Bohemian Rhapsody

Perhaps we take it for granted that visual artists - unlike eternally adolescent rock rebels - deal in a considered, adult way with the perceptual reservoirs of childhood, but Kai Althoff breathes unexpected life into this territory. Far from conforming to the usual folksy idea of the artist, like a child with its toys, bringing life to dead objects through unfocused images of amazed innocence, Althoff reclaims a lived social history through the dream-like, emotional richness of distant memory.

Althoff is sitting on a mattress. His pale torso is bare and painted with coloured horizontal stripes like a pullover. He is smoking, and brushes his hair off his face from time to time, staring into space in a detached sort of way. Visitors to the Daniel Buchholz Gallery in Cologne on this winter's evening in 1996 chat amongst themselves or, slightly disturbed, look at the scene on the floor. Beside the mattress is an old stereo system - the kind teenagers have in their bedrooms - playing a record by the fictitious band Ashley's. The gate-fold sleeve of the LP, comprising colour reproductions of twelve felt-pen drawings, stretches accordion-like across the space. The images depict happy scenes of an androgynous, bohemian world populated by people in ring-pattern pullovers, sitting on beds, wearing gigantic headphones or eating breakfast. Each picture bears hand-drawn capital letters saying things like 'Thinking People', 'Supergroup', or 'A Coming-Out', which all turn out to be song titles. In the stylisation of Althoff's drawings, Hans Eligmann's Yellow Submarine cartoons (themselves inspired by Richard Lindner's work of the late 60s and early 70s) greet us from afar. The music itself, hissing distantly and playing a little too fast, sounds like a long-lost tape of an old Roxy Music session, reinterpreted by the Cologne group Can.

The production of Ashley's marked the first and only time that Althoff has clearly linked his double role as an artist and a pop musician in a single work. Many of the people who buy records by his band Workshop - their fourth album, Meiguweisheng Xiang, appeared this summer - know his work as an artist only from his sleeve designs. Few of the people who have seen his drawings, videos, performances and installations in an art context know anything about his music and seem unwilling to see this example of the much-vaunted blurring of the barriers between art and pop as an experiment in mixing different social forms, rather than as a mere workover of the reference list of cultural artefacts. Althoff recorded the music for Ashley's single-handedly in 1990 - six years before it was pressed for the first time as an artist's edition of 200 copies, two years before his first one-man show at Lukas & Hoffmann in Berlin, and a year before Workshop released their first LP. But the reason Ashley's became a work of art and not an 'ordinary' record is a pragmatic one: the artist had intended to issue the record in the normal way, but it was only when he was invited to exhibit at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart that the expensive design could be paid for. The album itself, now issued as 'art', is musically no more erratic, no more experimental (or simply worse) than the last Workshop album. It comprises four pieces, each between eight and 20 minutes long, ranging from Krautrock extravaganzas to dry House tracks. Both 'improvised and played by hand' and 'programmed', they cancel each other out in order to create something else.

Althoff's music is not a mere footnote which either strengthens or weakens his art, depending on the reputation that the 'from-Pop-to-Art-and-back-again' construct happens to be enjoying. He acknowledges that it is pointless to denigrate either sphere - playing 'high' against 'low' or popular appeal against exclusivity - or to simply escape from questions posed by one by taking refuge in the other. Althoff's art takes the social meaning of style very seriously - which initially has less to do with Pop than with the notion of bohemianism as one brittle element in avoiding a 'false life' (a notion to which the worlds of Pop and Art have commonly ascribed at only a very few moments in history). This is present just as clearly, though in a different form, in his static work as in his most energetic performances or interventions.

Moderne wird Lahmgelegt (Modernism is Brought to a Standstill, 1995), was an installation to which there was no access: the entrance to the space was hung with a grey, glittering plastic film that was transparent only at eye level. The work showed a schematic confrontation between cardboard figures the size of children: a seated SA man in his dull brown uniform, looking through a barred window at an agitated man and woman dressed in chic, bohemian/artistic clothes. At the rear of the space, leaning on the window sill, was David Bowie's LP Space Oddity (1969). The back cover, which faced the viewer, depicts Bowie as an androgynous figure sitting on a chair, some years before he was to go to Berlin and record Heroes (1977). An essay accompanying the exhibition identified the two cardboard figures under observation as members of the 'glamorous film world, 1931'.

At the time, it was possible to perceive the installation as overtly specific: a leaden reproduction of the leaden failure of marginal assertion tactics in the face of Fascism - the power that abolished Modernism's ideal of enlightenment precisely by adopting Modernist media and resources. But perhaps it should be considered in the context of the many other works by Althoff that, unlike this one, present a personal history of perception as fluid and by no means isolated. In creating Moderne wird lahmgelegt as an inaccessible exhibition, he intended to suggest that it was not possible to engage directly with the subject matter: that there is no handy way into the story of how the Fascist powers swept away the last remnants of bourgeois-democratic pressure for legitimisation. Thus 'style as resistance' - the dress-codes of camp, for example - is depicted either as ineffective, or as a life-threatening act of despair (something that seems to be returning as a structural element amongst the conditions of the neo-liberal social order).

