WE ANDROIDS
NOW THAT THE THEORISTS have determined that reality is not what it used to be, and have decided to murder it once and for all, a number of artists have emerged, like creatures from the Black Lagoon, more than eager to illustrate the crime in detail. The hand grows weary rewriting the names from the American side of the Atlantic—Peter Halley, Jeff Koons, Sherrie Levine, Haim Steinbach, et al. Yet while American artists and their collectors, like Meryl Streep versions of Karen Blixen in Africa, can more cavalierly scavenge and relish the souvenirs of a vanishing culture, European artists cannot play by the same rules. Here, both the hold of and loyalty to the past are far stronger.
This could set the stage for a number of deductions. Is it, for example, too harsh to say that vacuum-cleaner art, like that of Koons, might be most appealing to a society that has gathered comparatively little dust? At the same time, couldn’t we argue that the desire to assert a weightier history is reflected in such a transporting of the secular object into the realm of art? Or in the making of works of art that quote works of art? Or in dispensing reality—or is it art?—in nostalgic doses with that Book-of-the-Month-Club look, as does Eric Fischl? Now, going over to the contemporary West German scene, couldn’t one argue that here the reality of history is simply rearranged: that the metalanguage constructed becomes just another myth, as in the works of Reinhard Mucha, old bricoleur? Or is idealized in the typological titles Wolfgang Luy assigns his constructions?
Indeed, one can argue such points, but only if one is mad enough to risk fiery sacrifice on the altar worshiped by the lords of fragmentation and circled by the angels of simulation. For no artist is willing to cease to exist—however heroically—by stepping outside the status-quo shadows of our agreed-upon twilight. In post-Modernism’s no-man’s/everyman’s land between what is and what was, we now find our artists—in their efforts to demonstrate the unhinging of signified and sign—persistently disturbing the equilibrium of use and meaning. Thus we are faced either with works that emphasize pure “use,” sublimed and paralyzed—like the shelves of Steinbach, or the architectural structures of Stephan Huber, or the models of Luy—or with works that emphasize pure “meaning,” like the conduits and systems of Halley, or the abstract cyphers of Klaus Merkel, or the moral texts of Jochen Gerz.
But whether the object, in relation to the world, is reduced to something of a joke, a pleasing trifle, or a desperate gesture, a common denominator has by now made itself clear in the works of American and German artists. Both art communities of the ’80s celebrate the victory of the envelope. This triumph of the box over the cereal, the model over its realization, is the conquest of the look of art over the work of art, the esthetic over its corresponding ideology; it is, in short, the victory of an imagined or dreamed content over that content’s real substance and character. In America, that imagined content owes its life to the absence of memory. In Germany, however, its existence is due to history’s still-too-recent heavy burden. This shared disregard for reality functions by laws of logic so bizarre that it frees American artists, whose immersion in the here and now is so overwhelming, from the need for any measurement between art and artifact: the immediate itself instantly acquires the aura of value—perhaps as close as it can get to the aura of history, or time, as described by Walter Benjamin.’ But in the German Weltanschauung ( world view), immediacy has no place, for the matrix of reality here is considered graspable only when processed through historical consciousness. If parts of that history and that consciousness have had to be suppressed (as those touching on and touched by the period of the Third Reich), German artists stand deprived of an essential ingredient for their cultural production.
