Sculpture after Concept-Art

Robert Fleck

Visitors at the exhibition „About War”, a show of major importance set up by the Grazer Kunstverein in 1989 [1] were confronted with a rather uncommon situation: In one of the rooms, Hartmut Skerbisch had placed two large sculptures shaped in the manner of houses. As their position and size blocked the view of a potential way out, they functioned, in a sense, as a labyrinth. The steel sheets they were made of, their industrial, hard finish and the purity of the minimalistic formal language eradicated any direct, narrative reference to the theme of the exhibition while creating an immediately comprehensible sculptural equivalent to an incomprehensible phenomenon: Through the position of the sculptures and the overall experience of the-situation war became perceivable on another, a sensual, reflected level beyond the clichés drummed into the contemporary mind day after day. [2]

To one who had observed Hartmut Skerbisch’s artistic career and bad repeatedly crossed his way over a period of more than a decade, the situation was equally surprising. Skerbisch’s works had been mostly immaterial, transported via photography and other media and appealing, through visual arrangements or texts, to the viewer’s willingness to submit to a certain mental labour or to emulate some special, often minute but highly poetic perceptive situation, while in this instance the artist was dealing with very concrete sculptural facts. One could make a point of this observation and say that Skerbisch’s work was so impressive because he handled purely sculptural essentials with utmost clarity and precision, displaying the flexibility and versatile craftsmanship of a sculptor while preserving the purely mental origin of a sculpture that had nothing of the manually shaped and developed product of classic sculpturing.

From then on, Skerbisch mostly impressed through „sculpture”. The floor-to-roof aluminium disc he installed in the Grazer Künstlerhaus in 1992 was, on the one hand, a highly intelligent and, in formal terms, perfectly autonomous solution for the beautiful, historically charged building; on the other hand, its „architectural” over-size, considering the classic concept of form, turned the location into a space of pure perception. As the result of super-precise sculptoral thinking, „Two Stages”, a dual sculpture for the group exhibition „Mixed Double” in the Vienna Secession during the summer of the same year, introduced two „black holes” into the light-filled and therefore sacred space of the Secession. And the giant „Light Sword” sculpture in Graz (1992), a real-size replica of the inner scaffold of the New York Statue of Liberty is certainly one of the best large sculptures in contemporary urban space. It was originally created for the „styrian autumn” festival whose theme, commemorating the 5OOth anniversary of the discovery of the new continent by Columbus, was „America Nowhere”. Instead of the sculpturally discordant torch of the Statue of Liberty, Skerbisch’s sculpture bears the sword mentioned by Franz Kafka in his novel „Amerika”. Has Hartmut Skerbisch left concept art and become a sculptor, anyone faced with his more recent works since 1989 might ask. In other words: What connects the two major phases of his oevre, which is, for the first time, accessibly documented in this catalogue? Are there not two persons, one superceding the other: the concept artist and the sculptor? Is there a link between his works of the seventies with mere hints of materialisation that invited the viewer to emulate minimal poetic situations, and the „bulky” works of recent years?

In a sense, these questions are rhetorical; however, they do lead to the core of Hartmut Skerbisch’s intentions. My personal answer would be a dual one: One can and should say that there are two Skerbischs, the earlier concept artist and the later one who expresses himself through a new concept of sculpture. Since the parallel developments of modern art have been acknowledged in the fifties and sixties, the older position of the history of modernism – lining up all the works of an artist like pearls on a single string of development – has become untenable. Particularly the best artists of our time did and do two or more different things either in a row or simultaneously, and it is precisely this thinking along various lines that makes them refreshing and avoids the exhaustion of creative proposals in self-repetition. Among the major protagonists concept art in Austria, Hartmut Skerbisch has become a paragon of the courage that refuses to stagnate in one’s formal language and will take directions no-one would have predicted from the existing work. Works like the Künstlerhaus „disc” and the „Statue of Liberty” seem to come from nowhere. There seems to be no preparation, no formal repetition or recognition effect in relation to the artist, but a freshness reminiscent of the works of young artists, yet formal mastery, even when faced with monumental dimensions that betrays the artist’s experience and long personal history. This paradox is to be sensed in the artist’s more recent works and makes them rather unique in recent art.

