Formal fluxus excavation
Rainer Apfelbaum presented a new descendant of fluxus at Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus
Who judges art as something consisting of a piece with special form and colour, will usually be accused of thinking too simple about the subject. We'll not complain about this. But sometimes, art fits into such a simple schema, although at the first glance nothing not even reminds you at form - and – colour – art. Such artpieces were found in the recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus in Augsburg, the artist is Rainer Apfelbaum (a saxophonist, read some remarks about the trance-events at his Finissage in our member's club), the exhibition's name „Krapplack“.
The first glance, as already said, far away from the object-likeness usually going along with formal thoughts. Different things, sometimes very casually coloured with red paint – based on the Krapplack pigment – are standing around, laying around, moving round from day to day. A piece of paper told the visitor, that the artist would come every day to move the objects and supplement them with new ones. The three parts of the exhibition hall offered some environmental limits for this semi-controlled object distribution: on the flat floor of the first room, the entrance-hall, Apfelbaum had designed a rectangle for his object-ensemble: newspapers, small and quite huge transport-boxes, most of them decorated with red strokes or drips, some with complete red surfaces.
The
second room offered with a small pedestal a fitting scene for a red
book – poems by Wilhelm Waiblinger – and a red
pigment-edge, an allusion to Beuys's fat-edge. Additionally in the
room two ladders, covered with red adhesive foil and decorated with
some colour strokes, standing or laying around in the middle of this
room. The third room: at first just one piece of art, a triangle out
of red pigment on the floor, again an allusion, recalling not only
colourfield painting on the wall but something like the yellow
square (made out of cobnut farina) of the first off-wall-exhibition
in Zürich and Berlin in the eighties (curated by Harald
Szeemann), or, more recent and like the huge boxes in the first room,
alluding to Anish Kapoor installations in the Haus der Kunst. But
Apfelbaum's triangle has a special, individual story. It not only
points out other artpieces, but reflects the recent history of trees
on a triangular meadow in Augsburg, that were cut off because of
public works on the passing road. (It goes without saying that the
adhesive foil and ladders, the meadow and a bicycle frame, pills
a.s.o. join with each other into a metaphor of life as installation
site (a kind of dictum since the german film „Das Leben ist
eine Baustelle“). More dangerous and quite auto- ? or bi-cycle
? - sentimental, all exhibits metaphorize to „accident“ -
their casualty and the red pigment smooth well with blood.
The presentation of this unspectacular political content fills the installation not really with politics but with some individual sighs, like the headache-pills in the first room's rectangle. Likewise, the continuing change of arrangement and object-selection appear as poetry of light individualism. As far, a work fitting its concept – Apfelbaum explains his interest in „Krapplack“, the special colour red and the special pigment with the symbolic function both have for „life“ as such. Ouk... this is, thus, the tradition of fluxus. The happening likeness of music and change convinces as a kind of light and nice descendant of the happenings in the 60ies and 70ies, when art was put off the wall, and worked out in the room and the public. In the presented descendant-like form, fluxus is obviously capable of being accepted even by the Augsburgian public, who is sometimes difficult ( the guestbook shows not only that a lot of other artists visited the exhibition but too, that not everyone was fond of it...).
The
visitors used the installation's open character to project their own
concepts onto it: The rectangle became a kind of wishing well, into
which a lot of visitors put something to become happy like the
artist.... Some people even dispended money in the rooms, perhaps
misjudging the saxophonist as public player and behaving according to
this better known aspect. Others had really nice and caring ideas and
put, for example, a little red bear puppet in the edge of a room –
this fit very well, because the bear looked ahead to the red triangle
and reminded visitors, who had already read the story of the real
meadow, of little animals and their problems with street-crossing.
But well, all this, framed. We had two rectangles and two triangles in the exhibition, all painted with red, sometimes belonging to the room, sometimes to the artist, the one flat, another one three-dimensional. Changing colour points therein. Ephemeral contents. Elusive free jazz. Thus, layers of colourfields, couched with some brutality: an excavated Pollock.
Ulrike Ritter
Exhibition is now closed, but interests can perhaps be answered with invitations to the „Kunstraum Apfelbaum“ at Kulturfabrik, Bergmühlstraße 34, 86153 Augsburg, the artist's working-place.
Current exhibition at Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus: Karin Jobst. Photographies. 02nd February 2008 until 09th March 2008
Exhibition opening at 01st February, 19.30 Uhr.
Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus
Maximilianstraße 48
86150 Augsburg
Tel. 0049 (0)821 324 4102
Di 10-20 Uhr, Mi-So 10-17 Uhr
