Beyond the Fringe, Art and Auction
German collector Harald Falckenberg isn’t shy about pushing the limits. He’s on a mission to bring thought-provoking, even transgressive, artists into the mainstream. By Bettina von Hase
A THUNDERSTORM BROKE as I was heading from the airport toward the outskirts of Hamburg-Harburg in Germany to visit the Phoenix rubber factory. Besides making hoses and shock absorbers, it is home to the Kulturstiflung Phoenix Art-Sammlung Falckenberg (Phoenix Art Foundation - Falckenberg Collection), one of Europe's most important contemporary art collections. Owner Harald Falckenberg comes to meet me on the factory's third floor. charging through the well-proportioned rooms—part gallery, part storage space – he has leased from the company. He seizes my suitcase, and we pile into his water-drenched car (he forgot to close the windows) to visit the opening of British artist Sarah Lucas's show at the downtown Hamburger Kunstverein, the art association, founded in 1816, of which Falckenberg has been chairman for seven years.
Falckenberg is a larger-than-life personality, a man of burly physique, voracious intellect and baroque eating habits. A former lawyer, he trained in Hamburg, where he was born, then in Berlin and Freiburg, always at the top of his class. The 62-year-old collector started making his fortune 30 years ago at Elaflex, a company that produces fittings and automatic nozzles used to fill cars with gas, and which he now runs full-time as president. He is that rare phenomenon, a truly authentic collector who is dedicated to art rather than addicted to the art world lifestyle.
He started acquiring art at the age of 50, and today his holdings comprise 1,600 works spanning the early 1960s to the present. With no restrictions as to materials, formats or media, it's a collection that is hard-hitting, even brutal. Falckenberg likes his artists uncompromisingly avant-garde. “It’s about the attempt to free yourself from having to make art for others, making it for yourself instead,” he says of the artistic spirit he admires. He cites infantilism as one of his favourite subjects in art – “because I believe that nearly all artists are infantile, both in the bad and the good sense.”
The Falckenberg collection examines personal identity, life on the edge and the decline of values. It celebrates the marginal and the grotesque. “I don't care too much about liking or not liking,” he says. “The most important aspect of collecting for me is to get into the processes of thinking, to enter discourses with yourself and other people. I collect art that enables this - critical, satirical, cynical art. Art of resistance, not sublime art. It has to do with humour as well. It may also be a mirror of my own personality. Perhaps if you’re collector like me, you don't need to lie on a couch before a psychiatrist.”
The collection is built on in-depth groupings of 11 artists (with more than 25 works by each of them). Falckenberg started with four Germans: Werner Buttner, Georg Herold, Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen – “Die Wilden” (“the wild ones”) of the early ‘80s. Then came their U.S. counterparts, John Baldessari, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Richard Prince; and later, three others “who put the incidental and playful at the centre of their art,” political Pop artist Oyvind Fahlstrom, conceptualist Dieter Roth and sculptor-installationist Franz West. To this core group, Falckenberg has added young artists who work in the same spirit, such as John Bock, Jonathan Meese, Jason Rhoades and Ena Swansea. And he collects their predecessors as well, from Vito Acconci and the Situationist guru Guy Debord to the Vienna Actionists and the Fluxus group, pioneers of performance and body art in the ‘60s.
“The most important aspect of collecting for me is to get into the processes of thinking”
Falckenberg reads and writes about art obsessively, his prodigious intellect working in tandem with his compulsive nature. “He has an astonishing range of knowledge for a collector,” says Zdenek Felix, an independent curator and former director of the Deichtorhallen exhibition space for photography. “He really studies, like a student, whole mountains of literature marked with coloured pens and Post-it notes.
