German Pavilion at the Biennale di Venezia

“A kind of schizophrenia has always been typical of my work and my life. If I limited myself to one thing only I would simply get bored, my mind would be starved of inspiration. Between music and image, people and language, the healthy and the infirm, the funny and the sad I always need to be given the chance to state the opposite too. To my mind, everything in the world is ambiguous.” (Christoph Schlingensief, May 2010)
After his death in August 2010, curator Susanne Gaensheimer and Aine Laberenz – Schlingensief’s wife and for many years, his closest collaborator – decided to not exhibit Schlingensief’s sketches and proposals for the German Pavilion, but rather, to show existing works. The selected works offer insights into central aspects of his multifaceted oeuvre.

In the main hall of the German Pavilion the stage of the Fluxus oratorio A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, which Schlingensief conceived for the 2008 Ruhrtriennale were presented. In A Church of Fear vs. the Alien Within, Schlingensief uses his own personal experiences to contend openly with the universal and existential themes of life, suffering, and death. The play’s stage, which consisted of many film and video projections and a multitude of sculptural, spatial and pictorial elements, offered viewers, more than any other of his stage-sets, an all-encompassing total installation. One of the pavilion’s two side wings featured a movie theatre where a program of six selected films from different moments in Schlingensief’s career were played on a large screen: Menu Total (1985-6); Egomania (1986); the Germany trilogy of 100 Jahre Adolf Hitler (1988), Das deutsche Kettensägenmassaker (The German Chainsaw Massacre, 1990), and Terror 2000 (1991-2) and United Trash (1995-6). The pavilion’s left side wing was dedicated to Schlingensief’s Operndorf Afrika, his opera village in Africa. Alongside photographs and documentation of the already realized parts of the African project – and in conjunction with selected scenes from Via Intolleranza II, Schlingensief’s last play in which he collaborated with actors from Burkina Faso – this portion of the pavilion featured a large-scale panoramic projection of footage of the natural scenery surrounding the construction site of the opera village. Website 2011

A coup! At the 53rd Venice Biennale the German Pavilion was devoted to a single, non-German artist not working in Germany. In 2009, curator Nicolaus Schafhausen liberated the Biennale from the rigid concept of the national pavilion. His argument: “I think it’s time to also allow thinking about German topics from a non-German perspective.” There is no doubt that the specific architecture and history of the national pavilion pose a special challenge, especially in times of a globalized art business. Liam Gillick’s work abandons the neutral space and exposes itself to the gap between modernism and modernist self-consciousness. The artist creates hypothetical models of society, even social utopias. “His action as an art producer [...] allows him to ask questions without being forced into a definitive solution.” (Schafhausen).

“Has no one ever thought about removing the house and building a new one?” (Gillick)

In the exhibition, the architecture is shown completely inside and out, the walls are white, no part of the building is cordoned off. A model of Arnold Bode’s  1957 Bauhaus-style renovation plans is presented in part of the empty hall. “The house is a place of memory, it shows its history.” Gillick, however, breaks the cool monumentality of the exhibition hall with the functional and standardized fixtures of a modernist kitchen à la Frankfurt. Thise kitchen is in tension with the logic of the building; in a way, its functionality obstructs the ideology of the pavilion. But it is also a place that can hardly be surpassed in its intimacy. Gillick himself spent months working on the concept of the exhibition in a kitchen, disturbed only by his cat. And in Venice, too, the kitchen is inhabited by an electronically controlled cat figure, which voices misrepresentations, misunderstandings and desires around Gillick’s own questions: “Who is talking? With whom? With what authority?”. It seems that the cat too is asking questions that do not necessarily have a definitive answer.  Website 2009

“I like the title because that’s what the whole world is about. Whether it’s war or not, that’s what it’s about. About energy and about oil.” (Isa Genzken)

Taking the perspective of  the historical building of the German Pavilion as a starting point, curator Nicolaus Schafhausen asks fundamental questions about the relationship between space, location and observation, insight and view. He selected an artistic position that has freed itself from strategic thinking and incorporates the viewer’s reference to reality in its art. Isa Genzken “is one of the most uncompromising artists of today. She pinpoints current times like practically no other contemporary artist” (Schafhausen). This multi-genre artist subjects the ideals of modernism and their pop-cultural recoding to a metamorphosis in which splendour and misery, euphoria and disillusion are all closely intertwined. Genzken’s works always reflect unpleasant contradictions and contrasts in connection with social, economic, political and current situations in order to create clarity.

