Diederichsen, Diedrich,

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P ublic S pa ce I T wo A u dien cesworks and documents from the Herbert Collectioninuentaire

This book ispubl ished by Museu d'Ar t Con-temporani de Barcelona, Spain and KunsthausGraz, AUSlIia on the occasion of two exhibi-t ions: one at the Macba Barce lona fromFebruary - Apri l .2006, and the other a t meKunsthaus Graz in June - September 2006.Each exhibition is made with its own selectionof works and documents f rom the Herbe rrCollection by Manuel Boria-Villel in Barcelonaand Peter Pakesch in Graz.The bonk follows two earlier publications 011the Herbert Collection with their own title andsubtitle: L 'A r ch it ec te e sc a b se m . R i pe n oi re(Eindhoven, 1984) and M an y C olo re d O bje ctsP la ce d S id e b y S id e to F orm a Ro w of M any C oloredO b je cu . P r og ramm e (Luxembourg, 2000).The publication. P u b li c S p a ce 1 1 "' 0 A u d ie n ce s.Inuentaire gives a large overview of works anddocuments ofthe Herbert Collection. As ineach 'Inventory', it is incomplete' . The book ismade in the context of a permanent growingdocumentation, starting with Repertoire , throughProgramme rill this l iWetltaire .

Museu d' Art Conternporani de BarcelonaKunsthaus GT3Z


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Artistic Theories ofPubUc SpaceAPrehistory of InreractlvityDiedrich Diederichsen

A colored map like those used in school s.Typically, a distinction is made between 'physi-cal maps', on which mountains and waterdepths, valleys and altitudes are represented bygradations of coLors, and 'political maps', onwhich each country is assigned a single color,which then fills irs borders without develop-ment or gradation. These borders are absolute;they are uninterrupted contours. These twOtypes of maps can easily be 0"signed to the rwofundamental building blocks of painting: con-[Our and development, Blake and TUrner, comicstrip a nd expression, po litics and poetry. MarcelBroodthaers's work C arz'c du m ond e poetiqu e,from the politicaLly and poetically significantyear 1968, deconstructed tills binarisrn of the

internationalist hippies, German revanchisrs andEEC politicians all agreed on that.Bordersbetween states, it was said, were. artificial and,moreover, often the result of military violenceand despotism. The physical map 1105 a betterreputation; it, is said to be closer to nature -even more peaceful - than the political one.Even so, the preference for supposed Iy naru-ral borders over allegedly artificial ones was, inpostwar Germany for example, less frequentlyencountered inthe form of a peacefully utopianhippie idea than as an idea coming from thepolitical right. InGermany it was me languageof tile exiled and the revanchists: the 'naturalborders of Germanness' were proposed tocounter the artificial borders of tile postwar


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Marcel Breocthaere, C a rt e d u m o n da p o ti rl qu e , , 968

the preexisting assignments of signs and thingsand actions to one another. Nevertheless - andthis too is a crucial operation of Brocdthaers 's1968 work - it is not a matter ofindiffereneewhich everyday or political context is suspend-ed by this aesthet ic framing, by the de- andrecontextual ization. It is in fact crucial that i tbe an ideological context , bul an invis ibly ide-01 gieal one, Th e enemy o f v isu al 3It, whichoperates in the realm of the visible, is evidence:that which is ,or seems to be, se lf -evident in therea lm of the vis ible .The map is a document offai th in euidence.Evidence is the care of this visual ideologythat connects i llustrat ions - but also abstractcol r fields, logos, pictograms, even l ines andcontours - so closely with reali ty and the abi li tyto act thar the ideological character of thisautomatism goes unrecognized. Except from anaesthetic perspective: the ideological evidencedisappears precisely where formal beauty, 'pureart' , a rise .Tha t i swhere it begins to be evidentthat everything thai looks l ike one thing couldalso look l ike another. Broodthaers does not ,however, permit this other ideology ~ the ideol-

