Be the Dead Tree On Albert Oehlen’s Paintings Daniel Baumann The table is well covered, but the interpretation and discourse are running towards desserts and love. And we? We keep reading, because in the past fifteen years alone more than twenty exhibition catalogues on the work of Albert Oehlen have appeared, and each one includes at least one essay with at least one pronouncement or explanation. This artist has been relentlessly pursued by a wave of interpretations that he himself has encouraged. At times he rides it, at other times he ignores it; he has been known to play with it and then to disperse it again—preferably all at once, so that a sense of autonomy sets in, not for the art but for the artist. “I am not willing to be a pawn of the art market, theorists, or curators.” 1 “Albert Oehlen is a difficult artist to pin down. This is deliberate on his part.” 2 True, yet it is generally agreed that he makes paintings. These are described as varied and unpredictable, which may explain the nervous search for interpretations. Two different approaches seem to prevail. The first one attempts to place Oehlen in a kind of genealogy by comparing him with other artists. With more or less success he is associated with and discussed in relation to Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, Anselm Kiefer, Francis Picabia, Sigmar Polke, Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Julian Schnabel, and so on. In some cases he has triggered these comparisons himself by mentioning Dalí or Picabia in interviews. Interestingly, these comparisons provide little insight beyond emphasizing that Oehlen makes things differently. But what does he make? The second approach contextualizes his work within the 1970s 1. Albert Oehlen in “Now It’s Much Better: An Interview with Albert Oehlen by Max Dax,” in Albert Oehlen: 1991–2008, and 1980s: by acknowledging the influence of Jörg Immendorff; by con- exh. cat. (Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2008), p. 83. necting Oehlen with the evolution of punk music and German New Wave 2. Bonnie Clearwater, Albert Oehlen: I Know Whom You (Neue Deutsche Welle); by portraying him in connection to the artists’ Showed Last Summer, exh. cat. (North Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2005), p. 6. group around Werner Büttner and Martin Kippenberger; and by linking Oehlen_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 41 6/17/14 5:54 PM Be the Dead Tree him to the appearance and economic success of Neo-Expressionist painting. Some of this has led to persistent misunderstandings that have particularly affected his reception in the United States. The American art historian Hal Foster recently echoed this when he said: “Again, all that [Oehlen’s strategy] was difficult for us to read; it appeared to be just a forced revival of old ideas of originality, authenticity, and genius.” 3 Foster was alluding to the antimodernist notions of art as promoted by the Neue Wilde (New Fauves), by the Italian Transavanguardia, and by artists like Julian Schnabel. Yet from the beginning Oehlen kept his distance from this revival, which he has made clear in texts and interviews as well as in articles written by critics such as Wilfried Dickhoff, Diedrich Diedrichsen, and Roberto Ohrt. As early as 1986 the Austrian linguist Martin Prinzhorn suggested that Oehlen’s art refuses the simple and unambiguous pro- duction of meaning while at the same time playing with our desire for it.4 This is an art based on a deep-seated skepticism about interpretation and discourse, which—so goes the suspicion—are doomed to lead to heavy-handed concepts like Modernism, Postmodernism, Expressionism, Appropriation, or Abstraction. While these concepts seduce as well as perform as crutches that assist in sequencing and structuring time and thought, this is not what Oehlen’s work is looking for. To avoid being pigeonholed, Oehlen and his companions shrewdly (and with humor) developed a framework that proved essen- tially dysfunctional for interpretation. You cannot avoid it, you must take it into account, but it is as serious as it is contradictory, and sometimes intentionally annoying. It relies heavily on apodictic statements, provokes with an affirmation of banalities, is not afraid of rejections and contradic- tions, risks misunderstandings, and stubbornly clings to the notion of the beautiful picture. The mainstream and the market seem to be at peace with it: it is self-reflexive skepticism, it is painting about painting, and it expresses itself by way of a dialectical “both/and”. To them, Oehlen’s art plays out opposites such as figural and abstract, structured and informal, gray and colorful, passionate and distanced, banal and sublime, elegant and objectionable, bad painting and postconceptual, and so forth. This 3. Hal Foster and Achim Hochdörfer, “Oehlen as consensus has now