“Art and architecture should avoid fascistic tendencies. They should meet and walk together exuberantly and kindly, light-heartedly and intelligently.”  (Genzken)

During the exhibition the Pavilion building was completely scaffolded and covered with an orange protective sheet. Was this a false announcement of reconstruction or a cancellation of the monumental pretension of the building? While the entrance with a multitude of mirrors created multiple perspectives that brought the distance to the self and to the other closer in or further away, the large exhibition hall was equipped with a myriad of objets trouvés that could not be perceived in their entirety during one single tour: masquerades, skulls, stuffed animals, dolls, music stands, water pipes, astronaut figures dangling from the ceiling. The suitcases in particular showed that the viewers were participants in the mass tourism of the Venetian art world.

“I am not interested in ready-mades. The meaning lies in the combination of things. In a time like today, the time of neglect, it is important to use cheap materials” (Genzken).

In this context, the exhibition title ‘Oil’ stands programmatically as a metaphor for all of Genzken’s works in Venice. Website 2007

“What fascinates me [...] so much is their approach to fundamental questions of art under the conditions of contemporary culture.” For the German Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale, curator Julian Heynen invited two young artists who were each challenging contemporary visual art production in their own independent ways, and creating new ideas. Heynen himself was keen to “take this system of demands and conventions off the grid for once” and escape German art representation.

With his works in sculpture and painting, two art genres that were increasingly losing their presence at the Biennale, Thomas Scheibitz represented a formal decomposition of the sensuality of the material world as “fragments of contemporary reality” (Heynen). Tino Sehgal, on the other hand, completely removed the material from his art and designed a counter to the materialistic economy of art production: “I merely change the constitution of what is being exchanged” (Sehgal). Instructions for action created by the artist were carried out by so-called interpreters.

The pavilion building was divided between the two artists. Both artists used one side wing as well as a part of the main hall for the exhibition of their works. Thomas Scheibitz’s monumental sculpture made of wooden panels, The Table, the Ocean and the Example (alluding to a work by René Magritte), filled the apse, and paintings such as Family by the Sea and Model were on show in the adjacent room. They all made use of familiar ciphers, but at the same time, through abstraction and variation, they eluded clear interpretations, creating a cool closeness. The works were supposedly supervised by staff. In Tino Sehgal’s work This Is So Contemporary, the museum attendants danced around the visitors explaining the works as if they were human wall labels. In the next room, the performers of the work This Is Exchange attempted to engage the visitors in a conversation about the market economy, who in turn were able to have half of their entrance fee refunded at the entrance to the Giardini by means of a password.

A short period of time for the production of such an important exhibition: curator Julian Heynen only had a good six months from the time of his appointment to the opening of the 50th Venice Biennale. His selection was also unusual in that he chose a series of works by the photographer Candida Höfer, some of which had already been exhibited previously, and a new work by the painter and multi-genre artist Martin Kippenberger, who had died back in 1997. Heynen explicitly stated that he had “not chosen the artists, but the works”. For him, the two, as members of the first postmodern generation of artists, and despite the difference in their works, were united by the “question of the place of the elements involved in the art event”. For Heynen, the much-worked Venice pavilion became a simple exhibition hall where the experience of the place in relation to beholders own ideas of themselves were now central: “where does a materially tangible work of art belong once we have a fully developed Duchampian system”?
The work ‘Ventilation Shaft’, selected by Heynen and realised by Kippenberger’s regular architect Lukas Baumewerd, was part of the series ‘METRO-Net World Connection’. This was a fictional worldwide network of underground railway stations with real entrances and ventilation shafts in Leipzig, Canada and Greece, which could now purportedly also be heard in Venice through a seven-metre shaft beneath the Giardini. Originally planned for Tokyo, ‘Ventilation Shaft’ could now be experienced in the main hall of the German Pavilion, which thus radiated its monumental emptiness. The 28 works by Candida Höfer were on show in the two side wings. Here too: apparent but concentrated emptiness. The spatial photographs of (semi-)public yet deserted places such as theatres, railway stations and restaurants created a peculiar combination of intimacy and distance, and above all they penetrated our cultural and historical Western perception of the world.
Both artistic positions impressively testified to the fundamental shifts in the relationship between identity and place at the turn of the 20th to the 21st century.

