Visual Arts in Germany: Exhibitions and Artist Portraits

He had endless discussions with Beuys and shared a love for picture titles with Kippenberger. Now Meuser is exhibiting his work at the Municipal Art Gallery in Karlsruhe under the title “Crumple” (Knautsch), guaranteed pathos-free.
What to do once your education has come to an end and you have no idea what to do in the future? “Yes, there I stood suddenly, without talent, and could only cry for help”, Meuser has said, recalling the time after his studies at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. In Joseph Beuys’s class, the students did not so much work at practical things as engage in endless discussions. They wanted to change society; production fell by the wayside. Erwin Heerich, born in Essen in 1947, who graduated under Beuys, couldn’t do anything about this, and just as little his study of philosophy and art history with the idea of teaching in the back of his mind. And yet something became of this man who received his pseudonym, Meuser, on the streets when he was six years old. Now Meuser, who has himself been a professor at the Karlsruhe Art Academy since 1992, is exhibiting his work at the Karlsruhe Municipal Art Gallery under the title Knautsch (Crumple).

Found objects from the scrape yard

Meuser received mental support at the time from Imi Knoebel, who showed understanding for the hesitation and procrastination of her younger colleague, whose working materials were henceforth to come from the scrap yard. To fetch junk, to ponder how something is arranged – Meuser saw this as very concrete work. In response to the question what he was actually doing, he invariably gave the same answer: he didn’t know himself. If he knew, he wouldn’t have even begun with it – his own special dialectic.

T-beams, metal plates, grids, odd structures whose function could no longer be identified found their way into his studio, where he welded them into new combinations, varnished them and gave them titles. Meuser does not see his found objects as ready-mades. His compositions have nothing surreal about them; they always make use of very specific forms. Nothing too much, whether with the material, the color or the meaning. “Once without everything” is the principle of his art. Important for Meuser is above all the exact positioning of his work in a room or on walls: “A painter checks the composition of a picture; I compose outside the picture”.

“I’m from the Ruhr – I want to set something against pathos”

Quite unlike his overpowering teacher Beuys, Meuser does not take the meaning of things all too seriously. “I’m from the Ruhr – I want to set something against pathos and set things in a real context again” is how he has put it. Sober reality instead of the usual image of auratic sculpture.

That the works do not, however, remain stuck in a cool Minimalism is because of the titles, inherent in which lie a nearly banal sensuality. Initially geared to an abstract reception, Meuser’s works were still untitled at the start of his career, a circumstance that was later to change because of his friendship with Martin Kippenberger. In 1978 Meuser met the six years younger artist, exhibited works in the latter’s Berlin project space “Kippenberger’s Office”, and was soon under contract to Kippenberger’s gallery dealer, Max Hetzler. From then on Meuser belonged to the legendary “Hetzler boys”, who caused quite a stir in the German art world of the 1980s.

“Found quotations” as titles

Titles such as Mit Mokka nach Mekka (With Mocca to Mecca), Oberweite Doppel D (Double D Bust), or So hatte ich mir eine Briefkastenfirma vorgestellt (So I would have imagined an offshore company) raise associations and not infrequently a chuckle. Like the sculptures themselves, the titles are often found objects, linguistic constellations of everyday culture: taken from newspapers, hit song titles or proverbs, puns, alliterations or euphonious technical terms from completely different contexts. The humor here never becomes primitive; rather, the titles juxtapose a playful lightness to the works.

Damaged tin

If Meuser’s works hitherto followed the clear line of geometrical bodies, with Knautsch they now turn to found objects whose forms were clearly once quite different. The title Knautsch is most likely taken from comic-book language and means perhaps the noise something metallic makes when it is deformed. In the works, this corresponds to the damage done to the cube, plates or other objects and brings into play the narrative element of a time sequence. The viewer imagines the original appearance and circumstances of the objects, how they may have come to their present condition. And he might think that a battered, pale yellow grille bearing the title Drehkreuz Baldeneysee (Baldeneysee Hub) (2009) possibly tells of the lightness of summer with gentle melancholy; of how, if you happened to live in Essen, you might go to this nearby pool to cool off and have to pass this grille as the last obstacle. In 1973, when swimming here was forbidden and the open-air pool was shut forever, Meuser was sitting in Beuys’s class and still knew nothing of his talent.