Private/Corporate
Works from the Daimler Art Collection
and the Paul Maenz Collection:
A Dialogue
A discussion about
private versus corporate
Private / CorporateA discussion about private versus corporate collecting and "art as material"
Participants:
Dr. Renate Wiehager, director of the Daimler Art Collection (RW)
Paul Maenz, art dealer and collector (PM)
Dr. Gerda Wendermann, curator at the Neues Museum Weimar (GW)
Dr. Friederike Nymphius, assistant at the DaimlerArt Collection (FN)
The discussion took place at Daimler Contemporary on March 1, 2002RW: I'd like to start with some questions to former gallery-owner Paul Maenz, as the Paul Maenz Collection essentially grew out of his activities as a gallery owner. Herr Maenz, when your gallery closed in 1990, the DuMont Verlag produced a lavish volume about 20 years of gallery history. It was subtitled "An avant-garde gallery and the art of our times".1 The volume opens with an essay by Donald Kuspit called "Dealing with the avant-garde" and addressing a series of fundamental reflections about how art is perceived today. Kuspit writes that avant-garde art has become a "real-concrete utility article" and a "concrete answer to our desperate prayers for a meaningful existence".2 What does a formulation of this kind sound like to you now, ten years after the book appeared? Was this 'impassioned' assessment right at the time? Is it right for contemporary art?
PM: When I received Kuspit's essay I thought the content was a bit too pompous, and actually the form as well. We persuaded the author to render some of the "fat" down before the essay was published. The idea was not to make the gallery into something heroic. We wanted statements about the art of the day that the book is about, not a eulogy. Even so, Kuspit's essay is interesting. Especially when it looks at the ambivalence, the dialectic arising from the fact that an avant-garde gallery-owner's work, if it is successful, at the same time reduces the energy levels that are his fundamental driving force, in other words it detracts from the avant-garde's revolutionary energy. Kuspit sees the ideal gallery-owner as a kind of "John the Baptist" or as an impresario. At the time he was also particularly concerned with the subject - or possibly we should say the unavoidable dilemma - of how avant-garde art and its naturally critical basis approach is transformed into cult objects or culture fetishes. We might find ideas like this a bit difficult now. Of course all that comes from the spirit of another time, and so does Kuspit's diction.
RW: Kuspit says that an avant-garde gallery-owner has to sell art at a profit, but even so "selling is not the essential feature of an avant-garde gallery". Can you say something about that in the light of your own gallery activities? Do you think we still have avant-garde galleries centred around the epistemological thrust of a person's activities, rather than the financial element? How did you deal over the years with decisions about what stays in the gallery as part of a 'private collection', what became 'part of the collection' for you, and why, and what was sold? There's a lot to answer here, but perhaps you can identify a point where you'd say that the start made in the sixties was linked with decisions to buy certain works because they addressed things in a particular and fundamental way, I'm thinking of Peter Roehr's work, for example?
PM: Actually it all started quite differently. I invited the artist Konrad Lueg to take part in an exhibition in 1967 - along with a few others who were still unknown at the time, like Richard Long, Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan, Peter Roehr etc.: "And one day all this will be yours, my darling", in Frankfurt am Main. And at the end of the same year, Konrad, who'd changed his name to Fischer by then, came up to me and said: "Why don't we open a gallery together?" And I said: "You must be mad! Just look what's going on here with the Springer press, Rudi Dutschke, Vietnam. It's not the right moment to open a gallery." He still went ahead and did just that shortly afterwards, in Düsseldorf. And it was a very good gallery, as we all know. It just took me two more years to be clear in my own mind about art, society and my own aims. And then I got hold of my first gallery space in a backyard in Cologne, with Gerd de Vries, who's been my partner ever since.
Incidentally, spaces like that that came into being through sheer necessity led to a completely new kind of gallery, from Turin to Amsterdam, as far as their function was concerned as well. You mustn't forget that these loft galleries, as they were called later, didn't exist before. In fact most of these galleries became workshops. The artists were given a ticket and the art was done on the spot. So a whole new kind of gallery had developed in the course of time. They're what normally happens now and are part of the art business as a "look". In fact designers go out of their way to simulate the original poor, ascetic factory space, in other words Mary Boone as a Prada version of Fischer, if you like. Anyway, that's how it all started. Our factory floors have got a bit bigger and showier over the years, but we've deliberately never left the back yards.
