Jörg
Immendorff: I Wanted to be an Artist
Golden Paley Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design
20th Street and The Parkway
Philadelphia, PA 19103
215 568 4515
23 January - 21
March
By JAMES
ROSENTHAL
Jörg Immendorff
Ohne Titel (Untitled) 1994
pencil, gouache, ink, 35 x 25 cm
Collection Philip Isles, New York
This expert survey of Jörg
Immendorff's career reassesses an artist whose period of notoriety in
America lasted a relatively short time in the 1980's. This was partly
a matter of mistaken identity - he was too closely linked with the neo-expressionist
and new image (?) bandwagon prevalent at the time. His connection to
direct contemporaries who gained mega-celebrity status, Anselm Keifer
and Gerhardt Richter, is also shown to be partly incidental. From this
exhibition, Immendorff emerges more fully as an original artist of great
complexity. This reevaluation also makes distinctions that remove him
from convenient generalizations made about the "postmodern"
Eighties, the Trans-Avant-Garde, and art generally, and it illustrates
thoroughly the conceptual nature of his work.
Born in 1945, Immendorff
was of the generation that experienced post-war disillusionment that
politicized every waking moment. As a student in the 1960s, he faced
the task of examining Germany's tragic history and its fraught relationship
with modernity. This forced him to devise a balancing act between eras.
Immendorff subsequently takes on the multiple roles of jester, storyteller
and historian. He actively participates in a self-conscious continuum
of twentieth-century German art while simultaneously throwing stones
at the powers that be. After running the full gamut of conceptual work
á la fluxus, his adoption of painting appears as a sort of purposeful
and elaborate bluff. Although this suits his needs, it makes the connection
to Ludwig Kirchner and the original German expressionist group die Brücke
seem almost superfluous. What comes to the fore instead is a weaving
together of political, social and personal myth making. It is the content
that matters most, putting him more in line with the social, satirical
and metaphorical intents of George Grosz and Max Beckmann respectively.
Immendorf's early work from
the sixties tells of the political upheavals of his days under the mentorship
of Joseph Beuys. At that time, with the strong fluxus influence, there
existed all sorts of manifestos, sloganizing and politicized minimal
art. A petition to end the Vietnam war from 1965 (signed by Beuys and
others) serves as a defining historic document here. This section of
the show also conveys how Immendorff's later shift to painting, in all
it's conventionality, is not so much an "about face" as it
is a specific strategy-he goes on to combine his well-learned conceptual
precepts and his inherent politics with his painterly methods.
The large "Café
Deutschland" paintings (1978-83) feign expressionist representation
and zeal and move towards a system of complex metaphor which is in some
way novel. Although illustrative, viewing these so-called Picabian "bad
paintings" is merely the first step one takes in deciphering their
meanings. They must be read as "multiple texts" not just formally
as paintings. The bars with wooden floors serve as meeting places of
mythic characters where the artist and converses with Mao, Marx, Stalin,
Beuys and Brecht. Whether conspicuously or not, Immendorff avidly adopts
the mantle of Beuys and with it, the ability to fabricate and mix myths
with facts.
Beuys's image appears continuously
in Immendorf's work. A small painting, "Gertrude Stein," includes
a depiction of Beuys piloting his Stuka dive bomber with "Fluxus"
written (in typical Immendorff fashion) across the wings. In the large
painting, Sun Gate, a diagrammatical outline of his teacher becomes
a Beuys's museum.
Jörg Immendorff
Anbetung des Inhalts (Worship of Content) 1985
oil on canvas, 285 x 330 cm
Collection John and Mary Pappajohn Art Foundation, Des Moines, Iowa
Eventually, Beuys turns up
in Immendorf's theatrical productions of the 1990s. As the paintings
progress, Immendorff both pays homage and mocks, cycling his own personal
myths, those of East and West and those peculiar to the art world. This
process reaches a natural culmination when Immendorff uses theater --
for which he was originally trained -- as his canvas. Immendorf's video
production of Stravinsky's opera Rake's Progress is ingenuously used
as an unlikely channel for German art and society. Key figures appear-Beuys,
Penke and Lüpertz -all playing different historical figures in
the play. The artist Baselitz plays the Keeper of the Insane Asylum,
while Lüpertz becomes Mick Shadow, Rakewell's alter ego. With Immendorff
as Tom Rakewell, one can see a fantastic interweaving of past and present,
a confluence of Germanic art historical reference brought to life. Immendorf's
use of Hogarth's morality tale shows his strange affinity with the English
caricaturist and reinforces where Immendorff's interests lie: in promoting
an open-ended dialogue on culture. The fall of the Berlin Wall, so long
at the center of his rationale, may have been the reason he went looking
for alternative fertile ground to further extend his content and may
partially explain his disappearance after his 1980s heyday.
Immendorff promulgates a
watertight tautology that runs progressively through his ideas and delivery.
His questions about the purpose of art and the conceptualization of
the artist's role are answered by the work itself and indeed, in retrospect,
by Immendorff's own life. His question, "What Can Art Do?"
resonates particularly well now as art continues to develop an apolitical
global/corporate mind set. This superbly researched show qualifies his
unique contribution to art and ensures his enduring legacy.
James Rosenthal is an
artist and critic who lives in Philadelphia
