New Light on Weimar - Weimar, Germany

Art in America, July, 1999 by David Galloway

The third component of this unique exhibition, which focuses on official and unofficial art from the period of the East German regime, is similarly low-key. There is no attempt to sanitize or embrace the products of Socialist Realism, merely to give the works a forum in which they can speak--for better or worse--for themselves. Industrial scaffolding, draped in plastic, has been used to create a vast rotunda in the Gauforum, where some 500 paintings jostle for space. They were taken over en bloc, and without regard for chronology or theme or artistic quality, from the holdings of former workers' collectives, factories, government offices and museums. Even among the official paintings that hang in the rotunda, there is considerably more individuality than in the show of Nazi art--at times, indeed, a certain experimental flair, even if the overall impression is one of triumphant mediocrity. The essentially uncurated, lock-stock-and-barrel approach can be questioned, of course, as can the small, unrepresentative ensemble of works by "unofficial" East German artists. And yet, taken as a whole, the trio of shows graphically documents the tragic influence of totalitarianism and dictatorship on the artistic spirit.

Weimar's Contemporary Venues

The Maenz collection can scarcely close the yawning gaps left behind by 60 years of persecution and repression, but its presence is, at the very least, an important symbolic gesture. Otherwise, Weimar boasts only a single address for contemporary art: the ACC (Autonomous Cultural Center), containing two galleries and a cafe that helps cover operating costs. The experimental institution originated in 1988, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, when students occupied a derelict house where Goethe (inevitably) had found his first residence in Weimar. Led by a whirlwind named Frank Motz, now the ACC's director, the students staged concerts and film marathons that attracted as many as 200 spectators and regularly raised the hackles of local party functionaries. Immediately after the reunification of the two Germanies, and before Western investors could snap up the choice property, Mott was able to secure the house with the aid of private sponsors. A small gallery, focused primarily on art from and about Weimar, was created above the cafe, and in 1996 additional exhibition spaces were rented in an adjacent house.

Here Mott and his partner, Andrea Dietrich, have pursued a program that few contemporary museums could match. They have documented a forbidden past with shows by such classic modernists as Paul Klee, provided the first, local solo exhibitions of such influential contemporaries as Cindy Sherman and William Wegman (who was delighted at the thought of bringing his weimaraners to Weimar), and scandalized the conservative majority by placarding the city with erotic photographic images by the French team Pierre and Gilles.

Simultaneously, the ACC spotlighted the achievements of local artists and inaugurated an international artist-in-residence program. With "Europe in the Box," the center has just staged its 99th exhibition in less than 10 years. Since the designation of European Cultural Capital was established in 1985, a total of 15 cities have enjoyed a year in the spotlight. The ACC chose one younger artist from each of those cities and sent him or her to visit colleagues in the city that had been selected as cultural capital for the following year. Thus, Philip Huyghe traveled from Antwerp to Lisbon, and Dany Prum from Luxembourg to Copenhagen, as roving ambassadors appraising the terrain of "the new Europe." The artists each responded to the experience within the confines of a wooden box measuring 23 5/8 inches per side, in which they created assemblages and shrinelike compositions or simply packed the components for room-filling installations. That such an international vision should emerge here, in a town unworthy of inclusion in official German train schedules, would no doubt have provoked a chuckle from the immortal Goethe.