* Sugar, fat and felt – about collecting art and the art collections *

Who likes to have pictures in his or her own four walls, visits either a watercolor course and paints one for him- oder herself, or he goes into a furniture store to acquire a decorative acrylic "modern" or "classic" ham, abstract flowers in monochrome style, an impressionist or anything like that. The images may not have a striking subject and of course no complex "issue." A certain physical appearance is allowed. That is a matter of better exchangeable posters or other similar pictures in the interior: the mirror. The superior home-management makes it obviously different: A plastic surgery in Beverly Hills favores modern art, especially contemporary, large format photography, gives such the role of framed posters in aesthetical, physical and financial respects one more dimension than art has in the half house of the German middle class. Sometimes even a movement from the binary into the four-digits. Following the Fibonacci series, then there are also collections whose individual works are nearing the eight, although they are neither a museum nor an emirate. Such collectors are called luckies and have detected early enough that art increases in value if the artists are offered something particular. You can for example offer a castle, in which artists can stay during international exhibitions without a so almost vulgar form of public scholarship like in the Villa Massimo - or you offer an extraordinary setting, gallery like, but with a gallery owner who is buying rather than simply distributing ... this category includes Alfred Greisinger, a confectioner who has own affinities for shaping, used strictly professional. That is, shaping in marzipan, figuratively. (Find here: The trilingual classic about animal sculptures in marzipan.)

Can you eat lean pieces of cake with chocolate icing and lices of marzipan pigs, wavering dangerously under the fork paddles of eating between contemporary art? Yes, if the taste of the works fit the pie or the cake is only inserted in the cafe, however, and just the tea drunken? (Thus, instead of not looking at the art you won't look or taste the cake...?) The works maybe not be eight-digit, but five, with an upward trend?

In the legendary Café Drexl which, as an exhibition at the Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus approves, in its time again and again in the newspapers due to its almost Dadaist art actions and its permanent exhibition stock, the fur coated lady, the art historian and the always coffed alcoholic all were educated to a unique optimization and loyal escalation of taste. The cakes or biscuits uniquely well – and everything object of awareness. During the exhibition opening Greisinger was appalled to note that some plates in different colours, not black (but with adequate pastries) were put wrongly on the table designed by Felix Droese - the exhibition's artworks mainly created by Beuys pupils and in some respect conjoined artists with rank and name now; but not so very obvious when the collector Greisinger bought them. And as biscuits raise the energy values in comparison to bread, also the values of the artworks rose. The confectioners favorite is of cause Felix Droese, a decadent, as Greisinger convinced the visitors who listened quite magnetized to his reports about the personal experiences with the artists he bought. Decadent – due to a villa in Frankfurt - Ortenbach (well, even my mother lived there sometimes, later in a villa in Dahlem, what does that mean if you are not already a famous artist, or collect value raising pieces, or at least the only heritage....), Well then other students of Beuys. Greisinger told during his guiding tour, how Droese reacted in radical incomprehension of him and sent him a death symbolizing representation of a ship, as a symbol of the collector himself and his collection, when he had sold a few pieces due to a current financial crisis. The shuttle ships now as a proud symbol of immediacy in the relationship with "bigs" in the Neue Galerie, including numerous other works, nice and flat, one around the other on the walls around the decorative tables signed by artists who are or should be legendary, as they are: Jonas Hafner, Andreas Eder Rose, Klaus Michel, Christian Stein Leuven, Juergen Brodwolf and just Droese. One table is dedicated to Beuys-Inkunabels and so filled, another one halfly designed by Beuys, with a variant of instructive writing panels, one knows in big formats as one of the most representative Beuys artwork of the Museum Ludwig. Furthermore, dozens of photographies of the master of fat and felt It has an iner logic of professions, that Beuys goes first before the pupils, especially Droese's and Brodwolf's, art and decadence. In the exhibition there is - of course - a room designed corner. But there is no fat. Actually, what is known as Beuys-piece collection in a confectioner's cafe would expect an emphasis on materials, for the confectioner, ingredients – thus studies of fat, wax, felt, dead hare and its or a wolf's milk. The alter ego of a marzipan pig slide, so to speak. Or the radical continuation of Greisingers "Cocoa Painting," a naturalistic portrait of Napoleon 1968 (the classical perspective on the 68ers can greet the confectioner as Jacques - Louis David, perhaps only half acknowledged, and if ever with jobfriendly darkened sympathies to 68, perhaps more lovingly mocked even by Uschi itself). But collections are not works of art. They themselves with what was interesting and available – whoever usually buying pret a porter will know about that. Well, Greisinger's collection is at least in between. But the art works tend less than exspectable in the direction of a natural sugar or energy-related program. They remind and cultivate the entertaining in the unruly traditions of Dadaism and the arts as a 'seemingly' aesthetic infringe as stressing unobliging, but sometimes interesting, perhaps personally or because of a general message. The wild, often informal table designs are hidden under glass. The services fit easily fur, while on the wall the visitor is amused with Daniele Buetti's pictures of the autodestructive power of models or the Groszisms of the 80s feminism, which Greisinger regards as pictures against AIDS. Others may just see funny-shocking anal sex picture in the drawings. Ellen Cantor wanted to show perhaps just a likewise male humour as their male colleagues after arts?

