Ulrich Horndash


 

Franz W. Kaiser
"Ulrich Horndash"
Tema celeste, Milano, octobre/décembre 1989
p.69

The work, entitled Alter Ego, occupies a single wall, 36 meters long. The interconnecting areas of color are applied directly with a roller. The pictures hanging in the white and black center fields are silk screen prints mounted on stretchers; as colored surfaces, they form part of the composition. They feature images based on archive photographs of imploding Modernist buildings, UFOs and a crowd of people. Ulrich Horndash took the title of the work from an article about demolition engineers in the German magazine Der Spiegel, citing a remark by Mark Cannel to the effect that the demolition engineer is the "alter ego of the architect," since demolishing a building calls for the same skills and knowledge as those required of the architect himself.
Ulrich Horndash's interest in architecture is familiar from his earlier work. In this work, however, there is a new element indicated by the artist's reference to the American architecture critic Charles Jencks' seminal book The Language of Postmodern Architecture. Jencks dates the beginning of postmodern architecture back to the dynamiting of a Modernist housing project in St. Louis at precisely 3.32 p.m. on 15 July 1972.
In addition to architecture, Horndash's work exhibits an interest in heraldic forms and colors, in forms and techniques with a historical significance or a definite content: i.e. in aesthetic fields outside Modernist l'art pour l'art.
Hence in Alter Ego we find allusions to the colors of the German and French national flags, although these allusions lack any immediate significance, beyond the fact that the installation is in France and is by a German who on a previous occasion used the tricolor as an object in one of his exhibitions.
Nevertheless, black, red and yellow, and blue, white and red form the basic colors, although their appearance in the work is slightly modified or, as one might say, aged. This, together with the transparency of the characteristic formal structure, puts one in mind of the work of Rietveld or Mies van der Rohe. The work resembles a 1:1 model of a facade in the spirit of early Modernism, of what is now seen as the "classic" avant-garde in architecture and the decorative arts, which strove synthesize applied and fine art and to derive a model for social praxis from the reconciliation of beauty with utility. This project of transposing art into life was directed against the notion of art as an autonomous institution, removed from everyday concerns. However, the project failed. The idea of a functional beauty pIayed into the hands of a purely economic rationale and was copied all over the world: as is so often the case, it is impossible to decide whether the fault lay with the originators of the principle or with its commercial exploiters. The postwar avant-garde continued to offer an alternative model, but one which was largely self-referential. In the post-war period, art and architecture followed separate paths.
In this context, Alter Ego can be seen as a conscious tribute to the classic avantgarde notion of a total art: its point of departure is an awareness of the fatal consequences to which the reception of avant-garde art has given rise. One of these consequences is that the word "beauty" itself, in relation to art, has been virtually outlawed.
In taking up Mies van der Rohe's concept of beauty, Horndash proceeds from an awareness of the incestuous selfreferentiality of autonomous art, which urgently requires new impulses. Hence, in all of his installations, the initial aim is to make the white cube of the seemingly neutral exhibition space into a definite place which allows for, or indeed invites, associations or cathexes of a non-artistic kind.
The avant-garde project of the Aufhebung of art in life is echoed by the postmodern notion of the Aufhebung of art through the aestheticization of the everyday world. However, the latter is not a process of Aufhebung in the full dialectical sense: the contradiction between art and life is not sub lated but abolished, by removing one of the terms. The aestheticization of everyday life follows the imperatives of consumer capitalism and has precious little to do with any form of critical art project.
Hence the question whether artistic autonomy is a necessary or a reprehensible thing can no longer be posed in the same terms as in the past. It has become necessary to rethink the problem of the place of art in society. The twin alternatives are equally unattractive: either art simulates its continuing existence within a specialized market system - a risky business, since the idealistic categories of the "beautiful" and the "sublime" on which the system, with its exorbitant prices, relies for its legitimation, cannot be simulated on a long-term basis - or it returns to its traditional avant-garde role as a source of provocation, which, in view of the overwhelming power of the media to simulate provocation, has become an unrealistic project.
Perhaps, however, we have reached the limit of this either/or dichotomy?
One may find grounds for optimism about the endurance of art in the economic necessity for the market of art's idealistic connotations and in the way artists themselves work, which defies standardization. In theory, art could continue to exist and develop in the dialectical process of Aufhebung between autonomy and everyday life. This would mean, in practice, a conscious programme of rehabilitating repressed idealistic categories and at the same time including non-artistic elements, creating discrete places in the internationally standardized exhibition space.
In this way, art would potentially be able to return to its original task, as defined by Schiller before the idea of aesthetic autonomy took root: the task of leading mankind, via beauty, to true human freedom.

Translated from German by John Ormrod