Every artist is unusual, but German artist Wolfgang Laib is more unusual than most.
For 23 years he has worked with non-artistic materials such as pollen, rice, beeswax and milk to create extraordinary pieces that stand apart from those by any of his contemporaries. He uses the materials in simple ways — scattering, gathering, compressing — as other artists might use dry pigment or clay.
But however much Laib’s arrangements resemble color-field paintings or rudimentary sculpture, his materials always assert their natural character, letting us know they are from a world seldom called upon in art making.
All the pieces, including extremely spare drawings Laib has just begun to exhibit, grow less from an aesthetic imperative than a pared-down way of life that has established harmony between the artist and nature. They convey through sight and smell some of the intensity Laib feels by having immersed himself in a timeless organic environment. And their effect on viewers is more important to the artist than issues of style, contemporaneity, development or look.
Laib now works just as he did when he switched to art from the study of medicine in 1975: He uses the same materials in the same ways toward the same ends. Yet none of the process seems to him repetitious. He is continually renewed by partaking of life cycles that are greater than himself.
“You will go somewhere else,” is both the title of a piece in Laib’s new exhibition at the Arts Club of Chicago and the name of the show itself. It also describes the act of creating and seeing Laib’s work, as his pieces transport both artist and viewer from the senses to the spirit.
The forms of Laib’s pieces are elemental: houses, boats, mounds. For several years, the works were small and sat directly on the floor. More recently the artist enlarged and elevated some of them on scaffolds and wall shelves.
“I always wanted to have distance between the viewer and the work,” Laib says. “I liked pieces not to be reachable and touchable. Our culture pretends to reach everything, to grasp everything and to have everything available. My work presents a challenge to that.
“The small piece on the floor, if you take it seriously, has the same noli me tangere (don’t touch me) as the large supported pieces. There’s a different solution of how to achieve distance, but the effect is, I think, the same.”
The extreme simplicity of Laib’s forms — each has outlines familiar from children’s drawings — led critics to describe them in terms of the elementary structures of Minimal Art. His houses, in particular, had a close visual relationship to the tiny dwellings sculptor Joel Shapiro made early in his career. But there similarities came to an end.
Asceticism as a theme
“It was a total misunderstanding that I would be interested in floor sculpture,” Laib says. “That was only a formal explanation of my work, which tended to be minimal. But my interest in Minimalism was because it was an ascetic situation. I was not interested only in the minimal shape. I was interested in how life and everything involved had this asceticism.”
Laib lives simply, without many material possessions, at his childhood home in Metzingen, Germany. The pollen he uses for some pieces he collects himself from flowers and trees in the vicinity. The process takes about three months, and he repeats it annually, looking forward to how the collecting time determines his own. Such work regulates his life, bringing it into closer harmony with nature.
“That’s very pleasing,” Laib says. “Just to participate in it is extraordinary. From the beginning of my work I participated in something much bigger than I would ever have been able to do myself. Instead of creating yellow paintings, I participated in the incredible beauty of the pollen. That’s how I saw it, so the more the process (determined my actions), the better.
“People keep asking me: `How did you have this idea?’ or `How did you get to this point?’
“Well, it’s not a thought you just have one afternoon. There is a life that accumulates in work. There is also a certain way of doing things. Other people live near where I do, but they don’t do what I do. So you come to a moment in your life where work occurs, and somehow all the earlier experiences are in it. The pieces are related to what an artist’s life is.
“For me it always was wonderful to go home and be alone. It’s not so easy for my wife and daughter because I can’t have (social) connections there. I cut them off. I live very alone. I make my work alone. Then I go back into the world. I go back through exhibitions. It’s not a contradiction. It’s very beautiful to have such intensity for yourself and also have experience in the world. The extremes are the most interesting; the thing in between is what you grow to hate.”
Looking for a spark
After 20 years, some viewers still find Laib’s art extreme — and hate it. He says it’s especially true in Germany, where other artists feel the spareness of his pieces constitutes an implicit criticism of their own. Perhaps they feel challenged by Laib’s asceticism. Whatever the case, he is pleased no matter how the work retains its thrust.
“I think art should create a spark in somebody else’s life,” Laib says. “At an exhibition there will be people who know my work and much about it. There also will be people who never have seen it and find it very far from their lives. Sometimes nothing happens on either side. But at other times a spark may occur that initiates something in a person entirely different from what I would say or do. And that’s the best.
“That’s the challenge and the beauty despite all the disappointments in the art world. In medicine I saw a dead end. In art I see the end is open. As naive as it sounds, the whole world is open to you. And that’s not modest. That’s expecting a lot. But I think it’s important to expect a lot even if you know you won’t reach the goal. The more open the work is, the more vision comes into it, and there’s always farther to go.”
The farthest Laib has gone to date is a plan for one of his chambers of beeswax to be cut into a mountain range. This project, which ranks with vast, incomplete Earthworks such as James Turrell’s Roden Crater, has proceeded at a glacial pace for six years, though a site in the Pyrenees has been picked. If the government of France accedes, Laib will have a cave chiseled into the rock to hold an aromatic womb of beeswax, which pilgrims would enter after visiting a neighboring town to retrieve the key.
Refusal to be categorized
The venture would for many confirm an impression that Laib is, in essence, a landscape artist who always has worked hand-in-glove with nature. He disagrees.
“I certainly have used nature in my works,” Laib says, “but I think I could have used other materials to achieve the same things. If I had lived somewhere else, I would have used something else. The work is not solely about (what people understand as) nature. For me, it’s also about how one could be independent from time and what other artists do.
“Pollen and beeswax are substances that you would have encountered 10,000 years ago. It is, for me, an incredibly pure idea to use such materials. It means, in part, an independence from time and all the small problems that seem so big to us.
“If an artist works like a politician on little problems, who cares after a while? Of course, we have to solve them and then get at the big problems that really threaten our lives. Still, beyond that, there’s another level of existence we should not forget. It’s very important. It has always been there. And when I left medicine, it was what I searching for.”
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“You will go somewhere else,” an exhibition by Wolfgang Laib, will continue at the Arts Club of Chicago, 201 E. Ontario St., through April 4.
