Klaus Wanker: Living in a Magazin
on beautiful surface and abysmal emptiness

Fashion is perfection for the moment. It is a promise of uniqueness as well as of affiliation. You can’t abscond from fashion, especially when you’re young. In the centre of fashion world stand the models filling it with life, only few of them as famous as the clothes they wear. Mar-keting and music have developed codes manipulating teenagers’ formation of identity. Vien-nese artist Klaus Wanker takes this street wear fashion world into his painterly focus. His art is not about fashion itself, it’s about this manipulation conducted by industrial marketing.

It is always the faces that dominate his pictures. They look the viewer into the eye, turn side-ward, turn away or look right through you. Their mimics strangely distant, his figures stand before blocks of colour, circles and stripes, their bodies craned, heads arrogantly in their necks, arms on hips. They are all young and beautiful in an immediate and touching way, yet their algid aloofness is almost painful. Their faces do not represent personality, not character; they are no portraits, but painted surface. And still, they embody an urgent demand for vivid individuality.

This contradiction stands for a young generation’s want for identity, membership and a posi-tion in society. Pose and mimics serve but one goal: visualizing an attitude to life. An attitude which is made accessible for home use through the advertised product. Wanker’s templates come from fashion magazines. The artist specifically decides for advertisements with young and unknown models hoping for their breakthrough. He fulfils their wish – just not in the way they had thought. Instead of being film or fashion stars, they become the centre of a picture based on the same strategies as advertising pictures. Wanker’s artistic strategy of exposing a soulless commercial branch and its manipulating influence on youth culture adds up: The models in their austere and algid beauty are all but happy and strangely vulnerable. Wanker utilises the advertising and fashion photography as substitute, as the only more or less le-gitimate space for what has been banished from high arts: beauty.

In his transformation of consumer goods, Wanker focuses on an increasing commercializa-tion of everyday life that teenagers have to come to grips with. Wanker’s exposure to sym-bols and their social meaning are interfaces to his central paintings of youthful models. In his painted transference, Wanker inserts backgrounds with designs typical for exchangeable spaces such as club rooms, metro stations or music videos. He reduces the backgrounds to rudimentary geometrical forms presenting the “star” as placed in front of a light box back drop. His choice of the frames, the emphasis on the faces closely related to the close-ups often applied in advertising photography stands in the same context

While his paintings where untitled in the beginning, he now adds script to his latest works, that also form titles. The decisive factor therefore is the advertisement’s slogans always com-ing with the pictures and sometimes laid over the pictures in music clips and films. This pene-tration of script and picture is visualised through the transparency of letters that span over the whole painting, catching the eye only at second view. Hollywood plays its role here, too. Especially in large and expensive Hollywood productions, product placement is of increasing importance. It’s this subconscious manipulation that Wanker wants to transpose into painting. The script is comprised in the painting process, is put onto the surface simultaneously with the figure. The paintings’ frugality rather represents anti-advertisement, thereby contradicting its motive.

For his big “Swimming Pool” – pictures, Wanker emanates from photographs showing water in a pool. He breaks up the undulation and decomposes it in colour segments. In “Five Girls Under Water Fight”, a paperwork displayed on the floor and seeming as if seen from bird‘s eye view, the colours evoke connotations of people diving under the surface and through the water’s movement melts into abstract forms of colour. In this works, Wanker plays with fig-uration and abstraction, mainly focusing on this theme’s aesthetic components. While in this “waterworks”, pure painting already stands back behind the idea of presentation, Wanker emphasizes another formal aspect in his following works: the size.

The centre of his ensemble is formed by four large-format paintings: On “flagship”, a giant pink strawberry flies through the light blue colour field, while on a different painting a panicle of grapes hovers over a bright green underground. Blueberries spooking loosely through matter and all these artificial, plastic-like fruits are accompanied by three small round panels showing pink strawberries with differently coloured dots. This works is fed from the discus-sion on genetically manipulated food. Wanker transforms this theme into flatulent fruit paint-ings executed on polystyrene. The artificial base seems like an ironic wink to manipulation of nature. The fruits’ size forces them to the ground; they lie in line there, to the strawberry’s sides – a bunch of grapes, a sunny side-up – as if the worn monstrous aliments were starting on last effort to riot.

In BANG BANG, the viewer is literally surrounded by three wall size works. Wanker expands two-dimensional painting into space: The pictures show scenes from a video game, con-structing an illusionist space. Teenagers live in their own worlds consisting no longer of two-dimensional pictures but of an hermetic and fantastic reality. In a large-scale painting, three young people are pointing their guns in different directions into the void dominated by a heli-copter drawn onto the wall additionally increasing the painterly illusion. Five coloured Styro-foam disks stand as abstract signs for their shots. The paintings do not reveal the game’s dramaturgy. Wanker does not provide a real setting of winners and losers. In contrast to many artists analysing in their work the interface between fiction and reality through anima-tion, Wanker paints “Action”. Painting has long since lost or passed on this function to the new media. To repaint scenes of this subject is to deal with its aesthetics and contents and adding something to them through painting.

While in BANG BANG, the freedom a youthful generation’s alter ego is assumed to posses can be relived in the installation of the painted video game, Wanker simulates a different but no less artificial world in his magazine allowing an escape from reality. For a short time, Wanker has his models dive into their private worlds where each of them can indulge in a short lived stardom. World-famous for 15 minutes, so Warhol’s prophecy for everybody is more topical now than ever before. Almost it seems as if being a star had become a brand mark to comprise whatever content one may want to fill it with, best prove hereof being the everyday afternoon talk shows.

Having worked as a model himself during his time in university, Wanker soon found out that in reality, behind the glamour and magic of the beauty business, those in the spotlights are mainly beat-up people. Beauty and attractiveness are attributes one doesn’t speak about critically. One owns these attributes in superior and tacit acceptance. The idea of beauty is adjusted and regularised. Who or what appears to be beautiful for what reasons, who de-cides and who defines what will be brand marked “beautiful” in a certain time and place? Wanker paints models. These paintings, he integrates into an imaginary fashion magazine titled “Imaginary Stardom. Collection 03/04“.

Wanker’s Star Sketches stand for the Warholian disideologization and dishierarchisation. Being a Star is before and above all free space for individualism. Yet it lies in its nature to bring forth new group phenomena subjected to specific codes and uniforms. The concept of Istar and the high gloss magazine “Imaginary Stardom” are painted commentary on this. As structural constituents of youth culture, outfit and lifestyle combine to form a sort of happi-ness intending a feeling of “Imaginary Stardom”. As in real fashion magazines, Wanker’s Collection 03/04 first of all shows beautiful people in beautiful clothes. Wanker doesn’t leave it at purely aesthetic adaptations: The fashion statements are based on fashion codes, which Wanker transforms into seven large-scale bar codes, the EAN-paintings.

Wanker subtly changes the emblems designating products of the everyday world provided by society. Models’ set cards, listing mere formalities and vital statistics - abstracted surface to signalise through feature advantages a product’s saleability to the client - serve as basis for his codes. The individual is reduced to pure data. Accordingly, the painterly share is ex-tremely reduced, the loss of identity stressed through the synthetic sealing. In the end, the beautiful surface remains an illusion in which the passer-by form this entirely opposite world always seems to hear the music play

Text: Peter H. Forster, 2005
 

exhibition "imaginary stardom" 2003, Reuterweg 18, Frankfurt