Roy Lichtenstein. Woman Cleaning , 1962. Reproduced in Barbara Rose, “Dada Then and Now,” Art International , January 1963.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 A Logistical Inversion: From Konrad Lueg to Konrad Fischer

MICHAEL SANCHEZ

Konrad Lueg, 1963 When Konrad Lueg saw a reproduction of American pop art in Düsseldorf for the first time, early in 1963, he responded by becoming a German pop artist himself. 1 Unable to travel to New York, Lueg recalled that he “felt addressed” by this reproduction from afar: “My own work,” he explained, “began with pop art, specifically with an image by Roy Lichtenstein, which I saw in a journal.” 2 The image in question, from an article by Barbara Rose in the January 1963 issue of Art International , was a painting by Roy Lichtenstein, Woman Cleaning (now known as The Refrigerator ), which had been exhibited at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York the previous year. 3 Still a student at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Lueg immediately showed this image to three of his classmates—Manfred Kuttner, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter—who quickly became pop artists too. 4 Just five months after their initial reception of these images, these artists had already organized an exhibition of their own work, which they called “German pop art,” at Kaiserstrasse 31A in Düsseldorf. 5 “I grew up under the ‘sign’ [ Zeichen ] of these images,” Lueg said in 1966. 6 Under the sign of pop, Lueg bore another name. When he became a pop artist in 1963, he changed his name: born Konrad Fischer , he adopted the name Lueg , his mother’s maiden name. 7 “As a painter,” he said, “my name is Konrad Lueg.” 8

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After World War II, the direction of transmission between the continents reversed. As several scholars have argued, Europe, formerly the sender of art to America, became the receiver of American art. 9 This reversal— and the media system engineered around it—defined the conditions of possibility and impossibility for “German pop art.” In a 1966 article titled “Art and the Communications Network,”

Grey Room 63, Spring 2016, pp. 6–41. © 2016 Michael Sanchez 7

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Lawrence Alloway, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum who organized an early exhibition of pop art in New York, described its basic structure. Modeling it on broadcast communication, Alloway described this media system as “a tree, a river, or a flash of lightning” radiating outward from the “point of origin in the studio.” 10 Although he referred to it as a “network,” Alloway’s system was, in fact, a centralized and sequential chain. Its source was the artist’s studio in New York, the place where paintings are produced (“a work of art,” Alloway said axiomatically, “is made in the studio”). 11 After leaving the studio and entering a gallery or a museum, the “river” splits into two forms of reception. On the one hand, the work itself enters a collection; on the other hand, an image of the work is retransmitted to a broader public through what Alloway specified as “catalogues and magazines.” 12 From sender to receiver, communication is conceived unidirectionally: with senders located in New York, readers of Art International in Germany could only be receivers. Yet the conditions faced by the German pop artist, receiving American pop from afar, were analogous to the condi - tions that produced American pop in the first place. In an interview, Lichtenstein said that his pop paintings, begun while living in Ohio, developed as a result of the fact that he “wasn’t in close contact with cur - rent painting and sculpture. Most of what we saw was in reproduction. Reproduction was really the subject of my work.” 13 Never painted from life, but traced by overhead projector from rastered reproductions, Lichtenstein’s raster paintings are, in John Coplans’s words, “reproduc - tions of reproductions.” 14 Generated out of what Alloway called the “mass media,” pop art was redistributed back through it. 15 But Woman Cleaning could only arrive in Germany via Art International ’s presses in Lugano, through yet another layer of mediation. Once Lichtenstein’s raster paintings were reproduced through the raster of Art International —an expatriate journal based in an intermediate location, Switzerland—“reproductions of reproductions” became reproductions of reproductions of reproductions.

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The German pop artist was defined by a double bind. Since Lueg, Polke, Kuttner, and Richter were artists, they could not merely receive pop: like their counterparts in New York, they had studios and painted in them. But by the same token, since the pop system located the senders of pop art in America, the German pop artist also could not produce pop art. With no choice but to consume pop and to produce it, and yet pre - cluded from doing either, these artists had only one option: to reproduce

Invitation to Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition, Düsseldorf, 11 May 1963. Manfred Kuttner Archive. Image courtesy Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels ZADIK, Cologne.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 the entire chain of mediation, starting from the position of the receiver. 16 As Richter recalls, one of the first plans developed by the four artists was to organize “an exhibition of Lichtenstein paintings, all of which we would paint ourselves.” 17 Authored by Lichtenstein but produced remotely in Germany, these paintings, had they been realized, would have taken the form of painted reproductions of print reproductions of painted reproductions of print reproductions. The invitation card to the Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition makes clear this second-order relationship of German pop to American pop. 18 The square card is lined with a list of terms for pop, taken from the first page of the same article by Rose in Art International that contained the image of Lichtenstein’s Woman Cleaning . When they reprinted and translated these terms, the German pop artists added question marks to them: “Pop-Art?”; “Know-Nothing-Genre?”; “New Vulgarismus?”; “Neo-Dada?”; “Nouveau-Realisme?” 19 Swirling like a broadcast from afar, these terms surround the names of Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter. 20 Signaling that they had received these signals, the four artists reproduced them as questions that demonstrated distance, both physical and ironic, from their source. 21 All four artists met in 1962 at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf as students in the class of the painter Karl-Otto Götz, an informel painter who was also an influential proponent of information aesthetics in Germany. 22 Influenced by Max Bense and Abraham Moles, Götz devel - oped his pedagogical techniques on the basis of their ideas. From 1962 to 1965, for example, Götz used 300 students at the Kunstakademie as test subjects for experiments in what he called “information processing” (Informationsverarbeitung ). 23 To determine the “storage rates” (Speicherrate ) and “channel capacity” ( Kanalkapazität ) of his students, Götz designed tests to measure the speed and accuracy with which they were able to reproduce images. 24 Adapted explicitly from cogni - tive psychologists such as Donald Broadbent, but clearly related to the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon in 1948, Götz’s model approached “learning processes” ( Lernvorgänge ) in terms of information filtration. 25 As Götz shows in a flow diagram, signals enter the brain through a sensory organ conceived as a

Sanchez | A Logistical Inversion: From Konrad Lueg to Konrad Fischer 9

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Shannon-style noisy channel, to be filtered through its short-term and long-term memory (in one experiment, these signals included grids of logos such as the one for OMO, a popular brand of laundry detergent). 26 According to Götz, the function of the artist was to receive and filter inputs; as a teacher, he taught his students to process these inputs into outputs. 27 Images of pop art in Art International , which Lueg described pointedly as “signals” ( Zeichen ), were one such input. 28 By processing inputs of American pop into outputs of German pop, the German pop artists figured themselves as media for pop: in a later work, Telepathische Sitzung II (Telepathic sitting II; 1968), Polke identified William Blake as the “sender” ( Sender ) and himself as the “receiver” ( Empfänger ) of this transmission. 29 In Polke’s work, the sender—another artist, whether Blake or Lichtenstein—is almost always located abroad. Received and retrans - mitted across a noisy channel, these signals were subject to interference. (Cables in Telepathische Sitzung II, for example, connect a “yes” from Blake to a “yes,” a “no,” or no response at all, a blank space, from Polke). Below: Konrad Lueg. While studying under Götz, as Reiner Speck notes, Polke read the Waschlappen (Washcloth), 1965. Courtesy the Estate occultist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing’s research on “teleplasma” of Konrad Lueg and Greene in Phenomena of Materialization (1920) .30 After receiving a signal, the Naftali Gallery. teleplastic medium (always female) would secrete what von Schrenck- Opposite: Telegram from Notzing calls a “mass of white fabric” from her mouth—like the canvases Konrad Lueg to Gerhard by Lichtenstein that the German pop artists dreamt of “materializing” Richter, 9 April 1964. Courtesy the Archive of remotely, or “teleplastically,” in Germany. 31 Like Polke, Lueg performed Konrad Fischer Galerie. a version of this “teleplastic” operation in many of his works, perhaps most explicitly in his series of Waschlappen (Washcloths) from 1965. The title of these paintings explicitly references the washcloth held by the woman in Lichtenstein’s Woman Cleaning, repro - duced in Art International . In Lueg’s paintings, the washcloth inside the image of the American raster painting comes out of that image in Germany, materializing into the support for another raster painting. 32 In his 1966 Vitrinenstück (Vitrine piece), Polke describes the senders of these signals as “higher beings” ( Höhere Wesen ) who control his artistic actions, remotely, by issuing “commands”

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 (Befehl ). 33 As they began to leave the Kunstakademie , the German pop artists moved from one raster to another and one “higher being” to another: Lichtenstein’s raster paintings took the place of the Rasterbilder by Götz that Richter, for example, had made when he was Götz’s teach - ing assistant .34 Now the American artist, not the German teacher, became the “higher being” issuing “commands” to Richter. (Recalling the German pop artists’ fantasy of becoming Lichtenstein’s assistants, Friedrich W. Heubach compares these “higher beings” to “commissioners.”) 35 In the numerous drawings he made under such “commands”—for example, Befehl vom 12.2.68 (Command of 2/12/68; 1968) and Kopf (Head; 1969)— Polke shows dots entering a head, as if the benday dots of Lichtenstein’s raster and the raster of its reproduction in Art International are infiltrating the brain. Polke followed this command by reproducing it as command: after entering a receiver, the dots reemerge as second-order artworks, such as Befehl vom 12.2.68 , which reproduce the process of reproduc - tion itself. In the medial hierarchy of pop art outlined by Alloway, Lichtenstein occupied a “higher” position than Polke. With Americans as the “major artists,” as Lueg would later describe them, a pop artist in Düsseldorf could be only a “minor artist.” 36 To be a second-order pop artist, within this logic, was to be a secondary artist. On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in 1964, at Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Düsseldorf, Richter received a telegram, written in English, addressed to “MR. RICHTER”: “ALL THE BEST FOR THE MOST IMPORTENT [ sic ] EXPOSITION IN HISTORY.” Although this telegram was signed by three “higher beings” in America—“OLDENBURG, ROSENQUIST, LICHTENSTEIN”—it had been sent, as a joke, from Düsseldorf by Lueg to Richter’s gallery on Luegplatz. 37