FN: Did you start working with the artists you represented later at that time? Many galleries seem to have quite a through-put of artists to suit the market, and it's rare for the original core to be there to the end.
PM: Yes, and the good relationship has lasted right down to the present day with most of them, so that's a good thirty years. The gallery opened with Hans Haacke, and of course I still see him when he's doing something here in Berlin - in the Reichstag for example - then it went on pretty quickly with Josef Kosuth, who represented - shall we call it the hard side of Concept Art at the time. Then other artists came along, most of them in Germany for the first time, from Giulio Paolini to Daniel Buren. The art of the day, in other words. Of course there's a certain satisfaction in the fact that a large number, in fact most of these artists did then go on to make a major contribution to the way art was in the next 20 years, and are actually rated very highly today on the whole. This is true of Anselm Kiefer, of Keith Haring, of Hanne Darboven - of most of them.
RW Once more, this question: which works stayed in the storeroom for one reason or another and which went on, as the result of a conscious decision, to form the nucleus of what has come to be seen as a 'private' collection? Or perhaps there wasn't a distinction and no distinction had to be made? And were there moments when you quite spontaneously decided, while a work was in hand: "I'd like to keep that, that's not going up for sale"? What was the process that led to the "Paul Maenz Collection in the Neues Museum in Weimar", where there are after all about 450 pictures, sculptures and installations, a large collection of graphic art and also, as a gift from your long-standing partner Gerd de Vries, a library of about four thousand volumes?
PM: In the busy, intensive early years there was no chance of thinking about a personal collection, partly for financial reasons of course. Seeing it all emerging and developing was so fascinating that the urge to own things really did seem secondary. We really were right in the thick of things. To quote Kosuth: "This art doesn't have viewers, just participants." And that is how we saw ourselves as well - the dealers and the collectors. It really was, unlike today, a fairly manageable group, a "small radical minority", as people said at the time. The same seven people often came to the openings for years. And at the end of the exhibition we were delighted to be able to write to the artists: "Fifty-eight visitors - fantastic result." And that counted as a real success, as these fifty-eight people - and this is not like today either - really were "participants". Despite all this it was often the good works that didn't find buyers, but were dragged on from one year end to the next. And then at some time or another we decided to put them on one side for the day when "their hour would come", I mean, when people would realize that they belonged in museums. Anyway, we accumulated quite a bit of art for a whole range of motives.Even so, when I got together with Weimar in the early 90s I hesitated to call it a collection, but Gerd de Vries and I tried to give the thing some sort of shape. That one yes, that one no, we'll need to buy that as well etc. Nevertheless I still don't see the whole thing so much as a "collection" as a great tangled ball of wool with threads hanging out of it. And the great opportunity the museum would have would be to pick up the loose ends, tie them together and continue to work on the fabric. This task would be made easier by the fact that the available threads are all pretty similar. For example, if you wanted to knit a bit more of the German myth you could take Kiefer as your starting-point, but Paolini's "italianità" could be interesting in Weimar's case. Of course there are proper work groups and complexes that are complete in themselves, including a series of so-called "Blue Chips" that have now become part of the base currency for museums. Nevertheless, I still hesitate to call it a collection.
RW: The gallery-owner's responsibility, Kuspit writes at another point, does not end with the choice of artists, but also lies in decisions about presentation, which is how the gallery-owner intervenes in the artistic process, making himself and active part of it. If one looks at the photograph records of the exhibitions in the various spaces in your gallery from 1970 to 1990 there is an unmistakably "emphatic" radicality and precision in terms of presentation, in fact the presentation as it relates to the condition in the space sums up the artistic argument to an extent. Now, by the hand-over to the Neues Museum in Weimar you have given up a large part of your collection and so have only limited influence on the presentation. What does that mean to you?
