BarocKonKret (1994)

In 1961, in Munich, the lovely mother of my friend Gerhard von Graevenitz paid me a compliment that left me perplexed for many years: “Your grids are so wonderfully Rococo.” My perplexity, a bit too visible (at the time I still associated my grids with Spanish-Moorish “arabesques”), upset her, her son confided to me. Today—unfortunately too late, because both she and Gerhard have passed on—I wish to offer my apologies and pay homage to her. 

I had been thinking of those “French rock gardens,” or those instances of the Italian Baroque, which I saw, thirty-five years ago, as “foils” to my work. Nor have I yet fallen, today, under the sway of Boucher, Bernini, or Rubens. 

This love at first sight came rather late, perhaps fifteen years ago, when I was charmed by, among others, Wies, Ottobeuren, and Vierzehnheiligen in Germany, and Stams, Melk, and Altenburg in Austria, during my magnificent trips spent zigzagging among their Baroque and Rococo churches. This allowed me to appreciate Madame Graevenitz’s compliment, and to discover, as she had, that some of my “grids” and my 40,000 Squares from the sixties do indeed have a certain Rococo quality.

Now, moreover, I even claim to consider Baroque the majority of the works and installations I have created since the end of the seventies.

What, then, are the qualities of this Bavarian-Austrian (to put it simply) Baroque that please me so much and that I am trying to manifest in my work?

A sense of humor, a frivolity, a joie de vivre, that one will never find to the same degree in any Western church.

Thus: formal games liberated from any message; saints who contort themselves and step off their pedestals and play with their halos.

A marvelous irreverence, as well, toward architecture, with those savant imbalances, those volumes that speak in dialogue with one another in ignorance and defiance of all symmetry. To the point that any given architecture can be “Baroquified” just as casually and just as successfully.

A total mix of genres. The Zimmerman brothers in Wies played the roles of architects, of painters, of stucco virtuosi, and of sculptors all at once.

A blinding and joyous clarity of white, of gold, and of luminous colors.

If there is a point on which I may still feel somewhat removed from Baroque art, it is perhaps that horror of empty space. That profusion which is often cited, in my view wrongly, as the essential characteristic of that art . . . and which for that matter seems to me . . . ever more appealing.