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While not an “assistant” to Lichtenstein, Lueg, like the man in his 1963 painting Der OMO- Vertreter (The OMO representative), nevertheless attempted to be a “representative” for American pop in Germany. 38 As this painting shows, to become such a representative was to become a medium for pop, a channel for its “signals,” in Lueg’s words, to enter and exit the artist. 39 Anticipating a later text by Polke, “Presumably You Have a Hole in Your Head You Want to Fill with Art? Or, His Laughter Cannot Be Killed ,” Der OMO- Vertreter depicts a man with a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 “hole” in his “head” to be “filled with art.” 40 A channel for receiving these signals, the vortex-like hole over the man’s face was taken from the logo on boxes of OMO, an imported laundry detergent. 41 Like pop art, OMO was an imported product, and Der OMO- Vertreter was, as Lueg envisioned himself, a German medium for this product. As a German pop artist, Lueg did not “grow up,” as he put it, under his father’s name, but “under the ‘sign’” of American pop. 42 Although he would adopt his mother’s name, Lueg also dreamt that by dropping his father’s name he could take the name of another “higher being,” from another continent—that of Lichtenstein. 43 In the window of the Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition, Lueg exhibited a box of OMO detergent on an electric-pink chair by Kuttner titled Heilige Stuhl (Holy seat) (1963). Below: Konrad Lueg. Der OMO- Vertreter (The OMO Similarly, in Leben mit Pop: Eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischer representative), 1963. Realismus (Life with pop: a demonstration for capitalist realism), a 1963 Courtesy the Estate of Konrad Lueg and Greene happening organized by Lueg and Richter in a local furniture store, Lueg Naftali Gallery. sat on a chair next to a television, in the position of receiving its broad - Opposite, top: casts. For an artist to sit on the Holy Seat was for that artist to become a Kaiserstrasse 31A medium for transmissions from “higher beings” (in a “telepathic sitting ,” exhibition, 1963. Manfred as Polke put it) . When he placed his box of OMO on Kuttner’s Holy Seat, Kuttner Archive. Image courtesy Zentralarchiv des Lueg modified the box in a particular way. He inverted the M to a W to internationalen Kunsthandels form OWO , the W becoming a middle term between two Os, akin to ZADIK, Cologne. grains of detergent powder or dots in a raster. 44 From OMO to OWO , from Opposite, bottom: Mann (man) to Weib (woman) , Fischer to Lueg: for Lueg to identify him - Konrad Lueg. Untitled , 1963. Courtesy the Estate self as a medium for pop was to understand mediation in biological of Konrad Lueg and terms, like the female mediums in von Schrenck-Notzing’s telepathic Greene Naftali Gallery. sittings. That is, it was to take his mother’s maiden name. Later that year, Lueg made another work, resembling Der OMO- Vertreter , in which the painting itself appears to have been designed as a channel for pop. In this untitled work, the hole in the head of Der O MO- Vertreter becomes a literal hole in the canvas. With the hole oriented vertically, in reference to Lucio Fontana’s Concetti Spaziale , this painting, in its horizontal format and black- and-white palette, resembles a television, a reference that was

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 likely deliberate. As Christine Mehring argues, Fontana had used his cuts, or tagli, to make painting into a medium of transmission, based on a principle he called “sending through.” 45 Adapting Fontana to his own ends, Lueg figured painting itself as an OMO- Vertreter , a medium through which inputs could be received. 46 In telepathy, a human medium performs this transmission function. But in the pop system, the position of the medium was already occupied by paintings and images of paintings transmitted each month in Art International . As long as he remained the painter who called himself “Konrad Lueg”—the German pop artist who painted on the basis of American pop paintings—Lueg himself could not truly become a medium. To become, rather than merely depict, an OMO-Vertreter , a double displacement was required: Lueg had to remove the canvas from the position of the medium, and to remove himself from the position of the artist. Only through a logistical inver - sion, away from Art International and away from painting, could the artist take the medium’s place, canceling one system of media - tion to initiate another.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Konrad Fischer, 1967 In 1967, Lueg stopped his work as an artist, “switching sides,” in Günther Herzog’s words, to become a dealer instead. 47 Many decades later, he described his art as a failure: he was “totally unconvinced” by it, he said, and was “happy to be able to do something else.” 48 As arguably the most influential German dealer of his generation, he exhibited American artists who were, he said, the “antithesis” of his own work (“precisely those things I didn’t work on as an artist”). 49 With this shift in positions came another shift in names and identities: “I had a different name and turned into another person.” 50 In a different system, one he had largely engineered, Konrad Lueg could become Konrad Fischer. If Lueg became an artist by receiving images of Lichtensteins, Fischer became a dealer by meeting the sculptor Carl Andre. Instead of paying to ship one of his cumbersome metal floor pieces from New York, Fischer offered Andre a plane ticket to Düsseldorf to make the work for his exhi - bition on site. 51 The program for Fischer’s gallery developed trans - atlantically, through correspondence with Kasper König, an agent based in New York. 52 Several days before Andre’s flight landed, König sent a telegram Below: Telegram from to Fischer, in Düsseldorf, announcing the artist’s departure on October Kasper König to Konrad Fischer, 11 October 1967. 13, 1967: “ANDRE IN DUSSELDORF 1115 LUFTHANSA 411 FRIDAY Archive of Konrad Fischer 13.10 WITH PLANS STOP MATERIAL PREPARATIONS AS DECIDED Galerie. Image courtesy TODAY STOP LETTER TO COME HOPE WEATHER IS GOOD AND Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels YOU BOWL A STRIKE = KASPER =.” 53 ZADIK, Cologne. Andre’s arrival at the Düsseldorf airport, aboard Lufthansa flight 411, Opposite, top: Invitation set a new system into motion. 54 Abandoning his initial plans, the sculp - to Ontologische Plastik, tor decided instead to conceive a new work for the exhibition. In a letter 21 October 1967. Courtesy the Archive of Konrad to König, sent after two days in Germany, Andre wrote, “The sculpture Fischer Galerie. has changed utterly to something else but that always happens and Opposite, bottom: Konrad makes clear the need to go to the place of exhibition.” 55 This new work, Fischer and Carl Andre, 5 x 20 Altstadt Rectangle , was not imported to Germany but rather con - Düsseldorf, 21 October ceived in response to conditions on the ground: its long shape was based 1967. Photo: Manfred Leve. Courtesy the Archive of on the gallery floor plan, and its name, Altstadt , refers to the neighborhood Konrad Fischer Galerie.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 of Düsseldorf where Fischer’s gallery was located. 56 Commissioning the work from Andre, and arranging for a local fabricator to manufacture the steel plates placed on the floor, Fischer did not merely exhibit this work but became, he said, “part of the process of producing it.” 57 While Lueg had begun by receiving images of paintings that had already been produced and mediated from afar, Fischer began with a scene of live feedback: an interaction between artist and dealer whose result was 5 x 20 Altstadt Rectangle . While the distinction and distance between sender and receiver had been Lueg’s premise as an artist, Fischer’s premise, as a dealer, was to collapse the two. 58 “When I was an artist everything was so far away,” he recalled in a 1971 interview. “Warhol, Lichtenstein and all those were unattainable great men. But when you know them, you can have a beer with them, and get rid of your inferiority complex. I insist that the artist has to be here when I show his work.” 59 Lueg could not make contact with Lichtenstein, but Fischer could make contact with Andre. Indeed, on the invitation card to Andre’s exhibition, titled Ontologische Plastik (Ontological sculpture), he printed “Carl Andre ist da ” (Carl Andre is present). 60 A body cannot come out of a raster, but a body can come out of a plane. In Leben mit Pop , Lueg had attempted to materialize another image from the January 1963 issue of Art International , this time a sculpture by George Segal. Sitting next to a television, in similar positions to the figures in Segal’s sculpture, Lueg and Richter staged a transfor - mation of Segal’s plaster casts into their own living bodies, as if living bodies could have traveled “tele - plastically” through the image. 61 By a simple shift in the means of trans - port, Fischer implemented these fantasies on the level of logistics,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 making a “teleplastics” of bodies, not paintings or sculptures, into an infrastructural reality. Instead of airmail delivering copies of Art International , commercial airliners arrived in Düsseldorf carrying artists in the flesh. More significant than a turn from painting to sculpture, Fischer’s logistical inversion departed radically from the system that Alloway had described as an “intricate apparatus through which art, reproductions of art, and writing about art, circulate.” 62 No longer based on the circulation of any artistic medium at all, it was, instead, a supply chain for artists them - selves. 63 When they arrived in Düsseldorf, Fischer’s artists stayed in the attic of his home, human bodies in place of paintings, among Lueg’s unsold canvases. 64

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Andre’s 5 x 20 Altstadt Rectangle can be read in at least two ways. One approach is negative, leading to the discourse known as institutional

critique, while another is positive, pursuing what was constructed out of Below: Carl Andre. 5 x 20 the very terms of this critique. These can be summarized by two instal - Altstadt Rectangle , 1967. lation photographs of the exhibition. Installation view, bei Konrad Fischer. Courtesy the The first, showing Andre’s work in the otherwise empty gallery, imme - Archive of Konrad Fischer diately suggests one definition, the most famous, that Andre gave to his Galerie. Photo: Fred Kliché. 65 sculpture: as “place.” The closer a sculpture comes to the condition Opposite: Carl Andre. 5 x 20 of the “place,” according to the logic of site-specificity, the more it Altstadt Rectangle , 1967. resists its status as a commodity. 66 As a critique of the artwork’s circula - Installation view, bei Konrad Fischer. Courtesy the Archive tion, initiated by Andre and other artists of his generation, this narrative of Konrad Fischer Galerie. has been written. For Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, its most eloquent exponent, Andre’s definition of sculpture as “place” marks its point of inception. “Pointing to the spatial specificity of the sculptural work (as opposed to the material specificity that Judd talked about),” he writes, “Andre’s definition also origi - nally implied (as did Flavin’s practice) a subversive assault on the commodity status of works of art (given that they were movable objects, context - less, offering themselves to every

