Art Office

In 2023, art historian Susanne Altmann will spend two months in Rotterdam. She is one of the guests in the context of the artist exchange between the cities of Dresden and Rotterdam for over ten years. Goethe-Institut Rotterdam (which will unfortunately be closed in 2024, which will probably mean the end of the exchange) and CBK Rotterdam ensure that the participants are accommodated in both cities. Altmann previously studied architecture and art in Rotterdam's public space (A WALKING TRIP AMONG SISTERS – UNDERSTANDING ROTTERDAM ON FOOT – CBK Rotterdam – CBK Rotterdam). She described her first impressions of Rotterdam for the magazine DCA (Dresden Contemporary Art) in mid-2023. In the latest issue of DCA she discusses the projects of a number of artists, such as Maarten Janssen and Moritz Liebig. CBK Rotterdam had the text translated by Peter Jamin.   

 

Concrete, baroque, plasticine and cucumbers: one more time to Rotterdam and Dresden (or vice versa)

Is it possible to portray the history of Dresden on a roll of wallpaper? Absolute. Maarten Janssen leaves no doubt about this. But how do you achieve that?

When Janssen started his research residency in Dresden, he resolved to get to know the city without prior literary or historical knowledge. He wanted to be guided exclusively by impressions that he - almost naively - would gain in the urban space. His interest, it was already clear, was for the built environment and the more or less visible cultural-historical information that buildings and monuments would reveal to him.

While he was thinking about an artistic form for his research, at some point he came across a book. Forgetting his intention, he started reading Kurt Vonnegut's famous novel Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade (Slaughterhouse Five, or The Children's Crusade). Many will know this book, it is the developmental novel of a young man who became a German prisoner of war as an assistant chaplain in 1945 and performed forced labor in Dresden. For Janssen, it was not so much the reflections on the bomb inferno that struck him, but Vonnegut's introductory description of how he found the form for his book. The American author had, as he writes, “sketched the Dresden story countless times” and continues: “The best, at least the most beautiful, sketch was on the back of a roll of wallpaper. I had used my daughter's paint crayon; each main figure was given a different color. At one end the blue line met the red and then the yellow line, the yellow line ending because the figure the yellow line represented died. And so forth."

Stacked image paths

This representation of parallel narratives on a strip of wallpaper was the key to Janssen's own work 'Beton und Barock'. However, he turned the idea a quarter turn and 'stacked' his image strips horizontally on top of each other. Last summer it was on display at the C. Rockefeller Center for the Contemporary Arts – for a short time only. At first glance it did not resemble a structured narrative, but rather came across as a strict work based on pure form repetition. Such an approach is in keeping with Janssen's serial, geometric art, but here in Dresden each part had its own iconographic background. A fragment of the painted imitation of Renaissance wall stones of the Stallhof and an element from Friedrich Kracht's band of concrete ornaments around the Robotron building form the basis of the wall covering. Strip after strip, photographic images of friezes from different centuries squeeze in between them. There are quotes from Reinhold Langner's relief at the student flat Güntzstraße 22 (1955), from the late medieval Dance of the Dead by Christoph Walther (1573, today in the Dreikönigskirche), from the Procession of Princes (procession of princes) by Wilhelm Walther (1876), of images on pedestals of various monuments and of the cycle of images about the history of Dresden that is hidden behind weeds in front of the Neustädter Markt (1976-1979. Edgar Ponndorf, Peter Makolies, Dietrich Nitzsche , Vinzenz Wanitschke). For residents of the city, this kaleidoscope of finds may be even more exciting to decipher than for non-residents.

Temporary irreverence

Overall, the idea of ​​'exposing' artists to an area they are unfamiliar with is quite brilliant. For several years now, the Goethe Institut Rotterdam, the local art center CBK Rotterdam and the state capital Dresden have been organizing their artist exchanges under the label 'Investigating...', or 'investigating'.

 

The Dresden artist Moritz Liebig also undertook such a voyage of discovery a year ago – but in Rotterdam. Like many visitors to the port city, he was immediately struck by the abundance of urban art expressions. There was really nothing to add to that. Or is it? Liebig jumped on his bicycle to explore the grounds. His project 'Additional Sculptures' sounds lofty and serious: works must be “re-contextualized and the existing content must be artistically supplemented”. But when you look at the results of his interventionist forays, the humor often surfaces. This is preferably expressed in contrast and color - in the form of fruit, vegetables and bright plasticine. A prominent subject of such an intervention was the Willem Schürmann Fountain, created in 1916 by Charles van Wijk and Bon Ingen Housz, which paid tribute to the memory of the playwright of the same name through an ethereal flutist. However, this statue stands on a pedestal of four antique-looking masks. Liebig provided these bronze heads with snake- or frog-like tongues and glowing eyes, each in a primary color. In keeping with the theatrical pathos of the penultimate turn of the century, the water-spewing monument was transformed into a set of Medusa heads. But only for the moment; After all, Halloween was already over, and the artist also makes it a point to ensure that his 'additions' remain only fleeting, albeit well-documented phenomena. A similar fate befell the already funny bald head of Silvia B. on the Claes de Vrieselaan, which as Ode to the old (1994) seems to emerge from the depths of urban history. Liebig provided it with a radiant blue collar that appears liquid, and which reminds us that the Dutch subsurface is in principle quite damp. The sculptor took a more serious tone with improvised sleeping places, composed of sad leftovers from city life, for example under Henry Moore's unusual brick wall relief (1955). The discarded mattress Liebig used there was deployed even more often – probably most spectacularly as a folded insert between the world-famous legs of Auguste Rodins'l'Homme qui marche' (1905). This exciting, momentary irreverence continued with countless cucumbers on the cubist surface of Fritz Wotruba's Reclining figure (1969). There could be no end to the list. Fortunately, Moritz Liebig has captured all his 'additions' in a slideshow and a multi-part screen montage. But even the few examples highlighted here demonstrate – once again – Rotterdam's special carelessness in dealing with public art, whether it is contemporary, classical or monumental.

 

Changes

Maarten Janssen's walk through Dresden between baroque and concrete clearly distinguished itself from this. Instead of constantly stumbling over works, Janssen and his co-resident Lavinia Xausa searched for them with dedication. Inspired by a project by their Dresden colleague Svea Duwe, their path also led to the Soviet World War II memorial on Olbrichtplatz, moved there from Albertplatz in 1994. While Janssen incorporated the narrative frieze of the pedestal into his 'Dresden wallpaper', Xausa thematizes the different perspectives on the monument.

Her poetic film 'Amanda' spans a fictional arc from the Second World War, from victory and defeat, occupation and new beginnings, to the end of the Cold War. With faded images, seemingly insignificant details and private objects of memory, she sketches the contours of a twentieth century in which Dresden is almost symptomatically embedded. And no matter how much many citizens there resist changes in 'their' city (and often confuse this with their own personal changes), when Kurt Vonnegut returned to Dresden one last time in 1967 - which he had left in ruins - he wrote: Apart from the many vacant plots of land, the city bore an astonishing resemblance to Dayton, Ohio.” So it goes…

 

Photos: Maarten Janssen – Beton und Barock | Moritz Liebig – Schürmann fountain / mystic tongues | Mortiz Liebig | Moritz Liebig – Ode to the old / Sylvia B Wade in the water | Maarten Janssen – Concrete and Barock (detail)