artintelligence

Whereas Nairy Baghramian, Annette Wehrmann and Mark Wallinger indulged in yet more variations on the interminable Readymade theme Hans-Peter Feldman went past such superficial interpretations of deconstructive art and tackled the deeper, underlying issue which is the reconciliation of art with life (see Deconstructing Installation Art). Instead of a useless, whimsical and self-indulgent art trick Feldman actually contributed something both enduring and useful (I can hear the aesthetes scream at the mention of this barbarous word). Feldman’s action recalls the productive liaison between art, architecture and design that first emerged in Art Nouveau and Jugendstil and evolved into the international modernist style via De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus. That productive, socially relevant liaison was thrown away in the 1960s in favour of the Readymade art games. Such games and art tricks were encouraged by the art market thereby evolving into a tedious and apparently endless endgame now so pathetic that one wonders whether fine art can survive it much longer (witness the debacle that is Documenta 12).

Instead of genuflecting at the altar that is Duchamp’s urinal like so many of his colleagues, Feldman did something very simple and very effective. What is beautiful about his work is that it concerns a toilet, just like Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. But whereas Duchamp took a urinal and transformed it into something useless (a seemingly endless self-referential art game) Feldman returns the toilet to the real world, the world that Dada and Surrealism were trying to make art relate to, albeit in their anti-constructivist and ultimately destructive and counter-productive fashion (Burger 1984).

The public toilets in the Domplatz square that houses Munster Cathedral had become decrepit from overuse in this popular inner-city location (Skulptur-Projekte). Feldman renovated them using modest yet effective design. His work of art is outstanding because it reconciles art with life not in terms of empty rhetoric but in actual, practical terms. He shows us that art can be functional. It is very strange that most artists and curators appear to have forgotten about the modernist revolution and the utopianism of De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus. People have brushed this revolution away on the basis that it was ugly, dehumanising or, more recently, because it has become a ‘corporate style’. The problem is that the alternative that is being served up consists of either Readymade art tricks or modes of grunge that is supposedly transgressive but is in reality quickly transformed into precious objects by the fine art system. Witness for example the supposedly ‘transgressive’ grungeism of Jason Rhoades at this year’s Venice Biennale which was framed by his commercial gallery as being so very precious that visitors couldn’t photograph it, Rhoades was one of only three artists (another was Francis Alys) in that massive exhibition whose gallery refused the right of people to share images of his work. The fact that Rhoades died last year at the age of 41 is tragic but the point I’m making has less to do with individual artists than with the commerical system that encompasses them.

REFERENCE
Bürger, P. 1984. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.