“Last Lecture Show”: Werner Büttner in the Kunsthalle Hamburg – Culture

Anyone who doesn’t laugh at all in this exhibition is probably holy. At the latest with the slaughtered mallards with the title “Killed by Death” the most humorless Germans are overwhelmed by the biochemistry of spontaneous diaphragmatic grimaces. Because the mock and animal painter Werner Büttner does not work without a goal. Like all desperate humanists, he holds out as a contemporary witness, thanks to irony. And the message to all like-minded people not to forget their disgust at humiliating “profit making” sometimes turns into a real joke. “Killed by Death” is coming anyway. Even for defiant pessimists like Büttner. But everything beforehand simply cannot be accepted without comment. If you can’t change it.

Like other great ironists, such as Heinrich Heine, Elfriede Jelinek, Christoph Schlingensief or James Ensor, Werner Büttner has been a part of it, whose work creates the necessary distance for himself not to be meant by the curse of future generations. Ever since Büttner climbed the dung heap of a society still infested by the Nazi era in the eighties, in a rope team with Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger, to screamed the morning of caustic painting, he has been aware of his dual role: He is part of a humanity that unfortunately is not influenced by Hegel’s world spirit is directed towards the good, but innocently enough he accepts the duty to remain unruly. Just not too serious, because it is well known that the most serious critics of the moose themselves are some.

Büttner is a moral artist who does not want to teach. Its enemy is hypocrisy

The “Last Lecture Show” in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, set up on the occasion of Büttner’s departure from the professors’ college of Hamburg University of Fine Arts after more than 30 years, despite its size, it is not a retrospective. Almost no loans can be seen in this show, which Büttner himself has tightly hung, only pictures from his possession, mainly newer ones. So the intention is guided by the author. The “Last Lecture” is a lecture of ironic pedagogy in pictures. Divided into seven chapters with laconic titles, it demonstrates the educational measures and premises of a moral artist who does not want to lecture. But who has clear enemies. And they have a common mental disfigurement: hypocrisy.

For example, when it comes to the lively ideology of economic policy that everyone is the maker of his or her happiness. Werner Büttner has a few contradictions to note under the chapter “Thrownness and entanglement”: “Just no illusions” is what he calls his gloomy self-portrait from 1989, a head on chicken feet in front of an overturned power pole. “Anpfiff zur Biographie” from 1998 shows an infant in the face of the midwife’s hands, as he is already entangled in tens of strands of meaning. And there is the bright yellow cinema for outsiders, in which the realistic film “Why not die out?” really to be redeemed.

Büttner loves philosophy, but he doesn’t believe it. And he is a political artist who fears the compulsion of programs. Out of this literary ambivalence, he has also been protecting the environment of the painting for forty years: the good title. With Werner Büttner, the motif and text almost always fight over who is better, but only together do they produce the typical, wise Büttner humor. In the double chapter “From the life of the gods / the losers”, the bloodshot gaze of God through the Trinity triangle is a “symbol with a spectacle hematoma”. A sad dog on a dirt road knows: “Probably death will also be a disappointment.” And eight Cossacks in rear view are “The Avant-garde from Behind”.

Open detailed view

Whereby this method of comical speech also has a disadvantage, which is probably partly responsible for the fact that the one honored here from the old Hamburg Büttner-Oehlen-Kippenberger rope team was able to gain the least world fame. The individual painting seldom appears so complex as a work of art that one can delve into the painterly diversity. The interesting cosmos of satire and empathy, from which this art derives its depth, only emerges in the long narrative, as offered by the Hamburg exhibition with around 170 paintings and collages.

The factor of compassion is likely to be overlooked by most viewers. The constant painting against bans on thinking, against strong currents of the hip and narrow-minded political correctness that Büttner practiced all his life may tempt one to think that everything about him is stubborn opposition to the swarm obedience of the taste of the time. But when Büttner buys flea market pictures in order to “heal” them in his adaptation, when he paints Magritte’s “Le Barbare” anew, which destroyed German bombs, or again and again places the animal tortured by humans at the center of his art messages, it is amazingly good “Doing good”.

For him, the dying polar bear is a black bear in the black sea: “Arctic negative”

Despite all the shyness of appropriation, Büttner dares to come close to sensible propaganda for environmental goals when he paints the dying polar bear on the melting ice – for ironic self-protection, however, as a black bear in the black sea, title: “Arctic negative”. It hangs in a room with animal motifs and the chapter heading “Parallel creatures, released for consumption”, a sentence which, in its clarity, suggests that even the funniest hop-frog will eventually get to the point due to the cynical ignorance of its environment Humor no longer helps – and the person still has to light the torch of real anger.

Open detailed view

Werner Büttner does this in the accompanying catalog. In short texts he explains his headings, the chapter “Unreasonability germinates like weeds, even by starlight” with the words: “In the collages in this chapter I give a little insight into the maddened pace with which the irrationality of all areas of our lives Time maltreated. Your combinations go back to my alienation and my disgust. ” Or he prints rough hate leaflets by Magritte against the corrupt and mendacious Belgian upper class after the Second World War, which, in his opinion, should be written to the rulers with power and influence again today.

That is why this exhibition is by no means one of those curated collections of used tires that are set up on late career or birth anniversaries for deserving artists. The first ever show in the Hamburger Kunsthalle for one of the most formative painters in the city is more an angry and thematically very topical training in committed art that does not bend for big prices. Werner Büttner, who locates himself less in the triangle with Oehlen and Kippenberger than with James Joyce and Satan, appears here as Professor Unruh, who cannot bear the moral failures of his time. But he knows that nobody likes to listen to pessimists. But where optimism is known to be just a lack of information, in this case pessimism is an excess of humor. Too bad if that really were Werner Büttner’s last lecture on ironic pedagogy.

Werner Büttner: Last Lecture Show. Kunsthalle Hamburg. Until January 16th. The catalog was published by the HfbK Hamburg material publishing house and costs 29 euros.