Westkunst, 1981

A Historiography of Modernism Exhibited

Mathilde Arnoux, Maria Bremer

• Publisher: Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9782735130580
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: European History

In 1981, the Cologne Trade-Fair centre hosted a large exhibition titled Westkunst: Zeitgenössische Kunst seit 1939 [Western Art: Contemporary Art since 1939]. Organised by art critic Laszlo Glozer and curator Kasper König, the Western-centric survey highlighted avant-garde art and politically charged themes of freedom and individual expression. By examining Westkunst's historiographical stakes in light of the Iron Curtain division of Europe, the show is revealed in this collective volume as paradigmatic of the ways in which hegemonic concepts of 'Western art' and the accompanying processes of othering were fashioned in the art world. Westkunst's universalising claims are scrutinised here by focusing on the artistic tendencies exhibited; on exhibitionary discourses and practices of decontextualisation, comparison, and appropriation; on the alleged realisation of the values of progress, freedom, and autonomy; on the enacted conceptions of temporality and the architectural devices of narrativisation; and on the exhibition's blind spots and exclusions and the critical reactions it elicited. This analytic output makes fresh use of the archival materials, which are neither centralised nor systematised, with significant excerpts republished throughout the book. Seen through the lens of exhibition history, this revisiting of Westkunst sheds light on a broader trend of cultural conservatism that was gaining strength in the 1980s, just before the end of the Cold War, and on the start of new forms of globalisation.

Table of contents

• Introductory pages
• Table of contents
• Editors’ Note
• Introduction: Unlearning Westkunst, 1981
• Ungers’ Column Grid and a Naked Support: Westkunst’s Mock-Up Architecture as Artefact
• An Exhibited Historiography of the Present: Historical References and Temporal Constellations of Comparison in the Westkunst Exhibition
• Fabricating the Universal: The Westkunst Documentaries
• The Threshold of the West? Danish Cobra Artists Exhibited at Westkunst and behind the Iron Curtain, 1948–1988
• Theatricalising History: Thomas Schütte’s Westkunst Modelle in Context
• Curating Critique: On passiv explosiv as Counter-Exhibition
• Peripheralism as a Cultural Privilege? Investigating the ‘Ostkunst’ and ‘Westkunst’ Discourse before and after 1989
• Documents
• Sources
• Photo Credits and Copyrights