print April 1991

DEEP SURFACE: THOMAS RUFF

WHEN THOMAS RUFF was introduced as an “up-and-coming” artist at Art Cologne in 1987, the 150th birthday of photography was approaching, with all its accompanying foofaraw. The interest in Ruff at such a time was both curious and appropriate, since his work retrospectively invalidates a fundamental notion about photography throughout its history: the idea of its documentary “reality.” In the photograph, Ruff shows, we are confronted by a second-, third-, indeed nth-hand kind of reality, a reality—whatever that means—fundamentally challenged; or, alternatively, by an utterly absolute reality, the

print September 1990

THE UTOPIAN ADVENTURES OF ANNETTE MESSAGER

MULTIPLICITY IS THE CREDO of post-Modern civilization. Plurality or ambiguity has entertainment value. If the center does not hold, if the final efforts of a philosophical/ideological commitment have lost credibility, then the chameleonlike transformation or—to put it more cynically—the celebration of noncommitment may appear as the ultimate stability in instability. In any case, that would seem to be the best way to describe the current mind-set of Western culture. The era of utopian vision now belongs to history, and any reassertion of utopian values must now smack of romanticism.

Yet upon

print September 1989

PARTS AND PARCELS: THOMAS VIRNICH

THE PEOPLE OF BABEL, we are told, tried to build a tower to the sky; tried to storm the infinite regions of God. The story has an inhibiting moral—it is arrogant to imagine a life other than the one we already know—but like the Greek Prometheus myth, it also testifies to an enduring desire to try the limits of the possible. Actual history has shown that the consequences of that desire can be both as liberating and devastating as the myths imply. The early European visitors to the Americas, for example, such as Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci, broke through the boundaries of an age’s

print November 1986

Stephan Huber

The most self-aggrandizing of the Baroque kings was the French Louis XIV, the Sun King. One of his later royal namesakes, the 19th-century Bavarian King Ludwig II, had not a little in common with Louis in regard to cultural pomp and universalist ambitions. But Ludwig did not have to look to France for a role model; he had at hand a rich reservoir of Baroque art and architecture, to which he did his utmost to add. Bavaria has been living on the resulting grandeur ever since—as have the arts, too, though in a completely different sense.

Stephan Huber is one of the most outstanding young sculptors

print November 1986

Per Kirkeby

"It’s [Augustus Charles] Pugin’s dream of a medieval town community,” writes sculptor/painter Per Kirkeby of Copenhagen’s Grundtvig-Church and its environs, which affected him so deeply as a child and have now provided the spiritual “model” for his newest sculpture. It is the initial work in a proposed series of flat brick floor sculptures, which are unprecedented for Kirkeby. This piece, which is untitled, is especially significant in the context of this rendezvous with his childhood, that is, with that particular church. The examination of a historicizing construct from the vantage point of

print October 1986

Günther Förg

The installation design of this recent show shed light on the complexity of Günther Förg’s work, which continues to resist stylistic categorization. (One is reminded of the intermediary-form concepts of the early Constructivists.) The museum’s central gallery was both the site of the exhibition and a work of art in itself. The wall opposite the gallery entrance served as the ground for an untitled wall painting, a graduated arrangement of colored rectangles that resembled a steep stairway; above these, a dark green band ran the length of the wall. The remaining walls were hung with monumental

print September 1986

That can hatch from an infinity of eggs.

THE CENTRAL EXHIBITOIN OF the 42nd Venice Biennale, “Arte e Scienza” (Art and science), provoked questions even before the traditional “varnishing” —the preview—of this multinational event. At various times in our century the arts and the sciences have drawn close to each other in a mutual exchange, but in the '80s, as scientific thought has grown increasingly inaccessible and incomprehensible, a mood of pessimistic alienation has developed between the two. The question even arises as to whether the theme of art and science is a good point of departure fora show today—is it the light at the end

print September 1986

Gustav Kluge

The location of Gustav Kluge’s paintings is an experiential realm that lies somewhere between external reality and the unconscious. Here, isolated figures swim about in an impastoed sea of petit bourgeois experiences—petit bourgeois in this case having nothing to do with class-specific behavior but rather with the generation of our lives into trivialities. One of the most striking works at Zwirner showed a small, rather helpless-looking female creature carrying an enormous black male figure like a club through a landscape of paint. Entitled Der Spielgefährte (The playmate, 1985–86), this is an

print Summer 1986

Miriam Cahn

The famous question Is it still possible to write poetry after Auschwitz? has been transformed by the Swiss artist Miriam Cahn into the no less pressing question, Is it still possible to make significant art in a world that is threatened by the nuclear bomb?

Cahn’s medium is drawing, a painterly kind of drawing marked by many gradations between black and white, line and surface, figure and spatial expanse. Her images are traumatic, comparable to that incomprehensible dance of figures in a dream, where location is as difficult to define as it is in Cahn’s work. Each drawing intensifies this

print Summer 1986

Imi Knoebel

For the Modernists, nonfigurative art was the inevitable goal of all future evolution in the arts. According to midcentury wisdom, one was either an abstractionist or dead. Then came the declaration of the end of Modernism, and objective artists, content painters, triumphed over the “contentless” artists. Now, roughly five years after the victory celebration of the figurative artists, art brokers are announcing the rebirth of nonobjective painting with “geometria nova” (new geometry), a style exemplified by the work of John Armleder, Helmut Federle, Matt Mullican, and Gerwald Rockenschaub. What

print May 1986

DREAMING AWAKE

IN A RAW BARE ROOM at the last Documenta exhibition, in Kassel, West Germany, in 1982, stood a sloppily constructed sculpture of gutterlike lengths of metal propped up on uneven legs so as to assume, on careful inspection, the rough outline of an airplane. Water poured from a pipe to run in a stream through this system of gutters, like a source of energy or power. The creator of the work was Albert Hien, a Munich-based sculptor born in 1956, making him one of the youngest participants in Documenta 7—to many, a complete unknown. Despite its interest, this installation of his was poorly attended—it

print May 1986

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter has exhibited his work so infrequently in the past that this retrospective has of necessity turned into an art-world event. For months the art public has focused its attention on this show, and it will undoubtedly continue to do so, as the exhibition is scheduled to travel to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Kunsthalle Bern, and the Museum moderner Kunst in Vienna as well.

It is a unique accomplishment of this exhibit (for which Richter was consulted) that a balance has been struck between chronological documentation and a presentation of important highlights. Of the 191 selected

Annelie Pohlen