Between Koons and Merz lies...?

During our last two classes, we've looked at the often inscrutible work of postmodern German artist Gerhard Merz. Seeking to find out more about him, I googled his name, and discovered James D. Campbell's catalog review of Merz's exhibition in Philadelphia's Lawrence Olivier gallery during the late 1980's.

If Jeff Koons took postmodern art to one extreme - creating works that are (arguably) anti-intellectual and immediately accessible to even the least artistically-savvy viewer - then Merz (and Campbell) take postmodernism to the other. It seems as if the viewer 1) needs an art history degree to understand the meaning(s) inherent in Merz's work, and 2) a PhD to understand Campbell's analysis of the exhibition. For example, consider the first paragraph in Campbell's catalog essay:

There are feelings which tax our powers of expression and seemingly defy explanation. Why should certain things in later Schoenberg-that crescendo of an abstract classicism based on pure form -make me think of Gerhard Merz's Italia MCMLXXXVI? Why should reading certain passages of Sofficci's First Principles of Futurist Aesthetics send my thoughts wandering through the four floors of Merz's staircase installation in Munich's TRV building? What was it in the pellucid blue in Mondo Cane that flashed before my eyes the blue of Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes? Again, and further, why should this artist's Dove Sta Memoria evoke with wonderful clarity the multiple oddities-the rectangular hollows over the tabernacles, the isolated triglyphs - of Michelangelo's anteroom to the Laurentian Library in Florence?

This paragraph is not an exception, but rather representative of the tone of the entire essay. Campbell does not analyze Merz' work as much as he links it - via academic jaron - to increasingly obscure reference points.

Of course, this tension regarding the "accesibility" of art is nothing new. What I find fascinating, however, is just how dichotomized this subject became during the 1980's. The more that artists such as Koons rejected the critical, intellectual legacy of 1970's conceptual art, the more that artists such as Merz felt the need to defend this legacy. They're reacting to the same artistic legacy within the same artistic movement, yet their artwork could not be any more polarized.


In the end, my goal is not to demean the work of either Koons or Merz. Rather, my goal is point out the importance of finding an artistic middle ground. In my opinion, both Koons and Merz belittle their audience: Koons makes work that is purposefully anti-intellectual, while Merz makes work that is purposfully elitist. Surely, it is possible for an artist to challenge his or her audience without alienating them. Difficult, but possible.