ogy of pure art - to tr iumph: there : isno purebeauty per se, only ideology crossed our .Art is tic cri terion: causing an immense connec-rion t o crumple using only a minimal quantityof ink.Broodthaers 's work isnot only locatedbetween the genres in the visua l a rts of histime; it is also located between l iterature andpainting. With a small movement, he opens upafield with this piece. His horizon is broad.imilarly, the col lect ion under discussion hereseems to reach very far and yet remains veryconsistent. It i s, on the one hand, a far -rangingcompilation of art is tic acts and objects , some-thing like a cross-section of 00.0 or more hlstor-ieal epochs; 00 the o ther, it runs along" veryconcise forrnu lat ion of a few fundamental prob-lems of art, the publi c sphere , and polincs,I began with a small motion that raised far-reaching, fundamental quest ions. ] would l iketo continue with a very global hypothesis thatwas made with wide-open windows, f rom whichI will then find a path back to individual works.Pol it ical aesthet ics has moved away from itsclassie set of questions in two phases, without

being able to leave them behind entirely. Thesec lass ic quest ions were bow art could dea l with asocial reali ty that lay ent irely outside i tself; howit could ger access to the other public tharexim there - completely ou tside it - and how it.could mobilize it; and finally, what it had tointroduce into this exchange Slid mobilizationf rom i ts essence - however that might bedef ined. Did i t exi st a t a ll outs ide i ts soci al pur-pose? What would be the ontology of pol it icalor critical art?That was the s ta te dur ing the f ir st twenty t- such as Pop Art - laysomewhere between The two. The point of thisis not to creat e an ar t histor ical system. M yinreres is rather in one phenomenon of theconnect ion between art and pol iti cs and i tsantagonis tic morphologies. My thesis is thatthere i s an impli ed rext, an inner core ofenergyin the Annick and Anton Herbert Col lecti ontha t t ries to work OUte lements of the f ir st prax-is from examples of the second. This approach,this focus, led to au oppor tunity in the 1980s toint egrat e a new generation of 3TtiSt5 into thecol lect ion, art is ts whose posicion was in a cer-tain way marked by precisely this tension, thisunresolved confl ict between these two strandsof pol it ical modernism. This was in par t madepossibl e by the a ttempt to se tt le or resolve [hiscon flict and in part by an a rtitude of irony ornegat ion toward the whole constel lation. Bothstances may certainly be found in the work o fartists like Franz West, Maniu Kippenberger,and Mike Kelley.\1(1hatthen would consrirure such a transversemotif , intersect ing both large strands of pol it i-

cal aesthet ics? And bow does it relate ro theposit ions of this second generat ion, whose pro-duct ion began, or at least became visible, in the1980s? M y proposa l. They are quest ions of theconsti tution of the publi c sphere, i n both anart is tic and aesthet ic sense, from an abstractand formal perspec tive as well as 3 phenomeno-logical one, with a committed gaze bu t also asarcast ic one. 'What are the spaces, formsshapes of the public space?Wllat are i ts insti ru-rions? What dialogues take place in these spacesl ind under these condi tions? Final ly, what rela-

Artistlc Theories of Public Space ~ Diedrich Diederichsen 9


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I~

Frenz West, Ordinary language, 1 99 5 [ wi th F ra nz W e st a ndAnton He-bert aaas Van Gavo ro s t raa t . G t 'i e f" l tl

tionship does art adopt toward it? I s it part o fit, a privileged observer, able to intervene?1would like [Q limit myself 10 just a f ew , butnonetheless central, motifs from a w id e variety

o f works and to attemp t to work ou t their per-s isrence, not only as a sign of the specifici ty ofthi s col lec tion but a lso as an unf inished andhence continuing aspec t of the - crit ical orpolitical or self-reflexive - an of the periodbetween 1960 and roday .They are above a llformal propert ies of works, but what they havein common leads to a content-based obl igat ionbetween the mis sing l ink of the two directionsor pract ices described above.A work byFranz West that wa s refined in aseries of phases provides us with our first clues ,

