Dr. Rainer Beßling
PERGOLA
On entering, the viewer is confronted by the image of an exhibition.
The open door of the Atelierhaus Friesenstraße in Bremen frames our view of a series of panel pictures, inviting us to step closer. But the viewer's attention is then caught and redirected. In the vestibule, one work demands to be seen straight away. Two red beams on the wall form a counterbalance to stairs that also assert their presence. The beams radiate presence like a beacon, and their volume and colour quality means that their impact extends into the space. The wall also plays its part in this creation of form: recesses in the beams – set horizontally, one above the other – create squares. The objects, which adopt the formal language of minimalism, highlight and simultaneously present the space.
A more careful look reveals the unpainted wood structure on the front edges as well as holes and sample cuts in both beams. The production process and origin in the workshop are inscribed into the objects, therefore. In addition, traces of processing point to an earlier work: the beams were used previously in an installation in the pavilion of the Gerhard Marcks Haus in Bremen. There, Reinhold Budde cited Blinky Palermo's language of form and colour and so joined the tradition of explicitly space-related works, characterized not least by succinct asceticism and a wealth of pointed commentary.
Budde already makes a complex statement in the prologue to his contribution to the “Passages” trilogy in the Atelierhaus Friesenstraße, for example: strikingly, here the focus is shifted to the architectonic situation of the exhibition location, as the intervention's plastic presence and colour quality reverberate. At the same time, the concept of the project “Passages” is explored rather ambiguously: the visitor finds himself ensnared in viewing perspectives and pointers within a spatial context. At the same time, temporal references are opened up by references to the work's exhibition history and genesis. The idea of passage should also be understood, therefore, as a chapter in a work development that the artist is pursuing concisely and consistently in accordance with the spatial characteristics of different art institutions.
The six panel pictures, five white and one green, which the visitor encounters at the second stage of his passage, reveal their links with the prologue in several respects. Here, Budde points to his origins in painting; at the same time, he uses a remarkably concentrated form to make sense of the change in roles from the image to the image-object, the change in function from representation to presence, and so to expansion away from the wall into the surrounding space. The colour of the picture panels positively protrudes into the space, an effect accentuated by painting the panel edges with white wall paint. The visitor's first impression that he is approaching a presentation of exhibits, therefore, is counteracted.
By using the monochrome white Budde not only takes up, ex negativo so to speak, the predominant monochrome black in his own artistic production; he also uncovers a wide horizon of semantic and structural references. It is already made clear by the arrangement of the panels in a row that this is not primarily about the extensive symbolic field surrounding the colour white and therefore about narrative elements. The serial arrangement does not emphasize the potential content of the images but their structure and materiality, i.e. the mode of the image, how it manifests. The distinct quality of a solitary composition is replaced by gradually appearing, continuing characteristics.
The paint, applied in several layers and polished layer by layer, is extremely concentrated and appears with a deep shine. The energy discharged in the process – in its own physical-temporal, concentrated employment – is reflected in the surface and offered for exchange with the space and the visitor's perceptual energy. The latter is thrown back upon himself in resonance with the picture panel. Here, the space around the picture-object and between it and the viewer is invoked and thematized; it could be described using the word atmosphere. Thus, besides the physical space, a sensually charged spatiality is brought to our attention.
It is almost impossible to see the monochrome white – the greatest intensity of light that outshines everything, and the focus of all the colours of the spectrum – without art-historical references. In Budde's case, however, this does not appear as a simple citation of a historical gesture of obliteration, but as an integral aspect of a multilayered opening up of perception and as a gateway to recognition, like a pause in music, the source of every form and its simultaneous contemplation. The artist brings a calming influence to the exhibition location with this white, promoting concentration and sensitivity to the finest of painterly nuances; at the same time, he raises fundamental questions as to the character of painting and the quality of colour. Colour as a sensual stimulus and colour as material are unified – the apparent emptiness conceals a wealth of potential for reflection.
One image-object in matt green stands out from the line of white panels; not least, it points to difference as a basic element of perception. Here, Budde structures the arrangement and at the same time visualizes rhythm itself as a central aspect of creative design. At this point in the interventions, the viewer's eye is caught, meanwhile, in the specifics of the exhibition space, which functions primarily and in a rather profane way as a corridor to the studio. Symmetries in the interior architecture thus stand out, the supposedly neutral spatial casing itself presents plastic characteristics. The room does not appear as a static dimension, therefore, but as the outcome of a constellation of relations and of our attention, which is tempered in turn by changing creative impulses.
The green picture panel, at the same time, creates a bridge to a mural work that appears in front of the visitor as he now enters the central, architecturally most striking segment of space in the Atelierhaus. If he orients himself according to the line of the long corridor, his eye falls upon eight high-gloss black aluminium rails, which simulate a second ceiling in the space with regularly distributed struts across the path of the corridor. In addition to this “pergola”, which provides the title for Budde's work in the Atelierhaus Friesenstraße, at the starting point of the corridor – initially behind the person passing into the exhibition – there is a piece of artificial lawn dominating the wall. If the visitor turns around at the beginning of the corridor, he is confronted, close-up and in detail, with this attempt to create a deceptively successful imitation of tufts of grass. From a distance, the piece seems like an additional area of colour in the space. As “artificial lawn” and especially in interplay with the “pergola”, it represents an ambiguous, both ironic and precise demarcation of the exhibition space, along with its transformation and examination of fundamental aesthetic questions.
