Review
“Acknowledging these and introducing other threads, the context-specific exhibition project PARTS (1997), by Fareed Armaly (fig. 1)—one of the main protagonists of the Conceptual, critical deconstruction—diagrammed the magnified spaces and history of the Kunstverein from its early days as part of a bourgeois Aufklärungs-milieu [Enlightment-social environment] and Gesellschaft des Geschmacks [Society of Good Taste cfr title by Andrea Fraser], leading to the postwar relocation and the re-foundation of society, up to the post-totalitarianism utopian projections. From the introduction of a national television network, to the tensegrity structures of Frei Otto and its landscaped roofs for the 1972 Olympic stadium, to that of the reception and distribution of German electronic music, Armaly drew patterns of correlations. Armaly’s previous knowledge of the local art world through his and Michael Krebber’s input in the Buck-Nagel Galerie (which later mutated into Christian Nagel Galerie)—a space considered as a formative for a renewed methodology associated with the institutional critique of American Fine Arts Gallery in New York—stemmed from this reflection on relations and aspirations. The information on the multitude of relations was printed onto cardboard sheets and folded into empty containers that formed building blocks, creating the shape of a monumental column mimicking the neoclassical arcade below. The formal continuity and technological discontinuity allegorized the aversions to ruptures with the past and the aspirations of continuity of traditional forms for future generations.
This longing for historical continuity after the 15-year usurpation of the public sphere also marks a skeptical attitude toward genuine disruption, a concept of philosophy of history that Armaly’s project formulates in a completely different form from that of Rüdiger Schöttle’s legendary Theatergarten Bestiarium, which associated Bavarian rococo delusions with the Postmodern simulacra theory.”
(Excerpt)