Vases holding fresh flowers placed neatly one beside the other in the Tobias Rehberger exhibition Home and Away and Outside. What’s the point?
Thaddeus Strode made a modest selection: twelve daisies. Rirkrit Tiravanija, in contrast, likes it more elaborate: he decided for twenty-one long-stemmed yellow roses, twenty-one blue and purple irises, and added to those twenty-one kumquats on skewers. Sharon Lockhart found a bouquet of white geraniums fitting. Tobias Rehberger asked fellow artists to send their favorite flowers to his gallery. His staff members them placed in them vases designed by Rehberger. He called them Porträtgefäße (portrait vases)—bulgy, angular, glass, extravagant, plain, garish, monochrome. In the first round, nine flower arrangements in vases were produced for an exhibition at the gallery, followed by more. That was in the nineties. Twenty years later, the concept and the formal language seem as fresh as they were then.
The title of the series of works, One, appear ironic in view of the aesthetic battle that flowers and vases fight and the heterogeneous image that the arrangements convey. The portrait develops between the familiar and the foreign, between pseudo-aesthetic features and a stylized artistic signature. It is actually no different in the case of a painted or photographed portrait. Only that Rehberger levers out the customary notion of representation. Charming, subtle, humorous. As a student of artists with a talented sense of humor such as Martin Kippenberger and Thomas Bayrle, he sucked in wit with his mother’s milk, so to speak.
What Makes Art Art?
The arrangements of flowers in vases radiate in glistening light against a white background. They brazenly oscillate between sacred and banal object, between art and everyday design. Rehberger plays with the tension between the disciplines and makes coy reference to the classic genre of the still life. The arrangements are not labeled. It becomes obvious to viewers that this is art, above all because they are in a gallery and meandering through a Rehberger exhibition. A vase as such is already a hybrid out of an object of daily use and a decorative object. Rehberger reinterprets their function with his concept of the “portrait vase.”
What makes art art? How does it originate? And what impact does art have in the space in which it is presented? Rehberger examines these questions in his work. What are otherwise plinths and seating cannot be distinguished in the exhibition architecture designed by the artist. The arrangements of flower vases are innocently placed among them. “Oh, how nice!” exclaim some of the visitors. Why not: visual stimuli are definitely justified, which is sometimes forgotten in an overly politicized and conceptualized art world.
Yet the arrangements would not be Rehberger’s if they were completely lacking a discourse. The art market also plays a role in the concept; the works are worth something because a successful artist created them. That is the element that connects the artists portrayed in 1995: all of them had already exhibited in the gallery for which Rehberger assembled the exhibition of the Porträtgefäße. At the time Wolfgang Tillmans chose pink roses, rather kitschy. Jest or serious? Whether or not they are actually his favorite flowers is uncertain and does not even matter. Besides purpose and representation, what Rehberger is scrutinizing in this series of works is our concept of identity. As for him, he also portrayed himself in the circle of his fellow artists: he opted for pink, orange, and red gerbera and put them in a crystal vase.