Walking Through Two Germanys

A guided tour with curator Stephanie Barron

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

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Making fun of him.

Exactly, the same piece that we saw in the other room. Here is a Hans Haacke installation. We’ll have a different one at the German venues. He’s the only artist who lives in the States who’s in the exhibition. He’s German. He obviously has a practice that kind of is in both countries and this was kind of an antiwar piece. He asked that when this piece is displayed in the United States we use a photo blow-up of a U.S. antiwar demonstration. If it’s in Germany you can do a German one.

Lutz Dammbeck, Nibelungen (Nibelung) (1986-1988)

Sibylle Bergemann, Ohne Titel (Gummlin) (Untitled [Gummlin] (1984)

Gundula Schulze, Ohne Titel, Dresden (1986)

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Fair enough.

Now we’re into the one wall with photography from the late ’70s, but otherwise basically the ’80s, where artists are kind of relooking at fascism, very differently from the way it was done in the ’60s. There’s a different edge to the work. This is an installation by Raffael Rheinsberg [Hand und Fuß (Hand and Foot) (1980)] who found in the 1970s, in an abandoned West Berlin railway station, the shoes and gloves from prisoners who would be taken to labor camps. He collected them and turned them into an installation in the 1980s.

We’ll segue to the photography which could have been in an earlier gallery. It’s kind of late ’70s. So the Bechers, of course, so well known [Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gas Tanks (1970)], but these are works by some of their early students, so Candida Höfer. This is from a portfolio she made about Turkish guest workers. Or early Thomas Struth, and again the ambiguity of — other than the Volkswagen — was this East, was this West? [Thomas Struth, Friedrich-Engels-Straße, Leverkusen (1980)]. And then this marvelous Thomas Ruff portfolio; though it’s from the ’70s the interiors are all these ’50s, ubiquitous German interiors [Thomas Ruff, Interierur 13B (Interior 13B) (1980)]. Like I said, terrorist activity was pretty prevalent. Kidnappings, the assassinations provoked someone like Jürgen Klauke in the West to do this series, which he began in the ’70s and continued until 2000 of these kind of anonymous terrorists, these photographs of anonymous terrorists. [Jürgen Klauke, Antlitze (Faces) (1972-2000)]

Lutz Dammbeck is an artist from the East, who then went to Hamburg, combines images from photographs of Hitler’s favorite artist, Arno Breker, the sculptor, and he sews them together with images of leaders from the Baader-Meinhof gang in these kind of iron frames, a very powerful piece [Lutz Dammbeck, Nibelungen (Nibelung) (1986-88)]. This room is what I call the underground scene in the East in the 1980s. Look at the works of the Dresden group, called the Autoperforationists. They would do hours and hours of performances. We have the videos from them. We have black-and-white photographs and what they called the utensils from the performances.

This piece in the middle of the room is by Via Lewandowsky [Gefrorene Glieder brechen leicht (Frozen Limbs Break Easily) (1989)]. It could be almost a metaphor for the two Germanys. You have this Janice figure attached to this body, where one leg is fettered, the other unfettered, and the figure is almost running into a knife. It sits teetering on this contraption that is unstable and filled with rocks from destroyed Dresden.

Photography, again, is strong in the East. Artists were able to work a little more privately doing photography. One of the strongest, I think, is Gundula Schulze Eldowy [Lothar, Berlin 1982 and Lothar, Berlin 1983]. This is a series of work she did about [a postal worker] called Lothar, and when she asked to photograph him he said, “Fine, but in addition to this photograph I want you to come home and take my photograph in my flat,” and he insisted upon posing [nude]. It’s a pretty wacky interior. This is a photograph of a child getting an X-ray [Ohne Titel, Dresden 1990 (Untitled, Dresden 1990)]. It’s a really tough photo, but she’s very good.

There aren’t a whole lot of women in the show.

Well, this room has a lot. Gundula, Evelyn Richter, Maria Sewcz, Helga Paris, Barbara Metselaar-Berthold. The women photographers in the East ...

... are happening.

Totally. Totally. This is kind of the East German Nan Goldin: Helga Paris. Photographs over here by Sibylle Bergemann [Ohne Titel (Berlin), (Untitled {Berlin}) (1986) and Ohne Titel (Gummlin), (Untitled {Gummlin}) (1984)]. So a lot of women in this room.

Then the last room is all West. Postmodernism never happened in the East, but it of course happened in the West. Martin Kippenberger [Zwei Proletarische Erfinderinnen auf dem Weg zum Erfinderkongreß (Two Proletarian Women Inventors on Their Way to the Inventor’s Congress) (1984)], Rosemarie Trockel [Ohne Titel (Untitled) (1987)], and then a combination of Isa Genzken [Tür (Door) (1988)] and Richter [November (1989)]. Then the very last work is a video by Marcel Odenbach from the West, who happened to be in Leipzig in the East when the wall came down. So he just did this video [Niemand ist mehr dort wo er hinwollte (No One is Where They Intended to Go) (1989-90)], where he almost collages images of people going back and forth across the wall and just what was going on at the time. It makes a nice counter in a way to the historical footage at the beginning of the exhibition.

The exhibit will be at the Broad Contemporary through April 19.

Click here for an installation slide show.