Three versions produced in 1993 were call edDa s b e st el lu : O v al (The Oval en Order) D e r F a l lv on G ra z (The Fal l ofGraz), and D e r N e u e T ir e!(The New Titl e) ; t he version produced in 1995is called O r di na r y L a ng u ag e, an allusion tothemes and problems in analytical philosophyThis work is more a scenario than an insral la -tion, It displays and ironizes the resul t of thedisint egra tion of the project f rom the 19605 ofan art of ideas, an. a rt t ha t a tt acks the questionof i ts ontology on a theore tical leve l as wel l ason B design level. Almost of necessity, this pro-ject had to transform, to disintegrate, inro itsconsriruent elements once irs symbolic inter-ventions had .run into resis tance from a realrela tionship - rhar i s, an economic and poli ti ca 1rel ati onship thar has i ts own inte rest in the pro-duction and uti lization of symbolic productsand architectures. These energies and structures

sravoj Ziiek. FilmstiH OUI of thevideo Da s b e st s /I re O v al (1993)by Bernhard Riff. Joharmes S c hl Bb r ug g e a n d 'F ranz Wes t

cannot, of course, s imply be l ef t [0 art and can -not organize the syst em of an. One resu lt o f thedisintegration in thi confrontation was a cer-tain fet ishized enthusiasm fortheory in the anworJd of the 1990s, but also a. self-reflection,which has a t times become fer ishi zed as wel l,that was only very indirectly connected to theoriginal reasons for media specifici ty and thecri tique of the social and insti tutional frame-work of arr, almost as if it were tied to a kind oftradi tion. The term Neo-Conceptual i sm expressesthis almost traditionalist reference to the olderproject of Conceptual Art very wel l.1\lf ir st glance, West' s work seems ro be anallegory of this cond irion, The splendidly and

lavishly covered benches and couches form akind of auditor ium. At the same r ime, they rep-resent the famous bur a lso highly speci fic ver -sion ofWest' s i dea of a presence of the observerin art. From the outset, his oeuvre has beendis tinguished by the fact that a highly empiri-cal, freq uently arbit rary viewing subject is pres-ent in the work, not as an evocation or a perf o r-rnarive magic but a lmost as it were a saberexperimental set ting, l ike the bodies that wearor hold c lose his PaJ3s ti lcke (Adaprives), Or thepubli c and priva te assembl ies tha t form on mebenches and sofas - in Los Angeles an ins ta lla -tion of his benches in from of MOCA was afavorite meeting place forme homeless, Thisaudience, which is alluded [Qconcretely, inte-gra ted empir ically (as in the photographs of thePqj3slilcke, fo r example), is the comic and yetrea li st ic consequence of the aporias of the theo-retical audience in t he formal des igns of

F ra nz W e ST . 4 Pallsri ick8 , '983

Minimalis t and Conceptual Art . It is analogous10 a theory that has run amok in an amusingway.Even the 'discourse' that the audienceseeks here has disembodied i tself by it simplemethod. The sound always comes f rom theopposi te direc ti on to the image .There is avideo monitor on e ither side of the audiror iumon which an artist importan t loWeSt is seen asa talking head - speaking) preaching, lecturing,d iscussing - but all that is heard is the vo ice ofthe theori st f rom the opposi te side (and viceversa). The grimacing fates have been deprivedo f t heir words. A t the same time their words aremass ively present on the oppos it e side of ' [hescenario,At one point the voice ofa pas sionate ly ges-

rur ing Slavo] Zizek is heard c lear ly - in panbecause he is so loud that he can beheard easi-ly even f rom the other s ide and inpar r becauseLawrence Weiner whose voice occupies theloudspeaker assigned to Ziie.k's face, has JUStfal len silent. Then, asWeiner begins to speak

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again, his calm, tempered American tone i sdrowned cur by the frenzied terminologicalskirmish on Zizek's s ide. By very simple meansWest has placed on s tage the dramati c e lementsof conremporary art: t he discourse , t he (of tenmediated) charismatic presence ofthe artistand/or theor is t, me witnessing presence of anaudience, the media, and '[be installat ion, andbe has left open the question o fwhat is ho ld ingth is arrangement together. On [he one hand, itis ,as described above , the memory of a founda-t iona l golden age of Conceptua l Art , in whicha ll ' the e lements of art and i ts opera tions werenewly negotiable, or seemed '[0 be. And that itis why it was discussed at such length. On theadle r, however , it i s t he cur rent si tuat ion, inwhich i t is precisely the sole absent, unrepre-sent ed e lement tha t holds the syst ems and i tscomponents together namely, the marker.And precisely because i t seems impossible [Qchange i t, it i sdi scus sed at such length. Butnow in an idle and powerless way.

