Game with Reality:
Art, the world, and the
floorboards that mean the world
At
the onset of modernism, art freed itself from 19th-century traditional
illusionist theater. The stage was now free for artists’ subjective
perceptions, who went on to stage themselves and the world in newer and
ever more revolutionary forms. An excursus by Andreas Schlaegel.
Pablo Picasso, Stage Curtain for the Ballet "Parade", 1917
©VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2005
In the end, it was
the horse. Up until that point, the audience was still able to bear
Jean Cocteau’s drama
Parade with the famous
Diaghilev Ballet –
Eric Satie’s music accentuated by the pounding sound of typewriters
and clinking bottles, sirens and revolver shots. But
Pablo Picasso’s slapdash horse costume, in which two actors were
hidden, proved to be too much for the Parisian public. The 1917
performance unleashed a veritable scandal: barkers who looked like Cubist
paintings on stilts luring the public as though to a circus attraction,
followed by actors playing small girls, imitating
Charlie Chaplin and dancing ragtime.
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Pablo Picasso/ Character from
Parade by Jean Cocteau and Eric Satie,
Decor and Costumes by Pablo Picasso, Paris, Mai/ May 1917, (c)VG Bild-Kunst,
Bonn 2005
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Although Picasso, the horse’s creator, was responsible for
the immediate offense, he was spared in contrast to his collaborators.
Cocteau and Satie were charged with "cultural anarchy" for the
performance, and Satie was actually locked up for eight days. What was it
that incensed the public and the state to such an extent as to throw a
composer into prison for his music? The cause for the indignation is easy
to explain. In those days, people were used to theater performances in
keeping with 19th-century art that produced illusionist scenarios and
portrayed events, feelings, and historical details as realistically and as
close to nature as possible. This bourgeois expectation was carried out ad
absurdum.
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Max Beckmann, Der Ausrufer (Self
Portait Circus), 1921 Deutsche Bank Collection
(c)VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2005
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Max Beckmann, Circus, from "Tag und
Traum", 1946 Deutsche Bank Collection
(c)VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2005
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Parade, however, was not
merely a radical departure of the avant-garde from the traditional art
forms of the 19th century. The strategy of freeing art from illusionist
theater and penetrating into the authenticity of the true and genuine –
this repetitive playing out of modernism’s various possibilities led to
what has since become the self- evident fact of the artist’s original,
subjective perception: "Circus Beckmann" can be read in clumsy letters on
Max Beckmann’s self-portrait The Market Crier
(Self-Portrait at the Circus) from 1921. Beckmann himself appears as a
sad clown in the arena of the
Weimar Republic, a bohemian grown tired, listlessly calling out the coming
attractions of his own Varieté. "Art serves knowledge, not entertainment,
transfiguration, or play. Searching for oneself is the eternal and
inevitable path that we must take," as he said in a lecture held in 1938
in the New Burlington Galleries while in exile in London. When Beckmann
stylized himself as a caricature of a clown, it was an artistic strategy
of self-determination to join in forming the historical reality that he as
an artist – whether in Weimar or as an émigré throughout the Nazi era –
was at the mercy of. Through his pose and his masquerade, the artist
provides the key for deciphering his drama, his theater of the self in
which limitations are invalid.
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Jonathan Meese, General Tanz - Drei
Streifen für ein Halleluja, 2005
Photo: Andrea Stappert, Courtesy Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
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Thus, today’s artist can stylize himself after the bad guy
bent on world rule from the first
James Bond film, as
Jonathan Meese recently did in his
exhibition at the Berlin gallery
Contemporary Fine Arts. Or, like
John Bock, explain his economic and aesthetic theories in excessive and
idiosyncratic lectures aided by improvised sculptural props and
elaborately costumed actors, as he recently did at
Hamburger Bahnhof on the occasion of the exhibition for the
Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art 2005.
Jürgen Klauke, Eine Ewigkeit, ein Lächeln, 1973
Deutsche Bank Collection, (c)VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2005
Or the artist can stylize himself as a sex god, and like
Jürgen Klauke’s androgynous hermaphrodite – half
Gustav Gründgens’ diabolical Mephistopheles and half glam-rock
bird of paradise – subvert socially normed roles and gender identities.
Adorned in jewelry and made up with a white face, garish red mouth, and
artificial fur collar, the artist stages himself for his image series
An Eternity, A Smile (1973) as a hysterically grimacing model, thereby
blurring the boundaries between subject and object. In the apparently
neutral space of a professional photo studio, the classical role of the
male subject as artist/photographer and the female object as model and
projection for male fantasies are called into question. Jürgen Klauke’s
carnivalesque and sometimes aggressive, gaudy extroversion contrasts with
comparable artistic positions such as that of
Pierre Molinier, whose small black and white photographs immortalized his
lonely, existential, but also explicitly autoerotic games occurring
primarily in the privacy of his own four walls. In their efforts to
transgress their own boundaries, both artists painfully hit up against the
fundamental questions of human existence: life and death, beauty and
eternity.
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