Germany in the Can
The Makeshift Sculptures of
Manfred Pernice
Plywood, laminated
fiberboard, cardboard – at first glance, Manfred Pernice’s sculptures seem
as dry as the materials they’re constructed from. Yet the "best-known
unknown artist in Berlin" loads his containers and oversized cans with
historical, social, but also highly personal references. Tim Ackermann
explored Pernice’s work and discovered some very emotional stories.
Manfred
Pernice
"The GDR is the big can," says Manfred
Pernice. He’s right – but it really depends on the can’s contents.
While the West German boulevards like the Kudamm
and the Kö
have always served caviar, the pedestrian zones in the East tended to make
do with herring. But Pernice’s work of art, which was inspired by an East
German pedestrian zone, can’t even pass for a sardine: a forlorn plywood
container with a window and door that stirs up bad memories of greasy fast
food à la GDR. A staircase leads up to the roof of the barracks; its plain
metal bars suspiciously resemble a highway overpass. A few meters away are
a few old cement flowerpots with scruffy bushes and a small spindly tree
growing inside them. It looks as though bums, punks, or pooches had been
urinating on them on a regular basis.
Haldensleben,
2005
©Manfred Pernice
Haldensleben
is the name of the small city in the Magdeburger
Börde that inspired the artist Manfred Pernice to make his
large-scale installation. Haldensleben, a work from 2005, can currently be
seen in a solo show of the artist’s work at the Museum
Ludwig in Cologne. Actually, it’s about Haldensleben’s desperate
attempts to market itself; originally, it was the "Ceramic Works" there
that attracted Pernice, a passionate collector of GDR crockery. In
Cologne, respectable Rhinelanders will now, in effect, have the
opportunity to catch a whiff of a dense concentration of pure,
unadulterated East German desolation. Far from the exoticized provinces of
a divided Germany, however, the Cologne show provides a few nice insights
into the artistic work of Manfred Pernice.
Haldensleben,
2005
©Manfred Pernice
At
a distance from the plywood container and somewhat lost in the general
aura of shabbiness stands a lonely, cylinder-shaped sculpture partially
painted in white. An oversized can, which is typical Pernice: cans play a
key role in his work. The artist, born in 1963 in Hildesheim, became
famous in 1998 when he showed his six-meter-high Main and Central Can
at the first Berlin Biennale
in the old Academy on Pariser Platz – as
an allusion to the famous unrealized tower by Vladimir
Yevgrafovich Tatlin. The special thing about Pernice’s cans is that
they don’t consist of tin like the originals do, but of typical low-budget
materials such as plywood, laminated fiberboard, and cardboard. The
cylinders often seem temporary, fragile, glued together in a slapdash
manner.
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Manfred Pernices work for Documenta
2002 Courtesy Galerie NEU
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The works of a manic hobby craftsman who always gives up
just before he’s finished and then starts fiddling around with something
else. In spite of, or maybe even due to the rough Home Depot chic of his
sculptures, which are often assembled together into "can fields," Pernice
is fairly successful. And not only in his hometown Berlin. The artist was
shown at the Venice Biennale in
2001 and 2003, the documenta in
2002, P.S.1 in New York, the Portikus
in Frankfurt, and so on. This year he will be taking part in the renowned Skulptur
Projekte Münster. It’s obvious: Pernice is a new German
"sculptor" shooting star. The King of the Cans. And self-avowed opponent
of the return deposit: "Deposits on cans are really the pits!!" – with two
exclamation points.
Although Pernice uses
basic geometric forms like the cylinder and the parallelepiped for his
cans and containers, he’s miles away from the polished, stylish Minimalism
of a Donald
Judd. His sculptures aren’t "L’art pour l’art" in a white cube devoid
of reference. On the contrary: Pernice does everything conceivable to
anchor those seemingly so elevated forms securely back in reality.
Sometimes the artist wallpapers his sculptures with photographs or
collages of texts; other works are decorated with tiles taken from the
entrance to the building of Hamburg’s Railroad Police. A cylinder often
stands for a particular person whom Pernice finds interesting and has, for
this reason, "canned." And so, when a "can field" is temporarily assembled
together for an exhibition, it’s like a transitory group of persons
gathered together, with each existing in his or her own individual can
shell. A pessimistic social idea about internally isolated individuals?
The artist begs to differ:
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Dose der Bahnpolizei: at
Hauptbahnhof, Ecke Glockengießerwall/Steintordamm, 2000
Courtesy
Galerie NEU
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"The canned characters aren’t hopelessly hermetic cases;
they act in more or less interesting ways in a can world. Being canned can
also be a connection or a relationship, whether it’s an affectionate
imprisonment or a torturous state of being at someone’s mercy. I picture
the cans as always filled and never closed."
Both:
Untitled, 1995
©Manfred Pernice
Deutsche
Bank Collection
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[2]
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