The prosecutor had been in the cafe, reported Greisinger, and because the Café Drexl, where these pictures were issued was in Augsburg (in Bavaria), we believe him. It is definitely a phenomenon, when an art enthusiastic confectionery collects art not to be regarded as somebody with a special taste, but with genuine sympathy to all resistive, in southern Germany and with a great hair quiff, that reminds everyone of the fifties (because of the radical social difference NOT Kaurismäki). The resistance is not politically fixed. With Rolf Zimmermann is also an Informal in the exhibition, thart had once problems in the GDR. And Droese's rejection of monetarist questions encounters probably even the collector's fascinated surprise people feel towards others who are used to eat anticapitalistic nourishment from golden spoons (This has perhaps been the most usual way of left wing theories). Funny and almost exactly fitting the picture of bohemians is a story Greisinger told about Juergen Brodwolf. He visited him in his apartment, where two smelly turtles were caught and lay on bed (in this case "turtle" is no metaphor for older ladies). There were thus really these two giant lizards of a complacent kind on the soiled bed of the artist, who by this rose his works, inconspicuous, poetic things, in the sky beyond the corrupt air. (For fair play we let our readers know that Mr. Gresinger disclaimed this, but did not answer to the question, who, if not Brodwolf, was the artists with two tortoises, because he even blamed the author (me, U.R.) to have mixed up "all and everything" in the article, and thus we became convinced that a special kind of afraidness of having said too much was the reason for the negative judgement about the article. As Mr. Greisinger liked to propose us to take the article out of the web or to write less, just something short, we in return like to refuse this proposal as given by a confectioner - not only because the attacked author have always to be aware of her ideal weight. Culture, including writing and journalism, is concerned with sublimated oral pleasure of an intellectual concern with and free thoughts about the free products, language like utterances and thoughts of others, this is to be concerned with freedom instead of announcement - to use the phrases of Franz Josef Strauß. Thus, who likes to reduce lively journalism to opening dates and press releases, in consequence mustn't eat any cake or engage him-/herself in modern arts.). The sensitive pieces are hanging in the Neue Galerie, as in the former Cafe Drexl in cleaner surroundings. The anecdote sensitizes : How is the air in cafes - you think of the Cafe Einstein in Berlin - particularly when overcrowded, what for confectioners indeed is the ideal condition. Sooner smoke, still the sticky, heating or moist air of shopping stressed sweating tourists with wet coats and jackets. In summer more of the strange mixture of human sweat and coffee .... sometimes comes even a wet dog in between, besides the cold muzzle, and then, just as we see it before us in the Café Drexl retrospective, brushstrokes including the table of Brodwolf and further poetic objects beside us, the dog and the cake... A re-enactment - a beautiful expression – of the Drexl Cafe in the Neue Galerie is completely made possible when at selected times tea or coffee and cakes are served. Or just to the exhibition openings.

Anyway the power of the rich and in retrospect, even the poor, ranks funnily in the pre-Christmas time anyway, in the context of art and art collections, taken from the rich themselves, as the art engaged private consultancy, with the help of big names Markus Lüpertz, a somewhat strange shaped knight-sculpture and a beautiful young art award winners of Russian origin, Alexander Knych, chosen for this award from the Art legend, intervened in the Schaezlerpalais with the delightful music of two guitarists, winners of JugendMusiziert. The Fuggers' family, traditionally money and gifts donors of the Kings, similarly not adheres to their private castles but presented itself with a stylish Christmas shop where you could up to the fourth week of Advent acquire treasures such as Stetten's history of Augsburg.

Gratifying when we learn at the opening speeches that even the notables of these initiatives are somehow cork or even successful artists, in complete opposite to the totally superfluous advertising for the profession of a police officer in some leaflets lieing around in the art collections and perhaps even to the proclaimed greyhoundy streamlined citizen life...

Exhibition until 18 Januar: Café Drexl. Works from the collection Greisinger. Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus. Maximilianstraße 48, 86150 Augsburg, Phone 0821 324 41 02, Opening times Tues, Wed - Sun 10-17.00 . On 15 Januar 2009 at 19.00 a conversation with Alfred Greisinger in the Neue Galerie in Höhmannhaus (Attention: The website's links are not updated) takes part.

* Report and photos: Dr. Ulrike Ritter *