Walking Through Two Germanys

A guided tour with curator Stephanie Barron

Comments (0) By Tom Christie Wednesday, Mar 18 2009

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This is an artist, Arno Fischer, who was doing a portfolio called Situation Berlin, which he started in the late ’50s and was planning to finish, but the wall went up in August 1961. Here’s the Kurfürstendamm in the West[Kurfürstendamm, West-Berlin (1957)] and here’s Stalin-Allee in the East. Fischer was looking at these comparisons, but wasn’t able to finish it so it was never published.

Then we have some of the approved, official artists in the East. People like Willi Sitte [Massaker II (Massacre II) (1959)]. It’s not a great painting by any stretch, but it shows that some of these artists were looking to Picasso. Picasso was okay to look at because he was a communist. So he would be able to be reproduced in the East German art period, whereas the other main figures of modernism would not be. These, I call Penck before Penck. This is really early work.

Georg Baselitz, Bild fÅr die VÑter

Eugen Schönebeck, Ginster (1963)

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How well-known was Penck?

Penck was actually pretty well-known, but not in the ’50s. He was known in the ’70s and he didn’t leave until 1980, but he was showing in the ’70s. Now we’re in the late ’50s, early ’60s. So again, another film clip to show the economic miracle in the West and just to kind of give an idea of what that felt like.

[Moving into room No. 3.] This room is all West, and we have artists who are part of something called the Zero Group. They’re kind of pushing the envelope of new technologies. It’s artists like Otto Piene [Zur Geschichte des Lichts (On the History of Light) (1958-9)], Günther Uecker [Das gelbe Bild (Yellow Painting) (1958) and TV auf Tisch (TV on Table) (1963)], who did the nails, and who’s basically attacking, literally, consumer objects. We have some single-channel video over there in which he actually goes through a field of the nails and he’s hammering them into the fields almost as if he’s sowing it with seeds. It’s absolutely beautiful.

So again, Fluxus video is part of this whole scene in Germany early on, whether it’s [Joseph] Beuys, or Nam June Paik, who was there. These are all 1964. These are all early happenings. Fluxus really began in Germany. The Chocolates and the literary sausage is Dieter Roth, who chose food and organic material to make his art out of. [Roth’s sausages are made of chopped-up books by authors he didn’t like.]

Those are absolute genius.

The whole notion of it is just fantastic. Then the Chocolate Lion Tower has about 1,800 pounds of chocolate. Each one of these came in its own little box.

This is re-created? How did that happen?

We contacted the artist’s estate and we paid for the fabrication of this to be used for this exhibition.

It smelled good the night I was here, but then I read Christopher Knight’s piece in the L.A. Times...

Christopher thought it was revolting. It’s a little much. When we were installing it I ended up having to go buy this huge box of chocolate for the guys who were installing.

[Wolf] Vostell is somebody who’s not well-known enough at all, I think, in the United States, very political. One often thinks of him or talks about Rauschenberg in the same breath sometimes, but he’s really, really political. He’s anti-West, anti-American [B-52 (“Lippenstiftbomber”) (B-52 {Lipstick Bomber}) (1968) and Coca-Cola (1961)].

This room (No. 4), is one of my favorites because you just feel this energy and this excitement. We’re not playing by rules anymore, and you realize after the room we came through first of all how international [it’s become]; suddenly now there’s a discourse. They’re not only looking to a German past, but American artists are being seen. We’re basically in the mid-’60s here. Zero Group is like ’59 to ’60, so this room is all ’60s. You see an influence of Pop Art, which in Germany got kind of twisted into something called Capitalist Realism. So an artist like Konrad Lueg [Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1966)], who became the dealer Konrad Fischer, did these works using shower curtains. Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among the artists showing in this style of so-called Capitalist Realism. So we reconstructed this installation that Richter did. It was a 24-hour installation celebrating this guy called Volker Bradke, who was just some guy who came and hung around with him, so in a very Warholian way. Basically Bradke gets his 15 minutes. He gets one of [Richter’s] blurry photo paintings, a bunch of photos and this equally boring blurry film.

So there are more jokes now.

There’s irony. There is no irony in the East, but there’s definitely irony in the West. Polke, early Polke, this is one installation and to his specifications, and it’s these 12 paintings on this lattice work [Fünftziger Jahre, Die (The Fifties) (1963-69)].