Notes on Reinhold Engberding at TJ Rusk MS

Late last year I received an unexpected email from Reinhold Engberding who, through some judicious googling after viewing a cultural piece on Dallas, won himself a CentralTrak residency. He also discovered that we are here, and not likely to leave anytime soon. Last month, once he'd settled in, we had him over for dinner where he presented us with a handsome copy of the catalog from his solo show at Ahrensburg Castle near Hamburg. The show was entitled Our Vather is Undings Son, an anagram of the title of Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son. The title refers to an installation of seemingly autophagous trousers whose bound and partially inverted forms echo those of the Goya painting, and a body of drawings in shellac of young men who could be the age of Reinhold's son, were he to have one. The Is That My Son? series stems from the amusing questions two men of different ages might be asked while on a date together.

Jami and I were more than delighted to receive the catalog, and I was equally thrilled when Reinhold agreed to come speak to my advanced art students at some point in the remaining weeks of his residency.

Reinhold came to my class last Tuesday to presented a PDF slideshow of his work, and to share with my students a little of his own history and education. The following are my own idiosyncratic notes from the talk with amendments and additional information in brackets:

[at] 17 quit school
      due to bad grades
      studied l[and]s[cape] architecture

Davos    -    sanatorium
    teddy bear

[the three main strands of his work:]
SELF PORTRAITS
WORK W/ CLOTHES
CROCHET


SELF PORTRAITS
double photos
         ↓
sewn [together?]
photos in frames
lead to 1st crochet piece
[Reinhold at one point had bought a number of skeins of black cotton yarn to sew together a number of photos for strange self portrait that rearranges his face in such a way that he appears to suffer from harlequin-type ichthyosis. After attempting to sew the photos together he quickly saw that it looked like a failed undergraduate attempt at a mixed-media piece. He remembered back to his school days, when the shop and the home-economics teacher used to swap classes. During one of those swaps he learned how to crochet, a skill he quickly put to use with all of his extra yarn.]

found photos from sanatorium
matching poses
overlapped

2006 Switzerland
residency
childhood photos [of the towns residents] mixed w/ his own


USED CLOTHES


jackets and pants
2 jackets from each place [thrift store]

embroidery -

2 men wearing jacket

double trousers
pants sewn and laid in a line

men's jacket
arms put through collar

[Crochet]

shellac and wax

[filled with] Marbles
Hansel and Gretel

Adam - [an Australian student traveling in Chiang Mai. They went out a few times, and were asked if they were father and son, leading to an entire body of work based on that question.]
replaced eyes
replaced face

is that my son[?]

looked [on websites] for men that could be the age of his son [were he to have one]

portraits on watercolor paper
in shellac
on glass
____________________________________________________________

[work done while at CentralTrak]
young men from yearbooks
early 60s
older than R
15 year-olds
photos from Vietnam

[At this point my kids began asking questions. I was proud that they were brave enough to speak up, and also, the questions they asked were excellent. For some of the kids having a real live artist in their midst was a bit like having a unicorn walk into the room.]

[What was the bear made of?]
wonderful calm inside the bear
child hugged bear on stool
industrial felt

[How long do you work on an individual piece?]
crochet 1 ball a day
to crochet
      +
forming, filling and treatment

[In Germany do you have any type of mythology you use to inspire your artwork?]
Mythology
     vs.
childhood
fabric - closeness to the body
[The answer here was "No," but that there are German artists like Anselm Keifer who are very interested in German myths. Reinhold himself is more interested in working from his own childhood and personal experiences.]

[The preceding question prompted me to ask how he felt being compared to Beuys, since that was the first comparison made when I showed his work to other teachers.]
Beuys:
likes drawings and some installations
Documenta [7]
but performances/lectures
"No. Bored."
[he is more interested in]
daily life
rather than
worldmaking
[Reinhold attended Documenta 7 where Beuys launched his 7000 Oaks project. He found Beuys's lecture to be rambling, disconnected, and simply boring. He admires the broad scope of Beuys's agenda and his desire to remake the world both artistically and politically, but has no desire to do that sort of thing himself.]

[A student asked, in a round about way, if he had created any work that he thought was bad, but that other people liked. This question was not well understood, and therefore answered twice once before and once after I clarified.]
some people like [the]
first steps in the process
better than the finished work
------------------------------------
serigraphs sell quickly and easily
[He has at times gone to a collectors house, found that they had a serigraph he was no longer fond of, and asked to replace it with something better.]

[Do you use psychology in your work?]
psychology
criticism
viewpoints
[We both answered this question. I told my kids that art critics often interpret art from a particular point of view, like psychology, Freudian or Jungian analysis (which tied back in to the mythology questions earlier), marxism, feminism, etc. The artist's job is to simply make the work that means the most to him or herself.]

[At this point one of the kids asked what his favorite piece was from his own work. While Reinhold fished for an answer I jumped in and said it's often whatever you happen to be working on at the time, since it's the piece you're thinking about the most. Reinhold agreed, but then said that if pressed he'd pick one of the crochet pieces.]

[Who's your] favorite artist[?]
DMA [there might have been something there that he'd liked, but I do recall complaining that lately the shows had been more like what you'd expect from a
Richard Serra [Adores the piece in front of the Fort Worth Museum of Modern Art. He likes his work very much even though it is so unlike his own.]
Louise Bourgeois ([he mentioned that she held a] reception [sunday salon] at her house in [her] last days) [He admires her work, and how active she was to the very end, she's also a favorite of some of my students.]
Gerhard Richter [I asked which body of work, he answered the photo-based paintings]
-------------------------------------

[What was your] 1st art experience [?]
parents didn't like art
[but they had a] print of [Caspar David Friedrich's Cross in the Mountains]
Van Gogh
Picasso [taught him that art didn't have to look like anything in particular. A very important lesson]

__________________________________________________________________________________

We ended there, with Picasso. Reinhold said he was very impressed with the kids, how respectful they were, what good questions they asked. He was afraid they would be unruly.

After the talk we went out to chat a bit and stopped at my bank along the way. While I was at the teller a woman came rushing in, ran up to the window where her partner was and began explaining that there was a man out in the parking lot taking pictures of everything, the cars, the building, everything. Just then I saw Reinhold through the window taking a picture of a bunch of suckers at the base of a live oak tree. I asked the woman if the man had a beard. She said, yes, and a blue shirt. I laughed and explained that he was a german artist, visiting here on a residency, and that even though it might not look like it, he was in a foreign country and was therefore taking pictures of things in that foreign country. She seemed relieved, and we all laughed. Her partner shook her head and said, "That's pretty good." Osama bin Laden had been assassinated the day before, so she may have had terrorist retaliation her mind. Reinhold was quite amused to hear he'd been the cause of so much alarm.