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WEST BARCELONA |
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We publish here the lecture that Veit Loers gave last 15 March to present “Franz West without Franz West” at the Consulta Media Centre. Veit Loers analyses and delights in the return of what he calls Carnivalisation in art. In other words, the reappearance of the grimace, the grotesque and a sense of humour as instruments with which to carry out a critical review of reality and of art itself. Following this line, Veit Loers presents Franz West as a paradigm of the renewed validity of the bizarre and the use of humour in art.
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| Vista general de Franz West sense Franz West |
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VEIT LOERS
What do you want me to talk about today? About Franz West? About his humour? About the Carnivalisation of art or about Franz West without Franz West? I think we have to say a little about all of them. Obviously, this presentation would also have been possible without Franz West. Moreover, it does not start with Dieter Roth or with Kurt Schwitters, but rather goes back to humanity’s prehistory. It’s just that at some time it was scorned because it was thought to denigrate the dignity of art. Old impressionist techniques were generally employed to express humour, as this was considered more personal than an image with more representative intentions. But El Bosco was able to allow himself the freedom to represent elements abounding in humour, or that were bizarre to say the least, in subjects as significant as the Apocalypse or |
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Judgement Day. It is obvious from such pieces that humour always appears in relation to other elements. There is also something disturbing about the grotesque. After Brughel, the Dutch works of this genre in which people are seen drinking, eating, vomiting and urinating all appear in the guise of moral subject matter and omens. They are presented as metaphors of the seven capital sins in a device to enable their representation.
As far as humour is concerned, the 19th century was rather pathetic. That’s why artists like Grandville concentrated mostly on engravings. The German caricaturist Wilhelm Busch also painted landscapes full of expressivity, but with not a trace of humour. And the Avant-garde originally began without the humour that would eventually blossom following the First World War under the name of Dada or Dadaism as a form of cynical anti-art.
Neither was humour in great demand during the post-War Avant-garde. It would not be until emergence of the Fluxus artistic movement in the early sixties that a disfiguration and customisation of artistic ideas would begin. In Viennese Actionism only Otto Mühl included grotesque and humorous elements in his Actions, a comical version of neo-Dadaist humour that in the fifties paid tribute to the Vienna Action Group, with Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener and Konrad Bayer. Within Vienna Actionism, or more accurately the post-Actionism in which we find Helmut Qualtinger and, later, the artist Dieter Roth, Franz West developed his highly personalised version of humour with his “"Paßstücke” (undefined, malleable forms that could be moved and worn on the body).
“With their bold, adaptable bodies, I call the Paßstücke art (art is that which those who understand a little about the subject say is art). And the growing intensity of their reception gives those objects movement, a movement whose relationship with art may be perceived at numerous levels, such as a passive perception based on associations abounding in clichés, an active perception which deals with the object’s function and, finally, a medial perception, from where we set out (popular language) towards the world of art in an ideomotor response. In short, the Paßstücke are a motor for the processes of movement within a non-presented use.” (1983)
But what does all this mean? Franz West uses the same intellectual language as that of the intellectual discourse we also find employed in a somewhat overstated fashion by art theoreticians, and he uses it to ridicule them. What he says in fact are tautologies, but at the same time explanations of his “Paßstücke”. In simple terms, the pieces that made West famous are not art until they are combined with the human body and the movements the body makes. It’s not that some sort of third-party performance takes place, but rather that the “Paßstücke” transports the user to the world of art and transforms him or her into part of it. We find this world, advanced by its own laws, above all in his collages; West continued with that idea of the observer’s penetration of the world of art in a way which is consequential, above all with his furniture, the sofas and chairs, which in fact are not real furniture but models for an artistic world in which other laws apply. But it also appears in his other works – the sculptures in paper mache and in aluminium are based on the principles of mimetic figurations by the artist himself or by other people that adopt a bizarre posture with regard to their surroundings, which may equally be a group of sculptures or a museum. Because the world of art that West wants to introduce us to is also a world of humour, irony, sarcasm and all that is grotesque. Humour is clearly a weapon against the exaggerated seriousness in art as well as in life and in West’s case he is also personally influenced by the authoritarian structures of the Austrian family and state. It should be added that West’s stepbrother, Otto Kobalek, was a cabaret performer and friend of the well-known cabaret artist Helmut Qualtinger.
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In West’s humour we also find almost all of the relationships described by Sigmund Freud in his book The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious: the mechanism of desire, the joke as a social process and the relationship between jokes, dreams and the unconscious. We find humour in the way West begins his works, and in the game he plays with collectors, institutions, galleries and other artists. He called the exhibition he held in my previous museum in the German city of Monchengladbach “Sporadic Objects; Towards another Reception”. Part of it was made up of beds and chairs which illustrated how the reception of art has to come about while we are sitting or lying down. Among West’s early sculptures and one of the most significant pieces that can currently be seen at the MACBA is a meeting-place, a bed covered in aluminium foil and paper mache in which he had slept for a long time. He declared it a work of art in an extremely well known state, |
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| Veit Loers Dieter Roth, Soloszenen, 1997 |
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representing a kind of West-styled Serra. The use of elements of language in another context, the rules of the semiotic and the tautology of the rules…all of this is closely related to the play on words used by Ludwig Wittgenstein, the famous Viennese philosopher who interested both West and Sigmund Freud. But what especially impressed West was the aesthetic theory of the Russian literature theoretician Michail Bachtin, who dedicated his life to the study of works by Rabelais, Cervantes, Dostoyevsky and Gogol. He speaks of the Carnivalisation of art basing himself on Roman festivities such as the Lupercania and the Saturnalia in which, in a kind of upside down world, masters served slaves and a festive atmosphere reigned in the streets and plazas of Rome that has characterised the culture of laughter and carnival from the middle ages until modern times. During the middle ages, laughter was understood as ritual laughing, the sacred parody, when people laughed at funerals, or the risus paschalis, the “Easter laugh”, when preachers and others used jokes and parodies to ridicule the gospels and irritate the religious establishment. Any genre, even that of prayer, thought or song, had its ironic, burlesque counterpart, from the childish bishop and drinkers’ liturgy to the liturgy of money. According to Bachtin, the statutory artistic monologue and spontaneous carnival come together in the dialogue as a semiotic, open system aimed at metamorphosis. Phenomena associated with this culture of laughter include freedom from the restrictions of hierarchical position, eccentricity and the nakedness of all involved.