Hallway and porch, bedroom, kitchen, storeroom, loo, the last hole, the smallest wank, pouf, the big wank, the end, studio, coffee room, in the core, love arbour.

Gregor Schneider’s artistic contribution to the German Pavilion at the 49th Venice Art Biennale presented what seemed to be an irritating juxtaposition of everyday and strangely intimate spatial situations. Curator Udo Kittelmann chose an artist who works “on the image of extreme living spaces”, “on the conflict of the eternal opposites of being.” Schneider, who was 31 at the time, had already been working for over a decade and a half on ‘Haus u r’, the modification of his parents’ house on the outskirts of Rheydt in the Rhineland. It is in this house that the artist (lives and) works, and here he produces the furnishings for his works, which await a fragmentary or complete transplantation or duplication of ‘Haus u r’ into ‘Totes Haus u r’ (‘Dead House u r’) at another location, so that in Schneider’s sense the house has been “killed off”. But it is by no means just a matter of cloned architecture; rather, the work explores the effects of the condition of its spaces, thus putting the beholders and the space into an introspective and emotional relationship.

In Venice, visitors entered the Pavilion’s monumental building through a staid-looking front door. Only 15 people could explore the work at one time, so long queues formed in front of it. Behind the entrance, it was not the great halls that awaited, but narrow corridors, steep staircases, interlocking rooms, standardised passageways. The West German post-war period in its purest form. You could leave the ‘Haus’ and not have noticed anything out of the ordinary. And it was precisely this so ordinary experience that constituted the living space of (self-)reflection created by Schneider, for those spatial stratifications were to be perceived “emotionally rather than rationally”. According to Kittelmann, this was a “complex spatial system of different atmospheres”. Schneider himself spoke of “invisible energetic sculptures” that functioned like a “second skin”, always changing, because the condition of the spaces was continually in the process of being updated.

The house as a built soul, as the work ‘Totes Haus u r’ was often interpreted, came very close to Schneider’s dream of transplanting the entire ‘Haus u r’. The work also convinced the Biennale jury and won the Golden Lion for the best national contribution.

For the 48th edition of the Venice Biennale, curator Gudrun Inboden entrusted the German Pavilion to Rosemarie Trockel, a remarkably versatile artist. Gudrun Inboden justified her decision to choose the work of a single artist for the entire pavilion spaces by saying that the pavilion “would only suffice as a whole to give the mobility of her pictures the necessary scope.” Rosemarie Trockel was the first female solo artist shown at the German Pavilion. This selection was no coincidence, as Trockel’s work had been concerned for decades with the subversion of encrusted gender hierarchies, role models and the art world. Trockel’s feminist push in art and at the same time her playful use of humour and irony as well as her sense of aesthetics all continue to make her one of the most influential contemporary German artists.

The exhibition consisted of three video works, each shown in one room. The one-hour work “Eye” in the middle hall showed in seven consecutive sequences one left eye each, supposedly looking at the viewers. These were exclusively women’s eyes: the observing “male gaze” was countered by a female gaze, an inescapably “other seeing”.  This film was intended as a prologue leading into the two side spaces. On one side a view into the past, in the film “Children’s Playground”, which engendered memories of free spaces and of the everyday nature of  restlessness. On the other side “Sleepingpill” showed a utopian bedroom space in an undefinable future, with artificial materials and sleeping facilities, as well as occasional noises of slumbering that formed the contrast inviting to eternal rest.

Alternating between a childlike past and a (forever) sleeping future, however, the eye of the present disturbed this supposed logic of development and “block[ed] any emerging process of totalisation” (Inboden).

For the German contribution to the Venice Art Biennale in 1988, the commissioner Dierk Stemmler invited the artist, Felix Droese. For Droese, the exhibition in Venice represented an opportunity to bundle his work of the preceding years in a creative and political way. As a former student of Joseph Beuys, political action had always been part and parcel of his artistic intervention.

