Visual Arts

The Sprengel Museum and the Kunstverein have devoted a double exhibition to the conceptual artist Timm Ulrichs in his hometown of Hanover.

The double exhibition comes at a particularly opportune time. First, it pays due tribute to the conceptual artist on the occasion of his 70th birthday, which he celebrated on March 31, 2011, in his hometown of Hanover, and this with the meritorious engagement of those important institutions that chimed in to the series of major exhibitions only in the 1970s. Second, there is much in the contemporary art scene that has again gone viral since Ulrichs instigated it in 1960s.

Ideas galore

This has reference not only to those artists who, like Jonathan Monk, have taken up decidedly historical positions. Much more important is that we can probably only today appreciate what Ulrichs first, or simultaneously with colleagues, explored, invented and tested across all media and art movements: like Ulrichs, for example, Giuseppe Penone too has demonstrated man’s intervention in nature and left his handprint on a tree trunk; like Ulrichs, Hans-Peter Feldmann was also one of the first to investigate obscure, revealing historical photographic documents; and like Ulrichs, Dennis Oppenheim has inscribed artistic witnesses into the landscape – the European’s thumb spirals in no way lag behind the land art ideas of the American.

Finally, we could also compare the body actions of Vito Acconci, to say nothing of his simultaneous speech arts. In short, the range of Ulrichs’s experimental ideas is huge and was established early.

The original does not have to be unique

It is well known that some questions and innovative ideas are in the air at certain times and are taken up in several places independently of each other. Here the double exhibition at the Sprengel Museum and the Hanover Kunstverein, and even more so the exhibition catalogue, will put things in the right light. To insist upon copyright, however, is futile and even flagrantly contradicts Ulrichs own understanding of art, according to which the idea is more important than the art object and, over and above this, life and art are one.

In the “advertising headquarters of total art”

So begins the exhibition at the Kunstverein, and so too Ulrichs’s abrupt entry into art. In 1961 he already declared his living and working space in Hanover an “advertising headquarters for total art”, including a “one-room art gallery and theatre”, and exhibited himself as the first living art work. A large photo of this action rings in the theme of self-presentation, and Ulrichs proceeded to analyse himself with scientific, statistical, metrological and linguistic-philosophical resources as an example of mankind in general.

If for the exhibition he has convincingly realised as a sculpture the long-cherished idea of illustrating the similarity between the most abstract signs, zero and infinity, he guides the mathematical-philosophical reflection ultimately into the theme of death. This is connected to the fact that Ulrichs often goes to extremes and exposes himself to danger, as, for example, when he locked himself up for hours inside a hollowed-out boulder (1981).

The German language and the end of the world

But lurking close to the deadly seriousness is often wit and irony. In the field of language, Ulrichs operates with both in an inimitable manner. Like Joseph Kosuth, he runs through all the precise semiotic differentiations of an object from real thing and its term to its sign. Tautologies and contradictions produce an intellectually stimulating game with logic and the limits of the sayable, which Ulrichs, like Wittgenstein, equates with the limits of the world. An obstacle to his international career, which Ulrichs truly deserves, has been his use of the German language which, unlike the English of Robert Barry, is not understood everywhere.

The path between the Kunstverein and the Sprengel Museum is marked by enamelled signs with inscriptions such as “Do not read this sentence to the end!” If the visitor follows these signs to the museum, other sides of the “idea producer” and “total artist” open up to him. Here he is welcomed by an amusing version of an installation with noisy squeaking doors. Rather less fun, because presented redundantly and monotonously, are Ulrichs’s original models of and for works in public spaces. They prove that an art work is convincing and enduring only if it retains a residue of the indecipherable. One hopes that the ingenious chair and table sculptures will some day be part of an exhibition on the relation between art and furniture.

Photography and video

Stunning, and possessing an unexampled diversity of form and content, are Ulrichs’s photographic series. Quite apart from the controversial subjects, Ulrichs gets to the bottom of the medium itself and its possibilities. His videos are no less revealing. It is here that a view opens into the centre of his life and understanding of art: Ulrichs conquers the world by seeing, reading, strolling, collecting and thinking. Mind and senses are simultaneously in action and life itself provides enough material for an art work; he need not reach for colour or sound.

On the other hand, he is not satisfied with pale formulations: his concepts must take incarnate form. From the beginning, this pioneer conceptual artist, by contrast to some overly intellectual contemporaries, touched on shocking or outrageous relations with vivid images and got to the heart of the matter.

Conscientious pedant and lovable anarchist rolled into one

We can see from Ulrichs’s works that he must possess extraordinary teaching skills. And in fact he has contributed these for decades to the Münster branch of the Düsseldorf Academy of the Arts; here he has supervised students with demonstrable conscientiousness and inspiration, and has surprisingly remained true to Münster even after his retirement, listing it along with Hanover and Berlin as one of his places of residence.

Those who know Timm Ulrichs describe him as a conscientious pedant and uncommonly lovable, unconventional anarchist rolled into one. Is it any wonder when we read in a press release: “Unmistakable characteristics of Timm Ulrichs’s works are the extraordinary combination of lightness and intellectual wit with precision and analytical depth, and the stimulating analysis of language, its limits and its logical misunderstanding”.