A Logistical Inversion: from Konrad Lueg to Konrad Fischer
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Roy Lichtenstein. Woman Cleaning , 1962. Reproduced in Barbara Rose, “Dada Then and Now,” Art International , January 1963. 6 doi:10.1162/GREY_a_00193 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 | | | | | 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. | | | | | 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. 8 Grey Room 63 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 .