New Light on Weimar - Weimar, Germany

Art in America, July, 1999 by David Galloway

The short-term projects that make up "Light on Weimar" acquire a special resonance in a city ponderously encumbered by historic artifacts. So, too, does the Artists Garden established by Barbara Nemitz, who teaches at the Bauhaus University while keeping an atelier in Berlin. Works like Rainer Matysik's Botanic Sculpture, a circle of saplings bent gently toward one other by retaining rings, will take years to assume their final form, while Laura Stein's All about Eden, a makeshift arrangement of flowers and shrubs in bright red-orange pots, must be renewed each spring. Only Daniel Spoerri's Sunbathing Lawn: Keep Off the Grass makes an unmistakably overt sculptural statement in the form of oversized, grass-covered couches. In the Artists Garden, situated in a pastoral stretch of woods and meadows along the Ilm, visitors must literally search for living works that blend into their surroundings. This is the best and, perhaps, the only location from which the shadow of Buchenwald briefly recedes.

There, too, art has been integrated into a setting maintained as both a memorial and a warning. In addition to a permanent exhibition of works created on the site by onetime inmates of the camp, in an effort to comprehend their own experiences, one encounters works by contemporary artists who attempt to lend the horrors of the past a current relevance. None of these is so moving or so disturbingly, irrelevantly lovely as the photographic still lifes of Jerusalem-born Naomi Tereza Salmon. Isolated against gleaming white backgrounds are the banal, battered daily objects to which prisoners clung: worn shaving brushes, for example, and hand-carved combs whose patinas make them seem suffused with the rich coloration of icons. In the treatment of these mute witnesses to genocidal terror, nothing is beautified, yet all is somehow beatified.

Artists who work in Weimar are inevitably drawn into the myriad contradictions of the city's past. The Wuppertal-based photographer Ute Klophaus was commissioned to undertake just such a schizophrenic journey, and for her exhibition "Mythos Weimar" at the Schiller Museum she produced 170 black-and-white photographs of the city. Best known for her 20 years of photographic collaboration with Joseph Beuys, Klophaus has had considerable difficulty in moving out of the guru's shadow. Yet she has long since developed an idiosyncratic style of coarse-grained black-and-white photographs. Indeed, the fragment and the oblique, overlooked angle are her specialties, and "Mythos Weimar" thus marked a refreshing departure from the technicolor perfection with which "Germany's prettiest town" is regularly promoted. But the same off-kilter vision is applied--one is tempted to say indiscriminately--to the residences of Goethe and Schiller, to cobblestone patterns and door knockers, and to Buchenwald interiors. To be sure, the inherent contradictions, including the dangers of estheticizing evil, are not of Klophaus's own making, and it would be wrong to fault her considerable accomplishment in refocusing the Weimar myth. Nonetheless, her greatest achievement may consist in having made so graphically clear the irresolvable paradoxes which lurk at the heart of the Weimar experience.