Pöpp68
NGBK, Berlin, Germany
The Canon Club, Trip to Oslo (1970)
‘Vivre sans contrainte et jouir sans entrave!’ (Live without limits and enjoy without restraint) sang the generation of 1968, as students took to the streets. While they rioted, the war in Vietnam raged on, JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated, and the Prague Spring witnessed Alexander Dubček’s election in Czechoslovakia. Under the banner of the personal as political, 150 women protested against the Miss America Pageant, while feminism’s radicalism impacted directly upon the art world, as Valerie Solanas shot and wounded Andy Warhol. In Frankfurt am Main Baader-Meinhof bombs exploded in department stores.
But times have changed. Today, Fauchon, the luxury Parisian food shop, commemorates those days of mass political protest by offering a May ’68 brand of tea, ‘with a flavour of revolution’. The ’68-ers’ rebellion and hedonistic abandon has congealed into the smug middle-aged complacency implicated in the present global financial crisis. Can the cultural and artistic legacy of ’68 be re-engaged with without indulging in either rose-tinted gazing or cynical condemnation? Can any of the lost radicality of that generation be redeemed in today’s post-political, apathetic, corporate climate?
‘pöpp68’, NGBK’s strange new group show, suggests not. Presenting itself more as a working project – with numerous workshops and events – than an exhibition, it brings together a curious group of ‘intergenerational’ artists’ work and historical documents, loosely based around the issue of social participation in art. But there is no more framing, no hint at critical reception, and no suggestion of whose version of ’68 is being re-engaged.
Jole Wilcke and Christophe Kotányi, ‘Jurassic Park 68’ (2008)
The best work is undoubtedly from the veterans of that year, many of them German and East European artists often overlooked in a narrative that has largely been constructed from an Anglo-American perspective. There are brilliant black and white video works from the Croatian feminist pioneer Sanja Iveković, such as Looking At (1974), which records a prime-time evening news broadcast with a static camera that captures only the lower-right corner, the earnest sound jarring with the displaced visuals. There are documents and films by Copenhagen collective The Canon Club (named so because of their collective purchase of a Super 8 Canon camera), such as Oslo Trip (1970), documenting their gate-crashing of an art museum dressed as Native Americans. Excellent videos by German film-makers Claudia von Alemann and Reinhold E. Thiel, such as EXPMNTL Knokke (1967/68), present two men laughing like lunatic hyenas, bringing to mind early Vito Acconci.
But the newer works don’t cut it. Rainer W. Ernst and Paula Hildebrandt’s Globalisation is a Political, Public Affair (2008) is a floppy and all too obvious installation critiquing the cotton industry, while the video Parking – Finding a Place (2007), documenting a performance by Rebekka Uhlig’s ‘Performance Choir for Experimental Singing’, comes across as embarrassing and provincial. Framed original copies of silver- and bronze-covered issues of the Situationist International, and anti-authoritarian socialist flyers distributed by the German writer Peter-Paul Zahl in 1970, are sandwiched in between past and present works, but their status – romanticized aesthetic objects, or radical political documents – isn’t clear. Sadly, all they really achieve, like the show, is to suggest the vague ‘flavour of revolution’.
Sarah James
Responses
Added by Ulrike,
The publication “participation objections anyhow“ is published now (294 pages, paperback) http://ngbk.de
With six collaborative projects, a conference, and an exhibition, pöpp68 targeted and probed possible modes for participation in art.
In 2008 pöpp68 brought together artists born in the 1960s (Seraphina Lenz, Nanna Lüth, Ulrike Solbrig, Rebekka Uhlig, Giuliano Vece, Jole Wilcke) with artists and theorists that were already active in 1968 (Claudia von Alemann, Kirsten Dufour, Rainer W. Ernst, Sanja Ivekovic´ & Bojana Pejic´, Barbara Kleinitz, Christophe Kotányi) allowing them to revisit some of the complex issues that became prominent features of political and social discourse in ’68, like fascism, body and power, gender politics, consumption critique, as well as a more general questioning of authority; while also giving opportunities for participation in workshops and other avenues for exploration and intervention. As an intergenerational forum, pöpp68 looked at the chances for participation and forms of resistance from 1968 to the present.
The publication “participation objections anyhow“ (German/English) documents and contextualizes the entire project with workshop descriptions and text contributions by “Espace Masolo”, Stephan Geene, Sabine Hark, Barbara Loreck, Suzana Milevska, Rahel Puffert, Veronica Sekules, Raimar Stange, Eva Sturm, Wiebke Trunk, “Ultra-red”, and others.
