In Goslar, the town of 50,000 in the northern Harz region of Lower Saxony, is proud of its ancient traditions. This year marks the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the city. The old town with its listed half-timbered houses, churches and secular buildings is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Rammelsberg watches over the city, at the foot of which the Salian emperors set up an imposing palace in the 11th century. Ore has also been mined in Goslar’s local mountain since at least that time. The deposit has only been largely exploited since the 1990s and is now a museum for the mining tradition and also a world heritage site. The Goslar Kaiserring, a gold-set aquamarine with the engraved portrait of Emperor Heinrich IV, has a history of just under fifty years and is awarded with the holy earnestness, as if the Canossa walker had worn it on his finger himself.
In 1974, the window manufacturer Peter Schenning had the idea of bringing his city, which was very much stuck in the past, up to date. He founded an association to promote modern art and donated a prize that was intended to do without any prize money. Goldsmith Hadfried Rinke designed a ring and Henry Moore was the first artist to be honored with it in 1975. He was joined by an illustrious array of figures in international contemporary art. Max Ernst got the Kaiserring, Joseph Beuys of course, Georg Baselitz even two years before Gerhard Richter. Rebecca Horn was the first woman to be allowed to wear the piece of jewelry, soon followed by Cindy Sherman and Katharina Sieverding. Matthew Barney has one, and Wolfgang Tillmans, as well as Rosemarie Trockel and Isa Genzken. And since last weekend, the British video artist Isaac Julien has also been able to call himself a bearer of the Kaiserring.
The presentation of the Goslar Kaiserring follows a strict protocol. The winner is always chosen at the beginning of the year, but then has to wait until a Friday in October. First he has to face the press, then the questions of the students of the almost 500-year-old Ratsgymnasium. This is followed by the festive imperial meal in the Great Holy Cross, a former hospice from 1256, which is interrupted by three after-dinner speeches “About dealing with modern art”. The ritual ends with the singing of the Steigerlied to commemorate the miners’ work. On Saturday, the chairman of the jury, which is made up of top-class art historians, holds the laudatory speech for the prizewinner and as a kind of crowning finale comes the ceremonial award of the Kaiserring in the Kaisersaal of the Kaiserpfalz – by the Mayor of Goslar, who can at least feel appropriately weighed down by the weight of her council chain .
Knighted
Part of tradition is that they are broken. In recent years, for example, the conceptual artists Barbara Kruger and Adrian Piper have shown themselves to be unwieldy and demure prizewinners. Isaac Julien, on the other hand, presented the best of British manners. After all, he has already endured completely different ceremonies: He was appointed Commander of the Empire by Prince Charles and “Royal Academician” by the venerable London Academy of Art. Last summer he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II during her Platinum Jubilee. Sir Isaac Julien could dare to do what no prizewinner had dared to do at the Goslar Imperial Meal: he grabbed the microphone.
Isaac Julien
What: Thierry Bal
And because a lot of words had already been lost – speakers unfortunately rarely keep to the required brevity of a traditional dinner speech – he addressed the audience very sympathetically, thanked them for their goodwill and immediately passed the microphone on to Christian Holze, this year’s Kaiserring scholarship holder. Isaac Julien had the feeling that there should be celebrations here under the sculpture of Christ on the cross.
Because after Andreas Beitin, the director of the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, as the first speaker, had mainly done advertising for his own exhibition “Empowerment” and the audience was still wondering what he might have meant by “planetary feminism” and what role “non-humane Living beings” may play in it, a top dog from Goslar, who was born in Goslar, appeared as the second table speaker: Sigmar Gabriel. The former Federal Foreign Minister drew attention to Kassel, almost 100 kilometers to the south-west, and his ongoing outrage. If you invite a politician this year to talk about dealing with modern art, then he “would not be able to avoid a critical examination of Documenta 15”.
