Asta Gröting
Goethe's traveling carriage, Adenauer's Mercedes and my smart, 2012
Artist
Asta Gröting
Title
Goethe's traveling carriage, Adenauer's Mercedes and my smart
Year of creation
2012
Technology and dimensions
polyurethane, 70 x 193 x 426 cm (carriage), 39 x 179 x 480 cm (Mercedes), 32 x 153 x 253 cm (smart)
Year of acquisition
2012
Acquisition of the foundation
Asta Gröting's sculpture group consists of life-size casts made of polyurethane and shows the beige underside of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's traveling carriage, Konrad Adenauer's Mercedes limousine in black and the artist's own smart, also made of black plastic. Lying flat on the ground, the wheels protrude into the room and provide an unusual view from above of the chassis, which is the supporting part of each vehicle.
The sculpture stimulates reflection on German history in a radical close-up view.
In Goethe's traveling carriage, Adenauer's Mercedes and my smart, Gröting deals with forms of craft and mechanical production and their transitions into digitalized and segmented work steps and addresses this decreasing tangibility through her end products. Here she recasts three bodies from three centuries as sculptures by encountering them from their interior, from the underside of the vehicles, from the imprint of their drive mechanisms, the visibility of their laws of motion. The forms she encounters are as if they were marked by their time; from what is lived in them as well as from how we look at them.
The view of Goethe's traveling carriage, a luxury car from the young Federal Republic, seems undiminishedly present today, but just as functional, like a miniature. Gröting brings him closer using his details. Its rubber molding shows that everything about it has been carefully crafted, that each part differs from the next in material and surface, that the vehicle was individually crafted by craftsmen and finally assembled. Today, you can only feel its form immaterially, only through a scan, in complete contrast to its counterpart, Gröting's own smart, which the artist tilted on its side in order to take a direct mold from its plastic shell. Everything craftsmanship has disappeared from it; its form is the disguise of a digital machine that cannot be individually grasped. Together with Adenauer's monstrous ship, a Mercedes from the 1950s, far from the cleaned shell of the smart, but just as far from Goethe's forged handicraft.
Gröting lays out a sculptural history of the movement. A story of travelers as well as producers, in which access to the material shifted radically, from the craftsmanship of shaping the material to the consumerist tangibility of its designed surfaces. Gröting, far from a nostalgia for past handwork, locates art as a place of rematerialization, where all times become starting points for realized sewing.
Gröting's work demonstrates sculptural spaces of experience as actual bodies, between lovers, relatives and cultural communities. The greatest possible closeness of two people in the silicone impression of their connected bodies, the stabilization of a family bond in the bronze top view of their heads and the rubber impressions of three means of transport since the initiation of national, German cultural history, are lined up here to form a haptic community of sculptures, which in a thin impression follow the Look for the uniqueness of the surfaces. Gröting's expanded shells create a kind of materialized aura of these bodies. The molded undersides of Goethe's traveling carriage, Adenauer's company car and her own smart, lie in the room like immobilized, mechanical animals, whose organic shells appear like the view of a past life, evidence of a past that is no longer tangible, a form of movement apart from the present. It is the created proximity of changing social forms of life, be it mechanical aids or the materialization of our personal bonds in love or family, that become tangible in Gröting's sculptures, relationships that we encounter here as bodies in space.
Britta Schmitz
