Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

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Among the works of Georg Baselitz there are some pictures to which a particular importance has been attached. The picture Big Night Down the Drain (Große Nacht im Eimer) is especially bound up with his fame. Baselitz has now painted such key works once again, and they will soon be accessible to the public in exhibitions at the Albertina in Vienna and in Shanghai under the title Remix.

The painter, whose hallmark has since 1969 been to present his pictures upside down, has now tried another, still more controversial procedure. He has copied himself.

Georg Baselitz

In an interview with Thomas Wagner, the painter commented: “I paint a picture, and then I see there are quite a few mistakes. Then I paint it again. And it has mistakes again – and again and again. At some point this has to stop. It simply won’t work. An important part of my work is a kind of uncontrolled state of intoxication. ... Of course I have always said ‘Repetition is inertia’. To repeat my own work seems to me always to be fatal. But now I have a concept and a justification for it. ... I take photos of my pictures and paint them then again. ... Naturally so as to improve them. That is a protest” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6.206).

He characterises his method as a procedure of self-ascertainment. “I want to test whether I can swing myself again to the height at which I once was. Because I find my pictures from back then still pretty good today.” Doubt and self-assurance consort with one another in this formulation.

“Remix” – a questionable concept

Book cover

For the new group of works Baselitz has adopted a concept from music: “remix”. In music, this means the use of old tapes or a new arrangement in another style. In painting, it is a questionable concept. Music is a temporal art. It has no original in the sense that this exists in painting. Music is always interpretation.

In painting, too, however, the repetition of a picture is not unusual. The practice of copying masterpieces belongs to the classical methods of training in painting. The novice tests his own art on models. And there are sufficiently many famous painters who have continually reprised one single motif because they believed in the “one”, “absolute” picture. Cézanne painted nearly 100 Bathers. And the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, whom Baselitz reveres, painted his picture Girl on a Bridge nearly twenty times over.

Paintings, however, are physically unique objects. Repetition really makes sense only if it contains an interpretative difference. The mere reduplication of a picture is either worthless or, even worse, an attempt at “counterfeiting”. Masterpieces are looked upon as unrepeatable. In this sense Baselitz’s series is in fact a radical self-experiment, something new.

The method poses the question about the quality of an artwork. In contrast to sport or technical productions, achievement and quality in art are not easily measurable. In the case of a runner, a glance at a stopwatch suffices to recognise a world record. In art, things are more complicated. If the quality of a work is to be accessible to inspection, then there must be a previous agreement about how quality is to be defined. The establishment of a common judgement in this issue today is quite hopeless.

'Great Friends'

Therefore substitute criteria are shunted about in the world of art in place of aesthetic judgements. The value of a work is read off from either the market value, the judgement of experts or the number of exhibitions in prestigious institutions. These criteria are questionable. They are subject to historical vicissitudes. Today scarcely anyone talks of the best-paid salon artists of the 19th century. Controversial outsiders, who were often life-long failures, have in the meantime been recognised as the artists who set the new standards.

Baselitz has decided to use the method of comparison with his own works. If the substitute criteria of market value and public recognition obtain, then the new pictures are as good as those upon which the artist’s fame rests. But what would we think of a writer who wrote reviews of his own books and came to the conclusion that they were particularly good? Are artists really the best judge of their art? Is the lacking detachment a defect, or does closeness to the work improve judgement? Or is the chosen method only a attempt to deceive an already perplexed public? The method Baselitz has chosen certainly has its treacherousness.

Altered context – altered effect

'Big Night Down the Drain'

Let us take an example: Big Night Down the Drain (1962/63) caused a scandal. The picture of the ugly dwarf with his open trousers was looked upon as obscene and was removed from the exhibition and confiscated by the police. At a time when abstraction dominated painting the resort to the ostracised style of figurative representation was an aesthetic provocation which bore witness to a radical rebellion. When Baselitz repeats the picture today in a much larger format, these factors cannot be copied. At most the colours of the palette can be remixed.

The then unknown painter has now long been a star. All that he does finds nearly unopposed recognition. The purported “obscenity” can hardly be understood today. And figurative painting has asserted itself again so successfully that the picture is now without any contradictory force against the zeitgeist. On the contrary, it is itself part of the mainstream and so has become anything but an expression of opposition and contradiction.

When today Baselitz repeats this picture as a “remix”, then he is copying his own success. By showing the once controversial phallic form more plainly and making the dwarf’s face, with its haircut and moustache, more expressly resemble the physiognomy of Adolf Hitler, he robs the picture of its former disquieting power. The effect is flatter, exactly as if Baselitz longed for the scandal that cannot actually be repeated. The resemblance to Hitler gives the impression of coquetry. The historical trail has thinned. And the dirty colours of the picture have given way to a smooth brilliance.

What was then an event in a long, continually renewed process of painting is now created in a few hours by the vitalist effort of a masterly routine. Critics speak therefore of the “greater freedom” of the picture, of its “artistic sovereignty”. But what do these expressions really mean? Art critics, an art critic once wrote, reminded him of a hanging judge who pronounced his judgement without referring to a law-book. This is an aphorism of dazzling brilliance.

'Eagle'

In the “remixed” picture Eagle (Adler) and the copied Great Friends (Großen Freunde) the game repeats itself with dwindling historical energy. Swastikas painted on the kneecaps of the friends or like colourful decoration on the margin of the picture are without persuasive force. No other painter could permit himself such devices. The Eagle lacks today the disquieting eeriness that it possessed in the immediate post-war period as a nationalist symbol whose aggressive power was scarcely ruptured by the upside down hanging of the picture. The play with such “German motifs” still burdens Baselitz’s reception in the U.S.A. Now the Eagle is a radiantly blue motif whose reference to reality is missing. The nose-diving heraldic beast has suddenly become a fat blue hen. It is precisely the matter-of-courseness of the artistic routine that irks.

Format as claim

It is astonishing that the critics have simply passed over in silence Baselitz’s enlargement of the pictures’ format. The format of a picture is invariably a decision that bears on the politics of art. When someone paints a big picture this always implies the claim that the picture is a “great picture”, and that the painter who employs this format is a “great painter”. Or, to quote Baselitz again: “In art it is a question of how and by what means one asserts oneself”. That much is plain. But the success of these pictures can hardly be owing to their topical references.

What remains radical about Baselitz’s Remix series is his posing of the question about their quality and their success by means of a comparative method. The weak point of this method is that the pictures are exposed to comparison only with Baselitz’s own art, as if there were no other standard. “One needs the dialogue with oneself, and has a lot to say to oneself, basta” (G.B.). Shameful is, and this is a reflection of the present situation of the art scene, that the critics have not taken up this challenge. They cautiously talk around the pictures, avoid the questions that the pictures so obviously pose. Raising an objection could easily be understood as arrogance. Yet Baselitz’s art begins by raising a radical objection.

Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (ed.): Baselitz Remix. Dialog der Bilder; Verlag Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2006, 290 pages, ISBN -13: 978-3-7757-1846-2.