Artikel von Gesine Borcherdt

Eigentlich ist Veneklasen Werner eher eine Kunsthalle und keine Galerie. In dem Projektraum des Galeristen Michael Werner, den er seit 2009 zusammen mit Gordon Veneklasen an der Rudi-Dutschke-Straße, zwischen taz und Springer-Hochhaus betreibt, geht es eben nicht um das großgestische Galerieprogramm mit A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz und Peter Doig. Sondern in drei Räumen samt eigenem Kinosaal werden Experimente erprobt – per Performances, Talks, kuratierten Gruppenschauen, Filmen. Peter Doig kuratierte hier sogar schon selbst eine Ausstellung. White-Columns-Chef Matthew Higgs versetzte die Räume mit Produktionsfotos von Rainer Werner Fassbinders „Querelle“ in ein rötlich-schwüles Ambiente, und Clarissa Dalrymple, die 1992 die ersten Young British Artists nach New York holte, zeigte hier „Secondary Evidence of Things Unseen“.

Lange nicht, wenn überhaupt jemals gesehen sind die Arbeiten, die die Galeriedirektorin Birte Kleemann nun für ihre Ausstellung „Shakers & Movers“ ausgegraben hat: Klassiker, die aber in dieser Zusammenschau noch nie zu sehen waren – und die ohnehin meist zwischen Buchdeckeln vor sich hin dämmern. Mit Fotos, Notizen, Pressetexten und Filmmaterial holt sie Mary Bauermeister, Joseph Beuys, Sylvano Bussotti, James Lee Byars, John Cage, Jürgen Klauke, VALIE EXPORT, Yoko Ono, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik und Ulay nach Berlin – das als ehemalige Inselstadt selbst Teil vieler Arbeiten ist. Ausgehend von frühen Stadien von Fluxus und Performance, die dem Fortschritts-Hurra im emsigen Nachkriegsdeutschland die Stirn boten, schlägt die Schau den Bogen bis in die 1970er-Jahre.

Allen voran Mary Bauermeister. Ihr legendäres Kölner Atelier ist Brutstätte der späteren Fluxusbewegung – hier trafen erstmals Gleichgesinnte wie Karl Heinz Stockhausen, Nam June Paik, John Cage und Sylvio Bussotti aufeinander. 1961 wird das Happening „Originale“ aufgeführt– eine offene Performance, die den Aufbruch in neue, multimediale Dimensionen einläutete. Die Schau zeigt Aufnahmen, die aussehen wie ein Gipfeltreffen der neuen Avantgarde.

Doku-Material kommt auch von Joseph Beuys: 1972 fegt er den Karl-Marx-Platz in West-Berlin nach den Demonstrationen am 1. Mai aus. Die Reste präsentiert er in seiner Berliner Galerie René Block, bekrönt von einem Diskussionsabend – ein humoristischer Dreh zum Thema linkspolitische Ideologie und ihre Umsetzung. Einen Monat später eröffnet Beuys sein Büro „Organisation für direkte Demokratie“ auf der Documenta 5 in Kassel – wo James Lee Byars seine Performance „Calling German Names“ vom Dach des Fridericianum aufführt. Nun ist sein Kostüm aus rotem Stoff samt goldenem Megaphon in Berlin zu sehen.

Und es geht weiter mit den großen Namen: Nam June Paik malt bei „Zen For Head“ im Bauermeister-Atelier mit der Stirn eine Linie, Jürgen Klauke macht 1972 mit seinem „Selbstportrait in Illusion“ Gender-Politik, noch bevor der Begriff für die Kunst erfunden war. Yoko Ono lässt sich bei ihrem berühmten „Cut-Piece“ die Kleider vom Leib schneiden. Dagegen bilden ihre Meditationsanweisungen wie „Stay in the room until the room is blue“einen regelrechten Ruhepol.

Der Coup: Ulays Berlin-Aktion. 1976 entführt er Carl Spitzwegs „Armen Poeten“ aus der Neuen Nationalgalerie, um das Gemälde in einer Kreuzberger Gastarbeiterfamilie an die Wohnzimmerwand zu hängen – „Irritation... There is a Criminal Touch to Art“ demontiert nicht nur das bürgerliche Klischee vom einsam werkelnden Künstler sondern fragt danach, wie sich wohl die türkische Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Kulturlandschaft wohl so fühlt. Ulay wird für seine Aktion strafrechtlich belangt und hat die Wahl zwischen Gefängnis und Geldstrafe. Er flieht nach Holland, wird aber bald bei einem Zwischenstopp in München verhaftet – ein Freund kauft ihn frei.

Nun ist Ulay nach langer Zeit erstmals wieder in Berlin. Am Samstag, den 19. Januar um 17 Uhr eröffnet die Schau mit einem Talk zwischen ihm und dem Kunsthistoriker Dr. Eckhart Gillen. Am 22. Januar um 19 Uhr führt Alexandre Babel Arbeiten von John Cage vor. Die Ausstellung läuft bis zum 2. März.

