Robyn Thomas

Albert Oehlen/Home and Garden New Museum NYC September 2015 

I began traveling the painting road at a time it was deemed by some to be a road to nowhere. Those some since re-discovered it as an endless highway; not a straight shot down an expressway, more a narrow, mountainous two-lane highway. It is a road with endless hairpin curves which can result in either an exhilarating ride, a smash up, or death.  All depends upon how the driver takes the curve. In the 1980s when I first got behind the wheel of my car I felt the drivers who were still driving their cars down that mountain highway were either driving like stock car drivers behind the wheel of Formula 1 Ferraris, or they took the curves with such caution that they might as well have just walked down the mountain, because they were driving a Renault Twizy. Some drivers sped along as if they were Tod and Buz headed down Route 66 in a classic 1960s Corvette convertible in search of meaning; it was always a pleasurable experience in its own way, each season brought a new model year, but every time the key turned in the ignition it was still the same old car.  

And then there was Albert Oehlen truckin’ along behind the wheel of a backhoe.

Unlike his contemporaries, with Albert Oehlen painting is neither about the car nor about the driver. Sometimes I’m not even sure if it is about the road. Early on Oehlen seemed to be excavating a road that had been declared a dead end simply because it had been buried under a pile of rocks and mud which had recently slid down the mountain. He recognized just because the road is temporarily blocked does not mean it doesn’t continue on. I’m unsure if this recognition came to him before he began the excavation, or if it was a discovery made during the process, but I’m beginning to think it came to him while he was playing around in the mud. I don’t believe he was trying to build a new road on top of the old; he wasn’t looking for the cool, trendy vehicle which would carry him over it either. He grabbed the backhoe and began digging through the layers and was probably surprised to find the road that lay underneath and continues on ahead.

Over the past quarter century I have had the opportunity to see Albert Oehlen’s paintings in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the US and Germany. This is however the first retrospective exhibition of his paintings that I have had the chance to see, and it was the first solo exhibition he has had in a New York museum[1]. I was curious to see and hear the conversation that would occur between the works, which in the short time span they were produced cover a broad range of approach to the problems and solutions Oehlen has taken.[2] Oehlen is known to take a hands off approach to the work once it leaves his studio, letting it speak for itself independent of the artist’s voice, because of this I did expect to gain a better view of the pile of mud and rock and not just shovels full of dirt deposited here and there that I have otherwise stumbled across. I hoped to see the progress made in clearing the roadway as a means of reassurance that this journey can continue, if not just for him, then for myself.

The exhibition was relatively small for an artist known for his productivity, with the number of works about equivalent to the time span covered. Despite a loosely chronological installation, the space did not dictate a chronological viewing of the work; I tended to wander around, viewing works as they caught my eye which is my preferred manner of viewing exhibits. 

I was first drawn to a group of square abstract paintings Oehlen created between 1988-1991. His initial exploration of painting was focused on figurative/self portraiture; the story behind Oehlen’s journey to abstraction has become one of those art world legends which will continue to sustain the paintings, although in my opinion they do not need this type of support...but it is a good story.[3] Oehlen is quoted from an interview with Glenn O’Brien in Mark Godfrey’s catalog essay Disdain and Desire: Albert Oehlen’s Abstraction[4] as shifting from the figurative to the abstract because that is how he understood the trajectory painting had taken in art history and therefore saw it as a natural progression in his own work.[5] 

In contrast to the grey-scale paintings and the figurative/self portraits also on the first floor, what was apparent to me in these five abstract paintings was the critical distancing he had applied in the other work towards the act of painting was falling away...he was trying to keep it up, but he couldn’t...he’d fallen under the spell of the pleasure of painting. In the self portraits and earlier figurative works, the muddy brown colors were a tool he applied as a means of establishing false expectations, re-creating cliched desires of the viewer. In those paintings the tension between the “seriousness” of the fictions the artist created of the viewers’ expectations and the truthful, humorous, “insincerity” of the artist does not reveal an encounter with the pleasure of painting. The muddy brown base colors accented by intense cobalt blue, viridian, indian yellow, salmon pink and vermillion appearing in the abstract paintings portend to a similar use of color as a tool to uphold this tension, but then something happened, the tool broke. Removing the representational subject from the painting destroyed the insincerity contained in the painting. 

Oh shit! Oehlen became “Shallow Al” and painting became Gwyneth Paltrow sans fat suit.[6]

The road didn’t end there. There still was something to be said about painting in the last decade of the twentieth century:  the digital age. The early black and white paintings[7] combined silkscreen prints on paper, of computer generated lines and patterns with directly painted forms, and smoothing of pixelated lines by the artist’s brush. This series directly followed those decadent abstractions in their production and were installed on the same floor. Next to the preceding body of work this series really appeared to be lacking. It wasn’t just the color; the surface, the pleasure that was a part of the paintings from the late eighties are absent but it is an overall feeling of lack of resolution which shines through. None of these works contain any sense of being finished...and that is the point Oehlen has arrived at. The longer I spent going back and forth the wrestling match between the digital technology and the painter’s brush in these paintings became more heated. It was clear the match could not end with a winner...the technology was already passé and the painter’s brush could only do so much. There was no space, no depth present in which the two could hash things out; they were confined to the surface of the canvas in a never-ending slow burn. 

