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020712: Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsrhue Déjà-vu? The art of replication
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsrhue
Déjà-vu? The art of replication
From Dürer to YouTube
21.04.2012 – 05.08.2012
No art without copies
By Matthias Kampmann
There's hardly a theme that divides the intelligentsia in a more ongoing fashion than the question of the entity and non-entity of a copy and copying in the age of the internet. One hears about it from film-makers, writers and musicians who are worried about their sinecure. Graphic artists are outnumbered in this distortive battle. How the copy has shaped and enriched our visual culture from the beginning is really exemplified and mirrored in the history of painting, sculptures and graphics.
It's the special merit of a wonderfully structured and prepared exhibition in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe to correct this fashionable, one-side view. Plausible, exciting and based on solid, historical research, the show offers the opportunity of expanding the horizon with a view of the exhilarating heritage of artistic copies with the aid of around 120 works from the late Middle Ages to the present time. "Déjà-vu. The art of replication from Dürer to YouTube”.
The exhibition commences with a photographic work by Claudia Angelmaier. The 2-metre wide tableau, "The Large Piece of Lawn, 2004/2008" shows Albrecht Dürer's iconic-like aquarelle in a very special way. The artist, born 1972, has read into a dozen art books - in which the legendary picture is printed – and has arranged and lighted these in a small public collection in two rows of six double-paged books. Plainly visible differences show the impossibility of substituting the original.
A propos Dürer. The work of the Frankish superstar of the German Renaissance pervades almost the entire exhibition. And not without reason, because he marks the new-age conception of an original notion which implies and reveals the mercantile factors and the emergence of the artist's subject. That was completely different in the Middle Ages. At that time, copies were the guarantor for consistent iconographies and ensured aesthetic orientation. The copy was the norm.
At last a show which doesn't only organize its contents plausibly and clearly in the exhibition rooms but also offers a comprehensive contribution to the, up till now, only partially written art history of copying.
In the later part of the 20th century, the copy mutated to the artistic principle. In the years of Appropriation Art, the conceptual of sharpening the bastion called Genius was invoked and artists developed the dissolution of picture boundaries by devaluation of material factors such as canvas colour or form. Elaine Sturtevant, exemplary protagonist for this mode of appropriation, once said: "It's an art that repeats the seduction of the superfluous and in the process of the replication, dissolves to make way for the most important thing – the thought.
But the story isn't over by a long chalk. Klaus Mosettig's pencil drawings of the action paintings, "Lavender Mist“, by Jackson Pollock, are more than just meticulous emulations. They deflect the gaze to process and time. That laypeople imitate Cindy Sherman on YouTube or Flickr brings the everyday back into the picture following the fascination of the story of the copy.
State Art Gallery Karlsruhe
76133 Karlsruhe, Hans-Thoma-Straße 2-6
Tel: 0721 - 926 33 59
Fax: (0721) 926 67 88
E-mail: info@kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
http://www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
Opening times: Tue-Fri 10.00 - 17.00, Sat, Sun, public holidays 10.00 - 18.00
Mehr Texte von translated and summarized by: Liz Wollner-Grandville
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020712
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
76133 Karlsruhe, Hans-Thoma-Straße 2-6
Tel: +49 721 926 33 59, Fax: +49 721 926 67 88
Email: info@kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
http://www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 10-18 h
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
76133 Karlsruhe, Hans-Thoma-Straße 2-6
Tel: +49 721 926 33 59, Fax: +49 721 926 67 88
Email: info@kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
http://www.kunsthalle-karlsruhe.de
Öffnungszeiten: Di-So 10-18 h
