Archive Newsletter No. 10
October 2022
The previous Archive Newsletters were authored by the former archivist of the Kunstverein, Adrian Djukic. On the occasion of the Kunstverein München’s bicentenary next year, this edition marks the beginning of a new format that also includes guest contributions addressing the history of the Kunstverein based on personal experiences.
Snapshots and Sightlines
By Saim Demircan
During my last year as curator at Kunstverein München in 2015, I invited artist Stephan Dillemuth to screen video footage he had taken of exhibitions at Friesenwall 120, the artist-run space that he started in Cologne in the early 1990s. [1] While watching the distinctly handheld quality of this material it occurred to me that the role of subjectivity in documentation might have been overlooked within exhibition histories. In my research since, I’ve sought out instances where a documentarian’s agency is apparent in their encounter with an artwork or exhibition and consider what different points of view reveal about artistic and curatorial practice.
Looking at the Kunstverein’s archives with these ideas in mind I was led, somewhat naturally, to Renate Kern’s photographs. Kern was the Kunstverein’s Head of Administration from 1976 to 2007. When the Archive Space was initiated in 2020, she gave archivist Adrian Djukic several color prints of photos she took over the years she worked there. These mostly document the social environment of the Kunstverein, including art trips for members, celebrations, and openings—occasions at which Kern was present, often amongst people in an audience. Whereas professional photographs of exhibitions predominantly record the Kunstverein’s official history, Kern’s snapshots document a more embodied, lived experience of the organization. Seeing the Kunstverein from her perspective, we can rethink how and by whom an institution’s history is formed, and what more “amateur” forms of documentation can contribute to contextualization.
As such, I’m interested in how Kern’s photos contrast with the archived materials that are more regularly used to historize exhibitions. These types of images appear to be directed by a singular, or cyclopic, institutional eye, which can also contribute to an unilateral view of history and are often repeatedly taken by the same photographer. [2] In this respect, Kern’s photos are an addendum to what has become an increasingly homogenized field in the evolution of exhibition documentation, itself contingent on photography. Throughout the 20th century, the development of the gallery as an aesthetically neutral space has removed art from its place within any visibly concurrent social or political reality, locating it instead in an “eternity of display” according to Brian O’Doherty. This timelessness (of space), it could be said, is reflected in art’s documentation, which O’Doherty describes as a “metaphor for the gallery space.” [3] These ahistorical mechanisms have also led to the elimination of any evidence of spectators in official forms of exhibition documentation. The inclusion of people in Kern’s photographs, on the other hand, timestamp the Kunstverein at various points in its past and help narrate the history of its program as it has been shaped by certain figures that appear together in these images. For instance, several photos capture the shifts in leadership between Zdenek Felix, Helmut Draxler, and Dirk Snauwaert, who each ran Kunstverein München one after the other between 1986 and 2001 during a period when the outlook of the institution was undergoing significant change.
Notably, Draxler’s time as director following Felix in 1992 represented a shift towards theoretical and discursive art forms at a time when artists were beginning to treat the exhibition itself as a medium. Throughout his tenure, Draxler made the Kunstverein a preeminent site for artists associated with what Karen Archey recently termed second wave Institutional Critique in the 1990s, many of whom were from America. [4] These practices had already arrived in Germany under the auspices of gallerist Christian Nagel in Cologne, who had shown artists such as Andrea Fraser and Renée Green for the first time outside of the U.S. [5] Kern’s photos situate Felix, Draxler, and Snauwaert within the Kunstverein’s galleries—they are often seen giving speeches surrounded by or in front of people—visualizing the role of the director as the storyteller of this institution. If a professional photographer directs the eye towards an artwork along well-traversed sightlines within an exhibition, Kern had a knack for catching glimpses of relationships between people in these same spaces. For example, in a snapshot from the opening of Thomas Locher’s 1995 exhibition, Preamble and basic rights in the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany [Discourse 2] A Commentary, Draxler’s head is turned towards Snauwaert, who would become director the following year, in a moment perhaps symbolic of passing on the baton.
Many of Kern’s photographs are taken from the position of a member of an audience at an exhibition opening or event. Often, someone’s shoulder or applauding hands might appear at the edges of the frame. These accidental inclusions gesture to the Kunstverein as an organization where sociability is integral to its structure—“Verein,” after all, means society. One of her later photos (presumably taken after she had retired) shows Bart van der Heide giving a speech in the entrance to the Kunstverein. [6] In this picture he is framed by what can be read as symbols of social forms of patronage: a woman in a shimmering cocktail dress, a bottle of champagne, and a supportive glance from Florian Seidl who was then chair of the board. Seen from Kern’s position as employee and a member of the Kunstverein, the relational quality of her images provides an extra layer of contextualization to the milieu that encapsulates what takes place there. Looking at this photo, I’m reminded of the way that the artist Louise Lawler displaces the art object in her photographic work to reveal the surroundings in which art appears in collector’s homes, restaurants, and offices. Even in her photographs of art in museums and galleries, she purposefully includes things that are more usually left out of shot or removed, such as labels, wall fixtures, or other artworks. “In a photograph, the location of the edge is a primary decision, since it composes – or decomposes – what it surrounds” writes O’Doherty. [7] What appears at these edges speaks to the context of presentation and when this context is an exhibition, it reveals that exhibition’s participation within a wider system of display.
