For those of us old enough to have experienced the 80s up close and personal, it is odd to see how the decade is presented to a new audience that abides in a slicker and ultra-consumer oriented era. Conventional bias maintains that the theory-centric decade was responsible for all sorts of culture wars resulting in the prevalent political correctness that obfuscates everything today. With the luxury of hindsight, a general retrospective look pegs the decade as a period where the progressive nature of the two preceeding decades is almost stopped. Liberalism came to an end and it was only theory that allowed new areas to prosper in art and culture generally. In our present media run era, this becomes age-specific territory where the recent past takes on whatever spin it is given; it's Reagan, it's skinny ties, it's big hair. And yes, popular culture dominates the field. The Jörg Immendorff show at Moore College of Art and Design is a good example of how this quandary can be addressed and it succeeds, against the odds, in setting a high standard for contextualizing one artist from a given period while keeping the extraneous to a minimum, i.e. you can't visit the 80s without setting the stage with the two previous progressive decades. So the show invariably tackles two problems at once, a reassessment of Immendorff individually and a flashback to that period with the aid of specific scholarly research. This is invaluable both for those who were there and those who weren't.

As a fledgling "Neo-Expressionist" painter in grad school, the likes of Keifer, Lupertz, and Immendorff were mentor-like high achievers who, in my eyes, were channeling both their Expressionist predecessors and the whole of German history. They settled on painting after having gone through the "happening" 60s and after having adopted the radical approach of the Fluxus movement. For me, having already mimicked early Modernists outright, it was nice to have living artists to emulate for a change. However, their transference of Weimar and WWII, rife with guilt and charged with political extremes -- an attempt to redefine their damaged culture through art -- wasn't my main interest. It was the simple fact that they were painting and this opened up the options. The heavy stuff was entirely too much for a wee American to digest, though the joke was a good one; I would copy their work and add some levity and a bit of punk rock figuration. So, all at once my student work was dealing with contemporary issues. This was put to the test when, in one critique, the infamous art critic Clement Greenberg reviewed our class's work. Was there anything formal for him to look at in my painting of a punk rock band a la 1920? I knew my picture was not "modern" for him unless using a time machine, but was it contemporary? In 1981, my small part was to try and suburbanize these big issues into something current and I had a whole childhood of war films, model planes, and rock music to draw upon. The idea was that it was all mediated, there was no first hand experience of anything. Of course, the irony of having a German Jewish name (they came to America in the mid 19th century) was not lost on me. Oddly enough, I was asking a question similar to Immendorff's, "how can I become an artist?" Can you actually live in a consumer culture (neither urban or rural) and authentically pursue a bohemian role? As the progressive and purist goals of the modern were called into question, I asked myself, "Was the object to go forward or not?" The part of the Post-Modern debate that hinged on whether looking back was progressive or regressive was crucial for me. And, it wasn't a case for seeking irony or appropriating styles so much as being lumbered with a complete inability to take anything seriously, a failure to abide dogma. If "progress" was at an end, there was nothing left to do but, as the Brits say, take the piss. In retrospect, and now as a self-confirmed Luddite, I am more interested in the past or at least with comparisons with the past.

The other concurrent activity of the time, punk rock, also gets a lot of reassessment these days. It shared a similar zeitgeist with art that was also turning its back on what went before and was oddly parallel to Post-Modernism, in the sense that it announced the end of something, specifically apolitical mainstream rock and all the me-generation fluff that went with it (personally, I would like to disavow being a part of a generation that gave up political views for possessions and perpetually upgrading techno gizmos). With this a sea change came a period of do-it-yourself expression without the aspirations to greatness or record deals. Thousands of would-be "Expressionist" punk rock enthusiasts also embarked on a DIY art career. It was great fun and nothing at all to do with theory. Very few succeeded in a career sense, but for a new generation, Modernism no longer fit the bill. So, it seems odd that the consensus these days is to conclude that the 80s were overly theory-laden when the whole idea at the time was to leave all that serious minimalist dogma, as in the "fuck art let's dance" brigade. And it's ironic that the painting of the time is somewhat disparaged now when much of the impetus at the time was not necessarily theoretical. Sure, behind all the alpha male chutzpah (Schnabel, Salle, Germans, and Italians) there was some serious theoretical investment, but there is some real significance in that these people were painting, making strong statements and (even more importantly) making lots of money. That, in itself, is an argument against the view of theory dominating the decade. Though Modernism's conventions, lording over the cult of genius, originality, and passé avant-garde, were challenged by Post-Structuralist thought, the simpler idea was that it had simply run out of steam and didn't relate to the new life in the suburbs and malls. Things change. I have to say that my attitudes at the time embodied a lot of youthful bravura and naiveté, but the part that exulted in punky contrariness wears well.

For some reason, the surprise in viewing Immendorff's career now is see how he stuck to his guns. Having virtually disappeared from the US scene in the late 80s, he continued to prosper in Germany, mature, and make excellent work. So what caused his curious withdrawal from our shores? Perhaps it was due to a decline in the art scene after the market crash of '87 -- the New York art boom ended -- or the fall of the Berlin Wall (shortly thereafter), so long the centerpiece of the Cold War, and Immendorff's rationale, and binary East/West outlook. Perhaps it was passing vogues and the bad reception of the Refiguring Painting exhibition at the Guggenheim in '89, which may have spelled the death knell for painting. The market mood had surely changed, and with it the critical climate. Generally, for whatever reasons, by the end of the 80s, painting was no longer the main act. "Installation" was now everything. Regardless of the intervening fourteen years, this remains the case, and theory continues to inform practice albeit in less overt and insistent ways. The Immendorff exhibit at Moore is a fascinating reminder of these developments and how much potential for art was set aside. In any case, whether there have been misjudgments or not, we've returned to a conservative lauding of art conventions and now search endlessly for the flavor of the month without regard to wider social benefits. Concerning art's past, I believe scholarship is left to define which legacies remain and which are discarded, pinning down at least some of our variable histories, without which we'd have less to look back upon and lose our bearings completely.

© 2004 James Rosenthal and InLiquid.com; image copyright © Jörg Immendorff