Do something outrageous
What followed was a clear reckoning with the many people responsible for the Kassel anti-Semitism scandal, which had shaken the public: “Neither the mayor of the city of Kassel, Christian Geselle, as chairman of the documenta, nor the selection committee that set up the Indonesian artist collective ‘Ruangrupa’ as artistic suggested direction, or ‘Ruangrupa’ itself,” says Gabriel, “found the courage to do what was appropriate: to share responsibility for the massive damage to one of the world’s most important exhibitions of contemporary art.” That Gabriel The basic law was then declared and how the freedom of art in Article 5 competed with the inviolability of human dignity in Article 1 was a very controversial topic for the audience – especially the numerous art historians, curators and museum people who had gathered – until late in the evening. Because in Gabriel’s view, there would have been “quite justifiable reasons to do something outrageous: namely to exercise censorship.”
Isaac Julien politely ignored this policy claim, which was often seen as an affront, to contain art. Finally, Gabriel praised the winner for his impressive examination of topics such as “immigration, confrontation with new cultures, the absorption of foreign cultures and the confrontation with fears”. At the Documenta, on the other hand, individual artistic achievement was collectivized and with it the question of who “takes responsibility for the success or failure of this idea”.
It was not without a certain irony that the next day a black Briton, who grew up in London’s East End as the eldest of five children in a family of immigrants from the Caribbean and has been working with post-colonial themes in his video installations for decades, was given the prize ring in front of a Prussian spiked helmet backdrop of all places. Like many a stately legacy from the Middle Ages, the Goslar Palatinate was given a Germanic twist by the Hohenzollerns, here with the wall paintings by Hermann Wislicenus created in the 1880s. And so this year Isaac Julien stood in front of the monumental triptych “Apotheosis of the founding of the empire” with Kaiser Wilhelm I and his heir to the throne Friedrich III. on horseback, flanked by the Staufer Barbarossa and by the Imperial Chancellor Bismarck on foot.
At the Documenta 11 in 2002, the artist was celebrated for his triptych “Paradise Omeros”. The three-channel video installation transferred the three-wing devotional image into film art. In opulent images, Isaac Julien travels back and forth between his family roots on the island of St. Lucia and his youth in England, between the ambivalences of a double identity.
The elegiac video “True North” from 2004 also takes up the structure of the triptych and tells the story of the African-American polar explorer Matthew Henson, who was part of the expedition that first reached the North Pole, but who never achieved fame because of the color of his skin , which was due to him. The postcolonial cultural theory of the “Black Atlantic”, which contrasts white western nationalism with the transnational consciousness of the black diaspora in Africa, has probably never been interpreted more appealingly in art than in the work of Isaac Julien.
Julien is now showing two films that were made thirty years apart in the Mönchehaus Museum in Goslar. In 1989’s “Looking for Langston,” a gay community of black and white men flirt and dance at a swanky nightclub until they are broken up by a right-wing thug and brutal cops. The film is dedicated to the writer Langston Hughes, whose poem “I, Too, Sing America” became a slogan of the civil rights movement.
In 2019 Julien directed the film “Lessons of the Hour”, which re-enacts episodes from the life of former slave and freedom fighter Frederick Douglass in tableaux vivants. These two works also have that engaging aesthetic that visually flatters the viewer in order to subtly send their political message.
Isaac Julien: North Star (Lessons of the Hour), 2019 Framed photograph on matte archival paper, mounted on aluminum
Quelle: saac Julien Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro
One can assume that Isaac Julien was also awarded the Kaiserring because the jury judged this artistic lifetime achievement to be an all-round success. At least that’s how you could understand the laudatory speech by long-standing jury chairman and video art expert Wulf Herzogenrath. He now handed over the chair of the committee to Marion Ackermann, Director General of the Dresden State Art Collections.
She emphasized the importance of tradition and ritual to culture. However, for the success of the art, Ackermann said – in a concluding speech to the Goslar event, which is to be understood as a replica of Sigmar Gabriel’s statement and which was probably not intended in the ceremonial – the artists must absolutely be allowed to fail.