Tek u svemiru možeš istinski promijeniti seksualni poredak. A tu je i Hans Henny Jahn, najveći njemački književni bacač raketa i mraka.
Cosmic Communities:
Coming Out Into Outer Space – Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity
an exhibition organized by Diedrich Diederichsen & Christopher Müller
feat. Marcus Behmer, Stefan George, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hans Henny Jahnn, Lutz Bacher, Hans Kayser, Ludwig Gosewitz, Jordan Belson, Hapshash and the Coloured Coat, The Fool, Rogério Duarte, The Red Krayola/Mayo Thompson, Walter de Maria, Sigmar Polke,
Emil Schult, Isaac Abrams, John McCracken, Pedro Bell, Kai Althoff, Henrik Olesen, Öyvind Fahlström, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sun Ra, Hartmut Geerken, Albert Oehlen, Jack Goldstein, Jutta Koether, Isa Genzken, Palermo, John Coltrane, Tony Conrad
2 November 2017 – 13 January 2018Space is the place where the homosocial collides with the cosmos in this group exhibit that brings together works by artist muscians, art collectives and composers in a show that challenges “Western, bourgeois sexual order” by going off-planet to the realms of the spiritual, the magical and the psychedelic.
The curatorial flight of fancy suggested by this show’s wryly incantatory title makes for a dense and surprising group show, co-organized by Diedrich Diederichsen and Christopher Müller. Their springboard is the cultish literary cliques that orbited two Germans in the early twentieth century, the poet Stefan George and the writer and organ builder Hans Henny Jahn. The men’s rejection of bourgeois heterosexual mores and their quests for alternative cosmic harmonies are seen here as paving the way for such far-flung explorations as Jordan Belson’s “Brain Drawings,” from 1952, and the Afrofuturism of Sun Ra. Some of the most visually compelling works invoke sound, including Tony Conrad’s freestanding “Fair Ground Electric Horn,” a conceptual instrument made from a big white funnel, and Lutz Bacher’s forensic-looking floor display of organ pipes. One lush highlight is an oil-painting outlier: Isaac Abrams’s golden-hued dream garden, from 1965.
https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/art/cosmic-communities-coming-out-into-outer-space-homofuturism-applied-psychedelia-magic-connectivity
For we do not regard even the perfect hierarchy, the most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of lifeless units that count for nothing in themselves, but as a living body, formed of parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and freedom.Cosmic Communities: Coming Out Into Outer Space – Homofuturism, Applied Psychedelia & Magic Connectivity at Galerie Buchholz on the Upper East Side takes the living body of early 20th-century utopian intellectual communities as its starting point. Organized by cultural historian Diedrich Diederichsen and the gallery’s Christopher Müller, the exhibition brings together art and ephemera spanning the 20th century, anchored by two German literary and intellectual groups from the fin-de-siècle period: the circle of Symbolist poet Stefan George, and Ugrino, the polyamorous community headed by writer Hans Henny Jahnn.
George (1868-1933), a political reactionary whose work was adopted by the Nazis for his advocacy of self-sacrifice and his belief in a secret, true Germany, was at the center of the George-Kreis, an academic circle modeled on classic Greek organizations. Although George was celibate, the Hellenic principle of man-boy love permeated his circle and work.
The curators sharply contrast Behmer’s charming, folksy imagery with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1976 slapstick comedy Satansbraten (Satan’s Brew), presented here on a video monitor along with film stills, in which a frustrated writer adopts a high camp image and surrounds himself with male prostitutes to model himself on George.
Hans Henny Jahnn, who was also an organ builder, founded Ugrino in 1920 with his partner, the musician Gottlieb Harms, as a utopian community dedicated to literature, architecture (specifically, sepulchral), and baroque music. Jahnn, whose dramas were censored in 1920s Germany for their portrayal of “deviant” sexuality (incest and self-mutilation), seemed to equate sexual liberation with personal and collective freedom, exemplified in the sexual interrelationships between male and female Ugrino members.
In their exhibition essay, the curators explain:
[…] we are here primarily addressing the special cases [of collectives] in which the supposed cosmic laws, the musical and mathematical harmonies of planetary orbits, and the numerical ratios that can be found in both nature and music serve as justifications for recasting interpersonal, societal, but also sexual relationships. Ideas of Pythagoras or Kepler here created all-encompassing artistic equivalences which were meant to organize contemporary forms of coexistence as well as important artistic and scientific work, and which were also supposed to give rise to the society of the future.The first of the exhibition’s two galleries features Ugrino architectural plans and insignia, as well as Jahnn’s sketches for organs, a photograph of a test organ, an undated painting of Jahnn by Karl Kluth, and photographs of Jahnn (in one, he poses alongside an organ). The result is the beginning of what could easily be developed into an archival solo showcase on Jahnn.