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 kind of transaction).” 67 In Buchloh’s account, such a “subversive assault” on the “commodity status of works of art” develops from minimalism into conceptual art before culminating, around 1970, in the institution- critical practices of Michael Asher and Daniel Buren. From, in Thomas Crow’s terms, Andre’s “weak” site-specificity to Asher’s “strong” one, the history of modernist sculpture concluded, for Buchloh, with sculptures that no longer circulate at all. 68 However, in the second photograph of the exhibition, 5 x 20 Altstadt Rectangle is presented quite differently. Instead of suggesting a fusion between the work and its architectural container, it shows three people, including Fischer, running down the length of the sculpture. More than sculpture as “place,” this photograph recalls another, apparently contra - dictory, definition that Andre gave to his work. In the same interview in which he described his sculptures as “places,” Andre also described them as “roads,” comparing their identical elements to railway cars. 69 After Andre’s exhibition opened, one local reviewer called the gallery a “ Toreinfahrt für Kunst ,” a “gateway for art.” 70 Literally situated in a “gate - way” from the street to the courtyard of a building, with curved doors at either end like a channel, Fischer’s gallery took the form of a “road”— perhaps not so much a “gateway for art” as a runway for artists. 71 In 1973, Richter described a “new movement” spreading across Europe that “doesn’t have a name.” 72 According to Richter, this movement com - prised “artists as diverse as Robert Ryman, Gilbert and George, Walter de Maria, Bruce Nauman, Sol LeWitt,” who could not be “classified” through categories such as “minimal art, realism, process art.” 73 At least one common denominator connected these artists, however: all made their works on site, and all but one showed with Fischer. Within the art- historical categories typically applied to this period, the artists who exhibited with Fischer during his first year include figures customarily classed as minimalists (e.g., Andre), conceptual artists (e.g., LeWitt), land artists (e.g., Robert Smithson), performance artists (e.g., Nauman), and even

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 painters (e.g., Ryman). 74 But in another sense, Fischer’s program was entirely consistent. 75 Fischer worked with artists who could be integrated into a certain infrastructure: his logic was not categorical but logistical. Fischer’s model—in which, as Andre stated in 1972, “dealers trans - port artists to make shows, rather than transport works”—was so impor - tant to Andre that he immediately made it a precondition for working with any future dealer or curator. 76 Integral to an entire network of European dealers, curators, and collectors—including Wide White Space in Antwerp and Art & Project in Amsterdam—Andre claimed that this poststudio model, as he called it, was his “only contribution to art his - tory.” 77 But art history, with few exceptions, has not accorded Andre’s claim the recognition it deserves. 78 Based on the writings of a specific set of artists, like Buren, in the early 1970s, and canonized by Buchloh and Craig Owens in the 1980s and 1990s, institutional critique chose for its target another form of circulation. 79 For example, in “The Function of the Studio” (1971), translated in a 1979 issue of October , Buren polemicizes against the same system Alloway had described more neutrally five years earlier. 80 In nearly identical terms, Buren describes the studio as the “point of origin” for the artwork, a “ stationary place” for the production of “ portable objects” that “travel” outward to galleries and collectors. 81 If the studio, in Buren’s account, was “a kind of commercial depot” for what Buchloh defines as “commodities,” the artist worked in situ , to use Buren’s term, in order to deconstruct the terms of this system, rejecting the “unspeakable compromise,” as he put it, “of the portable work.” 82 Yet at the moment Buren so vociferously attacked this system, it had already been largely superseded. Nevertheless, his critical discourse con - tributed to the instantiation of the new system, by resurrecting, like an alibi, the phantom of an old one. At this historical juncture, to moralize against the circulation of objects was, implicitly at least, to plead in favor of the circulation of persons. 83 In 1992, reflecting on his history with Fischer, who gave him his first exhibition in 1969, Buren made this plea explicit; describing Fischer’s model as the positive counterpart to his critique, Buren replaced in situ with a less familiar term. “A gallery should offer every young or not so young artist,” he wrote, “the opportunity to test his works in vivo .” 84

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A critique of the commodity is not a critique of the market as such, but of one particular form of market organization. 85 For the dealers and col - lectors of Fischer’s generation, as for artists such as Buren, its target can be specified: the market developed by Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend for

Opposite: Telegram from Ileana Sonnabend to Leo Castelli, 15 April 1965. Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 the export of pop art to Europe. On an organizational level, this market mirrored, in many respects, the “communications network” described by Alloway: both were one-way, centralized, and based on the circula - tion of objects. Compare König’s telegram with a telegram sent in 1965 from Sonnabend in Paris to her partner, Castelli, in New York: “PLEASE SEND ME ALSO ANDYS TWO CAR CRASHES ON WHITE I CAN SELL THEM ALSO SEND WESSELMANS AND DINES LOVE ILEANA.” 86 One telegram inverts another: where König told Fischer he was sending an actual sculptor, Andre, from New York to Germany, Sonnabend in Paris asked Castelli to send her paintings from New York. In 1962, Castelli and Sonnabend formed an alliance whose purpose was to position Sonnabend as the sole distributor for Castelli’s artists in Europe. 87 This monopoly was based, like Alloway’s system, on a one- way flow of paintings from New York to Paris. One continent was the sender, and the other was the receiver. 88 An advertisement for Castelli’s gallery printed in a 1966 issue of Art International clearly shows the structure of this monopoly. 89 The names of artists represented by the gallery are printed onto traffic signs. The road through which their work circulated was “Route 77,” referring to the address of Castelli’s gallery, 4 East 77th Street in New York. Unlike Fischer’s “gateway for art,” this was a road for paintings, a U.S. road that started with Castelli. 90 Based on the same hierarchy as Alloway’s system, Castelli always showed an artist’s work in New York before sending it to Sonnabend in Paris. Only after Castelli had shown “Andys,” “Wesselmans,” or “Dines” would he forward them to Sonnabend, who would in turn forward them again to her own satellite dealers (for example, Gian Enzo Sperone in Turin). 91 With Paris as a hub between New York and the rest of Western

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Europe, Sonnabend attempted to create a single channel between the continents for pop art—what one German historian at the time referred to as the “communication point” ( Vermittlerstelle ) or “bridge-head” (Brückenkopf ) of American art. 92 Not only did she act as a representative for the pop artists in Castelli’s stable, Sonnabend also maintained quasi- exclusive relationships with artists who showed at other New York galleries, such as Green Gallery and Sidney Janis. 93 Echoing Alloway’s river metaphor, Rudolf Zwirner, who began as a Cologne-based pop art dealer, referred to Paris and New York as the “sources” (Quellen ) of this art. 94 As receivers moved farther and farther down the river, away from the source, the delay in reception increased. Castelli first showed Lichtenstein’s paintings, for example, in May 1962, then shipped the unsold works to Sonnabend in June 1963, who forwarded several of them to buyers in Turin via Sperone in December of the same year. 95 The middle term between the two continents, Sonnabend stood in the position of the medium. Given that the position occupied by Germany, the position of the receiver, corresponds in market terms to that of the collector, Germans were, not surprisingly, some of the most voracious early collectors of American pop art. The Cologne collector Wolfgang Hahn, in 1963, was the first to do so seriously, followed by Peter Ludwig in 1965 and Karl Ströher in 1966, among many others. 96 For the same reason that Lueg, in his studio, could not produce pop art, but only reproduce it, German dealers could not sell pop art directly from the studio but only resell it. The market for American pop art in Germany was, therefore, a “sec - ondary” market in much the same way that German pop art was a second-order American pop art. And just as Lueg could not put himself in the position of the medium so long as another medium already occupied it, dealers like Zwirner could not put themselves in Sonnabend’s position while she remained exclusively in power. Due to the unexpected intensity of German demand, a bottleneck quickly developed, provoking deal -

Advertisement for Leo Castelli Gallery, Art International , Summer 1966.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 ers like Zwirner to try various methods of circumventing her. 97 For instance, they were occasionally able to source works through agents in New York, such as Thomas Borgmann or König, who mediated the sale of the Kraushaar collection of pop art on Long Island to Ströher in Darmstadt through Franz Dahlem. 98 But more importantly, dealers began traveling to New York themselves. Schmela, for instance, bought a Lichtenstein directly from Castelli in September 1963. As Phyllis Tuchman noted in 1970, this technique met with success only because Castelli did not enforce the monopoly arrangement with Sonnabend as strictly as he claimed: “Zwirner, Ricke, and Friedrich were making trips to America [in the mid-late 1960s], meeting artists and collectors. Soon, they began to realize that they could buy art directly in New York rather than, say, from Ileana Sonnabend, who had been controlling and direct - ing the market in Europe.” 99 Even Castelli, he later admitted, bypassed Sonnabend and sold directly to Sperone. 100 As long as they swam against the stream, however, German dealers would remain secondary. The artists faced the same problem. At the precise moment they tried to enter the system, they found themselves moving in the wrong direction. When Lueg and Richter traveled to Sonnabend’s gallery in Paris to show her photographs of their work, against the direction in which these images were supposed to flow, they were “so nervous,” Fischer recalled, “that all the photos fell out of our hands to the floor.” 101

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Term by term, the “post-studio” system, named by Andre and imple - mented by Fischer, inverted the “studio” system described by Alloway and implemented by Castelli and Sonnabend. 102 In the words of Rolf Ricke, a dealer who opened a gallery in Kassel several months after Fischer by buying a plane ticket for another American artist, “The tradi - tional path from the studio to the gallery was broken and its forms were questioned; a new partnership began between the artist and the dealer, in which the latter became involved in the process through which the art emerged.” 103 Instead of traveling to the river’s “source,” Fischer invited artists, the source of the flow, to come to him. “Clear spring water,” König wrote in a letter to Fischer, could thereby replenish the Rhine. 104 An entire generation of American artists, as critics such as Wibke von Bonin and Georg Jappe noted at the time, developed their careers largely in Germany. 105 The result was what Ursula Meyer called “a strange reawakening in Europe.” 106 If galleries and public institutions in Germany, according to Walter Grasskamp, developed initially out of an infrastructure based on

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 the transportation of paintings by rail, they were revivified by the return of an earlier model, through another infrastructure, a century later. 107 Rather than the German artist adapting to the American infrastructure, the American artist adapted to the German infrastructure. The ramifications of this inversion were enormous. Not only did Fischer show art that was the “antithesis,” as he put it, of Lueg’s work as a pop artist, he started his gallery as an antithesis to the satellite galleries for pop in Europe. 108 Alloway suggested in 1966 that his model was “more complex though not totally different in kind from the preceding five hundred years.” 109 By the time Fischer opened his gallery, just a year later, this qualitative threshold had been crossed. In 1972, Alloway revised his text, publishing it in Artforum as the essay we now know as “Network: The Art World Considered as a System.” Considerably less sure of the descriptive power of his earlier model, he suggests that “post-studio, site-based, and conceptual” art—precisely the art shown by Fischer—had begun to threaten the future of what he recognized as the centuries-old “studio” system six years earlier. 110 Where Sperone in 1963 began his career as a subsidiary of Sonnabend by exhibiting Lichtenstein’s work at the Il Punto gallery in Turin, Fischer inaugurated his gallery by importing an American artist to make new work locally that had never been shown before. 111 Fischer no longer depended on access to preexisting artworks but on access to artists as potential producers of exhibitions. Moreover, once the studio ceased to be located in a single place, the place of production could no longer take precedence, as it had for Alloway, over the place of distribution. Nor could different places of distribution, as they had with Castelli and Sonnabend, be arranged hierarchically according to their physical dis - tance from a single place of production. With American art produced in Germany for German distribution, both Castelli and Sonnabend were, at least in principle, disintermediated: their radial supply chain, centered on the studio in New York, became a contradiction in terms. Just as Fischer’s model detached the studio from any fixed location, the art fair detached the gallery from any single address. In 1967, the same year Fischer started his gallery in Düsseldorf, Zwirner, in collaboration with Hein Stünke, organized the first art “fair,” Kunstmarkt 67, in Cologne. 112 Partially funded by the city of Cologne through its cultural docent, Kurt Hackenberg, the fair was split between two locations, one commer - cial and one noncommercial: the recently refurbished Gürzenich , a medieval market hall; and the Kölnischer Kunstverein , a municipal exhi - bition space. 113 As Mehring notes, the fair developed in response to the infrastructural complexities of postwar Germany. 114 Since the East/West divide had isolated Berlin, the prewar capital of German art, in such a

