German Art World

Occasioned by Poland’s EU Presidency, there were a series of exhibitions in Berlin in late 2011. Here a summary look.

Placed “Side by Side” in history

First, it is important to mention the exhibition Side by Side at the Gropius-Bau. By means of approximately 800 exhibits, Anda Rottenberg traced the vicissitudes of the German-Polish relationship before and beyond the existence of the Iron Curtain. She screwed the exhibition spiral-like, as it were, into history, abandoning a strict chronology in favor of thematic nodes such as the dynastic ties between Poland and Germany. The fabulous prime example of the Landshut Wedding (1475), where the Wittelsbach Duke George the Rich was married to the Jagiellonian Princess Hedwig, gave an opulent look at these connections.

Side by Side did not presume to disentangle adequately the thicket of political power relations and military conflicts caused in the eighteenth century by the so-called “Polish partitions” in terms of art history. The international loans ranged from beautifully preserved illuminated manuscripts, pictures by Lukas Cranach the Elder and sculptures by the German artist Veit Stoß (who worked at St. Mary’s Church in Krakow) to the film The Channel (1957) by Andrzej Wajda.

Only a single curatorial blackout made an uncomfortable impression: the brutal backdrop of a walk-in cage for the melodramatic presentation of Jan Matejko’s colossal picture Preußische Huldigung (Prussian Homage) (1882) and other pictorial contributions on the Teutonic Orders.

With the exception of formalist sprinklings such as a nail sculpture by Guenther Uecker, topical spotlights on works by Wilhelm Sasnal and insertions of works by Gregor Schneider gave the exhibition a historically reflective, often somber contemporaneity.

“Polish!” Poses the crucial question

Beginning last autumn, Berlin also had strikingly unruly exhibitions on purely contemporary Polish art. While the group show Polish! (Slawomir Elsner, Katazina Kobro and Piot Uklanski) at the Bethanien Künstlerhaus posed anew the crucial question of identity as laconically as possible, the Polish art stars Pawel Althamer at the German Guggenheim and Miroslaw Balka at the Academy of Art in the Pariser Platz impressed viewers with solo shows.

With black and white video projections, each attuned to a room, Balka composed a requiem to the non-places of the Holocaust in Poland from the never innocent perspective of a later generation. Whether the viewer sees harmless deer hopping through the winter landscape of the former death camp Auschwitz or, elsewhere, gigantic abstract turned-up gas flame rings, Balka’s poetic and never documentary video memorials evoke at the same time the twentieth century’s darkest chapter of human atrocity.

Pawel Althamer’s sensational performance

But it was Pawel Althamer who achieved the literally most sensational performance when he had his father’s Warsaw plastics factory ALMECH move into the German Guggenheim for the season. Willing visitors and museum staff served as models for a group portrait by him and his Polish team. In accordance an art-life project that extends through all social classes, Althamer succeeded in bringing about an ingenious exchange between the production systems of art and business.

Using real, live models, he and his team manufactured two sculptures a day consisting of plastic and reinforced steel frames. To begin with, Althamer and his assistants made a silicon mask of the person to be portrayed. Then, in the second step, they formed a phantasmal body from strips of hot plastic manufactured by ALMECH machines. Not only did Althamer’s little community of volunteers grow with each day, but so too did the spectral procession of figures that seemed to have sprung from a zone intermediary between life and death. Like a resurrection scene from a medieval picture, the figures seem to strip linen swaddling from their mummified bodies. Some smile beatifically, as if floating in a sort of Nirvana; others in turn give the impression that they have been plunged into a black hole of depression.

With all his well-researched explorations of social reality, Althamer has a tendency to perform balancing acts with transcendence: “I didn’t want only to bring a community to expression in a sympathetic way, but also to create an atmosphere for spiritual experience”.