Rudij Bergmann:
BORIS LURIE
TV-PORTRAIT IN GERMAN
SÜDWEST 3 TV | Screening on November 6, 1996 at 10.15 pm
MANUSCRIPT:
Boris Lurie - arrived in New York more than fifty years ago... In the luggage the oppressive burden of memories... of the younger sister, for example ... Present and past... Like her mother, her sister was deported by the Nazis in Riga in 1941. They too have a grave in the skies.
Boris Lurie... an art that has never been solely about art and that derives its aesthetic categories from the artist's many and contradictory experiences and whose timelessness is a current one.... What has happened has been: thus present.
The beautiful and the naked, scenes of torture and images of saints collaged into the panopticon of the respective present. And in detail the tiredly known male fantasies, from the beginning to all eternity oscillating between the woman as a vamp and as a bourgeois woman; who in the cold war year 1960 is not coincidentally called Mrs. Khrushcheva.
"Oh Mama Liberté" - Desperate and NO!art programmatic.... Political, expressive and in combination all-embracing pornographic.... and many a message... Like the one that behind every dominatrix - no matter if man or woman - lurks a concentration camp superintendent or vice versa... no matter ... Lurie's "Oh Mama Liberté" is still today as NO!art manifesto a social counter-attack.
Although Boris Lurie plays his dangerously ambiguous game with the voyeuristic, what remains is NO!art's artistic outcry with obscene means against the socially obscene, which makes everything and everyone available as a commodity and offers women as meat like any other, piece by piece, according to need.
Sexism with ulterior motive. A woman, equipped with the bucket as a bizarre headgear is reference that the Central European Jews in the Middle Ages had to wear pointed hats as a discriminatory marking. On the one hand. On the other hand, it brings to mind the German extermination camps, where Jewish prisoners were additionally humiliated with buckets as headgear, while standing guard until they fell down.... Painted in 1949 by Boris Lurie.
More radically than anyone else in this century, Boris Lurie has artistically manifested the simultaneity of events. The horror, the unimaginable paired with the full life, the pleasure with the horror.... And to banish the horror sought in the manner of conceptual art....
In the manner of the concentration camp pictures Boris Lurie 1963 shows other tortured. Women, of course. But their torturers are now those who give free rein to their lust for torture... The border between the different pleasure and torture chambers of the world is narrow... In pin-up girls, companions of every proper GI and truck driver in the prudish fifties-sixties, Boris Lurie recognized the "real America". But it is not about plump breasts. With Sex and Crime, the artist attacked those social perversions that led to the Vietnam War, to race riots and to the re-formation of a radical left... And the worldwide student battle cry "USA - SA - SS" has been slogan of the American NO!art artists, which was part of the New Left.
Bare-chested and politically radical. Always keen on the connection between sex and power, NO!art was and remains the real antagonist of the worldwide victorious Pop-Art... NO!art: an art that mercilessly goes against "good taste" and that still cannot be belittled culinary for museums and living rooms. Which is all well and good politically, but a pity for art's sake.
Survived, but homeless.... Boris Lurie ... A man who longs for Europe in the middle of Manhattan. An artist who has had too many homes to be at home anywhere.
About Rudij Bergmann: 1943 born in Bad Godesberg/Germany. Filmmaker, author, critic. He becames widely known for the cult series BergmannsART, then the only TV magazine on visual arts, which he made for the German SDR television channel. He has made several TV series for SWR/ARTE, including "Nackt ist die Kunst" and "Der Leonardo-Code", as well as documentaries on Wolf Vostell. Since 2009, Bergmann has produced his films under the BERGMANNsART label. Lives in Mannheim. — see more in German http://kulturportal-rn.de/seite/rudij-bergmann/