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Miyoko Ito’s paintings are compelling, and very quiet. In this first European exhibition of the undervalued artist, comprising sixteen canvases and one charcoal drawing, nothing seems arbitrary or ingratiating. Themes of landscape and interior architectures are brought together in an aggregate of spatial illusion and geometry; distinctions between inside and outside become obsolete. The works blend traditions of Eastern representation with Western modernist abstraction (Chinese landscape painting and Surrealist Picasso are specific influences). There is a dreamlike consciousness in these paintings—reality is negotiable, unmoored, and challenging.

Paintings such as Mandarin, or The Red Empress, 1977, are like rooms consisting of screens and connected spaces with distant views. Nearness is indicated not only by a consistently brushed surface of subtly modulated color, but in some cases, as in Architecture of a Landscape, 1971, by canvas tacks half driven into the side of the stretcher that appear to reference votive or fetish objects. Such a tableau of displacement and association indicates that Ito was driven by much more than successful formal arrangement. The warm but not relaxed colors in the works—often ranging from turquoise through greens and browns to red—is both radiant and subdued, like the light before a storm. Ito lived in Chicago from 1944 until her death in 1983. Though independent, her paintings have a visible connection, in their surreal shape play, to the Chicago Imagists. More recognition is sure to come for this artist, whose elusive vocabulary resists easy categorization.

-David Rhodes

Mousse Magazine #35, Fall 2012

Quiet Mastery by Robert Storr

The headwaters of modern art in American are many, but none thrust artists forward more forcefully or in more fruitfully diverse directions that the confluence of two major currents that originally flowed down the Seine from Paris and across the ocean to New York; Cubism and Surrealism. The origins of Abstract Expressionism, the first basically indigenous avant-garde tendency to flourish in the City That Never Sleeps when it started to eclipse the City of Lights, are to be found in the fusion of Cubist and Surrealist tropes transformed under expanding pressure from the vast scale and explosive energies of their New World context.

But the New World was a lot bigger than New York, and the impact of Cubism and Surrealism reached far beyond one period or movement. Indeed, both currents spread up and down the Americas as well as Westward across the United States, becoming part of the ground water throughout the hemisphere with the result that when writing about any one of the artists or artistic development fertilized by them one is – or should be – reminded of all the rest. It was to this protracted process of aesthetic transposition and variegation that we owe twentieth century modernism’s essentially cosmopolitan characteristics long before there was any talk of geo-political, market-driven “globalism.”

A prime example of the subtleties of that fusion can be found in New York School painter Arshile Gorky who, despite his Armenian roots and Russian pseudonym, tried harder than anyone of his generation to graft Cezanne on to Picasso on to Miro in order to become a School of Paris painter, even as he added his own distinctive inflections. A less celebrated, but similarly synthetic pictorial poet was the Japanese-American painter Miyoko Ito. If Ito has until now been less well known than Gorky it is at least in part because her assimilation of Surrealism and Cubism took place in the middle to the United States rather than on either coast. Counterbalancing transplanted New Yorkers like Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston – two other immigrants who conjured a distinctive American way of art out of the same European inheritance – alongside ex-Westerner Jackson Pollock were Mark Tobey, Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko all whom spent a portion of their formative years in the Northwest, while Ito’s own youth and young adulthood began in California where she attended University in Berkeley and where, during the first years of the war, she was briefly interned with other Japanese-Americans as a potentially dangerous alien. For her part, moreover, Ito imbued the Cubo-Surrealist amalgam with a distinctly Asian sensibility and for good measure spiced it with the eccentric accents of her native Chicago, hometown, as well, to such friends and contemporary masters of the grotesque as Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Irving Petlin, Ed Paschke, Jim Nutt, Roger Brown and Ray Yoshida.

Ito’s first mature works were delicately inscribed and intricately patterned drawings, lithographs, etchings and canvases of domestic settings. Objects and figures are reduced to sharply, elegantly contoured lozenges which are fitted together with the precision of a jig-saw puzzle. Doubtless the extraordinary nuances Ito achieved in these early quasi-representational images derive in part from the traditions of Japanese printmaking and painting. In larger part, however, they are the expression of her own innately quiet temperament, while the formal idiom she employed was international to the extent that we can unmistakably recognize it in the prints and drawings Louise Bourgeois produced from the late 1930s through the 1940s, although there is no way that Ito could have known of them. Rather Ito and Bourgeois were speaking – fluently – in a form of graphic Cubo-Surrealist Esperanto before going on to create their own very different individual languages.

The grammar of Ito’s language was simple, but, as her paintings attest, remarkably supple and responsive. From Cubism Ito extracted her fundamental armatures made up of bars or slats, as well as what seem to be bits of molding plus extravagant arcs, knots and arabesques that mimic the forms generated by architects and designers with pliable rulers and French Curves. With these elements Ito constructed dense compositions that alternately or simultaneously evoke landscapes, interiors and still lives. The latter are keyed to the same warm tonalities found in the diminutive canvases of Giorgio Morandi – she owned one of his etchings – but on occasion suddenly blush hot pinks and reds – Pop Art was in part the inspiratiom – or just as dramatically cool down into deep subaqueous greens, blues and chromatic blacks.

