Jutta Koether

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Jutta Koether’s paintings

perform on many levels.

(case study 3)

Jutta Koether’s artwork establishes a network with the surroundings and makes the white walled presentation of painting problematic.  In what way does the discourse around painting change when a piece is viewed alone versus when it becomes a part of a performance?

Jutta Koether - Seasons and Sacraments, February -April 2013, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scotland

“Double Session” was the name for one of three performances performed at her solo exhibition Seasons and Sacraments.  It was an exhibition shown in two different countries, with the exhibition presentation changed to respond to the space. Double session is a reference to a lecture from 1970 where Derrida unfolds the difference between an original and a copy the hierarchical difference between the two. The copy performs not a mimicry of anything already in existence but should create/perform a truth of its own.

“In this speculum with no reality, in this mirror of a mirror, a difference or dyad does exist, since there are mimes and Phantoms. But it is a difference without reference, or rather a reference without a referent, without any first or last unit, a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh wandering about without a past, without any death, birth, or presence.”Derrida, 1981 p. 217

The borrowed Derrida title of the Jutta Koether performance invites visitors to the exhibit to question the reality of illusion, the stability of form and the connections between all realms not just between her artworks but all perception and reality.  In this exhibition a visitor would have found: relationships between paintings in many forms, the conflagration of high and low cultural references, and reason to question the meaning of illusion and symbols as they are described, translated, transmuted and described again. Her painting has been described as transitive, painting beside painting, and entering a network. Many of her exhibitions are activated by live performances.  

“You just create a moment, what I call “invisible brushstroke,” and that’s why I like performing, beside the fact that it’s not an object after all. It’s a very intense moment, for me similar to when I look at an artwork that is really fascinating.”- Jutta Koether Gordon, 2011

Jutta Koether’s work is heady but humorous, loud and subtle.  It performs and unfolds on many levels and differently over time.

   Jutta Koether New York 2007

Jutta Koether lives in Germany and New York, Teaches University. She studied philosophy. She makes paintings, plays music with rock stars, and creates assemblage/sculpture. She shows internationally she speaks on panels and cultural institutions as an art critic and artist.  She is a hyphenated artist.

Studying her exhibition, Seasons and Sacraments, creates the question of where is painting now? It recalls the tradition of a network of artworks working in tandem together across media like at Black Mountain College. Looking at Koether’s work confronts questions of taste, aesthetics, and the amount of cultural currency required to understand what at times feels like an inside joke. Koether's work is democratic in that many forms are presented in which invites many points of entry to understanding possible meanings.  At the same time, her work is also elitist in the fact that it's referring to philosophy like Derrida, historical painters like Pussin, and counter-cultures like Punk, and New York noise bands.

Koether, right of Martin Kippenberger 1981 Berlin

Jutta Koether did not go to art school. She studied philosophy in Cologne Germany.  She was most interested in the problems and potential of painting even then.  She met artists and discussed art through her writing work at SPEX magazine including Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen. She was interested in what women can bring to painting.

“One of my first projects was titled “Smell of Female” after the record and song by The Cramps. I also like to incorporate living social facts from a point of view that is shaped by the female experience. I like to do things with painting that men cannot do. And yet finding the knowledge of the other doesn’t mean to limit yourself, or self-marginalization. I like tactics. Not to stabilize expectations but to confound them. Even those of your friends. Even your own.”Gordon, 2011

Charlene von Heyl, Michaela Eichwald, Jutta Koether, Cosima von Bonin, Isabelle Graw

1991, photo by Hans-Jörg Mayer as a play on “militant” feminism just before she left for NYC

Painting stands apart from other work. It is shown in a white-walled room. It has been defined by Greenberg and Rosenberg and now Krauss as a set thing- pigment on a flat support.  If painting does not perform its set roll then critics may see it as simply not painting. So, in what way does the discourse around painting change when a painting is viewed alone versus when it becomes a part of a performance?

“Her works do not just point melancholically to a social world forever left behind; they also, more enthusiastically, gesture toward a reality in which painting's peculiar means and ends will not necessarily be lost or made irrelevant but will be strategically aligned with other social forces.”Blom, 2011  The activating performances act alongside the paintings and transform the experience of them into an evolving art form that is alive with unfolding readings.

Koether performing with Lux Interior at Reena Spaulings, 2009

The performance of “The Thirst” that accompanied the exhibition at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, is noisy and dark. I quote the comments from the YouTube documentation...

kuku ruku 4 years ago

HORRIBLE. arty-farty rock needs to die

Vlad Putain 3 years ago

+kuku ruku
Fortunately for all, you will die sooner.

The gallery is crowded there are many young people and quite a few older art world adults standing with bemused or outwardly upset faces. Some of the younger set are visibly enthralled: eyes closed filming with their cell phones, eager to engage with the musician/artists. There is a makeshift stage with unfinished two-by-four vertical partitions. The performers sometimes enter the crowd; Kim Gordon walks with her guitar into the crowd at one point and rubs it on to a viewer’s shoulder.  Jutta Koether several times takes a break from playing her Roland synthesizer (heavily distorted so that it sounds more like noise and less like notes) to point a long tube with a video recorder near the end into the crowd. The apparatus that she uses to record looks aggressive almost like a long gun with a site on the end.  It passes close to people's faces, recording them as they record her. This footage is then used as part of the documentation. During the performance Koether also uses long tubes of what looks to be copper to play the synthesizer akwardly from  a distance. There are some spoken word elements performed by both Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether.

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Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon perform “The Thirst” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2011.

