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PERMISSION to Laugh

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Chapter One

The "Cultural Turn" in 1970s West Germany

DEAD JOKES. Otto F. Best's assessment of Germany's reputation for humorlessness should not come as a surprise. For hundreds of years, nationals and outsiders alike have characterized the Germans as overly serious, self-involved, morbid, or incapable of mirth. In his 1993 book on the subject, Best, a United States–based German scholar of comparative literature, takes the reader through the three-hundred-year history of the word Witz in order to trace the origins of these lingering assumptions. Initially defined under the influence of the French esprit, Witz in the late seventeenth century connoted Geist, or spirit, closely related to the English "wit." This affiliation was contested from the beginning by the French themselves, with whom German philosophers argued for over a century regarding the potential for esprit within Germanic language and culture. By the twentieth century, argues Best, Witz had lost its depth: "In German, one describes Witz as the gift of reason and Witz as a type of text with the same word. Other languages make a distinction. Esprit exists in French next to bon mot. Wit in English is next to joke." Best claims that modern Germans have the disadvantage of relying on one conception of Witz that has come to signify nothing more than light wordplay.

This book challenges such a limited conception of Witz by examining the work of several artists who, in 1980s West Germany, simultaneously mocked and revived its historical fortunes. Werner Büttner, Isa Genzken, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, and Rosemarie Trockel are part of a generation (all were born between 1947 and 1953) that prioritized wit, wordplay, and joking as effective strategies for artists working in the wake of modernism. The West German artists who emerged in the 1980s represent the third generation—following the generations of the postwar period and the 1960s—responding to a series of cultural shifts that culminated in the late 1970s with a widespread loss of faith in the avant-garde link between art and politics. For the artists of the 1980s, the weakness of Witz did not present a disadvantage; its supposedly corrupt status was one of its attractions. The modern status of Witz as everyday joke provided the artists with lowbrow punch lines that could nevertheless hint at the term's earlier associations with highbrow culture, generating humorous categorical and conceptual slippages.

Joking is a mode of communication that is not typically described as innovative. Run-of-the-mill jokes tend either to be up to date, preying on current political or social ills and deriding those responsible, or they fit into classic categories, such as ethnic or profession-based topics. Regardless of the format, the telling of traditional jokes has long been a relatively tired narrative form, despite its resurgence during the age of the Internet and e-mail message forwarding. For German artists of the 1980s generation, joking was the perfect vehicle for the expression of cultural pessimism. According to a joke theorist, the form has suffered from a loss of the ability to edify, one of the key virtues associated with the Witz of the Enlightenment. Carl Hill writes that from the eighteenth century on, the "punch of tendentious jokes often contained a far-reaching yet immediate critique of repressive social structures." This historical background will be kept in sight as I explore how West German artists of the 1980s tapped into their country's long-running, if often downplayed or ignored, engagement with the comedic. Despite the term's loss of philosophical strength, the artists in question still occasionally revived Witz in its classical form, even if they did so with evident irony. Their return to the tradition of Witz took place at a moment in West Germany when, given dominant cultural debates about domestic terrorism and grappling with the Nazi legacy, the "humor situation" was not well established. Perhaps this explains why much of the work discussed in this study is not laugh-out-loud funny; instead, the jokes are often subtle and indirect as if in anticipation of an unpredictable and contentious response from the audience.

Two singular works of art offer cases in point. In 1970, West German artist-activist Klaus Staeck made the seemingly self-evident announcement that the 1960s had come to an end. His small sculpture Requiescat in Ludwig (plate 1) claimed as much: a mock tombstone fashioned out of a catalog published that year that contained highlights from the influential private collection of chocolate magnate Peter Ludwig. Located at the time in Cologne's Wallraf-Richartz Museum, the Ludwig collection was weighted heavily toward US pop art of the 1960s. In this work Staeck took aim at the West German cultural elite's desire to own contemporary American art. He affixed a metal plate engraved with the decade's dates and the Latin for "rest in peace" to the book's cover, partially obscuring a prototypical pop painting by Roy Lichtenstein and reinforcing a message of historical passage. This modest object was to be displayed on the floor standing up as if marking the spot where the outgoing decade had been buried for good. As a critique of the German importation of a seemingly uncritical American pop art, Staeck's sculpture lamented pop's occlusion of more socially and politically progressive art of the 1960s.

Several years after he produced it, Staeck's piece made a significant appearance at Documenta 6 in Kassel during the summer of 1977. His initial critique of 1960s German collecting trends had new meaning as the 1970s was beginning to approach its own conclusion. Documenta 6 took place after student protests had turned into organized violence and immediately prior to the 1977 German Autumn, when key members of the radical terrorist Red Army Faction died under questionable circumstances at Stammheim prison. The mid-1970s had seen the social fabric of West Germany come under enormous strain, prompted by an economic downturn that had started in the oil industry in 1972 and the social crisis engendered by domestic terrorism. By 1977, as Documenta 6 curator Manfred Schneckenburger signaled with the Staeck object, whatever traces of sixties optimism had lingered into the next decade could now be declared outdated. Thus it was that Staeck's unimposing sculpture gained measurably in terms of its currency with a historical moment frequently characterized by pessimism.