reached the back covers of exhibition catalogues, Schoenberg—That’s a Wild Thought: A Conversation between Hal Foster and Achim Hochdörfer,” in Albert where we read: “Albert Oehlen’s oeuvre, which covers a period of more Oehlen: Painting, ed. Achim Hochdörfer, exh. cat. than thirty years, is distinguished by its fundamental skepticism about the (Vienna: Museum of Modern Art Vienna, 2013), p. 130. potential of painting as medium. Instead of turning his back on painting, 4. Martin Prinzhorn, “Verkehrt und Falsch,” in Albert Oehlen, exh. cat. (Cologne: Galerie Borgmann Capitain, 1986), 5 however, the artist uses the medium itself to articulate his skepticism.” n.p. The same direction is taken by Wilfried Dickhoff in “Fazit der Perspektiven,” his introduction to Albert Oehlen: Before even going that far, it is simply interesting to acknowledge Abräumung, Prokrustische Malerei 1982–1984, exh. cat. how in the 1980s artists like Oehlen took into their own hands the creation (Zurich: Kunsthalle Zürich 1987). of context. It obviously connects him to the twentieth century, as most of 5. Albert Oehlen: Terpentin 2012 / Turpentine 2012, ed. Stephan Berg, exh. cat. (Bonn: Kunstmuseum Bonn, 2012), the leading artists then were not only eager but also forced to establish quotation on back cover. 42 Oehlen_Guts_Final_FINAL.indd 42 6/17/14 5:54 PM Baumann context while at the same time carefully preserving their autonomy. In the case of Oehlen, however, it reached a disorienting level, since he clarified as much as he turned the situation upside down. The man is a quick thinker, he is well informed, and again and again he spins us off balance. His main weapon is the interview, in which, from the authoritarian standpoint of the artist, he declares ideas and assumptions to be invalid, or turns them, by vastly exaggerating them, into absurd or paradoxical presumptions. One of the high points is the notion that painting has to be overcharged with motifs, that it needs to be overburdened and tortured in order to expel from it any content.6 This idea that content can disappear, that it plays no role and is not perceptible, echoes through the many published interviews as a kind of leitmotif: “I’m not in a position to recognize the content,” he claims.7 That would be fantastic! But no thanks. For Monsieur Essentialism stands right around the corner. Better to call on the pope. Oehlen knows this, of course, and therefore time and again trips himself up (and us). Ignoring for a moment the question of content and setting aside the ban on perceiving it, one encounters motifs that resurface through the years. What to make of them? Enjoy them! As an interesting example, note the dwelling as it appears again and again in the 1980s. It is in the collages of the publication Ewige Feile (Eternal File, 1983), then painted in word and image, most famously perhaps in Die Wahrheit liegt in der Wohnung (Truth Lies in the Home, 1984). In the same year, it appeared as a leitmotif through the catalogue of the legendary group show Warheit ist Arbeit (Truth Is Work) by Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen. And finally, in 1987, it was seen in the exhibitionAlbert Oehlen: Abräumung (Albert Oehlen: Moving Out) at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which Wilfried Dickhoff placed in the context of the “tyranny of intimate spaces.” 8 The fact is, the history of the Federal Republic of Germany would be inconceivable without the dwelling. It was the place where German life after the Second World War could re-create itself in harmony with the Western culture and its post-war economic miracle: washing machines, televisions, Coca-Cola, sexual revolution, petite bourgeoisie. In the acme of unsuspected normality, there, shielded from the public, even the past could live on. Thus it is unsurprising that Adolf Hitler and fascism are ele- ments of this group of works (see Portrait A. H., 1984, or Morning Light 6. See especially Albert Oehlen, “Albert Oehlen im Falls into the Führer’s Headquarters, 1982). What is perplexing about this Gespräch mit Wilfried Dickhoff und Martin Prinzhorn,” Kunst Heute 7 (1991), Cologne. series of paintings is the degree to which Oehlen stubbornly keeps the 7. Oehlen quoted in Albert Oehlen and Daniel Baumann, motif apart from its rendering in paint. The application of color and com- “Im Land der Motive brennt kein Licht mehr / The Lights Are Out in the Land of Motifs,” in Die Götter im Exil: Salvador position (on one side) and the motif (on the other) never come together in Dalí, Albert Oehlen u. a. / Gods in Exile: Salvador Dalí, Albert these pictures. The art doesn’t speak of what is seen, and here, dialectic Oehlen et al., ed. Peter Pakesch, exh. cat. (Graz: Kunsthaus Graz, 2006), p. 7. is of no help. This approach precisely identified the rift that nearly broke 8. Dickhoff, “Fazit der Perspektiven,” n.p.