"Guru and Antagonist"
The press on all
in the present must be transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys
In its current exhibition, the Deutsche Guggenheim brings together two heroes
of contemporary art:
all in the present must be transformed: Matthew Barney and Joseph Beuys
reveals numerous surprising common denominators, but also differences
between the political visionary from Germany and the American superstar
artist. Yet the press is divided concerning the success of the exhibition
concept of curator
Nancy Spector from the
Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In the Berliner Zeitung,
Sebastian Preuss calls the "ambitious double show... a surprising way to
revitalize
Beuys" that presents the American
Matthew Barney as "a kind of antagonist, an heir, and a confident partner
in dialogue. The eye is attuned to important parallels and influences."
Preuss discovers common elements in the sculptures and drawings of the two
artists. "Like Beuys, Barney regards sculpture not as something static,
but as part of an action. In contrast to Beuys' concept of the
'social sculpture', the former football star and model makes his own body
the center of his work." "Beuys and Barney are especially close in the
drawings. Both are masters of the delicate notation and surreal diagram,
the shift from thin line, color smear, and collage element."
To Nicola Kuhn of the Tagesspiegel, it initially seems "pretty
daring" to combine Beuys and Barney – "guru and antagonist" – in an
exhibition. "Yet the things this unequal pair have in common soon come to
mind: the performance character of their work, the relentless
implementation of the whole body, the existential expression of self, the
narrative element in their dramatic actions, the overriding mythological
structure, the use of wax and Vaseline as material, the arrangements in
vitrines as a sculptural form, the installations." As in the juxtaposition
of
Beuys and Rodin at
Frankfurt's Schirn, "it's once again an American – Nancy Spector of New
York's Guggenheim Museum in cooperation with
Deutsche Bank – that daringly takes on Beuys, this time pairing him with a
contemporary. She herself has termed it 'an experiment' currently on show
at the Deutsche
Guggenheim on Unter den Linden. Here, too, for nearly ten years now,
two strong partners have entered into a fruitful relationship that has
brought the city an added cultural value, to borrow Beuys' words." While
Kuhn fears that the dual exhibition will not prove particularly popular
with the public,
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she nonetheless adds: "No matter. It's the will to
knowledge that counts. And that is an honorable attitude in the art
business, where the main factor is increasingly considered to be the
quota." The exhibition concept, however, seems "purely additive" to her.
But she finds the similarity of the drawings to be "remarkable", the
juxtapositions of the two central installations "right on the mark." She
sums it up thus: "in the encounter between Beuys and Rodin in Frankfurt,
visitors could discover something new about the sculptural thinking of the
two protagonists. But the Berlin combination remains strangely weak in
terms of its statement. Despite it all, though, it was worth the try." In
an interview with the taz, the architect, curator, and critic
Thibaut de Ruyter joined in on this opinion. He called the exhibition "a
good example for how you can show art today: an experimental concept
instead of a huge spectacular machine (…) not a success, but an unusual
attempt brimming with questions and possibilities."
"Is
something growing together at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin that
already belongs together? Or is it a case of opposites attracting?" This
is the question Jens Hinrichsen poses on artnet, examining the work
of the two artists for factors they have in common, most of which he finds
in their drawings. "But when you look behind the works' surfaces and
parallel working strategies, the philosophies that emerge are actually
quite different." For Hinrichsen, Spector's "experiment" inspires visitors
to a fresh view of both artists. "Seen from the Barney perspective, isn't
there a lot of humor and color in Beuys' art? And doesn't the younger
artist's work harbor far more holy seriousness and genuine pathos than is
generally assumed?"
In any case, for Eva Lennier of the Welt
, opposites attract. "One is a great healer, the other an awful hedonist.
They seem connected purely through the painstaking formulation of their
own individual mythologies. But if you search, and that's what Nancy
Spector (…) did in an admirably precise way, there are amazing
connections, such as the use of line in the nudes or the sleds that appear
in Barney’s large-scale installation
Chrysler Imperial of 2002 as glamorous, battered sliding companions."
And for Lennier, as well, the combination with the works of the young
American opens up a new perspective on the German art shaman. "In any
case, what the show succeeds splendidly in doing is implementing Barney to
add a new, exciting, and profoundly charged turn to the way we view Beuys."
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