 |
|
|
WHEN IDEOLOGIES BECOME FORM
Notes on recent works by Tilo Schulz
Cold wars produce heated ideological battles, which are also fought on the sideline of art. As in the dispute over formalism, they brought aesthetic and political fundamentalists into the arena, whose aim was to place a seal on the division of the world into two camps and to cement the schism between East and West. Der Kampf dem Formalismus in der Kunst und Literatur, für eine fortschrittliche deutsche Kultur was a resolution passed by the 5th plenum of the central committee of the SED (the East German communist party) on 17 March 1951. Otto Grotewohl, the GDR prime minister, summarised it as follows; "Literature and visual art are subordinate to politics, but it is clear that they exert a strong influence on it. The idea of art must march in the direction of the political struggle."
While in the Eastern hemisphere the doctrine of a politically committed realism was propagated, in the West people turned against the "dreadful enjoinment of culture through the primacy of the political" (Werner Haftmann) and elevated abstract art to a credo of the free world. Its most powerful platform in the Federal Republic was the documenta, which was founded in 1955 and saw itself - taking place as it did only 30 kilometres from the Iron Curtain in a border area - as a bulwark against socialist state art.
In his recent works the Leipzig-based artist Tilo Schulz reflects on these once antagonistic positions, which accused their respective opponents either of formalism or of proximity to totalitarianism, in a variety of ways. He is less interested here in a reconstruction of the conflict than in its aesthetic defamiliarisation against the background of the condition postmoderne. He therefore approaches the phenomenon by merging those artistic languages that in the 1950s were seen as incompatible: figuration and abstraction; realism and formalism.
His exhibition (don't) look back in anger (2005) (fig.), for example, circles around stereotypes of masculinity found in John Osborne's socially critical play Look Back in Anger and the film Fight Club. But this inquiry into masculine role models is conveyed in a formal language that seems to embody the exact opposite of a socially critical realism. Schulz uses geometrical structures from the vocabulary of minimal art, which by definition aspires to objectivity, abstraction and depersonalisation, but which may also be read as the epitome of male rationality: an instrumental reasoning that is unconscious of the fact the white cube is not free from power politics. This remarkable synthesis of gender studies and constructivism - which combines, for example, an abstract halftone structure with the photograph of a muscular Brad Pitt -thus raises the question of the aestheticising of ideology and the ideologising of aesthetics.
Like other artists of his generation - Jonathan Monk, for example - Tilo Schulz uses the visual repertoire of modernism on the one hand in order to identify its purist pathos and to demonstrate the historicity of the apparently objective. On the other hand he aims to reveal the gender-specific coding within the apparent neutrality of formalism, and here perhaps follows a similar impulse to Monica Bonvicini, for example, whose installation Stonewall 3 (2002) presents modern architecture not as the incunabulum of pure logic, but as an utterly sexualised, sadomasochist construct (fig.) and is crowned by a cryptic quote from the theorist Bernard Tschumi: "Architecture is the ultimate erotic act, carry it to excess."
Tilo Schulz, in addition, takes up the theme of the cultural-political power struggle around formalism, as represented in the political conflict at the beginning of the Cold War. In his installation Rechts, links und dann doch nicht gerade aus (2006) (fig.) he makes use of quotes from the booklet Der Kampf dem Formalismus in der Kunst und Literatur, für eine fortschrittliche deutsche Kultur and combines them with the aesthetics of Japanese comics. We see manga figures mouthing phrases like "Formalism means the destruction and subversion of art itself."
The irritation for the viewer arises on the one hand through the linkage of current Far-Eastern mass culture and Stalinist art theory. On the other, the melancholy countenances, down whose cheeks the occasional tear decoratively rolls, counter the bellicose message. And Schulz's conceptual wall paintings also play with the self-referential artistic discourse as practised in pop art by Roy Lichtenstein, for example. His famous painting Masterpiece (1962) (fig.) shows in comic style a melancholy painter before a canvas, being comforted by a blonde beauty with the words: "Why, Brad darling, this painting is a masterpiece! My, soon you'll have all of New York clamoring for your work!" And Lichtenstein's no less well-known work Brush Stroke (1965) depicts just such a thing in precise graphic halftone to give the heroic acts of abstract impressionism the appearance of an ossified, pseudo-authentic gesture in the final throws of its commercial objectification.
