ART REVIEW : Germany’s Changing Picture

Since about 1980, the meteoric rise of German art to international prominence has been among the most-remarked events of contemporary culture. The late Joseph Beuys, who died in 1986 at the age of 64, is today widely regarded as not only the paterfamilias of Germany’s return to artistic significance, but as the single most important European artist of the postwar era.

As American audiences have come to be acquainted with contemporary German art, American museums have begun to take an expansive look at its individual artists, their variety of mediums and historical roots. The most recent effort was undertaken last year by Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, which organized a sprawling survey of “Photography in Contemporary German Art: 1960 to the Present.”

It features the work of 19 artists, beginning with Beuys and ending with a generation born in the 1950s. Following presentations in Dallas/Ft. Worth and in New York, the show has now arrived, in considerably altered form, in Los Angeles.

The Lannan Foundation’s galleries, where it opened Saturday, are relatively small, so the show is being presented in two sequential parts. It also has been edited from its original, rather vast scale, with fewer works by each artist. Finally, and for reasons that are not entirely clear, the celebrated artist Anselm Kiefer angrily withdrew his work from the exhibition, when finally he saw it in April at the Guggenheim Museum, Soho.

Kiefer is said to have been upset by the way his large, silvery, mixed-media landscapes had been installed. Whatever the case, his unfortunate absence leaves a gaping hole.

As the exhibition’s title pointedly suggests, “Photography in Contemporary German Art” does not examine camera work as an independent medium. The kind of photography explored by the show is instead part of a fundamental postwar shift, which can also be seen in American art. A reigning formal emphasis on exploring the unique properties of painting, sculpture and photography was joined by a more conceptually elastic approach.

No longer was the camera seen as a pure medium with a precise, internal history. Photography’s technical properties and artistic past were not ignored, but neither were they worshiped. Instead, photography began to be regarded as one tool among countless others, like paintbrushes or paper, available for use in the pursuit of an artistic idea.

The change that occurred in the 1960s was both dramatic and basic: Rather than an artist serving the dictates of a medium, the medium was now made to serve the artist.

Sometimes this liberating shift was taken to radical lengths. In the exhibition, the always remarkable Sigmar Polke goes so far as to remove first the camera, then the negative, from his photographic art.

He placed pieces of uranium on unexposed film, which dutifully recorded its invisible, radioactive energy, creating a glowing image. The notion of an essential spirit in matter is given loopy form.

Subsequently, in a group of exquisite works that derive from a Goya painting of two crones, sometimes titled “Time,” Polke used a mysterious process (perhaps simply an overhead projector and chemically treated paper) to create a haunting sense that the grinning picture has magically coalesced on a surface before your eyes. Imagine seeing ancestral images take shape in smoke or clouds.

This new Conceptual photography had a specific aim. In the American-dominated postwar era, it sought to redirect attention away from the materialist basis of Western culture. As with the explosive emergence of such hybrid forms as performance art (which incorporated theater), video (which contrasted with commercial television) and installation art (which employed found, non-art objects), the blurring of distinctions among the discrete mediums of photography, painting, sculpture and even architecture meant to restore vitality to the disintegrating power of a spiritual and intellectual idea of art.

The Lannan’s bifurcation of the exhibition into two parts is not without justification. Walker curator Gary Garrels identifies two general tributaries for Conceptually based German photography since the 1960s. One branch is led by Beuys (and then Polke), and is the focus of Part I; the other is led by the husband-and-wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher (followed by Gerhard Richter), and will be the focus of Part II, opening July 16.

Generally, the Beuys half is concerned with an intuitive, expressive mode. The Becher half will explore structural typologies. As artists rarely fit into hard and fast categories or strict genealogies, it would be unwise to cling too firmly to these divisions. Still, they offer a useful organizing principal.

Several terrific individual pieces stand out. In addition to Beuys’ photographic “specimens,” pressed between glass and held in steel frames, or sometimes boxed and presented in display cases, Polke’s work is uniformly strong.

Martin Kippenberger makes Pop paintings with bright, densely layered imagery. Small plastic knickknacks are then laid on the surface, the painting is photographed and finally it’s destroyed. Oddly, the photographs that remain, which display piles of pop-culture detritus, are autobiographical self-portraits: In German, Kippenberger means “a mountain of dumped rubbish.”

Bernhard Prinz’s “Three Allegories: Idea-Ideal-Ideology” is a triptych in which the different panels each show a woman holding a bowl in her lap, a traditional symbol for fecundity. The properties of each bowl--clear glass, white ceramic, shiny copper--seem to be subtly echoed in the sitters’ clothing, the settings, even the look in the women’s eyes. The transparency of ideas, the refinement of ideals and the obduracy of ideology are given startling form.

Finally, Gunther Forg’s exceptional installation, “Villa Wittgenstein,” both embraces and throws a monkey wrench into any faith in knowledge based solely on sense experience. Six life-size photographs of glass doorways in the villa of Viennese philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, champion of logical positivism, hang on dusty green or bright orange walls, along with one mirror and one large, black-and-white portrait of an unidentified woman.

Link by link, Forg lays out the chain of illusions that surrounds anyone caught in our world of ubiquitous, photographic windows and mirrors--a prison that’s chillingly beautiful and seductive.

One disappointment of Part I is that, with few exceptions, only art made since 1980 is on view. A single work (by Polke) dates from the 1960s.

From the 1970s there’s a big, uninteresting, movie-posterish photograph of a “swamp thang” by Katherina Sieverding; two grids of painterly, abstract, black-and-white photographs by Imi Knoebel and five works by Beuys, in which photographs are a kind of modern, archaeological artifact, presented in quasi-scientific displays.

The remaining 50 works all were made within the past 10 years. Perhaps Part II will offer a fuller examination of prior developments in German photographic practice. For now, however, what we have is closer to a fine survey of some recent work.

* Lannan Foundation, 5401 McConnell Ave., (310) 306-1004, through June 27. Closed Mondays.