Contemporary Central European Art [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 138-154]

140
VICTOR H. MIESEL
a conference on contemporary religious movements in Central Europe?
Those post-modernists who counted "revolutionary content" infinitely
more important than innovative form, and understood "revolution" as
incompatible with anything discomforting to "real existing socialism"
simply said "Aha!" They knew that that conjunction was no accident.
Anxiety. The title itself raised the eyebrows of those who, though not
at all disturbed by political implications, were disturbed or embarrassed
by what one of them called "brand name fatigue." Was the name too
catchy? or kitchy? or simply stale? Almost 100 years ago Munch used
it for paintings and prints. Thirty years ago it was all the rage, especially
on university campuses. But in the '60s it seemed played out. I believe
it was Josef Albers back then who called one of his paintings Angst is Dead.
He was wrong, of course. Angst lives!
Anxiety. That was also the name of the massive bronze which impressed everyone when they first entered the exhibition galleries. It was
also reproduced on the posters and announcements for the exhibition.
The statue was made back in 1911 by one of Czechoslovakia's most distinguished old masters of modernism, Otto Gutfreund. Thus, despite its
vehement cubo-expressionism (or because of it, thanks to the charm which
antiquity bestows on things, especially bronze) it could appear like a sponsoring good uncle, respectable, prosperous and benignly reassuring. It certainly
was reassuring to a few knowledgeable and well-travelled viewers who
remembered that the magnificent bronze had been, just a few years ago,
a major attraction of the state-sanctioned and very "up-beat" show, Auf
dem Weg in die Modeme-Tschechische Kunst, 1878-1914. On display
in the lovely former artists' colony of Mathildenhohe, Darmstadt, Gutfreund's figure joined 700 other works in a pageant dedicated to the progress
and the success of the moder spirit in the arts. Jewelry, gilded furniture,
sumptuous color surrounded Anxiety and Anxiety became delightful art
within a magic circle of Jugendstil aestheticism. In that circle it seemed
in rather poor taste to recall that Gutfreund's statue had made its debut
the same year as Jakob van Hoddis' drab and tiny poem, Weltende. Looking
back with what seemed good-humored complacency, a former Expressionist
who had "made it" as a Minister of Culture for the DDR, Johann Becher,
was pleased to call that poem the "Marseillaise of the Expressionist Revolution." Actually it is a chillingly banal prophecy which perennially grows
in horror.
Yes, as the poem puts it, the bourgeois' hat still flies off his pointed
head, workers still fall from roofs, dams collapse and most people still
have the sniffles. However, the world does not come to an end. It goes
on but it does seem to be getting grayer and meaner, more and more soiled
and degraded, not merely by the obvious-outright lies and violence-but
by hypocracy, cant, selective memory and systematic forgetting and not
least by cleverness, by a sophisticated knowingness which more often than
Zlatko Kauzlaric Atac, The Cyle of Life (1987).
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