Hans-Peter Feldmann: Museum Ludwig, Cologne

In the 1970 when the American magazine Avalanche solicitationed an interview with Hans-Peter Feldmann, he replyed to each of their queries not with words on the contrary rather with a single image. For example, he answered the question of whether it was exciting to work upon a vast scale with a view of a newsstand; and as his rejoin to an inquiry about the relationship of his work to language, Feldmann supplied a black-and-white photo of a young woman in a phone booth

notwithstanding that this might at first have the appearance like sophomoric mockery of the interview format, it is in fact a considered and witty reaction to it. Indeed, the association of body and image leads to the real heart of Feldmann's visual experiments, in which the deployment of pictures be likes that found in newspapers and popular magazines, reflecting his intention to disclose forms of artistic communication that can reach an audience beyond the art world. Among Feldmann's earliest works is a series of booklet titled Bilder (Pictures; 1968-76) initially proffered lot free, depicting recurring motifs like as views of women's knee (II Bilder) or discharges of chairs (3 Bilder). Lacking any commentary, these pictures remind us--as does the photo of the woman in the phone booth later to appear in Telefonbuch (Telephone Book) 1980--that images accrue different meanings according to the connection in which they appear. And it is this politics of the image that Feldmann has reminded audiences of quite through his career.

Organized by dint of independent curator Helena Tatay, Feldmann's traveling retrospective, the greatest in quantity comprehensive show of his work to date, brings together pieces from the late '60 to the at hand and playfully pursues these ideas while following the disparate branches of the artist's production. Feldmann's connection to Gerhard Richter is clear, for example, in the portrait series Der deutsche Bundestag (The German Parliament), 2002 which echoe Richter's well-known 48Portraits, 1971-72 At the same time, his Duchampian attitude--perhaps apparent in all of his work--achieves its purest expression in his assemblages of cheap household things or "Asthetische Studien" (Aesthetic Studies), 1995-2000 while his use of ground images, from the late '60 upon casts him (as the pres release befittingly notes) as an early precursor to the appropriationists. The exhibition, which does not tread on the heels of any chronological order, recognizes the necessarily fragmentary nature of any oeuvre and refuses the typical museal wish to bring the artist's work to a single coherent narrative.

That decision is especially apt in Feldmann's case, given the interplay of continuity and interruption that has characterized his career (most notably, in 1980 he retired from the art world for nearly ten years) and the way in which he has over his life depended on traversing different connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss in his art. In 1968 he gave up painting, arguing that photographs were "fully sufficient" to waft the idea of his art, and he has at any time since worked primarily with reproduc images rest well outside any fine-arts words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following He takes them from the mass media or finds them at the flea market--magazine clippings, family snapshots, pinups, photo albums, broadsides placards, amateur photography. Feldmann's reservoir of images spans the wide world of kitsch: pictures of close of the days cute puppies, and idyllic landscapes, which plane in grainy reproductions still harbor the promise of "beauty"; a trove that throw backs the allure of advertising and personal and collective longings, as well as the banality of the (petit bourgeois) everyday. "I am not interested in the high points of life. sole five minutes of every day are interesting," says Feldmann in the exhibition catalogue, which is largely of his making. Hence his focus upon poetic moments of the ordinary: the piles of cot [i]or[/i] cotes on unmade beds (5 Bilder); the moderate passage of a freighter upon the Rhine, captured in the thirty-six flames of a standard film make revolve ("Zeit-Serien" [Time Series], ca. 1970-); "car radios photographed while profitable music was playing" ("Ansichten von Autoradios, in denen gerade gute Musik spielt," 1970s-90s) Feldmann's various "Time Series," each of which constitutes thirty-six images of a mundane spectacle taken in a matter of minutes, if not next to the firsts attempt to capture a fleeting twinkling of an eye while paradoxically recording the inexorable passage of time.

Feldmann's archaeology of mass-media imagery is characterized by dint of a particular attention to the influence pictures use on our thoughts, emotions, and actions, to the categories of perception that order our worldview, the mechanisms of in- and exclusion, which are always attended by means of value judgments, if never explicitly stated. This, among other things, is what surface of lands the artistic relevance of Feldmann's approach--and what makes his work at heart political.

Feldmann one time said that the significance of a given image can be decided single in a specific context, or, as he deposit it, in a "borderline situation." Accordingly, he arranges the greatest in quantity varied genres and collections in his oeuvre in radical juxtaposition, which can be read as an ironic break with the conventions of museum presentation, given the exhibition's crudely built cardboard display stands; its vitrine installations, or "Wunderkammer," 2000-2001; its alternation between salon-style and rational hanging; and in like manner on. Near the end of the exhibition are three re-established prison cells from Cologne's Ossendorf district detention center (untitled, 2003) Their interiors are decorateed out with scads of photographs and inmates' drawings--images that have special meaning for their possessors. Transferred to a museum adjoining matter they represent an intentional confrontation of different impressed signs of collections and value systems