Kunsthalle Düsseldorf

SIN­GU­LAR / PLU­RAL
Col­lab­o­ra­tions In The Post-pop-polit Are­na
8 Ju­ly – 1 Oc­to­ber 2017

Cu­rat­ed by Pe­tra Lange-Berndt, Di­et­mar Rübel, Max Schulze and Gre­gor Jansen

An ex­hi­bi­tion for the 50th an­niver­sary of Kun­sthalle Düssel­dorf am Grabbe­platz

The fo­cus at this ex­hi­bi­tion is on artists who lived in Düssel­dorf and worked to­geth­er dur­ing the 1970s: Klaus vom Bruch, Michael Deistler, Bruno De­mat­tio, Achim Duchow, Astrid Heibach, Can­di­da Höfer, Christof Kohlhöfer, In­grid Kohlhöfer, Klaus Met­tig, Lutz Mom­martz, Tony Mor­gan, An­ge­li­ka Oehms, Sig­mar Polke, Ul­rike Rosen­bach, Stephan Runge, Con­rad Schnit­zler, Emil Schult, Mem­phis Schulze, Katha­ri­na Sieverd­ing, Ilona & Wolf­gang We­ber.
With these pro­tag­o­nists, we take a fresh look at how the arts be­gan to set out along more dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed paths in the post-war years, and at sprout­ings of sub­cul­ture in Ger­man-speak­ing coun­tries and around Eu­rope; most of the works on dis­play in Sin­gu­lar / Plu­ral have nev­er be­fore been shown at an ex­hi­bi­tion. A piv­otal fac­tor is that this loose-knit group of cos­mopoli­tans de­vel­oped their predilec­tions and strate­gies as they re­spond­ed to and dis­tanced them­selves from ves­tiges of Ger­man fas­cism. They were in­ter­est­ed in post-paint­ing paint­ing, in mu­sic, pho­tog­ra­phy, slide pro­jec­tions, film and in­ter­me­dia, per­for­mances, ev­ery­day life, the rites of the Rhineland, comics, pop cul­ture, rock­a­bil­ly, hip­pies and rock­ers, punk and new wave. We have de­fined this con­stel­la­tion as the post-pop-polit are­na. It is about at­ti­tudes to pol­i­tics and about re­order­ing the myths of what is pop­u­lar, about ap­pro­pri­at­ing, re­peat­ing, sam­pling, rein­ter­pret­ing, copy­ing and fak­ing vi­su­al ma­te­ri­al out­side the main­stream. Apart from seek­ing to es­cape the Cold War or­der while caught with­in the nar­row con­fines of the West, and be­fore the art sys­tem went glob­al, the artists ex­hib­it­ed here raised im­por­tant ques­tions about the func­tion of im­ages in the emerg­ing fun-driv­en in­for­ma­tion so­ci­ety.

