New issue of Sculpture features German artist Wolfgang Laib who collects pollen which he then uses to create stunning installations.
“I was facinated with what pollen is in itself. Pollen has incredible colours,
which you never could paint, but it is not a pigment and its colour is only one
quality out of many, like a hand has a colour, or blood is red but it is not a
red liquid, and milk is white, but it is not a white liquid. It is the difference
between a blue pigment and the sky.”
“Milk or pollen are extremely beautiful - like the sun or the sky. And why be
afraid of beauty? Recently so many artists, especially German artist, seem to
think it has to be as ugly and as brutal as possible. Beauty is bourgeois?
What a strange idea. I tried to participate in beautiful things…and this is
my great fortune.”
-From Light Seed catalog 1991
Is nature chaos? To a certain extent it would seem so. Yet, the pollen collected by Laib is produced for reasons that science can logically explicate upon. However, (as far as I am aware) there is no mathematical pattern or at least a repetitive regularity to the amount of pollen produced, collected by flying insects, let off in the air, etc. Its like the weather-which can be explained but not entirely predicted or calculated.
Enter Laib. Collecting the pollen and adding a certain amount of methodically planned out, very precise (and often primary) color scheme. Sometimes he creates very balanced and aligned piles, or a spreads the pollen out into a recognizable shape like a square albeit with soft edges. It is symmetry but not precise. It is disorder and logic collaborating. The end result is the creation of a pleasing and fragile equilibrium in both the theoretical and the purely aesthetic.
Keep it coming Germany...
2 comments:
I definitely recognized this artist because there is an article about him in my reader from my Religion and Contemporary Art class that I took my last quarter in college. Some higlights from that article:
1.)Laib's work is first and foremost generally observed as a form of meditation/contemplation that distinguishes between "the idea of a cyclical recurrence in one's life, in one's actions, on the whole, and the idea of a development which runs in a straight line and ultimately ends up in tragedy."
2.) one needs only to contemplate the sacred site on the gallery floor- the numinous "groundwork." It alone can resanctify a the space of a gallery - emblematic of the profane world, just as the house symbolizes abd indeed functions as a sacred temple - in every part. However impure it may have become, the world is continually purified by the sanctity of sanctuaries.
3.) Lastly Laib is compared to your other favorite: Beuys. "His healing intention is related to that of Joseph Beuys, whose shamanistic attitude and reverence for the "mystical" properties of materials Laib shares...thus while Laib continues in the tradition of Beuys' material primitivism, Laib has both a more refined sense of material..and respect for its potential as literal nourishment..certainly Laib's ritual collecting of pollen suggests a life subtly and deeply in tune wuth the rhythm of nature."
So yeah. I'm into this Buddhist art dude.
Laib is a terrorist against people with allergies.
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