I
Reinhold Budde is encroaching bit by bit into the surrounding space with his more recent works. As a painter, he has investigated the picture space and the image’s impact at, on and in front of the wall. In the work “To Palermo” in the pavilion of the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus he occupies the whole of the small building’s interior with three precise interventions. His setting of colours and architectonic elements activates movement in space, or rather: to experience the work it is necessary to move within the space. In the centre of the room, a white beam with vertical black-painted stands has been set directly across the collar beam that passes above the door and into the room. In this way the space is divided into two halves. The thin, black-painted supports frame narrow passages into the rear half of the room. The reverse of the new cross beam is painted red, and from the viewpoint at which the viewer sees this colour, at the latest, he will also notice that a triangular section of wall above the door has been painted yellow. There is a position in the room where these three parts unite into one “image”: a yellow triangle with a thick red horizontal line and thin black vertical lines.
The three colours mark three spatial zones. Through the door one can see the black stands, in the room one perceives the yellow triangle up above and having passed between the black supports and then turned around, one will also see the third colour. And yet the position with the one image described above is not compelling, by any means – it is simply one possibility.
“To Palermo” is suggestive of homage. Some individual elements of the work, like the three colours, a triangular shape above a door, or the verticals attached to a cross beam are direct recollections of famous works by Blinky Palermo (1943 – 1977). Budde seems to be quoting, although these quotations are less dominant than our experience of the space as outlined above. But taken separately, each one could certainly be attributed exaggerated significance, so that the reference to Palermo also includes one of the latter’s few theoretical statements about his spaces: the fact that they could only be perceived on the spot.
II
Those who quote provoke comparison. Budde employs signal colours that also appear, in different contexts, in Palermo’s works. While Palermo used signal colours in his late metal pictures and for the panes of glass he painted in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976, Budde employs them to mark the architecture. In his mural paintings and drawings Palermo used much less powerful colours or in one contrary case an entire wall element of oxblood colour, freestanding in the space (Hamburger Kunstverein, 1973), which became a sculpture for that very reason. In other words, Budde’s quotations lead to quite different accentuations.
Palermo could still rely on the walls in the rooms he manipulated being basically white, so that even one line could have some effect. By contrast, Budde knows that only clear signals are assertive enough in face of today’s brightly-coloured exhibition practice, and so he uses colours with appropriate connotations. In “To Palermo” the signal colours indicate that this is all about painting. In order to enable the viewer to experience a space today using minimal means, these means need to be very striking. Of course, Budde is obviously concerned to point out and investigate a basic idea of art around 1970 – the physical experience of space – under current conditions. Reinhold Budde makes a space visible and places himself consciously within a specific tradition by means of its title.
III
In art history, the term “radicalized painting” is sometimes used for the American Minimal Art of the 1960s and early 1970s. In this way, firstly a logical movement is described from the flat surface into three-dimensional space; secondly, the phrase underlines the fact that many artists who were investigating that space in those years had been painters originally. A third fact is far more important, however: over the course of modern art history the painting had lost its function as something aiming for illusion and had been perceived more powerfully as an object. And so how is it distinct from another object? Through positioning in space? Through simple convention? Clement Greenberg seemed to have described the end already in 1962, when he pointed out that an empty canvas could be a painting. By turning this question around and examining not the “painting” but the “thing”, the generation of the Minimalist sengendered a productive escape from this apparent dead end. The discussion was not about what happened in the painting (for that could be a mere canvas), but what happened with this object when it was perceived by other people.
When Blinky Palermo mounted bright-coloured lengths of cloth that had been sewn together onto canvas stretchers, he presented a different escape route. This strategy did not correspond to the fundamentalist, rigid debates in the American magazines. But using the colours and their cultural meanings (fashion and signals) he demonstrated that painting is also possible under changed circumstances. And that is still valid, even today.
IV
The American debate concealed a powerful nationalistic impulse. It was a matter of liberating US-American art from European influences – rigid terminology and logic served the purpose of this exorcism particularly well. The artists employed immense intellectual acumen to reduce art to the so-called phenomenological triangle of object, viewer and space. And while the object was being reduced more and more, the two great unknowns were uncovered in the space and the viewer.
Minimal objects were still leading their viewers to maximal interpretations, so that the famous self-reassurance of the Minimalists that “a box is a box is a box” fell down for the obvious reason that a box is also a container for potential content. By contrast, the third element of the triangle, space, seemed to adopt an interim position. It could not be controlled like the object but was not completely uncontrollable, like the viewer. While modern sculpture investigated space through the confrontation of two bodies (the artwork and the viewer), the Minimalists opened up new perspectives on space by problematizing the former. Their method consequently proved itself a very effective strategy: in a first step, the artist reduces the parameters of his artistic language. In the second step he controls and manipulates these few remaining parameters and so deliberately influences the perceptual situation, primarily the space and (to a slightly less controlled extent) the viewers.
The precision of this American thinking decisively shaped ideas about art and space. The consequence of such debates seemed to be the disappearance of media differences, since everything and anything could be an object. Blinky Palermo is the artist who turned this apparent negative around to make a positive. He productively negated the question of whether painting would ever become obsolete in as much as he showed how (already almost old-fashioned) abstract painting was possible under the conditions of design, object art and Pop Art. The tradition of Minimalism seems to be a tradition of negation. And this is how it is still perceived today; its rigid logic appears predominantly – rigid. Blinky Palermo, by contrast, stands for a possible escape from negation. Here, the main thing is the possibility of minimal interventions that are capable of maximal significance. This fundamental openness is the tradition of Palermo.
V
The three colours yellow, red and black which Palermo used in several key works in 1976 and 1977 mark his position between two cultures. On the one hand, they remind us of the flag of the Federal Republic of Germany; on the other hand, his American contemporaries already recognised in them Palermo’s reception of Indian colour patterns. And while his American colleagues wished to exclude that kind of ambiguity, today it is a key reason for Palermo’s fame.
In this context it seems important to understand that Palermo’s work was not just a simple reaction to minimal positions but evolved simultaneously to them. The question of the object, the space and the viewer could be answered differently, therefore, just as the question of the empty canvas did not exclude alternatives, by any means.
Anyone who considers Palermo’s art-historical position in this way will understand that when Reinhold Budde refers to the other artist he is reminding us continually that his own work is not focused on reduction, negation or installation but on the central aspects of experience and painting.