A
TOUCH OF CHICANERY
San Francisco /James Scarborough
Hermann Lederles
new work at Lawson Galleries perfectly illustrates Jose Orega y Gassets
contention in The Modern Theme that art, along with culture, reason and
ethics, must enter the service of life. Ortega y Gasset prescribes, among other
things, an art that is spontaneous, athletic and imbued with vitality; he finds
it most apt that modern public history began on a tennis court in France.
Ortega y Gasset discerns a one-sided tendency in modern European history,
the intellectual heritage into which Lederle, a German, was born. Here, there
was a separation of culture and life as art distanced itself from the spontaneous
life of the person considering it and acquired a consistency of its own: culture
thereby became objective, set up in opposition to the subconscious that engendered
it (this conceit informs a large part of Michel Foucaults The Order of
Things). Culture, says Ortega Y Gasset, survives only when those who make
art and those who view it inject it with a constant flow of vitality. Pictorially
this can be illustrated by the difference in conception between the work of Lederle
and his contemporaries Julian Schnabel, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Palladino.
The figures seen in the work of Schnabel, Palladino and Clemente are taciturn,
drawn, permanently in crisis, as if they have embarked upon a bleak search for
meaning in an otherwise solipsistic life. By the wholesale appropriation of images
drawn from mass media, popular ulture and art history, these esthetic scavengers,
particularly Clemente, set themselves adrift across cultures and styles in an
attempt to recover timeless truths on behalf of the modern experience.
Lederles
work, too, falls within the ambit of modern expressionism in that it demonstrates,
to a certain degree, the failure of traditional symbols to move us and the need
to galvanize them with a shot of heroic energy. The result, ironically, is purely
a superficial attraction. Take, for example, Election (1985), which presents
symbols in search of a context in what amounts to an iconographical shopping list.
It includes a tongue-tied figure with awkward hands, acting like a wallflower
at a dance. Beside him hovers a fish and one of those little Keith Haring "Gumby"
figures, looking surprisingly enervated. This is a spent art, as if the artist
is waiting for someone (but who?) to pull the strings so his paintings can start
moving. But there is more to Lederles work than this.
Lederles
work, granted, does posit a strain of angst a stylistic loan from Kirchner
or maybe Nolde. This gives the work its sense of a potential for crude force and
implies a desire, like that of his German forebears, to wipe the cultural slate
clean. But Lederles strain of angst is unlike that of his contemporaries;
it is less virulent and more acrobatic: yes, the figures are almost sculptural,
pared down with that coloring-book black line, but the atmosphere is more charged,
more affirmative. The works are most effective when they stop struggling to be
iconographically sound and instead spontaneously react to their contrived environment.
Blue Fall (1986), one of the best pictures in the show, depicts a Picasso
saltimbanque rescuing an Avignon demoiselle who has a Franz Marc horses
rump. The theme is heroic both in conception and execution a rich bravura
style married to a palpable context.
This is an artist who has assimilated
all the cannibalistic tendencies that surround him and has decided that such feckless
accumulation is not for his palette. Each of his figures, so reminiscent of everyone
elses, is unique in its determination not to ride the existential merry-go-round
note how each figure about to embark on one of those patented trans-historical
voyages is anchored to a person or an object. Lederles is an art which,
when offered the easy way out into styles, kitch and pop culture, has heroically
decided when enough chicanery is enough.
ARTWEEK SAN FRANSICO 1987