PM: Often the moment when a work of art was shown in the gallery for the first time was also its world première, the hour of its birth, and the way it was presented for the first time also of course helped to define the new artwork's first "form of manifestation". To this extent I was also involved in the realization as the gallery-owner. So for example: at the time of Concept Art a lot of American artists used to head straight for the stationery shops in Cologne because we have a different aesthetic from the Americans for our office goods as well. Shops like this were exciting for those artists, not to say exotic. And so it went on, the gallery didn't look like a New York gallery either.
And then as a gallery-owner, or better as an assistant, you were involved in what was happening on the spot in our place, in terms of content as well as form. And as my background was in design and graphics I was quite a useful partner, quite apart from the fact that I knew my own galleries like the back of my hand and knew best where and how the best effects could be made. To that extent the museum has also inherited a good proportion of the "historical genesis process" that led to certain works of art. And of course my personal handwriting was also shaped and developed by the artists, and so it also inevitably bears the mark of its time and is bound to that time.
For that reason I assume that I would also mount an exhibition of today's art through the eyes of the 60s and 70s to a certain extent. A visual language that is certainly still widely understood. I assume that it is still largely valid for the "translation work" that is part of the gallery-owner's, and also the curator's, role. As a gallery-owner you are between two extremes, as it were, the artist here and the collector there, and if you're lucky you bring off the "translation" in such a way that the learning curve is handled in a way that works, without undue simplification or misunderstandings. In other words so that acting as a go-between for the artist with his verbal speechlessness and the unprepared collector, who is perhaps not up to it, actually comes to something. To doing a deal as well, of course.
RW: After 1990 your collecting activities were separated from the contexts of gallery activities and obligations, so aspects like discovering, presenting, mediating and marketing were no longer to the fore. Was that a liberation for Paul Maenz the collector?
PM: Perhaps it was not so much a liberation as a logical act, quite apart from the fact that beginning and end always belong together in some way. In the end Gerd de Vries reminded me that I had said from the outset that we would have to choose our moment to close the gallery one day, and stop at the right time. I'd forgotten that a long time ago. I think that after twenty years the crucial thing I realized was that for young artists - the only ones that made me interested in the gallery, fundamentally - I was now from the same generation as their fathers. That perhaps made the whole business particularly interesting for some ambitious newcomers. But that did not lead to mutual identification, which is somehow generation-specific. I really do believe that this identification, this "pulling in the same direction" is essential for establishing credibility and the power to convince, in other words for the partnership between client and gallery. Anyway, I don't know of an "old" gallery that would really suit young artists if they are really interesting; and the converse also applies.
RW: Donald Kuspit sets up two key criteria for an avant-garde gallery: he says that in the first place it is "a space for critical, oppositional questioning of society", a "metaphor for an alternative psycho-social space"; but that secondly it is also a "place for mystical meditation on art".3 Is it possible to apply comparable criteria to a company collection's public "gallery"? Or does the critical observer in this case have to go through the "economic evaluation processes" first that the art has gone through in order to open itself up to the socio-critical and meditative potential. Your long co-operation with Hans Haacke has meant that you look critically at who evaluates or uses art, and for what purposes. When you go into the Daimlerexhibition galleries here in Haus Huth: can art meet the criteria mentioned, or is the "evaluation process" the first thing to strike you.
PM: When I come into the Daimler Art Collection here in Haus Huth I am in the company of art. But when I go into some big hall where the company collection is placed somewhere between the cafeteria, the offices and the conference rooms, then of course some conflicts are immediately visible. The quite obvious loss of an affective link, of personal responsibility, as found in private collections, would be an example. In any case, here in Haus Huth you're confronted with art first, with the exhibition. Of course I'm interested in the question then of why does the company do this, and what for? The impression given is that here a company collection is making its appearance in the mediating form of an art-association or museum situation. I can imagine that this causes some conflicts. For example, that the company's main job is to maximize profit in a way that really can be measured, and on the other hand this is set against, shall we say, art as intellectual material that is much more concerned with maximizing cognition. I think that the tension between these two poles will not always be completely without friction.
