“Made in Germany” does not seek to illuminate “Germanness.” Thirty-eight of the show’s fifty-two artists live and work in Berlin, which is now a hodgepodge of expats seeking cheap rent; indeed, twenty-two included here are not German-born. The exhibition is an equivalent to the Whitney Biennial, albeit with fewer artists and more real estate for each contribution. And because it is in context with the conceptually weighty and thematic Skulptur Projekte Münster and Documenta 12, the pressure to be all things to all people is lessened, resulting in a rare survey show that is just that: an exhibition featuring a sampling of compelling, focused, and confident art.
Tue Greenfort’s Sculpture Garden, 2007, revitalizes the Sprengel Museum’s private-access sculpture garden by creating a path on which only a few visitors at a time can walk, in the company of a museum guard. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have hired an attractive young man to stand composed on a pedestal at the same venue, handing out cards to viewers that read (in English) HAVE YOU COME HERE FOR FORGIVENESS. The duo’s living sculpture is placid and dry when compared with Drama Queens, their profoundly funny, parodic theater work staged for Skulptur Projekte Münster. Nearby, formally abstract works by Florian Slotawa, Gabriel Vormstein, and Sergej Jensen command an authoritative presence among politically charged photographs by Henrik Olesen and David Zink Yi.
In Hannover’s Kunstverein, Amelie von Wulffen’s washy wall paintings evoke lulling personal histories, while in an adjacent gallery, Jeppe Hein’s colossal mobile hangs from ceiling to floor. Its shiny chrome orbs—balancing at the ends of rotating horizontal rods—make for an arresting kinetic object. But viewers circumnavigating this mobile soon discover that random air currents are not responsible for animating the sculpture. Sensors above the gallery entrances respond to movement around the work, transforming the oversize modernist mobile into a site-specific social sculpture. Other noteworthy contributions here are video works by Julian Rosefeldt and Candice Breitz. Both examine common routines and pleasures in daily life, while photographs by Annette Kelm explore the conceptual space between the genres of still life and portraiture.
Hannover’s Kestnergesellschaft presents Alexander Laner’s work, which was created by a trapshooting thrower that hurled clay disks at a large interior wall near the institution’s entrance. The field of gashes in the drywall mimics the spray from a shotgun. The evidence of such force directed inside and at the walls of a contemporary art space is powerful, especially when juxtaposed with Ceal Floyer’s poetic Spirit Level, 2004, a bright yellow construction level simply attached to the wall at eye level. For it is in this tension and difference that artistic potential in Germany is made.
