Postkarte am Bubi, Franz Marc and Auguste Macke, 1911. This looks like mostly AM really. I love the way the feathers become the fish…
“We actually had many more exciting exchanges back-and-forth, most of which were very unproductive and very unbecoming of two grown men.” LÖL.
Danaé Xynias’s “Weite Fluren” is a good match for the Orangerie.
In framing the composition of a landscape painting, the challenge to the image maker, following eons of tradition, comes down fundamentally to where to place the horizon line. Contemporary painters have toyed with this problem experimentally, such as in Colin McCahon’s various large-panel installations of volcanic vistas in New Zealand. At the far reaches of these modern manifestations falls Trevor Paglen’s Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010) presenting the horizon as, also, metaphorically unreachable. To sort of put things back into perspective, so to speak, Danaé Xynias makes the brave choice to return to the subject of landscape painting – the meeting of land (or water) and sky – allowing the horizon line to settle for the most part naturally in the center of her canvases.
Xynias’s current exhibition, “Weite Fluren,” is a mixture of landscapes and stylized still-lifes. (The still-lifes are certainly interesting in their own right, with rounded forms of pumpkins and melons against a zero-depth background intensifying the relationship between subject and frame.)
A reference in the catalog for the show marks an oblique historical lineage by referencing both Caspar David Friedrich and Jacob van Ruisdael, demurring that Xynias doesn’t quote them directly. This is true, though particularly the low clouds often associated with the van Ruisdael family are a clear evocation of the past. Make no mistake though Xynias is strictly a modernist, in the sense that her facture is very clean, the painted surface entirely flat and removed from the content in careful application. The space Xynias makes reference to in the exhibition title is obviously something that is of keen interest in its totality to the painter, a graduate of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf who practices in a remote studio in Niederbayern. “Weite Fluren” is luminous in its incarnation at the Orangerie in the Englischer Garten, the classicizing space with the summer-lush exterior always at the peripheral always in view. The show is hung simply, without name markers as a distraction, with the larger landscapes singly or in groups slightly above eye-level, making visitors have to look “up” into the skies of the paintings.
The Popular Artist Jeremy Deller…
Felix Burrichter, the editor and creative director of PIN–UP (“the only biannual magazine for architectural entertainment”) and the curator of the current “Paper Weight — Genre-defining Magazines 2000 to Now” at Haus der Kunst explained his work process for the exhibit quite simply. The present-day print artifacts were chosen to reflect a range of well-known and unknown individuals showcased in magazines defiantly having a post-print life “off the reading table.”
More slickly produced and (seemingly) precisely targeted than Nick Logan’s The Face, which arguably is the forerunner, at least in typographic/photographic style of many of these volumes, the periodicals examined in Paper Weight are densely specific.
Visually, the exhibit at Haus der Kunst depends barely at all on a background knowledge of what are essentially very glossy ‘zines. Architect Andreas Angelidakis was clever to blow up the magazine covers to slightly-smaller-than-billboard sizes but particularly to make the finishes completely matte and impermeably saturated; they recall story boards but make visitors feel as if they are moving about the set of Lars von Trier film. (There are a few unfortunate Tracey Emin-recalling pieces of furniture here and there but nothing too invasive.
My favorite scene was the proximal juxtaposition of what happens to be the cover of the current edition of Fantastic Man featuring a stunning portrait of conceptual artist Jeremy Deller in a pink hoodie angled near a 2012 issue of The Gentlewoman featuring Angela Lansbury against a complementary tarama salada background. Fantastic Man of course is obviously trenchant and droll somewhat in the manner of the late Quentin Crisp while The Gentlewoman takes itself quite seriously (the Lansbury cover is somewhat of an anomaly with the usual sitters ranging within Beyonce and Christy Turlington to the same equestrienne-socialites you also don’t know from W and Town & Country.
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Video is a small but strong component of Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s exhibition at Haus der Kunst.
The legendary documentary Degenerate Art: The Nazis vs. Expressionism is available now (and probably not for long, so, Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you know what I mean) on youtube. Part of the mythical status of this program that originally aired in 1993 on the BBC is that it was never converted from VHS to DVD or digital download and has thus been difficult to locate and view.
As you might guess from the title this documentary by David Grubin is about the famous 1937 art exhibit held in Munich called Entartete Kunst, intended by the Nazis to show, collected, the most non-enobling effects of “degenerate art.” (Der Turm der blauen Pferde was part of this exhibit in Munich, and then removed when the show traveled to Berlin, beginning its period of being missing and presumed destroyed. I wonder sometimes if it would make Franz Marc scholars more happy or more sad if it is ever recovered…).
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There were opportunities during Isabelle Graw’s presentation this past week at the Lenbachhaus to make some some site-specific comments about the collections at hand, and Graw did make tangential connections to work by Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Tillmans, thought not those which belongs to the museum’s Kunst Nach 1945 collection.
Intensely and yet breezily theoretical (I have heard Graw speak several times, on one of those occasions dismissing the Adorno-Horkheimer ‘culture industry’ works most art historians spend their lives trying to understand as insufficiently complex for her needs in explaining the reification of art) Graw is an engaging speaker, readily admitting that many of her contentions create oppositional paradoxes which thus cannot be argued against. Graw herself occupies dual roles, as professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Frankfurt am Main and as an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst, the respectable but for-profit Berlin art journal. Graw also has a heavy amount of street cred coming from a lengthy association with Martin Kippenberger during Kippenberger’s time in Cologne.
Her talk at the Lenbachhaus, Malerei als indexikalisches Medium in der neuen Ökonomie recasts the idea that paintings are “alive” somehow in the sense that they emanate an autonomous value in terms of the role of Painting with a “P” as both commodity and part of the larger “organism” of the process and documentation of the making of art.
Indexical is a word mostly associated in art history with photography, and photography is important to Graw’s current interest, which expands upon many of the ideas she raised in her recent book High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture in the sense that “documentary indexicality” is all but a de-facto given the ubiquity of record-making technology. Additionally, in the trinity of “icon/index/symbol,” “index” marks a definite place and time by compelling a reaction in the beholder. But I think it is the more abstruse “referential indexicality” that most interests Graw in this sense, as she used Diedrich Diedrichsen’s term “Selbstdarsteller” to describe Kippenberger’s performances of himself as himself (as opposed to performing “the other” or just “being” himself).