For almost three and a half decades following World War II, that previous era of madness and mistrust, the era of National Socialism—and its corresponding esthetic—were a taboo. In fact, even an artist such as Joseph Beuys could not really achieve what he has been almost universally praised for: entering the black hole of recent German history—the Third Reich. For even in Beuys’ powerful fat and felt works, which resonate with the drama of his wartime experiences, we find the artist amplifying that personal drama into metahistorical fable. With these ominous objects and constructions, we are reminded, of course, that Beuys was a bomber pilot in the German army, that his plane was shot down, that his Tartar peasant rescuers wrapped him in these materials to save his life. But what we are rarely asked to consider, or even acknowledge, are the specific and political ironies of these radically self-referential works: that Beuys’ rescuers were, in fact, his intended victims; that it was only by his allegiance to, or at least participation in, the German war effort that this personal drama would have taken place at all.2
It’s relevant to note here that throughout his career, Beuys never publicly voiced a word of regret for his participation in the complex, well-oiled death machine we call Nazism. In one project, however—his models and drawings for a 1958 competition sponsored by the International Auschwitz Committee—Beuys did pay explicit tribute to Nazism’s direct and intended victims. His proposal featured the placement of red, markerlike sculptures along the path from the railway stop, through the concentration camp, and to the crematorium. Yet later that year Beuys returned (reverted) to his radical interiority, when he placed these drawings along with other drawings and objects he’d made relating to Auschwitz—including, among other things, his “signature” fat and vials of poison—in a large glass showcase. Thus the “homeopathic” character of Beuys’ Auschwitz, 1958, effectively transforms a specific historical horror (that requires time-specific explanation) into timeless icon (that does not). In the catalogue for his 1979 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, we hear Beuys saying, “I find for instance that we are now experiencing Auschwitz in its contemporary character.”3 What Beuys did, essentially, was to take Auschwitz off the shoulders of the multitude of individuals, the nation, responsible for it, and to put that burden on the shoulders of “human” character. And this opened the gates for a flood of younger artists more than willing to follow down the same path, turning fact into symbol, the elements of a particular historical horror into timeless existential icons for man’s cruelty to man. It is in this context, then, that we can read Markus Lüpertz’s “evocative” depictions of soldiers’ helmets, Georg Baselitz’s expressionistic upendings of the isolated hero, the grotesque interiors of Jörg Immendorff’s “Café Deutschland” paintings of 1977 on, even the chilling and primal cavernscapes of Anselm Kiefer. Granted, there is much to be admired in the way these artists struggle to confront the painful legacy of World War II. Baselitz’s topsy-turvy figures, for example, offer up both poignant and provocative testimony to the bankruptcy of the notion of the hero. But ultimately, it is only through their “universalizing” or “mythologizing” of a specific historical event that these works achieve their resonance.
But by the late ’70s, an influx of philosophical theories from France offered the next generation of German artists a kind of release from this bind. One could almost hear the collective sigh of relief when the sanctification of the sign owing nothing to the signified became a widespread gospel. In other times this sanctification would have required a radical break from the very matrix of cultural production in which the German artist has always worked. But thanks to the “envelope” proffered by scholars like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard, the legacy of National Socialism could now be explicitly used. For the esthetic of a reality could be employed, these theories served to suggest, without the user assuming responsibility for the ideology it either reflected or produced.
A look at the work of Günther Förg and Albert Oehlen, for example, can suggest the range of forms this “de-tabooing” has taken. Förg photographs, among other things, sites of fascist power, as in his 1983–86 views of the Palazzo della Civiltà, in Rome’s EUR district—that assemblage of museums and memorials that Mussolini conceived of as the architectural core of the “Third Rome.” And the mute but authoritarian weight of Förg’s bronze reliefs in tabloid form evokes the oppressive heaviness of power. Oehlen, in a series of self-portraits, plays with the posture of the “forward-looking” hero so exploited in Nazi propaganda, or paints a portrait of Adolf Hitler, or uses the swastika motif in several works.
We could attribute this focus on the emblems, icons, or afterimages of power to ignorance—to the lack of sufficient information provided by postwar German schools on the precise nature and scope of Germany’s Holocaust atrocities. Thus we might say that this fascination with the meaning of the unspoken, or the denied, could be the means by which the artist can investigate, through the back door, so to speak, his or her own history. It’s even possible here to consider such works manifestations of a process of “decontamination,” whereby classical forms, freed from their political implications and use, might be returned to their original role as heralds of humanism. But in the works mentioned above, the distance between esthetic and ideology is implicitly asserted, as the influence of post-Modernist theory frees German artists from laying claim to any of the ideological implications of their images except for the art-historical ones. A critical perspective is missing. We have no way of discovering these artists’ opinions. Emerging like blazing banners—and yet with no message—these works achieve their profoundly arrogant air.
