“I dreamed of having my name in the papers, of having lots of exhibitions, and of course I wanted to do something ‘new’ in art. Egoism was my guide.” (Jörg Immendorff: Das tun, was zu tun ist, 1973)
These fine words, apart from their tone of maudlin self-reproach, can still apply to Immendorff today. His choice of the political party and the kind of art that would best “serve the people” was never in conflict with his desire to “be in the papers”.
In the early 70s, Immendorff was immersing himself in the ideological, programmatic and cleansing purgatory of the Maoist League Against Imperialism. It is the aims and strategies of this group, along with its inevitable dramatic schisms, which he so finely portrays in Das tun, was zu tun ist (To Do What Is To Be Done).
When I encountered Immendorff’s work a few years on, it reminded me of the legacy I had buried since the age of sixteen when I left the Maoist League, under the influence of Godard’s cosy dictum “one shouldn’t make political films, one should make films political”. The legacy can be expressed as an awareness of the unavoidable embarrassment of content, and of partisanship, the awkwardness of (political) content with its unavoidable moral presumption, and the necessity of moral presumption in a situation where all other authorities have failed. The awkwardness of content unsettles one’s ease in adolescence, and later on increasingly challenges one’s own sense of validity and the validity of one’s art.
Only an artist could communicate this disturbance – though not one of those ideologically “right-thinking” artists, who were probably closer to the party line than the trivial agit-prop painter Immendorff. Their thoughts were too simple for me, as all thoughts on art are too simple when compared with the intellectual possibilities of their realisation in an image. In Das tun, was zu tun ist, and also in the furniture exhibition “Position/Situation”, Immendorff showed me how “political correctness” can be more exacting than just “right-thinking” – that it lies not only in subjecting oneself and one’s art to infinitely laborious, funny and above all painful procedures, but also in exposing those procedures and constantly evolving new ones: working egoism into an endless self-criticism. When you get what you want, there is either something lacking or everything is distorted out of recognition. In culture, desires or demands are seen to be independent of power and production. It is this separation which demarcates culture as such. All demands made in the field of culture are fulfilled these days with increasing velocity, but always in a self-defeating way. Parents give the wrong records, toy cars of the wrong brand, art schools and ideas abound, but in the wrong places, with the wrong people.
The realm of political demands, expressed within culture and on a cultural level, is a classic example of the distorted idea-desire-fulfillment curve: demands are always met completely, but in a way which entirely severs them from the political reality they originally addressed. From democracy to the equality of women, all demands are seen to be realised, but only among artists. The results most frequently evinced by this concept of political art are such phenomena as token women in exhibitions and democratically organised groups of artists – the opposite of what was being demanded in the first place.
The fact that the things that one fights for are actually achieved, but precisely reversed, is the eternal misfortune and the eternal error of protest art, and the eternal tragedy of “political” culture in general. But it is, in some sense, an obsolete tragedy. In future the tasks of culture will no longer be evaluation of morality, the apportioning of guilt and praise, but instead the distillation of pure and ever stronger stimulants, the primary material of the leisure industry.
Art was never in competition with reality, but rather lived close to it and fed on its most exciting and advanced areas. Art is a parasite, attached to the most advanced, distinct, beautiful and characteristic products of false relations. But its proximity to those products does not raise the question of whether it can thereby have a correct content, but of how any content is arrived at, how a basically non-political (purely artistic) self-interrogation can lead to an (inevitably political) field of content. Neither Immendorff’s contemporaries, nor Immendorff himself, came close to making such painful demands on art as did the members of the Maoist League, who even saw Immendorff’s portraits of the classic figures of Marxism/Leninism as somewhat slanted.
The pursuit of content, and of the most “correct” content possible, leads the visual artist, and particularly the painter, to the extreme limits of his competence, where it is jeopardised by what it cannot do or be. This would expose Immendorff to question the very fact of painting, in a way more extreme than anything thrown up by art history since the advent of cinema, Duchamp and Dada, which has aimed at overcoming painting entirely. There will always be a dialogue between Immendorff the painter and the Immendorff who started out with the dictum, “Stop painting”.
“Can you change anything with it?” asks Elvis, pointing to an Italian sports car, picking up a mariachi trumpet and finally Woody Guthrie’s guitar. Jeff Koons stands up and tells him that the mariachi trumpet, the sports car and Woody Guthrie’s guitar are precisely what the world is. Tattooed on the forearm of W. Axl Rose. Today the question is less whether culture can change the world than whether the world still has a chance of getting noticed through the maze of culture that has engulfed it. Faced with this situation in most of the media-saturated countries, and the continuing tendency of media and culture to spark off revolutions in places outside their domain, Immendorff’s questions, “For What? For Whom?” (in Das tun, was zu tun ist) seem antediluvian. They are in the spirit of Mao’s speeches and ideas in Yenan, still tied to the belief in art’s transformative potential, based on insight and benevolence.
The most beautiful paintings are those that also say something about the artist, which appear superficially to be against the thread of his intended meaning and only secondly and thirdly in line with his intentions. Immendorff’s later paintings, such as his champagne-drinking scenes with Duchamp and other classic artists, or his portraits of the Galerie Werner and its milieu of curators, collectors, critics and friends, address the way in which the world is transformed using “a simple paintbrush (0.70 DM)”, “a wooden frame with a canvas stretched across it” (it is here that the artist’s idea is given form), and normal housepaint. In these paintings, through these paintings, capital moves around, people are magnetically attracted and bound together, and manifestos performed on the unsteady stage of interpersonal and hierarchical relations are turned by those very relations into solid facts of economic power. The Maoist understanding of how to use cultural campaigns in support of the State is finally mobilised to represent the way in which the production of art today both stabilises and moves Capitalism, as a power-political interplay between money and ideas.
In his later paintings, Immendorff has kept to the correct political questions, but the felt prohibition on painting no longer derives from political morality or conflicting peer group pressures: it derives rather from impotence in the face of the institutionalised affirmation of painting, enabling it to express only the magnificence of depicting its own pointlessness, brokenness and commodification. One way of expressing this impotence is by the use of a figuration which totally reduces objects to a symbolic function, and thus can harmonise self-reflexive irony with the old committment. Only when the attitude of the artist towards what he depicts is clear can the style of painting become apparent, and not if the attitude leaves the content hanging, as in Richter’s Baader-Meinhof paintings.
For What? For Whom? It has become impossible for the successful painter in his 40s to express solidarity with the struggling peoples of the world, however strongly he may feel it. World affairs have not in some way become post-political: the life-cycle of the painter has changed, demanding a new approach. If one has decided in favour of painting at some point, it is necessary to go on developing as a painter. The artist’s means of production have greatly evolved – doing justice to these means of production does not mean experimenting with computers, but at least being familiar with the life-style that is possible for artists today. For at the very point where they are most closely related to power, the arts can develop a range of different functions, opening up unconquered areas attached to ideas and languages which cannot exist elsewhere.
Art sticks to power and is also furthest from power, further from the people than any other medium and thus furthest from the ravages of power, which occur among the people (and which also consist in barricading away the people’s efforts for self-realisation – the very thing art desires for the artist). It is thus also free to make contact with its own most recent, correct and uncoded energies: the energies from which, in Mao’s words, “the correct ideas of the people emerge”. If the visual arts create an awareness of this condition of their existence that is not exhausted in the resentment and emotionalism that we all know, but leaves the contradiction on display as a massive joke, that’s something.