More than Just Nails
Berlin Honors Günther Uecker
With an Opulent Exhibition
Günther Uecker made a name
for himself as a "nail artist". On the occasion of his 75th birthday, a
three-part exhibition in Berlin, sponsort by Deutsche Bank, presents his
work in all its aspects - from Uecker's early "noise machines" to his
light installations and rarely-shown watercolors. Christiane Meixner
took a look at this birthday show.
Actionism is old hat. In
the 1960s,
Günther Uecker constructed his Krachmaschinen with his own
hands and unleashed them on a perplexed public, which soon ran off, in
Baden-Baden in 1968. Instead of playing pleasant melodies, Uecker’s
Terrororchester brought the noise of factories and industrial shops into
the museum, in order to “show a society fleeing itself at the place of
their wishes”. The artist subsequently published his texts about his
machines in a “Uecker newspaper”, in the style of a manifesto, because the
mainstream media weren’t interested in social criticism.
Nail performance with a piano, 1964, © Günther Uecker
That’s all changed today. The public is flocking to the
major, three-part
exhibition in Berlin marking the occasion of the 75th birthday of this
painter and sculptor, who has long since become one of the most important
international representatives of German art of the 20th century. And
Uecker, who has spent months at a time in South America, Tibet, Japan and
Patagonia, has become a traveling salesman for cultural expression, which
has long been a factor in his work.
Brief an Peking, 1994 Works in the Düsseldorf studio, © Günther Uecker
Now Uecker is turning to spiritual matters instead of
aggressive hammering of nails. Friedensgebot (peace offer) is the
name of his latest installation at the
Martin-Gropius-Bau. It places quotes from the Bible, the Torah and the
Koran alongside each other as equals, and shows that, as one gains
personal insight, one’s understanding of cultural dependencies grows. In
the 1980s, as a reaction to the nuclear power plant disaster at Chernobyl,
Uecker created human-sized ash pictures that show silhouettes desperately
flailing their arms. His Letter to Peking, for which he wrote the
United Nations human rights charter on large white pieces of cloth, was
meant to be exhibited in China in the mid-1990s. But the show was
cancelled shortly before it was due to open. In front of this impressive
“gesamtkunstwerk”, a nail, his trademark, appears as simply one tool among
others – even though “nail artist” has become a kind of synonym for
Günther Uecker.
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Aschemensch, 1987, © Günther Uecker
The excessive gestures of covering chairs, bedside
tables and entire pianos with nails – thus removing them from the
bourgeois sphere – fits perfectly with the romanticized image of an
ebullient, rebellious genius.
This exhibition, which has been
organized by the Neue Berliner Kunstverein
(NBK) and sponsored in large part by Deutsche Bank, gives Uecker’s work a
different framework. In 20 chapters, which the visitor can move through
room by room, it tells in a structured manner of “
ZERO” and other activities with which the artist, born in Mecklenburg in
1930 as a farmer’s son, began following his move to the Düsseldorf
art academy. Light and movement were the themes that connected him in the
1950s to artists like
Otto Piene. The group’s central creed was that art occurs in front of
the viewer and is not generated as a fixed image made up of abstract
painterly gestures and a bit of paint.
Das gelbe Bild, 1995, © Günther Uecker
The show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau begins with
Gelbes Bild from 1957, the tension strips of which Uecker was covered
with nails, as an expression of his mistrust of the classic panel. In a
similar manner to
Lucio Fontana, who, during the 1950s, expanded the surfaces of his
monochrome works by a further dimension through perforated and slashed
canvases, Uecker discovered in the nail an individual instrument with
which the flat image could be dangerously extended into space.
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