Kunstmarkt 67, Gürzenich, Cologne. Photo: Manfred Tischer.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 way that it could no longer serve as a market center, galleries were scat - tered across a cluster of smaller cities in West Germany, particularly the Rhineland. Because of this decentralization, dealers in these cities found it advantageous to meet periodically in order to aggregate clients and exchange information about prices. The fair, Fischer noted, served this function. 115 Where Sonnabend had failed to reposition Paris as a fixed hub for all of Western Europe, the fair initiated a more sustainable double movement wherein galleries simultaneously deterritorialized themselves from their permanent locations and reterritorialized into temporary loca - tions. In the first Kunstmarkt , Zwirner of Cologne and René Block of Berlin occupied adjacent booths, allowing a visitor to walk a few steps from Cologne to Berlin. 116 As one contemporary reviewer observed, “everything was on one street.” 117 By 1968, that street would even include 4 East 77th Street: the year after the Kunstmarkt was founded, Castelli reconstituted his gallery at a booth in Cologne. 118 Not only did the street have no beginning and no end, it was not even linear. Rather than being organized radially, space was conceived topologically, with distances between different points no longer fixed. However, due to its formation out of a union of German art dealers, the territory covered by the Kunstmarkt was initially limited to Germany. In response to what he called the nationalist “chauvinism” of the Cologne fair, Fischer, along with Hans Strelow, organized a parallel fair the fol - lowing year at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Prospect 68. 119 Extending his poststudio model into the fair, Prospect, as Friedrich Meschede notes, included only one German dealer, with the vast majority drawn from across Europe and America. 120 With Sperone and Virginia Dwan in adjacent booths, a viewer at Prospect 68 could take a step not only from Cologne to Berlin but from Turin to New York. 121 As a result, collectors began to mobilize along with dealers, formalizing a tendency that Sonnabend had expressly tried to prevent: the ten - dency to buy abroad. 12 2 Subtitled an “international pre - view” ( Internationale Vorschau ), Prospect was not only an exhibi - tion of international art, like the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Cologne fair, but a “preview” of it. 123 Indeed, since much of the “inter - national” work in this exhibi tion was made locally, through the post - studio model, visitors were able to see art in Düsseldorf before those in its artist’s country of origin. On the eve of his first opening, Fischer said in an interview with the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten that the purpose of his gallery was to eliminate delay. “I want my exhibitions to ensure that peo - ple in Germany don’t have to find out two years later which artists and art movements are currently happening.” 124 Once American art was being made in Germany, the delay between production, distribution, and consumption would vanish. Alloway wrote that, with the development of the “mass media,” there is “almost no time-lag” between the produc - tion of a work and its dissemination. 125 But as Lueg had shown with his first exhibition of “German pop art,” a year after the movement had appeared in New York, that qualifier almost was not incidental but essential. 126 Several years would pass before a painting by Robert Indiana, reproduced in the January 1963 issue of Art International , would hang on the walls of Schmela’s home in Düsseldorf. 127 With scheduled delays between positions in the supply chain replaced by temporal loops, the spatial involution created by the fair was also tem - poral. 128 Disrupting the sequence established by Castelli and Sonnabend, American artists began to show with former Castelli satellite galleries before showing with Castelli himself. 129 For example, Robert Barry exhib - ited with Sperone in Turin before Castelli at 4 East 77th Street; and Bruce Nauman, a Castelli artist, exhibited with Fischer before Sonnabend in Paris. 130 By 1970, one perspicacious critic, Tuchman, had already regis - tered the novelty of this situation: “it is astonishing to see so much American art in Germany and it is unnerving to see New York art there before it is displayed in New York.” 131 When Michael Werner, a dealer from Cologne, opened a branch of his gallery on the second floor of 4 East 77th Street, the very space previously occupied by Castelli, the inversion was symbolically complete. In their first exhibition, Lueg and his fellow German pop artists had imagined that pop could be more than a mere “import product” in Germany. 132 What was fantasy in 1963 became reality in 1967; not only was American art no longer an “import product” in Germany, it was no longer even really American art. Fischer suggested as much in 1976, when he asserted that “New York art” was a term that had become obsolete with the “pop or color field painters.” 133 Criticizing the territorial terms (“American art” in “European collections”) of the catalogue in which his statement appeared, Fischer argued that American art made in Germany was “art by artists who happen to be American.” 134 He expressed total indifference as to an artist’s country or city of origin: “It’s entirely the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 same to me whether an artist lives in New York or Düsseldorf.” 135 This was another way of saying that, as the artist moves through the post- studio supply chain, it becomes increasingly difficult to determine whether that artist lives in New York, Düsseldorf, or anywhere at all.

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In a speech delivered at Prospect 69, Harald Szeemann described his work as a curator, paralleling Fischer’s work as a dealer, in terms of a shift from places to people .136 “One doesn’t travel any longer to a place,” Szeemann said, “but instead to people that one already knows.” 137 Szeemann already knew these people because he had already been intro - duced to them by dealers like Fischer, who provided a number of the New York contacts he reproduced in the catalogue for Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. 138 In his essay for this exhibition, from the same year as Prospect 69 and based on the same poststudio model, Szeemann makes a related point: “the major characteristic of today’s art is no longer the articulation of space but of human activity.” 139 “Much art now,” Lucy Lippard said in a 1969 interview, “is trans - ported by the artist, or in the artist himself, rather than by watered-down, belated circulating exhibitions or by existing information networks such as mail, books, telex, video, radio, etc. The artist is traveling a lot more, not to sightsee, but to get his work out.” 140 Where just a few years earlier Lippard had described the distribution system for pop art in terms of mass media, now she spoke the logic of the new system. 141 Against the circulation of artworks (through “circulating exhibitions”) and the circula - tion of information through “existing information networks,” Lippard emphasized the circulation of the person. 142 In his catalogue essay, Szeemann similarly contrasted the work of the artists in Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form, for whom “the medium no longer seems important,” with the interest of a previous generation in “comput - ers.” 143 Rejecting photographs of his own exhibitions as mere “things of the past,” Fischer insisted, instead, that invitation cards be used to illustrate a 1971 interview with Georg Jappe, emphasizing physical attendance over mediation through images. 144 A shift away from techni - cal media is a shift onto people: constructed according to the same homology, Szeemann’s, Lippard’s, and Fischer’s statements all indicate a single reconfiguration. But the medium had not disappeared. Instead, human beings had been redefined as media, and a new system organized around this re - definition. At the crux of what Rosalind E. Krauss identifies as the “post- medium condition,” an artist’s use of any particular technical or artistic

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 medium became secondary to his or her ability to mediate in a physical sense—that is, to take A Voyage on the North Sea .145 Within this system, as Lippard describes it, art is no longer stored in an artistic or technical medium but “transported in the artist himself.” As a storage medium for art, the artist’s physical body is circulated in order to “get his work out,” transforming it into a medium of transmission as well. But as we have seen with Andre’s first exhibition with Fischer, transmission can only occur by processing inputs from outside: art transported “in” the artist himself was realized only after the artist arrived at the point of distribution, in response to its specific inputs. Since the artist alone was not sufficient to “get his work out,” what the artist stored was, therefore, only a potential for outputs. The bodies of artists thus operated in such a way as to com - bine the three medial functions identified by Friedrich Kittler: storage, processing, and transmission. 146 The full title of Szeemann’s exhibition, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works—Concepts—Processes—Situations— Information, contains another summary of this logic. What does the artist transport in his “head”? “Concepts,” Szeemann writes. What function do these concepts serve? They “process” inputs into outputs (in the form of “information”). Processing happens “live”—that is, it takes place upon contact with another living person. 147 Over the course of these interac - tive “situations,” according to Szeemann, the artist develops an “atti - tude” ( Haltung ) that can give “form” to this entire process. 148 In so doing, the artist’s “works” replicate and encourage this process itself. At the opening of Live in Your Head, a cloth hat piece by James Lee Byars connected the heads of König and Anny de Decker, the director of Wide White Space. 149 In another work from 1969, Byars called this connective tissue between bodies, arranged in rows like seats on a jet, an “airplane” — a Pink Silk Airplane .150 “Even if we get the art works out of New York,” Lippard continues, “even if the objects do travel, they alone often don’t provide the stimulus that they do combined with the milieu.” 151 Such a definition of milieu was extremely similar to one concept of “place” developed by Andre in 1968: not a fixed site but something that “every living organism carries around with itself all the time.” 152 Based on the passage of a “stimulus” from one body to another, transmission no longer occurred over long dis - tances but at close range. 153 For Lippard, not only did these bodies store a potential for art “ in themselves,” they also stored a potential for the cre - ation of a “milieu”—and this milieu, like the art, spread by “stimulus” between them. 154 By 1970, the critic Jack Burnham, in “Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art,” could describe the communication structure of art not

