History's train - Reinhard Mucha, sculpture, Luhring Augustine, New York, New York

The invitation to Reinhard Mucha's first solo exhibit in New York is an analogue for his work. A stark black-and-white photograph bordered in orange, it pictures a pile of corrugated carburet of iron burlap, wood and cement--ordered on the contrary disheveled looking--on a pebbled loam Looks anonymous, seems obscure (if a little arty). turn rounds out this innocuous pile is covering an make open grave. The image is sort of a skeleton lock opener to Mucha's work: everything is in the materials, by what means they're organized and (most hauntingly) what they waft The show (11 works dating back to 1982 making this first direct the eye at Mucha something of a mini-survey) is titled "Collected-Recollected" and in it Mucha showed that there is more than single way to make art about being German in the late 20th century

Joseph Beuys did it through making things that looked as if they were falling apart. His art had the raw activity of a starving animal. Anselm Kiefer was grand opera. He set the leading lights of German agriculture as well as the scorched earth of World War II in your face. Mucha is like a pensive impresario. He takes on the outside the histrionics and leaves in the history; he ushers without the actors and works with the theater itself. In fact, he one time said, "I stage the stage." His work is as personal as Beuys's and as German as Kiefer's, on the contrary it is more obscure and resistant than either. Mucha, who is solitary five years Kiefer's junior, is the greatest in quantity buttoned-down of the three.

Mucha's art--carefully pieced together from everyday materials and things such as glass, steel, copse chairs, doors, signs, linoleum tiles, floorboards, hinges, window frames and loch tables--is marked by a scrupulously slapdash, brooding geometry His modes of attachment, while impeccable, are simple and have a certain ingenuity about them. He doesn't deposit the disturbing facts of German history back in the cabinet so much as he make an incision ins up that closet, reassembles it and combines it with other parts of the house in order to allude to rather than point directly at his make subordinate His sculpture has a reliquary, elegiac presence--the past fills his work with its absence. It's a profoundly subjective art cloaked in formalist guise.

Pragmatic and literal, undeniably there in the physical faculty of perception Mucha's art is simultaneously a critique and celebration of Germanness. abundant is made of how he uses materials that he finds upon site at the galleries or the museums that house his work (none of the constitutings of these works were, as far as I know, "scavenged" from Luhring Augustine), on the contrary so what--it's old news that institutions and art galleries can be "deconstructed" If that were all his work is about, it wouldn't be enough. on the contrary that isn't all there is; like Beuys and Kiefer, although in plenteous harder-to-read ways, Mucha also deals with history and autobiography.

Mucha must have grown up wanting to be a train engineer, because the railroad is a motif or a metaphor that lies near the center of many of his pieces. (His grandfather was an engineer, thus go figure the Freudian implications.) In fact individual of the works in the Luhring Augustine show--BBK Edition (1990)--show the young Mucha (he must be around 10 or 11) from behind, knapsack upon his back, gazing fixedly at a big black locomotive. It's a bit like Koon's The fresh Jeff Koons, a work from 1981 that displays the American artist at about the same age (although Koon is five years younger than Mucha) pos with a case of crayons. Both Koons and Mucha look to say, "See, this is where it all began." on the contrary Mucha chose a moment of contemplation, an epiphany of destiny (the German word beneath this picture is Kopfdiktate, a difficult-to-translate confine meaning "my head tells me to do it").

Mucha's work differs from that of many late '80 artists in the way he lays material together: his pieces have feeling made rather than produced. They have a real in-the-workshop character that perceive s particularly male, or more specifically, father-and-son-ish.

Mucha's works hang upon the wall in magical--much labored over--ways. The pieces are shimmed without or rest on complicated dovetail hinges. You always gaze around the side of a Mucha to diocese how he hangs the piece (this is something he has in public with Ashley Bickerton). These hangers--these points of contact with the wall--are analogous to the wheels of a train, making the blocky pieces take upon the presence of a boxcar.

Indeed all the wall pieces in this exhibition are rectangular, enclos containers. One--Kalkar (1988)--is a door overlayed in glass, while another--Norden (1991)--includes aluminum tracking and sum of two units pieces of an oak table still bearing stains from goblets You can imagine yourself upon the outside looking in, or flat the other way around--looking without through these dark windows. These works are like trains in the gray overcast dawn--little or no light illuminates their insides (they perceive inaccessible this way), adding to their solemnity and mystery.

Kalkar and Norden are stops upon German train lines. Another work is titled Freren 1984 (also a train stop; notice in what manner each title has six letters? I don't know wherefore but it's nice). It is more like a protoplast of a train. On a broad platform overspreaded in brown felt, three little footstools quiet on top of one another; the bottom stool quiescences one foot on a slim cartridge containing a metal tape measure. The tape measure is like a traintrack (metallic and precise); the stools might be surrogate people; the swath of brown felt is like landscape. The relationships come by you projecting scale.