetics” consequently connotes a positive perceptual judgment (as opposed to its negative sibling of “anesthetics”) and evaluates a surface, form or arrangement that our eyes can linger on. Aderhold’s colorful paintings — which merge figuration and abstraction, and display a rich, often quite ambiguous texture and tactility — are surely beautiful to look at, yet most of them speak through a quality that calls from beyond a linen surface stretched onto a frame. They are aesthetic not in a common, but rather natural sense of the term.

When Hegel presented his ”Lectures on Aesthetics” in Berlin between 1820 and 1829, he grounded his subject in “the wide realm of the beautiful,” which he restricted to fine art, and understood aesthetic not as a qualitative statement, but as the science of sensation and feeling; while art presented the means to portray the human essence, at first in a physical form, and later “a more spiritual form.”[2] In his view, art consequently reveals or embodies ideas — things intangible and abstract by their very nature. Independent from whether one agrees with Hegel or not (not to speak about whether one fully understands him) there is something genuine in both his notions of aesthetic and art, and therefore they closely relate to Adernold’s paintings and artistic practice, because Aderhold’s work seeks an encounter that is based on visceral and sensitive understanding — preceding judgment and preconceptions.

The exhibition’s title has its origin in a small square painting recalling a fragmented female face. A pair of bright red lips, slightly off-center and enticingly opened to reveal the tips of an upper row of teeth, is joined by a single, dislocated eyeball staring from the upper right of the canvas. There are no lids, not even a hint that could ease the viewer from this constant gaze. However disturbing this impression might be, it is simultaneously calmed (or distracted) by overlapping, translucent patterns that fill the painting’s remaining space. Washed out swathes of mint green, soft pink and lemon yellow are joined by cloudlike formations of black and grey. This well-orchestrated visual chaos, of seemingly no end or real beginning except from the boundaries of the canvas, can be understood as a metonym for what Adernold’s work touches upon — affects — and is further emphasized by the work’s title. Null Komma Null (2011) translates as “zero point zero” and emphasizes Adnerold’s conscious decision to deprive his viewers of any linguistic and therefore logical or intellectual point of reference.

A similar kind of felt, visual noise is present in two other artworks. City 2 (2008) and Makes My Eyes Rain (2014) are large paintings of geometric forms that recall cityscapes, fragmented maps, perhaps even ruins. Even if Makes My Eyes Rain is more figurative in its nature, both images depend on and are ultimately held together by their dripping, fluidly colored backgrounds. The layers, stains and marks dissect, highlight and conceal, and thereby allude to a state of precariousness like a fading or incomplete memory, or the residue of a dream. The Force Take series (2012) instead confronts the viewer with lines and layers of color deprived of any figurative symbolism or “objective” representation. According to Eric Sutphin, who curated the show, affective states are the unifying conceptual principle in Aderhold’s practice, materializing through the formal element of the stain. These stains are often made of coffee or thinned paint, that appears to be acrylic, watercolors and ink— they emerge like diffuse bodies and bubbles, obliterate and allow new (two-dimensional) connections to be drawn, or rather seen. A notion of the psyche resonates within these paintings and ties into Adernold’s background as a psychotherapist.

In fact, Aufriss (2007) is a large collage taken from charts, graphs, illustration and notes, each of which originally provided maps of the human mind by documenting studies on how memory changes or is affected by the experience of negative and positive life-changing events. Considering the work’s systematic arrangement of numeric and textual sequences, its grid-like structure, as well as its use of information as aesthetic material, Aufriss recalls the work of Hanne Darboven. However, this complex drawing fulfills a kind of key function, not only for the show, but also for Adernold’s practice: the signs, numbers and schemes ultimately display not unrelated forms, but affective states that are reduced to or are encoded within indices. The surface then becomes a fragile façade for indiscernible chains of information, for something that is held within, somewhere between the mind and the guts.

[1] http://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/aesthetic_1

[2]Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), xiv, 3-4.

The post The Heart, the Mind, or Somewhere in Between: On Detlef E. Aderhold’s “Null Komma Null” appeared first on artcritical.

Harun Farocki, who died on July 30^th, was the master of the conceptually precise essay film. An insightful and prescient documentarian with a light touch, he was no editorialist or propagandist, but rather a critical thinker with a deep political commitment. Unlike many other artists born of May ’68, Farocki avoided both Bertolt Brecht’s proscriptive didacticism and Jean-Luc Godard’s love/hate of conventional narrative. Farocki observed, and observed well. Simply by placing a camera where something interesting was occurring — a worker being trained, a TV advertisement being filmed — Farocki was able to give capitalism just enough rope to hang itself. There’s a mirroring of form and content in his work: the films examine freedom and labor, and are constructed in a way that grants the audience an unusual degree of freedom in their construction of meaning. Farocki’s method is the cinematic manifestation of Hemingway’s advice, “Show, don’t tell.” To enjoy a Farocki film is to be the loser in a jiu-jitsu match: it’s not the filmmaker’s efforts, but rather the workings of the viewer’s own intelligence, that lead one to arrive at the filmmaker’s conclusions.

