Marseille. In the past decade, Peter Friedl (b. 1960) has become one of the most successful internationally of his generation of Austrian-born artists socialized under aesthetic aspects. After participating twice in the documenta (dX und d12) and enjoying an intercontinental parade of solo and group exhibitions – the latter often curated by influential exhibition organizers – the MACBA in Barcelona, probably the most seminal museum intellectually on today’s European contemporary art landscape – mounted a retrospective of his work of in 2006 titled »Work 1964–2006.« The exhibition was on view this summer in Marseille.
As in so many of his projects, Friedl works reflexively in this retrospective as well – which is already evident from the title: »Work« in the singular. In this show, Friedl displays an incessant interaction with, and a representation and re-appropriation of contemporary art approaches that have long since become socially acceptable, playing with their aesthetic clichés and the historical experiences on which they were founded.
A few different narrative strands on the subject of work are bundled here and arranged in large groups of works. In the process, Friedl’s »agit’trope« sets off in search of his own role models and those of other artists: at first by taking recourse to his own biography – in the drawings he made when four years old (1964), i.e. a phase when children first show a sense of composition and an individual feeling for line; or in the autodidactic drawings and gouaches of the early 1990s, which seem like the minutes of self-analysis in art therapy sessions; or in large balloons sporting steno-like graffiti notes (»Peterchen,« 1992–1995); or in a designer table sculpture (»Peter,« a collaboration with D+, 1999).
In the other work groups as well, we can sense Friedl’s desire to plumb the reservoirs of memory – here of the cultural variety. The evocation of historical pictorial conglomerates in specific political milieus, which form a backdrop for pop-culture icons and are then in turn obscured by their power as images, is the intention for example behind the video »King Kong« (2001) that dominates the show with its soundtrack. It shows the South African musician Daniel Johnston sitting one after the other on three benches in Triomfpark, the former Sophiatown of Johannesburg – cynically named so by the white regime after defeating the black resistance (1955). Johnston chants his King Kong Song (1989) about the impossible love of the monster for the white stranger in a storytelling singsong. The song becomes a denunciation of Apartheid as well as an elegy for the South African boxing star Ezekiel »King Kong« Dhklamini, who after the end of his career killed his girlfriend and himself. Dhklamini was apotheosized as the hero of the South African jazz opera »King Kong« (1959), the last act of which, incidentally, is set in Sophiatown. A pan across the park with its playground packed with mostly black children to whom »The King« Johnston is singing, one of whom is wearing a King Kong mask, holds the video together with a melodramatic pictorial gesture. From here the imaginary lines of imagery move into the pop-culture mainstream, all the way to Andy Warhol.
But they also lead self-reflexively back to »Work«: In »Peter Friedl« (video, 1998) museum workers from Paris or Brussels slip into costumes as their favorite animals, arranged on podiums; »Playgrounds« (1995–2006), for which Friedl photographed over 400 playgrounds all over the world, shows not only the historical and regional mutations of a modernist planning type, but also a travel geography of the artist in the age of international art projects; the archive of newspaper photos, »Theory of Justice« (1992–2005), compiled with the help of the Vienna design studio D+, features countless images of revolts and demonstrations or protests and both their enemies and heroes, focusing here again on the struggle against Apartheid. And many other works in this retrospective – iconic models, theatrical arrangements, instructions in the form of pictures, drawings, objects, videos and installations – reference not only children and their world of perception, or music, or animals, but also the artist’s autobiography. When in the short video loop »Tiger or Lion« (2000) a Bengal Tiger in the imaginary cage of an exhibition space (the Olympia Gallery at the Hamburg Kunsthalle, where otherwise Delacroix’ painting »Tiger and Snake« is on view) locks its jaws onto a giant stuffed toy snake, this can also be seen as a metaphor for Friedl’s own working method as artist. This method involves on the one hand a belief in conceptual strategies as compensatory work on largely isolated postmodern projects in visual art, which are so often prematurely aborted and thus riddled with contradictions. Friedl’s strategy of approaching what are in terms of the mainstream conventional critical and conceptual art practices and the corresponding aesthetic strategies from the periphery shifts our attention from the media, from the works themselves, to the way in which they are conveyed. This shift in meaning cannot help but be flat, because Peter Friedl’s works always serve at the same time as acts of strategic communication with the current power constellations in art criticism. A one-word puzzle from the early 1990s suggestively calls this relationship: »Cretino«.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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