Thomas Schütte. Hindsight Dates: February 17 – May 17, 2010
Related publications:
Related videos:
When used as the title of Thomas Schütte’s retrospective, the word “hindsight” carries multiple meanings. Primarily, it refers to the fact that the exhibition surveys a career that now spans more than thirty years. But it also alludes to the ways that, especially over the past decade, the artist has looked back, mining both his own earlier work and the sculpture of previous eras. The art of the past has served Schütte variously and richly: it has been a source of inspiration for individual works; and it has provided a crucial reference point in recent years for honing his aesthetic. Initially conceived as a commission for a work in the public arena, Die Fremden (The Strangers), 1992, for example, exemplifies the way this recursive dialogue functions.With its vocabulary of taut simple shapes in bold bright hues the sculpture pays homage to two modernist predecessors: Oskar Schlemmer’s prototypes for his Triadic Balletand a series of late paintings by Kasimir Malevich heroicizing stoic Russian peasantry. Reference to these iconic precedents imbues Schütte’s figures with a dignifying lineage. However, in the artist’s mind, the work’s air of profound gravitas is also grounded in the social circumstances which shaped its genesis. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, worsening unemployment and a growing housing shortage in the German Federal Republic transformed foreigners and, in particular, Gastarbeiter –workers long resident in the country– into scapegoats. By siting his figures high above the viewer, Schütte underlines the unbridgeable distance that separates us from them once they have been cast in the role of the Other. Several proposals for monuments which immediately followed that public commission in the early Nineties – Kleine Respekt(Small Respect), 1994, Kein Respekt (No Respect), 1994, and Großser Respekt(Large Respect), 1995 – loosely reference the destruction throughout the former Eastern Bloc in the 1990s of memorials to leaders once considered invincible. Adopting a more characteristically mordant tone, that in this group of sculptures approaches parody, Schütte drew inspiration for his small groups of struggling figures, mired up to their thighs in some unidentifiable morass, from key works he had made a decade earlier under the rubric Mann in Matsch (Man in Mud). Given that their expressionist modelling approximates a thoroughly clicheed artistic idiom, an outmoded gestural style then in vogue with the more reactionary of his German peers, their Beckettlike bleakness never quite escape his subversive irony. From the beginning of the Eighties, in tandem with this quasi expressionist idiom, Schütte had explored a second, very different visual language. Drawing on contemporary architectural debates, this innovative body of work, which includes Studio I and I I, 1983, and E.L.S.A. 1989, took the form of modest constructed sculptures. Akin to architectural maquettes, these models were intended primarily as speculative proposals, as conceptual constructs rather than as blueprints for actual buildings – though several, including an ice cream pavilion, were subsequently fabricated at full scale. Indebted in part to Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s pared-down buildings comprised from architectonic volumes imbued with a poetic resonance, Schütte’s models range broadly across many building typologies: tribunes or viewing platforms, villas and studios, one-man houses (venues for solitary rural retreat), a gas station and a bunker. Presented on table tops which metaphorically signify a sense of placelessness, they connote an inward turning sociality, a lifestyle both private and withdrawn, in contrast to the engagement with social space that is premised in his monuments and memorials. Nonetheless, on occasion, he returned to the subject of strangers for, like Hotel for the Birds, 2006, the various Houses for Terrorists offer temporary shelter to the transient and nomadic. Although from the time he began exhibiting internationally Schütte was generally recognized as a sculptor, he had initially been schooled in pictorial modes. In 1975, on completing the orientation course at the Dusseldorf Art Academy, he enrolled in Gerhard Richter’s painting class. There he was exposed not only to his teacher’s incisive inquiry into the problematics of painting as a pictorial discourse, but also to certain radical forms through which others among Richter’s colleagues sought to critique painting’s identity and autonomy: Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Blinky Palermo, in particular, offered the precocious student a range of options for subverting conventional pictorial models.1 Slyly challenging the underlying logic of his mentors’ works Schütte furthered their incipient engagement with the decorative in a memorable series of in situ pieces that includes Ringe (Rings), 1977/1990, Girlande (Garlands), 1980, and Großser Mauer (Large Wall), 1977. Comprised of some 1200 “bricks”, small abstract paintings in a gestural idiom, Großser Mauer makes the architectural support integral to both its identity and function, while its use of illusionism wittily glosses the notion of site-related art. Soon, however, the conceptual playfulness that underpins this remarkable formative work darkened into a deeply baleful tone, exemplified in the heterogeneous group of memorials that began in the early Eighties with a tomb to commemorate the artist’s own untimely death (1981); and subsequently included a caustic proposal for a monument to Alain Colas, the lone French sailor lost at sea (1989); and a hypothetical gravesite for the monster revenant, Adolf Hitler (1991). Indeed, the contrarian spirit informing these proposals provides a key to interpreting the artist’s protean engagement with myriad sculptural modes, styles, forms, materials and techniques throughout his career. When, today, even the most innovative of vanguard practices from the late Sixties and Seventies has become codified and institutionalized, the most fruitful site for vanguard exploration may prove to be languages fully inscribed in a historicist discourse. That is, if formerly radical modes have been reduced to the level of a quotable idiom or sign, then the seeds for regeneration may, paradoxically, lie within what which is currently considered conventional. Convinced that much early Modernist sculpture, by Pablo Gargallo, Gaston Lachaise, Aristide Maillol and others, is ripe for recuperation, female figure. First explored through rapidly executed ceramic studies, this unlikely subject has generated a rich vein of work in bronze, aluminium and steel. Aware, of course, that an ideal cannot be regained through imitation; and that, on the contrary, to remake is to disfigure, Schütte has continued to sport with notions of travesty in sophisticated and self-ironizing ways, as evidenced in a recent trio of whimsical dogs. Disarmingly playful, these hounds take their bearings from a venerable lineage, a tradition of reclining animal sculptures whose avatars include the heraldic lions guarding London’s Trafalgar Square and sundry sphinxes recumbent on the banks of the Nile. Reviving yet another paradigm – the once ubiquitous fountain – Schütte’s latest sculpture, like so much of his work over the past fifteen or so years, infuses tradition with improvisation. More maverick than revisionist, it, like them, attests to the potency of an aesthetic at once premised on looking back in order to move forward, and yet filtered with a trademark scepticism. Biography Born in 1954 in Oldenburg, in Northern Germany, Thomas Schütte studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973-1981 (first with Fritz Schwegler, then from 1975 with Gerhard Richter). Beginning with his first solo show in 1979, he has exhibited widely, with major exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1998, Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1998-1999, and the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2009. His work was included in Documentas 8 (1987), 9 (1992) and 10 (1997), as well as the 55th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2008) and Skulptur Projekte Münster, in both 1987 and 1997. He currently lives and works in Düsseldorf. |
