Über hannes

Johannes Lothar Schröder lebt als freiberuflicher Forscher, Autor und Lehrer in Hamburg. Sein Arbeitsgebiet ist der Zeitbezug in Werken der bildenden Kunst besonders im Futurismus und in der Performance Art und den hiervon beeinflussten künstlerischen Äußerungen. In der letzten Zeit recycelt er eigene Archivbestände in Form von Objekten, Performances und Installationen. Prototypen realisierte er auf verschiedenen Performancefestivals u.a. in Szczecin und Salzau www.performance-festival.de und auf Konferenzen von Performance Studies international (PSi) in New York, Mainz, Kopenhagen und Utrecht (2012). Schröder war von 2008 - 2013 Vorstandsmitglied im Einstellungsraum www.einstellungsraum.de. Im Archiv dieser Homepage sind zahlreiche Aufsätze zugänglich. Er unterrichtete Kunstgeschichte und Performance Art an verschiedenen Hochschulen (darunter Frankfurt, Hamburg, Lüneburg, Ottersberg). Workshops und Vorträge von ihm gab es in Tokio, Berlin, Hamburg, Nagoya, Eichstätt und anderswo. Er ist Mitherausgeber von „Journal Oriental“ www.amokkoma.eu

Actuating a Crucial Phase in Modern Art

The Black Mountain College (BMC) was a place where artists met poets, writers, mathematicians, psychoanalysts …, where teaching and research, arts and crafts intermingled. Ironically the crisis and the coming world-war propelled its success, as the German Nazis, who closed the Bauhaus and fired important researchers from their positions provided the College with all kinds of talented teachers and progressive researchers.

Anni and Josef Albers were amongst the first to arrive in North Carolina, where they started a successful career as teachers, who over the following decades influenced generations of U.S.-American artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly just to name two famous ones. However the amalgam of 50 scholars, researchers and practitioners had a much bigger general influence on the achievements of an interdisciplinary teaching and learning which also lead to the blurring of borders between the fine arts, crafts, music, theatre, dance and literature. Notably the teaching of many other exceptional persons among them the weaving of Anni Albers, the stage of Xanti Schawinsky and the experiments of Buckminster Fuller opened the students eyes to the fact that abstract art leads to open relations of fields formerly separated as “high and low“ and arts and sciences.

All images show activities of HZT-students performing the archive July 26 photo: johnicon, VG Bild-Kunst 2015

All images show activities of HZT-students performing the archive July 26
photo: johnicon, VG Bild-Kunst 2015

A Performative Archive

The exhibition in Berlin which displays the sources of Arnold Dreyblatt, who delivered the concept, and with other archives and collections now offers to a museum audience a glance behind the curtain. The installation made of materials, which were used to build the campus of Black Mountain, displays rare examples of artworks and crafted objects that coined the modern art of the second half of the 20th Century. Although they are widely unknown to Germans this exhibition shows the origins of interdisciplinary artworks, which appeared in Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, Cologne, Wiesbaden and other German towns and cities around 1960, where musicians, writers and poets performed to which the emigrants, who had to leave Germany 30 years before, inspired them.

inside and outside is meeting in the window-glass photograph by johnicon, VG Bild-Kunst 2015

inside and outside are meeting in the window-glass
photograph by johnicon, VG Bild-Kunst 2015

The exhibition is too small to unfold these chapters of the impacts and influences, which the BMC has had on the arts since the 1950s. But it leads to the paintings of the permanent collection in the east wing of the Hamburger Bahnhof where now two remarkable diptychs of Rauschenberg are shown. For those readers to whom this is again too much reference to painting, watch the show and the performances by students of several art-schools, who perform the archive. Arnold Dreyblatt invited them for one week residencies, in which they research in the archive and study the documents not only for the audience, but to read them on one of the four stages in form of staircases integrated in the architecture of the exhibition designed by raumlabor_berlin. This experiment of bringing back to life archival documents refers to the interdisciplinary experiments of the BMC and will hopefully inspire future curators, to experiment in making a museum a place for public practice and interactive research.

Johannes Lothar Schröder

The Exhibition: Black Mountain ein interdisziplinäres experiment 1933 – 1957 kuratiert von Eugen Blume und Gabriele Knapstein bis zum 27. Sept. 2015 im Hamburger Bahnhof.

Ein Katalog ist bei Spector Books in Leipzig erschienen.

For more pictures of the author see also @johlothar at Twitter

a contribution of the students of HZT, Berlin –   http://tanzraumberlin.de/Performing-an-Exhibition–435-0.html?id=712

Faster than a supersonic-passenger-liner

On Sunday, 10th of May 2015, Chris Burden died of skin cancer in the age of 69. For the critics of the 1970s who wondered whether he would survive the decade of Body Art, he made a pretty long career as he became an influential teacher at UCLA, where he was the dean of the art department. Besides being a teacher, his spectacular performances and installations made him a general example of an artist who takes risks and shows, what you can achieve by pushing the limits of your body and art. He took the risks of being shot at and of folding himself in a 2 by 2 by 3 feet locker for five days.

