Claus Föttinger
18 JAN – 23 MAR 2025
If I had the choice between a hammer and a mirror, I would choose the lamp. Differently Bertolt Brecht. As a theatre-maker used to disposing of the work of others, he maintained an instrumental relationship to art and the world. The former is best thought of as a hammer. With this, the notoriously bad conditions prevailing in the latter could be hammered into shape for the better – in contrast to an art that sees itself as a mirror and which society holds up to itself whenever it feels like taking a self-critical look at itself. No-one who thinks of Lars Eidinger here. It goes without saying that the art of action, according to Brecht, is superior to that which aims at representation, reflection and knowledge, which has become rare.
Unfortunately, the majority of contemporary art, which likes to see itself as ‘political’ and ‘activist’, takes the Brechtian model as its role-model and has manoeuvred itself – with this as the means and end – into a dead end. Activism has been freewheeling for years: without any prospect of change for the better, especially as far as politics is concerned, which this type of art likes to think it is. Seen in the light of day, the hammer and mirror from Brecht’s model are easy to recognise as two equally false alternatives. The unreflected act, even if it comes from the most radical representatives of contemporary art, is no better than reflection without consequences. Moreover, the field of artistic possibilities extends far beyond the polarity of hammer and mirror. This field contains expertise for problems that many people probably don’t even know exist. And it is precisely such problems that hold solutions that allow manoeuvrability, even for those who are stuck in a dead end.
Let’s turn to the lamp. We have known since the days of Diogenes that there can never be enough light. This is all the more true when current conditions are characterised by a consciousness that, according to Peter Sloterdijk’s old formula, is ‘enlightened’ but still ‘wrong’. All the better if the lamp of choice is not only an illuminant, but also radiates its well-informed knowledge into the world on topics such as masks, tourism and migration as the light and dark side of modern mobility, cinema or even the costs of colonialism.
Anyone who thinks of hammer, mirror and lamp not first of all as art, but as questions of interior design, is actually right. Claus Föttinger is an expert in interior design, who combines hammer, mirror and lamp in a practical way to create an aesthetic model in its own right. It is a model in the fine tradition of the Trojan horse, which looks harmless but is not.
Föttinger lets his Trojans circulate in the form of an artistic work that would be underestimated by anyone who thought it was ‘just’ furniture – because the artist’s favourite formats like to take the form of lamps, illuminated wall boards, illuminated tables and stools or – his main metier – radiant bar ensembles that create their very own atmospheric conditions and where tea and champagne taste good.
It is very appropriate to understand Föttinger’s objects and installations, which balance beauty and purpose, as ‘social media’: They only really develop their artistic value when they are put to use – whether as a large bar or a small lamp – in an ideally communal way, aimed at exchange. (In this respect, Föttinger’s approach is not so far removed from Brecht’s hammer. It’s just that he has voluntarily „pulled the tooth“ of the dogmatic, do-gooder attitude of someone who always knows best what is good for everyone else. And the mirror is also on board, from which I like to have it reflected back to me that perhaps I’m not as great as always assumed – provided I look into it critically enough).
In his current exhibition, Föttinger is not focussing on the big picture, the whole and the complete, but on the building blocks, the individual elements and the structures connecting them in his artistic work, through which he has been working on two thematically equally important strands since the early 1990s: the social, which consists to a not insignificant extent of the jointly different; and how difference and connection – between materials, opinions and people – can be artistically choreographed, historically placed and contextually situated. There is no object that has not been informed by the artist’s extensive research into world- and visual cultures.
The fact that the lamp plays the leading role in this exhibition is fitting: whether in a monumental or an added form. The lamp is the object that, because it provides light in such a beautiful and functional way, creates a connecting structure between you and me and our surroundings – because only in the light can we look each other in the eye and then decide all the better whether we have understood each other or not.
Text by Hans-Jürgen Hafner
Photos by J. Bendzulla and VAN HORN | D. Steinfeld 2025
CLAUS FÖTTINGER | GALLERY EXHIBITIONS
Claus Föttinger
3 Sep. – 22 Oct. 2016