The corners sometimes hide the best pieces of the exhibition, like video “There is a Criminal Contact in Art” (1976) by Ulay (Uwe Laysiepen) or Tracy Moffatt’s and Gary Hillberg’s film “Artist” (2000).

Ulay, There is a Criminal Contact in Art, 1976

Ulay documented, with lapidary comments by himself, a performance during which he kidnaps Carl Spitzweg’s “Poor Poet” from the Old National Gallery in Berlin, in order to hang it into a Turkish immigrant worker family’s living room. Moffatt provides a manual of film scenes which looks at the handling of “art” from the creation up to the destruction of works of art in feature films – together with quick music this becomes a visual aerobic lesson that in the surrounding, rather boring field formed by the works of Imi Knoebel and Timm Ulrichs freshens up the viewers’ perception considerably.

If you have enough time, take a seat in one of the boxes at the edge of the hall: Sitting on captivatingly beautiful wooden cinema chairs from olden times, it is a treat to listen to a lecture of Boris Groys. “Iconoclastic Delights” (2002) connects the theoretical remarks on audio tape with the fitting film cutouts.

Josef Leo Koerners departments in the halls invite you to trips into the more classical art-historical aspects of the topic and surprise again and again with small treats: A side out of a book from the British museum, which represents the “Whipping of Christ”, and on which the faces of the torturers were cut out by an unknown person, or Albrecht Dürer’s “Welding Cloth” from Vienna’s Albertina, formed from only one line that runs thickening and diluting in a circle, thus depicting the face of Christ.

Peter Galison’s showcases of scientific visualizing methods exemplify the exhibitions goal to be no pure art exhibition, no exhibition about science, but also no historical exhibition alone. But in this the weak point in the concept is to be found: while in individual corners and angles interesting and informative exhibits exist, the cooperation of seven curators results in a cacophony, similar to the above mentioned “Musicoclash” installation on a visual level. An Exibitoclash, so to speak.

Iconoclash
Date: May 4th – August 4th, 2002
Place: ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe)
Address: Lorenzstr. 19, 76135 Karlsruhe, Germany
Tel: +49 721 8100-0
info@zkm.de
https://www.zkm.de