Günther Uecker

Gunter Uecker

A German artist who wants you to feel the pain

Gunther Uecker is one of the most prominent members of the German art movement Zero and is presenting some of his works at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum

By David Momphard

In Thus Spake ZarathustraFriedrich Nietzsche opined that anyone whose task it is to create has first to destroy and "break values into pieces". This same belief lies at the heart of works by the artist Gunther Uecker, whose collection of 17 works of art are installed at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum now through Jan. 11.

Uecker's star rose in the international art scene during the 1960s as a core member of the group Zero, along with Heinz Marck and Otto Piene. The Dusseldorf-based group was strongly influenced by French artist Yves Klein and advocated taking art to its root -- starting from zero.

His first use of techniques radically invasive to his materials came when he began shooting arrows at the paintings adorning the walls of his studio. He was thrilled by the way the stark shadows of the arrow shafts divided the picture visually and shared his discovery with other Zero members.

The group would later experiment with embedding packets of paint under a huge canvas covered with white distemper, then firing rifles at it. Bullets that happened to strike a paint packet would result in paint splattering and oozing from the "wound" -- a visceral reaction that fascina-ted Uecker.

Thus, "inhumanity" became a central theme of Uecker' s work and nails invading wood became his preferred means to convey man's relationship with the world around him -- a fact which is obvious to visitors to the exhibition. What is not obvious is the inspiration for the works on display, each of which was created between 1990 and 1992.

The wall dividing Uecker's native Germany had fallen the year before and it was among the more turbulent times the country has known.

One event in particular that struck Uecker was a period of about a week, when hundreds of neo-Nazis went on a rampage chasing, beating and in some cases killing migrant workers in the country. Skinheads pulled foreigners from their homes into the street and their violence was cheered on by thousands of onlookers.

Piles of tires burned while music was played nearby and hawkers sold beer out of carts on the street.

Uecker holed himself up in his studio following the riots and began producing works of striking, disturbing visual textures: Tree, a 90cm-tall stump with topped by a canopy of tangled nails;

Painterly Garden, a 2m-wide panel of wood brushed with white distemper with sharp, fist-sized stones pounded through; and one of the more disturbing,Aggressive Field, a 2m-square panel with a grid penciled onto it of 5cm squares. At each of the pencil-mark intersections, a large nail has been driven from behind.

The varying shadows from the protruding nails combine with the perfectly straight graphite pencil markings to create a dizzying effect akin to an optical illusion. Like many of Uecker' s works, it' s simultaneously intriguing and off-putting.

Of note in the exhibition is a work that Uecker has transcribed for a Chinese-speaking audience. 60 Words from the Old Testament gleans from that work a complex vocabulary regarding hurt and pain. The Chinese characters for each word have been brushed onto separate panels to replace their German counterparts from the original.

Gunther Uecker Cuscino 1965.

TRA; the edge of becoming, palazzo fortuny

...Uecker began to investigate the potential of nails as a material for his art. Initially, his experiments were an extension of his monochromes, as he embedded the nails into the surface of single-colored paintings and objects. Although he sometimes applied them in informal patterns across the picture plane, in many works the nails mapped a gridlike pattern, fusing the monochrome and the grid. Uecker has noted that he regarded nails "as structural elements," and was "trying . . . to create vibrations by using these materials in an ordered relationship to one another, one that disturbs the geometric order and may even irritate."¹

While he could elicit a sensation of vibration through the play of light across the nails—especially when he created circles with nails inserted at varying depths—he achieved even more effective results by setting his compositions in motion. Simple motors rendered some works kinetic, and others, such as Tactile Rotating Structure (Taktile Struktur Rotierend, 1961), required the viewer's manual activation. In this piece the viewer turns a nail-studded circular relief in the center of a silver burlap background. When at rest, the porcupine-like protrusion of nails seems at once comical and threatening; but once it is animated, the combination of light and motion generates a series of ever changing, dematerialized images that, according to Uecker, embody a spiritual potential.