In effect, then, the wedge between the object and this world, so welcomed by German artists in investigating their own deeply problematic history, can suggest itself as the instrument of salvation from that history, just as so much of today’s post-Modernist kitsch appropriation wants to suggest itself as an instrument of salvation from a current threatening reality: the “totalitarianism” of consumer society. But without a critical perspective, a perspective the German artist stubbornly withholds, this salvation is as superficial and as tenuous as the process by which such citations by American artists have been crowned with the aura of art; for the transformation will be limited to only the fleeting period of time during which the taste of the era will tolerate it. And still we and our artists grasp at its old underlying message again, art for art’s sake, and raise it to its new axiomatic summit, for art’s self-oration as trumpeter of change, if not its promoter, has never been so feeble as it is now.
The work of Klaus Merkel, consummate professional down to the tips of his fingers, embodies the dynamics of this attitude/stance to the nth degree. Merkel’s works in his spring-of-1988 exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande and Westfalen in Düsseldorf respond, with utter elegance and precision, to the entire lexicon we now carry with us as we approach pictures. In fact, our response to Merkel’s work has the character of a Pavlovian reflex, so perfectly have both artists and observers now been conditioned to what I would call “decent” or “unquestionable” art. Unquestionable art is, of course, unquestionably art, for it beautifully negotiates all the rules and roles of art, fluently speaks and manipulates the vocabulary. And the viewer is so satisfied by the skill and savvy of this performance that he or she can forget that it is a performance. For here is an art so profoundly conscious of being art that even the component of the unconscious—or, to put it more pointedly, the component that risks mistakes—has been as brilliantly integrated as everything else, in a gesture as beautifully executed as if the artist had shot a ray of light down through the depths and layers of the soul to touch it. The problem is that once the gesture is confused with the real activity—once the picture nicely knows itself to be art, and the accumulation of pictures nicely knows itself to be an exhibition—the object ceases to ask questions about the world; instead, it functions as a model, a model of what it might look like to ask questions, a model of what a work of art should look like, far superior to the work whose inability to decipher itself was, until now, its greatness. The pictures of Klaus Merkel, then—and Merkel is not alone in this—are to art what androids are to humans: a perfect simulation, without the force of life.
But how can we decide what is the conscious element and what is not, and how can we know that what we see are gestures—the formulas for feeling—and not the authentic feelings themselves? The point of such rhetoric here is familiar, but the questions themselves are irrelevant, for it is not the use (or abuse) of gesture that is disturbing, but the context in which the gestures are put to work. The emblems, the knotted x’s, the leering apparitions on color fields in Merkel’s work are signs and gestures that are axioms about the arbitrariness not of life, but of the life of the picture. Gestures in art have an extremely short life once the name of the game is ingenuity. Of course, the name of the game, as we’re now told, is not ingenuity, not originality; paradoxically, however, the stronger this idea takes hold, the more pronounced grows the notion of the artist who illustrates it as young genius. Perhaps that’s because the divorce of the object from the world, and its marriage to the construction of a world of art, is accompanied by the elaborate staging that we associate with revolution. On two adjoining walls in his exhibition, Merkel hung dozens of his pictures tightly packed together in a salon-style arrangement. Thus a reservoir of gestures, each somewhat individualized, yet unindividualized by their intimate closeness with one another, protect one another, shore up one another, suggesting a shared core that holds them together, offering the illusion of a radical yet hermeneutic wisdom.
