The newspaper articles suspiciously hailed a new European master, handsomely hiding out in East Germany with several competent disciples. In the photos, Neo Rauch’s feet were up and his hair slicked back. One of his younger followers held a raven, and another was pictured barefoot. Was it their humor or their seriousness that was so unmistakably German?
As I wound through the Berkshires toward “Life After Death” at MASS MoCA, I prepared myself to wade through some pompous pictures, drink a Coke, and console myself with a drive back through the fall colors. I was well prepared to dislike Neo Rauch. His name alone seems a kind of artworld concoction, the last name immediately bringing Ruscha and Rauschenberg to mind, and the first name being just a prefi x. The paintings, when reproduced in magazine miniature, look like referentially elusive pastiche.
The first room of the show abruptly ended my plans. Three large Rauch paintings imposed themselves on the huge space in an entirely unexpected way. They reminded me, in their scale, of the altarpieces by Giotto and Duccio that dominate the first room of the Uffizi. Their density and poise projected across the length of the gallery. In their ordering, the pictures evoked Max Beckmann. The characters seemed interrelated both narratively and spatially, although you couldn’t tell exactly how. Their coloring—acrid yellows, phthalo greens and orangey reds puncturing a neutral atmosphere—was both traditionally German and very contemporary. Grünwald or Nolde could have chosen the palette, but Rauch deployed it to bask his objects in our era’s artifi cial and otherworldly light. Seen together, the pictures demonstrated a level of competence and ambition that is all but startling to fi nd in a contemporary museum.
The most recent painting, 2004’s Demonstrations, is, as its title suggests, a complex gathering. Along the right edge, letters spelling d-e-m-o-s float down on black disks, introducing the root of the theme. A newsstand, a dark building, and a blurred white sky frame the dense center of the picture. To the right, a skeletal tree divides a man and a woman. He sits naked with his back to the scene, arms tied to the trunk. She stands behind the tree in riding boots, gloves, and an overcoat, calmly regarding a ravenous dog. (His tail curves back up suggestively toward her, and his black paws pin a bloody bone, but she has him tightly leashed.) Behind them, a man in a trench coat strides earnestly toward the protest, which, despite its apparent importance, takes up a very small section at the painting’s center: five placards emerge from a crowd of heads, but we see only the blank sides of the picket signs. All this foregrounds a man who resembles a child-size Hitler with an adult face. A bearded, high-ranking soldier in an acid green uniform has placed a comforting hand on his back. The other hand gestures toward the dog and out of the picture toward us. Are we part of the demonstration?
The second vertical picture, Diktat, gives us a strange lecture on representation, starting with the four green curtains that take up almost half the picture. Each fold and crease of the first curtain is faithfully presented, as if Veronese had seen photography. On the second one, the folds are painted as a kind of psychedelic convergence, a green electric cascade. (You think you see details, but you can’t fi nd them anywhere.) The third is illustratively summarized, and the fourth and farthest is simply a shape. Three white thought-bubble clouds float perspectivally in front of these curtains. The closest bubble hangs from the top of the picture and contains a ramified thing with some, though decidedly not all, of the attributes of a chandelier. The second bubble presents a red structure that suggests a cluster of mushrooms, and the third, a pile of shapes verging on bones and turds. All the forms hover near representation, and the last collection hovers just above a man with a handsome ram’s head who is apparently delivering a lecture. He leans forward in his brown and yellow tuxedo with two fingers propped like a hoof on the desk. The gesture,
which remembers the cuckold king, introduces another seemingly illicit coupling: two serpents, one red and one white, twirl into a sinister water fountain in the foreground, their mouths horribly open. (Surely an astounding speech, but none of the audience members are listening; they are all intently reading.) Through the window, the air is a silvery gray. This is postwar, postcommunist, postindustrial, postunification, postmodern Germany, so all of it is strange, and none of it is funny.
The third picture, horizontal, feels like a still from a dream. Along the bottom, a lizard leapfrogs an egg slipping from a floating blue frying pan, and a bodiless head wearing sunglasses spits out a blank speech bubble in the shape of a condom. He looks like Karl Marx (or is it Jerry Garcia?). A man in a top hat enters from the left, proclaiming the painting’s title, Das Neue. He is holding a rigid black cobra, which could be a wand, a walking stick, or just a stiff snake. The painting’s central area has the appearance of a room, but again, we’re dreaming. A handsome woman, reminiscent of one of the readers in Diktat, is knitting in a chair made of gray logs. There is an empty white bed, and a man is where the corner of the room would be, but the walls have disappeared. He is looking out at warehouses with waves for roofs; a peach glow at the horizon is introduced by bricks. You’re presented with an achingly specific scene, but you have really no idea what it means. You are just waking up.