Besides the structure of the corridor, which motivated the exhibition curators to conceive their “Passages” project, one of the special features of the Atelierhaus is a garden in an atrium, which has been used or assimilated by many exhibitors in the past. For the knowledgeable inside the building, for the initiated visitor, a site-specific reference by Budde's work is indicated already here.
The installation of an element of garden architecture in the interior space, also possible to discern in the light at the crossing point of the rails with the ceiling lamps, means that the artist is now examining various interlocking moments as well as confrontations. On the one hand, semantically, he merges a porch and a corridor, which also fulfils the function of a vestibule and thus of an interim space. The interplay of these two threshold situations is also recognizable in formal terms: the distribution of the rails, which resemble both graphic inscriptions into the space and its rhythmicizing and dynamizing, corresponds to the arrangement of studio doors, which now, for their part, also appear as a formal, structuring aspect. On the other hand, the situation of transition from garden to building marked by the “pergola” could also be understood as corresponding to the transition from production to presentation in the Atelierhaus.
The idea of parallelism between the artificial lawn as a wall work and the “pergola” gives the latter added force and pointedness. Tipped at 90 degrees, the imitation grass is reminiscent of Duchamp's readymades and their assumption of aura within an exhibition context. Thus the lawn as a field of colour is elevated into an art object, whereby the artist has taken great care to highlight the wall as an exhibition surface and to avoid the object slipping into the role of decor. At the same time, the simulacrum making an obvious effort at likeness is revealed as an illusion in itself. The presentation of the copy, therefore, also serves to represent copying as such. In this way the imitated object can reveal what tends to be concealed, or rather is often overlooked in the “natural” object: the fact that a lawn is equally an “artificial” object, that the garden is a surrogate for natural space. Of course, in this context we should not forget that the “artificial lawn” in increasing everyday usage represents a further cultural overforming and sealing of the ground.
Through multiple, reciprocally reflected interlocking of garden and interior design, Budde thematizes the relationships of inside and outside, of natural, cultural and art space, of distortions of reality and representational structures; all of which should not be understood merely on a physical-spatial level. At this point, Budde's staging for “Passages” could already have ended. But one more surprising volte-face is offered to the visitor who continues his walk into the junction of the corridor at the back: evoking previous experiences and occurrences in the spatial work, and at the same time raising them to another level.
The ultimate, expected view into the garden is not given to us: instead, Budde has fixed shining foil over the windows and the French door, and so closed the art space off hermetically and visually. The gesture can be seen as reference to a relationship between the interior human world and the outside world that is fractured in so many ways, between reality and virtuality, or also as a further pointer to the frictions between nature and landscape image, if one accepts the garden – as a cultural landscape – as a replacement for nature and a projection surface for an aesthetic sense of nature.
However, a closer formal interpretation is advisable before this broadening of the thematic horizon. The window rails fit together with areas of white and primary colours to create a picture landscape, which – together with an area of colour on a neighbouring wall – expands into a spatial image. The constellation makes us think of the window pictures by Ellsworth Kelly and thus of the development of abstraction from the shadows cast by our everyday world. Associations may also arise with Mondrian, as his non-representational compositions are known to have been preceded by images of fields. In any case, Budde directs attention to the beginnings of modernism, not only characterized by the assertion of art's autonomy but also by a farewell to the window as a view into the world, and to images gained from the view through a window as a reflection of the world.
The window is closed in modernist art and consequently in Budde's works as well. The very covering of this highly symbolic architectural element, the window, makes the visually altered threshold situation between opening out and delimitation all the more significant. The artist's refusal to permit a view enables reflection upon seeing and visibility. In the evocation of the image-character, the everyday is taken out of context and the eye adjusts to a transitional sphere between exhibiting and concealing, between veiling and unveiling.
The choice of shiny foil to cover the windows is not merely chance. By this means, Budde comes back full circle to the white images at the start of his spatial work, inasmuch as he simultaneously introduces an important distinction: while the image-objects created in a painterly way intensify and expand perception with their concentrated surface energies, the foil represents a point-by-point stimulation of the eye, reminiscent of the functional aestheticizing strategy of design. Here, the covering becomes prominent, appearing as the decisive interface between man and goods: generally speaking, what comes between man and the world as a designed surface.
Reinhold Budde's “Pergola”, the first episode of the three-part “Passages” work in the Atelierhaus Friesenstraße in Bremen and a chapter in the artist's characteristically sequential creative œuvre, unites aspects of architecture, art and design, in reflection and form, to create a trialogue full of friction. In the staging of spatial images that change as one walks through the installation, enriched step by step, as well as in the development of perceptual moods initiated sculpturally, or through colour and architecture, he sensitizes viewers to the power of atmosphere on the highest formal level and with clarifying brevity. In his aesthetic strategy Budde achieves an exemplary coincidence of practice and intellectual concept. His works are places of experience as much as paths of insight, and also incorporate a performative quality in the presence and presentation of plastic images.
