I wish I were…in Liechtenstein

14Feb08

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, photo via Wikipedia

Liechtenstein’s capital Vaduz has a population of 5.000. Other than the castle (upper left of the image), the main tourist attraction of this village is the Kunstmuseum. In the neighboring countries of Switzerland and Austria or even Germany, almost every larger town has a Kunsthalle or two. Most of them are modernist kasbahs like the one in the photo above.

The Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is currently showing an exhibition of early work by Thomas Schütte.

Schütte (born 1958) is one of the most famous artists of his generation to emerge from the Düsseldorf art scene in the early 1980s, best known for working on the border between architecture, stage design , and ceramic figurative sculpture. Recently, he designed a plastic “Model for a Hotel,” which is now on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein focuses on Thomas Schütte’s lesser-known early works of the late 1970s, when he was at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Fritz Schwegler and Gerhard Richter, moving from painting to sculpture. The exhibition, which runs from February 1 until April 20, 2008 was first on display at the Henry Moore Institute Leeds. (vernissage.tv)

Тhe slick, somehow still disposible materiality in these early pieces survives into his later oeuvre. You can see this at Schütte’s personal site, which has a very extensive artist’s portfolio. It was here, browsing images of illustrative architectural models, one-man-houses, disposable environments, that I had the idea that Schütte’s IKEA-art somehow fits in perfectly with the modernist kasbah (art to life for the standardized global petit bourgeoisie).

But at the same time, this kind of art has a tendency to dialectical inversion.

Though it comes from conceptualism and minimal, it lands in neo-expressionist figurality, as in Schütte’s gnarled handmade ceramics, or smackdab in the middle of a new Biedermeier, as in the watercolor series “My Private Kosovo” (1999).

These floral arrangements are dangerously poised on the brink to commercial kitsch. Their return to illustrative mimesis is clearly a private-profitable art therapy that refuses any real social broadening, other than of course, universalization through the commodity form.