Chris Burdens Arm, Köln 1992, Foto: johnicon, Courtesy: NONNOMPRESS, Kiel; VG-Bild-Kunst 2014

Chris Burdens Arm, Köln 1992, Foto: johnicon, Courtesy: NONNOMPRESS, Kiel; VG-Bild-Kunst 2015

When he turned to create objects by building the B-Car in 1975, he did not give up this spirit of performance-art, but instead created monuments of human triumphs over the limits of the physical. In 1977 he took a banal rubberband powered airplane made by paper with him when entering the Air France supersonic-passenger-liner from Paris to Washington D.C. just to prove that it can fly faster than the Concorde at Mach 2.05 groundspeed.

For those who doubt that his later large scale installations have something in common with performance art, one can say, that they are monuments of the ludicrous, as part of the poetic capability which is reinforced by will and imagination. At first glance it seems crazy to imagine one could meet a flying steamroller in reality. Not so in the exhibitions of Burden, where he achieved things which seemed impossible. In the MAK in Vienna you could encounter the “Flying Steamroller” in 1991. These installations are monumental for the spirit of performance art, as they show that steadiness and leverage are virtues of performers making big things move. And he was aware of the dangers of the big, careful to control the big and the destructive potential of the big. This was demonstrated by Samson in 1985, when he used a 100-ton jack, which was connected via gear box to the turnstile of entrances in Museums and galleries. Should hundreds of thousands of visitors have attended Burden’s art show, his work of art would have destroyed the walls of these buildings.

These works were under the control of the artist. But the “Fist of Light” consisting of 116 halide light fixtures and cooling systems, which could change black into white hit him metaphorically and in reality. The light, a constant theme of his art, could not destroy him, but the sunshine did.

Johannes Lothar Schröder

Kriegswütige Männer + Kunstverweigerer

Hugo Ball über Hans Leybold

Vor 100 Jahren zog eine Generation junger Männer blindwütig in die Schlachten des Weltkriegs. Einen von ihnen – Hans Leybold – hob sein Freund Hugo Ball am 12. Februar 1915 in einem Nachruf im Architektenhaus in der Berliner Wilhelmstraße 92-94 den Streitsüchtigen und Scheiternden hervor. „Die weißen Blätter“ druckten den Text im April 1914 in der Rubrik „Glossen“ ab.

Ball erinnerte an die Versuche, mit denen sich der junge Schriftsteller – stellvertretend für die nach vorne strebende Gruppe – zu profilieren versuchte: »Inzwischen verspritzten wir Glossen und Gedichte, nach allen Seiten. „Die Revolution“ verkrachte nach 5 Nummern. Leybold wurde nacheinander Mitarbeiter des „März“, der „Aktion“, der „Zeit im Bild“, der „Tat“. (…) Er fiel Athleten an, Kunstturner, Studenten, Cafétiers und stiftete auf diese Weise eine Art abgekürzter Polemik. Er hielt es für ganz unwichtig, Literatur zu machen und für sehr schwer, ein deutscher Schriftsteller zu werden, weil das eine contradictio in adjecto sei.

Aber das alles half ihm nicht. Eines Tages, mitten ihm (sic!) Krieg stürzte er vom Pferd, vor der Stadt Namur, kam zurück nach Berlin, pflanzte einen Vollbart ins Café des Westens und begab sich in seine Garnison Itzehoe, von wo er depeschieren ließ, er sei mit dem Tode abgegangen.“

Nach Erhalt des Heftes beschwerte sich Ball über die redaktionellen Kürzungen in einem Brief: „Die – stilistisch – spitzesten Sachen sind weggefallen. Die Sache sieht aus wie eine geköpfte Distel. Ich ärgere mich sehr.“

Un-Künstler

Contradictio in adjecto, ein Widerspruch gegen das Substantiv durch das Adjektiv, bezeichnet ein Phänomen, das heute in der Diskussion über Verweigerungskunst wieder aktuell geworden ist, nachdem sich Kritiker auf die Suche nach Künstlern gemacht haben, die sich weigern, beim Kunstproduzieren mitzumachen. Trotzdem setzen sie sich mit Kunst auseinander, wodurch letztlich doch etwas hervorgebracht wird. Welches Begriffspaar könnte diese künstlerische Haltung adäquat zu bezeichnen? Wie könnte in diesem Fall das passende Oxymoron lauten?

Allan Kaprow hatte 1971ff mit drei Aufsätzen über die Ausbildung zum Unkünstler („The Education of the Un-Artist“ in der Art News) versucht, dieses Phänomen sogar als Ziel der Kunstausbildung zu fassen. Darin sagte er zahlreiche Tätigkeitsfelder z.B. aus dem Bereich des Sports und der Freizeit voraus, die heute von erfolgreichen Unternehmen bedient werden.

Wenn man darüber nachdenkt, wie viele Anregungen aus der Kunst in die Alltagswelt eingeflossen sind, ist nicht mehr unbedingt die Verweigerung des Kunstmachens ein Oxymoron, sondern die Tatsache, dass Relikte der Verweigerung von Kunst Einzug in Ausstellungen, Sammlungen und ins Museum erhalten haben.