The man with the imposing biceps crying bitterly, a whole towel he’s holding in his face, while he lets the tears flow. Who will receive the image of the African-American in the entrance to this exhibition, to understand this is perhaps, inevitably, as a gesture of empathy with the Black-Lives-Matter-movement – and is no longer with questions about the rather modest quality of painting. In the retrospective of the work of John Miller in Berlin at the Schinkel pavilion, you can meet and then more wine at the end of people of white skin color can’t hide their dismay, what also always. Also, you are almost desperate and, in turn, in a sympathetically spoken, naturalistic style painted, you can imagine accomplished.
Miller painted these snapshots more than ten years ago, it originated after the American Reality TV Shows, in which citizens of all Stripes to spread your life in front of the eyes of the Public, but also to demonstrate and expose her to leave, which the New York-and Berlin-based artist bespiegelt a media cynicism that is in the middle of the modern media society – ultimately to all of us, not to individual groups. In this respect, he commented, with the moderate grade of the painting and a meager social Status quo. “A Holiday in Other People’s Misery” called the Miller, his sarcastic series of works from 2009.
Then a few steps further and hangs there, a large, brown ball from the ceiling, it is with a lot of small figurines populated and in turn triggers an associative Reflex: Just as the Coronavirus is from the looks, from afar, at,. Clear – the whole world is here represented in the pandemic. But this plant has not to do with the global plight of the presence of the cause nothing, Miller created his “World Without End” in 1989, perhaps as a reaction to the end of the Iron curtain, but in the view of a world in the clamp of the disease.
we Have not learned, however, that relevant art creates ambiguous images that must be read by each new Generation and designed? Actually, it does, but then we are very close to an understanding of art as a high culture, of the contemporary art reserved and, at least, not the suspect wants to expose to a classical Canon to continue to write. The 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio-born artist, author and musician, and under the ominous ball in a little appetizing brown (the alludes, so to speak, the opposite of chocolate) is the solution because it is also a clear and pithy: “NO”. As a walk-in carpet, the two letters are in uppercase to the feet; with categorical no Miller quoted quite bluntly, a collective of artists of the sixties from New York named “No!Type” which used the art of Negation – and in 1964, even with an artist much acclaimed “Shit Show” circles of attention made.
At the same time, Miller continues with his art: His works describe the socio-economic, and ecological lines of conflict, the move, approaching and crossing, which will remain flexible and readable. At the same time, Miller consistently seeks the complicity with all that has contributed in the past fifty years, a noble concept of established art in an intelligent way, to undermine or to re-encode. That is why he is appreciated as an artist artist. The sixties are to be Canon, here are his classics, with whom he conducts a constant dialogue to be found.
The Berlin-based retrospective worthy of his OEuvre, the first in Germany, would have a larger institutional framework, witnessed but on the other hand, the yield of a smaller exhibition can be. Miller has been with the decades as a master of a disposable culture, for which he has developed in painting, sculpture, and object is a pretty distinctive foul language.