The crucial thing is certainly how it is possible to handle this sort of bi-polarity, whether it can actually be used to strike sparks. There are circumstances under which artists have to resist a firm like this and its expectations in just the same way that the firm has to beware of a lot of artists' ambitions to take over completely. And this is certainly not an easy act to have to perform.
FN: No, it's certainly not easy to carry off this balancing act, especially when a company collection, as ours does, has an art-historical, academic role to play as well as meeting certain demands in terms of quality. And on top of this something that you have just mentioned is crucial: you have to have your heart in collecting, showing enthusiasm for art and of course personal links with the artist.
PM: That has to be the case as well, the decisions have to be driven by individual energy.
RW: But the companies also have to have the courage, as has been the case with Daimler, to develop individual energy and appoint appropriate experts. Once this first step has been embarked upon, the position of the people in the company who are responsible for the art also has to be invested with power and room for manoeuvre.
GW: But that was the idea behind the Daimler Art Collection from the outset, that the decisions should be in the hand of an individual, not a committee.
RW: That is true. But it is also exceptional, and was so above all in the years my predecessor Hans Baumgart held the post. But this kind of responsible "authorship" for a curator would be a good development in general. If too many people are involved in decision-making you don't have a clear vision. And every collection needs a vision.
PM: I think that the days are long gone when collections were made on the principle that the main thing is that the firm feels good. Firms that know what they're doing now tend to treat art just as professionally as they do their own usual business. The art positions, I mean the posts responsible for art within the company, are sensibly filled at the same level as top management. It's not possible to work with each other on the same level if you don't do that.
FN: I think the way Daimler do it is right too. Both the company and the art business know that Frau Wiehager has a track record as a museum director, has excellent connections in the art world, specific interests and as well as all that has developed a personal 'profile' of her own. This knowledge alone produces an image of the collection, transparency and a relationship of trust between the art world and industry. This could also put an end to the prejudice that companies just exploit artists. In fact both benefit from each other . . .
PM: . . . the trick is certainly keeping the right balance. This means, if I could put it like this, creative added value for both. I am certain that a lot of artists have learned a great deal from their dealings with a big firm. All these are learning processes - but that's how I see practical dealings with art anyway.
RW: Frau Wendermann, a question for you about collecting museums: the FAZ was always very critical in the 1990s - and it still is - about the increasing number of collecting museums, because they are losing sight of the genuine role of museums - collecting, keeping, showing - in favour of a 'borrowed' shiny façade. How do you see this tendency?
GW: I think Weimar was very lucky that Paul Maenz gave his collection to the museum in 1994. The town had been cut off from international art development for decades anyway by the iron curtain. The Weimar municipal collections would never have been able to fill this forty-year gap from their own financial resources. And it was also in Paul Maenz's interest and the museum's that an important part of his collection is permanently linked with Weimar as an acquisition and gift. We see the Paul Maenz Collection as the fundamental basis of the Neues Museum, as something to be sensibly developed, with the support of other collectors as well. Paul Maenz himself has never insisted on sole rights, and so other collections are represented in the building as well. The museum should be open to contemporary art in any form.
RW: And is that not something you're always having to defend yourself about, in Weimar or elsewhere?
GW: Of course that question does arise. The Neues Museum opened in 1999 when Weimar was City of Culture, and then in particular there was a lot of criticism from East German visitors saying that the museum was too one-sidedly Western. We countered this reproach by showing a selection from our stock of GDR art in the following year. We intend to mount thematic exhibitions about this problem area in future as well. Quite apart from the fact that art has always been collected internationally - as everyone knows, Goethe preferred to collect Italian art, but French and Dutch art as well - I'm afraid we have to say that our historically accumulated collection of GDR art is very mediocre in comparison with Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, for example, but also with the museums in Altenburg and Gera. The various directors here weren't very courageous about purchases and tended to by second-rate, casual works by important GDR artists like Wolfgang Mattheuer and Bernhard Heisig as well.
FN: Would the museum have had a big enough budget at the time to be able to buy good, expensive works for the collection?
