print February 1993

Adrian Schiess

Strangely, this exhibition immediately piqued my interest though the works on the walls—in a visual sense—were paltry. Hung at about the same height, there were almost abstract, gestural watercolor-formations painted on torn pieces of paper pasted directly on the wall. They were without content, divorced from the space, requiring neither meditation nor close inspection. The whole show was nailed to nothing, fastened to nothing. And it doesn’t help to say these paintings refuse to represent the concrete or the explicable. In fact, Schiess uses the simplest methods, but they create what one could

print January 1993

Springtime for Hitler

A TELEVISION IMAGE from the reunified Germany of 1992–93: a long-haired, bearded man, beer can in hand, wearing a cowboy hat and a black leather jacket with fringes, repeats “They have to go, they have to go, they don’t have our German culture, they have to go.” In the background, a building burns; it is a dormitory for immigrants seeking asylum in Germany.

This image—the neo-Nazi cowboy, obviously impressed with “American” culture—was perhaps the most monstrous in the series of images that have been broadcast, with increasing frequency, from eastern Germany since the attack on the Rostock

print October 1992

John Miller

Rock sucks, disco sucks, and brown slime over everything.

This was John Miller’s third exhibition during the year he just spent in Germany, a period that the catalogue for one of the earlier exhibitions, at the DAAD space in Berlin, excellently documents. The book offers a variety of models for considering Miller and his trademark brown: the reinvigoration of the dandy, campiness, the combination of verbal and visual pranks, and a stance of correct yet critical behavior. In The Office Party and the Communist Party, 1991, the critic finally finds a place among all Miller’s crusty brown objects.

print September 1992

IN A CLEARING STANDS A BOXER: DOCUMENTA IX

print September 1992

Jutta Koether

SIMULTANEOUSLY A MASSIVE coup de main and an ostentatious display of generosity—even of love?—Jeff Koons’ 40-foot-high puppy of living flowers in the palace garden of Arolsen, thirty miles from Kassel, faces down the abundant speculation over his next career move. Koons’ last body of work was a collection of arguably or, rather, notoriously pornographic sculptures and photo pieces. Since their appearance, the always lurking question—part sympathetic, part spiteful—has , been “How will he top them?” He answers in Puppy, a sea of flowers—a work that is popular to the point of vulgarity.

When it

print May 1992

Arnold Schönberg

It is always interesting to observe an artist who is recognized in one arena while struggling in another with an almost more brilliant insouciance. In Arnold Schönberg’s case, the struggle produced a considerable number of interesting paintings: fascinating/failed paintings of bizarre curiosity. Do we need yet another painter who produced scurrilous portraits and pensive landscapes in the first days of Modernism? Take for example the often-reproduced Der rote Blick (The red eye, 1910), half August Strindberg, half Goya-remake, simultaneously self-portrait and an example of symbolism. Here

print April 1992

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas’ “written drawings” refer mainly to existential situations involving sex, death, love, the child, man, racism, fear, and woman as painter. This show is a turbulent journal exposing the artist’s most personal concerns. At the same time, Dumas also insists on the significance and justification of defending intimacy, and on the artist’s need for self-observation, exploration, and analysis of the psyche.

I am not looking at this exhibition as a whole. It’s the old story of how isolating a work of art increases its relevance, favoring a mild kind of terrorism, a humanist slant. It’s an

print February 1992

Georg Baselitz

This exhibition of Georg Baselitz’s new work attracted much attention, including that of people who had long ago lost all interest in Baselitz. Is it because of the amazing way Baselitz has liberated his painting style? Or is it the desire to make him an exception that exerts such great appeal? These paintings break with his conception of the heroic portrait. thereby enabling the work to acknowledge the presence of the viewer and to leave a space for the personal experience of the paintings. The relationship of the viewer to the work offers the possibility of a physical experience, and departs

print January 1992

Laura Emrick

In her exhibition entitled “Regolith and Reproduction,” Laura Emrick incorporated science and technology in her art. She takes for granted a familiarity with the newest developments in the media and in technology, as well as with the images, stories, desires, and utopias they produce. For her, the seminal event in the development of media culture was the first moon landing. The voyage through space; the broadcasting of information by satellite; and the creation of utopias are simultaneously real and science fictional, opening outer space itself to larger-than-life fantasies as well as to flight.

print May 1991

Elke Denda

We should not be misled by the lively, cheerful appearance of Elke Denda’s work. Though she likes Mondrian, Matisse, and Sigmar Polke, she has also been decisively influenced by her teacher at the Düsseldorf academy, Fritz Schwegler, whose work has been summed up by Luk Lambrecht as “an intimate work that looks like a strangely plastic reflection of a diary.” The basic features of Denda’s oeuvre are personal signs; simple colors and patterns; schematized observations of nature; stylized, minimalist painting; and observations of the past as well as the world of childhood. Most of these characteristics

print January 1991

Peter Fend

Is he an anarchist, an ultraliberal marketing expert, or simply living proof that the two types are interwoven—especially in America? During the past summer and fall, Peter Fend—as ego, as part of OECD (Ocean-Earth Construction and Development Corporation), as artist, as entrepreneur of planned multinational art corporations aiming to make the world better through artistic means—traveled between Cologne, Frankfurt, and Paris. Always holding a new conspiracy theory, he introduced himself and his permanent preoccupation with improving the world’s ecology. His blueprints and analyses, his assertions

print December 1990

Michael Krebber

This show is a trailer of sorts offering glimpses of Michael Krebber’s cosmos where he operates as a “veteran nay-sayer,” a worker and a producer of “negative exhibitions,” starting out as usual with his own pleasure as initial impulse.

Just as the Situationists wanted to remain professional amateurs, Krebber skillfully develops methods of being an artist, but not a professional one. This is confirmed by a plethora of documents from his life without work but also without boredom. Thus, the walls are covered with things—for instance, an article from the German newspaper, Frankfurter Allgemeine