feAture Thomas schuTTe
e a r l i e r t h i s a u t u m n at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Thomas
Schütte unpacked work he hadn’t seen since the 1970s, made when he
was a student at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. “Well, I didn’t cringe”,
he says. The German artist is not one for unqualified endorsements
or shouts of approval; he might celebrate winning the lottery with a
single handclap. When he heard he had been selected to design
the next sculpture for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth (unveiled this
November), he pronounced himself ‘pleased’. His art, too, has this
quality of understatement and caution, even though it ranges across
a variety of media and is created prodigiously, in amounts that might
make even Thomas Hirschhorn swoon.
A student of Gerhard Richter during the peak of conceptualism,
Schütte has long sought, as he puts it, ‘a way out’ of minimalism and
conceptualism. In his twenties he began making architectural maquettes
that looked like stage sets for a Lilliputian race – they were peopled by
Star Wars figures, to be exact, which were made in a scale of 1:20 – and
created pseudo-decorative installations in people’s homes as well as
in galleries. Inspired by round stickers he had lying around his studio,
he covered a wall with hollow circles in a range of colours, each sized
about the width of a handspan and laid out with a graphic designer’s
eye to colour patterning. (The exterior facade of the Henry Moore
Institute currently reprises a dramatic example of these installations,
first made at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1981, of circles in
gold leaf.) Much of this scrounging around one’s studio is typical to
poor art students, but in Schütte’s case it represented a break from the
monumentality and heroicism embodied by the Michael Ashers and
Richard Serras he saw around him. Even an anti-monumental stance,
such as Asher’s, is in a monumental register; by contrast, Schütte’s work
from that time hovered lightly in the grounds of mimicry. In Mauer (Wall,
1977), individually painted rectangles, set precariously on pins, created
a trompe l’oeil solid-brick wall. Playing true to his doubts, Schütte left
his artworks open to possibility – stage sets for a play that hasn’t been
realised, a brick wall that would fall down in a gust of wind.
His architectural models – which he has continued to make –
are given names as if for a fantasy town that met real-life concerns:
Haus für zwei Freunde (House for Two Friends, 1983), a symmetrical
wooden construction with a tower at each end; squat One Man
Houses (2003–5); and the more airy Ikea Variations (Divorce House)
(2006–7). Another recent series, looking like musty, inhabitable late
Donald Judds, is titled Ferienhaus für Terroristen (Holiday Homes for
Terrorists, 2002). Though Schütte rejected the idioms of Düsseldorf,
he has retained its belief that art should bear a social conscience, and
he has frequently addressed both recent German history and current
concerns. At Documenta in 1992 Schütte showed Die Fremden (The
Foreigners), ceramic lifesize figures shaped like lumpen vases, with
downcast eyes and assorted luggage, which were placed around the
German city of Kassel. The strike at debates about ‘Germanness’ was
unmistakable, but the figures themselves were fragile, sad things, which
looked as if the political message they carried had been forced upon
them, much as a train delay, discrimination or change in immigration
laws might be. Their bottom halves were shaped like urns, and they
resembled legless ‘little people’ toy dolls – a meeting point of Schütte’s
imagination and political realities.
The shift to figuration at the time was radical, and Schütte
moved from Die Fremden into varied series of different figures – a
wide range that includes the grotesque, exaggerated waxen faces of
his United Enemies puppets (1993–4), his futuristic aluminium ‘ghosts’
and his well-known suite of female nudes in bronze and steel that have
Artreview 68
Thomas Schutte.indd 68 2/11/07 15:10:47
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