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PAINTING AND SCULPTURE
CLAUS BRUNSMANN Eva Schwab
special Guest:
„FAZZOLETTO PER UN ETERNITÀ“
Vinylperformance by Gabi Schaffner
INTRODUCTION
The shimmy-sha-wabble was once a well-known dance, which gained some popularity with the advent of jazz. He was first introduced at fairs and fairgrounds: on the stages, the bums wiggled at the Hochy-Koochy, legs were stretched, torsos bowed, shoulders were shaken. Shimmy, Bump and Grind, circling hips, twitching and strutting, the astonished visitor at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 was thrilled to see the unusual performances presented by African American artists. The new fashion dances spanned a wide arc beyond the time of slavery into the past African traditions and formed a reference to their own history, which could be remembered in the dance ritual. As a fashionable expressive groove, now called THE SHIMMY, it picked up speed and appeared in Europe by the time of the golden twenties. With flirtatious nonchalance, jiggling on the spot, the Shimmy was a huge success in Paris and Berlin.
JUNGE UNRAST meaning Restless Youth, is also such an engine: a coming together from two sides that face each other and meet in the middle. This is how we move!
Baudelaire's dictum that YOU should always be "absolutely modern" is the imprint of modernity, namely to be modern. One should not look at the old, the past. Sadly you get older and still want to be modern, the will to remain contemporary.
But good art does not have to, or cannot be measured by the will, but by the authenticity of your contemporaneity. With Oscar Wilde, the image might ages to itself, becomes ugly and grumpy, while the portrayed remains immaculate. …at least for a while. Then everything cramps.
Animals have difficulty recognizing their own counterpart in the mirror. They often turn away after a while or react awkwardly with noticeable threatening gestures. In this case, they did not pass the mirror test.
Contemporary in Paris in the nineteenth century is nothing more than in Berlin in the twenty-first century: “Man, Nature, Technology” sang Kraftwerk for the Expo 2000.
Man, nature, technology. The topics remain related, the stories are similar. Only the voice is modernized. The inner motor of it all, maybe the motivation, is and remains a young restlessness.
The desire to create ‚the shaping the world as a picture‘ by the painter.
Whether life flows directly into the fresh color, as in the case of Eva Schwab, or whether pictures are brought to you from the outside, as in the case of Claus Brunsmann and his A.R. paintings: the truth of the work lies in it´s presence: in direct contact with the extraterrestrials or normal people.
Contemporary is a bridge to this nature. Even the light that can be reflected in the water by the sun speaks of it.
Text by Claus Brunsmann