WHEN THE PARTY’S OVER
On flowers, evanescence and painting in the works of Marius Glauer
Every high has a comedown. This insight rings particularly true at the start of these hardly roaring ‘New Twenties.’ For a year humanity has been experiencing what was considered to be inconceivable: the permanent celebration of life has come to a grinding halt, at least in the Western industrial nations. Constant acceleration was slowed down and a limit was forced on man’s omnipresence in the age of globalization. The magnitude of this new constrained reality presents a stark contrast to the size of its cause: it is a microscopically small organic matter, a virus, that is currently running the world, challenging anthropocentrism and casually – but with lasting effect – exiling the light-heartedness of lavish parties from everyday life.
The photo works of Marius Glauer tell similar tales of peak and imminent fall. The artist continually references a pictorial genre, addressing the thin line between being and fading unlike any other: still life. In this sense, the photographs Dark Blossom Margiela and Blossom Margiela, both from 2019, can be understood as a detailed study of such arrangements of heavily symbolic, sumptuous and graceful objects. The seemingly abstract works show color gradients lively oscillating between pink, blue and silver. What is depicted can be fathomed, but it cannot be grasped. Vague shapes of blossoms, as mentioned in the work’s title, can be discovered in distorted reflections, while ‘Margiela’ hints at the true protagonist of the pictures: a silver purse of the haute couture brand Maison Margiela. Following the logic of still lifes, the luxury item becomes a symbol and points to the progressive work of Martin Margiela that transcends the boundaries of fashion and art.[1] Thus, the ‘Margiela’ series can be understood as a contemporary interpretation of still life. The artist replaces baroque splendor, glass goblets and silver with a status symbol of the 21st century. Thereby, he concentrates on a pictorial moment which in the past indicated a painter’s level of artistic skill: the depiction of reflections.
Glauer’s focus on the floral is also evident in his work Untitled II, produced in 2015 as part of a photo series. Limp and drained, the three-part fragment of a garland droops down a transparent pillar. Hatchings on the surface of the narrow square block cloud the material’s clarity. It might as well be made of glass, crystal or ice. Its form and consistency seem familiar and recall conventional presentations of sculptures in exhibition rooms, although the arrangement cannot be assigned to any known context. In fact, the scenario seems to borrow rather from imaginary worlds such as crystal fairytale palaces or science fiction universes. The homogenous and artificial lighting of the objects amplifies this unnatural and otherworldly atmosphere. Finally, the picture’s protagonist shines in an equally cool light, raised on a pedestal: a garland made of high-gloss foil which develops a life of its own and can hardly be read as a symbol of joy and festivity any longer. Like an exhausted body, it longs for the ground. The first of its three floral elements clings to the top of the pillar as a golden crown. The second, violet part cascades and elongates, all the more emphasizing the third, silver element of this decorative item. Like a heavy blossom in an instant of fleeting beauty, just about to wilt, the garland hangs its head.
The artist accentuates the motif suggested in this picture – the transformation or the loss of vital energy – with black liquid. It stains the garland and pedestal’s pristine and seductively glossy surfaces and trickles off the petals in opaque drops. In long uneven streaks it runs down the glassy pillar and intensifies the downward pull that acts upon the central figure of this picture. The elusive black substance contrasts the pure white image space and furthermore conjures associations of blood or machine oil – and thereby of liquids, the leaking of which can mean imminent death for man and machine.
In Untitled II, Glauer replaces the symbolically charged proud blossoms of the old masters and the baroque opulence of flower bouquets with cheap floral party decorations. Precious crystal glass becomes a plexiglass column, red wine representing lifeblood turns into black ink. Ultimately, the photographer highlights the artificial character of this scene: the sterile image space and the clinical setting call to mind where the picture came into being and where it will spend its afterlife – in the photo studio and the white cube.
In 2017/2018, at the exhibition Last Night’s Fortune Teller, the artist presented a work to the right of Untitled II which revisits the genre of floral still lifes much more explicitly. The photograph Pink Foil Flower, taken in 2017, shows just what the title suggests: a flower placed centrally on a pink foil. Despite the portrait format, Glauer cuts off his motif – a pink gladiola – at the top and bottom margin, drawing the focus all the more to the segment in full bloom. Much like the garland in Untitled II, this figure seems divided into three parts: the linearity of past, present and future is already inherent in the gladiola’s vertical and ascending growth form. The transition of being and fading manifests in just one plant. The picture, thus, concentrates metaphorically on the now, while tomorrow and yesterday are indicated, as if according to a timeline, through a bud and a wilted blossom.
