in progress. Werke aus der mumok Sammlung Wandtext/exhibition text

and scribbles seem to be vestiges of everyday life.
Nam June Paik, too, adhered to Cage’s belief that music is a chronological sequence
with no distinction between sounds, noises, and silence. His unconventional musical
instruments and sound installations eliminate the traditional dividing line between
composers, performers, and audience. In 1963 Paik organized the Exposition of
Music – Electronic Television in Wuppertal; Manfred Leve’s and Manfred Montwé’s
photographs show that the concerts performed during the exhibition were
spectacular events involving prepared pianos played for and with the audience.
Paik’s Klavier Integral, an instrument repeatedly played by the artist himself, is
presented by pianist Manon Liu Winter in a video.
Performance art and installations became increasingly important from the late 1950s
onwards. Nonetheless, painting was to remain the dominant genre, particularly the
informal, gestural painting of the USA and Western Europe. Any attempt at fi guration
tended to raise associations not only with the offi cially approved art of the Nazi
period but, more generally, with the totalitarian practice of using painting as a
propaganda tool. When Georg Baselitz relocated from East to West Germany in
1957 he was confronted with this polarization between figurative and abstract art.
His reaction was to paint “really bad pictures with manure, mud, and noncolors.” At a
time when composition and harmony were disparaged, the works he created in the
early 1960s broke taboos with their proscribed content, culminating in his upsidedown
paintings from 1969 onwards. When turned through 180 degrees the motif
can still be recognized, but attention is focused on the painting itself: “An object
painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object.”
Baselitz and A. R. Penck, another emigré from East Germany, were among the main
proponents of a new style of fi gurative painting. In the 1980s Penck began work on
a pictorial repertoire comprising works with neoprimitivist, pictogram-like forms. Just
like the crude lettering and dirty, earthy colors, these abstract human fi gures evoke
tristesse, reminding us of the graffiti-covered ramshackle walls in certain cities. As
the Purism phase drew to a close, modernist painting became increasingly receptive
to the experiences and pluralist media that are salient characteristics of metropolitan
life. François Dufrêne’s lacerated posters, with their painterly all-over structures, are
illustrative of this phenomenon.
From the late 1950s onwards artists increasingly turned their attentions to everyday
cultural phenomena. Jasper Johns reduced his pictorial repertoire to simple, banal
subjects such as fl ags, targets, and numbers. Although commonplace, symbolic
motifs such as Target possess an iconic, emblematic quality. Since the late 1950s,
art theorists have primarily been concerned with producing a new concept of reality.
French author and critic Pierre Restany coined the term Nouveau Réalisme to defi ne
a new perception of reality based on a new appreciation of materials and objects.
Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri were the two main proponents of Nouveau
7 in progress. Wandtext / exhibition text, 7. Juni 2013