High-Vis: Imi Giese's sculptures with luminescent paint at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1978

© 2017 Dr Amelia SullyIn this thesis, I focus on the exhibition of a series of five sculptures in ‘Rainer Giese: Selected Works’, the solo exhibition of postwar German artist Imi Giese at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1978. Giese had painted these wood and pressboard constructions of angles and geometric shapes with green and orange phosphorescent paint, a type of luminescent paint that emits light as an afterglow. At the Kunsthalle in 1978, these five sculptures were exhibited in the dark. As one critic described, the sculptures seemed to dematerialise. At the same time, another critic recognised that Giese’s works of art were made of everyday materials, which reasserted their materiality. In this thesis, I ask what the meaning of this simultaneous immateriality and materiality of the works was at the Kunsthalle in 1978. To answer this question, I draw on Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s strategy of counterpolitics in their political economy of labour power in History and Obstinacy. I argue that on the one hand, the phosphorescent colour of the works in the dark caused the effect of the sculptures’ dematerialisation. This abstraction of the works from three-dimensional painted wood and pressboard sculptures to two-dimensional geometrical notations reproduced capital’s logic of abstraction. On the other hand, the materiality of the works, which was based on the paint’s applications, one of which was its safety application, was also dialectical. It was safety technology and at the same time was a potential workplace health and safety hazard, and this opened onto another dialectic. As Marx showed in Capital, workplace health and safety regulations were the product of class struggle. The paint had the potential to be resistant to the same forces it reproduced in the seeming dematerialisation of the works, instantiating the counterpolitics of obstinacy that Kluge and Negt were writing about at the same time as the exhibition