Sin­gu­lar / Plu­ral is a themed group show struc­tured around is­sues like col­lab­o­ra­tions, colo­nial his­to­ries, mu­sic, comics, economies and gen­der. The works – and the doc­u­men­tary ma­te­ri­al, print­ed mat­ter, vinyl and oth­er re­lat­ed items – are not pre­sent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal se­quence, but fol­low the same labyrinthi­an pat­terns as the
pro­cess-based col­lab­o­ra­tions and de­bates in which these artists en­gaged. The art demon­strates a sense of po­lit­i­cal mis­sion and self-irony; it res­onates with con­tem­po­rary in­ter­ests. Christof Kohlhöfer and Emil Schult drew psychedel­ic com­ic strips, Bruno De­mat­tio and Stephan Runge probed in­to in­di­vid­u­al mytholo­gies and
counter-cul­tures, Mem­phis Schulze, Achim Duchow and Sig­mar Polke pre-empt­ed a street art craze by tak­ing up the spray can. Lutz Mom­martz and Astrid Heibach raised ques­tions about for­mer Ger­man colonies when such cu­rios­i­ty was still rare in Ger­man-speak­ing coun­tries, and Michael Deistler trav­elled to Egypt in the foot­steps of the Nazis’ mil­i­tary cam­paign in Africa. Mean­while, Can­di­da Höfer cast an ethno­graph­ic eye over so­ci­ety back home, and In­grid Kohlhöfer in­ter­ro­gat­ed clichéd views of freaks.​Tony Mor­gan, Ul­rike Rosen­bach and Katha­ri­na Sieverd­ing ex­plored gen­der-crit­i­cal per­spec­tives and rock pos­es in pop cul­ture, and Con­rad Schnit­zler trans­formed the Pop Art her­itage with new forms of elec­tron­ic mu­sic. Many of the mul­ti­me­dia works have been re­con­struct­ed for this ex­hi­bi­tion, mak­ing them ac­ces­si­ble again for the first time. Achim Duchow, for ex­am­ple, com­posed sound for slide pro­jec­tions that ad­dressed the role of the Red Army Fac­tion, the gut­ter press and the art mar­ket dur­ing the “red decade”. Key to the cu­ra­to­ri­al con­cept is that group mem­bers ex­per­i­ment­ed with un­ortho­dox lifestyles and at the same time sus­pend­ed sin­gu­lar au­thor­ship. Like Klaus vom Bruch, Ilona and Wolf­gang We­ber pro­duced por­traits of the Düssel­dor­fer Gruppe in the form of slide shows and col­lec­tions of pho­tographs, where­as oth­ers swapped their ma­te­ri­al or, like Sig­mar Polke with Mem­phis Schulze or Achim Duchow with An­ge­li­ka Oehms, cre­at­ed joint works. As philoso­pher Jean-Luc Nan­cy phrased it, “be­ing-with” – or, in oth­er words, be­ing a “sin­gu­lar plu­ral” – al­ways as­sumes en­gag­ing in ex­change with oth­ers, and that begs the ques­tion: how can groups evolv­ing with­in spe­cif­ic art pro­jects func­tion as a plu­ral­i­ty with­out the “we” laps­ing in­to a to­tal­i­ty.

With­in the Düssel­dorf mi­lieu, these pro­cess­es of ex­change, trans­for­ma­tion and dis­cus­sion were main­tained with­in pub­lic fo­ra; the Kun­sthalle op­er­at­ed as a cen­tral stage for their ac­tiv­i­ties. The artists on show in Sin­gu­lar / Plu­ral played an ac­tive part in set­ting the his­tor­i­cal agen­da for this in­sti­tu­tion with, for ex­am­ple, the al­ter­na­tive cy­cles be­tween and Prospekt, while the ma­jor ex­hi­bi­tions were usu­al­ly re­served for the pre-war gen­er­a­tion. The pre­sen­ta­tion of this an­niver­sary show there­fore makes cru­cial ref­er­ences to three his­tor­i­cal ex­hi­bi­tions: Yes Sir, That’s My Ba­by, which was part of the be­tween cy­cle in 1973, the Sig­mar Polke ret­ro­spec­tive Bilder, Tücher, Ob­jek­te in 1976, which was ac­tu­al­ly a group ex­hi­bi­tion in the form of a to­tal in­stal­la­tion, and Nach­barschaft, al­so held in 1976.

The artists
Klaus vom Bruch, Michael Deistler, Bruno De­mat­tio, Achim Duchow, Astrid Heibach, Can­di­da Höfer, Christof Kohlhöfer, In­grid Kohlhöfer, Klaus Met­tig, Lutz Mom­martz, Tony Mor­gan, An­ge­li­ka Oehms, Sig­mar Polke, Ul­rike Rosen­bach, Stephan Runge, Con­rad Schnit­zler, Emil Schult, Mem­phis Schulze, Katha­ri­na Sieverd­ing, Ilona & Wolf­gang We­ber.