Wolfgang Laib: Transcendent Offerings

Art in America, March, 2001 by Carol Diehl

With a few carefully chosen natural substances--beeswax, stone, milk, pollen--Laib constructs simple but potent monuments to being and the nothingness that forever brackets it.

A life summed up in art is a beautiful thing, and the work of Wolfgang Laib--the subject of a retrospective that opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and travels this month to the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle--is made up of objects in which the man and the art are deftly melded. In Laib's sculpture, the mystical rituals of the East are recast in the language of modernism and executed in materials found near his rural home in southern Germany: beeswax; stone and marble; and the rich, yellow pollen of flowers and trees. A singular statement eclectically arrived at, this work is rooted in the rich intellectual milieu provided by the artists' parents, exceptionally thoughtful and well-educated people who combined their desire to heal--his father is a doctor--with strong interests in Eastern cultures and Western art.

Laib, who was born in 1950, today lives in relative isolation with his wife and teenage daughter on property he shares with his parents outside a small farming village. While Laib has taken over a couple of ancient outbuildings for living and for his studio, his mother and father still occupy the house in which Laib spent his adolescence. In 1960, despite Germany's strict zoning laws requiring that houses be clustered in towns and villages, and specifying every detail of a building down to the size of the windows, Dr. Laib, together with a young Swiss architect, built a modernist glass house in the middle of a vast meadow surrounded by forest. As the family began to take extensive trips throughout Europe and later to Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Mesopotamia and India (where Dr. Laib ultimately undertook to develop and support an entire village), the house became a reflection of their experiences. Over time it was emptied of furniture until almost nothing was left in it but a few well-chosen Eastern religious sculptures; the Laibs slept on futons and ate their vegetarian meals sitting on the floor. This extreme simplicity and orientation to the floor would later become important elements in Laib's work.

On a trip to Paris, the 15-year-old Laib was introduced to the work of Brancusi, whose rebuilt studio, then in the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, became a place he would visit again and again. That same year the family made a pilgrimage by car to Romania to see Brancusi's Endless Column, Table of Silence and Gate of the Kiss. A loner, Laib had only one friend at the time, a local landscape painter who was his grandfather's age. This man, a friend of the family, was influential in their adoption of a pared-down lifestyle, and he also introduced them to Lao Zi and Chinese philosophy.

When it came time for Laib to go to college, a choice had to be made. He had wanted to be an artist, but the artists he had met, except for his older friend, were uninspiring. Responding also to a certain pressure from his father, Laib rejected art school to study medicine in the medieval city of Tubingen, augmenting his medical classes with lectures in a range of humanistic subjects including Indian language and culture. He spent six months in rural southern India writing his thesis on its drinking water; when he came back to Germany, he did not return immediately to school. Instead, he spent half a year chiseling away at a boulder he had found in the countryside near his home, shaping it until it was long and rounded like a giant watermelon, its surface smooth, black and polished. When he finished the sculpture, he placed it in his parents' living room, where it remains today.

Although Laib completed his studies, he found the medical view of the body too limited, too literal, and he never became a practicing doctor. The stone, which he named Brahamanda, a Sanskrit term meaning "Egg of the Universe," became the physical embodiment of his decision to become an artist. The next year the family traveled for the second time to Konya, Turkey, where Laib made another Brahamanda to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the death of the poet Rumi and placed it near the entrance to Rumi's tomb. Taken for a meteorite with the potential to make barren women fertile, it was visited by so many hopeful females that the stone had to be moved to a more protected place.

Because the second of these works was unavailable and Laib feared damage to the first, neither is in the current retrospective. Instead, that significant period is represented by eight other shaped and polished stones of various sizes and colors, each small enough to be held in the hand, which Laib arranges on the floor in a loose circle. Although described in the museum literature as egg-shaped, they are actually longer and narrower than an egg--more like gelatin capsules in form--thereby serving as a literal representation of Laib's transition from doctor to sculptor. That association aside, there is something almost unbearably perfect in their form. At the same time, they project the sense, which permeates Laib's work, of activity internalized. It's not surprising that the Rumi Brahamanda was seen as having special powers; the stones are like pellets of contained energy.