Still Another German Onslaught
Still Another German Onslaught
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, January 17, 1987
THE Germans, of late, have been in the habit of intimidating us with the wealth of their creative produce. And still no one is complaining.
We have, in recent months, been swept off our feet by German kinetic art, German cartoons, German environmental art, German writers and scholars, German musicians, German filmmakers. And the exhibitions, in particular, have been nothing short of fantastic—comprehensive and intelligent, invaluable sources of inspirational reference and joy.
The current mammoth exhibition of Contemporary German Prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila is by no means an exception to this enduring standard of excellence. There are close to 200 artworks on display, occupying both floors of the museum, and spanning over twenty years of graphic innovation from the 1950's up to the mid-70's.
The collection itself is virtually free of token participation, a regrettable flaw in most embassy-sponsored shows of this nature. The participating artists include many of the more prominent names in recent German art — Joseph Beuys, Sigmar Polke, Gunther Ueker, Walter Storther, A. R. Penck, Liehard Von Monkiewitsch, Georg Baselitz, Klaus Rinke, Paul Wunderlich, Georg Karl Piahler, Wolf Vostel, Bernhard and Hilda Becher, Rolf Escher, among a host of others — many of them exhibiting previously-unknown work.
To be sure, the range of this impressive collection is not limited to the venerable. Polke, for instance, is represented by a series of large photo-derived screenprints of anonymous street performers that are deliberately at odds with conventional aesthetics — pictures that are badly focused, badly composed, and inexpertly solarized into a dense murky grey. On the other hand, Vostel delights in contemporary decadence through his magnificently-wicked use of day-glo paint and glitter encrustations, X-rated images, and bizarre juxtapositions of war-zone atrocities.
This pronounced tendency to the wholesale use of photographic composites and disparate text is even more apparent in other works of recent vintage. The performance-related pieces by Franz Eberhard Walter and Klaus Rinke extend beyond the visual into explicit narrative, being documentary works both before and after the fact. Penck himself makes arbitrary use of language in his primal drawings and figurations, as does Dieter Krieg in his lush pseudo-industrial renderings of whitewashed ephemerality.
Photography is likewise the sole vehicle for visual reckoning in the haunting architectural images of twin monoliths by the celebrated Becher tandem, just as the camera literally plays window to the world in Eberhard Gunther Willikens' mesmerizing domestic interiors and Monkiewitsch's well-known structural corners bled into white. Other notable photo-related works are by Dieter Roth, Ulrich Ruckriem, Stefan Wewerka, and the anatomical nightmares of Paul Wunderlich.
As might be expected, the geometric, the colorful, and the illustrational are also represented in full force, almost like concessions to the elderly — a throw-back to German ingenuity and thoroughness.
The exhibition-notes remind us that "Germany has a longer and more consistent printmaking tradition than almost any country," and it certainly shows. There is little else for the conscientious critic to do other than to recommend the exhibit wholeheartedly.
An interesting sidelight of the festivities is the museum-backed forum of leading Filipino printmakers at the gallery site itself. It may result in some serious ego-bruising for our homegrown talents, given their determination to assess their own development against this awesome backdrop. But then again, that's Pinoy spunk for you.
Enjoy!
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Still Another German Onslaught” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, January 17, 1987
