Marz 1996 6. Jahrgang Nr. 21 DM 25.- OS 195.- SFR 25.- 10752 FPainting I: Light from the Other Side. Siegfried Anzinger, Ross Bleckner, George Condo, Axel Kassebochmer, Albert Ochlen, Terry Winters bei Monika Spritth “That's always the major difference between like the performing arts io me and being a painter, you know, lke a painter does a painting and he does a painting and that’s it, You know, he's had the joy of creating it and hangs it on some wall, somebody buys it, somebody buys it again, or maybe nobody buys it, and it sits up in a loft somewhere until he dies, But nobody ever said to him, nobody ever said to van Gogh: Paint a starry night again, man! (Joni Mitchell, live concert, California, circa 1970.) In America, a painter paints a painting with paint. In Germany, ein (e) Maler(in) malt cin Bild mit Farbe*. The intimacy of the difference and correspondence between these two state- ments lies at the heart of this, the first install- ment in a series of painting shows planned by Monika Sprueth Galerie for 1996, In three rooms, canvases from six noted painters, all male and in mid-career, face off. In each room, respectively, hang medium: and large- scale works by a pair of painters, always one American and one German (or Austrian). What are these paintings expressing? What do they have to say to one another? In the first room, shared by Axel Kasseboehmer and Ross Bleckner, one hears the rhetoric and rebuttal that echoed in the halls of the French Academy two centuries ago between the Poussinists and the Rubenists. It is known that early on in his devel- opment, Kasseboehmer imitated or quoted Poussin.! Essentially, he does so here as well. Color he subjugates to (out)line, material to image, picture (Bild) or illusion, That is not to say that materiality and process are not at issue, they are, but they are secondary. Kasse- boehmer’s use of color (tinting) and surface (receding) are the synaesthetic equivalents to harmonics which fill out any musical com- position. Were Kasseboehmer’s oeuvre trans- posed as music, it would twang and draw! like a folksy Texas ballad. Kasseboehmer's cowboy brand of hilltop hallucination" hard-edgy, surrealistic landscape if you will, more or less obscured of all ornament save the animated outline of waving trees that, or rather who, resemble new gothic Reming- tonesque figures lined up like Rangers in a row, chromatically silhouetted along with an- other C&W standard - the meandering hori- zon, against yet a third Western song trope ~ the afterglow of sunset. The magic hour of twilight is, in this Ruhrgebiet-born painter's world, reminiscent of the industrialstrength he saw over fields and cooling towers as an impressionable child. Perhaps it is the pumped-up radiance of Kasseboehmer’s rustic mythology that lends a jail house air to the dark light* stripe paintings of his New Yorker neighbor, Ross Bleckner, which in the end only underlines Bleckner’s mischievous incarceration of more light (and image) in greasy paint and linen cells than is released, Goncealing and reveal- ing, like organized folds of flesh or drapery, are prerequisites for Bleckner’s ,Bad Boy of the Baroque” sensibility in search of a new Sublime. He said in interview in 1988: ,] had to make my last stripe paintings self-analytic, peremptory in a sense, now I want to make, them self-cannibalizing. So that they can tum inside themselves."? And his paintings become themselves, exactly that, paintings. The mother of all color, Light’, breathes termittently in these ,Stripe Paintings", pulsing like the approaching-disappearing light of a revolving beacon off in the dix tance, toying with the spectator phototropi- cally, while the canvases search for them- selves, encrusted in their own surface mate- riality, paint and linen, The pragmatism of the concrete potentiality, encapsulated in the English — to paint a painting with paint ~is definitely on the top of this painter’s agend: His means: primarily ,fuzzed out“ oil stick, Bleckne commitment to light and form free from the confines of any outline (yet entrapped in his painterly materials) lend, his work the sort of tly sculptural, arc tural potential for beauty, that Rubens, yet 10 be outdone, was the master at. ‘The signature irony of Cologne-based Albert Oehlen and New York and Par based George Condo gives way to absurdity in the ,masterpiece theatricality” of their €o- installation in the second room, The paint ings are partially ,roped off* by rough and ready studio folding worktables, making any approach to the paintings cumbersome. Irony lapses into absurdity at this point. Its inten tion, the aggrandizement of the ridiculous 21339/40 Blick in die Aus- stellung » MatereiI* ei Monike Sprith, Koln, New, 1995 bis Fb. 1996, 214 30 (irony) reverses itself to ridicule all that is great (absurdity). Albert Ochlen’s largish-scale work in the show catalogues diverse annotations of most of Modernism’s ,isms*, spraying and brush- ing aluminum silver corpuscles, even a rain- bow array of hues onto what should be a unified painted surface, but is instead @ pic- ture (Bild) collage, that reads like an abbre- viated lexicon of 20th Century abstract trop- isms, heavily citing the Post-war period in Germany. Ochlen remains close to his self proclaimed roots in Niewschian philosophy, primarily his pithy proto-postmodem notion ‘of ,the appearance of appearances"®, which translates here into a cynically absurd pic- ture of paintings. In contrast, George Condo's absurdity is good-natured. .What takes place on Condo's canvases often seems absurd or arbitrary; its the accumulated effect in the mind that eventually reveals a pattern.*7 The pattern is as poetic as Miles Davis muifling the horn for a sensual passage, or Charlie Parker letting loose for the rush, But it’s also almost puritanically, pragmatic, in the way Piet Mondrian is Calvi- nist, Jackson Pollock, tribal, and Frank Stella, matter-of-fact. Yet Condo never achieves their stature, that would be absurdity’s anticlimax. Instead he plays the unsung sort of anti- hero, trying to equal Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, with whom he compares himself. aJesper Johns made ,American flag’ art, Andy made Campbell soup’ art. T make Eu ropean painting art." ‘The agent for line over color in painting (Poussinist) and visa versa (Rubenist) in this room at first appears murky. However, ex: amining Oehlen’s and Condo's respective application of paint (Farbe), one can only admire Condo's most fluid virtuosity with a brush, and Oehlen’s markmaking brush- work fudged a bit with a spray effect. Condo is clearly unable 10 resist the ,paininess* of painting (Rubens), while Ochlen only masks what is in actuality an underlying pastiche or overlaying of painting-isms, perhaps intention ally not adding up to a unified materiality of painterly surface, remaining a heterogeneous sort of mockery, or outline of Modernist ab- stract painting tropes instead. ‘The tables turn in the next and final room shared by Terry Winters and Siegfried An- zinger. Terry Winters’ large purplish. paint- ing, an ,clectric network", looks like a blow- up of a PreCambrian fossil trace ~ the first visibly structured forms of life.’ His mono- chrome beginnings during the heyday of the hands-off Primary Structures or Minimalist, movement gave way to the lascivious temp- tation, also felt by a coterie of his peers, in- cluding Carroll Dunham, Bill Jenson and Stephen Mueller in New York, to follow Cy Twombly’s lead (who was based in Ttaly at the time, which made all the difference) and ,coolly*, in MeLuhan’s sense of ,cool*",