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Among the phenomena to be encountered in this culture of laughter, we also find the figure of the trickster, who C.G.Jung introduced in the world of psychology in his book The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. This trickster, or scoundrel, that Greek mythology represented in the figure of Hermes, and Nordic mythology as Loki, is an archetype that still entertains today’s cultural human being, but is at the same time frightening in its unpredictability. Today’s scoundrel is an artist like Martin Kippenberger, Paul McCarthy or Maurizo Cattelan. Franz West’s Carnivalisation is the fundamental relationship in the work of art – cooperation and participation – but also includes work on parody and hybrids as regulators of an art concept that opposes a socially protected aesthetic that changes its taboos but that does not entirely question its rules.
This is also the case with the other artists that we can see in “Franz West without Franz West”, through videos, on the Internet or in catalogue documentation. They have been brought together again following the line of the previously mentioned posture of the Fluxus movement of the sixties and seventies, from Fontana and Manzoni to Broodthaers, Artschwager and Dieter Roth. But we should not forget that the most important formulations are often those that contain elements of humour in a figurative sense, as in the case of “One-Man-Movements” by Bruce Nauman in his studio, and others by Vito Acconci and the Dutchman, Bas Jan Ader. You will see in the project video and possibly in the video of Dieter Roth’s solo scenes or perhaps in Rosemarie Trockel’s video that a dark, opposing side still plays its part. In the case of Roth, the loneliness inside his shell and, in that of Trockel, the appearance of a bizarre, fairy tale world. In Peter Piller’s photographic sequences, the simple combination of identical symbolic subjects creates the comic quality of the situation. Humour plays with the rules of film, of artistic convention, of existence itself, and so on. It’s as threatening as it is obsessive. Mike Kelley is the master of the uneasy which, according to Freud, arises out of that which is familiar/secret, where humour is transformed into something disturbing and all that is horrific can be turned into ridicule.
Going back to Bachtin’s idea of Carnivalisation, both the theatre and comedy, together with participation, all play a fairly significant part. We can sit with absolute normality on Franz West’s African-textile covered sofas in the MACBA entrance hall and watch the videos. But while doing so, we have a somewhat ridiculous effect on the installation as a whole. Why? Because the welded metal sofas, with their grotesque upholstery, undermine the spirit aiming at the perfection of modern architecture. But also because they intensify the recovery of art. Earlier we used a quotation from West, “Art is that |
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| Veit Loers Dieter Roth, Soloszenen, 1997 |
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which those who understand a little about the subject say is art.” It should also be mentioned that the African textiles were from the
Netherlands, and that they had been created by Dutch designers for the African market. The philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us that, in contrast to what happens in a tragedy, in comedy the actors not only play a role, they are also present as real actors and that this allows the hypostasized world in which we move as spectators suddenly to have relevance for us. This is called situation comedy. One day, following the Battle of Jena in 1806, Hegel saw Napoleon riding through the streets of the city in which he had taught philosophy, and is said to have uttered, “The world spirit riding on a horse”. This was an observation which, on the one hand, may be considered a visionary description of the Emperor’s importance in world history but which, on the other, was ludicrously comical, because the abstract symbol of the explanation could now suddenly be seen riding on a horse. In the case of Martin Kippenberger participation is only a requirement; he himself has withdrawn and pretends to be the loser. The communications network of his underground train stations is nothing more than bluster, a sad testimony to the resignation that peoples invented by Potemkin build. Spiderman’s workshop; the Herbert Collection at the MACBA represents the artist as a sad Spiderman in the students’ room from which this comic book figure proceeds. It is linked to a press news item according to which spiders under the effects of drugs spin webs that are different from their normal webs. That explains why there are posters with the names of drugs written on them. Kippenberger’s art is a drug that confronts the normal world.
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Humour in art is always a sign that relations do not change, that we adapt them, opposing them in silence. There was almost no art with any decent amount of humour or irony in 1968 because it was the year in which the change was being worked. Now, in times of uninterrupted capitalism, humour once again has a place in art. Irony does not have to be found always in one particular place, but rather, as in the case of Marcel Broodthaers, can refer to the museum, can suddenly approach the centre. That is when the children may not enter the museum, the museum security guard is converted into a camel-driver and, instead of art, they exhibit palm trees and canons.
Humour is liberating, but it can also prove expensive. This has been evident with the Islamic reaction to the Danish caricatures of the prophet Mohammed. And it is easy to foresee that in the immediate future a masterpiece of humour will figure in the list of record-breaking prices at auction. In these cases, humour must be protected. |
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