Chris Reinecke
In February 1970, Chris Reinecke suggested to visitors at the Cologne Kunstverein that they 'create a healthy atmosphere by spraying cod-liver oil in a museum. It'll cause a general panic! They'll think you've been sloshing paraffin around because you wanted the whole lot to go up in flames!' Continuing her iconoclastic tendencies, a little later she let loose a burning toy mouse at the opening of an André Masson exhibition in Dusseldorf.
During the late 60s student revolts, fuelled in Dusseldorf by Joseph Beuys' founding of the German Students' Party, Reinecke, along with Jörg Immendorf (who was then her husband), Hans-Jürgen Bulkowski and Wolfgang Feelisch, founded the LIDL Action Room, a political programme which they directed against what they perceived to be the elitist attitudes of the Kunstakademie. This exhibition concentrated on Reinecke's work from 1966 to 1970 and it is ironic that it is being shown in a museum - she always refused to become part of the institutionalised art system.
That the show is austere seems appropriate to the period. Reinecke's typewritten notes, along with some photographs of her work and a few surviving original pieces, were all that covered the walls and filled a few showcases. The show also addressed the interest that has long been shown in the transitional phase of 68, an interest that appears less concerned with political utopias than how they affected form, design, fashion, art and pop culture.
In her work, Reinecke attempted to criticise accepted social mores, a strategy which is apparent in her playful use of household materials such as food, cotton wool or wool. In her 'Kaugummibilder' (Chewing Gum Pictures, 1967), for example, visitors were asked to stick their chewing-gum on prepared stencilled landscapes. She dressed members of the audience in her 'Umgebungskleider' (Surroundings Clothes, 1967), made of transparent plastic, before writing on them - like a second skin - descriptions of what the viewers could see: stones, wall, buildings, as if the things that surrounded the viewer literally became part of them.
With the realisation that art was powerless in the face of the realities of political power, Reinecke soon became disillusioned. While continuing to explore artistic strategies, she concentrated on her political work, in particular fighting against the state of public housing in Germany. As a response to a provocative statement by a local conservative politician to 'build your houses yourselves!', in 1970 she designed mobile homes: a crocheted cocoon that could be hung between lampposts and a one-person cabin on wheels. But the plans she drew were never realised, even though they could have provided unexpected answers to the politician's challenge.
Reinecke differed from Beuys and Immendorf in her fundamental distrust of concepts such as the auratic work of art and the artist as genius. 'People long for something unique', she once wrote, 'for the wound-dressing against the everyday. Why do so many of them get into the lift marked ''distinction''?' Reinecke preferred the lift marked 'triviality'. In an action called Rätsel des Himmels und die Lösung (Puzzle of Heaven and the Solution, 1968), she crocheted a carpet runner, following a timetable that allowed her breaks for smoking and eating. Her emphasis on submitting 'domestic' female skills to a regulated working process emphasised the fact that such a process involves real industrial exploitation. Nonetheless, Reinecke offered no alternative to the 'crocheting equals female' equation.
The photograph of the performance radiates the presence of the artist. She is seen sitting on a dirty concrete floor smoking, which seems to add a defiant quality to the self-driven nature of her timetable. It's as if she's saying that energy, seriousness and pleasure could ultimately have an effect: that her dismal equation - crocheting equals female, and art equals the sublime - could cancel each other out.