Instead, the exhibition leads from George and Jahnn to various 20th– and 21st-century artists, musicians, and intellectuals “by similarity and association” rather than direct lines of influence. The correlation between transmission devices and mysticism is one of the exhibition’s leitmotifs, in works such as “Telefon” (1971), a screenprint of a nondescript telephone mounted on yellow paper by Blinky Palermo and Gerhard Richter; Sigmar Polke’s “Telefonzeichnung (Gespräch)” (“Telephone Drawing (Conversation),” 1975); Emil Schult’s 1974-75 cover design for Kraftwerk’s recording Radioactivity (Radioactivität); Walter de Maria’s stainless steel “High Energy Bar” (1966); and two iterations of Isa Genzken’s “Weltempfänger” (“World Receiver”), the first, from 1982, a radio, and the second, from 2017, a concrete cast of a radio with attached antennae.
The most interesting objects are those that hold logic and mysticism in suspension, as in a series of geometric drawings (1968-1971) and undated glass vessels by Ludwig Gosewitz that mirror the graphic sci-fi cover of a 1969 edition of Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. There are also Jordan Belson’s ink Brain Drawings (1952) of biomorphic forms, Öyvind Fahlström’s series Improvisations for Nightmusic (1967), and two multicolored mandala drawings from 1971 by John McCracken (which fall loosely into the psychedelic camp).
The exhibition is strongest conceptually when the curators focus on collectives and artists seeking a new social and cosmic order through art. Following George and Jahnn, Diederichsen and Müller home in on scientist Hans Kayser (1891-1964), avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, Brazilian designer and musician Rogério Duarte, and the prophetic composer and performer Sun Ra.
Undated musical notations by Stockhausen, done in colored marker on paper, are accompanied by several of his recordings and photographs documenting a performance of his 1974 science fiction opera Sirius, in which emissaries from another planet send a message to Earth. Costume designs for Sirius by Stockhausen’s then-wife, artist Mary Baumeister, are also on view.
Cosmic Communities can be perceived in two distinct ways: as a whole in which major and minor players equally contribute to a tapestry of information and images, or as a study of the key players and their philosophies, with many of the above-mentioned works serving as supplemental material. A slightly different exhibition emerges with the latter, raising questions rather than simply illuminating aesthetic and philosophical connections.
The emphasis on music privileges Jahnn’s influence over George’s, but music is just one mode — if the primary one — of achieving utopias; and utopia is sought in these cases through a collective mentality in which order is imposed and a male leader is installed even as the establishment is rejected.
The representation of George and his circle in the exhibition is ambivalent, although Fassbinder’s portrayal in Satansbraten targets his persona perhaps more than his reactionary politics. Yet, despite the liberal politics of Jahnn and most of the included artists, a reactionary outlook is embedded in the patriarchal structure and strict order of the collectives; paradoxically, mysticism aligns here with authoritarianism, though it’s not so paradoxical in practice: George and Jahnn emerged from the fount of 19th-century German philosophy, which celebrated ancient Greece and advocated cultural renewal as a rejection of so-called “decadence” (i.e., moral or constitutional weakness). The same philosophy is easily co-opted into fascism.
The exhibition essay, available on the gallery’s website, clarifies some points (a publication is tentatively planned for next year), but not all of the questions it raises are answerable. What risks do we run of whitewashing history when we aestheticize reactionary politics and the myth of the male “artist-genius”? There are clear affinities among George, Jahnn and Sun Ra; how does this juxtaposition impact the relationship between Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism and the American Civil Rights movement? On the other hand, what do we gain by ignoring these histories and apparent affinities, or their aesthetic value? How do we tread the line between aesthetics and ideology? Between the art world’s responsibility to art and to fair and inclusive representation?
And it concludes with a skeptic. On a wall near the gallery’s back office, a manifesto by experimental composer and filmmaker Tony Conrad, from his 1995 CD Slapping Pythagoras, savages Pythagorean harmonics. It ends, “And here’s a slap, too, for stealing the names of all your sect members and taking credit for their works. […] Slapping you Pythagoras, it makes me feel like I’m rising, like watching falling water.” - https://hyperallergic.com/421249/the-cosmic-utopianism-of-two-fin-de-siecle-collectives/
