February 23, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Jörg Immendorff
Anton Kern
558 Broadway, at Prince Street
SoHo
Michael Werner
4 East 77th Street, Manhattan
Both through
March 3
These two exhibitions form adjustable bookends for the career of
the 56-year-old German artist Jörg Immendorff so far. The show at
Kern, "Lidl (Fluxus) Work and Recent Paintings," is devoted mostly
to his early Conceptual-style work; "New Paintings," at Werner,
brings him up to date with quirky, symbol-fraught paintings from
the last two years.
The Kern show is the more action- packed. Filled with paintings,
photographs, sculptures and ephemera, it documents a series of
politically charged performances and environments that the artist
created in Düsseldorf in the late 1960's. At the time, Mr.
Immendorff was both under the sway of his teacher Joseph Beuys and
trying to escape Beuys's orbital pull by making work that was
simultaneously political and absurdist.
In January 1968 he appeared in front of the parliament building in
Bonn dragging behind him a small wooden block painted the color of
the German flag and inscribed with the word "Lidl," a nonsense word
associated with the sound made by a baby's rattle. (The block,
titled "Lidl-Block," is in the show.) He was arrested for his
political impudence, and things took off from there.
He and friends opened the all-student, professor-free Lidl
Academy, which offered classes for children, entertained visitors,
including members of the international Fluxus movement, and was
host to performances by Mr. Immendorff, his friends and an
assortment of goldfish, turtles and dogs, some real, some not. To
prove it was a "normal" school, the academy also had a soccer and
boating team equipped with hand-stitched uniforms. The Dada-tinged,
very-1960's results were both a sendup of authoritarian
institutions and a serious attempt to invent an anarchistic
alternative model.
The Lidl spirit is nicely simulated at Kern, where a member of the
gallery staff is often sitting at a desk in the show to answer
questions or engage in discussion. The display itself, naturally,
has a kind of reliquary feel; it's both fun and poignant to look
at, with its sly and elaborate infantilism and its sprinkling of
Beuys-baiting jokes, including a tiny painting of the artist
himself in his signature porkpie hat.
Painting has always, in fact, been Mr. Immendorff's medium of
choice (here he differed with Beuys, which was a source of
tension), and it is the medium he has pursued most intensively
since the Lidl days. Several examples can be found at Kern, though
the concentration of new work is uptown in a series of semiabstract
pieces at Werner.
There, in an innocence-and-experience vein not so different from
the 1960's work, images of giant flowers and devouring worms
predominate, along with emblems of mazes and Towers of Babel that
mix fairy tale sweetness and adult disillusion, just as the
remarkable Lidl project did.
--
carol starr
taos, new mexico, usa
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
