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To trust the cat to keep the
cream, to put the cart before the horse, „den
Bock zum Gärtner machen“ - just some common phrases
to tell that something goes wrong. Now we have it – but the
other way round? Well, it comes along like a warning, not to stage
the dishes under the table, but onto it, and ..., because it is –
just art again – to be asthonished, yes. An enriched collection's
carousel is working for the public and publicity of art at the H2 –
Centre of Contemporary Art in Augsburg, from 1st of
october up to march 2009 staging its new artworks and some proven
and honored pieces from the depot in a new constellation.
What are the newbies? Nearly disappointing: nearly only very merited art works, some of them made by artists – like an sculptural assemblage by Christian Hörl, a well representing piece out of an object group called „Leibeserziehung“ - who are already well collected at H2 (Ballett, 1999/2000; screenprint with glass and tool handles; „Prison / Prisoners, with Waltraud Funke and Udo Kindermann, dia installation). The original „buck“ for physical education – a timber trestle for english readers - with glass printed photographs of male ballett-dancers in very female tutus, presented in a huge glass box ( perhaps just to be protected from unauthorized usage), has of course the glamour of souvereign art making – Hörl almost seems just to have to order his objects a little to get them into tenseful constellations. But unfortunately, his formal vanguardism usually does not see the light of an international art exhibition or competition, perhaps because the artist, educated for church painting, keeps his „Je ne sais quoi“ about his concept while forcing unmaskable right wing contents in his artworks – like in his buck-assemblage, that seems to judge the strange impressions the ballett dancers give to the viewers as grotesque forms of cultural behaviour (reminiscent of some funny monsters on gothic church portals), like ballett dancers at all, Yogis and asiatic acrobats, french and baroque garden architecture and other forms of just being ornamental. The idea the buck gives to somebody in search of an interpretation is of course, that these dancers with tutus are acting out a kind of role-changing and becoming bucks within becoming female or get into female roles. Well, may be these ideas are not everybodies (!Ouh, english language, your origines, your disculturalities, your literal sense...!) pleasure.
Just
being ornamental – thus a good idea for art and other objects?
A public relation photography the H2 advertises with supports this
idea. But otherwise, most of the exhibited pieces contradict exactly
this. Let's stay a little in the sports section, currently threaten
to become a difficult companion of the arts in Augsburg - loved by
everybody and awfully cheap, and not appropriate to be judged as
unimportant or mindless and dull, because such a lot of people spend
their time on it. Well, all these people are just playing football or
running around in the parks to be fit for the arts and museums at
sunday ? Sounds funny – but may be it is exactly like this:
Just think of the popular nearly public parties resp. exhibition
openings of the art collections and museums in Augsburg, where –
of course – everybody (! exact sense of language again) tries
to be free of wrinkles or tiredness but to be beautiful, well dressed
and full of funny ideas. Where to get them, if not in fresh air –
and why, if not for the arts?
Sports to become ornaments in a good sense, well. Another new piece of art, a quiet not too big photography of the Augsburgian, very selfassured Bavarian (even if educated in Düsseldorf in the north of Germany, with Thomas Ruff as professor and his student of excellence) Kathrin Ahlt, who handicrafts her analogue photographs into paintings – unfortunately favouring classical landscape motives like the sea, ships, the alpes and other snowcovered, beautiful mountains, a.s.o.. Her new photography in the New Art Collection of the H2 is well chosen, with some distance towards this, „showing“ some mysterious objects to the photographer in frog's perspective, who, like the spectator of the finished photograph, can recognize just something coming onto his side of the hill. Ahlt thus may be sometimes right, and not only repeating North Germany's standards of self-explanation, when she tells us about her photographs that they have an indirect subject, are *photographs of photographs* – not just beautiful again like romantic landscape paintings.
Further achievements: Eight pieces of the series „Sky Art“
by Otto Piene, a private beneficence to the H2.
