Curated by Barry Blinderman
January 23 to March 12, 2016
1916 Race Street (at N 20th Street)
Philadelphia, 215 965 4000

These are images that we have seen before: paintings of desire, fear, and pain, or even dreams. A perfectly presented entree, concocted in a corporate culinary laboratory, packed and frozen, to offer quantified flavor with glossy convenience. Or, perhaps, a fastidiously folded flannel shirt, with one sleeve arranged to emphasize the pattern. These are images that, in one way or another, sell: beauty, leisure, vitality, and freedom, all available at cost. Walter Robinson has painted many of the things we want to buy, over the course of several decades, expropriating both the Panglossian ideal of commercial product photography as well as the roughly hewn yearnings captured from the illustrated covers of pulp novels. Since the dissolution of Artnet magazine, where he served as editor 16 years, Robinson has been able to fully devote himself to painting once more, some of the recent results of which are on display in his first traveling retrospective, organized by Barry Blinderman, former gallerist and director of the University Galleries of Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, the first venue of the show.

Robinson’s paintings, more often than not, make use of commercial illustrations as source material, while also deriving a great deal of their meaning from them. Over the years, Robinson has spoke of the advertising circulars and mail-order catalogs he often employs as “wanting to be art,” and while his physical re-representations in effect complete this goal, a larger debt is owed to the surreptitious art historical referentiality that laces through our culture. This is a canonical appropriation in which classic forms appear and reappear over various iterations, even as the referent is lost. Robinson plays with these brushes with history and the cultural affectations they have given rise to, while questioning the stability of such representations. There is much to draw on in the calculated Never Never Land of advertising; Robinson enters this world not in search of a barometer of the times, or even the means of their unraveling, but rather to observe, report, and allow viewers to come to their own conclusions.

Recent paintings after Lands’ End catalogs capture the innocuous fashion of inconspicuous clothing — the arrangement of tasteful pastel moccasins (Shoes, 2014) or models reduced to bodies, faces removed to direct attention solely to the swimsuit for sale (Sun, Surf, and Style: the Swim Tee, Ride the Wave, 2014). The space of snug familiarity offered by the mail-order catalog is one that has been nearly displaced by the more immediately gratifying Internet; the catalog is in part a fast-fading lexicon of desire, a place for dreams to be bought, or at least coveted. Seen through this cornerstone of old media, the somewhat dowdy styles offered by Lands’ End can seem nostalgic, a middlebrow vision of predictability and contentment, an unchanging standard confounding a world in constant flux.

The comfort of one’s own home, and the food products one can prepare in it, has provided Robinson with another rich source of raw material since the 1990s: the resplendent surfaces of food photography. In Oriental Beef (1994), sauce congeals in autumnal hues with preternatural fluidity, coating the rice below; the plate is tightly cropped, betraying the boxed origin of the source photograph. In another recent series, Robinson has created a taxonomy of burgers, portraying both the home reconstituted and the take-out. The components of Amy’s Veggie Burger (2012), are elegantly fanned out like a hand of cards, the layers carefully displayed in adamant renunciation of its processed origins, while the earlier Big Mac (2008) is a solitary caloric monolith, the undulating surface of the crowning bun turned into a sesame-seeded lunar surface.

In Robinson’s consumer product still-lifes, branding is both emphasized and deliberately obscured, while subjects are returned to sometimes decades later and re-composed. Honey (2014) is beautifully illegible while the Budweiser logo of Three Beers (1987) fades in and out like a memory of the brand. Johnny Walker bottles merger into liquid reds and golds while Vicks Vapor Rub remains sharp with trademarked clarity. These products remain more than their constituent ingredients, even surpassing intended uses; like the ineffable yet instantly identifiable red of Coca-Cola, these are brands as identities, woven into national myth until the seams become indistinguishable, part and parcel to a corporatized American experience that we are all compelled to enter.

The work that proved name-making for Robinson in the early 1980s, adapted pulp novel covers, is likely the most difficult for the uninitiated to enter into. Each painting is a simplified reworking of an original paperback illustration, with titles taken from the novels themselves. At times, these interpretations appear self-explanatory. In Something of Value (1986), a woman grasps a man for support who is armed for a confrontation, evidently near as he defiantly looks over the horizon toward unseen menacing forces. Society Nurse (2011) remains cryptic, with the presumably titular nurse carrying a tray of surgical instruments with a far off look in her eyes. Robinson begins with images projected directly on his canvases, working in the dark, and his paintings are completed with loose, nearly impressionistic brushwork, never losing detail. These paintings archive images that just as easily could be lost to time, reveling in the melodrama of desire that simmered between the original book’s thin covers, outlasting the armature of the stories themselves, now faded away and left to obscurity.