A crucial moment in Farocki’s oeuvre is the opening sequence of his Inextinguishable Fire (1969), an anti-Vietnam War salvo created when he was only 25 years old, having recently been ejected from film academy for his radicalism. The filmmaker is seated at a desk, in the manner of a TV news anchor. He reads to the camera:

“How can we show you the injuries caused by napalm? If we show you pictures of napalm burns, you’ll close your eyes. First you’ll close your eyes to the pictures. Then you’ll close your eyes to the memory. Then you’ll close your eyes to the facts. Then you’ll close your eyes to the entire context. If we show you someone with napalm burns, we will hurt your feelings. If we hurt your feelings, you will feel like we’d tried napalm on you. We can give you only a hint of how napalm works.”

Then, he stops speaking. How does napalm work? In close-up, we see Farocki press a lit cigarette into the skin of his forearm, without flinching.

Farocki’s Inextinguishable Fire (1969)

It’s a visceral demonstration of the uncompromising political commitment that would animate a career spanning over 120 films and installations. (Unlike those who consider clicking a Facebook like-button to be political activism, Farocki clearly “had some skin in the game.”) It’s many other things as well: a declaration of solidarity with victims of the Vietnam War; a critique of the pretense to neutrality of TV news; a work of transcendently masochistic performance art pre-dating both Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic.

The “hint of napalm” can be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s entire project. The art arises from the necessity of finding a “hint,” a soft alternative to a reality too harsh to express directly. The artist doesn’t want to hurt the viewer’s feelings, doesn’t want her to close her eyes — thus a new strategy is needed. Jacques Ranciere proposed that political art often fails because the politicized artist presumes he has specialized knowledge that his audience lacks; its tone can’t help but be patronizing. Farocki usually side-stepped this kind of didactic or pedagogical stance: his work is concerned with making its point, but is equally concerned with affirming the audience’s ability to figure things out for themselves. And this occasion for respectful affirmation becomes, in itself, a political act.

One strategy for “hinting” is to focus on the mundane as entry point to the profound. The subject of Zum Vergleich (“In Comparison,” 2009) is, at first glance, “How are bricks manufactured in different parts of the world?” One would assume this is a spectacularly boring topic, but in fact, the film presents nothing less than a feat of time-travel. In Africa, bricks are individually shaped by hand; in India, by plopping handfuls of mud into molds; in Morocco, by simple assembly lines; and in Germany, by massively efficient automated production facilities. Each location represents a distinct moment in the history of capitalist production, from pre- to post-industrial. Besides demonstrating technologies from primitive to complex, the film lets us examine how different the experience of work is for the laborers in each location. Long takes, beautifully composed, give the viewer time to feel the worker’s daily experience. In comparison with the community of joyful women of Burkina Faso, infants strapped to their backs, who sing in unison as they rhythmically mold the raw earth, the lone German factory worker paces aimlessly, at a loss for what to do, as he helplessly oversees the huge machines in their mighty and flawless production. In Farocki’s hands, this lonely figure becomes the tangible embodiment of alienated labor. It is no small feat to make such an abstract and slippery concept so plainly visible.

An excerpt from How to Life in the German Federal Republic (1990), by Harun Farocki

Another of Farocki’s preferred indirect methods is to examine moments of simulation: the play-acting that naturally occurs whenever anyone tries to teach something. When Farocki films, for example, a group of children made to practice crossing an imaginary street, the activity becomes denaturalized; the training appears as the process of the construction of subjectivity. In the absence of the actual, the ideology around what the actual might be becomes foregrounded. While Brecht believed that the conditions of life were revealed when the theater made its mechanisms obvious, Farocki sought the same reveal in the impromptu moments of theater that occur within real life. With a title that jokingly implies the film will explain capitalism to residents of former East Germany, How To Live in the Federal Republic of Germany (1990) is a compilation of a great many of these bizarre scenarios of dress rehearsal, suggesting a world in constant preparation for a reality that never arrives. Two policemen practice making an arrest, with one assuming the role of the bad guy. As a form of therapy, anorexic women pretend to eat imaginary meals. In one particularly odd sequence, a man coaches a woman on how to perform a strip-tease, his obvious male chauvinism complicated by the way he demonstrates stripper moves. Indoctrination (1987) documents a five-day workshop in which corporate middle-management executives are drilled in the art of self-presentation. These aspiring ladder-climbers rehearse performing a degree of competency they don’t actually possess, so that they may better “sell themselves.” We can tangibly observe ideology spreading contagiously, and that the effect of absorbing an ideology is a variety of contortions within a person’s mode of being.

A trailer for Farocki’s Videograms of a Revolution (1992), compiled by Spectacle Theater

Whereas Brecht was a firebrand true-believer Communist, and poet-auteur Godard a son of Marx and Coca-Cola, Harun Farocki was simply a deeply intelligent and humble man of the left, whose hopes and fears for our world were born not of dogma, but of a timeless humanitarianism. His profoundly committed artistic and political vision will remain forever inextinguishable.

5 Recommended Films by Harun Farocki:
Videograms of a Revolution (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108489/
Zum Vergleich http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1380817/
Serious Games 1-4 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2793502/
How to Live in the Federal Republic of Germany http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0277794/
An Image http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0360426/

A 2012 interview with Farocki by the Goethe Institute http://vimeo.com/40929381

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