Magnus Schäfer
I, a Painter
(excerpt, p. 13)
If Michael Krebber's practice of the 2000s is about painting, it is not so much about
producing paintings as it is about calling oneself a painter. Krebber stages this
question of identification as a problematic one, acting it out as a conflicting relationship
to painting. The concept of painting appears here less as a set of material and
discursive conventions than of external and internal projections, expectations, and
attributions, which someone who calls him- or herself a painter – or who is called
a painter – is required to deal with. Krebber's way of dealing with this situation is to
continually attempt to make himself detached by pursuing a mode of formal articulation
that makes his relationship to painting appear ambiguous and allows him to
continually re-position himself. The figure of the dandy, whom Krebber has invoked
repeatedly in his work and writings, provides a model here, not so much in terms
of a particular historical aesthetic as a paradigm for constructing an ever-shifting personality
to work against predictability – that is, to work against attributions. The
dandy's position is, as Oswald Wiener pointed out, one of defense, which involves
a series of techniques to avoid lending oneself to a fixed definition – formal "tricks"
to falsify whatever expectations the other (or oneself) may have.
(1) Rather than a question
of producing paintings, the question of calling oneself a painter then becomes
one of how to act in a given situation.
In 2003, Krebber showed twice at the New York gallery Greene Naftali. After
not having shown in the city for a decade, he first presented Flaggs (Against Nature):
sixteen equally sized works with a limited color palette, all using factory-made
fabrics mounted on stretchers like paintings, but without any paint on them. Some of
the textiles featured various grid patterns, others the motif of a galloping horse in
a moonlit landscape in slight variations. His next exhibition, Here It Is: The Painting
Machine, followed about six months later. Again, Krebber used factory-made fabrics
that were put on stretchers, but the variety of the textiles was greater and their
colors and decors more exuberant and playful. And, perhaps most noticeably, Krebber
had painted on them.
(...)
1. See Oswald Wiener, "Eine Art Einzige," in:
Riten der
Selbstauflösung, ed. by Oswald Wiener and Verena
von der Heyden-Rynsch, Munich: Matthes & Seitz
1982, pp. 35-78 (Wiener, 1982). References to
Wiener's ideas and terminology appear in a number
of Krebber's own texts.
