The tapeworm title of this exhibition looks as if you could choke on it. Before this happens to me, I prefer to let it slowly melt in my mouth. But the contents of »deutschemalereizweitausenddrei« still bother me, and I take a closer look at the blurb. The curators, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Rene Zechlin, don’t give much away: the national adjective only has to do with the regional characteristics of production conditions. Even the close proximity to the similarly vague term denoting the medium was only meant to provide a »generic classification«. So, apparently, this is some kind of examination of a specific trade under German conditions.

However, this down-to-earth combination also simply follows the tried-and-true recipe: the whole is greater than its parts. The building was full and the feature section applauded the »blob generation«. It was in the air or was simply there, and someone had to do it. It has now been done.

The list of participants brings together around sixty currently familiar names of artists who are painters in the strict sense. It thus gives a representative cross-section of the yearnings and phobias of German visual politics between the four sides of a frame. It was less a selection than a presentation of a phenomenon from this winter’s spectrum. Some established names have deliberately been left out. The majority is aged between thirty and forty. Like the many other visitors, I have come from the scene of a public life dominated by sell-outs and depression. In dark times like these, people look for an orientation to show them a light at the end of the tunnel. The blurb puts it like this: Painting is a general trend. Perspective is there and ready for use. This trend is not only specifically German, but exists in international competition. Really, it shouldn’t need to be said any more, but the title was obviously a little lost on the page, which is why the various effects are explained more precisely: »The traditionally ‘conservative’ status of painting is probably a result of its being overloaded with connotations, with gesture, genealogy and imagic rhetoric being at least as important as what is made visible at the level of content.« That sounds weighty and important. But to me, it is still unclear what medium you can’t say that about. Aren’t even telephone conversations characterised by an »individual style« (voice), »expression« (tone of voice), »singularity« (I’m now calling you), »references to historical positions« (last week, you said…)? Certainly, it has now become fashionable to rediscover that what you say and how you say it are equally important, as if that had not always been the case.

In the art scene, this recent wave of insight into the interplay between form and content has led to old media being played off against the new and to an astonishing rediscovery of the visual. The former aspect has been worked to excess in connection with the critique of the boom in »new media«, but that somehow doesn’t matter. To now present painting once more as a new, old possibility of rediscovered complexities is rather a late and self-evident truth, and pictures should really be compared with something else.

Blurb does not have to be taken all that seriously, but it can tell us a lot about structural intentions So I read on: one of the side effects of the trend is a »politicisation of the painting discourse«. The choice of words here could make one doubt whether the person who came up with them is interested at all in the matter. But still, it would be good to see it, and if there really is a politicisation, it can speak for itself. At the end of the curators’ introduction, things move towards a mysterious point: the painters are looking for possibilities of maintaining their subjectivity. This makes them likeable, because they make themselves vulnerable. I unfortunately do not understand why this is meant to comment on the restorative tendencies of the Berlin republic, although the painters are accused of being part of this restoration, as the blurb says. Is the Berlin republic not ruled by beings that are constantly saying »I« and insisting on their subjectivity? I do not want war, because I have an experience. This is meant to sound sympathetic, but is nothing more than the monstrous distortion of subjectivity into a pure gesture of power.

It is surprising, anyway, to select subjectivity as an instrument to oppose restorative tendencies; it is too deeply rooted in the idea of the bourgeois individual to be effective. And it is barely possible to operate using subjectivity as a prominent instrument in art today without distinguishing it from subjectivity as a resource of utilised work. This utilisation is less restorative than innovative in the sense of a post-industrial revolution. This is why the desire for an unfolding of subjectivity is close to the border of the neo-liberal phantasm. It needs a disruption. Oh well, we are still at the euphoric stage.

In the face of standardised living situations and the alienation caused by the increasing division of labour that accompanies every speeding-up of the propeller of innovation, the »desire« to manifest oneself in a personal style is understandable. Who would deny feeling this and similar urges? But is artistic production merely a place for satisfying urges? And wouldn’t deviation be more appropriate than subjectivity? The factor of subjectivity really is not enough to construct something beyond »objective standards« - ie. the laws of utilisation – and, at best, an interruption of them. It remains self-gratification, withdrawal, or it misfires. And why are painting and the manifestation of subjectivity put into one parcel at all? Painting, of all things, is first and foremost a technical problem and seldom direct; it has a relatively long way to go before becoming a subjective statement.

[b]Accepting the rules[/b]

Curious to see the paintings that achieve this act of the splits, I cheerfully climb the steps in anticipation of pictures by sympathetic people who face general reproach. In the first floor, I am greeted by a huge enlargement of a superimposition, produced by computer, of photographs showing an airport and a street. It was meticulously painted by Corinne Wasmuht. The airport is blue, the street multi-coloured; together, this builds up an atmospheric pull and shimmers. It is dominated by a double transfer: firstly, one medium imitates another twice. The overlapping is a translation of the analogue double exposure into digital photography, while the digital picture is adapted to the painting medium of oil on wood. The thick veil of the mediated effect envelops the transformed reality. But it seems less as though Wasmuht is looking for something than that she is following a method – a direction that is often taken in the exhibition.