Droese unceremoniously renamed the German Pavilion ‘Haus der Waffenlosigkeit’ (House of Weaponlessness), which was now emblazoned on an iron sign as a heading above the inscription Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Federal Republic of Germany) on the outside wall. Certainly a gesture intended to evade any national and historical appropriation, but also to evoke countervailing forces: “Strength is not only for those who have weapons, but also for those who can imagine something”. Droese used this thought to let his monumental paper cuts (mostly untitled) appear in a kind of metaphysical space. The shadowy, fairy-tale-like silhouettes complemented by an expansive sculpture made of sawn-off slices of the trunk of a 200-year-old oak tree doubly represented the enigmatic yet clear themes of the exhibition.

Death and redemption, represented among other things by animal skeletons and gates set into the architecture, were intended to engender a form of autonomy in relation to historical fate through the means of art: “You can’t walk away from history once you’re born" was the thesis thus far. Droese created strong references to the world shaped by Christianity, taking a playful approach to Christian images and ideas. But contrary to the controversies surrounding religion (“war is inherent to Christian philosophy”), Droese saw charity and suffering as a responsibility of art – in order to link up with the spirit of his teacher Joseph Beuys and utilize social sculpture to resolve the “great human question of communal living”.

Curator Dierk Stemmler scored a major success with the German contribution to the 42nd Venice Art Biennale, as his selection of the artist Sigmar Polke earned the latter the Golden Lion award for best artist. Stemmler described Polke as an “explorer, inventor, discoverer, kindred spirit” who overlooks nothing and “goes to himself through the very other.” The theme of the Biennale, “Art and Science,” was implemented very precisely in the German Pavilion, which was transformed into the “Athanor” alchemy workshop.

Polke, who was already a highly regarded and productive artist, took on his self-proclaimed “special task” and challenged border zones both inside and outside. For example, the work “Der Polizist und das Schwein” (The Policeman and the Pig) satirically addressed the binary for or against state authority already in the pavilion's outdoor area. Inside the pavilion, the dissolution became even more obvious: humans and nature, chance and control, faith and reason. A multitude of works of various forms was scattered throughout the building, while any form of explanatory order was difficult to ascertain, most likely intentionally.

Both metaphorically, as with materials such as quartz (light, birth), meteorite (extra-terrestrial, death) or cinnabar (philosopher’s stone, life), and also technically, Polke wanted to stimulate the imagination. Iodine grains attached to paintings reacted to the incident light, hydro-paintings reacted to the existing humidity, and thermo-paintings changed their shape through the body temperature of the visitors present. Sigmar Polke’s ambiguous and imaginative artistic language deprived the German Pavilion of ideological appropriation and abandoned clear didactics in favour of imaginative ambiguity and irony.

In 1982, the East German Democratic Republic (GDR) took part in the Venice Biennale for the first time, and the West German Federal Republic promptly reacted in the following edition by adding the wording “Bundesrepublik Deutschland” (and the equivalent in Italian) to the “German” Pavilion. The artistic positions of Lothar Baumgarten and A.R. Penck selected by curator Johannes Cladders selected also reflected this game of local titling, be it German or Venetian.

Thus Penck, who himself had only been living in West Germany for four years, fed the German-German controversy by exhibiting works that had been created during his own GDR days. The two series of paintings “Mike Hammer” (also a former pseudonym of Penck’s) and “Standart” (a portmanteau of standardised linguistic and pictorial signs and “Art”) were intended to question the self-evident nature of Western concepts of art. Penck’s trademark pictogram representations were neutral ciphers that he saw as a playground of sign systems: “The picture asks the beholder.”

Lothar Baumgarten “exhibited” his work on the floor of the pavilion, placing inlays throughout the building depicting animals abstracted to geometric shapes. In “Venetian red”, Latin American river names were also arranged at right angles on the floor system, broken only by the dominant black “America” lettering near the apse. After all, the name of the continent comes from one of its supposed discoverers, Amerigo Vespucci, who in turn named a place there “Little Venice”, today’s Venezuela. Baumgarten thus created a double reflection of projected cultural transfers. Baumgarten had himself spent some time living with the Yanomami people in Venezuela, and his contribution was accompanied by an explanatory publication, a doubly effective festschrift to the cultures of oral history.

Curator Johannes Cladders invited three artists to exhibit in the 40th Venice Biennale’s German Pavilion under the theme "Art as Art - The Persistence of the Work". The question of artistic permanence was intended to link the highly disparate positions of Hanne Darboven, Gotthard Graubner and Wolfgang Laib and to relieve the room’s architecture of its historical charge.