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Em the achievement of this work, wb.ich goesbeyond the allegorization of mi. circumstance,lies in the seemingly loosely arranged theaterthat holds everything together, The looking andthe having to look , me div is ion into act ion andobserver - all of this obeys the construction of atheater, Thethearer as on extremely heteroge-neous and yet archaic" rt form pract ices anunexplained power lO cia e the scene and holdit together , l t s tands for the inf luence of theabsent , of the sp ir it or me ghost, ot the absent19605 and their power to ask fundamenrnlquestions, and for [he absent, or at least unrep-resented, market, which does in fact manage[his today, even if ilgoes undiscussed. The the-arer thus completed is men opened again i"two crucial places: l.The fundamental categoryof the direction of attention and the associated'fourth wail' is called into question by establish-ing two directions, but the self-contained truthof the stage. isdivided in [WO, and its secondhalf is moved behind the observers' backs.2.The benches on which the observers sitdown, and that rhus constitute the space of meaudience - tha t i,the constitutively unmarkedsphere of this theater, its neutral space, whichcan normally be taken in without the need toobserve it - are in rum artworks, Specifically,they are artworks by an artist who, after all,e rablished himself by positing tha t he made aname all. the market by offering to let observersget right in dose, litera Il y [0approach [hemwith objects, The benches are thus marked in adouble way as art per se: 0[\ the one band , asart objects as opposed 10 neutral objects orpure Iurnirure , and on the other , as specif ic ar tobjects that s tand in r el ati on , t o a specific prox-imity to the bodies of the observers - o r just asfrequently [Q the body of a model- that FranzWest initiated.The necessary premises for my thesis - name-ly , that the conceptua I ide of nonconceptual,'embracing' art and the nonconeeprual side ofconceptual, self-reflexive art become entangledat the hear t of the Herbert Collection - werepresumably long since settled forWest by thet ime he began his work . His sculptures can beseen asThe comic conclusion. to the theatrical-ization of sculpture that Michael Fried fearedwould be [he consequence of Minimalism.They derive thei r comedy from me fact malthey translate Fried's the-;'retical doubt, which

lDan Grahom. Publ,c Space/Two Audiences. 1976j wi lh D nn Gr ah am, A nn ick end Anton Herbe rt , 1 9871

isfounded in modernism, into concrete modelsthat naturally look different from the aporias oftheory, but they do so without declaring thetheory's questions to be Obsolete. I t is not with-out reason that West constructs an aporeric the-at rical space, one ihar, in the t ruest sense of thephrase, SiIlS o f f b a ck w a r d, And just as be doesnot juxtapose modernist and later Conceptualideas "S opposites but rather forces them intoconcret ion, he [uxtapcses the embracing an ofhis early years inVienna, an art that diffusesinto Life,with the unwieldy conceptualization,the form of conceiving a transit ion from art tolife: hod ies that are adorned in concepts with-our resulting in an unmarked normality ofadormnenr.Dan. Graham roo always built spaces for thetheory of theater and communication thataddressed the question r am discussing here,frequently in a way that was not dissimilar toWest's. In Graham's work, moreover, one canalso see, as a pure compound, an early exampleof the intersection in theme and subject matterthat may be considered the 'core of energy' ofthe Herbert Collection. Graham always Iormu-la ted his po it ion, which was at base a Concep-