Escaping the heat I headed to the second floor of the exhibit where I was greeted by the large and refreshing fountain of Selbst als Frühling [Self-portrait as Spring], 2006. This is not an immediate successor of the black and white paintings, and within the context of Oehlen’s work this seemed more of an attempt at reconciling the paintings of his youth with those of middle age. The additional element of collaged pages from botanical studies points towards the final body of paintings [2008-2011] in the exhibition which incorporate collaged advertisements. The digital does not appear directly in this painting like it does in the predecessors, but it is hard not to see its presence in the overall composition of the painting. 

Oehlen was still making the black and white silkscreen and oils, and he had also returned to the ironic, tongue in cheek figurative/self portraiture work of his origins as represented by the grey scale painting Bad, 2003[8] as well as the Untitled installation from 2005. That installation, relegated to a corner space on the first floor of the exhibition, consisted of a bedroom/studio apartment reminiscent of what one would find in a 1970s students’ WG somewhere in Germany, with its striped wall paper, ugly rug and bedding, accoutrements such as an orange, two burner hot plate, espresso cooker, bed pan, sorry plastic plant, turn table and LPs stacked against the wall.[9] Hung on the wall was a poster of an exhibition in Vienna the artist took part in, as well as a couple of earlier, smaller works, and a mirror. Laying in the bed under the comforter was a ‘traditional’ self portrait of Oehlen with a realistic hand emerging from beneath the cover, brush in hand painting himself; perhaps the artist revisiting the onanism of his youth?[10]

On the second floor I found both Selbst als Frühling [Self-portrait as Spring], 2006 and the super-colorful “switch’ paintings of the late 1990s to be less exciting than the five paintings from 2001. The struggle that was unresolved in the black and white paintings of the previous decade has been resolved, and I feel painting won the match. The digital element in these paintings comes from digitized images silkscreened onto the canvas, like in the ‘switch’ paintings. There is still a strange flatness, but it is balanced by the tools of painting to create an artificial depth. Whereas the black and white paintings were about the struggle resulting from the limitations of the mediums, these paintings become a celebration of the struggle leading to the pleasure that can be found within those limitations. I found myself wanting to spend the most time with these paintings, perhaps to the detriment of the later paintings. I began thinking about those later paintings a few days after seeing the exhibition, wishing I had taken a longer look.

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[1] The New Museum published with SkiraRizzoli a catalog for this exhibition. Gioni, Massimiliano, Fredi Fischli, Niels Olsen, Mark Godfrey, and Anne Pontegnie. Albert Oehlen: Home and Garden. New York: New Museum/Skira Rizzoli, 2015. Print. At first glance I didn’t want to buy it. It is ugly. The type face, layout, binding, color of the reproductions is all crap. And at $50US it was definitely overpriced. But after taking another look at the essays I was hooked. It contains three great little essays and one interview with Oehlen. After reading the first essay by the exhibition’s curator Massimiliano Gioni I came to the conclusion [or maybe just am giving those involved the benefit of doubt] that the catalog’s aesthetics, like Oehlen’s early paintings, is intentionally bad. The writing in it is not.

[2] 1983-2011

[3] "Albert Oehlen: Stupid as a Painter" by Massimiliano Gioni, Gioni (2015) 11. Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger had holed themselves up together in a house in Andalucia in 1988 with only the other to provide critic and feedback on the work they were producing. Taking the isolation as an opportunity to explore unexplored avenue, Kippenberger looked to self portraiture, and Oehlen to abstraction. Considering Kippenberger’s critique of his friend’s earlier, figurative paintings, this isolated, situation becomes even more dramatic and important to development of abstraction in Oehlen’s work. To the figurative work Kippenberger was quoted in Stephen Schmidt-Wulffen’s essay “To Claim That Things Might Be Done Differently, On the Question of Painting in Albert Oehlen’s Early (and Later) Works” (Berlin: Holzwarth Publications and Galerie Max Hetzler, 2002) as having said “You ought to buy them, it’s not possible to paint worse than that.”

[4] "Disdain and Desire: Albert Oehlen's Abstraction" by Mark Godfrey, Gioni (2015) 47.

[5] As Godfrey points out in his essay, statements such as these from Oehlen should be taken with a grain of salt. In his self portraits Oehlen was known to create paintings that were an expression of insincerity as a means of allowing himself to focus on painting’s conventions and the discrepancy between society’s desired understanding of painting and the artificial constructs by the artist in addressing these desires.

[6] Shallow Hall (2001) Directed by Bobby Farrelly, Peter Farrelly.

[7] The exception to Oehlen’s rule of black and white is Festnahme [Arrest], 1996 in which I detected a touch of Prussian Blue pigment in an otherwise black line. The color does not reproduce in the catalog image, but is visible on the photo I took with my iPhone.

[8] Bad is in German ‘bath’,what the woman depicted in the painting appears to be sitting in while observed by a partially obscured figure with an over-sized eye. However could this be just a return to the ‘bad’ painting of his youth?

[9] At the front of the stack was Andy Gibb’s Flowing Rivers, (1977).

[10] I did try to photograph myself in the mirror in a way so that it appeared I was in bed with the painting of Oehlen, but unfortunately I could not get the correct angle as the mirror was hung just slightly out of the range to do so. I can only deduce the artist wanted to be alone.