If Staeck's miniature antimonument can serve as a bookend to the early years of post-1960s art in West Germany, then Martin Kippenberger's artist's book Das Ende der Avandgarde can mark another endpoint. Produced for an exhibition at the Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne in 1989, it is one among scores of books and editions that the prolific Kippenberger produced from 1977 up to his death in 1997. Typical of his work is the partially accidental nature of the final product. The misspelled title printed on the book's cover was the result of a printer's error, but Kippenberger liked how it reinforced the message of the content inside. This consisted of six pages printed in silk screen with a balloon motif, an image that Kippenberger frequently employed. Within the balloons, which resemble speech bubbles in comic strips, he inserted images and texts that referred to his life and work. The relevance of the great avant-garde tradition, a balloon about to implode, appears to have been compromised by Kippenberger himself. Kippenberger and a number of his contemporaries promoted a mixture of willful and fortuitous humor, bringing up questions of failure and ineffectiveness. This generation mobilized various modes of joking and self-deprecatory humor throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, launching a period that had strong ties to the 1960s but that spoke directly to anxieties of the present moment.

Staeck's consistent use of satirical humor as a means to highlight greed, corruption, and hypocrisy represented one only option among many available to artists emerging in the mid- to late 1970s who sought to invest their work with socially critical subject matter. In Staeck's work from the early 1960s to the present, the politically motivated art object is designed to broadcast a clear, forceful message of critique. His position is by no means naive, but it stands in contrast to that of the subsequent generation. While numerous young artists who experienced the 1960s as children and teenagers were affected by the era's protest-oriented mentality, they came of artistic age in the late 1970s at a political moment filled with doubt and insecurity, often perceived to be empty of the promises of the previous decade—the notion of taking a concrete, identifiable position was fraught with difficulties. These younger artists arrived on the West German scene after the groundbreaking work of neo-avant-garde groups like Fluxus and individuals like Joseph Beuys had failed, despite their best efforts, to unite art and life in a lasting way. Beuys's long-running, well-publicized attempt to promote a politically transformative "social sculpture" had only achieved limited results. The sense that a historical chapter had closed led many to adopt a postmodern second-order status, thus abandoning the avant-garde's drive toward rupture and renewal.

The 1980s generation of artists heralded what the cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen wryly labeled the "Coming of Cynicism," a condition often attributed to the market-driven art world of the 1980s. It would be far too simple to claim that cynicism was the inevitable condition of artists emerging during the aftermath of the 1960s. Diederichsen's highly loaded term, one that presupposes a state of defeatism, is more a provocation to discussion than an honest representation of this generation's outlook. Certainly there existed a wide spectrum along which West German artists could situate themselves in terms of political and social commitment in the aftermath of 1960s utopianism. But a number of them did make clear in their work that they no longer had much faith in art's power of direct political persuasion. Instead of promulgating a group aesthetic, it is perhaps more accurate to speak in terms of loose affiliations and shared attitudes that reflect a deep sense of skepticism rather than a withdrawal into cynicism.

TWO MODES OF JOKING. I want to propose that the turn to jokes and wit by numerous German artists of the 1980s was an effective strategy in a time of political disenchantment. As most humor theorists have agreed, jokes are inherently conservative, more attuned to the maintenance of tradition than its rejection. Yet jokes can also open up avenues of critical thought, leading to what philosopher Paolo Virno calls "innovative action" and breaking through everyday speech like disruptive bursts of dissent. An artist who occupies the space between conservatism and protest is not necessarily settling for a position of ambiguity; it is possible to highlight, even to critique, the inconsistencies of the present by embracing them at arm's length. Benjamin Buchloh, writing about the French Nouveaux Réalistes of the 1960s, recognized the possibilities that lie in consciously working within current contradictions: "articulating the profound ambiguities of cultural production by inhabiting its contradictions is different from mere complicitous affirmation." The artists discussed here could surely be accused of occasionally affirming the ambiguities of the present, but I argue that they intentionally employed jokes and wit in order critically to reveal the contradictions of the day.

Throughout this book, Witz will be considered as offering two distinct structures: a narrative device with a setup and punch line (the everyday joke) as well as a more discursive conception of the term that places it closer to Enlightenment wit. The difference is one of temporality: the former exhausts itself in a hurry while the latter takes time to unfold. Together, jokes and wit provided the vehicles by which these artists could treat political and topical subject matter without losing sight of the perceived impossibility of direct action. I seek to explore the ways in which the two communicative modes afforded the artists a license to embrace ambiguity while still making critical statements. Some members (Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen) of this generation of German artists may have gravitated toward the standard, short-lived joke, but others (Isa Genzken, Georg Herold, and Rosemarie Trockel) developed a more philosophical wit that called for contemplation. Chapters 4 and 5 separate these two groups of artists in order to pursue the two distinct models of Witz.

If humor and laughter are often described as reactionary, I want to follow the lead of humor theorist Simon Critchley and explore the joke's potential for instantiating "a dissensus communis distinct from the dominant common sense." Yet one of the difficulties that arise when seriously engaging these artists is that they frequently found the most potent material for their works in the realm of the common cliché or social stereotype; one such trope is gender-based humor. Given the prevalence of sexist jokes, male and female artists alike faced obstacles when employing the mechanisms of such gags while trying to undercut their offensive messages. The danger of trading in stereotypes, even with critical intent, must be acknowledged. The subversive possibilities of laughter may have been recognized in theory but were often ignored in practice. However, in influential research that began with an exhibition in 1983, Jo Anna Isaak identified laughter as a potentially subversive tool for women artists of the 1980s. She described how the social codes of jokes lend themselves to a gender-based analysis. For Isaak, laughter functions "as a metaphor for transformation, for thinking about cultural change." Such an approach proves useful in locating the moments when the work of these German artists initiated the constructive laughter Isaak describes.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from PERMISSION to Laugh by Gregory H. Williams Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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