Should the picture be a distanced window on the world? Or is the picture itself part of everyday life? Does the artist contemplate the world aloofly vis-à-vis, or does he already stand amidst everyday life in whose jumble he creatively merges himself?
Two of the most famous German painters of the last decades,
Gerhard Richter (born 1932) and
Sigmar Polke (born 1941), appear to personify this difference. Does painting begin, as with Richter, with a white canvass, a
tabula rasa, to which the master applies his ideas, a paradoxical grammar of seeing or media-theoretical reflection intermediary between photography and abstraction? Or does he take finds from everyday life as the base of the picture, for example curtain fabric from a department store, as Polka has often done?
On the one hand, art emerges only in its difference from usual life; on the other, all art draws its material ultimately from everyday experiences. Since Pop Art, as whose early German exponents Richter und Polke designated themselves in the 1960s in Düsseldorf, painting has increasingly dealt with the circulation of images in the press, advertisement and television. Painters stopped making pictures of the world, even of highly abstract renditions of an intellectualised inner world, and began painting pictures of pictures, artistic reflections of the pictorial world of the mass media. By looking through the window of the mass media, they placed themselves at the same time amidst our media-determined everyday life.
Pictures of pictures – this could be the title for a first common approach to the very different works of Eberhard Havekost, Stefan Ettlinger, Corinne Wasmuht and Johannes Kahrs. Like many painters of his generation,
Eberhard Havekost (born 1967) begins with photographs he has taken or images from the mass media. His translation of photography into the much older medial imaging technique of painting takes place unsentimentally, not as charging of the image with brushwork and the drama of colour but rather as a sobering up, as a drying out and a drying up of the glossy and instantaneous elements of photography. He has precisely located his examination of everyday sights – nameless, all-purpose architecture, random orderings in second-hand shops or mass media poses – at the level of style. It is a style that entices the viewer to reflectiveness, because it avoids all promotional enthusiasm for the given subject and all clever painter’s tricks.
‘The TV programme is like a water tap: it can be can turned on and then images pour out’, says
Stefan Ettlinger (born 1958) describing his raw material; ‘You can really find everything there’. Following the principle of zapping, he grasps scenes and fragments out of the pictorial stream of TV channels, videos, glossies, post cards and his own photographs. Human beings, houses, street scenes, Märklin tramways are assembled, tableau-like, into an enigmatic panorama. On the canvas, which is set in a horizontal position when being painted, the thin egg tempera homogenises what does not belong together: self-organising gestures devoid of any will to an expressionistic style. Ettlinger’s pictures are composed of conflicting props and splinters of a perceptual world distracted by the flood of images and so depict visual order as a process, as something that always comes into being anew, against the regulatory insinuations of the photographic document. His painting reminds some of Edward Munch. The achieved effect could perhaps be called Kafkaesque, less in the nightmarish existential sense than in the dream-like combinations of receding and grotesque perspectives.
The pictures of
Corinne Wasmuht (born 1964) are decelerations. Tortoises, frogs or snakes, animals that sometimes don’t move for hours, keep completely and definitively still in the early pictures of the Argentine-born painter. In her newer works, since about 2000, she has worked up photographic multiple-exposures and initially generated image overlays on a computer that are then brought onto large formats and to a downright stained-glass window-like luminosity. What looks like a few seconds of a pixel storm is transferred into a permanent image during a painting process lasting several months. In this painting the difference is sublated between genuine and simulated, natural look and digital appearance. The enormous formats and the picture surfaces worked through down to the smallest detail signal that everything is important, everything should be looked at. That may be felt by the viewer to be an excessive demand, requiring that his already hectic everyday perception be accelerated still more. Differently viewed, Wasmuht’s conception of the picture signifies the most extreme deceleration: if it is worth looking at everything closely, then I should take the time to do this.
More dramatically than even photography, the bodiless electronic sights of television and cinema burn themselves instantly onto our retina. The pictures of
Johannes Kahrs (born 1965) show sections of objects or people that the painter has obviously not seen with his own eyes but on photographs or film stills. Kahr’s translations of these photographic aspects into painting occur as a kind of filtering process. Filtered out from the photograph is the mechanical aspect, which immigrated long ago into our everyday seeing and has now become habitual. In the interplay between photographic colour errors and fuzziness on the one hand and painting on the other, Kahr lights up the difference between seeing through a camera lens and seeing with the naked eye. That today we know all collectively known images through the medium of photography has made the camera lens into a sort of social keyhole. We see infinitely many sights to which we have no physical access: only looking is allowed.
Another but equally characteristic perceptual event of our time is mapped by the large-format, boldly coloured pictures and installations of
Franz Ackermann (born 1963). Between jet set and jet lag, the experience of the frequent traveller crumbles into signals, pictograms, fragments of architecture, skylines. Disparate, the impressions may originate in the artist’s own experience or in 3-D animations from the Internet. Ackermann’s dynamic-cheerful compositions seem optimistically to portray the exertion of the individual consciousness doing the jigsaw puzzle of all the splinters of perception and re-integrating them. On the one hand he looks through the window of mass media imagery, and on the other sublates the distance of the window view on the world with the help of installations as walk-in pictures.
The colour spaces of
Katharina Grosse (born 1961) drive the boundary dissolution of the artistic image (the canvas as the window of concentration) yet further into everyday architecture. The classical avant-garde detached colour from the represented object and made the former autonomous. A hundred years and innumerable variations on canvas later, this unheard-of step into abstraction has definitively lost its rousing radicality – or so it appears. In years of intense painting, Katharina Grosse has found ways of literally breaking open the canvas limits of conventional colour-field painting and at the same time of bringing colour to bear more abstractly and intensely. Her vibrant colour installations, which sometimes fill large halls, are done in spray paint. By avoiding the abrasion of brush on canvas, she accelerates the movement of painting. Like dew, the colours rest rather before or over the sprayed walls and materials than on them and appear to have uncoupled themselves from their base: pure colour.
Another step towards the artistic detachment of colour-effects from their material base is likewise represented by the digital painting of
Anke Pfisterer (born 1962). Like Grosse’s, Pfisterer’s departure from the conventional image carrier rests upon extensive work in abstract painting on canvas. With her new pictorial tools, Pfisterer has tapped possibilities of synthesis beyond brushwork and collage that lead the electronic image beyond the everywhere prevalent basic schema of the photographic-illusionist representation of space and figures.
Should the picture be a distanced window on the world? Or is the picture itself part of everyday life? Does the artist contemplate the world aloofly vis-à-vis, or does he already stand amidst everyday life in whose jumble he creatively merges himself?
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