GW: I think that in the GDR days it was not so much a question of money as of personal contact with the artists and the courage to acquire works that went beyond the officially prescribed realism. Many of the works in our store were simply allocated by official district authorities.
RW: If we go back to Paul Maenz's image of the ball of wool with ends hanging out of it. What would you start to pick up? How are these decisions taken? Against the background of the current collections in Weimar?
GW: We try to pick up a variety of threads by continuing, completing or also introducing artistic positions that are not featured in the Paul Maenz Collection. A lot of this is wishful thinking, and comes to grief because we are so constrained financially, but we have brought some things off. For example, we have complemented the extensive group of works by Peter Roehr with a serial work by Herman de Vries, who influenced him in the early 1960s as a member of the Dutch Nul group. In this context a work by Jan Schoonhoven would be an important further step, also in the dialogue with the outstanding Piero Manzoni collection. And then we were able to complement a work by Imi Knoebel that he produced as a response to the death of Josef Beuys and that had been somewhat isolated in the collection with another work by a pupil of Beuys, Blinky Palermo, and also with two chalk drawings by Beuys himself that he produced shortly before he died, and that have been lent to us.
But we have also acquired works like Pipilotti Rist's installation "Das Zimmer" (The Room), as an attempt to involve the most recent generation in the collection, artists like Angela Bulloch or Sylvie Fleury, for example. As well as this we would of course like to improve the quality of our GDR art department. Here we have been able to buy a central work by Michael Morgner, an outsider who went his own very particular way, the 1988 "Deutsches Requiem". And we are also trying to acquire works by younger German artists like Via Lewandowsky or the Nicolai brothers, regardless of questions of East and West.
RW: Frau Wendermann, when you watch from Weimar the commitment with which the Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, for example, is building up an art collection, and the actions and exhibitions that Siemens are coming up with, etc., what are the developments that you find interesting there?
GW: It is very revealing to see how the Deutsche Bank is not just building up its own company collection, but also running its own art gallery with the Guggenheim Museum, though this is not so committed to art that has not yet established itself fully. I personally find the Siemens culture programme more interesting, like for example the "Zuspiel" (Pass) exhibition series, which was staged in various art associations and museums. An internationally known artist and a younger one were invited to work on a joint project. This project was certainly beneficial for all concerned, and I know that it has been much copied as well.
RW: To what extent do you have a sense from the outside of how Corporate Collections develop?
GW: It's not something I've paid a lot of attention to.
RW: Perhaps that's a revealing remark about the "non-public" nature of big corporate collections?
GW: Of course museums have reservations as they used to benefit from patronage, from big companies as well, and now they have to face up to these Corporate Collections' ambition to run their own exhibition houses and have more influence on the art market.
RW: Herr Maenz, in 1979 you and Gerd de Vries carried out a survey of artists, putting this question to seven of the gallery's artists: "What do you expect - in ideological, commercial and technical terms - from a gallery that works within the current cultural/economic structure?"4 Would it be worthwhile today to change "gallery" to "company collection" and address the question to artists whose work is in the Daimler Art Collection? Or does the critical context for a question like that simply not exist any more?
PM: We exist thanks to our prejudices. As far as the present assessment of things is concerned, and this applies to the way company, private and museum collections see themselves as well, a lot of things are in a sorry state because people simply don't know each other very well. We are still dragging some of our 1968 ideas around with us in this respect, slogans that might have been right at the time, and that were motivating and important for working one's own position out. And now that same generation are working as museum people and find it difficult to shake of those sets of ideas.
The younger curators are less beset with this fear of contact. They grew up in a different age and learned above all from the artists of their own generation. And today's artists don't see the spectre of capitalism in a multi-national like Daimlerany more, but the highly complicated reality that a concern of this kind represents. And it is precisely this complexity that intelligent artists see as a challenge. And as for the museums: only if these contact fears disappear will they come to the form of partnership that museums really do have to rely on to an enormous extent nowadays. And this is why a co-operation like the one we have here between the Neues Museum Weimar as the home of my private collection and the industrial giant Daimler as the owner of a company collection can make sense and be beneficial for both parties. The key thing of course is that we all know what we want.