In contrast to fulsome New York School gestural abstraction, Ito pictures are of modest size and her touch is comparatively dry. In the same degree, Ito’s approach deviates from the ones that produced the smooth, even surfaces of classic Hard Edge abstraction – I am thinking of works by Al Held, Ellsworth Kelly especially – that followed in the slip stream of Abstract Expressionism. Nevertheless, connoisseurs of oil technique will quickly grasp how Ito loaded her brushes with rich impasto pigments and spread them slowly and deliberately so as to maximize every textural incident that arose when her stroke skipped, abruptly stopped short of, glanced off or passed over the barrier of an earlier layer or, in some instances, over a patch of previously collaged canvas, causing her canvases to vibrate with exquisitely palpable passages or flash when contrasting colors belonging to different but equally exposed sedimentary strata meet the eye. Into this tense faceting and interlacing of marks and forms Ito would then introduce wispy, errant lines that loosen up the relations among the dominant shapes and areas like an untied silk thread dangling from a suit of Samurai armor it was intended to bind tightly.

Ito showed steadily throughout her long career yet was in most other respects a reserved if not reclusive woman. This cost her dearly in an era when “success” increasingly depended on a constantly visible, immediately identifiable public persona to complement a likewise recognizable signature style. In this regard consider Bourgeois again or Yayoi Kusama. But as Morandi, Eugen Schoenebeck, Eugène Leroy and other self-effacing “painters’ painters” have demonstrated, conspicuous absence can be a kind of presence. In such circumstances invisibility may even enhance the public’s appreciation of memorable images created by a truly independent imagination in full command of a sure hand. Despite her erstwhile obscurity and long after her actual disappearance from the scene the indelible staying power of Miyoko Ito’s quiet masterpieces is proof.

Review by Jurriaan Benschop, Artforum.com Critic's Picks, May 2012

Bessone’s paintings seem to bring the chambers of consciousness into view. One could say that the Los Angeles–based artist paints mental portraits, charting currents of thought and association and revealing the chaotic, conflicted, and—at the same time—colorful world of our minds. Her current exhibition consists of fifteen paintings, all produced in 2011–12, with the eye as leitmotif. Sometimes this eye is part of a face, and sometimes it appears independently, or as the sense organ of some indefinable creature.

One of the most attractive aspects of these works is the freedom of their palette and draftsmanship; they have energy, color, and flair. Furthermore, they are often suggestive of modern masters: Picasso with his multifaceted portraits, the eyes and hands of Philip Guston, or the Surrealists with their interest in desire. Allusions like these form the keynotes of the exhibition, over which Bessone occasionally bursts into music all her own. This leads to beautiful pieces such as the transparent Portrait, in which thin layers of color create an existential image, and Happysad (MK), an artful balancing act between joy and sorrow, and between a recognizable portrait and abstraction. There’s also the unruly Papapau, with a face resembling an explosive cloud.

Some paintings, such as Untitled (Brother) and Garden Variety, come across as more lighthearted and less focused. But the exhibition as a whole does honor to the painter’s art. Bessone combines consciousness with art-historical lineages and summons, ultimately, the direct, visceral pleasure of painting.

Review by Tim Ackermann, Berliner Morgenpost, 15 January 2012

DEUTSCH
"Resultat einer ungewöhnlichen Zusammenarbeit ist auch die neue Ausstellung bei Veneklasen/Werner. 1982, kurz vor seinem Tod, drehte Rainer Werner Fassbinder seinen Film „Querelle“ nach einem Roman von Jean Genet. Querelle ist Matrose und Schmuggler in Brest, sein Leben eine Parabel, gespickt mit Mord, Verrat und queerer Liebe zwischen Seeleuten und sonstigem Hafenvolk. Neben Hauptdarsteller Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau oder Günther Kaufmann gehörte auch Roger Fritz zur Crew. Und wenn der nicht den Polizisten spielte, übernahm er die Aufgabe des Setfotografen. 119 Bilder veröffentlichte er in einem Buch, Veneklasen/Werner zeigen sie nun erstmals an einer Galeriewand. Das Licht in den Fotos ist pink und golden, Zigarettenrauch wabert und gelegentlich fokussiert die Kamera auf dramatische Details: Ein Schauspielergesicht oder eine Pistole neben einem Würfelbecher. Der Magazinfotograf Fritz hat damals die surreale Vision Fassbinders kongenial umgesetzt."

ENGLISH
"The new exhibition at VeneKlasen / Werner is the result of an unusual collaboration. In 1982, shortly before his death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder filmed Querelle, based on a novel by Jean Genet. Querelle is a sailor and smuggler in Brest, his life a parable, full of murder, betrayal and love among sailors and denizens of the port. In addition to the actors Brad Davis, Jeanne Moreau and Günther Kaufmann, Roger Fritz was a member of the cast, not only playing the role of the policeman but taking on the task of production photographer as well. His 119 pictures were published in a book and now VeneKlasen / Werner exhibits them for the first time in any gallery. The light in these photos is golden and pink, cigarette smoke billowing, the camera focused at times on dramatic details: an actor's face or a pistol beside a dice cup. Fritz has captured the surreal vision of Fassbinder in a sympathetic way."