THIS IS TOMORROW – a tour

»Do women have to be naked to get into the Met Museum?« asked the Guerrilla Girls back in 1985. This provocative question highlights that Western artists have often degraded the female body to a mere projection surface for centuries, while works by female artists remain underrepresented in museums.

The works exhibited in this room critically engage with the human body and its societal ascriptions. Artists such as Anys Reimann, Deborah Roberts, and Eleanor Antin comment on the conservative and conformist image of women, often in a humorous or ironic manner, and present counter-narratives to conventional portraiture. Anys Reimann uses collage techniques to assemble faces and bodies fragmentarily, conveying dynamic concepts of identities. The artist duo Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg also challenges social norms and gender stereotypes in their video work »Damaged Goods«.

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War, violence, and death are intrinsic to human existence, and since the dawn of artistic creation, their depiction and processing have been central themes for numerous artists – right up to the present day. Some, like the artist Käthe Kollwitz, have captured the immediate effects of war, loss, and social injustice in their works in very personal ways. Kollwitz’s expressionist prints and drawings are powerful manifestations of human suffering and the fight against oppression. Others, such as the Mexican installation artist Teresa Margolles or the painter Norbert Bisky, confront us on a metaphorical level with the physical and emotional consequences of drug violence or the experiences of a terrorist attack, thus highlighting the multifaceted nature of violence as a current global phenomenon: from physical brutality to more subtle, psychological forms. Every artistic engagement with violence connects to a shared experience, a collective knowledge of loss, death, and mourning. No depiction leaves viewers untouched, but will always evoke a personal emotion.

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Climate change is the greatest challenge of our time. As early as the 1970s, environmentalists warned of the dramatic consequences of global warming, and today’s generations are feeling its direct impact on their lives in many places. 

From the immediate present, the focus shifts to the future, raising the urgent question: What will our world look like tomorrow? This fundamental question has occupied artistic discourses for decades. Over 50 years ago, the Japanese-American artist Yoko Ono questioned in »Air Dispenser« the future availability of resources that had previously been unlimited and free. In 2019, Hito Steyerl used artificial intelligence to generate a garden of the future, »Power Plants«, which carries both utopian and dystopian features and ironically questions the credibility of AI. Cy Twombly’s »Natural History«, in which he replaces natural history with a fictional order of his individual worldview, gains new relevance through climate change deniers who dispute scientifically proven facts.

The works on display criticise current ecological and social conditions and challenge us to reflect on our role in possible futures, as well as our personal and collective responsibility in a human-altered environment.

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In the 20th century, artists began exploring new forms of interaction with the audience by allowing their works to be participated in or used. The creative exchange and collaboration between artists and the audience came to the forefront. Between 1979 and 1998, the poet and action artist Dieter Roth conceived his »Bar 0« as a place of encounter and shared experience. By inviting us as guests to sit at the table, he breaks with the traditional, distanced way of viewing and creates a new, more active form of reception. Similarly, the South Korean installation artist Haegue Yang invites the audience to experience her hemisphere made of bells and knobs in motion. Through active interaction, the installation unfolds a new visual and acoustic dimension and encourages playful discovery.

The French media artist Clément Cogitore deliberately incorporates elements and materials from various cultural-historical contexts and deconstructs them to assign new meanings. His video work is based on the baroque opera ballet »Les Indes galantes« (1735) by the French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau. Rameau took inspiration from the dances of different indigenous people and incorporated their rhythms and movements into his composition. Instead of resorting to colonialist stereotypes, Cogitore’s video features young people dancing to Rameau’s music in the K.R.U.M.P. dance style. This style emerged in response to the violent riots in Los Angeles in 1992 following the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King case. The intercultural dialogue between established tradition and contemporary expression shows that the boundaries between different cultures are permeable, allowing for new forms of togetherness to emerge.

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Everyday objects, advertisements, and mass media continue to serve as central sources of inspiration for artists who comment on the superficiality and consumerism of society and expose the underlying capitalist mechanisms. For example, American artist Jeff Koons uses iconic figures like the Hulk from the eponymous comic to question the commercialization of pop culture and the trivialization of hero images. Similarly, German sculptor Katharina Fritsch alters mass-produced plaster Madonna figures, which, with their yellow colouring, resemble supermarket goods, and questions the commercialization of religion and spirituality.

They continue an artistic tradition established by figures such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein in the USA in the early 1960s. These artists appropriated motifs from advertisements or comics and often reproduced them through screen-printing, echoing the mass dissemination of images in pop culture. In doing so, they offered an artistic response to the then-dominant abstract painting post-World War II, which reached its peak with the large-format paintings of Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman at the »documenta II« in Kassel in 1959. The works exhibited here reflect the zeitgeist of pop culture and established a new form of artistic expression.

In Europe, many younger artists increasingly turned to figurative representations, including Maria Lassnig, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter in German-speaking regions. Political and social themes, shaped by the experiences of World War II and the political tensions of the Cold War, found diverse expression in the works of Ulrike Ottinger or A.R. Penck. They critically questioned the influence of the media and the increasing permeation of life by consumerism, politics, and advertising. In doing so, they posed questions about the authenticity and value of art in a world shaped by commerce.

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Marcel Duchamp, often considered a pioneer of conceptual art, radically expanded the notion of what art can be with his ready-mades. By assigning new interpretations and contexts to everyday objects, such as a bottle rack, he laid the foundation for an art form where the idea behind an object holds more significance than the object itself.

Conceptual art shifts the focus from the actual execution of an artwork to the artistic idea. The works displayed here stimulate a dialogue about the boundaries and definitions of art. Originating from the Minimal Art of the 1960s, conceptual art has significantly influenced the development of contemporary art. A crumpled piece of paper as a work of art? The question »What is art?« shapes artistic production, and the media, themes, and artistic processes used are open for discussion.

The works on display challenge us to develop our own interpretations and question the value and meaning of the artworks. Here, conceptual art does not appear as a mere collection of objects but as a space for discussion and reflection, encouraging us to think beyond the confines of traditional aesthetics and understand art as a dynamic, discursive field centred on ideas.

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