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 in terms of “mass media,” as Alloway had, but in terms of its opposite, “rumor.” 155 Burnham’s account differs from accounts of conceptual art in the writing of Dan Graham, who defined information in terms of print media as early as 1967. 156 In Alexander Alberro’s study of Seth Siegelaub, similarly, “informatization” is coextensive with a turn toward “public - ity,” largely achieved through what Lippard derided as “existing infor - mation networks.” 157 But the crux of Burnham’s argument, taken from a study by the sociologist Tamotsu Shibutani, is that rumor is contrary to broadcast communication. Unlike “direct mechanical communication,” rumor, Shibutani writes in the quotation included by Burnham, “may be regarded as something that is constantly being constructed; when the communicative activity ceases the rumor no longer exists.” 158 Through what Shibutani calls “behavioral contagion,” rumors construct a “milieu” by transforming bodies into media and connecting one to another. The “milieu” persists only as long as the rumor, one form of “stimulus,” con - tinues to pass between them. 159 Fischer considered himself responsible for encouraging this kind of communication to the exclusion of all others. “The gallery owner’s job,” he said, is not to communicate things to a wide public but to “keep the family informed.” Jappe: The “family” being those who spread the word in the art world? Fischer: Yes. I do an exhibition, it’s seen by two people, they tell four others, they tell eight more—in six months there’s a chain reaction. 160 While Fischer is comparable in certain respects with Siegelaub, the American, unlike the German, focused on publicizing his artists through what he termed “outside information.” 161 Rather than directing commu - nication outward, toward a mass public, Fischer, conversely, directed it inward to constitute what he called the “family,” what Lippard called the “milieu,” and what Jappe called the “art world.” In a letter to Wim Beeren, the artist and critic Piero Gilardi imagined that exhibitions such as Op Losse Schroeven , the counterpart to Live in Your Head, would lead to “epidermic contact between artists all over the world.” 162

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Fischer’s operations were logistical in the sense that they were based on lodging and mobilizing his artists. 163 With typically laconic force, Fischer said his job was “to get artists over here, and to bring them into contact

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 with those who live here.” 164 Unanimously criticizing what Szeemann designated the “triangle” of “studio, gallery, and museum”—that is, a triad of production, distribution, and consumption—Fischer’s genera tion instituted another triangle in its place. 165 Whereas traditional dealers like Castelli and Sonnabend had mediated between artworks and collectors, Fischer introduced artists directly to other mediators, initiating contact between them. 166 Based on invitation (“to get artists over here”), and introduction (“to introduce them to those who live here”), this new triangle, at a level above objects, was composed entirely of humans. With no one merely a sender or a receiver, a producer or a consumer, every position became a position of mediation. But different mediators mediated at different orders. Inverting the hierarchy of the pop system, American artists, as media, found themselves at a level below German media of media, in the position Lueg had imagined for himself. In the same way that artists stored, processed, and transmitted their work, Fischer stored, processed, and transmitted these artists—storing them in his home, processing them through the “gateway for art,” and transmitting them to someone else. The development of air travel infrastructure, the notion of the human medium, the critique of the pop market: taken together, these hetero - geneous elements were not sufficient to constitute a new system. Only a reproducible set of operations, like invitations and introductions, could assemble them into one. 167 By transferring the functions of storage, pro - cessing, and transmission onto humans, this meta-media system, as it developed after 1967, differs in several basic respects from the media system that Kittler locates around 1900. 168 First, it redefined these func - tions, previously performed by separate technical media, in operational terms. 169 Second, it constituted a social system, which was also a partic - ular market formation, on their basis. Last, while Kittler ends his analysis with a vision of machines connected directly, into a human-free chain, Fischer and others developed a system based on vertically nested levels of mediation. 170 Through this shift of axis, in a hierarchy of invitations more than commands, Fischer could reclaim his father’s name.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Notes 1. This text includes material from the first two chapters of my PhD dissertation, currently in progress at Columbia University. Beginning with Lueg and Fischer, my larger project considers the development of a system, whose initial premises are sketched here, through figures including Kasper König, Martin Visser, Mia Visser, Carl Andre, Sol LeWitt, and Marcel Broodthaers. 2. Stella Baum, “I Enjoy Looking Back on the Years: Record of a Conversation with Konrad Fischer,” Kunstforum 104 (November–December 1989), reprinted in Brigitte Kölle, Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König , 2007), 278; and Dieter Hülsmanns, “ Handtücher und Waschlappen: Ateliergespräch mit dem Maler Konrad Lueg,” Rheinische Post 96 (26 April 1966): feuilleton. See also Günther Herzog, “How It All Began,” in Ganz am Anfang / How It All Began: Richter, Polke, Lueg and Kuttner (Cologne: Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels ZADIK, 2004), 36. This volume remains arguably the most comprehensive compilation of primary- source material on this pivotal moment in German art. 3. Barbara Rose, “Dada Then and Now,” Art International 8, no. 1 (January 1963): 22–28. 4. Brigitte Kölle, “Life and Work,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 18. For a compre - hensive account of Lueg’s career as an artist and Fischer’s career as a dealer, see Brigitte Kölle, “ Die Kunst des Ausstellens: Untersuchungen zum Werk des Künstlers und Kunstvermittlers Konrad Lueg/Fischer (1939–1996)” (PhD diss., Universität Hildesheim , 2005). 5. Gerhard Richter (attr.), press release for Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition, n.d. (probably May 1963), in Manfred Kuttner Archive, reprinted in Leben mit Pop: Eine Reproduktion des Kapitalischen Realismus / Living With Pop: A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism , ed. Elodie Evers, Magdalena Holzhey, and Gregor Jansen (Cologne: Walther König, 2014), 52. Because local galleries were already booked for the season, Lueg and his friends rented an empty butcher shop from the city of Düsseldorf to hold their own exhibition as quickly as possible. 6. Hülsmanns, “ Handtücher und Waschlappen .” 7. Thomas Kellein, ed., Ich nenne mich als Maler Konrad Lueg (Bielefeld: Kunsthalle Bielefeld , 1999), 18. In the chronology of Lueg/Fischer’s career included in a catalogue produced under the supervision of Dorothee Fischer, this change of names is dated to 1963, the year Lueg began his career as an artist. Friedrich Meschede and Guido de Werd, eds., Mit einer Möglichkeit gesehen zu werden / With a Probability of Being Seen: Dorothee and Konrad Fischer, Archives of an Attitude (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag , 2010), 358. 8. The phrase used as the title of Ich nenne mich als Maler Konrad Lueg comes from a letter written by Lueg ca. 1966. Quoted by Kellein on the catalogue cover, the full sen - tence reads: “ Ich nenne mich als Maler Konrad Lueg, (Lueg ist der Familienname meiner Mutter), um bei der Häufigkeit des Namens Fischer etwaigen Verwechselungen aus dem Wege zu gehen .” 9. For example, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). More recently, in The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), Hiroko Ikegami considers this structure in relation to the rise of Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend in the 1960s. Catherine Dossin’s “Stories of the Western Artworld, 1936–1986: From the ‘Fall of Paris’

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 to the ‘Invasion of New York’” (PhD diss., University of Texas Austin, 2008) is an excel - lent history of this period in the European and American art market. 10. Lawrence Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” Canadian Art 23 (June 1966): 35. 11. Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” 35. 12. Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” 35. 13. Diane Waldman, “Lichtenstein Interviewed by Diane Waldman,” in Roy Lichtenstein (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1971), 25. 14. John Coplans, introduction to Roy Lichtenstein (New York: Praeger, 1972). Coplans’s vocabulary derives from Donald Judd’s 1963 description of Lichtenstein’s work as “a rep - resentation of a representation.” Donald Judd, “Roy Lichtenstein,” in Complete Writings, 1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1975), 101. 15. Alloway first proposed his concept of the “mass media” in a much earlier essay, “The Arts and the Mass Media,” Architectural Design and Construction , February 1958, 84–85. 16. “Pop Art is an American phenomenon,” wrote Lucy Lippard, which “proved instantly appealing to young people the world over.” Lucy Lippard, Pop Art (New York: Praeger, 1966), 9. Nevertheless, New York pop, as she called it, remained primary: “The artists who originated the idiom are still the leading practitioners; the influence has spread, and Pop boasts not only a valid second wave, but also a generally imitative and incompetent third wave, not to mention the various related European manifestations” (69). To illustrate these secondary “European manifestations,” Lippard included a paint - ing by Lueg (192). 17. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist,” in Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961–2007 , ed. Dietmar Elger and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2009), 293. 18. Richter (attr.), press release for Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition, in Leben mit Pop , 52. 19. Some terms were also added (“ Naturalismus?”; “Antikunst ?”; “Pop-Around?”), and some were changed (“Common Object Painting” became “ Gegenständlichkeit ?”; “The New Realists” became “ Imperialistischer Realismus?”). See Ganz am Anfang , 74. “Imperialist realism” quickly became “capitalist realism,” the term under which the works of these artists is now known. 20. In another example of the move from transmission to retransmission, paralleling the invitation card, the German pop artists attempted to convince a local television network to broadcast coverage of their exhibition. Herzog, “How It All Began,” 36. 21. As Walter Grasskamp shows, German pop art, more commonly known as “capi - talist realism,” did not merely reproduce American pop art but incorporated specifically German content. Walter Grasskamp, “Flamingos, Color Charts, Shades of Brown: Capitalist Realism and German Pop,” in Leben mit Pop , 209–220. In his analysis of Richter’s early work, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh emphasizes the critical dimension of events like Leben mit Pop: Eine Demonstration für den kapitalischen Realismus. See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Readymade, Photography, and Painting in the Painting of Gerhard Richter,” in Neo- Avant-Garde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 370–71. More recently, Buchloh has noted the difficulty of pinpointing the register of Polke’s response to American pop art, particu - larly Lichtenstein. See “C. 1976: An Interview with Benjamin H.D. Buchloh,” in Sigmar Polke: Alibis , ed. Kathy Halbreich (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2014), 200.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 22. Herzog, “How It All Began,” 33–34. 23. Karl-Otto Götz, “ Visuelle Gedächtnisleistung und Informationsverarbeitung ” (1966), in Kunst und Kybernetik: Ein Bericht über drei Kunsterziehertagungen , ed. Hans Ronge (Cologne: Verlag M. DuMont Schauberg , 1968), 106; and Karl-Otto Götz, Erinnerungen und Werk , Vol. 1b (Düsseldorf: Concept-Verlag , 1983), 812. See also Abraham Moles, Théorie de l’information et perception esthétique (1958; Paris: Denoël, 1971), 27. 24. Götz, “ Visuelle Gedächtnisleistung und Informationsverarbeitung ,” 106, 109, 115. 25. Karl-Otto Götz and Katin Götz, Probleme der Bildästhetik: Eine Einführung in die Grundlagen des anschaulichen Denkens (Düsseldorf: Concept Verlag , 1972), 28. See also Donald Broadbent, Perception and Communication (London: Pergamon Press, 1958); and Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27 (July–October 1948): 379–423, 623–56. 26. Götz, “ Visuelle Gedächtnisleistung und Informationsverarbeitung ,” 115. 27. Götz, “ Visuelle Gedächtnisleistung und Informationsverarbeitung ,” 126–27; and Götz and Götz, 52. 28. Hülsmanns, “Handtücher und Waschlappen.” 29. As Kathrin Rottmann notes, Joseph Beuys, who also taught Polke at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, made a similar work based on the model of the telephone. Where Polke occupied the position of the receiver, however, Beuys occupied that of the sender, which corresponds to his function as teacher. See Kathrin Rottmann, “Consciousness Raisers,” in Sigmar Polke: Alibis , 27. 30. Reiner Speck, “ Okkulte Intelligenz ,” in Sigmar Polke , ed. Harald Szeemann (Cologne: Josef-Haubrich-Kunsthalle , 1984), 82–88. 31. Baron von Schrenck-Notzing, Phenomena of Materialization: A Contribution to the Investigation of Mediumistic Teleplastics , trans. E. E. Fournier d’Albe (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trubner, 1923), 89. 32. In a 1964 drawing titled Darf man Kinder auslachen ? (Should we laugh at children?), Polke figures this process by drawing a large red triangle emerging from the child’s mouth. 33. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ed., Sigmar Polke: Bilder Tücher Objekte, Werkauswahl 1962–1971 (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle , 1976), 80–82. 34. Christine Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts: Europe circa 1944–1969,” October 125 (Summer 2008): 36. Lueg left the Kunstakademie in fall 1962; Polke would remain until 1967. See Meschede and de Werd, Mit einer Möglichkeit gesehen zu werden , 358; and Kathrin Rottmann, “German Pop,” in Sigmar Polke: Alibis , 25. 35. Friedrich W. Heubach, “Sigmar Polke: Frühe Einflüsse, späte Folgen, oder: Wie kamen die Affen in mein Schaffen? Und andere ikono-biographische Fragen ,” in Sigmar Polke: Bilder Tücher Objekte , 130. 36. Konrad Fischer, “You Have to Be One-Sided So That Something Will Progress: Heinz-Norbert Jocks in a Conversation with Konrad Fischer,” Kunstforum 127 (September– October 1994), trans. in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 295. 37. Kölle, “Life and Work,” 28, 31. 38. On the cultural position of detergents, including OMO, in postwar Europe, see Roland Barthes, “Saponides et détergents,” in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), 37–40. 39. Hülsmanns, “ Handtücher und Waschlappen .” 40. Sigmar Polke, “Presumably You Have a Hole in Your Head You Want to Fill with Art? Or, His Laughter Cannot Be Killed” (1977), in Sigmar Polke: We Petty Bourgeois!