In his works on formalism Tilo Schulz makes complex reference to the art history of the post-war era and the conflict between politics and pop culture. Apart from defamiliarising propaganda slogans he also investigates - around 18 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall - the steel and concrete symbols of political division.
The metaphor of the Iron Curtain, for example, radiates from a curtain of dark wooden beads (fig.) incorporating the words Cold and War. In this way an explosive historical constellation becomes a seemingly comfortable interior in a museum space. The material signalises Scandinavian comfort, the once insuperable death zone has become a homely design article; history seems to have drawn to a close.
With post-historic consciousness Tilo Schulz uses the former national border between East and West as an element of his formally and materially aware installations. But he is also interested in the boundary between private and public space, and the installation of a curtain (fig.) in the glass cube of the GfZK transforms the display window of this public institution into a protected space. He thus raises the issue, in a museum context, of "shielded inwardness" (Thomas Mann), the strict division between home life and the hostile outer world that was principally called into question during the twentieth century. Totalitarian dictatorships like fascism or Stalinism subordinated the private to the public, in correspondence to the subordinated role of art in relation to politics. But aesthetic modernism also propagated overcoming the division between inner and outer - if in a less radical way. Transparency in architecture was celebrated as a democratic value in itself; the glass building was seen as the mark of an open society. But the display-window aesthetic, advocated by Bauhaus and its successors for private houses as well, foundered now and then on the refusal of even its proponents to live in glass houses. There are photographs showing Mies van der Rohe in a living room fortified with curtains. Charles Eames also valued private spaces of retreat, in which-as in his legendary Case Study House - he piled so many folkloric blankets and batik cushions onto his functionalist sofa that it was no longer possible to see how form should follow function.
Tilo Schulz alludes ironically to the embittered defence of the private also practiced in the GDR, with its varied niche culture. Here he also recalls a figure of thought formulated by Theodor W. Adorno in his article Functionalism Today: "The limits of functionalism are still those of middle-class mentality as a practical sense (...) The future of functionalism will only be one of freedom if it rids itself of its barbarism and no longer subjects the human being, whose needs it declares its criteria, to sadistic blows (...) from sharp edges. Almost every consumer will have painfully experienced the impracticality of the mercilessly practical."
Adorno's realisation that the question of functionalism was not concomitant with that of practical function is also pursued by Tilo Schulz in his debate with art and craft. The exhibition in Leipzig presents ceramics made in the 1930s to the 1960s by the Bauhaus-inspired artist Ursula Fesca. Here Schulz uses a modernist stainless steel sculpture as a pedestal for the "craft" objects. In this way he reactivates the question of the division of autonomous and applied art that is even today still practised by traditionally progressive institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Although the MoMA was one of the first twentieth-century museums to collect, from the start of its activities, contemporary design alongside painting, sculpture and drawing, it still adheres resolutely to the separation of autonomous art and art for a purpose. Tilo Schulz undermines this hierarchisation by placing art and design on the same level and by ending his exhibition tour with the presentation of work by Ursual Fesca.
In Formschön Schulz approaches the historical positions in the formalist dispute with gentle subversion as a means to obtain his aesthetic material for the present day. He not only calls into question the neat and tidy division into figuration and abstraction, autonomy and functionalism, art and craft, public and private spheres, but also the categorical distinction between form and content that-to modify an often-quoted exhibition title by Harald Szeemann-could come under the alternative headings of When ideologies become form or When forms become ideology. Yet Schulz's critical approach does not lead to the pale theoretical grey characteristic of so much conceptual work. Instead he creates works of art through which sense and sensibility, surface and depth, reflection and seduction all exhibit their own charms.
The Struggle against Formalism in Art and Literature for a Progressive German Culture
Right, left and then still not straight ahead
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
