The Art of

164
Whereas the principle of maximum contrast as in the case of the work Lolita,
however, becomes a kind of visual polemic that continues to apply half a
century later. This principle can also be found in Lurie’s late texts.
07
“WITHOUT FAIL /
After reading Peter
Weiss’s Auschwitz, / I
must eat ice-cream.”
Boris Lurie in:
Geschriebigtes / Gedichtigtes:
Zu der Ausstellung
in der Gedenkstätte
Weimar-Buchenwald,
Volkhard Knigge,
Eckhart Holzboog,
Dietmar Kirves eds.,
1947–2001, Stuttgart/
Bad Canstatt, 2003,
p. 179.
II
“3. August 1997 UNBEDINGT Nach Peter Weiss’s Auschwitz-Lesen,
muss ich Ice-Cream essen.” 07
In the late nineties, a slender envelope of printed matter with “NO!” stenciled
on it in red fell into my hands: a collective concoction from the surroundings
of the art academy in Karlsruhe. The very first picture already
made the position clear: a urine stain on the outside wall of the academy
building, then a copy of a backside, cut-up sneakers. A pin-up collage with
“NO” printed over it is positioned alongside the child’s drawing of a horse,
above which it is possible to read “Mein Plan” (My Plan) in clumsy lettering. A
late greeting to New York, with the dedication: “boris lurie, sam goodman,
stanley fisher, gertrude stein usw. no!”
With soir critique at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig in 2001, Inga
Schwede, Till Gathmann, and I initiated an event series that—as we wrote in
the first invitation—endeavors to foster unease and to turn to society and
its art in critical reflection. Following a kickoff event about Guy Debord’s
critique of the spectacle for the summer term 2002, we organized talks on
the history and reception of the NO!art movement (in retrospect it comes
as a surprise that the contemporaneity of Situationist International and
No!art did not grab our attention). None of us had seen the 1995 neue Gesellschaft
für bildende Kunst exhibition at the Haus am Kleistpark and the
rooms on Oranienstrasse in Berlin, but we were familiar with the superb
catalogue, which makes what was missed quite clear.
Matthias Reichelt was part of the group organizing the exhibition. We
met him at Dietmar Kirves’s apartment in the Graefe neighborhood of Berlin.
Kirves is responsible for the no-art.info website and sees himself as both
a chronicler of the movement and an activist. And thus the question is also
raised: is NO!art the practice of a small group—which was naturally a child
of its time—that has come to an end and was limited to a particular period?
Or is it still a lively movement in whose name artists time and again work,
exhibit, and publish, and which forges a path through history that, starting
from the cooperative gallery on 10th Street on the Lower East Side, branches
out into the present, similar to the underlying line of Dada to the Situationist
International to punk that Greil Marcus draws in his book Lipstick
Traces?
What interested us was NO!art in New York between 1959 and 1965, perhaps
the first artistic movement to directly address the Shoah. In this we
EIKO GRIMBERG