Klaus Honnef
ON Jürgen Klauke
2002
Jürgen Klauke is a unique figure in the art world. He invented things that are now seen as granted in their repertoire and that have influenced art of the last 30 years significantly. He is a pioneer in the area of multimedia and interdisciplinary artistic exploration. His work creates fascination and irritation in equal measures, oscillating continuously between the poles of attraction and repulsion.
As one of the first artists Jürgen Klauke uses photography as a means of artistic expression. He determinedly navigates its possibilities and edges, comprehensive and multifaceted like no other, and he discovered a completely new territory of art. He raised the question of gender differences more emphatically and more radically than anyone else and highlighted the problem of identity with often provocative images to the extreme. He has been working with the human body since 1970, and used it as an immediate means of artistic expression. He used it as object and vehicle of his art at the same time as Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman. He was one of the most prominent representatives of "Body Art“.
Moreover, Klauke introduced methods of representation to the visual arts, which were absolutely unusual when he started using them, like sequence and the tableau. He paved the path for 'staged photography' when he conceptualized the photographic medium and made it the immanent theme of his art.
Klauke finally also discovered the large format for himself and realized his artistic ideas in large format image sequences when most other artists still moved within the traditional framework of photographic practice. However, during his career, which was always accompanied by upheavals and new purposes, he never served the expectations or fashion trends of the art world his works always jarred. The early works consciously went against social taboos and operated in aggressive, subversive and disturbing ways. The later works embody an aesthetic standard, which has become rare in contemporary art, because they do not follow any of the mainstream movements. His work seems like an erratic block in the commercial art world, headstrong and bulky and at the same time vibrating sensuous strength. The sort of strength that pulls the viewers in immediately. Accordingly it is difficult to characterize an artist like Jürgen Klauke with the usual terminology of art criticism. His pictures and sequences do not fit into any of the existing drawers, they blow up the known cliches.
Careful analysis is required to satisfy the challenge his work poses, especially as he is an innovative artist. The problem starts with the process of making the works. Although he draws and paints, he is not a painter - and a photographer he is most definitely not. Still, the most important part of his artistic practice is made of groups of photographic works. He comes up with the subject matter, design and realization, and after that, he is the director of the visual implementation of his concept. At the end, he is often, at least until recently, the actor in his productions. Looking at his way of working, one could compare him with the big film authors like Buster Keaton, Claude Chabrol or David Lynch. It is also comparable to film in the sense that while the central figure, which the artist embodies in his pictures, has something in common with him, it is not identical with Jürgen Klauke himself. One would completely misunderstand his works it one saw them as self-portraits; if anything the early series and sequences come closer to that. As a matter of fact the work deals with compacted social images, reflection of the others - including their viewers. To be precise: it is about images of social and psychological syndromes and rejections, sometimes stepping into the grotesque, sometimes accentuated with irony.
Jürgen Klauke deals with the elementary in his art: the bypasses and disturbances in human communication, the common loss of reason for living, the crippling emptiness and boredom of an unfulfilled being, and last but not least the suggestive danger to mental and physical identity through the power of media as well as the developing mechanization of all areas of life - not excluding the area of the human body. When he breaks the power of this agenda, at times with irony, he shows more despair than distance. This does not cause the viewer to laugh freely, but a laugh that dies down rapidly and becomes self awareness: when looking at the others" in Klauke's artistic work, the viewers encounter themselves as strangers.