The youtube documentation I viewed was manipulated to combine Jutta Koether's footage, footage taken from someone or several people in the crowd, and frenetic shots of the paintings from the exhibit  around the room. The paintings also including the assemblage free standing artworks. The resulting video is decidedly Punk/DIY high-contrast, distorted and difficult to watch. The last words from the performance were Kim Gordon saying ”OK, you can come out now”.Moderna Museet, 2011  The performers leave the stage passing out photocopied papers, leaving the guitar set at angle to the amp in order to create feedback.  The audience does not know it is over until Jutta Koether returns to pick up some items and turn off the amps.  The crowd cheers.

Jutta Koether and Kim Gordon perform “The Thirst” at Moderna Museet, Stockholm 2011.

What is the relationship of the performance to the exhibition? There is an aesthetic connection: loud noise, loud colors (pink, red and orange) and text (all caps) in the paintings.  There is also a cultural connection between the back of the paintings covered in black, chains, skulls, viceral looking acrylic/glass to the underground noise/punk/goth scene of New York City.  During the performance do the paintings act as anything other than a backdrop or stage?  After the performance is the reading of the visual artwork altered?  It is impossible to tell without being there. There was a video display of the performance with low volume installed in the spot where the stage had been to mark its passing for the rest of the exhibition. In that way it does give any viewers that missed the live performance a sense of longing that may become attached to the images.  For visitors that are familiar with the underground club scene it may give them a feeling or warmth or nostalgia that connects to their experiences.  If you are an art fan but not a fan of loud noise would you bring that tension and stress to the readings of the paintings even it you did not attend the opening?  

Dämonen für Damen, Herren und Kinder, installation view at Utopie und Monument II, Graz, (2010). Courtesy Daniel Buchholz, Cologne / Berlin.

It is important to state that Koether considers her work painting, even when it takes different forms.  Koether’s work is different than the the installation artists with whom Rosalind Krauss seems perplexed. “Each of the installation artists, like Rebecca Horn or Jessica Stockholder, becomes marked by the very thing they wish to repress, namely painting, so in a sense they become the subject of (subjected to) painting. There seems to me to be a certain strange paradox in installation art in that it continues to refer to painting.”Plante,2013   Greenberg’s idea of meaningful painting is caught up in the idea of materiality and bringing something new to the confines of the medium.  Koether is coming at expanding the practice of painting by allowing painting to play in different forms and create connection in other art and in other thoughts and experiences.  While she may not being doing anything new with pigment she is trying to expand the definition of what painting can be.  She is expanding it with thoughtful exhibition design that controls and manipulates the viewers sight lines and paths of movement.  She is using materials that push the edge of what a support in painting can be, yes canvas, but also a pile of lacquered wood and found objects, formed transparent lucite with assemblage forming a ghostly table cloth, paintings with images on the front and the back visually gloating on glass walls that create everchanging combinations of images as you and other visitors walk around changing what in seen through and next to and reflected back.

Seasons and Sacraments, Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2013

Koether speaks about her mission while working for Texte Zur Kunst, “Here (at TzK) it has been possible for me  to conceive Painting AS painting, to do “inside” and “outside” jobs. To perform an ego-split, to act in opposition, meaning to live the “Figure of Paint” seriously and fundamentally and out of control, and to push my “fortune.” In my “canon”, to be able to conceive together what is bustling about in different stratifications, just like the strokes and layers on a tableau.” Her artistic role models are artists in whom she has “recognized practices of canon/counter-canon and who have translated antagonistic potentials into painting” Koether 2016 p5

Rock ON Jutta!

Works Cited

• Blom, I. “Jutta Koether.” Artforum International, (2011, Summer): 49, 394-395. Retrieved from http://proxy.artic.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.artic.edu/docview/873817172?accountid=26320

• Cardoso, Ana. “The Staging of Restricted Means in the Landscape Redefines the Terms of Pleasure of Painting…Lux Interior by Jutta Koether”. Reena Spaulings, (2009, 05,18) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRt0xMTHcTc&t=8s

• DCAdundee. “Jutta Koether- Seasons and Sacraments”. Dundee Contemporary Arts, (2013, 04, 10). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE2D0DUlEnA&t=589s

• Derrida, Jacques. 1981. dissemination. Chicago: University Press.

• Gordon, Kim. “Jutta Koether: the inside job”. FlashArt, (Issue 276, 2011, 01-02). https://www.flashartonline.com/article/jutta-koether/

• “Jutta Koether & Kim Gordon Performance (2/2)”. Moderna Museet, (2011, 03,30).https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_879808&feature=iv&src_vid=RPT2C-3ujCU&v=wwQ2XInLNWA

• Koether, Jutta. “Figure of Paint: On The Incontrovertible!” Texte Zur Kunst. (Issue 25, January 2016): p 134 - 139.

• Plante, David. “The Real Thing: An Interview with Rosalind E. Krauss”. Artcritical, (2013, 08, 30). http://www.artcritical.com/2013/08/30/rosalind-krauss-interview/

Works Consulted

• Anastas, Rhea, Gregg Bordowitz, Andrea Fraser, Jutta Koether, and Glenn Ligon. "The Artist Is a Currency." Grey Room, no. 24 (2006): 110-25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442735

• Joselit, David. "Painting beside Itself." October 130 (2009): 125-34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40368572.

• Sam, S. (2013, 09). Jutta koether. Artforum International., 52, 420-421. Retrieved from http://proxy.artic.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-com.proxy.artic.edu/docview/1442738344?accountid=26320