art as voyeurism
by
Douglas Messerli
Stephanie
Barron (curator) New Objectivity: Modern
German Art in the Weimar Republic, 1919-1933 / Los Angeles County Museum of
Art, October 4, 2015-January 18, 2016 / I saw the show at the press preview on
September 30, 2015
Before I even begin, let me clarify that
the “objectivism” hinted at in the show’s title can only be understood in that
word’s dictionary definition if it is proceeded by the word “new.” For, in
fact, the works in this show might all be described as being the most
“nonobjective” images possible. As Barron herself writes:
While they were not unified by
manifesto, political tendency, or
geography, these artists did
share a skepticism regarding German
society in the years following
World War I and an awareness of
the human isolation brought
about by social change. They chose
themes from contemporary life,
using realism to negotiate rapidly
changing social and political
conditions. By closely scrutinizing
everyday objects, modern machinery, and
new technologies, these
artists rendered them
unnatural—as uneasy as individuals alienated
from each other and their
surroundings. As if to correct the chaos
of wartime, they became productive voyeurs,
dissecting their sub-
jects with laser focus, even
when overemphasis on detail came at
the expense of the composition
as a whole.
In a painting central to the show, Otto
Dix’s To Beauty (An die Schönheit) of 1922, the dancing couples, despite the
frenzied playing of the black American percussionist (himself a caricature of a
US negro of the day), seem dazed and isolated in their activities, the woman on
the right seemingly dancing alone. The artist, presenting himself as a
well-dressed businessman (while in real life Dix was apparently a good dancer),
seems transfixed not by a real woman but the bust of what may be a prostitute.
The beauty which the painting’s title toasts is not even a real woman.
Another of his works, the 1923 Dance in Baden-Baden, shows two dancing couples with men leering at
women who seem to be so distracted from their partners that they might be
described in be in an entirely different space.
Just as in the period fictions such as
Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz,
obscenely poised prostitutes dominate some rooms of the show, along with
several works by Otto Dix and Rudolf Schlichter, devoted to “Lustmord” or
“Sexual Murder,” events that became more and more common during the Weimar era,
and were documented even in films such as Pabst’s Lulu.
Even in less obviously biased depictions
of German citizens of the era, such as the photographs of August Sander, the
emphasis is not so much on living, breathing human being as it is on a series
of typologies. Sander is less interested in the inner lives of his numerous
subjects as he is in how their very physiognomies clue us into their personal
behaviors and their roles or jobs in life. And, in that sense, they are frozen
in time and space, never to be released into the world outside of his
definitions of them: The Architect, Coal
Carrier, or Cook. Even when he
provides us with their names, as in the case of Helen Abelen, his photograph is
far more interested in her societally based position, Painter’s Wife, which presumably allows her unconventional
“mannish” look.
Although dominated by the portrait, the
New Objectivists also took paint and canvas into the surrounding landscape and
focused on the rising industrialism around them. Despite the later Nazi
adulation of nature, presumably, since many of these Berliners and others
painters were city dwellers, the natural world was often seen as an alienating
and slightly sinister space having to do more with the past than the present.
Nature is presented only in brief glimpses, from balconies or from strange
vistas. The exoticism of nature is expressed through several of these artist’s fascination
with indoor cacti, as in Geroge Scholz’s Cacti
and Semaphore (Kakteen und Sempahore)
of 1923. Even in this indoor “natural” scene there is the stench of perversity.
When
people actually enter into nature, as in Georg Schrimpf’s Reclining Girls in the Countryside of 1930, the influence comes not
from the great German tradition of landscapes, but rather from the Italian
Futurist artist Carlo Carrà.