Mary Bauermeister has died on March 2 at the age of 88, as confirmed by her son Simon Stockhausen to German press agency dpa.
She was considered the “mother of the Fluxus movement” — an art movement that broke with tradition, using Dadaist means to bring everyday life into art. Yet this categorization was not really fitting for the artist, who was born in Frankfurt on September 7, 1934.
“Fluxus didn’t even exist at the end of the 1950s,” she said in an interview in 2018. The term was not in circulation until 1963, when Fluxus festivals were being held in Düsseldorf and other cities across Germany. By then, Mary Bauermeister had already become a star in the US.
But before that, the art scene in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia was in turmoil. When she moved to Cologne at the age of 22 after studying art in Ulm and Saarbrücken, the city with the famous cathedral was still in the throes of Germany’s famous “economic miracle.” The last rubble fields caused by the war had just been cleared and women had been given equal rights by law.
Bauermeister’s studio turns into a meeting place for artists
The tall, blonde artist was exceptional. She disregarded norms. A trailblazer of her time, the young woman declared nature to be the material for her art, breaking with all prevailing genre boundaries.
In her famous “lens boxes,” dome-shaped pieces of glass, magnifying lenses and prisms merged together to form optically-distorted images and words that appeared to be magical structures.
After her arrival in Cologne, Mary Bauermeister soon became enthusiastic about the evolving New Music scene in the Rhineland.
Her attic apartment in the heart of the historical part of the city also served as her studio, while likewise developing into a meeting place for the international art and music avant-garde. Composers such as John Cage, David Tudor and La Monte Young gave their first concerts there at Mary Bauermeister’s invitation.
Cologne — a magnet for the international avant-garde
The public West German Broadcasting (WDR), with its radio station and renowned studio for electronic music, was a magnet for musicians from all over the world.
In addition, the International Society for New Music (IGNM) hosted a festival in the city. In the evenings, after various WDR events, an international audience and artists from all over Europe and the US used to gather in Mary Bauermeister’s studio, where a “counter-festival” was held, featuring many artists who had been rejected by the official IGNM jury.
Between March 1960 and October 1961, legendary exhibitions took place in Bauermeister’s apartment in addition to concerts. Fluxus stars such as Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik and Christo performed or exhibited their works in the “Bauermeister Studio.” The “Light Ballet” by Zero artist Otto Piene premiered with Mary Bauermeister’s support. Her studio was a hub of creativity and free-thinking.
Radical new beginning in art after the Nazi era
“All the greats slept on my mattresses — John Cage, Christo, writer Hans G. Helms, pianist David Tudor and Korean composer Nam June Paik, who is regarded as the inventor of video art,” Bauermeister, who was active through her old age, recalled in an interview. What she shared with her companions was a zest for improvisation.
She said her perspective on life was in reaction to Germany’s National Socialist past: “People murdering Jews during the day while listening to Beethoven in the evening made us suspicious. So, we loved everything that was radical and broke with the past,” said Bauermeister.
She was not only a hostess in a male-dominated avant-garde movement, but also constantly developed her own installations made of mirrors, sculptures made of fluorescent tubes or “writing pictures.” She created spirals of polished pebbles, which made her famous in the US in the 60s. She experimented with patched sheets that she mounted on light boxes. Ciphers, signs and text fragments from science, philosophy and mathematics, music and art formed the basis for her drawings, collages and objects.
Marriage with Karlheinz Stockhausen
During a composition course in Darmstadt, Bauermeister met composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. In 1962, they exhibited together in Amsterdam — Bauermeister’s first museum exhibition. A year later, she moved to New York, where she her prisms and lens boxes sold at top prices in galleries. A closer look at her glass spheres reveals notes by John Cage or Mary Bauermeister’s autobiographical texts.
In 1967, Mary Bauermeister married Karlheinz Stockhausen. Before that, the two lived for several years under one roof with Stockhausen’s first wife Doris in a ménage-à-trois relationship. Bauermeister had two of her four children with Stockhausen.
She wrote a book about this time, which was published in 2011 entitled “Ich hänge im Triolengitter: Mein Leben mit Karlheinz Stockhausen” (Hanging in a Triplet Grid: My Life with Karlheinz Stockhausen).
While the Museum of Modern Art already exhibited her works in the 1990s, Germany was for a long time more hesitant with the artist Mary Bauermeister. She was only rediscovered a few years ago in her home country, with her works being exhibited in German museums.
She continued to work in her house near Cologne, creating geometric shapes in the form of snails and pyramids from stones that had been smoothed by the sea. She also continued to create her pictures made of delicately arranged bit of straw, painted over with phosphorus paint, a technique she had already begun to employ back in 1958. In her house in Forsbach, she regularly held Sunday matinees in which she talked to interested people about her eventful life.
This article was originally written in German.
Article source: https://www.dw.com/en/avant-garde-pioneer-artist-mary-bauermeister-has-died/a-64866391?maca=en-rss-en-ger-1023-xml-atom