Dan GrahijITl. Two Conscio lJsn ess P ro Jec t lo n /s ) . 1 972

t llal one , in the con text "fWoodstock and laterPunl" with the excessive rituals of the Shakersand the performative practices of J im Morrisonor Pat ti Smith . I t i nor, however , rhe essaysand videos in which he argued out th is debatethat make me drink of Graham in this context,but rather rhe cooler works tha t seem to lead tothe abstraction of social communication andunfold their humor (and truth) by means of asmall laconic gesture. I am thinking, on the oneband, of the Cons ci ou sn e ss P r o je c ti o n (5), found inihe col lec tion in a version f rom 1972 and onefrom 1975, and, on the other of the workP u bl ic S p ac e / ' Ro o A u d i en c es , constructed for theVenice Blcnnale in 1976.The general question of the place, limit, andinstitutional and social conditions enters thelat ter work in the form of the question of the

audience - and specifically I.D the confrontationbetween the a b st ra ct a u di en c e as a category of aConceptualist criticism of art and its institu-t ions on the one hand, and the incorporarion ofthe CDr rerete audience inits specific, contingent,empirical presence when contemporary art isexhibited at the Biennales, Documentas, artfairs, and so on, In this experimental setting,and in several similar ones, Grahnm WaSattempting [0achieve a degree of 0bstracrlytechnical elegance in the formulation of positionon the theory and politics of communication,without forgeuing that this position in particu-lar can tirutes an authorization of the concreteand empirical observer. How can an observerbe introduced as a concept in an exhibitionwithout betraying the suspension of the artist'sconsistently formal solution to the problem,which is , after all, provided by the observer?TIle ' rwo audiences' of Graham's tide solvethe problem in different ways. On the one hand,

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observers view themselves and other observersin their arbitrary and contingent specificity; onthe other, they also see this as an ef fect of arational and transparent construction, and thus

s a predictable, scientifically rational result of aconceptual operation. In addition, observationbecomes Unobject thanks entirely [0 the intro-duct ion of what system theory will later ca ll asecond-order observer, but, unlike in systemtheory, this second-order observer is broughtback to the situated and subjective observer oftile first order. This, of course, results in twoaudiences on the conceptual level as well: thecategorical levels, which cannot in the finalinstance be reconciled with or assimilated byeach other, o f an empirically concrete audienceand of an audience tha t exis IS in tile abstractionof aesthetic and social process and experiences.The Cons ci ou sn e ss l "r o je c rWn ( s) offer a diffe rentreply to this problem; in them, the question of

concretization isapproached, so to speak, morerationalistically and politically 'than empirically,The difference between concrete observers andconceptual abstraction is not simply a categori-cal one. Wbat fall into the abyss that this d is-tinction opens up is that the observers can, forexample , also be female- that is, rha ; they arenot arbitrarily and endlessly different butspecifically and not randomly so, according togender, sex, class, ethniciry and other criteria.In order to answer this question without ques-tionnaires, however, Graham concentrated onthe question of gender and incorporated intohis experimen tal Set!ing the central startingpoint offeminist cultural theory rhar had beendiscussed by LaUtU Mulvey and others in the.1970$: the male gaze, the technological imple-mentation of a patriarchal reg ime of the gaze inthe fr)nn of the camera.

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A man observes 3 woman through a camera;the woman observes herself in a monitor. Bothare urged [0 concentrate exclusively on whatthey observe and [Qarticulate the content oftheir consciousness immediately - Graham'sword is 'verbalize' (whatever prelinguisric con-lent ofconsciousness he may have meant bythat) . According to Graham, the man is occu-pied only with an object , with an Other ; thewoman, by contrast, has [Q articulate herself asboth observer and observed. Graham says thisto counter 3 criticism he anticipates, namely,that he has once again made the woman into 8Uobject. In fact, however, he placed his twoobserver types in an antagonistic installationand revealed them to be const ructs of a techni-cal situation: 'the first-order observer is the onewho observes the objects without seeing himselfobserve; the second-order observer is the onewho watches herself observe. For the timebeing, that only works in the mirror - or, in thi scase, in a cleverly socially refracted mirror: theman as a mirror machine,This distinction between the two types ofobserver according to gender difference, whichis so vexing in the light of recent gender theory,need not necessari ly be read as an anthropologi-cal commcnrary but can alsobe understood asthe poin t of a cri tique, Graham sensed thatsornething was not yet righr with it. Because the'se:>.1.131dimension ' of the work was not yet suffi-ciently borne out in the second version a na kedcameraman had to observe a naked woman. TIlesexual component was now revealed.The naked figures are O f course always par-ticularly embroiled in the dialectic of concepru-al abstraction and phenomenological concrete-ness. 10 an, the naked body is the body of themodel, the paradigmatic and quasi-conceptualbody; nr 'the same time it is the bare, defense-less body, the one by which the individual qual-iry exposes itself without reification by the con-ventions of fashion and uniform. After, thenaked human being , the human being as such,always bas a concrete gender identity, Graham '5naked people resemble in their sobriety theones who try out FranzWest's PafJst i icRe. Theyseem to want to stand for something, very para-digmatically and abstractly; they eem to knowthat this, in itself is comic. But unforrunarely theperformance had to be repeated before wecould hear what was filling their consciousness.

