Amish Quilts und die Kunst der 60er Jahre

Quilts made by the Amish are renowned for their vibrant colours but above all for their minimalist designs, which consist of a few basic patterns: bars, centre squares, diamond and ‘sunshine and shadow’ patterns, as well as ‘tumbling blocks’ (rows of cubes creating a three-dimensional, almost psychedelic overall effect). In Kaufbeuren, seven such quilts were shown; the oldest – a regular centre square edged in green on a red ground – was made in 1895 by a certain Mary Lapp from Lower Millcreek. As the exhibition’s title ‘Amish Quilts and Art of the 1960s’ promised, these quilts were hung together with historical works of Minimal, Concrete and Kinetic art.

The organizational principle of the show was simple: squares with squares, diamonds with diamonds, bars with bars. A quilt with bars stood next to a typical striped picture by Daniel Buren (White and Dark Blue, 1973); 
a ‘tumbling blocks’ motif, next to a similarly radiant Op Art orgy by Victor Vasarely working with the same patterns (Cheyt-E, 1970); 
a ‘floating diamond’, between a Licht-kinetisches Objekt (Lumino-kinetic object, 1974) by Christian Megert and a diamond-patterned serigraphy by François Morellet 
(29 superpositions de 6 trames de points en trichromie, 29 superpositions of 6 grids of points in three colours, 1976). And where art hung alongside art, the structuring principle of formal similarity also reigned: gaudy, angular serigraphs by Josef Albers (Homage to the Square, 1970), next to Imi Knoebel’s gaudy, angular Revolver III (2003), next to Rupprecht Geiger’s gaudy, angular Ohne Titel (WV 861) (Untitled, 1994).

Consequently, the exhibition soon exhausted its narrative potential, but its ideas alone made it a welcome event. The minimalist quilts of the Amish, whose lives without electricity or motorization are also often ‘minimalist’, have long since become firmly established within the canon of North American (folk) art, and their radical designs have often been linked with the art of high modernism. Yet an exhibition directly confronting the two had never taken place in this context before. All the more regrettable, then, that the show offered no broader contextualization. There were explanatory labels for all of the exhibits, but a more in-depth exploration of the similarities and differences between concrete art and the quilt designs, beyond a superficial and clearly visible formal resemblance, was nowhere to be found. The question of why the aesthetic reductionism of Minimal and Concrete art should coincide with the design repertoire 
of a religious group that imposes radical restrictions on itself was left untouched. Regrettably. The point where spiritual renunciation of the world meets concretion 
in material and colour – where modest handicrafts meet the last uprising of the sublime, where radical religion meets rigorous modernism – is where things 
really start to get interesting.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell