print Summer 1994

Ingrid Rein

IT WAS MUNICH’S NAME as an art town, a sort of Athens on the Isar, that drew the young Adolph Hitler there in 1913. Over twenty years later, in 1935, he drafted a vision of Munich as a modern “city of the Hellenes”—the “capital of German art,”and the future “capital of the [Nazi] movement.” Even earlier, in 1933, at the foundation-stone ceremony for Munich’s Haus der Deutschen Kunst (the house of German art, the first representative building of Nazi architecture), Hitler had proclaimed, in his peculiar staccato, “I want to make Munich a city so honoring Germany that none shall know Germany

print September 1991

Anselm Kiefer

One function of myth is to establish an identity by emotionally binding the individual to a national collective; this function has been more taboo in contemporary Germany than anywhere else. Anselm Kiefer’s earlier attempt to shatter the suppression of German collectivity by investigating national identity irked his critics. Despite the demystifying tendency of his investigations, there remained a remnant beyond rational thinking in the conceptually precarious space he staked out for himself. It was easier to see that this twilight contained a historically determined, night-blind angst, which

print April 1990

“Einleuchten: Will, Vorstel, Und Simul In HH”

Anniversaries were the cause: the harbor of Hamburg is 800 years old, and Kurt A. Körber, the sponsor of the Deichtorhallen, is 80 years old. Einleuchten (Illumination), Harald Szeemann’s three-generations show, was also an anniversary for him as a curator. Twenty years ago, in Bern, he was a Dr. Livingstone, who explored the precarious terrain of a processual “social anti-form,” as he called it, in the exhibition “When Attitude Becomes Form.” In Hamburg, with 57 artists, including 14 from his erstwhile Bern team, he celebrated Einleuchten as a missa solemnis. At Documenta 5, 1972, in Kassel,

print October 1989

Julian Schnabel

Julian Schnabel was just 30 years old when his relieflike paintings made him one of the most successful and controversial artists of his generation. Art is consciousness, the psychic manifestation of knowledge, Schnabel has said. In Basel—where his paintings were first shown in 1981—he has installed the “Recognitions” series in the Kunsthalle and his works on paper from the years 1975 to 1988 in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst.

Schnabel’s combination, or collage, works are still sensitive and seductive in their delicate use of color, the sensuality of their materials, and the liveliness of their

print February 1989

DIMINUTIONS AND DIVINATIONS: DAVID HODGES

IN DAVID HODGES’ MINIATURE oil paintings the magic of 1920s new objective realism comes alive again. As if imbued with the latent excitement of a film scene from that era, these extremely minute images seem to capture a frozen moment in a dramatic encounter, or in an encounter of strange anonymity. Hodges’ scenes, “shot” at close range, and distilled to their essentials, throw the viewer into a narrative without a graspable plot or accessible characters. They tell only what the viewer wants them to tell. One looks at them, and then something begins to transpire.

This necessitates our predisposition

print October 1988

“Europa Oggi”

Most visitors to Prato, a largely industrial town approximately 11 miles from Florence, don’t come for art, although there are classical works here that would be worth the trip. But now Prato, which is one of the richest cities in Italy, wants to polish its image—which has always been overshadowed by Florence in matters of art—with the opening of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art. The initiative for this museum came from one of the leading industrialists of the city, Enrico Pecci, who died several months before the opening; he dedicated the building and its surroundings to his deceased

print May 1988

Thomas Ruff

The more intensely we scrutinize these straightforwardly realistic color photographs, the less we find out about the people they depict. Thomas Ruff’s enormous, utterly lifelike portraits remove the individual to the same extent that they bring the sitter closer to us. Every liver spot, every bit of stubble on a chin, every wrinkle on a neck, like any information conveyed by this emotionless hyperclarity, binds us to the surface of the visible. These unposed photographs feature young people of the artist’s own generation, shown full face or in three-quarter view and cropped below the chest or

print April 1988

Walter De Maria

For Walter De Maria, a work of art expresses the idea of realizing the absolute. There is also a global and historical aspect to De Maria’s art, which could previously be seen in his unrealized project Olympic Earth Sculpture, 1971, planned for Munich; it appears again in the two sculptures that De Maria created especially for this exhibition. (Eleven Part Circle of the Large Rod Series, 1986, was also included here, but had been exhibited elsewhere.)

The first, The Beginning and End of Infinity/The 25-Meter Rod, 1987, looked precious and auratic in the dim light of the gallery. This work consists

print December 1987

Ulrich Horndash

The call for a return to order, to a new classicism, has become increasingly audible lately. Here, as in Ulrich Horndash’s “Hellas” installation, it has taken the form of homage to the genius of classical Greece, the infinite productivity and vitality of the Greek spirit. This is not motivated by a thinly veiled nostalgia for antiquity but by the conviction that we are indebted to that culture for our principal models of the world—Heracitus’ view that permanence is an illusion of the senses and that the only reality is change, the constant state of becoming; Plato’s theory of unchanging Forms,

print November 1987

Asger Jorn

Asger Jorn’s experimental phantasmagorical art was an art of rebellion, a search for a new beginning in the climate of hardening cultural and political attitudes during the postwar period. In the spirit of Dada and Surrealism, he and his CoBrA colleagues Carl-Henning Pedersen, Karel Appel, Constant, and Corneille fought for a transformation of the world and of life in order to establish a “new art of the people” based on a liberated imagination and a lively, spontaneous creativity. “We have to make the people into artists,” Pedersen said in 1944. “People’s art,” wrote Jorn in 1950 in “Sozialistische

print October 1987

THINGS THAT GO BUMP

LISA LIEBMANN

Discombobulated and cacophonous, with a populist bent, Documenta 8 was almost entirely free of the lofty airs that surrounded its elegant, smug predecessor in 1982, and that to some degree hovered over many of the more ambitious and large-scale international exhibitions in the five years since. Absent, for instance, was any sense of highbrow intellectualism or formalism, and gone as well the sense of giddy congruence with recent commercial, critical, and promotional dicta. Painting, for one, seemed relatively scarce, and while classicism and mannerism, minimalism and expressionism,

print September 1987

THE CRITICS’ WAY

MÜNSTER RHINELAND—WESTPHALIA Pop. 266,000 Alt. 62m. 13C restored cathedral, 14C town hall, 18C palaces, Landesmuseum “Skulptur Projekte in Munster 1987” June 14–October 4. Hannover 186 km—Cologne 152 km—Osnabrück 57 km.

CRITICS
Donald Kuspit ????
Max Wechsler ????
Dan Cameron ????
Pier Luigi Tazzi ????
Ingrid Rein ????

TEN YEARS AGO IN MÜNSTER, Klaus Bussmann curated a large outdoor sculpture exhibition under the title “Skulptur 77.” And now Bussmann and Kasper König have organized a second such show, “Skulptur Projekte in Münster 1987.” The works, by a total of 53 artists from Europe and North