The painter Gotthard Graubner took over the central hall, creating the 4x4 metre sculptural painting "Farbraumkörper" (Colour Space Body) in situ: hovering a few centimetres above the floor, the canvas was filled with synthetic cotton wool and saturated with red paint, giving the impression of an oversized pillow. Positioned to end at the space’s apse, the work's monumentality in both dimension and colour gave it the air of an altarpiece, a revelation, a mystical message that also allowed the room around it to be perceived in a fundamentally new way.

Wolfgang Laib questioned the possibilities of perception and the permanence of space and art in the building’s left wing. A white block of marble, its surface hollowed out and filled with milk, on the floor next to it a square consisting of piled-up dandelion blossoms. A shelf on the wall of the next room holds five preserving jars filled with a selection of pollen. The works "Milchstein" or "Blütenstaub" referred not only to the myths and symbols with which nature is charged, but also to the inner spatial order of the pavilion, which influenced the geometric decomposition of its components through the relationship between light and shadow.

Finally, in the building’s right-hand wing, Hanne Darboven furnished the walls with her work "Weltansichten 00-99" from top to bottom. 1,400 framed sheets of type represented the complete calendar of the 19th century: 100 years consisting of 53 weeks made up of 7 24-hour days each. The rationalised linearity of time was further materialised by the depiction of 100 copperplate engravings of famous landmarks that the Darboven company, run by the artist’s ancestors, had historically produced as advertising material.

“Aperto Ottanta” (Open 80) – this is how the 39th Art Biennale opened the dawning decade of the 1980s. The curator Klaus Gallwitz had invited the avant-garde artists Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz to provide the German contribution. The latter declined, but the other two created a political exhibition that had a lasting impact on art criticism. Were their works appropriating the fascist rhetoric of the National Socialist past or did they instead intend to make that past unforgettable in a brutal way, by negating a negation?

Anselm Kiefer showed monumental paintings in charcoal, oil and iron oxide on burlap and woodchip wallpaper in the two side wings. In particular, “Germany’s Intellectual Heroes” and “Parzival” gave the impression that one could enter into their life-size pictorial spaces, which were created from wooden beams and resembled something between a simple attic and a hall of fame, between a memorial room and a junk room. Joseph Beuys, Robert Musil, Richard Wagner were the heroic names that flanked the walls and also haunted this German Pavilion, a building constructed in the spirit of National Socialist architectural idioms.

With “Model for a Sculpture”, the painter Georg Baselitz not only surprised the public with a formal novelty, but also chose an image that even more heated up the emotions. The stern posture, hairstyle and moustache of the figure sitting in the apse suggested Hitler, and the gesture of the outstretched right arm reinforced this reading. Painted in black, red and gold, however, the work was also intended as a warning signal for emerging fascist revivals.

The art critic Bazon Brock wrote in recognition of the exhibition: “The affective consternation in front of these works [...] stems from the fact that these artists [...] consciously or unconsciously hit on precisely those matters that make the state of the nation far more visible than any corresponding governmental pronouncements.”

Land Art, which was much discussed at the time, was echoed in the 38th Venice Art Biennale, and so the title of this issue, “From Art to Nature, from Nature to Art,”, could be read as a reaction to this. The contributions in the German Pavilion were also to be seen in this context, as curator Klaus Gallwitz had invited two artists who  –metaphorically speaking – provided the building with a rock floor and wall vegetation. The conceptual, abstract works by painter Dieter Krieg and sculptor Ulrich Rückriem lent the exhibition a contemplative mood.

Although Dieter Krieg’s works in the two side wings were large format, they were, contrary to his usual productions, painted on light sheets of paper and attached directly to the wall. In free gestures, between abstraction and figuration, human bodies became clear, interwoven with splintered tree trunks and very much in agonising postures. Kriegs’s paintings were accompanied by a monotonous tape recording, which stoically read out the encyclopaedia entries of countless artists in a seemingly never-ending manner.

Ulrich Rückriem, on the other hand, positioned his sculpture “Zerteilen – Verteilen” in front of the apse of the main hall. The four unworked cuboids made of blue dolomite stone were arranged in such a way that visitors were invited to walk between them and look down on them from above. “Sculpture – human being – and then it goes very steeply upwards.” Rückriem described this as a kind of curve that disregarded the pathos of architectural height and brought the space back to human dimensions. Likewise, the form of the broken stone emphasised the original relationship between humans and materials.