A TOUCH OF CHICANERY
San Francisco /James Scarborough
Hermann Lederle’s new work at Lawson Galleries perfectly illustrates
Jose Orega y Gasset’s contention in The Modern Theme
that art, along with culture, reason and ethics, must enter the
service of life. Ortega y Gasset prescribes, among other things,
an art that is spontaneous, athletic and imbued with vitality; he
finds it most apt that modern public history began on a tennis court
in France.
Ortega y Gasset discerns a one-sided tendency in modern European
history, the intellectual heritage into which Lederle, a German,
was born. Here, there was a separation of culture and life as art
distanced itself from the spontaneous life of the person considering
it and acquired a consistency of its own: culture thereby became
objective, set up in opposition to the subconscious that engendered
it (this conceit informs a large part of Michel Foucault’s
The Order of Things). Culture, says Ortega Y Gasset, survives
only when those who make art and those who view it inject it with
a constant flow of vitality. Pictorially this can be illustrated
by the difference in conception between the work of Lederle and
his contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo
Palladino.
The figures seen in the work of Schnabel, Palladino and Clemente
are taciturn, drawn, permanently in crisis, as if they have embarked
upon a bleak search for meaning in an otherwise solipsistic life.
By the wholesale appropriation of images drawn from mass media,
popular ulture and art history, these esthetic scavengers, particularly
Clemente, set themselves adrift across cultures and styles in
an attempt to recover timeless truths on behalf of the modern
experience.
Lederle’s work, too, falls within the ambit of modern expressionism
in that it demonstrates, to a certain degree, the failure of traditional
symbols to move us and the need to galvanize them with a shot of
heroic energy. The result, ironically, is purely a superficial attraction.
Take, for example, Election (1985), which presents symbols
in search of a context in what amounts to an iconographical shopping
list. It includes a tongue-tied figure with awkward hands, acting
like a wallflower at a dance. Beside him hovers a fish and one of
those little Keith Haring "Gumby" figures, looking surprisingly
enervated. This is a spent art, as if the artist is waiting for
someone (but who?) to pull the strings so his paintings can start
moving. But there is more to Lederle’s work than this.
Lederle’s work, granted, does posit a strain of angst –
a stylistic loan from Kirchner or maybe Nolde. This gives the work
its sense of a potential for crude force and implies a desire, like
that of his German forebears, to wipe the cultural slate clean.
But Lederle’s strain of angst is unlike that of his contemporaries;
it is less virulent and more acrobatic: yes, the figures are almost
sculptural, pared down with that coloring-book black line, but the
atmosphere is more charged, more affirmative. The works are most
effective when they stop struggling to be iconographically sound
and instead spontaneously react to their contrived environment.
Blue Fall (1986), one of the best pictures in the show, depicts
a Picasso saltimbanque rescuing an Avignon demoiselle who has a
Franz Marc horse’s rump. The theme is heroic both in conception
and execution – a rich bravura style married to a palpable
context.
This is an artist who has assimilated all the cannibalistic tendencies
that surround him and has decided that such feckless accumulation
is not for his palette. Each of his figures, so reminiscent of
everyone else’s, is unique in its determination not to ride
the existential merry-go-round – note how each figure about
to embark on one of those patented trans-historical voyages is
anchored to a person or an object. Lederle’s is an art which,
when offered the easy way out into styles, kitch and pop culture,
has heroically decided when enough chicanery is enough.
ARTWEEK SAN FRANSICO 1987
|
|