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Comrades and Contemporaries: The 1970s , ed. Petra Lange-Berndt and Dietmar Rübel (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König , 2011), 215–17. The article originally appeared in German in Kunst-Nachrichten 13, no. 6 (September 1977). 41. Polke, “Presumably You Have a Hole in Your Head You Want to Fill with Art?” 217. 42. Hülsmanns, “ Handtücher und Waschlappen .” 43. Catherine Dossin argues that German artists saw pop as a way to assume an alter - nate non-German identity after the war. Dossin, “Stories of the Western Artworld,” 144. 44. Herzog, “How It All Began,” 34. 45. Mehring, “Television Art’s Abstract Starts,” 44. 46. As Kellein notes, the cut was originally filled with pink foam. Kellein, Ich nenne mich als Maler Konrad Lueg, 58. 47. Herzog, “How It All Began,” 33. 48. Fischer, “You Have to Be One-Sided So That Something Will Progress,” 295. In 1967, coinciding with the dealer René Block’s Grafik des kapitalistischen Realismus , a compilation with a distinctly retrospective cast, the other German pop artists also moved away from “capitalist realism.” More than Richter’s, Polke’s trajectory into the 1970s can be compared with that of Lueg/Fischer. 49. Fischer, “You Have to Be One-Sided So That Something Will Progress,” 294. 50. Fischer, “You Have to Be One-Sided So That Something Will Progress,” 295. 51. Barbara Hess was one of the first scholars to emphasize the importance of this decision. Barbara Hess, “ 30 Jahre Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer 1967–1997,” Sediment: Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels 2 ( 1997): 17–29. Fischer was not the first dealer to import an artist to make a work on site, but he was the first to systematize it. His dealer and mentor in Düsseldorf, Alfred Schmela, held such an exhibition with Robert Morris, in conjunction with a dance performance with Yvonne Rainer at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie , two years earlier. See Monika Schmela, “Alfred Schmela,” Kunstforum 104 (November/December 1989): 232. Fluxus performances also began in the Rhineland through a similar model; however, they were not held in galleries or mu- seums but in concert halls and other performance venues. For a comprehensive history of Fluxus in the Rhineland, see A Long Tale with Many Knots: Fluxus in Germany 1962– 1994 , ed. Ina Conzen, Johannes Cladders, and Gabriele Knapstein (Stuttgart: Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen , 1995). 52. Thomas Kellein, “It Was All through Konrad,” in Mit einer Möglichkeit gesehen zu werden , 95–102. Kellein’s sensitive analysis is indispensible to understanding Fischer’s work. In my dissertation, I analyze this correspondence in detail in order to establish König’s importance in the development of the model I have attributed to Fischer here. 53. Kasper König to Konrad Fischer, telegram, 11 October 1967, in Galeriekorrespondenz 1967–9, Konrad Fischer Archive, Düsseldorf (the archive has subsequently been trans - ferred to the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen ). The original text reads: “ANDRE IN DUSSELDORF 1115 LUFTHANSA 411 FREITAG 13.10 MIT UNTERLAGEN STOP MATERIALANFERTIGUNG NACH PLAN NOCH HEUTE STOP BRIEF FOLGT GLUECK AUF SCHOENES WETTER GUT HOLTZ = KASPER =.” The phrase “Gut Holz,” from bowling, presumably refers to the long and narrow shape of the gallery. 54. Kellein, “It Was All through Konrad,” 101. On the early history of Fischer’s gallery, see also Kölle, “Life and Work,” 16–61; and Guido de Werd, “Seeing What Was New and Unique: Conversation with Dorothee Fischer,” in Mit einer Möglichkeit gesehen zu

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 werden , 147–163. 55. Carl Andre to Kasper König, 15 October 1967, in section IV, box 2, folder 8, Kasper König Archive, Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels ZADIK, Cologne. On a lottery ticket he sent to König on 10 October, Andre wrote that Fischer had “lost” the orig - inal plan, despite the fact that it still survives in Fischer’s archive. 56. Brigitte Kölle, “My Life as an Artist Would Have Ended Long Ago: A Written Conversation with Carl Andre,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 93. 57. Georg Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” Studio International 181, no. 930 (February 1971): 70. 58. In Barbara Hess’s words, “The presence of the artist on site was the sole condition for a successful collaboration.” Hess, “30 Jahre Ausstellungen ,” 21. Sophie Richard’s sem - inal research on this period, compiled in Unconcealed: The International Network of Conceptual Artists 1967–77: Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collections (London: Ridinghouse, 2010), also emphasizes the centrality of Fischer’s operations, particularly his decision to import the person rather than the artwork. More recently, see Lynda Morris, “Out of Düsseldorf,” Texte zur Kunst 96 (December 2014): 98–110. 59. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 70. 60. Invitation card to Ontologische Plastik (1967), in Galeriekorrespondenz 1967–9, Konrad Fischer Archive . The exhibition ran from 21 October to 28 November 1967. 61. Rose, 23. 62. Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” 35. 63. On Fischer as a “manager” of artists, akin to a manager of traveling musicians, see Helga Meister, “ Künstlerdepot: Konrad Fischers neue Galeriekonzept,” Rheinische Post , 21 March 1970, feuilleton. On related developments in the nineteenth century, in train rather than air infrastructure, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Urizen, 1979). 64. Brigitte Kölle, “Bruce, Here Is Some Paper and Some Pencils. You Should Make Some Drawings. Don’t Just Sit There! A Conversation with Bruce Nauman,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 188. 65. Phyllis Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” Artforum , June 1970, 55. This photograph was also included on page 107 of ProspectRetrospect: Europa 1946–1976 (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König , 1976), devoted to the year 1967. Edited by a team including Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, this catalogue, published on the occasion of a retrospective of Fischer’s Prospect series of fairs, includes one of the earliest formulations of Buchloh’s history of postwar art: Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Avant-Propos zu Re(tro)spect, in ProspectRetrospect , 6–8. 66. The most complete presentation of this narrative is Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). 67. Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist Sculpture,” in Neo Avant-Garde and Culture Industry , 16; emphasis in original. 68. Thomas Crow, “Site-Specific Art: The Strong and the Weak,” in Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 131–152. 69. “My idea of a piece of sculpture is a road. That is, a road doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point. Roads appear and disappear. We either have to travel on them or beside them. But we don’t have a single point of view for a road at all, except a moving one, moving along it. Most of my works—certainly the successful ones—have been ones that are in a way causeways—they cause you to make your way

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 along them or beside them.” Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” 57. While recall - ing David Smith’s evocation of the New Jersey Turnpike, or Morris’s conception of the viewer circulating around his minimalist sculptures, Andre’s statement is also explicitly logistical: he compares the parts of sculptures to railway cars in a 1968 symposium. See Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1972), 47. 70. Helga Meister, “ Toreinfahrt für Kunst: Konrad Fischer-Lueg eröffnet moderne Galerie,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten , 20 October 1967, feuilleton. 71. Kellein, “It Was All through Konrad,” 102. 72. Gerhard Richter, “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer” (1973), in Gerhard Richter , 80. 73. Richter, “Interview with Irmeline Lebeer,” 80. 74. Within two years, Fischer had organized the first European solo exhibitions of Andre, Hanne Darboven, LeWitt, Fred Sandback, Richard Artschwager, Nauman, Ryman, Smithson, and Lawrence Weiner. See Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 68. For a complete list of Fischer’s early exhibitions, see Konrad Fischer, ed., Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer, Oktober 1967–Oktober 1992 (Bielefeld: Marzona , 1993). 75. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 68. 76. Carl Andre, “Interview with Paul Cummings,” 1972, in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 77. “The first time I traveled outside of the country to have a show [with Konrad Fischer], I had meetings with various dealers, mostly German or Swiss dealers about having a show in Europe. But all of them said, well, you present us the works, we’ll trans - port them over to show them there, and I said to each one of them ‘I will go there and make a show for you but I will not send works.’ And this is my only true contribution to art history. I began demanding that dealers transport artists to make shows, rather than transport works, and as a result I got to travel to various places where I hadn’t been before. And I know for instance that for Konrad Fischer’s gallery I had a plan when I left New York [L beams]. When I got there the work that emerged was just utterly different. So I just stopped bringing plans to places and just went to the place and sort of evolved the work.” Andre, “Interview with Paul Cummings.” Andre’s contemporaries have made similar statements. For example, in 1976 the curator Klaus Honnef wrote, “the institu - tion must pay for the travel and accommodation of the artist.” Klaus Honnef, “Conceptual Art,” in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis Heute: Kunst der USA in Europäische Sammlungen , ed. Dieter Honisch and Jens Christian Jensen (Cologne: DuMont, 1976), 54. In an interview with Richard, Seth Siegelaub also points to the cir - culation of artists as the basic precondition of conceptual art: “Another very important fact is that because of the nature of the art, it was always cheaper to send artists around than to send works around. If you wanted to do a show, very often what you did was put things in an envelope, send instructions or make a telephone call. Even the artists could be sent around for less money than the cost of the shipment of paintings. (That’s even true today, in fact.) So there was a lot of movement of people if you were doing a show, and even with a relatively limited budget, people moving around was the second-best way. If that couldn’t be done, then the travelling artist was the next best thing.” Richard, Unconcealed , 472. 78. Christophe Cherix’s exhibition catalogue, In and Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), is a significant exception to this rule. In Unconcealed , Richard was the first to emphasize the centrality

