Wolfgang Laib studied medicine and finished all the examinations necessary in order to practice; since graduating, however, he has devoted himself exclusively to his work in art. His home is in a part of Germany known for a deeply rooted meditative, even mystical spirituality, and this location, together with his education, are decisive conditions for Laib’s work. The intensity of his preoccupation with “milk stones,” and more recently with pollen, is an expression of a creative fixation in the best sense of the term: on the one hand, it expresses the once-vital link of the doctor with nature; on the other, it affirms man’s immaterial ties with his environment as an indispensable root of life.
The visual form of the work is as lean as its artistic quality is rich and elusive. On the floor of this museum’s space lay a flat rectangular piece of white marble, its top slightly ground down to form a depression that was filled with milk. A little way off, also on the floor, was a square of yellow pollen; and on a shelf in the corner of the room stood several glass jars filled with pollen, their differing tones of yellow the result of the variety of plants used as sources. The materials seemed to emanate a quiet that permitted no disturbance.
Laib’s art works on the viewer on a level of spiritual contemplation. The substances give off their own energy, a life energy, literally present in the pollen and in the nutritive milk. This milk is allied with the marble, organic with inorganic, in a quiet, seemingly natural unity whose end is determined only by the evaporation of the liquid. For the duration of the piece, this unity is renewed by regularly topping up the hollow in the stone. Laib’s use of the rectangle as a shaping principle derives not from the rationalist, scientific spirit of the modern world, but from the form’s innate meaningfulness. It is present as a symbol in all human cultures.
A fragile unity of form, material, and color is basic to the work’s contemplative mode of operation. Where color is not an artistic goal but is innate to the medium and its meaning, nature and art coalesce tightly. A perceptible but indefinable advance toward a unison of art and life infuses Laib’s work. It applies as much to the dimension of time as to the irreducible facts of creation and decay, life and death; Laib emblematized time here by suggesting the process of collecting his material through his inclusion of the pollen-filled jars. The fragility of the pollen square creates a tension between one’s attraction to it and the necessity for keeping one’s distance from it; its transitory quality demands an intuitive perception from the viewer. And the spiritual life energy inherent in Laib’s media also demands respect.
Nevertheless, one wonders about the durability of Laib’s creativity. Will his forms, as they become familiar, become merely “beautiful”? To what extent can they be repeated? Where can Laib go next? No one can tell; for now, however, finally commanding the space and time it needs in this installation, the work has proved its efficacy.
—Annelie Pohlen
Translated from the German by Martha Humphreys.