The other, more fluid side of Althoff's serious attitude towards the meaning of style can be seen most clearly in his collaborations with Cosima von Bonin. These began with the poster for a joint exhibition at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 1995: Althoff is standing on a plinth and is wearing a blue, calf-length skirt with the name 'Cosima von Bonin' printed on the hem. She stands beside him, holding up his skirt so that the name can be read, and is wearing a red T-shirt emblazoned with the words 'Kai Althoff'. The image is a visual quotation of the 1974 LP Seductive Reasoning by Maggie and Terre Roche (better known as The Roches), right down to the details of the folksy, hippie clothing - yachting shoes with soles made of tyres and a ring-patterned pullover. (Althoff bought the album because of its unusual cover photograph.) At the opening of the exhibition, the two artists, wearing ponchos and enormous top hats, worked behind the bar, spending their breaks behind a temporary wall installed in the exhibition space, thus encouraging the audience to peep, not just at the artists, but perhaps also at the conditions of the bohemian art world and the desolate, unskilled jobs in its venues (bar-staff, invigilator etc.) that it sells as glamorous. On the last of the four evenings on which the exhibition could be viewed, the artists were absent and the space that had previously been accessible was now criss-crossed by nylon threads - even the option of a bohemian fringe existence had been withdrawn.

Althoff and von Bonin, under the pseudonyms Heetz and Nowak, once more addressed the paralysis of social exchange within the art institution at the opening of their exhibition in the Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, in 1996. A catwalk, roughly cobbled together from green building timber, had been constructed right across the grand though higgledy-piggledy architecture of the museum in such a way that you had to climb over or under it to get from one room to another. Von Bonin, wearing plain, heavy clothing with sleeves several metres long, appeared on the catwalk at irregular intervals while Althoff and two other performers, dressed in historical-yet-chic theatrical costumes, directed their admiring gaze up at her. Where fashion in the context of art is often spectacularly staged in a storm of flashlights, here we had a silent, almost rapt uneasiness in dull, dusty costumes. The accompanying video, 30 millions d'amis (30 Million Friends), confirmed this impression of unease. Trashily-made and melodramatic, the film told the story of two artists whose carefree lifestyle is clouded by impending financial ruin following some prank, and then abruptly brought to an end by an unspecified earthquake. In this allegory of the economic crisis and political shift to the right in post-reunification Germany, nothing can be taken for granted, each step is existentially significant, and friendship is an endangered, bare necessity.

Althoff's work exhibited at Stuttgart and Mönchengladbach, like his 1997 installation at the Robert Prime Gallery, London (at the centre of which stood a conspiratorial hideout concealing a gang of robbers made from lit, hydrocephalous lamps with faces painted on them), recalls Astrid Lindgren-like children's performances. It is also impossible to miss the echoes of anglophile aesthetics from the West Germany of the late 60s and early 70s, in which the boundaries between high and popular culture were noticeably blurred for the first time. This is as true of Eligmann's LSD-saturated illustrations (with which many of Althoff's drawings share the feature that human skin is left blank in order to emphasise the signifying quality of clothing, make-up and hairstyle), as it is of the ecstatic Krautrock of Stockhausen's pupils Can. But Althoff does not deliberately treat these sources as archive material; he treats them as perceptual memories that go right back into early childhood: 'I probably saw something or other that my parents had, like copies of the satirical magazine Pardon [one of the most important sources of post-68 cartoon culture in Germany], for example, and I still have it inside me, even if it is a little cloudy. I can then work it out completely [...] in a particular Utopian or imaginary direction. Which is also a way of getting to know things'. This use of a half-remembered period aesthetic is frequently combined with the employment of the dedicated-but-aimless clique as an allegory of the vulnerable Utopia of artistic bohemianism - and this is, in turn, an allegory of the social promises that have remained unfulfilled since 1968.

Politicised, activist art, issuing decrees and attempting to act upon society from a bird's-eye view, must (partly tactically and partly inevitably) 'forget' a subjective history of modes of perception in order to be able to act. This is certainly not Althoff's way: in working towards his own sexual and artistic socialisation through his 'cloudy' yet rich reminiscences, he retroactively opens up a perspective on future meanings of style from which the ability to act can then emerge. And he does this without being taken in by the omnipresent myth of resistance through tactical consumption. It is not so much a matter of pseudo-historically reconstructing a period of bohemian initiatives somewhere between hippiedom and pop, and it is even less a matter of revivalism or nostalgia, as it is of constructing an imaginary past. 'This is how it was' is replaced by 'this is how it will have been'. Future perfect, in which the promises of this era are held open again for later fulfilment.

Translated by Michael Robinson