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 of Fischer in this period and his decision to import the artist rather than the work, which she situates at the origin of site-specificity. Richard, Unconcealed , 57. Kwon, in her account of site-specificity, notes that the “mobilization of the artist ,” a development she associates with a second wave of site-specific art in the 1990s, may have replaced the cir - culation of the artwork as a commodity. Kwon, 31. 79. Daniel Buren, “Critical Limits” (1970), in Five Texts (New York: John Weber Gallery, 1973), 53–57 (the model for Buchloh); Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” in documenta V , ed. Harald Szeemann (Kassel: Bertelsmann Verlag, 1972) (the model for Owens); Craig Owens, “From Work to Frame, or, Is There Life after ‘The Death of the Author’” (1985), in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 122–39; and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–43. 80. Daniel Buren, “The Function of the Studio,” trans. Thomas Repensek, October 10 (Fall 1979): 51–58. 81. Buren, “The Function of the Studio,” 51. In this system, Buren continues, “the work” “travels” from the “studio” to “museum/gallery” or “collection” (53–54). In “Critical Limits,” the model for Buchloh’s “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” Buren conceives this “work” specifically as painting. 82. Buren, “The Function of the Studio,” 54. Buchloh identifies such a deconstruction of structural oppositions—including stationary place/portable object, private place/ public object—as the hallmark of what he calls the “critique of institutions.” Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969,” 139. 83. In his discussion of the development of Vitalpolitik in Germany, Michel Foucault was one of the first to clearly describe such a duality: by critiquing a purely transactional conception of the market, based on alienated labor and the production and distribution of commodities, ordoliberal economists such as Wilhelm Röpke developed a “moral framework” for another model, one in which the social and the market were no longer conceived as separate spheres. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France , 1978–1979 , trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2008), 242–43. My dissertation considers this connection in greater detail. 84. Daniel Buren, “Daniel Buren,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer, 129. This is not to say that Buren’s relationship with Fischer was unequivocal. Buren published a polemic against conceptual art in the catalogue of Fischer’s 1969 exhibition Konzeption / Conception. See Daniel Buren, “Beware,” in Five Texts , 10–22. 85. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 149. 86. Ileana Sonnabend to Leo Castelli, telegram, 15 April 1965, in Leo Castelli Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 87. Paul Cummings, “Oral History Interview with Leo Castelli,” 15 May 1969, in Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 88. Dossin, “Stories of the Western Artworld,” 202. 89. Art International 10, no. 6 (Summer 1966). 90. Another advertisement, from the May 1964 issue of the same journal, shows a map of Europe with a compass in the corner, indicating “North” (i.e., the center of measure - ment) as 4 East 77th Street. 91. According to Annie Cohen-Solal, Sonnabend essentially created Sperone to fulfill local demand. Annie Cohen-Solal, Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli (New York:

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Knopf, 2010), 325. Each of these satellite galleries had its own distinct regional clients. For Sperone, Giuseppe Panza was one of the first and most important. 92. Lucius Grisebach, “ Stationen amerikanischer Kunst in Europa nach 1945,” in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis Heute , 17. 93. Horst Keller, ed., Sammlung Hahn 1968: Zeitgenössische Kunst (Cologne: Wallraf- Richartz Museum , 1968). 94. Heinz Peter Schwerfel, Rudolf Zwirner (Düsseldorf: Kunststiftung Nordrhein- Westfalen , 2004), 41. 95. Sperone’s recollection, quoted in Cohen-Solal, 325. Reproductions of American pop art were distributed in much the same way. Before it could reach an artist like Lueg in Düsseldorf, a photograph of a painting by Lichtenstein had to be sent from New York to the offices of Art International in Lugano, for European distribution. 96. Castelli remarked that the “understanding for American art is much better in Europe than here.” Leo Castelli, in Der Spiegel, 30 November 1970, quoted in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis Heute , 21. See also Catherine Dossin, “Pop Begeistert : American Pop Art and the German People,” American Art 25, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 100–111. 97. Dossin, “Stories of the Western Artworld,” 133. 98. Klaus Gerrit Friese, ed., Kasper König: The Formative Years (Cologne: Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels ZADIK, 2014), 39. See also Richard, Unconcealed , 178. 99. Phyllis Tuchman, “American Art in Germany: The History of a Phenomenon,” Artforum , November 1970, 59. 100. Alfred Schmela, “Alfred Schmela,” in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis Heute , 139–40; and Cohen-Solal, 330. They were quickly followed by collectors such as Ludwig and Ströher, who traveled to New York in 1965 and 1966, respectively. See Dossin, “Stories of the Western Artworld,” 131. 101. Baum, 278. 102. Tuchman, “An Interview with Carl Andre,” 55. 103. Rolf Ricke, “Rolf Ricke,” in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis Heute , 144. Out of this “new partnership,” generated by Fischer’s logistical inversion, came a “wildfire of communication,” in Friedrich Meschede’s words, “that resulted in an unprecedented close collaboration between artists and exhibition organizers.” Friedrich Meschede, “The Freedom of Silence, or the Attempt at Making a Portrait from Archival Ephemera,” in Mit einer Möglichkeit gesehen zu werden , 109. Ricke inaugurated his gallery in Kassel by importing Gary Kuehn to make a work on site. In words that could also apply to Fischer, the critic von Bonin described Ricke’s model with remarkable precision: “It was in 1967 that Ricke introduced a method of procuring plastic exhibitions that proved (both for him and for other galleries) extremely practical; instead of importing the finished work from the United States—incurring both risk and high transport costs—he imported the artists themselves and let them create their art works right in the gallery where they would be shown. Gary Kuehn arrived for the first time in 196 7, equipped with plans which he brought to Kassel to work up his first European one-man show. In this voyage from one continent to another one can see the foundations of contemporary Conceptual Art in that the artist functions only as a mastermind in providing plans for an art work which can then be created without his actual presence—for which he only functions as a control.” Wibke von Bonin, “Germany: The American Presence,” Arts Magazine 44 (September 1969): 53. Brigitte Kölle describes Fischer’s technique of importing the artists