1. Günther Uecker, "Die Schöenheit der Bewegung" (1961), in Günther Uecker, Schriften (St. Gallen, Switzerland: Erker, 1979), p. 105. In German.

Gunther Uecker Cuscino 1965.

TRA; the edge of becoming, palazzo fortuny

László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light

László Moholy-Nagy. The Art of Light

June 09, 2011. - September 25, 2011.

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László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) is a world-famous figure of twentieth-century avant-garde art. As a most versatile artist he had a radically experimental practice in the field of painting, sculpture, photography and film as well as commercial and industrial design and scenography. His visual art together with his theoretical and educational work:

, his photographs, films and photograms - now synonymous with his name - were of such significance that they have transformed our thinking about art. In the series of Hungarian artists who accomplished world fame - Robert Capa, Martin Munkácsi, György Kepes - the Ludwig Museum - Museum of Contemporary Art now presents the work of László Moholy-Nagy in an impressive exhibition.

The central organising principle in Moholy-Nagy’s diverse activities was light: light defined his paintings, sculptures, photoplastics, photograms, photographs, typography and theatre sets. He did not regard photography as a tool for the perfect imaging of reality; rather, it was his conviction that the camera offered new possibilities for modern people, and finally liberates art from the obligation to depict, to copy reality. The years at the Bauhaus proved to be an experience that defined his entire life. He settled in Chicago in 1937, where he founded the ‘New Bauhaus’ and soon the Institute of Design and worked until the end of his life as an experimental, innovative artist, theorist and teacher. László Moholy-Nagy regarded art as a non-hierarchical, widely accessible and cultivatable activity that embraced the whole of life, and he firmly believed in the educational significance of it.

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Paintings such as The Big Wheel (1920–1), with its letters and numbers and diagramlike structure, and Black Quarter Circle with Red Stripes (1921), with its seemingly translucent planes, show Moholy’s distinctive take on Dada and Constructivism. This period also saw Moholy’s first experiments with camera-less photography, describing his so-called photograms as ‘painting with light’. By arranging mundane objects such as spring coils and cog wheels into geometric compositions and exposing specially coated photographic paper to light of varying intensities, Moholy created ghost-like images of peculiar intensity.

Fred Sandback

Fred Sandback
Blue Day-glo Corner Piece,
1968/2004
1/32" Elastic Cord & Spring Steel

14 x 12 x 6 inches
(35.6 x 30.5 x 15.2 cm)

Using nothing but ‘air and edges’ he magically alters our experience of the space. In his words, ‘the inherent mysticism resides in persisting in wanting to make something as factual as possible and having it turn out just the other way… the realisation that the simplest and most comfortable of perceptions are shadows’. This installation, conceived with the Fred Sandback Estate, offers a unique spatial experience.

extract of a 1960's text by Sandback:

The first sculpture I made with a piece of string and a little wire, was the outline of a rectangular solid—a 2 x 4 inch—lying on the floor. It was a casual act, but it seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for me. I could assert a certain place or volume in its full materiality without occupying and obscuring it.
I think my first attraction to this situation was to the way it allowed me to play with something both existing and not existing at the same time. The thing itself—the 2 x 4 inch—was just as material as it could be—a volume of air and light above the surface of the floor. Yet my forming of it, the shape and dimension of that figure, had an ambiguous and transient quality. It was funny too—it had an anecdotal quality on the order of “first there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. . . .” but in reverse.