ps what’s most obvious about Kern’s photographs, however, is the fact that the exhibitions at which these images were taken are almost always obscured. In many of them, actual artworks either cannot be seen or are only visible in the background. Rather, the social dynamics at play in her photos call to mind Hans Haacke’s documenta 2 Photographic Notes (Fotonotizen, documenta 2), taken while he was an art student in Kassel working on documenta in 1959. During this time, Haacke photographed the exhibition, focusing on people rather than the art on display. Overhearing the many conversations among art dealers, collectors, members of the press, as well as with the organizers of the exhibition, the artist came to realize that the exhibition itself functioned as a backdrop for a collective system of brokering. “Photographs furnish evidence” writes Susan Sontag, and Haacke bore witness to dealings in the art world early on in his artistic life—socio-economic machinations that would then become the primary object of interrogation throughout his practice. [8] Coincidentally, the photographer and collector Wilhem Schürmann—who himself often documented exhibitions—took the photos Haacke used in his controversial 1981 work, Der Pralinenmeister (The Chocolatier). [9] Both Schürmann’s photography and art collection were the subject of the exhibition Someone else with my fingerprints at the Kunstverein in 1998.
Kern’s photographs reveal the structure of the Kunstverein through the people depicted in them, too. While exhibitions come and go, Munich’s bourgeois society remains a constant fixture within the traditionally members-based organization. Crucial to its framework are the board members, often made up of upper-class professionals and collectors for whom supporting the Kunstverein represents a certain prestige within its local artistic community. As part of Draxler’s program, the social status of its board was psychologically deconstructed and dramatized by Andrea Fraser in her 1993 exhibition Eine Gesellschaft des Geschmacks (A Society of Taste) of which Kern took several photos at the opening. In the center of one of these appears former Kunstverein treasurer, patron, and lawyer, Bernd Mittelsten-Scheid, talking to Draxler with Fraser at the edge of the frame. Kern’s snapshot perfectly expresses the subject of the exhibition as it’s focused on the interplay between director and a board member with the artist appearing as an onlooker in the image.
The essence of my interest in Kern’s photographs lies in the coincidental. In her essay Notes on Photography & Accident, artist Moyra Davey circles round “the idea that accident is the lifeblood of photography” in the writing of Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, and Janet Malcolm. “For Sontag and Malcolm accident is the vitality of the snapshot,” notes Davey. [10] Kern’s photos bring the Kunstverein’s history to life through the incidental nature of the snapshot; compositions that staged photography rarely captures. Where official documentation renders artworks in exhibitions frozen in, or outside of time, the inclusion of people that surround, support, and constitute the Kunstverein in these photographs adds a usually unseen vitality to an institution’s historical records. Their representation, like that of its documentarian, now find a place on its timeline.
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Saim Demircan is a curator, writer, and PhD candidate at Kingston School of Art. He was curator at Kunstverein München between 2012 and 2015.
Editing: Gloria Hasnay
Many thanks to Adrian Djukic, Helmut Draxler, Jonas von Lenthe, Renate Kern, Johanna Klingler, and Laura McLean-Ferris
If you have any questions about the Martina Fuchs Archive, please contact Jonas von Lenthe via archiv@kunstverein-muenchen.de
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Footnotes:
[1] This was followed up with an interview in frieze d/e, issue 21, which can be found on frieze’s website or at societyofcontrol.com.
[2] For instance, Wilfried Petzi documented a large part of Kunstverein München’s exhibitions for more than twenty years, beginning in the early 1990s.
[3] Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkely: University of California Press, 1999), p. 15.
[4] See Karen Archey, After Institutions (Berlin: Floating Opera Press, 2022).
[5] Nagel himself is from Munich and had opened his first gallery here before relocating to Cologne in 1990, then the artistic center of West Germany in a country on the cusp of reunification.
[6] Bart van der Heide was director of Kunstverein München between 2010 and 2015.
[7] O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, p. 19.
[8] Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin Books, 2019), p. 3.
[9] Wilhelm Schürmann, ‘A Collector as Photographer,’ in: Stephen Prina, We Represent Ourselves To The World (Los Angeles: UCLA / Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, 2004), p. 218.
[10] Moyra Davey, Index Cards (New York: New Directions Publishers, 2020), p. 43.
Fig:
[1] Exhibition opening of Barbara Bloom - Signate, Signa, Temere Me Tangis Et Angis im Kunstverein München, 1990. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Renate Kern.
[2] Bart van der Heide at Kunstverein München, year unknown. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Renate Kern
[3] Exhibition opening of Andrea Fraser - Eine Gesellschaft des Geschmacks at Kunstverein München, 1993. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Renate Kern.
[4] Exhibition opening of Thomas Locher – Präambel und Grundrechte im Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland Artikel 1 - 19 [Diskurs 2] Ein Kommentar at Kunstverein München, 1995. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., photo: Renate Kern.
[5] Exhibition opening of Michael Croissant – Skulpturen und Zeichnungen at Kunstverein München, 1991. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Renate Kern.
[6] Exhibition opening of Andrea Fraser – Eine Gesellschaft des Geschmacks at Kunstverein München, 1993. From left to right: Helmut Draxler, Bernd Mittelsten Scheid, Andrea Fraser. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V.; photo: Renate Kern.