Mike, Kellev. Exploring. '1985 !From the series: Plato's Cave,Romko's Chapel, Lincoln's Profi le}

The phenomenology of a world of conceptspurif ied of phenomena brings us back [0Broodthaers. The first stroke, mentioned above,simultaneously established and dissolved a dif-ference: that between art and non-ar t (or poetryand politics). Inthe 19605 and 19705, followingBrian O'Doherty, the phenomenological side ofthe art insti tu tions - museum and gallery - andtheir magic power were identified by thedemarcation lines of the:'white cube', whichhave since become mobile as well . In his b lue-prints for museums Broodthaers formulated hispoet ic cri tique of the museums from the logicof assembling and collecting, classifying anddistinguishing, separating and assigning. MikeKelley and Martin Kippenberger evolvedanother phenomenological cri tiq ue of the insri-rution by broadening it to include psychoanaly-si s - if not trauma theory. In Kelley's case, i t isthe uncanny spaces, the caves, the spelunking,and the tunnel with which Kelley has workedextensively in both exhibit ion projects and the-oretical texts - one need only think of his 1986book P la to 's C a ve , R o th ho 's C h ap el , U n co il '! '5Profi le. There i sa drawing in the HerbertCollection from the related exhibit ion that

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eibortS us to crawl under it l ike a speleologisr.The writing on the drawing does not, however,peak of the heurist ic necessities of caveSesearch, but rather explicitly states that this~wJing for the sake of knowledge iss ti ll crawl-ing! CrawHWm1l .Degradation for the sake of knowledgeremains degradation. TIle physical degradationcorresponds (0 the moral ne. Resea rch notonly of caves but al 0 the general exploration ofspaces that supply prefabri~ated and henceunquestionable condi nons IS always built on anadaptstion to the space. Its architecture is norneutral; it is not jus t a demarcation; and norJUSl symbolic and definitional; it becomes psy-chotropic and sadomasochistic. Museums andother ins ti tut ions are concrete not only in anarchitectonic and polit ical sense; they are alsoconcrete in a psychological and phenomenolog-ical anticipation of all those who participate inartistic ccmrn unication . .Nor only are they notan asylum that locks out the relationships; i t isonly through them that a relationship isestab-lished: namely, the relationships that seek in aninsti tutions a suspension of reali ty and its prag-matism, caught up in a reali ty that intervenesfar more deeply.This psychotropic and sexual component ofartistic communication wa s explored intensely byMartin Kippenberger, beginning, in parallelwith Kelley, in the rnid-1980s. At the same timehe was interested in all the possible fictive globalorganizations of 'the system of art, and his blue-print for them can be interpreted as a proposal toimprove i t aswell as a car icature of i t. Several ofthe essential motif-sof his late work premiered ina real cave, a subterranean construction site thatnow functions as a subway station inVienna.This was nor only where the carousel made i tsfirst appearance; i t was also the beginning ofthe project of a worldwide network of subwayentrances: the .Metro-Net. Its point, however,was precisely that this network of enrrances didnot connecr entrances, only portals.One of Kippenberger's most importantthemes was the question of the possibili ty oftheartist figure. On w e one hand, i t seemed to bes tr ipped of i ts powers after the 1970s; on theother , i t conrinned to be present as a . ghos t -indeed, in its apparent absence in critical, pro-cedural art , i t often appeared in a form that wasfar less vulnerable to attack. If the arrists whose