1975 Notes This text was first published in Fred Sandback. Munich: Kunstraum, 1975, pp. 11-12. My work isn’t environmental. It’s present in pedestrian space, but is not so strong or elaborate that it obscures its context. It doesn’t take over a space, but rather coexists with it. Environmental art makes a new environment and obscures the old one, and that’s as far from what I want as realistic painting is. Most paintings and environmental art are aesthetically discontinuous with ordinary space, which is a quality I don’t want in my work. My work is not illusionistic in the normal sense of the word. It doesn’t refer away from itself to something that isn’t present. Its illusions are simply present aspects of it. Illusions are just as real as facts, and facts just as ephemeral as illusions. Illusionism is making a picture of something. Possibly the trapezoids and rectangles I made were pictures of something, but the open pieces aren’t. I’d rather be in the middle of a situation than over on one side either looking in or looking out. Surfaces seem to imply that what’s interesting is either in front of them or behind them. Interiors are elusive. You can’t ever see an interior. Like eating an artichoke, you keep peeling away exteriors until there’s nothing left, looking for the essence of something. The interior is something you can only believe in, which holds all the parts together as a whole, you hope. There’s an inherent transience to my work. Many larger pieces may only exist for a few days in a particular place, before being put away indefinitely. They are in principle always able to come into existence again at a future time, but will then be part of a new situation. If I remake a piece in a new place, it’s a different piece. If I remake a piece in the same place, it’s still bound to be a different piece than before. The line is a whole, an identity, for a particular place and time. I assume that this identity can be sensed by others. What I object to in a lot of art is its illustrative quality, the quality of being an execution of an idea. I don’t have an idea first and then find a way to express it. That happens all at once. That notion of executing an idea is the same as giving form to material, and it’s a confusion of terms. Ideas are executions. I don’t make “dematerialized art.” I complicate actual situations, and this is as material as anything else. It’s the same false distinction of paring away the matter to get at the idea which allows people to talk of something getting “dematerialized.” The use of numbers or systems in what I do is very casual and incidental. Sometimes pieces have even-numbered sets of measurements if size isn’t critical within general limits. More often, though, pieces are only measured after they’re completed. What I’m doing really doesn’t have anything to do with geometry, and it doesn’t have anything to do with deductive reasoning. The series of pieces for the Kunstraum is a series only because, after the important three-dimensional decisions had been made about the piece, it had a natural ambiguity about it—the parts could equally well be in any one of several positions. So the series is a consequence of those options; it comes after the fact. My work always exists in an interior space. This two-part being in a place is a given condition of all my work. Pieces are conditioned by and bound to a particular place. Still, they are not commentary—they don’t tell a story about a place—they are just there. There’s finally no reason for a piece being here or there. They are limited by the structure of a place, but not deduced from it. The scale I work on is large enough, but it’s particular, too. Large pieces can’t be transferred from place to place without being re-done. That’s a reduction in scale from a lot of sculpture in that it precludes, to an extent, a piece being uprooted from its point of origin without my being involved in it. More and more, working seems to be like performance; not in the sense of presenting a process, but in the conditions required to complete a piece. Some things are done and complete in my studio, but others are ambiguous until done in a particular place. A studio is necessarily vague and hypothetical for pieces like that. I like the connectedness of that kind of piece—you can’t stick it under your arm and carry it home. It has its own place and lifespan. 1977 Statement Notes A sculpture made with just a few lines may seem very purist or geometrical at first. My work isn’t either of these things. My lines aren’t distillations or refinements of anything. They are simple facts, issues of my activity that don’t represent anything beyond themselves. My pieces are offered as concrete, literal situations, and not as indications of any other sort or order. Lately much of my work has been executed in and for a specific place. It’s always been conceived with at least a generalized sort of place in mind, but these pieces are now bound to one site. This doesn’t mean that a piece can’t be redone in a different location, but just that it will be a completely different situation when it is. Of course there are things I’m interested in doing that I don’t have a place for, but because of that they remain necessarily vague and indeterminate. Most of these larger pieces have a rather limited lifespan—existing for a week or a month and then to a large extent disappearing permanently. It’s not that I place any value on their transience—quite the contrary. It’s just that that’s part of the scale of the whole endeavor. A consequence of the inclusivity or complexity that I desire is that there is a good deal of decision making for me about my control over a piece—deciding the limits beyond which my specific intentions can no longer have an influence. This might seem vague or incomplete, though of course I don’t find it so, and I’m certainly not interested in any formalized notion of “indeterminacy.” It’s simply a matter of penetration—making the situation as dense and complex as possible without faking anything. This text was first published in English and Flemish in Plan & Space, exh. cat. (Gent: Koninklijke Academie, 1977). 1989 Children’s Guide to Seeing We all need a place for play, whether it’s jump rope, baseball, or making a sculpture. I’m lucky enough to have the whole Contemporary Arts Museum in which to build my sculptures that are made out of knitting yarn. I need a big space like this because I mean my sculptures to take space and make it into a place—a place that people will move around in and be in. Knitting yarn is great for making the proportions, intervals, and shapes that build the places I want to see and to be in. It’s like a box of colored pencils, only I can use it to make a three-dimensional sculpture instead of making a drawing on paper. My knitting-yarn sculpture is a somewhat distant cousin to some other string games. Maybe the one that uses the most space is kite flying. But the one that is the oldest, and the most universal, is cat’s cradle. Indians, Eskimos, Bushmen, and many other cultures around the world have had games like cat’s cradle since before anyone can remember. Often cat’s cradle is about making a little place—just for yourself, or to share with someone. If you don’t know any of the moves, you can probably learn some from a friend, a relative, or from your mom or dad, if they remember them. If you ask the attendant here in the Museum now, he or she will give you some yarn to use while you are here and to take home. Your fingers might do some thinking while you wander around and look at my sculptures. And here are a few cat’s cradle ideas. Cat’s cradle is nice because you can put it in your pocket when you’re busy with something else, and take it out again when you’re not. Although, as you can see, it’s not so hard to build big things like my sculpture. All it takes is a ball of string. If you were feeling a little adventurous, you could even wrap up your whole house. This text was published in Children’s Guide to Seeing. Fred Sandback: Sculpture, (Houston: Contemporary Arts Museum, 1989).

