"Uno di voi, un tedesco in Florence"
Jemima Montagu
In 1976 a young German set out for Florence hoping to become an actor. In fact he started making paintings, but he did not leave the world of theatre behind. Instead Martin Kippenberger absorbed theatre and the theatrical into his diverse working practice as an artist and, above all, he became the protagonist, and often performer, in all his work.
Nearly thirty years later, Markus Vater, another young German, also went to Florence. His work bears certain similarities with his predecessor - the former "tedesco in Florence" - which is why the parallel is relevant. Vaters practice, like Kippenbergers, is extraordinarily diverse. His roots lie in painting - the result of many years of study in the painting department at the Duesseldorf Academy - and he freely experiments with a range of images and visual codes, from representational portraiture to kitsch airbrushed poster, and from newspaper photo-story to cartoons and illegible doodles. However Vater also makes objects, sculptures, computer animations, drawings and writings. When I say he "makes writings", its because, like the statements of Fluxus artist Ben Vautier or even the subversive doodles of Raymond Pettibon, writing is so integrated in Vaters work that it seems to take on concrete form. It is also crucial to the spirit or soul of his work.
Pithy, aphoristic statements, often accompanied by doodle-style illustrations, can be found across Vaters practice. They appear, suddenly, in the midst of a sculptural installation or embedded in a grid of paintings. Or else he covers an entire wall with these scribbles and drawings, creating a visual overload of images and ideas. These statements seem to be the essence of Vaters work because they act as agents of change or transformation which suddenly throw everything off-balance. They challenge and provoke, they inspire and amuse, and above all, they jolt the lazy viewer into thinking harder about the images in front of him.
why
is the world dominated by countries with changing seasons?
Architecture of Evil (2003) is an installation made during Vaters stay in Italy, which comprises a vast canvas drawing of Roger Daltry, lead singer of The Who, and a simple triangular structure made from pink paper with five short texts written on it. Vater has described Daltry in the drawing as "happy and at ease, human, there, upbeat"; its true - he is smiling and must be at the pinnacle of his career. But the texts, in sharp contrast, work against this mood of lightness, each exploring the idea of evil through bizarre musings and strange pseudo-scientific propositions. One text states: "Evil doesn't exist. There are only particles circling around other particles. There are arrows pointing in directions and particles which move through space in waves. Mankind is a temporary unstable construction. My mother is just an experiment which could burst any minute like a soap bubble. LetŐs be honest: we have absolutely no sense of time." If Daltry is all light, clarity and airiness, then these texts seem to present the dark side, a muddle of negative thoughts and nihilistic cul-de-sacs.
Architecture
of evil
The investigation of opposites appears to be a common thread in Vaters work. He has explained how he is interested in exploring the relative values of common binary structures such as good / bad, light / dark, inside / outside, etc. as a way of challenging traditional ways of looking at the world. It is not surprising that he often chooses to use comedy to subvert these values, and by playing the fool can also reveal the insight of the idiot-savant. In Model of God, 2003, Vater has placed a postcard, with stuck-on legs, on top of a small rock made out of papier-maché. The postcard shows a truck tipping cement off a quay into the sea, and the caption above the image reads; "he wants to make a model of god by filling the ocean with concrete". In this modest work Vater takes us from the heights of celestial fantasy, idealism and hope to the lows of a dried-up sea-bed full of concrete, from which this ugly papier-maché rock might have tumbled. It could be read as a critique of western capitalism's devastation of the planet, and the slow encroachment of concrete across the globe, but it remains more open-ended and less judgmental. Vater opens up ideas, and then leaves them floating as a series of alternative possibilities, a kind of fantasy parallel universe.
outside/
Model of God
Vaters bizarre philosophical theories and strange, hand-made objects place him firmly in the anarchic tradition of dada and Surrealism. But his tendency towards the role of mad scientist may be more closely linked to Swiss artists Fischli and Weiss, whose work also pursues the cross-overs between scientific knowledge and everyday life. Their first film Der geringste Widerstand (1980), which tells the story of a bear and a rat who set off to conquer the world and plumb the depths of science, could easily appear as a scenario in one of Vaters cartoons. Likewise their famous sequence of household chain-reactions in Der Lauf der Dinge (1987) shares the same spirit of improvised confusion as many of Vaters drawings and aphorisms, such as a touching painting of trees bending back down to earth with the caption: "Trees that couldn't make up their minds".
Bäume
But, as with the best humour, Vaters jokes and visual puns also express a serious side, exposing a genuine curiosity and concern about what is happening in the world. Through low-tech measures and materials, he reaches towards big issues and ideas, and isn't afraid of turning things upside down to see what lies underneath. Vater recently developed a theory about the relationship between the seasons and global power, exploring an observation that it is only powerful, western countries that have such marked changes of seasons. Moon, 2003, and Garden, 2003, which were both painted in Italy, explore related ideas; the former depicts an astronaut on a dry, barren moonscape reached as a result of sophisticated western technology, and the latter an image of a lush tropical paradise, untouched by human hand. Although Vater offers no specific explanation or critique, these works offer quiet, oblique reflections on world events and the distribution of power.
The
garden
