January 1983 - 10 20 30 40 - a look back at Wolfgang Max Faust's essay on Zeitgeist

Twenty years ago, Artforum addressed "Zeitgeist," a major international group survey trumpeting the return of painting. Senior editor Eric Banks looks back at German critic Wolfgang Max Faust's essay on that controversial Berlin exhibition.

FOR COCURATOR CHRISTOS JOACHIMIDES, the exhibition represented "a titanic battle, riddled with contradictions, before the walls of Troy.... Walls which history may often demolish, but which still encircle our consciousness." For critic Douglas Crimp, it was a brazenly reactionary "denial of the realities of the political climate," excluding "any art that might unsettle the mystificatory tendencies which [the curators] presented as exemplary of the spirit of the times." Revolution or palace coup? Whatever else might be said of the 1982 Berlin group show "Zeitgeist," it struck a nerve--no minor feat, following, as it did, on the heels of Documenta 7 and the 40th Venice Biennale. Indeed, Joachimides and Norman Rosenthal's forty-six-artist neo-expressionist survey, staged a few yards from the Berlin Wall at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, incited as much rancorous criticism as any early-'80s exhibition.

Artforum's response to "Zeitgeist," published twenty years ago this month, was itself pretty zealous. For the German critic and art historian Wolfgang Max Faust the emphatic "return to painting" championed by the exhibition signaled nothing less than another crowning, originary moment in postwar art: "What the 1982 Venice Biennale and Documenta 7 did not or could not show is made the center of attention here. Just as art had to 'go through' language (conceptual art), nature (land art), technical media (photography, film, video), the artist's body (body art), and physical action (happenings, performances), presently much of its development seems to need to 'go through' images." It was as if Faust had happily found himself in the middle of "Primary Structures" or "When Attitudes Become Form." He delved into the broader implications of the art hanging in the former crafts museum: The liberatory focus on "figurative expression" enabled a "multitude of stylistic possibilities" rather than the "continuation of a o ne-track tradition" in painting. As he worked his way through the contributors to the exhibition--father figures like Polke, Beuys, Twombly, and Baselitz, the Italian contingent of Chia, Clemente, and Cucchi, young Germans ranging from Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Salome to odd-fellow upstarts Walter Dahn and Werner Buttner, and a passel of Americans on the uptick (Schnabel, Salle, Rothenberg, Borofsky)--he spotted a salutary "esthetic of dispersal": This development makes possible a "multiple self that detaches itself from our familiar conceptions of a functioning subjectivity and of an identity found through art."

In conception and execution, "Zeitgeist" encouraged grand critical statements tying together the various tendencies in the show. Most famously, Joachimides and Rosenthal commissioned eight key artists to create thirty-two paintings in a four-by-three-meter format, and the results surrounded Beuys's sprawling installation Hirschdenkmaler (Monuments to deer, 1982). (Perhaps swept up in the "spirit of the time," Salle, Crimp notes, went so far as to title his contributions Zeitgeist Nr. I., Zeitgeist Nr. 2, etc.) The eclecticism of the show was matched by the strange-bedfellows catalogue, a single volume bringing together Robert Rosenblum, Hilton Kramer, Paul Feyerabend, and Thomas Bernhard. In Faust's reading, "eclecticism," in fact, emerges as a shining star in the constellation of virtues associated with the show--pluralism, historicism, "style," a knowing condition in which the "new painting" would paradoxically deny itself "inventiveness." Whether such a "painted philosophy," which dovetailed with a form of postmodernism emerging in the art world at the time, was quite so self-conscious of the world-transforming role conferred by the exhibition title, I have my doubts. The angsty, Sorrows of Young Werther mood of neo-expressionism--the agonal existentialism, the ersatz-Greco titles that would have embarrassed Hans Hofmann in his deepest Memoria in Aeternum mode, the breezy way that the critic can remark that "the new painting refers to a realm beyond language, to a seeing saturated by history and desiring both the provocation and the destruction of history"--always felt stage-managed, more prop than conviction.

Given all his gushing over the New Image, Faust's review adroitly managed to keep one foot solidly planted in the old. Where the "Zeitgeist" partisans emphasized the work's taboo-breaking revolt against the legacy of modernist art practice--the "ivory towers where artists of an earlier decade painstakingly calculated hairbreadth geometries, semiotic theories, and various visual and intellectual purities" (Rosenblum)--for Faust it mobilized an appeal to codes of "progress in the arts" that could have been lifted straight from the mid-century modernist book. "Whether the 'route through' painting will lead onward," he writes, "or will actually arrive somewhere, remains to be seen. Just where it is headed is an open question. When conceptual art began, Seth Siegelaub insisted that art has to change what you expect from it. The statement is also applicable in regard to images today." Perhaps this was the last moment such rhetoric was available to criticism. As much stock of the old as shock of the new, Faust's "Ze itgeist" response had a most untimely edge.