‚Meticulousness and Grace
Spectral Symphony of the Elements is a spatial artwork in the atrium of the Chemical Institute at the Technical University of Dresden. The slender elegance of the hanging glass tubes corresponds with the grace of the colour gradients, which in turn are meticulously and systematically assigned to the chemical elements. Soon after its completion in 2010, this work, which joins art and science, was met with great enthusiasm.
Perfection of form and joy of experimentation alongside openness and accessibility are not self-evident attributes of contemporary art. They are, however, characteristic of many works by Roland Fuhrmann, a specialist in architecture-related art and one of the most successful contemporary artists in the field. As a visual artist, Fuhrmann naturally possesses a special degree of imagination, creative ability and empathy. But, as his entire oeuvre clearly reflects, he is also a tinkerer, designer and, beyond that, a scientist who has written a widely acclaimed dissertation on streamlined airship hangars.1
Installations such as Spectral Symphony in Dresden and a ceiling design in the European Patent Office in Berlin owe much to Roland’s diversity of interests and versatile talent. For the ceiling design, dichroic glass panels react to different temperature and light conditions with changing colours and movements (link); at a grammar school in the Swabian town of Schorndorf, in the empty space under the glass roof of the atrium, light sets solar-powered modules of horizontally balanced coloured aluminium rods with motor propellers into irregular movement (link). There, endless constellations trace feather-light spatial drawings that have brought the work lasting attention. In this instance, too, grace, technical perfection and ingenuity interact playfully, imbued with the idea of site-specific art for Schorndorf, the birthplace of the engineer, designer and inventor Gottfried Daimler.
Diversity within Diversity
Architectural installations are Fuhrmann’s trademark. These site-specific works of public art in architectural settings are encountered in many forms and in many locations in Germany and abroad. However, Fuhrmann is a sculptor, installation, object, video and photo artist who also produces uncommissioned work that can be found in collections, museums and exhibitions. Two-dimensionality is as familiar to his œuvre as three-dimensionality; he masters small and large formats, and quiet, intermediate tones can be perceived just as much as loud alarm signals. In the diversity and mutability of genres and artistic media, exhibition and presentation concepts as well as artistic attitudes, Fuhrmann plays with all the possibilities and facets of aesthetics, poetry, documentarism, contemporary commentary and commitment.
For Fuhrmann, movement and agility are not only defined as the ability to deal inventively and confidently with the diversity of artistic media and possibilities of expression. Movement is also a constant form of expression in his work, denoting both represented movement and the actual kinetic movement of art in the medium of video or in its staging, manifesting itself in mechanical, electrical or natural wind- or solar-powered varieties, possibilities and intentions.
The movement sequences of Gret Palucca’s Expressionist dance, which previously inspired Wassily Kandinsky for his abstract ‘analytical drawings’2, are translated by Fuhrmann almost a hundred years later for a site-specific installation, to be seen on a permanent basis at the Palucca University of Dance in Dresden: a dynamic, neon-orange glowing structure that rhythmically inspires the modern extension of the university (link). Fuhrmann’s other works live not from depicted but from real, physical movement. Twelve stainless steel balls in a seventeen-metre-long water basin in the inner courtyard of a public utility company in Halle trace their rippling circles as computer-controlled raindrops – it is in their very movement that tranquillity is conveyed (link).
Aesthetics and Commitment
In Fuhrmann’s work, the meanings of the titles of works go hand in hand with a highly elaborate visual language and with visual and conceptual beauty, harmony and brilliance. This does not exclude the analytical observation and evaluation of things, or of political, economic and social conditions. An earlier mobile installation arranges six conveyor belts in a circle and brings coins into circulation with a rattling and a loud roar (link). This seamless, cause-and-effect aesthetic manoeuvres itself into an inescapable idleness that is thoroughly pleasing and entertaining as art, and at the same time a symbol critical of capital and an expression of the inescapable stupidity of many social, economic and political mechanisms.
The opposite of beauty – as Fuhrmann’s œuvre repeatedly conveys very succinctly is senseless formal skirmishing and aesthetic shadow boxing. In any case, dystopias and parables of unapproachable totalitarian systems and systematics can be staged very effectively with unrestrained aestheticism. For example, the perfidious perfection of an object made of rotating barbed wire, armoured chains and alarm sensors is captivating (link). It represents a kind of security system that evidently protects nothing and is of no use to anyone, and achieves artistic effect precisely in this inscrutability.
Fuhrmann never lacks scepticism and a critical approach. In a sound installation that has been put in place several times, programmed hammer blows on cast-iron wheels simulate busy work activity (link). But the title Prodsim – Productivity Simulator leaves no doubt: hammering produces nothing but sound and illusion. This not only reads as a – perhaps biographically justified – reckoning with the hollow East German workers’ statehood under which Fuhrmann, born in 1966 in Dresden, grew up. The artistic content of this advanced euphonic chime goes beyond the contemporary historical moment and can be read as a universal code of being and doing. Viewers may recall Albert Camus’s essay about Sisyphus3 and the sober, detached realisation of philosophical absurdity. Yet one thing always remains alien to Fuhrmann’s art: expressivity as the self-expression of the artist’s ego. Doom and gloom and pessimism are just as little his concern as messages of salvation, promises of comfort and tokenish lifebuoys: where reason, insight, feeling and intuition are not present in people and society, ideologies, metaphysics, religion and even art are of no help – at least according to the reading of many of his works. We are left with an insight into the inevitability of things, events and circumstances, whether they are pleasing and comfortable or not.
