Anton Henning: Midnight in Paris

The invention of modernity in one night

Anton Henning calls his latest exhibition "Midnight in Paris"; of course, the title is borrowed from Woody Allen. Claudia Emmert, the director of the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, which incidentally is housed in the only historically authenticated Bauhaus building in the Lake Constance region, rightly emphasises the coincidence between the Allen film and Anton Henning's process in her introductory contribution. On the one hand, the presence of painting, which has been declared dead with beautiful regularity for a hundred years, and on the other, the awakening of modernism, as it initially took place in painting until Duchamp came on the scene. But how do you bring these ends together today, and how do you deal with the expansive installation situations that have been running riot in the White Cube ever since? Anton Henning creates a counter-model: the exhibition and book jump back to the beginnings and the heyday of modernism and bring together the avant-gardes of the time in a salon whose chronologically strict but extremely condensed sequence of rooms picks up on the traditional pattern of our habits of interpretation and seeing: In the first room, the heavy pathos of the early days: Wagner hovers in the air, but a small portrait in the picture already shows the head forester Adolf Hitler, as we know him from Ernst Jünger's "Auf den Marmorklippen"; if you want, you can also recognise the young Heidegger in the portrait, who, after the embarrassingly short Thousand Year Reich, then posed as the hermit from Todtnauberg in a pointed cap and spoke to SPIEGEL readers: "Only a god can save us." By then, modernism was finally unstoppable in its triumphal march, as demonstrated by the second room by Anton Henning, in which the forms dance a boogie and the artist-subject once again takes off to unimagined heights. And the third room is already visible and present through a "window" in the front wall, exuding the enticing glow of a new morning that resembles our here and now. Now, finally, all the forms have been clarified, historically and functionally processed and reworked, so that the motto remains: "everything goes"; which is why the space, finally brought into a pattern, must hold together what the contemporary believes to know from his own experience as the mise en abyme of his life.

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