Exhibition

Claus Böhmler TYPOGRAMME - Schreibmaschine

18 Aug 2021 – 29 Oct 2021

Regular hours

Monday
Closed
Tuesday
10:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
10:00 – 18:00
Thursday
10:00 – 18:00
Friday
10:00 – 18:00
Saturday
10:00 – 18:00
Sunday
10:00 – 18:00

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Drawing Room

Hamburg
Hamburg, Germany

Address

Travel Information

  • M6 and M17 bus stop Averhoffstraße
  • U3 Station Uhlandstrasse (from there 10 minutes walk)
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The exhibition and the catalogue published by the Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König both concentrate on Böhmler’s series of Schriftbilder (drawings with text) he created in 1968 using the DIN A4 format.

About

Claus Böhmler, by his own account, was a “low-tech media artist”. During his in-depth investigations and observations he repeatedly explored not only current technological standards, but also those of the art establishment. Even early on as a student at the Düsseldorfer Akademie, he scrutinized his domestic and urban environment just as intensely as he did the accomplishments and world of ideas he encountered in the diverse and innovative art scene of the 1960s. Yet he quickly realized that even if one wanted to disrupt tradition and time-worn notions of art, one would encounter the pursuit of higher ideals, which Böhmler – acting a bit like a jester or trickster – brought back down to the earth of everyday life.

This can also be seen in the typograms he produced in 1968, in which he combined simple drawn elements with words written on the pages using a typewriter. Together, they initially recall a sketchbook in which everything from individual objects and interior spaces, to landscape situations or reconstructions of a traffic accident at an intersection, are all distilled into humorous word-pictures. A direct allusion to the art and artists of the time occurs only once, in a “Beuys’ Room” in which that artist’s “Fettecke” (“Fat Corner”) and “Eurasienstab” (“Eurasia Staff”) are not seen as objects, but formed instead by the words or rather by their letters. 

Without being direct references, motifs employed more grandly and more laboriously by other artists also appear. This particularly pertains to objects from the consumer world, that great theme of American Pop Art, which at the time was prominently represented in Germany at the 1968 documenta, and in the Ludwig and Ströher collections.

Let us compare one of his typograms with the Hot Dog Roy Lichtenstein put into play in 1964, boldly and monumentally enlarged in his famous comic and print-raster style. In contrast, Böhmler’s work reveals only the schematic outlines of a dinner roll, almost like a vignette on an otherwise empty page, and where he could have drawn the sausage the German word BRATWURST is written with a typewriter in capital letters. 

On the surface, Böhmler’s handling of image and language is reminiscent of Conceptual Art with its more brittle staging methods inspired by linguistics, such as in Joseph Kosuth’s famous installation “One and Three Chairs” (1965). Kosuth linguistically and semiotically deciphers the often irrational jumble of (post) expressionistic art theories circulating at the time: a real chair; a picture (photo) of the chair; and a description of the term “chair” taken from a dictionary.

Many of Böhmler’s typograms also stem from this in a similarly textbook-like, if also far more humorous fashion. For example let us look at the grandfather clock Böhmler shows us only in outline, with all the individual elements then placed as words where they would be found in or on the clock housing.

A “textbook” Kosuth directly referenced, and which Böhmler could also have been familiar with at the time, originates from an artist from the sphere of surrealism, and in a small manifesto written in 1929 it summarizes his original handling of words and pictures. René Magritte’s “Les mots et les images” consists of eighteen “paragraphs” presented to us in text and sample images, for example: “Parfois le nom d’un objet tient lieu d’un image” (“Sometimes the name of an object takes the place of a picture)”. Beside the schematic illustration of a hand and a box stands a form outlined by an oval in which stands the word “Canon”.

Many of Böhmler’s typograms also contain the words for things which are not depicted as images, or which occupy the space their portrayal might have occupied. Thus a table “lacks” one of its legs, which has been replaced with the text DAS TISCHBEIN (the table leg). Or an empty canvas is furnished with all the terms for things required to complete a painting: from paint and stretcher bars all the way to a studio easel.

Or we see a MAUER (wall) on which the words or letters appear like a portrayal of a wall’s outline. Here we find a distinct difference from the work of Magritte. The wall motif also appears in this work, but as an example of an “object”, that allows one to “speculate that there are some other ones behind it” (“Un objet fait supposer qu’ il en a des autres derrière lui”).

This possibility of the letters forming the shape of an object, as Böhmler presented in the wall example, is completely missing in Magritte’s work, and there is a reason for that. For in the latter’s work, the letters of the words are connected to one another in flowing cursive script, and not placed separately as is the case with typewritten letters.

The first functional typewriters were developed in the 19th century. Not until 1865 did a model appear in larger quantities on the market. Thereby the printed letters of the “Gutenberg Galaxy”, as the era of letterpress printing characterized by linearity was called in 1962 by the famous Canadian media theoretician Marshall McLuhan, were able to spread from printing workshops into private writing rooms, and above all into innumerable business offices. There, traditionally male writers were now mostly being replaced by women. Due to the “feminine” activities such as sewing and embroidery traditionally allocated to them, they were apparently more skilled at typewriting. The age of the secretary had begun.

Friedrich Kittler, who became famous in the 1980s with a study of literature based on McLuhan’s media theories, also describes the social and aesthetic effects of the typewriter on the writing process: “The continuously coherent flow of ink, this material substrate for all bourgeois in-dividuals or indivisibilities” gave way to “keystroke, backspace, automatic discrete block letters.”[1] Kittler also quoted Martin Heidegger, whose conservative criticism of technology was only able to see in this an “increasing destruction of the word”: “The typewriter snatches writing away from the natural realm of the hand, and thus of the word (...) Machine writing replaced the hand in the realm of the written word, and degrades words to a means of transportation”.[2]

Counter to such conservative cultural criticism, however, was the great enthusiasm with which many writers and artists turned to the typed word. 

[1]Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon. Film. Typewriter, Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose 1986, P. 287.

[2]Martin Heidegger, Vorlesungen 1942/43, cited in Kittler, P. 291. 

The exhibition project is supported by the Stiftung Kunstfond’s NEUSTART KULTUR Program.

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Claus Böhmler

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