The "West" may have won the Cold War, but in Germany, where the tension line of that confrontation was symbolized with a literal wall, the Ossies beat the Wessies in the cool war. Knocking around Berlin in the '90s, several years after the fall of that wall, you'd have to bludgeon an East Berlin resident and put him in a gunny sack and drag his unconscious body across the imaginary border if you wanted him to see a band or an art exhibition or a naked woman in West Berlin. Why, when a forbidden and wealthy area that for so long represented freedom was finally accessible, would those in the East disdain the West? Because it just wasn't cool. Once jeans and records and kebabs were available in the East, it seemed little else had been pined for all along. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, Western-style democracy had nothing on Milli Vanilli.
Yes, it was good to have the stinking Russian army gone and the constant threat of Stasi informants a distant memory, but it was hard to think too long about those things when every other burned out shell of a building in Mitte or Prenzlauerberg was a packed
bar-performance space-studio with a 24-hour interactive art exhibition or something along those lines, and a full-blown
scene was happening in the poetic clash between antiquated buildings and easy access to turntables and video projectors. It was a deliriously good time, and standing in a thick dust of
hefeweizen
, installation art and half-hits of Dutch Ecstasy, the West did look a little, I don't know, beige.
But it's easy to think you're cool in East Berlin, which is still Berlin, and another thing entirely to hole up and seriously study art in a remote-ish city bombed-to-hell-and-back by the Allies in WWII, conceptually depth-charged by the faux-socialist reconstruction efforts of the GDR and deserted by nearly half its populace in the heady post-reunification days when one could trade a Trebant for a Mercedes and Leipzig for Hamburg. But this is just what seven painters, featured at SITE Santa Fe (1606 Paseo de Peralta, 989-1199) in
Life After Death: New Leipzig Paintings from the Rubell Family Collection
, did. If East Berliners were consumed enough with their hipness to be bored by the West, those who chose to study at the Leipzig Art Academy were bored enough with the self-infatuated international artiness of East Berlin, and the trendy world of photography, video and installation art, to want to do something completely different: Learn to paint and learn to do it right with the full brunt of figure, landscape, perspective and the most mores of painting available.
The Leipzig Art Academy had been the center of Social Realism in the GDR's prime-those glorified images of valiant workers focused on the health of the state that have become the graphic symbol for propaganda with a capital P, and because of this emphasis retained a strict focus on a foundation of figure drawing and still life painting well into reunification. With the students free to determine how to exercise their skills, however, the Leipzig School came into being as a collective of rebellious painters capturing a contemporary life bloated with politics of identity, borders, sex, economics and art more through omissions, vagaries and disconnected fragments than through any easily readable lexicon. Curators Laura Heon of SITE and Mark Coetzee of the Rubell Family Collection are right to dub the style and sensibility evident in this exhibition "repressionism."
Life After Death
is expertly hung in the SITE Santa Fe galleries. Many of the paintings are keystoned by perspective points, interior spaces and controlled landscapes-all of which are magnified in the sparse arrangement of the work in which the edge or corner of one artist's work is often just visible through a distant passage, mirroring the frequent habit of these artists to include a fragment of an identifiable and signifying work of art barely visible within the rooms they paint. The thoughtful preparation makes it worth a slow stroll through the entire space before coming back to examine each work more thoroughly. Everything in the show is worth a look and then a second look, from Tilo Baumgärtel's kohl-drawn, urban portrayal of isolation, obscurity and something approximating peace with a multi-layered sense of the "East," to Martin Kobe's almost annoying and somewhat overdone Eurotrash mélanges of minimal Pop modernist constructivist diner/discotheques on canvas. Neo Rauch, older and more established and familiar to Santa Fe from an appearance in the last SITE biennial, will get a fair amount of deserved attention, but don't be distracted enough that you sacrifice time spent with Christoph Ruckhäberle and Matthias Weischer. Where the elder Rauch maintains a strict disconnect in the traumatized and agitated figures that haunt his paintings, Ruckhäberle offers an evolution, void of pomp and grandiosity, where flat-painted denizens of matte-painted interiors try desperately to make some contact with each other, try timidly to know or to show something real in the shell-shocked aftermath of the Iron Curtain. Weischer relies even more on pure paint manipulation and a social science of tape and palette knife against canvas to make his room interior paintings parables to painting's history as it parallels the human search for meaning and understanding in a fragmented and increasingly global tangle. The damage and terror done to the soul through social machinations hits home in our disparate nation, still believing in the infallibility of a government considering the construction of, of all things, a wall.
None of this work, no matter the Leipzig-centric lexicon of private symbolism in employ, is hard to approach or to make sense of. There are multiple layers of meaning to consider, but hanging out in the open is a profound painter's libretto of from the voices of those inured to hope and idealization by experience, but celebrating a deep and honest vulnerability, rather than the pretense of heroism in action and intellect that is the secret subtext of so many human endeavors in civic organization and in art. While East Berliners were busy teaching the West how to party like it was 1989, the Leipzig School was busy not giving a damn about anything but straightforward, righteous-and once more resurrected-painting.