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 themselves as not only a way of saving the cost of transport but of “intensifying personal contact with the artists and gradually building up an international network.” Kölle, Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 38. 104. Kasper König to Konrad Fischer, 11 July 1967, Galeriekorrespondenz 1967–9, Konrad Fischer Archive . 105. Wibke von Bonin, “Germany: The American Presence,” 52–55; and Georg Jappe, “Young Artists in Germany,” Studio International 183, no. 941 (February 1972): 65–73. See also Robert Kudielka, “Sociology of an Art Boom,” Studio International 179, no. 922 (May 1970): 206–07. 106. Ursula Meyer, interview with Lucy Lippard (1969), cited in Lippard, Six Years , 8. 107. Walter Grasskamp, “ Die Reise der Bilder: Zur Infrastruktur der Moderne ,” in Stationen der Moderne: Die Bedeutenden Kunstaustellungen des 20. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland , ed. Eva Züchner (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie , 1988), 26–27. 108. Fischer, “You Have to Be One-Sided So That Something Will Progress,” 294. 109. Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” 35. 110. Lawrence Alloway, “Network: The Art World Considered as a System,” Artforum , September 1972, 29–32. Alloway attributes this term to Andre: “Andre’s ‘post-studio art’ has the potential, not followed by Andre himself, of going straight from inventory to site, which would make it post-gallery art, needing no middle stage of display” (32). 111. Anna Minola, Maria Cristina Mundici, Francesco Poli, and Maria Teresa Roberto, eds., Gian Enzo Sperone : Torino, Roma, New York: Anni di Monstre tra Europa e America (Turin: Hopefulmonster, 2000), 14. As his model spread quickly throughout the continent, Fischer began working with dealers such as Sperone, even partnering with him to form a short-lived joint enterprise in New York, Sperone-Westwater-Fischer. 112. Stünke notes that the two immediate inspirations for the structure of the fair were the 1er salon international des galeries-pilotes , a fair of international contemporary art galleries held in Lausanne in 1963, as well as an antiquarian book fair in Stuttgart, the Stuttgarter Antiquariatsmesse , founded in 1962, where secondary market dealers also exhibited prints. Hein Stünke, “ Bemerkungen zur Vorgeschichte und Geschichte des Kölner Kunstmarktes ,” in Die 60er Jahre: Koelns Weg zur Kunstmetropole: Vom Happening zum Kunstmarkt , ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Cologne: Kölnischer Kunstverein , 1986), 344. Herzog points to the Deutsche Kunst- und Antiquitätenmesse , an old masters and antiquities fair held in 1956 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich, as another possible prototype. Günter Herzog, “ Aus dem Himmel auf dem Markt: Die Entstehung der Kunstmesse und die ‘Säkularisierung’ der modernen Kunst ,” Sediment: Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels 6 (2003): 11. 113. Bundesverband Deutscher Galerie, ed., 20 Jahre Kunstmarkt (Cologne: Druckerei Bachem , 1986), 15; and Eberhard Illner, “‘ Kenner, kauft Kunst in Köln auf dem Kunstmarkt 68’: Die Stadt Köln und der Kölner Kunstmarkt ,” Sediment: Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Kunsthandels 6 (2003): 43–58. For more on Hackenberg’s various roles, see Birgit Kilp, Alle für Kultur: Die Ära Kurt Hackenberg in Köln , 1955–1979 (Cologne: Wienand, 2009). 114. Christine Mehring, “Emerging Market: On the Birth of the Contemporary Art Fair,” Artforum , April 2008, 322–328, 390. 115. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 70. 116. The Galeriehaus , which began in Cologne in 1971, was similar to the fair in the sense that it gathered galleries from around the region into a single building.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 117. Günther Engels, “ Köln, heimliche Hauptstadt des Kunsthandels,” Frankfurter Rundschau , 10 February 1968, 5. 118. Bundesverband Deutscher Galerien , 169. Similarly, Wide White Space traveled to a hotel room in Kassel to exhibit works by its artists during the opening of Documenta 4 in 1968. See Yves Aupetitallot, ed., Wide White Space: Hinter dem Museum / Behind the Museum 1966–1976 (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag , 1995), 45–47. 119. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 70. See also Richard, Unconcealed , 80; and Hess, “ 30 Jahre Ausstellungen ,” 23. 120. Meschede, 46–47. 121. Konrad Fischer and Hans Strelow, eds., Prospect 68: Katalog-Zeitung zur inter - nationale Vorschau auf die Kunst in den Galerien der Avantgarde (Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf , 1968). 122. Sophie Richard, “Interview with Anny de Decker,” in Unconcealed , 405. 123. Fischer and Strelow, Prospect 68 . 124. Helga Meister, “ Toreinfahrt für Kunst: Konrad Fischer-Lueg eröffnet moderne Galerie,” Düsseldorfer Nachrichten 245 (20 October 1967): feuilleton. 125. Alloway, “Art and the Communications Network,” 37. 126. Pop art arrived slightly faster to Europe than abstract expressionism, which was introduced via Twelve American Painters, a traveling exhibition, in 1953–1954. See Grisebach, “Stationen amerikanischer Kunst in Europa nach 1945,” 10. 127. Karl Ruhrberg, ed., Alfred Schmela: Galerist, Wegbereiter der Avant-Garde (Cologne: Wienand, 1996), 189. 128. For a consideration of the question of topology in postminimalism, see Eric de Bruyn, “Topological Pathways of Post-Minimalism,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 32–63. 129. A similar point could be made about Los Angeles in relation to New York, particularly with galleries such as Ferus and Dwan. Showing his work in Los Angeles before New York, Andy Warhol was prescient in this regard and unusual among the New York pop artists. 130. Richard, Unconcealed , 75. 131. Tuchman, “American Art in Germany,” 68. 132. Gerhard Richter (attr.), press release for Kaiserstrasse 31A exhibition, in Leben mit Pop , 52. 133. Konrad Fischer, “Konrad Fischer,” in Amerikanische Kunst von 1945 bis heute , 147–48. 134. Fischer, “Konrad Fischer,” 147. 135. Fischer, “Konrad Fischer,” 147. In a much earlier letter to König, dated 5 November 1967, Fischer wrote that he “didn’t give a shit” ( Scheissegal ) about an artist’s nationality. Fischer to König, 5 November 1967, in section IV, box 2, folder 11, Kasper König Archive. 136. Siegelaub echoes this statement. The “center” of the system, he says, is no longer a place but “where any artist will be.” Seth Siegelaub, “On Exhibitions and the World at Large” (1969), in Idea Art , ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1973), 171. The following year, in the catalogue for 18 Paris 70, Michel Claura similarly stated, “art is where the artist is.” See ProspectRetrospect , 139. 137. Harald Szeemann, typescript of speech delivered at Prospect 69, 30 September 1969, p. 1, in folder 20, box 290, Harald Szeemann Papers, Getty Research Institute. See also Richard, Unconcealed , 95.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 138. Harald Szeemann, ed., Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Bern: Kunsthalle , 1969). 139. Harald Szeemann, “ Zur Ausstellung ,” in Live in Your Head , n.p.; and Harald Szeemann, “How Does an Exhibition Come into Being?” (1969), in Exhibiting the New Art: “ Op Losse Schroeven” and “When Attitudes Become Form,” ed. Christian Rattemeyer (London: Afterall Books, 2010), 175. The essay originally appeared in Op Losse Schroeven: Situaties en Cryptostructuren (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1969). 140. Meyer, interview with Lippard, cited in Lippard, Six Years , 8; emphasis in original. 141. Lippard, Pop Art , 9. Lippard associates this shift with the rise of Europe as a distribution hub. See Lucy Lippard, “Toward a Dematerialized or Non Object Art,” typescript, 1969, p. 4, in Garry Neill Kennedy and Anna Leonowens Gallery, NSCAD University. 142. Lippard, Six Years , 8. 143. Szeemann, “Zur Ausstellung.” 144. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 68. 145. Rosalind E. Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post- Medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 10. 146. Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992), 370. 147. “Information” can, in Siegelaub’s terms, be divided into “primary” and “sec - ondary” information. Siegelaub, quoted in Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 56. 148. Szeemann, “ Zur Ausstellung ,” n.p. 149. Friese, 38. 150. Patrizia Dander and Ulrich Wilmes, eds., A Bit of Matter and a Little Bit More: The Collection and Archives of Herman and Nicole Daled, 1966–1978 (Munich: Haus der Kunst , 2010), 150. 151. Lippard, Six Years , 8. 152. Carl Andre, transcript of a symposium held at Windham College, 30 April 1968, quoted in Lippard, Six Years , 47. More than the traditional art-historical notion of “site,” his concept of “place” can be more closely compared with Jakob von Uexkull, “A Stroll through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds” (1934), in Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept , ed. Claire H. Schiller (New York: International Universities Press, [1957]), 5–80. 153. This is quite close to how Foucault, following Georges Canguilhem and Uexkull, defines a milieu . See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977–78) , ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave, 2007), 20–21. See also Georges Canguilhem, “The Living and Its Milieu,” trans. John Savage, Grey Room 3 (Spring 2001): 6–31. 154. Lippard, Six Years , 8. 155. Quoting Shibutani, Burnham writes, “Conceptualism demonstrates that art as communication has much of the unverifiable consistency of a rumor. Unlike direct mechanical communication, the content of a rumor is not a specific body of information transmitted at the highest practical rate of fidelity, but rather something ‘shaped, reshaped and reinforced in a succession of communicative acts. . . . A rumor may be regarded as something that is constantly being constructed; when the communicative

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 activity ceases the rumor no longer exists.’ Art functions not unsimilarly.” Jack Burnham, “Alice’s Head: Reflections on Conceptual Art” (1970), in Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New York: George Braziller, 1974), 60. 156. Dan Graham, “Information” (1967), in Rock My Religion: Writings and Projects, 1965–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), xviii–xx; and Dan Graham, “My Works for Magazine Pages: ‘A History of Conceptual Art,’” in Rock My Religion , 26–31. In other texts, however, Graham explicitly develops a notion of the “human medium.” See Dan Graham, “Subject Matter” (1969), in Rock My Religion, 42. 157. Alberro, 2; and Lippard, Six Years , 8. 158. Tamotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumor (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 31. Ian Wilson is the conceptual artist who most programmatically emphasized oral rather than written communication. In 1970, Wilson held an exhibition with Fischer in “various locations” in the Rhineland (including bars and Kunsthalles). See Fischer, Ausstellungen bei Konrad Fischer , 54. 159. For Shibutani, rumor is a “collective enterprise” that depends on the “collabora - tion of a multitude of persons,” whose actions are defined by a form of “behavioral con - tagion.” Shibutani, 9, 95. 160. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 71. The phrase “art world,” coined by Arthur Danto in 1964, was thus relatively new at the time Jappe used it. See Danto, “The Artworld,” Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (15 October 1964): 571–84. 161. Siegelaub, quoted in Alberro, 57. 162. Piero Gilardi to Wim Beeren, 27 March 1969, quoted in Rattemeyer, Exhibiting the New Art , 47. In another letter to Beeren, Gilardi wrote, “Man and his national cul - tures are finished: what remains is ‘life.’” Piero Gilardi to Wim Beeren, 1 December 1968, quoted in Rattemeyer, Exhibiting the New Art , 48. 163. As Stanley L. Falk notes in his introduction to George C. Thorpe’s Pure Logistics (1916), the first study of logistics as an autonomous sector of military operations, the etymology of the word derives from the French logis , meaning “lodging or quarters.” Stanley L. Falk, introduction to Pure Logistics (1916), by George C. Thorpe (Washington: National Defense Press, 1986), xviii. Beginning with the Napoleonic era, logistics, according to Falk, can be defined in terms of “moving, supplying, and maintaining mil - itary forces” (xi). 164. Jappe, “Interview with Konrad Fischer,” 70. Reflecting on Fischer and his work, Andre echoed Fischer’s definition: “Konrad,” he said, “already knew most of the impor - tant artists and dealers and curators and collectors before he came to New York. When he visited America for the first time, he introduced me to them!” Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 91. As Dorothee Fischer noted, König had made this possible: “That was thanks to Kasper’s wonderful powers of persuasion. Konrad himself flew to New York for the first time at Easter 1968. And when he arrived, everybody already knew him.” De Werd, “Seeing What Was New and Unique ,” 162. 165. Szeemann, typescript of speech delivered at Prospect 69, p. 1. Szeemann makes a similar statement in his catalogue text “ Zur Ausstellung ,” n.p. See also Buchloh, “Avant-Propos zu Re(tro)spect,” 7; and Rolf Ricke, “Rolf Ricke,” Kunstforum 127 (July–September 1994): 252. 166. The Europeans to whom Fischer introduced his artists tended not to be other artists but collectors and dealers like himself. Gilbert and George, who were managed by Fischer, recall that Fischer advised them explicitly not to have lunch with a local artist,

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/GREY_a_00193 by guest on 26 September 2021 Polke, because he felt the meeting would be bad for their careers. Brigitte Kölle, “My Name Is Konrad Fischer. You Will Do Somezing wiz Me in Düsseldorf, Eeh . . . ? A Conversation with Gilbert and George,” in Okey Dokey Konrad Fischer , 210. 167. Joseph Vogl first proposed such an occasionalistic or operational definition of media systems in “Taming Time: Media of Financialization,” Grey Room 46 (Winter 2012): 82. 168. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , 177–368. 169. Friedrich Kittler, “The World of the Symbolic—A World of the Machine,” in Literature, Media, Information Systems , ed. John Johnston (Amsterdam: G and B Arts, 1997), 135. 170. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 , 362–63.

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