This exactly is, what Lea Peer really wants, the Suisse artist who paints in conservative styles snow covered mountains. They are – in contrast to everything they are in cutting edge art – in the collection, because the artist was witty enough to make some photographs of them in the Schaezlerpalais, that is an again and again May-danced, white-blossom crowned heritage of the Augsburgian art collection and museums.
In
strolling around and suddenly looking at oneself in a wall-like
mirror-plane, Peer's strong drives of being represented in the back,
standing next to Hörl's sportive and theatrical threstle, the
impression of art as staging arises, and – to get it the other
way round again – of observing art and everything staged within
and around it. The mirrow-wall, a little remaining part of the
monumental installation „Abflug“ by Magdalena Jetelova
at the H2 (->
*/magdalena_jetelova_engl.html*),
changes just into this, although in its origines more straight ahead
demonstrating contradicting aspects and principles of security and
observation, visibility and visual knowledge. Thus, the witty
curator, the H2's head Thomas Elsen, keeps his collection at the
cutting edge line even if almost unconventionally dedicated to his
region, sainted Augsburg and around.
There are proofs of this and of the contrary (really nearly like in mathematics!) in two other pieces just shopped: A photography by Anastasia Khoroshilova, who is already quite famous for her series „Islander“ - a hundred of portraits of people living in the country and decentered regions of the Russian Federation, there keeping their traditional cultures or at least aspects of it or trying to get closer to modern life and the metropols, all shown like they wanted to be shown and thus, showing something we would not find – for example - in Berlin, where the artist lives: They present themselves as content with their situations, fitting into and making the best of it. This is of course not the end of criticism, because, as the series title tells us, they are in different ways isolated, and the Do-Your-Day philosophy is thus perhaps a result of an obvious lack of communication and society. In contrast, these are the special region of Khoroshilova, who is not only well known for her art work but especially astonishing in the nice and awfully successful way she promotes it. Just some words here, some words there, repeating some complains about the Moskowity of the new art4.ru, the private collection of contemporary art in Moskow owned by the millionair Igor Markin (comp. * /art4russia.html *), some very attentive curators – swoops – the Khoroshilova exhibition at art4.ru as cooperation of the H2 and the art4.ru with a catalogue book edited by and for both institutions will be running in december of this year 2008 (reports will follow). Khoroshilova will keep to be successful, not at last because of this good management, that keeps her worth and prices. As curator Elsen told us (although he perhaps not usually judges art at first under this perspective), all the new art achievements are works keeping their worth, if not experiencing a rise.
We would think and hope exactly this for a kind of regional shooting star, in 2007 shown by the Stadtsparkasse in a solo exhibition, then, some months later, at the Neue Galerie im Höhmannhaus (head again Th. Elsen), now with a new delightful sculptural object present in the New Art Collection III of the H2: Rainer Apfelbaum, for years not very well known, not in any aspect an international artist, but in Augsburg, working still and contentful on his paintings with red colour and pigment, than, suddenly ? - getting out of the frame of simple life and simple pics, into the room and the freedom of lost frames – of handicrafted artefacts and their colour into chance given, sometimes even commonly created, industrially preformed but still always indivudally – even idiosyncratically and narrative, poetically (a.s.o.) finished or polished art works. In the New Art Collection a series of aluminium rails is shown. These objects are regularly ordered but more irregularly painted and covered with variants of red colours or special attention foil. Some words are given, too, to get the minimal-artsy work into something more personal and poetic: „Human broken“ leads us to an interpretation – however we will succeed in interpreting, this along is the interesting aspect, because, not only on the first glance, Apfelbaum's art is – or has been - at first and foremost, abstract. Perhaps it was abstract and is now formal and concrete, because of the usage he makes currently of concrete objects beyond the picture's frame. The wonderful drive to explode out of conventional forms shows himself thus with Apfelbaum at his best, even if the H2-collection piece emphazises his abstract origines, and keeps pretty, nice and on the wall.
This report will be continued soon....now, at 3.30 a.m., it's just „Mensch, ergo sum kaputt !“
