The Train at the End of the Tunnel

Art takes time. Endless back-and-forth wanderings through buildings, bungalows, basements, hotels, houses, homes, and graveyards literal and psychic.

In prison, people do time. Trying to find escape routes or places to stay.

Thomas Schütte and I are almost the same (biological) age. The same generation, so to speak. Often invited to participate in the same (thematic) group shows in the 1990s. It took various journeys through the years for me to appreciate his art.

October 1987 was the first time I saw his work in person, at Museum Overholland in Amsterdam. A solo show: Aquarellen. I did not know what to do with it. Here was a young, serious, German artist making sweet, colorful pictures of fruit. The black lemon was something I could understand, but pleasant slices of watermelons and potatoes? No.

Being familiar with the figurative drawings of the Italians of the Transavanguardia, like Francesco Clemente (shown at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1980), did not help me understand Schütte’s aquarellen any better; instead, they put me on the wrong track. The Italians clearly wanted to seduce viewers with their elegance and charm. Thomas did not. Or did he? Perhaps he was like a child pulling a yellow daisy apart around its small dark heart, petal by petal, saying, “Love me, love me not.”

In 1990, he had an exhibition titled Jokes. But Thomas does not want to make you laugh too loud.

Looking now at the invitation card for his show Dürer (at Galerie Nelson in Paris in 2002), so many years later, I smile with delight. Delicately etched lines forming a hare sit upright with the word Dürer below. The image is so simple in its linearity, yet it offers a pool of associations to drown in. There are the memories of Joseph Beuys performing How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare (1965). There is Dürer’s Hase (1502), whose posture reminds me of the prints of Dürer’s Praying Hands (1508) that were found in all the places with the wrong political views—and the power—in the South Africa I grew up in. There is Thomas Schütte himself, steeped in history of all kinds.

In December 1987, we were both in the group show called Nachtvuur (Nightfire) at De Appel, Amsterdam. Thomas showed three drawings titled Weinende Frauen (Weeping Women).

Exhibition invitation for Thomas Schütte: Dürer, Galerie Nelson, Paris, September 21–November 8, 2002. Pictured: Quengelware Nr. 40 from Quengelware. 2002. Etching on paper

The first time I met Thomas Schütte was in 1991 in Kassel.

The Belgian Jan Hoet (1936–2014) had arranged a meeting with a group of artists to talk about their participation in Documenta 9, of which he was the director.

Looking back on these discussions, Hoet said that Thomas was the most difficult of those assembled, almost at times like a psychiatric case. In approaching his contribution, Thomas started not with the concept of the show, nor with the choice of artists, but rather with the building, as he said to Jan Hoet: “You have to understand that Documenta is a building. What is most important about a building? The entrance door. If you don’t know what you want to do with the entrance, you should not want to make Documenta!”¹

Hoet understood Schütte and appreciated him dearly. He felt that, like most of his favorite artists in the show, Schütte started with his own pathology and from there captured the melancholy of the whole universe. And like all good art, his work is more than mere sentiment. It is a complex embodiment of contradictions.

Thomas had his doubts and criticisms about the workings of these much-too-large art shows, but he did participate. In 1992, at Documenta 9, Thomas Schütte installed his now-famous forlorn-looking group of brightly colored ceramic figures Die Fremden (The Strangers) above the entrance of the neoclassical former Rotes Palais building on the Friedrichsplatz. It set the tone for the whole exhibition, as if the fugitive or lost peoples of the world displaced the gods that once ruled here.

In 1996, Thomas and I met again, this time in the United States because of a group show called Distemper: Dissonant Themes in the Art of the 1990s at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The American politics of the day were very present. Mike Kelley and Thomas eventually engaged in a lively late-night bar discussion on public sculpture. Kelley said it could not or should not be done anymore; Schütte disagreed. Unfortunately, due to too much drinking, I can’t remember how the argument ended, but I believe it went unresolved.

It is worth noting, though, that in the year before he died, Kelley created Mobile Homestead, a near-exact replica of his childhood home in Detroit that was his first, last, and only public-art project.

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of Thomas Schütte today.

The exhibition Thomas Schütte is on view at MoMA September 29, 2024–January 18, 2025.