All is archived in Robinson’s work, in one way or another. The present often has a way of becoming tomorrow’s curiosity, and as a compendium of advertising — some of the most fleeting of images created — it serves as an absorbing document, one that continues to grow. There is a certain Postmodern slickness to the transformation that’s affected, an image shifting from one form to another. But unlike many of his fellow appropriators, Robinson is not attempting to splinter the tropes that both propel and stymie culture; the conversion of one commodity into another is presented succinctly and without great fanfare, belying the potential ennoblement that encompasses such a transaction. Hinted at in this work is a romance latent in all images, the cause and course of representation that dwells in our subconscious. Advertising offers solutions, and in his abstractions of our wants, Robinson counters with questions.

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23 January – 21 March

This expert survey of Jörg Immendorff’s career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980’s. This was partly a matter of mistaken identity – he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental. From this exhibition, Immendorff emerges more fully as an original artist of great complexity. This reevaluation also makes distinctions that remove him from convenient generalizations made about the “postmodern” Eighties, the Trans-Avant-Garde, and art generally, and it illustrates thoroughly the conceptual nature of his work.

Born in 1945, Immendorff was of the generation that experienced post-war disillusionment that politicized every waking moment. As a student in the 1960s, he faced the task of examining Germany’s tragic history and its fraught relationship with modernity. This forced him to devise a balancing act between eras.

Immendorff subsequently takes on the multiple roles of jester, storyteller and historian. He actively participates in a self-conscious continuum of twentieth-century German art while simultaneously throwing stones at the powers that be. After running the full gamut of conceptual work á la fluxus, his adoption of painting appears as a sort of purposeful and elaborate bluff. Although this suits his needs, it makes the connection to Ludwig Kirchner and the original German expressionist group die Brücke seem almost superfluous. What comes to the fore instead is a weaving together of political, social and personal myth making. It is the content that matters most, putting him more in line with the social, satirical and metaphorical intents of George Grosz and Max Beckmann respectively.

Immendorf’s early work from the sixties tells of the political upheavals of his days under the mentorship of Joseph Beuys. At that time, with the strong fluxus influence, there existed all sorts of manifestos, sloganizing and politicized minimal art. A petition to end the Vietnam war from 1965 (signed by Beuys and others) serves as a defining historic document here. This section of the show also conveys how Immendorff’s later shift to painting, in all it’s conventionality, is not so much an “about face” as it is a specific strategy-he goes on to combine his well-learned conceptual precepts and his inherent politics with his painterly methods.

The large “Café Deutschland” paintings (1978-83) feign expressionist representation and zeal and move towards a system of complex metaphor which is in some way novel. Although illustrative, viewing these so-called Picabian “bad paintings” is merely the first step one takes in deciphering their meanings. They must be read as “multiple texts” not just formally as paintings. The bars with wooden floors serve as meeting places of mythic characters where the artist and converses with Mao, Marx, Stalin, Beuys and Brecht. Whether conspicuously or not, Immendorff avidly adopts the mantle of Beuys and with it, the ability to fabricate and mix myths with facts.

Beuys’s image appears continuously in Immendorf’s work. A small painting, “Gertrude Stein,” includes a depiction of Beuys piloting his Stuka dive bomber with “Fluxus” written (in typical Immendorff fashion) across the wings. In the large painting, Sun Gate, a diagrammatical outline of his teacher becomes a Beuys’s museum.

Eventually, Beuys turns up in Immendorf’s theatrical productions of the 1990s. As the paintings progress, Immendorff both pays homage and mocks, cycling his own personal myths, those of East and West and those peculiar to the art world. This process reaches a natural culmination when Immendorff uses theater — for which he was originally trained — as his canvas. Immendorf’s video production of Stravinsky’s opera Rake’s Progress is ingenuously used as an unlikely channel for German art and society. Key figures appear-Beuys, Penke and Lüpertz -all playing different historical figures in the play. The artist Baselitz plays the Keeper of the Insane Asylum, while Lüpertz becomes Mick Shadow, Rakewell’s alter ego. With Immendorff as Tom Rakewell, one can see a fantastic interweaving of past and present, a confluence of Germanic art historical reference brought to life. Immendorf’s use of Hogarth’s morality tale shows his strange affinity with the English caricaturist and reinforces where Immendorff’s interests lie: in promoting an open-ended dialogue on culture. The fall of the Berlin Wall, so long at the center of his rationale, may have been the reason he went looking for alternative fertile ground to further extend his content and may partially explain his disappearance after his 1980s heyday.

Immendorff promulgates a watertight tautology that runs progressively through his ideas and delivery. His questions about the purpose of art and the conceptualization of the artist’s role are answered by the work itself and indeed, in retrospect, by Immendorff’s own life. His question, “What Can Art Do?” resonates particularly well now as art continues to develop an apolitical global/corporate mind set. This superbly researched show qualifies his unique contribution to art and ensures his enduring legacy.

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