It was May 2006 and between highways, new shopping centers and old industrial buildings, when the new "H2. Center for contemporary art" opened in Augsburg. Artists shall present contemporary, specific related installations in this great hall, to mirrow and to get into a dialogue with the collection of the museum itself. The first one to do this was Fabricio Plessi, who just laid down a handful of mountains in the hall, volcanoic stones, very huge. A kind of metaphor for art of course, that can be still watched in the halls, because the witty curator of the H2, Dr. Thomas Elsen, managed to bought three of them. These stones don't revel, they murmur. Natural sounds pour out of them, quite artificial, but well, symbolic. You'll heave a sigh of relief just to stand in hot art.
It may be senseful, as such, to transfigure art in nature and to look at nature just in the arts. One of the new art objects, Kirsten Ortwegs laying sculpture "Schlangenhaut" (snakeskin), surprises with semantical closeness. It's perhaps badly placed as a geographical point in front of the photography cabinett.
A contrast, because easier and very fresh, is the installation and sculpture about camping by Sebastian Walther. Really quite risqué. The very old van is even funny, if you don't go into the exhibition hall but watch it from the outside. You'll see nothing else than this camping van. Is this the exhibition hall? - you may ask - or did the workers just leave their car when they finished their spreading? Funny object!
Well, you are even allowed to go into it. A little film is shown inside, about a camping van, a tree and a car, who are falling from heaven to come together on a nice place in the lighted wood, on its green lawn. And to be put away again, just up into the outside of the picture. Well, nature in art, to visit it, to enjoy it, to look at it, it is so much easier at all this nature itself...just believe.
But of course, you'll get some problems even with art. Look at Tony Cragg. He combines in his sunfluted glasses - a beautiful yellow bottles glas sculpture - some very ordinary bottle 20 cent worth with high level hand made glasses - or do they just look like that? But they are all in a way out of their usual function, displaced bottles (perhaps women (like me or my mother) sometimes feel like that)). But what I want to say is, they are caricatures but beautiful. Some of these objects that should belong to a "Wertstoffhof" (that's how germans call the place where they bring their carefully collected litter to) are even more beautiful than a sculpture done by Henry Moore. It's shocking.
These glas-sculpture in front of the window, too, delicate irony of a place, where art works on being contemporary. But in the background and in front of the entrance abstract art is cuddling. Rupprecht Geiger's "Pinc contra Orange" behaves like red and pink just all over the wall. Great monochromy, great abstractness. This is art just to look at and not to ask about.
But no ! No silence in my mind in this exhibition. Like in search of rescuing itself, it trys to get out of being involved into the huge Ilfochroms at the right. The series "To inhabit a place" by Leta Peer shows conservative supraports with high mountains shimmering in snow but all these pictures in empty rooms (the famous Schaezler Palais), left for renovation, Just these traditional píctures will stay as they are. But don't they have to be new, if the rooms become new? Obviously we have the right to figure this question in a way that fits the "H2 in its time" problem. The tradition is quite endangered here, in these photographies, but kept, too, like the picture, which are...(new, of course)....
At last, we find a little and shy artwork created by Lisa Genzken. She was selected to present Germany on the 2007 Biennale in Venice. In small format an argument for traditional techniques presents itself in Augsburg's H2: "Basic Research" is a small picture, painted in oil on canvas, but looking like a printed surface. It doesn't figure anything, but shows just pixels in highleveled exacteness. This precision is without mimetical sense, but self-refering, imitating in its oilness nothing but an, in this way, subsidiary principle of imitation.(Well, sounds like good old german idealism ?).
The photographical cabinett of the "New Collection II" places the well edged line of irony and constructive lack of respect into the new media. Clegg & Gutman delicate the mind like Corbinian Böhm and Michael Gruber with photographies of normal people in abnormal situations. Waltraud Funk, Christian Hörl und Gerhard Kindermann create a kind of theatrical space with voices, pictures and narrations showing people in jail. How much you want to know or to hear about the men this artwork speak with and about, is your own decision. You can get an impression of the multimedia installation and go or stay and listen some more minutes to the things they tell. As a kind of multimedia concert, the installation abstracts from the individual person and from voyeurism, in this way.
Another piece of art, very big, that has been bought by the H2. is Felix Droese's "Wo geh'se? Im Kino", at whom you are forced to watch after having gone through the hall. You'll have a great cinematographical view then, that is given historical sense to by the huge artwork. This is, without contradicting itself, simply decorative, too, and, too, decoratively simple. At the back and from behind, Imi Knoebel puts the spectator of old forms of cinematography into small wooden frames. In its artwork of the 80ies, now owned by the H2, Knoebel orders small artframes to build a new kind of collection at the museum's wall. We might have heard about these ideas earlier, as a "Bilderstreit" (war of pictures) motive some centuries ago. Now, it's about the big "What, where, by whom and why it is" of art.
Contemporary Art can not be complete. And such, even in the H2 is one more room of artworks I don't discuss here although it's interesting of course (some pictures are pictured), and there will be a lot more art works I might leave alone for quite a long time when Collection III arrives (We'll keep you informed). The exhibition now, showing the "New Collection II" runs until October 2007, so you won't have problems of visiting it one or even two times and again and again.
