Thomas Schütte. No Heroic Illusions
Since the late 1970s, when he studied in Düsseldorf with German painter Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte (b. 1954, Oldenburg) has been subverting the language of sculpture through a manifold, eclectic oeuvre. For the occasion of his first Parisian retrospective at Monnaie de Paris, Max L. Feldmann has retraced the main steps in the career of an artist who “refuses to conform to any labels, systems of thought, theoretical constructions, or totalizing ideologies.” Bedtime Story No. 6: The Strike – But Life Goes On..., a short story written by Schütte in 1993, accompanies the essay.
In a 1989 review of an exhibition at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, New York Times writer Michael Brenson describes a “puzzling” work of art. A drawing of what looks like a futuristic apartment complex hangs on the wall. This form reappears in installation form on the gallery floor made of raw but cleanly cut plywood with cardboard wrapped around some pillars. A fourinch-tall toy man leans against one of them. Part of it appears to have been turned on its side by an earthquake. It gives, Brenson says, “no illusion of actual architecture.”
“What are we looking at?” Brenson asks. “And in the drawing, why was this skyscraper in the middle of nowhere? Is it architecture, sculpture or design? Is it a blueprint for the future or a commemoration of something past? Is this a big toy or is it functional? Is this work a game, or is it real?”
The exhibition was “Big Buildings,” the first American solo show by Thomas Schütte. Thirty years later, after major retrospectives at the Serpentine Gallery, London (2012), the Beyeler Foundation, Basel (2013), and the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2016), Schütte’s first Parisian retrospective, “Three Acts,” takes place this year at Monnaie de Paris.
The retrospective is named after Schütte’s three-part painting series “Dreiakter (Three Acts)” (1982). The first act shows a series of equally sized green bottles lined up and receding into the distance, alluding to the industrialized uniformity of how art is made and perceived. Act two shows a white Volkswagen logo against a lilac and tangerine background, like a parody of color-field painting, suggesting that industrialized aesthetic experience can only produce logos, copyrights, and trademarks. The third act shows three red-orange flags fluttering gaily in the breeze, signifying a range of new possibilities without saying if they are trustworthy.
The Paris retrospective’s three acts not only reflect the structure of the painting series, but show different sides of Schütte. The first act covers the monumental and miniscule scale of Schütte’s figurative work. This includes pieces from the series “United Enemies” (1993-2011), “Frauen (Women)” (1998-2006), and “Vater Staat (Father State)” (2007-10). The second act deals with Schütte’s representations of death, including death masks, wilted flowers, and funeral urns. The third act contains architectural models, including the “One Man House” series (2003-present), Holiday Home for Terrorists (2006-9), and Kristall II (2014), a life-sized scale house for meditation into which the visitor may enter.
Brenson’s questions about “Big Buildings” still make sense. They apply not only to individual works, but to Schütte’s approach, attitudes, and position in an art-historical narrative. Is Schütte a modernist or anti-modernist? Is his work political or anti-political? Is he, personally, a humanist or misanthrope? Answering these questions is far from easy.
We cannot neatly place Schütte in a history of contemporary art. Nor can we tell a clear story about how his work develops, as he refuses to conform to any labels, systems of thought, theoretical constructions, or totalizing ideologies. Schütte’s corpus consequently has no internal developmental logic of its own, and parallel tendencies in what he makes and how he makes it appear at different times. His smooth, plump glazed ceramic “Vases” series (2005), for example, are within a year of both the series “Heads” (2006), glazed ceramic busts with typically grotesque, sinister facial expressions, and the permanent installation Ganz Große Geister (Really Big Ghosts) (2005), three wobbly-looking three-meter-high yellow ghost figures made of enamel on cast aluminium, placed on a concrete platform outside the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Schütte’s crisscrossing methods echo how he talks about himself. While this might appeal to historians of art criticism, it leaves no evolutionary story where the artist’s biographical details link to specific facts about the works. Readers of his interviews will even find
Schütte denying anything the interviewer attributes to him. It is like listening to a squabble between children in the back of a car – “anything you say I am, I’m not” – with Schütte playing both roles himself.
Born in historic Oldenburg, West Germany in 1954, a visit to documenta 5 at the age of 18 seems to have left a lasting impact on the young Thomas Schütte. This was his first encounter with the work of Sol LeWitt, Blinky Palermo, and future-professor Daniel Buren, and he came away with an expanded sense of the free use of ideas and materials. Schütte would go on to participate in three more editions of documenta.
From 1973 to 1981, Schütte studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Gerhard Richter, Fritz Schwegler, Daniel Buren, and legendary art historian Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. He was thus exposed to the challenges posed to modernist orthodoxy by minimalism and conceptual art. As a student, Schütte was mainly interested in fakery, artifice, camouflage, and the ironizing of beauty. The hideous visages with which Schütte is often associated would, however, only begin to appear in his work in the 1980s, at the same time as his cleaner, more rigid architectural forms. This is just one story, and cannot account for the multiple interactions between conceptual art, architecture and politics in Schütte’s work, let alone his ongoing reflections on his own relation to the modernist tradition. His art-world reception is, however, much easier to trace.
Four years after the Marian Goodman exhibition, writer Noemi Smolik would state that Schütte’s solo show at Produzenten Galerie, Hamburg, was his “breakthrough” (ArtForum, December 1993). Schütte has won the Art Prize of the City of Wolfsburg, Germany (1996), the Kurt Schwitters Prize (1998), the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale (2005), and the Düsseldorf Prize (2010), previously assigned to Bruce Nauman, Marlene Dumas, and Rosemarie Trockel, and his work is now held in the collections of the Tate, the Clark Institute, MoMA, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Making sense of Schütte’s relation to art history is, however, much harder.
Schütte places his own project firmly within the classical project of figuration, from monumental ancient Egyptian sculpture to the heavy figures of Maillol and Matisse’s brutal sculptures. He also says, however, that he never thinks about the history of sculpture, only its future. An interview with contemporary art historian Rainald Schumacher adds further difficulties. Schütte says he is not an “avant-garde” figure making the future appear in the present, but part of a “rear-guard” who turn back to the past, opening future possibilities by looking at what modernism has neglected and forgotten. “In my eyes,” he says in an interview with James Lingwood, “the figurative tradition failed at the point when the artist had to create heroes in a democratic system, which nowadays is something television networks do much more effectively.” This is because, Schütte thinks, power is no longer embodied by a lone monarchical figure. This theme is everywhere in Schütte, no matter what he says.
One prominent example is Die Fremden (The Strangers) (199192), a group of life-sized glazed ceramic human figures made in the style of folk sculpture or wooden children’s toys. Each helpless-looking figure carries huge suitcases, boxes, or bags of their belongings. Their eyes are cast down, giving them a sorrowful expression, as if waiting for someone to treat them with a basic hospitality that never comes. Schütte says that he made these figures in response to televised footage of Kurds fleeing northern Iraq during the first Gulf War and Russians and others from the collapsing Soviet Union. At the same time, the German public sphere was full of questions about what defines a “German,” with answers ranging from passport to blood, country of birth, language, and mentality. The Strangers thus makes the viewer ask what makes these figures “other.” The viewer cannot tell if they are leaving or arriving. Nor do we know what they are carrying in their luggage. They bring not just their personal belongings – things that might look different from our possessions – but also new cultural treasures, attitudes, values, and quite possibly trauma.