The photograph Pink Foil Flower may be understood as a response to the arguably most famous floral still lifes in the history of painting: the sun flower paintings of Vincent van Gogh. As it happens, one of the Dutch painter’s pictures finds its way into Glauer’s work two years later. For the first time, the artist specifies a painting influential to his practice. The spatial collage R.I.P. of 2019, which was installed similarly to Untitled (Daimler), features a reproduction of van Gogh’s Sunflowers (F457), painted in January of 1889 as the last of seven versions of this subject.[2] Van Gogh consciously chose this firm context of floral still lifes at the end of the 19th century to refine his style and color palette.[3] While there are several pictures of gladiolas among his paintings, in the years of 1888/1889 van Gogh concentrates, for various, reasons on sunflowers. The rough blossoms support his almost conceptual artistic endeavor of exploring the manifold nuances of a single color – yellow. In consequence, Glauer picks the last version in the series of paintings showing yellow flowers on a yellow background. Blown up to the size of an advertising banner, the reproduction distinctly emphasizes van Gogh’s progressive style: the composition focuses entirely on the depiction of the robust blossoms which almost disappear into the pastose and expressively applied oil paint, whilst the vase, its set-up area and background are designed as equally well-structured but monochrome surfaces. Thus, Glauer – on a conceptual level – comes very close to this celebration of a single color when he drapes a pink flower on a pink surface in Pink Foil Flower.
Floral still lifes remain a recurring motif in the photographer’s body of work as he concentrates on the depiction of blossoms, particularly in the global crisis year of 2020. In his Radical Flowers series, he references the history of painting repeatedly, for example the poppy fields of Claude Monet. Much like the painters in the late 19th century, Glauer, too, starts to work outside his studio. While in his Poppies panoramas the night sky is still simulated by a blue-green glittering foil, the artist proceeds to work en plein air for his portraits of dried roses. Hence, the monochrome blue as seen in the background of Radical Rose III is not artificially created but actually depicts the sky.
The influence of painting is obvious in yet another art work, visible next to van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the installation R.I.P.: Mark Rothko’s No. 16 (Red, White and Brown) of 1957. Both paintings were magnified and reproduced on tarpaulins. Taut and overlapping, they are installed on the wall and the parquet floor. The baseboard aligns with the horizon line of van Gogh’s sunflower painting while Rothko’s composition is folded at the transition of one red sphere into another. Directly lining up and juxtaposing the paintings in this manner reads like a crash course in art history: it links the origins of expressionism straight to color field painting, and furthermore illustrates the continued effect of these artistic positions since the postmodern era. Along these lines, the equally abstract composition Uniques 4 of Marius Glauer – which marks the third element in this spatial collage and sits framed on top of the prints – enters into a dialogue with these icons of art history. The photograph shows a pink-purple plane with a glossy red streak of nail polish running through, seemingly continuing a contour of Rothko’s painting.
Yet painting and photography weren’t always conceived together as naturally as demonstrated in this work of Marius Glauer. From an art-historical perspective, and in regard to the development of the two competing visual media, emphasis was on examining which impact the emerging discipline of photography had on painting. Much less common was a focus on the influence of painting on artistic photography as emphasized, for example, in the exhibition “Painting in Photography. Strategies in Appropriation,” curated by Martin Engler and Carolin Köchling in 2012 for the Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main. In the exhibition catalog, Engler characterizes the relationship between the two pictorial genres as follows: “The simultaneity of the rise of photography and abstract painting in the second half of the 19th century led at an early stage to the formulation of a fundamental aesthetic opposition: reality and abstraction, documentary photography and autonomous painting […] were seen antithetical. It was soon established that this sweeping division […] could not be maintained, yet even today photography is still discussed in terms of its more-or-less direct relation to the real world.”[4] Carolin Köchling states, furthermore, that an examination of painting is noticeable especially in the work of conceptual photographers starting from the 1960s onwards, because “as the dominant medium [at the] time, painting [was] a point of friction against which artists [like Jeff Wall, Sherrie Levine or Louise Lawler] position themselves, whether in appropriation or in conscious demarcation.”[5]
How profoundly the subjects, strategies and movements of painting – and thereby especially abstract expressionism – have influenced the pictorial worlds of Maris Glauer is evident throughout his oeuvre. His references are partly indicated directly in the titles (as e.g., Munch, Munch, 2014), through the affirmative repetition of characteristic compositions (in this manner he refers in Red Foil Whip Cream of 2014 with whipped cream drawings to the work of Cy Twombly) or through the reproduction of paintings which he incorporates into his own works (as seen in R.I.P.). Glauer’s images may be understood as formal studies which, in the first place, are conceptualized predominantly as collages or assemblages – and hence much like paintings on a picture plane. The artist combines foils, fabrics and everyday items while the actual key moment of his practice consists of the consequent compression of already flat compositions. With his camera, Glauer reduces even arrangements protruding only a few millimeters to a single layer: the photographic paper. When the photographer – who does not act as an observer, but rather as an originator of images[6] – creates illusion and depth, he accomplishes this, paradoxically, through the process of flattening. The artist, thus, follows a program formulated not only by Clement Greenberg in his essay on “Modernist Painting,”[7] but also by Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb for the medium of painting: “We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.”[8]
This reflection on the relationship of photography and painting, however, leads too far astray from Glauer’s originally so intuitive gesture expressed in R.I.P. When the artist combines the already described paintings under the epitaph “Rest in Peace,” he pays homage to the powerful compositions of the modern masters. The ensemble of paintings can, thus, be interpreted as an ode to color: yellow, red and pink radiate throughout the exhibition space.