RW: . . . and you don't achieve that by trying to be exclusive, but by saying this is a spectrum, we are putting this together with something else and wanting to see it from a different point of view. There are a lot of people who want to use being exclusive to enhance their own value . . .
FN: . . . but being exclusive does not create public quality, it tends to frighten people off, which is not what's wanted . . .
RW: That's right, and I think that we have reached an important point here. The collection must have a quality of its own, but conscious efforts have to be made to work out a way of creating public quality. It doesn't just happen of its own accord, you have to take creative responsibility for it as a curator.
RW: Frau Wendermann, what has given you most pleasure in your many years of working with the Paul Maenz Collection? You've done a great deal of research about it etc.
GW: I like the fact that the collection has strength in depth and that there are extensive, very dense groups of works by artists like Giulio Paolini, Salvo, Robert Barry or Anslem Kiefer. These are highly authentic and as well has their artistic significance they say a great deal about the time when they were created and reflect reception history.
FN: You are interested in dealing with works that evolved at the time from the circumstances of their day, as contemporary witnesses, as it were, but also as milestones within a particular development, have I got that right?
GW: Yes, they are works from early development phases, when the artists hadn't yet established themselves. That is rare in museums, and it is a quality that we should continue in Weimar. Along with collecting work in complexes.
RW: Karl-Heinz Hering in Krefeld and Udo Kultermann in Morsbroich were brave enough in the early 60s to by work by young, unknown artists from exhibitions - at that time these were names like Yves Klein, Jean Tinguely, Piero Manzoni. A lot of museums could be more aggressive today as far as courage in the face of the contemporary is concerned.
GW: The subject of our discussion is "private" and "corporate". Actually museums' collecting strategies ought to be added in. They often collect on the basis of criteria that are supposed to be objective and safe, which is actually harmful, as it leads to uniform collections that are completely interchangeable. My wish for Weimar would be to find a better balance in future between exhibitions of established and very young positions, and to make corresponding purchases on this basis, setting new directions and guiding the collection into the future.
RW: I work right in the middle of the contemporary art process. I try to collect young artists provided that it is possible to discern a convincing and coherent work complex, and I try to analyse the Daimler Art Collection's established structure and keep it in mind, then work out how complexes can be completed etc. In addition to this there is the art-historical perspective connected with love of the objects.
PM: Probably that is also one reason for the young Berlin art scene's sympathetic response to your work. I would like to see Weimar treat my collection in a similarly lively fashion, incidentally. It thrives on, thrives through being used and being tied into things that are happening today. Otherwise art does not become something that the public are pleased about, angry about, that it can make its own and ultimately have some sort of say in it. As you are certainly aware, our gallery's motto was always Siegelaub's remark: "Art is to change what you expect from it." And when my works later went to Weimar, the idea was of course: here it is then, now do something with it. It's about using, not owning, as John Cage once said. I don't think it can work any other way, even here in Berlin, can it?
RW: Yes, people have started looking in, saying who is that, what's she doing. And the most important thing: alongside and together with the established names from Josef Albers to Robert Ryman we are showing young, international art.
FN: . . . and we're taking a risk by doing that. The public respect that as well, we don't just want to bury and feed them with beautiful images. Our last exhibition, "Geometrical Affairs", showed works that are definitely part of the Daimler Art Collection's history and have contributed a great deal to its image, like Albers, Bill and Graeser. The exhibition was well received by the public. But experience has taught us that the public prefers something more radical. I remember the first visitor to "Minimal and After", when she came into the Zobernig room, shouting out "Wow, that's quite something!". The more radical the art is, the more interesting the public find it and so do we, of course, because it stimulates analysis and discussion. We really shouldn't underestimate the public who just look in when they're passing, they want to experience something with art, just like us.
RW: That's right, discussion is important. That is the principal driving force behind my work, encouraging people to formulate something, to move something. I would like to create contexts in which people are confronted with art and have to think the status quo of their thinking through again. Initiating this process is the essence of art - and a company collection can do that just as well as a museum, a gallery or an art association. You just have to make sure that you know the principles you're working on and handle them correctly.