At the same time, however, Hartmut Skerbisch’s seemingly contradictory development can also be described in simple terms when taking into account the fact that there are two clearly distinct generations of Austrian concept artists. The prevalence of a specifically Austrian development or „school” of concept art has been repeatedly pointed out. [3] What has been overlooked all too often is the existence of two „generations” within this Austrian school of concept art, although the term is not quite appropriate in terms of age; it is, however, justified in that it refers to distinct times when the various representatives of the two generations entered the exhibition scene. In this sense, there definitely exists a „second generation” of Austrian concept artists including, besides Hartmut Skerbisch, leading characters like Franz West and Ernst Caramelle. Even though Skerbisch came forward in 1969, almost at the same time as the pioneer generation of Austrian concept art, they have always viewed the conceptual art movement triggered by American concept art and some indigenous traditions, like Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s conceptual interpretation of Viennese actionism and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical heritage, in a very different, poetic light – non-didactic and strongly oriented towards immediate sculptural work, while they – particularly Skerbisch and West but, in a sense, also Caramelle – steered clear of the Austrian concept art scene of the seventies. All three of them had approached concept art from the „classic” media of fine arts (Franz West from sculpture, Ernst Caramelle from drawing and Hartmut Skerbisch from architecture), leaving it again for the „classic” media, after a deep and thorough change through their conceptual practice, a change that would not have been otherwise possible.

In this sense it may prove very informative to view the works assembled in this catalogue in reverse order, going from a thoroughly renewed concept of sculpture back to concept art. This would demonstrate to what extent Skerbisch’s conceptual works – for instance, the „Two Flags Piece” at Hans-Jürgen Müller’s early retrospective in Stuttgart titled „Europe 79 -Art of the Eighties”, or the video-photo-installation „Leafy Speafing” about the human chest and the rhythm of breathing, as well as the plywood wall in Innsbruck in 1980 -were already about volume, about the three-dimensional body and the relativity of perception, themes that haven been taken to a new concept of sculpture in Hartmut Skerbisch’s recent works – a concept gained from the dialogue with the viewer in concept art. As one of very few artists in recent years, Hartmut Skerbisch thus managed to transmit approaches originating in concept art and the related body art of the late sixties to sculpture, transforming the conceptual dimension into precise work about sculptural essentials like volume and three-dimensionality.

This positioning of Hartmut Skerbisch’s current work would be incomplete without mentioning its deeply inherent relation to architecture. In a certain sense, one might say that works like the „War Houses” of 1989 or the „Light Sword” of 1992 redefine the relation of architecture and sculpture, basically through the link of concept art. After all, the linking of architecture and the fine arts, and, in broader sense, of applied and „absolute” art has been one of the great, underlying themes of Austrian art in past decades. What Hartmut Skerbisch has achieved in this context with his more recent, post-conceptual sculptures, is a comment on architectural space (in an exhibition or a cityscape situation) using terms gained from an exploration of the basic facts of sculpture in the light of concept art. This is also the basic idea that makes up the content of Hartmut Skerbisch’s more recent works: To make today’s architectural space once more comprehensible from the vantage point of a sensual reflexion about the terms „object” and „sculpture”. Time and again, and last but not least in Skerbisch’s works, these „age-old” terms of art prove to be ever new and highly topical.

[1] Organised by Elisabeth Printschitz. The documentation of this very important group exhibition did not take place at the time because of reservations in official places against this theme.A deferred publication and a documentation of the historic achievement of the late director Elisabeth Printschitz would be an important matter for the entire Austrian art scene.

[2] „’What is a cliché?’ someone asked Jean-Luc Godard. ‘This is very simple’, he said. ‘I take a guerrilla fighter, hand him and ask him to brandish it and shout. The image goes around the world. But what does this have to do with a cicvil war or a struggle for independence in reality?’ Nothing, nothing at all. With such a cliché one even takes the struggle out of from the guerilla’s hands. He is turned into a cliché. Since its very origins, art has always been a struggle against cliché, and without this struggle against clichés, we cannot understand art nor modernism.” Gilles Deleuze in his Lecture about Film, Paris VII-Saint Denis, May 1982.

[3] Insel Austria edited by Markus Brüderlin, Kunstforum international no. 89, 1987; Zur Rechtfertigung der hypothetischen Natur der Kunst und der Nicht-Identität in der Objektwelt, Cologne 1992; Identity: Difference, edited by Peter Weibel, Christa Steinle, Graz 1992; Kunst in Österreich edited by Noemi Smolik, Robert Fleck, Cologne.