Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures
"Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures" by John Kissick, Summer 2009, pp. 78-79
Back in the 1980s, you couldn’t go anywhere in the art world without being Baselitz-ed or Kiefer-ed to death by some angst-ridden dude (it was always a dude) who painted badly and seemed preoccupied with scrawling deep messages in German (occasionally, the artist actually knew a little German, which was always a nice surprise). But it has been a while since all those juicy, prototypically German 20thcentury preoccupations—like Nazis, memory, guilt, Cold War schizophrenia—have had much airplay in an art world more enamoured with globalization than any one nation’s navel-gazing. But 20 years and some critical distance have a way of creating their own share of new narratives, and besides, we appear to have an almost endless appetite for watching the Germans gaze at their navels.
Few nations engage the fancy of the curatorial community to the degree that Germany does, in great measure because few countries seem so naturally predisposed to gleefully picking the scab off any established national narrative. As history attests, some of the best ideological and philosophical cage matches of the 20th century can be traced, at least in some measure, to the contentious discourse surrounding the idea of Germanness: fascism versus communism, Kennedy versus Khrushchev, expressionism versus social realism, Sturm und Drang versus Fahrvergnügen. This has made for some great, if fraught, exhibitions over the years, as commentator after commentator attempts to stake out a few square inches of fresh turf amid the veritable acres of trampled intellectual terrain. And as with all plowed-under battlefields, most of those dangerous old bombs are just under the surface.
The exhibition “Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures,” curated by the long-time Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Stephanie Barron and Eckhart Gillen of Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH, is ambitious and compelling in its desire to create a more nuanced artistic narrative out of the complicated history of postwar Germany. If this is 21st-century navel-gazing, the German corpus looks pretty buff! Typically, these exhibitions of sweeping historical scope presuppose that the concepts of context and content are inextricably bound up in art production (Semiotics 101). As a model of such a mindset, “Art of Two Germanys” is one of those shows that you wish every undergraduate student could get the chance to see. The exhibition positively churns and bubbles, serving up a hearty German stew of politics, ideology and contested histories. But this kind of critical underpinning, while certainly legitimate, can also at times become a liability, in part because artists are often a lot slipperier than some curators appreciate. The problem with overcontextualization is that it either forces a monolithic, limiting political reading onto the work or, worse, constructs a view of art as little more than sociological material to be mined for larger ideas. It is a precarious balancing act to both assert a historical narrative and leave enough room for work that might on the surface contradict the story. And in this respect—despite the very real weight of history that bears down on the show—“Art of Two Germanys” does pretty damn well.
The show is designed chronologically, beginning with the defeat of Germany by the Allies in 1945 and its subsequent partition into Western and Soviet zones of influence. It proceeds through the Cold War, with the construction of the Berlin Wall and the tumultuous and radicalized climate of the 1960s and 1970s, and ends with the slow thaw of the 1980s that led to unification in 1990. What makes this period so notoriously complicated, at least from the point of view of art production, is that in perhaps no other context have the colliding values and ideologies of the 20th century been in such close proximity to one another. So the work, at its best, positively percolates with undercurrents of delusion, disillusion and dislocation. And that’s good! But Barron and Gillen have set the bar higher than in other recent surveys by attempting to more forcefully examine the artistic climate of East Germany: its official, state-sanctioned social realism was always peppered with dissident acts of Western avant-gardism. Here the result is a bit more mixed.
One of the problems with mining new territory is that every once in a while, you get the nagging feeling that perhaps there were some pretty good reasons why the area wasn’t mined earlier. Take, for instance, the importance given here to the exhibiting of work from the old East Germany. Between the end of the Second World War and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the border between East and West Germany was reasonably porous, so many of the most critically engaged practitioners in the eastern region ended up migrating to the less stifling artistic environs of the western one. There they became part of the established milieu of German art. This blurring of political pedigrees made for some great work, but it also left a bit of an artistic black hole back in the socialist state (A. R. Penck and the Autoperforationists being perhaps the most notable exceptions). Today, East and West seem—fairly or not—lined up against each other in the exhibition hall. But maybe that isn’t the point. What stands out most of all is that during trying times, with the ever-present spectre of Stasi informants, crippling economic conditions and incessant Cold War rhetoric all around, artists still continued to produce work in the old GDR. And it is these modest bits and pieces of documentation that speak most eloquently to that most German of dispositions: resilience.
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