It would take an army of explicators to verify these pictures, and most of the requisite etymologists, art historians, psychoanalysts, and ex-spies would probably have to be (East) German. It is hard for an American to tell, for example, just how precise or hermetic the paintings’ references are, not to mention what they mean in the pictures. Viewers in the former East must recognize those particular generic buildings, and helplessly recognize the old propaganda. This knowledge seems crucial if we are to distinguish this kind of symbolically thick work from that of a charlatan. But at the same time, Rauch doesn’t paint like a charlatan, which is a strong sign that the research—or prolonged wonder—might be worth the trouble.
What distinguishes Rauch’s visual language is an uneasy coherence: he has taken the time to represent different objects in different ways, but he has also worried enough to synthesize that vision. So while the logic of perspective is deployed to locate and depict objects, the logic of collage has been summoned to arrange them. This tension between what a thing is and where it is gives Rauch’s best pictures their strange stamina.
If this apparent restraint eventually allows for generosity in Rauch’s pictures, a similar paradox may govern the attention these pictures are getting. As we are now finding out in all the major newspapers, Neo Rauch long dwelled in Saxon anonymity. Even when the wall came down and Berlin became a booming art center, Rauch preferred the relative isolation of his region and craft. His work has gained a certain grandeur from this privacy, so this current level of exposure might seem a contradiction. But the economies of attention are in order here: the long season of concentration came well before its harvest as fame: there is something very well timed about Rauch’s relatively late arrival.
For the generation that follows Rauch, the story will be different. The New Leipzig School—which includes Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell, and Matthias Weischer—has already been touted as “the 21st century’s fi rst bona fide artistic phenomenon.” Still, it might not be too late to observe that these painters are not yet fully formed. To their collective credit, each of the artists in the group is pursuing a distinctive vision, and none are copying Rauch—except in that they are all making obliquely narrative paintings. I repeatedly get the sense, however, when looking at their pictures, that the stage has been set but the play has yet to begin. No one can say for sure what effect the artworld’s capricious attention will have on these painters as they develop, but one hopes that the current trend—of premature exposure, profi table calcification, and prolonged mediocrity—won’t hold true for the New Leipzig School. Time will tell.
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Some people thought I would be happy if a painter got the Turner Prize, and the morning after Tomma Abts was declared the winner, I bumped into some art students who even congratulated me on a “victory for Painting.” As we sipped our coffee and vigorously debated the prize’s merits, they mentioned that they hadn’t seen the exhibition.
I did see it. I intentionally saw it on the last day before the prize announcement, so as to savor the drama. I gathered from fellow museumgoers’ chatter that most people attended the show grudgingly, which was a shame: if I was going to watch an art prize, I wanted everyone to go along with it. I wanted it to be like a sporting event.
Trouble is, the only clear rules for the Turner Prize are those of eligibility. (Briefly: an artist under 50 working in Britain who has had an exhibition in the past year.) The rules of the game itself? Nobody knows. The winner is decided using the quintessential postmodern cultural method: election by committee.
I would never wish for a cultural committee that understood the secret laws of art—what could be more horrifying?—but some categories might be nice, for the spirit of competition. Consider for a moment the strangeness of an institution that seeks to compare small pieces of unfired earth with eight-hour digital projections, or wacky spinning belief machines to paintings on uniform rectangular canvases. In the literary world, awards are broken up into pretty specific categories, so nobody suffers the embarrassment of comparing the merits of a poem with those of a novel. In the film world, they won’t even compare an actor with an actress. But in the artworld, category confusion is usually provided as evidence of healthy pluralism, which, in the context of this particular art prize, led to art students, journalists, and other casual visitors thinking that Painting had won the Turner.
Now, about those paintings. The Tate’s wall paragraph declared: “Tomma Abts’s paintings are the result of a rigorous working method that pitches the rational against the intuitive. She works consistently to a format of 48 x 38 centimeters in acrylic and oil paint. She uses no source material and begins with no preconceived idea of the final result. Instead, her paintings take shape through a gradual process of layering and accrual. As the internal logic of each composition unfolds, forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes ‘congruent with itself.’” A friend of mine put it differently. He said they looked like screen savers.
Both comments are hard to argue with. In the official version, the story of the painter’s rules is the only story you have to know: the dimensions are the dimensions are the dimensions, and these paintings present themselves as… painted. Looking at the paintings, you can’t disagree. The part that’s hard to figure is how a painter who “begins with no preconceived idea of the final result” so consistently arrives at an “internal logic” which involves hard-edged, neutral, matte tones arranged to form slightly inflected geometric shapes that radiate outward from the center of the painting. Something else must be going on here.
