During the ’70s, many artists strove to leave the ivory tower of the art scene for the arenas of nature and society. Spurred by utopic visions of a humane world brought about by art, they discarded the bourgeois “l’art pour l’art” thinking that stressed the role of genius. With the recent onslaught of young artists concerned with the traditional media of painting, sculpture, and drawing, “pure” art (pure museum commodity) has returned to the focus of attention, a reversal Rudi Fuchs sought to institutionalize at Documenta 7; but recent art production makes this direction impossible to sustain. To an increasing extent, young artists’ work again reflects social relevance, and more and more artists are emerging who have never questioned the need for such relevance.
Bogomir Ecker is exemplary. In 1981, when the Karlsruhe Kunstverein attempted a preliminary redress of the situation in which the apolitical new painting was dominant, Ecker’s work was logically included in its exhibition. But there his bizarre sculptures and installations of found materials did not quite work. Elsewhere, in sites removed from the art scene—factories, junkyards, the byways of industrial civilization—their creative energy came across much more successfully. These two shows, then, were eagerly awaited: would Ecker’s sculptural language, casually rough and poetically intense, lose force in the groomed indoor spaces of the art business?
The shows proved that the gallery space need not subvert the energy of Ecker’s provocative sculptures. In Krefeld, challenged by the open architecture of this Mies van der Rohe villa, he showed an installation demonstrating a clear involvement with the space. In the less spare ambience of the turn-of-the-century environment in Bonn, he was more frugal in his accentuations. In both cities Ecker proved the suggestive strength of his work, which is made of found materials and painted generally in drab, only occasionally glowing, red and yellow.
The wall and floor pieces in both spaces slip between recollection of the familiar and remoteness from any clear meaning. A small train painted gray, its wheels flimsily attached, stood in the doorway of the van der Rohe building. A lectern with an illuminated glass plate showed the abandoned drawings of a vanished reader. Sculptural wall drawings suggest fleeing creatures, while a crudely formed metal mask invokes the human, a profound concern of Ecker’s. The indoor sculptures in Krefeld carried on a dialogue with those in the park; as if coincidentally, a sculpture floated in a tree, fleetingly suggesting a piece of furniture, but one lacking any interpretable function.
Even as finished works, Ecker’s sculptures convey an intimation of the suggestive power exerted on the artist by the found materials. The poetic ambiguity of his ciphers in space challenges usual viewing habits; here threatening in their bizarre, crude form, there comical in their inadequacy, always free in their ambiguity, they challenge the viewer to a dialogue through the medium of an imagination that cannot be standardized. Utterly contemporary in their rough, seemingly symbolic forms and their use of the materials of modern civilization, they seem like a rendering in the present of an archaic/mythical link between social structure and human culture. In this suggestive, “cultic” connection, the longing of the artistic individual for a new unity of people with their environment is intense. This is the utopic vision of the ’80s, and Ecker’s work is exemplary of it. The revolt against a standardized alienated society is unquestionably less amenable to analysis in Ecker’s sculptures than it was in the art of the ’60s and ’70s, but in its lapidary, difficult, and ironic form it causes no less disturbance. Only intuition can provide the key to understanding it.
—Annelie Pohlen
Translated from the German by Martha Humphreys.
