neo rauch at the met

Twenty minutes to one o'clock in the morning the day I'm supposed to fly to Los Angeles is probably not the best time to meditate on the small Neo Rauch exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that I caught this morning prior to my last day of research at the MoMA Archives. Given that the Archives do not open until the decadent hour of 11am, I decided to make it to the Met when they opened their doors at 9:30am and stop by Michael Werner Gallery on 77th and 5th to see a Broodthaers installation that just opened this week (and for which I was thwarted from seeing on Monday thanks to Time Out New York anticipating its opening by a day).

After a little of the now-customary security rigmarole at the Met's entrance (flashlight searches of one's bag, standing in a second line to turn on one's laptop and getting a little yellow pass to carry it about once it successfully does not detonate), I bee-lined it straight to Neo Rauch, where, although the show had opened while I was still living in Hamburg over a month ago (there was a little TV profile about his big New York opening on the local news there), art handlers were hanging the main wall label for the one-room installation of some dozen paintings. (I later realized it was one of the most laughably poor wall texts I've read in years: Neo is from Leipzig! Here are some random facts about Leipzig! He says he's 'conservative' and 'romantic' and that he 'paints from [his] dreams'! That makes him like Balthus!)

I had the room to myself for the hour I was there, pondering this little mid-career special installation of a painting cycle, "Para," that Rauch painted for the space. (This is the third such exhibition the Met has staged, and if this one is anything to go by, it is a enormously successful conceit.) The show sealed the deal for me: I love Rauch's work. Normally, I am seduced by a painting's facture - that is what sucks me into the medium. My enthusiasm for the work is therefore all the more surprising because its facture is subtle and secondary. At the same time, the imagery also plays second fiddle: I imagine there's likely to be a lot of talk about his "Germanness," evoked by boxy women with cellos or enlightened hunters-butchers-diggers-painters. (I wouldn't know since this is one of the rare instances where I have not read anything about an artist before actually seeing his work.)

No, for me, what made me stop in my tracks for painting that I would normally never go in for (again, not "material" enough, not abstract enough) was the fact that I have never felt so compelled to stand so far back from a painting (regardless of its size). My impulse to get up close right away was thoroughly unrewarding, and slowly I stepped back and back and back again until the painting looked about right clear across the room. For some of the really large canvases, I still think I could have used a bit more space. I was literally pushed to the other end of the room by these paintings.

I have an immediate theory about why this is, one that might preoccupy me on my odyssey tomorrow. The compositions of these paintings are already collage-like, atomized, disjointed. Figures that ought to be on the same plane are impossibly different sizes, so attempts to locate anything in an illusionistic (and coherent) space goes immediately out the window. But the works go one step further: even at the level of the figures' bodies corporeal certainty is a pipe dream. A man has a hulking torso, a rather tiny head, an hand that is too small and another that is too large. Rather than give the impression of being simply "poorly painted," the body stretches and morphs, distorting under the pressure of our gaze, which is itself anything but consistent, steady, or predictable. The thing looked at is as furtive as the person doing the looking. (And reading this, I think of Ingres, but that's not quite right...)

How Rauch effects the transitions between the pieces of his puzzle-like images is also brilliant: the painting breaks down into smears of pure abstraction, figures fuse into clumsy optical illusion (one woman's elbow is another woman's breast, and both are actually flags ready to be set aflame). All the rhetoric about "Germanness" or "dreams" or "romanticism" is a bit obvious and a bit of a trap. The works are uncomfortable to look at, but the result is - paradoxically - that you can't tear your eyes away.



Top, above:
Neo Rauch (German, born 1960)
Para, 007
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York
© 2007 Neo Rauch/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo: Uwe Walter

Top, below and at bottom:
Neo Rauch (German, born 1960)
Warten auf die Barbaren (Waiting for the Barbarians), 2007
Oil on canvas; 59 1/8 x 157 1/2 in. (150 x 400 cm)
Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin & David Zwirner, New York
© 2007 Neo Rauch/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
Photo: Uwe Walter

See link at right for larger images