Mar t in ' K ip p f ln ba rg e r , Sp id e rm a n A re li er . ' \9 9 6

careers began in the L9BOscorrected the courseof the conceptual-crit ical generation by demys-tifying the demystification of art and revealingthe unspoken assumptions of this project , thenfor Kippenberger this was the artist's unde-clared project. Whereas Kelley demonstrated tothe crit ique of ins ti tu tion the uncanniness of aninsti tution purged conceptually, and thus all themore frightening, Kippenberger held np topostmodernism's criticism of the subject theart is t-zombie, whom be had traced through avariety ofs tages and phases, modeled, and evenembodied. TIle last model was Spiderrnan, andits particular validity derives not simply fromthe fact that i t was one of Kippenberger's lastgreat works. It was an attempt [0trace thestrangest constant in modernism: m e isolatedart is t in the studio , inan oddly exposed semi-sacred space dedicated to the cult of an egothar bas special connections Co higher truths.A sadly comic and yet almost invincible super-hero like Spiderman.Kippcnberger integrated many allusions andderails into his S p id e rm a n A t el ie r . Leaning onthe walls of the s tudio were monochrome panelpain tings with the names of drugs . The layoutof these paintings recalls Mel Ramsden's con-ceptual point ing and On Kawara 's date paint -ings. Both artists stood for a desubiecrivizarionof the epitome of the subjectivist medium:modem painting and its fetishization of theindividual handwriting. But whereas Ramsdenand Kawara attempted to formulate seriously, if

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laconically, what COli Id be 'objectively' recordedin an oil paint ing, Kippenberger ident ified medrugs - mar is, the influence on me state ofmind and subject ivit y that was meant to beread automatically from a picture plane. Ioncetold Kippenberger about a DuMont book fromthe 1960s or 19705 about the connect ionbetween drugs .and artJt included a platewithsix photographs of spiders' webs made afte r mespiders had been given various drugs. Thisobjective, chemically demonstrable subjectiviryof the drugs, or their objectively dis tractinginfluence OD art , fascinated Kippenberger. Itwas precisely his image of the art is t; rhe effortto capture, humil iate, formulate the art is t layprecisely in the objectivity of me subiectivirygranted m e art is t by soc ie ty - a dul l, pre -dictable thing that cannot s imply be discardedor ignored because i t is the precondit ion forany suspension of me daily regime ofcommu-nicat ion: not because of i ts bri ll iant , unpre-dictable abundance but because i t is sri 1 1 theundefeated, reigning, open posit ion that isrequired by every otherwise dosed system likethe system of arr, The system usual ly changeswhen - and, unfortunately, sometimes onlywhen - the personnel changes , Replacing thisopen posi ti on with one Or more others is one ofthe prospects Or plans of Kippenberger's lateprojects on artistic subjectivity and its critique.The works in thi s coll ec ti on have one thing incommon that I can now perhaps identi fy more

specifically and yet more generally. They formu-l ate theor ies on me soc ia l condit ions of com-municat ion and the interrupt ions of communi-cation (i.e., an). They do so with material matderives born from. the direct communication ofeveryday media and from the tradit ions of art,and they usually a tt empt to make an up- to-datestatemen t about both. The fact that it is nor theart is tic discourse, which,as a rule is interwovenin the network of other philosophica l and theo-ret ical discourses, but rather the artworks them-selves that produce theories is an i dea tha t i ss ti ll underdeve loped, though it has come uprepeatedly in recent years , for example in thedebare on visual cul ture studies .The theori es formula ted by the works tha t I

have mentioned in Ole course of i llustrat ing myth es is O n a ' core of energy' in me HerbertCollect ion are almost all preliminary works fura crit ical theory ofpubli c space , of me role of

