Anton HenningMidnight in Paris

Anton Henning calls his latest exhibition „Midnight in Paris“; the title is of course borrowed from Woody Allen. In her introductory contribution Claudia Emmert, the director of the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen – which, incidentally, is housed in the only historically documented Bauhaus building in the Bodensee region – rightly emphasises the coincidence between Allen’s film and Anton Henning’s procedure. On the one hand the present of a painting that has been pronounced dead with fine regularity for a hundred years; on the other the dawn of modernism as it first took place in painting, until Duchamp appeared on the scene. But how does one bring these ends together today, and how does one deal with the expansive installation situations that have been running riot in the white cube ever since? Anton Henning devises a counter-model: exhibition and book leap back to the beginnings and to the heyday of modernism and assemble the avant-gardes of the time in a salon whose chronologically strict but extremely condensed sequence of rooms takes up the received pattern of our habits of interpretation and of seeing. In the first room the heavy pathos of the Gründerzeit: Wagner hovers in the air, yet a small portrait within the picture already shows the Oberförster Adolf Hitler, familiar to us from Ernst Jünger’s „Auf den Marmorklippen“; those who wish may also recognise in the sitter the young Heidegger, who, after the embarrassingly short-lived Thousand-Year Reich, posed as the hermit of Todtnauberg in a nightcap and told the readers of SPIEGEL: „Only a god can still save us.“ For by then modernism could no longer be halted on its triumphal course, as Anton Henning’s second room demonstrates, in which the forms dance a boogie and the artistic subject once again takes off to undreamt-of heights. And the third room, too, is already visible and present through a „window“ in the end wall, exuding the enticing highlight of a new morning that resembles our here and now. Now at last all forms have been clarified, historically and functionally worked through and worked up, so that what remains as a motto is: „everything goes“; which is why the space, definitively brought into a pattern, must hold together what our contemporary believes he knows from his own experience as the mise en abyme of his life.

Exhibition:
Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, 26/7/2015–10/1/2016