Next to this, Eberhard Havekost has also painted using two-dimensional models. The photographically captured gaze - often that of another person - is at present seen by many as adequate material, which makes the reflected world shown in the pictures at the exhibition often seem third-hand. In Havekost’s case, the greying pictures brazenly emphasise the familiar mood of the original, it goes in and out again. I know this well, it doesn’t hurt. Emptiness can be one of the best possibilities, but here it seems pleasant more than anything else.

Frank Bauer tries to fuse the youth culture photography of the nineties with the photo-realism of the early seventies, but comes to grief when he paints sweat. This technical weakness is so strikingly obvious that I am embarrassed by the way something like this disturbs me. What is really annoying is that it was clear years ago that this trend would come along; it is already starting to sag again. Fashions are nice, but I’d like to be surprised by them occasionally.

Antje Majewski succeeds in presenting photo-realism in all its tweeness. But the small, brown-painted room in which her paintings – based on photographs from a Moscow prison – are hung suggests that she intends something different. Majewski’s subject, which her pictures really can’t do anything about, makes me fear that this is what the blurb meant with »politicisation of the painting discourse« – the utilisation of motifs that are also familiar to us from political contexts. And Hendrik Krawen probably had something or other in mind when he created the juxtaposition of a capitalist icon (the Sharp logo in grey) and a communist icon (Ernst Thälman in greeny-yellow), also painted after photographs. Johannes Kahrs, too, with his picture of Ulrike Meinhof in prison clothes with arms crossed over her head, drawn with charcoal on paper and based on a well-known photo. The RAF picture that Gerhard Richter never painted.

I whisper to the pensioner next to me that this can’t be true. The poor man stammers that Majewski’s prisoners reminded him of the young Beckmann. I walk away, because I do not want to know if he means the painter or Germany’s most popular returning soldier as a stage character. After half an hour I sneak back into the reality of images that are familiar from media and here are subjected once more to a medial filtering. It remains unclear where subjectivity is being maintained here. What is easier to see is the attempt to build on and further differentiate the possibilities that known genres of painting, such as photo-realism, often only touch upon, by a repetition of their methods. That sounds pretty modest, but is interesting inasmuch as it breaks with subjects’ modernistic claim of ownership to visual fields of language. The invention of images or technology is seen as a quarry that many can work at. That which was introduced as a gesture long ago under the label »post-modern« has now become a widespread practice.

The dialectical movement within art away from an extreme tendency of openness in the nineties, with its alleged neglect of formal means, towards a more precise examination of the means used often takes place, however, on the border to the shallow waters of refinement. There is much that can be done, but there is still more that should be left undone.

Now, the trend to reprocessing is taking place on a well-tilled field – who wants to make too much effort? – and is, what’s more, very well safeguarded. There is the corresponding superstructure, which says we are in another stage of convalescence after the horror and overheated speed metaphors of modernity. The grandchildren of the victims and patients are now using this gradual process of reprocessing as a form of therapy that takes place between the remnants of too hastily consumed meals. This form of secondary digestion, or cud-chewing, as it is called in the animal world, undoubtedly proves to be productive in the case of commercial art. And sales are certainly the common denominator that can at present be agreed upon without any difficulty. It is a matter of functioning in given circumstances. The fact that this acceptance of the rules could be a consequence of economic restrictions is also suggested in the story by Ingo Niermann that is found in the middle of the catalogue for »dm2003«. This Berlin author, who last devoted his attention to people who have become bankrupt, here develops a scenario of subserviency. The first-person narrator and a certain Dan cherish the hope that »an original should be strong enough to benefit from being plagiarised«, but then encounter a horde of beggars. The beggars can only partly be called beggars, however, because they can only beg from one another, as they are crouching so close together. There is also no more movement to be expected in this mirror stage, as each of them »remains sitting on his place to show his extreme need«. The two nonetheless succeed in overcoming this dreary standstill. And although the first-person narrator, Dan, cannot convince anyone of his subserviency, for which he does not even need to pay, they at some stage reach the sea.

In the Frankfurt rooms, hung full of pictures, there is also a beach to be found beneath the surface: for example, in Thorsten Slama’s »Götzenbildnis des Wolfgang ›Joy’ Engel‹, which shows a demiurge. In this picture, Plato’s world architect, who rearranges the chaotic material to an ordered cosmos with a soul and the gift of rational thought according to eternal ideas, is standing in front of a house whose logic seems to be due solely to the decoration of its surface. The hallways are empty and look as though they must be incredibly draughty. Kai Althoff’s pictures are also filled with the strange coldness of frozen agitation. He succeeds in making the circumstances and methods of his unconventional images disappear in the fog until the viewers can no longer discern them. Althoff develops an in-between world that denies the existence of a social structure. This goes so far that it is called into question without a doubted reality even being given the unnecessary honour of a look-in.

Gunter Reski produces an interplay of the presence and absence of the outside world in a different way. Here, the translation of photos into paintings is counterpointed by the sometimes loose, sometimes exaggeratedly tight seams of the elements of painting. A torn visual language is the result. The found material is transformed in a relatively unpredictable and sometimes clever way, and then lies exposed in all its banality. An instable balance threatens to tip sometimes to one side, sometimes to the other: the search for a reality that is always elusive, extremely alienated and perhaps not comprehensible at all on the one hand, the fascination for a loose visual language that refers back to itself instead of carrying out conflicts on the other. This gap is often not kept open in many other pictures in the exhibition: they have sought their peace on just the one side.

 

Translated by Tim Jones

 

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