With his installation, Glauer created an altar, a space of remembering. Like pictures left at the scene of an accident, Glauer leaves a personal photographic note when he integrates his own work into the arrangement. Finally, death creeps into the installation in such a systematic manner that the whole ensemble – considered as a composition of objects – itself becomes a still life and vanitas depiction. The selected paintings come across as heavily symbolic in the light of the R.I.P. title: Van Gogh’s Sunflowers are a testament to a joyous peak in the life of the painter who became sick shortly after and took his own life. The wilting blossoms of his still life bespeak to a foreboding of mortality. Rothko, who declared he wanted to move people to tears with his paintings,[9] too, committed suicide. In this context, the viscous liquid running through Glauer’s photography inevitably prompts associations of blood.
The installation R.I.P. shows how closely the celebration of life is connected to death, its inevitable successor. In Untitled II Glauer already outlined a scenario for a somber reality following humanity’s excessive party. From today’s point of view, this photo work reads as a metaphor for the global comedown and sobering-up after the ever-increasing crescendo of contemporary life. As such, it has well found its way into pop culture: Along these lines, the music video When the Party’s Over, released in 2019, presents Billie Eilish in a similarly doomed context. Here, the existential crisis and apocalyptic framing are not caused by an epidemic but the end of a love affair. The singer – clothed in white with blue hair and overloaded with clunky silver jewelry – is placed sitting on a chair in a vast white room. A pedestal stands before her, with a glass of black liquid on top, almost inviting. Eilish pauses, then drinks it in full. Black runs out of her eyes, down her clothes, onto the floor. Her movements become inhuman, and appear erratic. She seems to perish from the serum just as Glauer’s garlands do.
After all, every ending marks a new beginning. Even after this phase of sobering and disillusionment, exhilaration and excess will reenter our lives. And the world waits with bated breath to see what form this return will take.
[1] The Haus der Kunst in Munich dedicated an exhibition to Martin Margiela in 2009. In his review, Georg Diez locates Margiela’s work with subtitles like “Sister of Death” and “The Disco’s Over” between glamour and apocalypse – a context suitable for Glauer’s works as well. Cf. Georg Diez, “Martin Margiela: Der letzte Schrei”, in: Süddeutsche Zeitung, March 20, 2009. URL: www.sz.de/1.387036 (last referenced on January 27, 2021).
[2] Today this painting belongs to the collection of the Sompo Japan Museum of Art in Tokyo.
[3] On the meaning of still lifes in the development of van Gogh’s work, compare for example Stefan Koldehoff, “‘Hauptsächlich malt er Blumen’”. Van Goghs Pariser Blumenstillleben”, in: Ortrud Westheider and Michael Philipp (eds.), Van Gogh. Stillleben, exh. cat. Museum Barberini, Munich 2019, p. 66ff.
[4] Martin Engler, “Abstract Worlds. Between Painting and Photography”, in: id. (ed.), Painting in Photography. Strategies in Appropriation, exh. cat. Städel Museum, Heidelberg/Berlin 2012, p. 9.
[5] Carolin Köchling, “Appropriation and Demarcation. Painting in the Light of Photography”, in: ibid., p. 15.
[6] In acting as a creator, Glauer opposes Clement Greenberg’s understanding of photography who described the medium in the 1960’s as “historical art par excellence.” According to Greenberg, photographers are meant to capture – not to create (!) – images that tell stories. The concentration on the formal and the abstract, he regarded as “great danger” to photography. Cf. Clement Greenberg, “Vier Photographen”, in: id./Karlheinz Lüdeking (eds.), Die Essenz der Moderne. Ausgewählte Essays und Kritiken, German translation by Christoph Hollender, Hamburg 2009 [first edition: 1997], p. 336-343.
[7] Clement Greenberg characterizes flatness as a property inherent only to the medium of painting. The concentration on flatness he, thus, understands as a “self-critical tendency of modernist painting.” Cf. Clement Greenberg, “Modernistische Malerei”, in: ibid., p. 265-278.
[8] Rothko and Gottlieb as quoted in James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography, Chicago 1993, p. 193.
[9] Harriet Schoenholz Bee (ed.), MoMA highlights: 350 works from the Museum of Modern Art, exhibition catalog, The Museum of Modern Art, New York 2004 [first edition: 1999], p. 196.