Similarly, in his Dove sta memoria (Where is memory, 1986) Gerhard Merz reworked a photograph of Cima da Conegliano’s Saint Sebastian of ca. 1500. In Munich’s Kunstverein, Merz installed the image at the end of a long, corridorlike room whose painted brown walls echoed the sepia tones in the image, and whose vertical framed blue-field panels (of the same size as the framed Sebastian) paced and punctuated the viewer’s approach to it. However, Merz’s claim for his work—that he is creating a pure, sublime art in the tradition of Barnett Newman—has no ground. For Newman’s political views, clearly and frequently articulated, can inform our reading of his forms, whereas Merz’s persistent coyness and evasiveness in stating his political position serves to remove Conegliano’s poignant, expressive emblem for human struggle from the arena of life, and to lock it into the hermetic house of art. Thus, when Merz asks “Where is memory?,” the only answer he offers, in effect, is that it lies in the realm of pure forms. But this in fact is not memory (which is always wedded to history), but nostalgia—that wishful (and wistful) thinking that, dangerously, turns its back on the real world in order to posit the existence of timeless, value-free ideals.
This closing up and this turning away are strong strains in the work of newly emerging German artists. Hubert Kiecol builds architectural models made of cement, sealed as tight as bunkers. The notion of the bunker appears also in Thomas Schütte’s Shelters, 1981, and his Eis Tempel (Ice cream temple, 1987). The house or shelter as defender (for what, if not art?) asserts itself also in the early-Renaissance-like frescoes of Georg Ettl, and serves as the literal stage in the painted and constructed scenerylike backdrops of Ludger Gerdes, into which the artist might introduce either real or depicted human figures. Luy constructs circular or spherelike structures that suggest the harboring of emptinesses within, as in his Phantasie ist Realität/Realität ist Phantasie (Fantasy is reality/reality is fantasy, 1986). Klaus Kumrow’s architectural constructs often enclose smaller structures within, or functional-looking but ultimately inscrutable arrangements of objects.
The distinctive nature of these artists’ affinities with post-Modernist architecture now becomes clearer. If post-Modernism can be seen as best regards and best discards from a classical past, it can also be seen as that bizarre stance which says, If art cannot adjust to life, let life adjust to art—the ideal position for these younger artists, still struggling to negotiate what appears an insurmountable esthetic/political barrier. Hence the pervasive dollhouselike atmosphere and appearance of so much of their art, where the monumental is reduced to the cute, and where pain is seduced into pathos, struggle into irony, ideology into spectacle, and expression into gesture.
Thus these seeming topplers of Modernism reveal themselves, strangely enough, as Modernism’s prodigal sons. Borrowing from the esthetic of National Socialism, or leaping past it, indeed they can succeed in seeming to stay immaculately in the front, looking as fashionable and fresh as the avant-garde they claim is dead. Indeed, however, these artists are only retreating to where that notion of the avant-garde was first given birth: in the humanistic, neoPlatonic movement of the Renaissance, where the artist was defined as the one who brings upon us the visitation of ideal forms. For what is an envelope if not the ideal form incarnate? In the “immeasurable” overlap between the eternal serpent’s mouth and its tail, German artists cavort as merry Spenglerian witnesses. But why is it that their play leaves us so dangerously satisfied? Why is it that we are so willing to grant them status as intergalactic spies (our new angels?) who should hold no opinion, no interest, in the reality they investigate? And why are we so eager to crown this disinterest as insight or analysis? Finally, we must ask ourselves if the envelopes being mailed to us again and again by German artists, and that we receive with such enthusiasm, are in fact as securely sealed as we want to believe, or if German history still remains a Pandora’s Box—one still frightening, yet still essential, to open.
Doreet Levitte Harten is a writer who lives in Dusseldorf and Jerusalem.
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NOTES
1. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969, pp. 217–51.
2. For a provocative discussion of Beuys’ self-mythologizing, however, see Benjamin Buchloh’s “Beuys: The Twilight of the Idol,” in Artforum XVIII, no. 5, January 1980, pp. 35–43.
3. Quoted in Caroline Tisdale, Joseph Beuys, exhibition catalogue, London: Thames and Hudson, Ltd., for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1979, p. 23.