This also applies to the LED film loop machines with soldier figures: viewers can see them march in endless circles, the disembodied puppets of Germany’s various political systems since 1871, advancing in strict lockstep and blind obedience under the rotating texts of the oaths of allegiance (link). The historicity that can be read in the texts and the soldiers’ outfits does not alter the enduring essence of power and military obedience.
Seriousness, commitment, wit, irony and travesty are not mutually exclusive. Fuhrmann devotes himself to the human condition in all its nuances of quiet poetry, shrill satire and wake-up calls. Combined with the sounds of dramatic explosions and machine-gun salvos, he updates the craters left by bullets that are still visible today on some of Berlin’s buildings by using animation in an award-winning video (link). With historical prison doors as spolia of the dictatorship of East Germany (GDR), he has created a memorial at Berlin’s Roedeliusplatz for the victims of the jurisdiction of the Soviet military administration and of the GDR’s system of justice in the early post-war years (link). This work is from the same artist who has also produced a black-humoured video that presents, in bilious staccato, animals that have met their deaths on the road – including a red-legged partridge that is being prepared, served and even eaten as a delicacy before our eyes (link).
This does not close the circle around Fuhrmann’s oeuvre. Play with language in the form of digitally retouching photographs, turning Spätkauf (24/7 convenience stores) into Spätsauf (late boozing) and Bestattungsinstitut (funeral home) into Begattungsinstitut (mating institution) are also part of this (link). If one pulls the string of one of Fuhrmann’s multiple objects with the disavowing title Großer Hampelmann (big jumping jack), the German federal eagle involuntarily spreads its metallic feathers.
This seems like a neo-futuristic, post-Dadaist verbalisation of the omnipresent national emblem. Here, as is so often the case with Fuhrmann, wit and a certain aggressiveness are combined with a precise design logic and an interest in constructs on the borderline between art, nature and technology.
Experiment, Cognition and Empathy
With his works, Fuhrmann breaks through categorical definitions of art in terms of themes, media, forms of expression and presentation. He is open to elitist, but also to popular, aesthetics, thought patterns and mediation structures. Essentially, his art has to do with visual experience and the sense of sight. His work creates optical intermediate states and situations of unstable perception. One of his specialities is anamorphic installations. In the outdoor area of the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Berlin, stelae that, when viewed in isolation, reveal horizontally layered fields of colour, combine, from a specific vantage point, into a pigment print of a photograph of a group of people (link). The beautiful play of shapes and colours connects with the message addressed to German politicians to keep in sight the image of a cohesive society.
At an institute for catalysis research at the Technical University of Munich, stelae on the outside and glass tubes hanging from the ceiling on the inside initially appear as merely charming, non-objective structural elements, but then, close up, are revealed to form the outline of an eagle (link) and a stag (link). The representational motifs that unexpectedly emerge from the abstraction of the works do not stand in an illustrative but rather in a disruptive, irritating and insinuating relationship to the use of the building. In this way, with an artistic anamorphic technique situated between analysis and synthesis, Fuhrmann very consciously establishes a visual analogy to general and, more specifically, to scientific cognitive processes, which also form the basis of catalysis research.
Fuhrmann has always operated with optical techniques, methods and forms of presentation such as chronophotographs and dynamographs, and thus looks back on a long history of development, sometimes even beyond the motion photographs of the British-born pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). In their obvious historicity, they bear witness on the one hand to cultural and technical historical foibles, and play out nostalgic, sentimental qualities. On the other hand, the stereoscopy of portraits or, for example, of night shots showing homeless shelters in Paris reduces the distance that usually exists between pictures and their viewers (link).
Fuhrmann exposes art and its history to experimentation. Marcel Duchamp’s bearded Mona Lisa loses its semantics and any mimetic reference in its electrical rotation. Only for a fraction of a second does the original image flash up after a button is pressed (link). Otherwise, the emanation of colour remains as the physical quintessence of art – as it does, incidentally, in a similar manner in the concentric colour-field paintings of Kenneth Noland (1924-2010), which Fuhrmann, presumably not entirely free of irony, once again sets in circular motion (link).
From very pronounced optical effects in earlier works, Fuhrmann’s photographic works have evolved into multi-part wall- and room-filling installations. One series comprises forty-five photos of primitive, anarchic French palombière hunting lodges as an expression of the lost need for freedom, of social togetherness, but also of the tricky, devious hunting of pigeons (link). Three thousand historical photographs of zeppelins mutate into Hœhere Wesen (higher beings) with a humorous reference to Sigmar Polke’s famous, eponymous painting.4 In both of these and many other cases, art, oddity, fiction and documentarism are found in close proximity to each other. Here, too, the multiplicity and redundancy of the images do not generate a narrative but rather a structure of serial variations that replace narrative. At the intersection of art and science, for example, Fuhrmann dissects his own scientific publication on the construction history of Dresden’s municipal airship hall into its individual pages, and then puts them on the wall as an engaging minimalist relief, like a constantly self-recharging energetic force field (link).
Art, aesthetics, life, nature, science and technology are neither opposites nor antagonists in Roland Fuhrmann’s work. They each result from the other, from the logic of things and of themes. This old avant-garde conviction manifests and symbolises every work in Fuhrmann’s rich œuvre, now also accessible in book form with this long overdue catalogue raisonné.‘
Notes
1 Roland Fuhrmann: Dresden’s gateway to the skies: the world’s first streamlined airship hangar and its influence on architectural history (Dresden: Thelem, 2019).
2 Wassily Kandinsky: Dance Curves: To the Dances of Palucca (Das Kunstblatt, Potsdam, 10/1926).
3 Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin books, 2005 [1942]).
4 Sigmar Polke: Higher beings ordered: paint the upper right corner black! (1969), painting at Museum Ludwig, Köln.