the viewer, and of imeract iviry, which can per-haps only be ful ly appreci ated in limes of anadvanced d ig ital public sphere - and mat istrue o f many of the other works in the collec-t ion as.well , works by Giulio Paolini ,Art & Language, Jan Dibbets, MichelangeloPistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Bruce Nauman,an d others. A digital public sphere w i . I J have alot to do with mobile installat ions, me psy-chctropics of spaces, and the uncanny presenceand absence of SUbject ive creators behind thescenes. In that sense it is only logical that thecoll ec tors Annick and Amon Herbert a re work-ing to combine their collection with a researchcente r, since many of the works in the col lec-lion function like theoretical models 018[:illus-crate why the exist ing purely conceptual modelsdo not work. But without a ttempting to replacethem. Anyone who wants [0work with them,who wants to engage with [hem in a contempo-rary way, wil l have "to pursue the problems andformation of concept s of rhe present and thefuture to which they have. contr ibut ed so much.

Minimal Art, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art:Ref lec tions on the Herbert Col lect ion.Anne Rorimer

Such is the b readth and depth of the HerbertCollecrion that an entire book on the arr of the19605 and 1970s could be written based on themany exemplary works included in ir,As agroup, works in the col lect ion point to the revo-lutionary activiry occurring at a time whenlong-h.eld conventions associated with paintingand sculpture were being questioned or over-turned in the interest. of aesthet ic renewal . Eachwork, separately, speaks volumes aboutinncva-r ions in art product ion labe led by rer rns sud. asMinimal art , Art e Povera, or Conceptual a rt.These terms, although by no means carved instone, identify shared methods and goals pur-sued by arti st s on both sides of the Atlanti cduring the years leading up to and extendingbeyond 1968.A narrative about the period, which here will[Ouch on a selection of major pieces, couldbegin in relation to almost anyone o f theHerbert Collect ion's impressive assembly ofworks. For the sake of argument, however,4 G l a s sc h e ib e n (1967) by Gerhard Richter offersa useful springboard for this essay. A keystonework, i t proffers the idea that paint ing, an aes -thetic reali ty unto i tself, has the capacity todel iver visual information either with or withourliteral reference to t he rea li ty of the wor ld.With i ts dear acknowledgment of the tradi tionof painting, 4 Glas s che ibe i encompasses the ful lreali ty of i ts real-world environment through i tspresentat ion of four separately framed, rectan-gula r glass voids . Unlike the opaque canvas sur-face of 11 painting, however, its four rectangularpanes of glass are colorless , t ransparent , andunadorned. Presented one bes ide the otherbetween hinged metallic frames that are sup-ported by floor-co-ceil ing poles , the glass panelmay be t il ted up and down to varying degrees .As Ole art is t has st ated, this work a llows one to

16

\ I

1 \ /,.-

I ,G e fh a rd R ic h1 e r. , 4 GI I lS!ichoibBn, 1967

' see every thing but grasp nothing." The f ramedpanes of glass are empty despi te the paradoxicalfacr thar each presents to full view whatever orwhomever is in mel t visua l range . Reple te withthe surrounding rea li ty of the room where it isdisplayed, 4 Glas s che iben may be seen as a kindof ideat ional contraption designed by the art is tas a counterpoint to me opaqueness of a paint-ed canvas. As such, i t resonates with paint ingsby Richter from me last fou r decades that, nomatt er what their subjec t or s ty le , seek to res is tsubjective, aurhcrial comment.The color-sample grids of Richter 's Color Chartpaint ings - exemplified by 1024 F arb en in 4Pel"TJ1Watifme", (1973) - masterfully succeed in.the representation of purely objective, chromaticfact. Pml1l1ranonen resul ted from Richter 's appli -cati on ofa ' syst em which, based on the threeprimary colors plus grey, permitted a progres-sive differentiation in constantly uniform steps.4x4~16x4=64x4=256x4= 1024.'2The adopt ion of a systematic, mathematicalapproach to the organizat ion of small "Variouslycolored rectangles within the large-scale rectan-gle ofa canvas made it pos sibl e for the arti st to

Reflections on the Herber t Coll ect ion - Anne Ror lmer 17

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Diederichsen, Diedrich,