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BERLIN’S EAST GALLERY REOPENS
The twentieth-anniversary celebrations for the fall of the Berlin Wall—while marking the end of German and European divisions—also include a few traces of the actual wall. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, the famed “East Side Gallery” has opened to the public after months of reconstructive work. The gallery of graffiti images—which were created by artists from around the world in 1990 on the remains of the wall—has also been named as the world’s longest open-air gallery. Measuring about 0.8 miles, the East Side Gallery is the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall. The gallery includes such works as Dmitri Vrubel’s Bruderkuss (Brotherly Kiss), portraying a kiss between Leonid Brezhnev and Eric Honecker.
OLD MASTERS IN PUBLIC SPACES
Vienna’s Kunsthistorische Museum has put another spin on art in public space. As Der Standard reports, the museum is exhibiting in selected sites around the city painted copies of ten masterpieces from the museum’s permanent collection. The exhibitions—for example of the Elder Pieter Bruegel’s Tower of Babel at the subway station Südbahnhof last weekend—surprised passersby taking shelter from the poor weather. The project is part of director Sabine Haag’s promise to make the stately museum more open and transparent to the public. The project continues with daily exhibits at various sites around the city until November 20.
CURATORS, DEALERS, AND ARTISTS—FROM LARRY GAGOSIAN TO MATTHEW BARNEY—SIGN BEUYS PETITION
There’s growing resistance to the presentation of the world’s largest Joseph Beuys collection at the Museum Schloss Moyland foundation inside Moyland Castle in Bedburg-Hau, Germany—and plans to revamp the castle. As Das Handelsblatt reports, this resistance has most recently produced a petition signed by sixty-four international artists, curators, dealers, and collectors, including Larry Gagosian, Matthew Barney, and, closer to home, the Berlin-Leipzig gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke and the Munich collector Ingvild Goetz.
Problems started last May, when the foundation’s new artistic director, Bettina Paust, initiated her tenure by announcing that the Beuys collection and archive would be completely revamped between October 2010 and September 2011 in order to establish the castle museum as a worldwide “Beuys center.” According to Das Handelsblatt’s report, two figures—the former secretary of Beuys, Heiner Bastian, and his widow, Eva Beuys—are setting up some significant obstacles. Bastian—who reportedly took twelve years to inspect Moyland Castle—has voiced two complaints publicly in the past three months about the unacceptable current conditions for conserving the collection. The latest critique is the international petition, which Bastian presented to Jürgen Rüttgers, the minister president of the local North Rhine-Westphalia state, with the demand for a more “dignified” site for the Beuys holdings.
Das Handelsblatt report raises the question of whether any of the prominent figures who signed Bastian’s petition had formed their impression after recently visiting Moyland Castle. “Lybke in any case could not be reached for a statement,” writes Das Handelsblatt, while Goetz “saw the museum a long time ago and got her information about the conservation problems from Heiner Bastian,” according to Goetz’s office. It’s equally unclear whether the petitioners are aware of Paust’s new plans for the Beuys collection or are simply against the suitability of Moyland Castle as a site for the presentation and the preservation of Beuys’s work. Yet if Paust’s plans include improving the conditions at Moyland over the next two years, then why question the suitability of the site now?
More serious opposition comes from Eva Beuys, who has long been unhappy with how her late husband’s work has been handled at Moyland—and not solely on the issue of conservation. At the beginning of this year, the Beuys family raised the possibility of a property claim against Moyland for unspecified Beuys works as well as the entire documentation archive, which is also an institute of the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In Paust’s eyes, both holdings belong to the Moyland foundation. Yet speaking for Eva Beuys, the family lawyer Gerhard Pfennig says that the founders of Moyland—the collector brothers Franz Joseph and Hans van der Grinten—simply transferred to the foundation artworks and archival materials that did not belong to them but were put in their trust for safekeeping.
What happens next—and whether the Beuys-family claim will turn into a full-blown legal case—seems to depend on the North Rhine-Westphalia state’s mediation skills. According to Pfennig, Eva Beuys has requested a meeting with state minister Rüttgers, who will want to avoid any legal battle. North Rhine-Westphalia participates in one-third of the foundation and has invested, over time, nearly sixty-five million marks in the institution while paying operation costs and pensions to the van der Grinten family. In light of the latest attacks, the state’s cultural secretary, Hans-Heinrich Grosse-Brockhoff, has stood firmly behind Moyland and rejected the suggestion that the Beuys holdings be moved to Dusseldorf. “The decision for Moyland is not to be reversed,” Grosse-Brockhoff told Das Handelsblatt. “One can’t mess that up. We are in the middle of a new beginning.”
For Das Handelsblatt, legal cases—which include an ongoing struggle over copyright—serve to lame the Moyland foundation. “What’s being attempted here with a vengeance is to pry these worldwide, eminent Beuys holdings out of our house,” said Paust, who is currently working on a new concept and profile for the Moyland foundation as a Beuys center. “Why don’t we sit down together?” she wonders, adding that she has already twice suggested a meeting with Eva Beuys.
ANOTHER STRUGGLE OVER PHOTOGRAPHS OF BEUYS PERFORMANCES
The other legal struggle around Beuys and the Museum Schloss Moyland foundation—over image copyright—is a struggle that could have far-reaching implications for both past and future documentations of artist performances. Last May, a Moyland exhibition featuring photographs of a Beuys performance was brought to a swift end through a temporary injunction initiated by VG Bild-Kunst, a German collecting society that protects copyright and collects royalties for artworks.
The photographs—taken by Manfred Tischer in 1964 of Das Schweigen von Marcel Duchamp wird überbewertet (Marcel Duchamp’s Silence Is Overrated)—are the only existing photographic documentation of the performance. Yet VG Bild-Kunst was acting not on Tischer’s behalf but on behalf of the Beuys family: Tischer’s photographs were allegedly an illegal reworking of the performance.
It so happens that the Beuys family lawyer—Pfennig—is also the director of VG Bild-Kunst. “In terms of copyright,” he told Das Handelsblatt, “we, like many colleagues, are of the opinion that the staccatolike dismemberment of an action through individual photographs is an encroachment on the flow of the action and thus, from a juristic point of view, a reworking of the artwork.” If one puts the argument more simply, Pfennig takes the position that photographs of an artist performance that have been taken without the legal approval of the artist are a breach of the artist’s copyright on the performance.
Last week, a Düsseldorf court decided that the Moyland foundation was not legally obliged to close down the exhibition with the Tischer photographs—albeit due to a formal legal error. The ultimate decision for VG Bild-Kunst’s argument against Tischer’s photographs—which will be made in the courts in March—could have sweeping legal consequences for all those who have taken pictures of artist performances and for the curators who would like to exhibit such documentation.
That’s only one chapter in the battle. Since one year ago, the Moyland foundation has no longer received permission from VG Bild-Kunst to reproduce images of Beuys’s works on invitation cards, posters, or even in exhibition catalogues. The ban on Beuys photographic reproductions also affects institutions that loan works from the Moyland foundation. For Pfennig, the case is clear. “[VG Bild-Kunst] gives no permission because Eva Beuys has not allowed it.” Again, Eva Beuys believes that Moyland does not handle Beuys’s works well.