Karla Black

Karla Black’s work draws from a multiplicity of artistic traditions from expressionist painting, land art, performance, to formalism. Her large-scale sculptures incorporate modest everyday substances, along with very traditional art-making materials to create abstract formations. Black chooses her media for their tactile aesthetic appeal: the familiarity of the texture of cellophane or the scent of cosmetics bridges the experience of tangible matter with the intimacy of memory or the subconscious. Black’s process is intensely physical and this energy is conveyed through her work’s ‘impromptu’ staging; this suggestion of performance psychologically involves the viewer with the making process, provoking instinctive responses to her precarious assemblages.

Black’s approach to sculpture is often described as holistic: her assemblages are more than the sum of their parts, each element interconnects physical, psychological, and theoretical stimuli which are both self-referential and relate to art as a wider-world experience. Her work absorbs art historical influences such as Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Eva Hesse’s organic minimalism. In Unpreventable Within, a large blanket of cling film is draped across the floor; a watery, landscape terrain, it evokes both vulnerability and protection. Coated with baby oil gel and paint, the liquid balms the surface and collects in its crevices as pools, creating a microcosmic ecology suggestive of generation and sustainability.

Black explains her haptic approach to making in relation to psychology, and cites Melanie Klein’s play technique – a method used to analyse very young children through their negotiation of the physical world rather than through language – as a contextual source. For Black, this sublingual articulation mirrors the sculptural process and offers the possibility for the work to achieve its own communication and agency. Nothing Is A Must is made from chalked sugar paper. It’s uplifted exaggerated form is like an open bag, made simultaneously monumental and flaccid. BRITISH ART SHOW - TRAMWAY Karla Black Formed mainly from loose materials – such as soil, plaster of Paris, powder paint, and soap powder – Karla Black’s sculptures are poised between fragility and robustness. She works with such unstable and impermanent materials ‘not because they easily change and decay but because I want the energy, life, and movement that they give.’ Whether earth-bound or suspended in space, her works are, as she explains, ‘actual physical explorations into thinking, feeling, communicating and relating’ and she emphasizes that she prioritises material experience over language as a way of learning and understanding. Despite their psychologically loaded titles, her sculptures are the result of ‘a need to just grab the world.’