What’s happening rhetorically is that a set of conventional painting habits is being given a mildly heroic status through adjectives like rigorous, gradual, and congruent. Process is thereby ushered forward— politely, quietly—to stand in for content. And while the paintings themselves aren’t exactly responsible for this textual maneuvering, their visual qualities unfortunately render them pretty complicit.
Taken as a group, they are exceedingly safe. Vectors regularly find an undisturbing route to the painting’s edge, and colors sit mildly next to one another. The shapes are careful not to name anything, and often permutate so as not to be nameable themselves. (If a shape with a clear identity appears—a triangle, say, or a sphere—it gets repeated until the impact dissipates.) The surface, for its part, is occasionally disrupted, but previous layers provide more “texture” than turbulence. The eleven identically-sized paintings are also displayed without inflection: regularly spaced at universal standard viewing height. The overall tone is one of painstaking neutrality.
Understatement is of course a wonderful tactic, provided that you first have something to state. Without content, the muted tends toward the silent. If, on the other hand, a painting’s content is the process of painting, then the general feeling drifts toward something worse—a kind of false modesty. It is hard to fault such carefully made, quiet—you could even say flawless—objects, but there is something about their very correctness, about their self-imposed limits, and the absence—or eradication—of risk, that makes their introversion hard to admire.
These paintings have been praised both for looking like early modernist paintings and for not looking like early modernist paintings. I think the trouble stems from the desire to make paintings with no referent. As the vocabulary for this kind of endeavor is inevitably limited (the surface of the painting can’t refer to the surfaces in the world, the color can’t resemble the color in the world, the shapes can’t, et cetera,) a lot of the attempts are going to look like variations: both repeating and not repeating the previous patterns. This brings us back to the screen savers. The lesson seems to be that if you attempt to make a painting with absolutely no referent, this painting will look (a) like previous paintings with no referent and (b) like recently outmoded developments in technology.
But just because it’s impossible doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. The old dream of the perfectly abstract painting can be used to generate startling new forms—for which the insatiably associative human mind will eventually find points of reference. The endeavor to be pure can still be noble. Hopeful, even.
Fortunately, three of Abts’s paintings troubled my more general thoughts, and gave me this kind of hope. Ert, Folme, and Veeke are all named according to Abts’s method of titling her paintings from a book of German regional names, but unlike Ebe, Epko, Ehme, et al., this trio has an air of aspiration about it. The reason is as old as it is simple: space.
Ert uses the same beige-gray palette as some of the other pictures, but uses it to enact a very peculiar spatial swirl. Four tsunami shapes converge to overtake the shield shape in the center of the painting. The slight shift in color between the two pairs of quadrants makes it seem, for a moment, that half the picture is underwater. But there is no water there, so the eerie sensation is that half the painting is under… a substance that isn’t paint, but only exists in paint. I can only hope that the difficulty of describing this pictorial effect somehow argues in its favor.
A second picture, Folme, is easier to narrate: Curved planes seem to loop off the surface of the painting, leaving impossible shadows near its borders. Remnants from previous elliptical journeys can be seen scarring the junctures. The whole thing is rust, green-gray, gray-green, and beige. The center of the painting is flat and plain, but the edges inconsistently involve the illusion of air. It is boringly balanced, but your eyes want to touch it.
Veeke also makes a thing the mind cannot understand. An irregular stairstep emerges improbably from thin, hue-shifting bands. The zigzags fold back on themselves at the top of the painting, and their repetitions are slightly off-kilter. Duplicitous shadows appear again, giving the impression that the even gray ground of the painting has many levels. You keep telling yourself it’s perfectly fl at. It’s not that spatial tricks redeem a painting, but they do at least give it some air.
In the context of the Turner Prize, these mute visual events provided some relief from the loud rhetoric and counter-rhetoric of the competition. (There was mutiny on the committee, derision in the popular press, and people in clown suits protesting outside.) So when the winner was announced, I got the funny feeling that the paintings were being rewarded for keeping quiet. Other people—I mean besides Tomma Abts—seemed interested in painting being strictly and only painting. Painting, they said, hadn’t won the prize for years. And, in fact, the last painter to win, Chris Ofili, had just gotten everybody into trouble for selling some of his art to the Tate—for £705,000—while serving on its board. (Plus, he painted with elephant dung.) So, in the ongoing narrative of the prize, it was time for Painting to win, and it was time for it to behave itself.
I don’t know if it’s why she won, but Abts’s closed-circuit creative method lent itself to this story because it made it easy for people to praise the category of activity rather than the specifi c objects. It was a relief to talk about craft, the dignity of process, and the lack of pretentious content; I too had grown tired of art. But this way of thinking is dangerous, even— and perhaps especially—to painting, because it quietly reduces an artwork to a mere exemplar: this painting is an example of Painting. So while Painting was getting attention for scrupulously being itself, I was quietly thinking: Shouldn’t it also be something else?