“This is a two-million-dollar piece of conceptual art. This is
bin full of wastepaper. Okay, class, who can tell me what the
difference is?”
This is just one of the questions trash collectors in Frankfurt,
Germany, will be asked when they begin mandatory art classes next
month. The classes were mandated after one of the city’s sanitation
workers picked up a sculpture by the artist Michael Beutler
believing it to be a pile of junk. The piece, part of a city-wide
exhibit, was later thrown into the city incinerator and burned.
A London newspaper reported that the poor befuddled sanitation
worker believed he was disposing of debris from a shanty used by
poor migrant construction workers. “I didn’t recognize it as art
and there was no sign or anything to show it was art,” the
sanitation worker, a Mr. Peter Postleb, told the Guardian
newspaper. The sculpture was one of 10 commissioned by the
Frankfurt Art Society. All were made of plastic sheeting used by
builders to box concrete. As of Jan. 14, two more sculptures had
perhaps not so mysteriously “disappeared.”
Herr Postleb, head of the city’s “Clean Frankfurt” initiative,
received a harsh reprimand from Mayor Petra Roth, and he along with
his fellow rubbish workers were ordered to attend contemporary art
appreciation classes after it became known that Postleb and his
crack crew of trash collectors “had last year nearly removed two
other conceptual art pieces: a car completely filled with sand and
a bathtub tied with a leash to a tree.” The artist, Mr. Beutler,
meanwhile agreed not to press charges.
Such misinterpretations occur more often than one might think.
In October 2001, a London art gallery cleaner threw out a
£5,000 exhibit by Damien Hirst which he mistook for garbage.
Last month Reuters reported that a female suicide was mistaken for
a performance art piece. In Berlin, of course. God knows how many
similar instances were not reported to the press so as not to
embarrass the artists, gallery owners, and fawning art critics.
Unlike the Frankfurt Art Society, Sanitation Director Postleb at
least had the good sense to recognize discarded concrete boxes for
what they are: junk. And had Mr. Postleb not been a true-blue
German, unwilling to disobey orders or question a superior, he
might have told Oberburgermeister Roth to shove it. After all, his
job is to remove discarded concrete boxes, among other trash. He
evidently does this all the time. Sadly, Mr. Postleb was not privy
to the latest ideas constituting minimalist pomo kunstwerk. Nor was
it likely that Postleb was overly familiar with the latest works of
Richard Serra, Walter De Maria, Robert Smithson or Sol LeWitt. How
was he to know these particular concrete boxes were not trash, but
masterworks? There was no way to know. And all the mandated
contemporary art classes likely will do is confuse poor Mr. Postleb
and his crew, causing them to stop and inspect every piece of
debris, every peel of banana, every soiled wrapper of gum, leading
to long discussions and heated debates over the form and context of
a discarded shoe, perhaps calling in an “expert” from the Bauhaus
Archiv, which will only succeed in delaying the normal trash
pickup.
When Quintilian (c. AD 35 95) wrote that “the height of art is
to conceal art,” he was referring to sculpture or perhaps drama
that was so lifelike as to be mistaken for the real thing — not
mistaken for garbage. Besides verisimilitude, another indisputable
quality of great art is its permanence, or whether it transcends
its particular time and place by offering eternal truths or
whatnot, or the difference between the poetry of T.S. Eliot and the
doggerel of Fitz-Green Halleck. What does it say about an exhibit
made of makeshift materials meant to be displayed on a temporary
basis? To me it says the artist wasn’t even trying for greatness.
He just wanted his take so he could skip town before someone tipped
off the townsfolk.
My office window overlooks a similar tragedy, a Richard Serra
sculpture titled Twain located in the heart of downtown St. Louis.
The installation is universally despised by St. Louisans, with the
exception of a few art theory types who doubtless hate it too, but
cannot bring themselves to admit a piece of contemporary art might
be bad. Were Sam Clemens around to see his namesake he would
doubtless sue the artist for defamation of character. Newcomers to
the city without exception mistake the rusted steel slabs for a
patch of blighted landscape. Others believe the work’s
graffiti-scarred walls (much of the graffiti reads “Get rid of
this!”) mask a sloppy construction area. Serra sculptures have been
knowingly and legally removed from other cities after long and
persistent public outcry, but in St. Louis the pressure from local
art groups not to give in to the philistines is strong and has thus
far carried the day.
And yet if Twain were not so massive (the eight slabs weight 20
tons each) it doubtless would have been carted off by trash
collectors ages ago. The lesson for contemporary artists is plain.
The larger and heavier your artwork the less likely it will end up
in the city dump or incinerator. I wonder if they teach that in
contemporary art class?