Felix has curated a show juxtaposing two collections, Falckenberg’s and that of Munich-based Ingvild Goetz, which will run from November 4 through April 30, 2006 at Phoenix Art's temporary exhibition space. Titled “Goetz Meets Falckenberg,” it is Falckenberg's latest effort to introduce important private collections to the public (including those of Emanuel Hoffmann-Stiftung, Ileana Sonnabend and Anna and Josef Froehlich) and to bring greater recognition to such artists as Vienna Actionist (and convicted paedophile) Otto Muhl and political billboardist Klaus Staeck.
Phoenix Art has 27,000 square feet devoted to temporary exhibitions (which amount to two or three a year) and 38,000 square feet for “laboratory space.” In the latter venue, Falckenberg has created a kind of intimate creative workshop, overseen by him and curator Martje Schulz. Walking around the Phoenix with Falckenberg, I am struck by the effortless flow of the space, a series of long and short views, diagonal perspectives, intimate areas for drawings and cavernous ones for the large installations.
The juxtapositions illuminate the meaning of often difficult works in new and provocative ways. The figures in McCarthy's Skunks, from 1993, With their grins and pink phalluses, stand like sentinels to announce a large-scale Meese oil of a figure lying in an egglike form; Kippenberger and Oehlen paintings lead to a large Meese bronze, The Propagandist, from 2005. The grotesque sculpture straight out of Hieronymus Bosch—half-man, half-beast with an overabundance of penises—dominates the space. Falckenberg pats it like an old friend. His interest in historical developments underpins the feeling that what his collection is really saying is that the marginal has a dignity all its own. “Art has to be seen in the context of a society, psychoanalysis, politics and history. There is no art in itself. Art always relates to something," he says.
Dominating the top floor of Phoenix Art is a large-scale Jason Rhoades - Paul McCarthy collaboration, Propposition, from 1999, which Falckenberg commissioned. A hole in the floor (part of the installation) enables the visitor to peep through the level below. Otherwise, this is a chaotic, cut-off world of consumer detritus, mesmerising and somewhat menacing, almost like a terrorist’s hideout. The claustrophobic sense of nightmare is alleviated only by stepping onto a balcony at the far end that offers a view of factory rooftops.
Falckenberg's decision to collect was the result of a “positive midlife crisis” – after so many years in business, he needed creative stimulation. He had no great master plan but let the collection develop organically with the help of such art world figures as Felix, artist Werner Buttner, Dusseldorf dealer Hans Mayer and New York dealer David Zwirner. While he keeps in close contact with them, his decisions are clearly his own. A work of art has to “irritate” him and hold its own against the other art in his collection to stand a chance of being acquired. He buys mostly from galleries and dealers, rarely at and never directly from the artists themselves. “l try to maintain a critical distance both from the art and the artist,” Falckenberg says.
“The more freedom you have from considerations of market value, the better your collection”
He admits he made mistakes at the beginning, buying well-known artists like Warhol at prices which were too high even then. “Buying too late is a big fault in collecting,” he notes. But the downturn of the market in the early ‘90s helped him acquire works he would later go on to sell for a 10-fold profit. Indeed, his core artists are now so expensive that he could hardly afford them if he had to pay today’s prices. But market values are of little interest to Falckenberg, despite his business acumen. “The more freedom you have from considerations of market value, the more successful your collection,” he says. “Good quality should be the only criterion, and if you choose well, it has an effect on its financial worth.”
Above all, Falckenberg's aim is “to discover something new or rediscover something old.” The “something old” is also in evidence at his apartment in central Hamburg. For a man of his means, it is surprisingly modest in size and luxurious comforts, though not in the art on displav. He keeps single works by artists he no longer collects because they are too expensive. For example, he has a 1965 Gerhard Richter piece, Ohne Titel (Rohre) or “Untitled (Tube),” in his living room. Nam June Paik’s 1994 installation Video Scooter stands in his study; a 1998 Peter Kogler installation of printed paper graces the hall; Mike Kelley's suspended soft toys, Plush Kundalini, from 1987, reside in the drawing room. The apartment exudes erudition and calm, in contrast to the cacophony at the Phoenix. Falckenberg lives with great art the way people live with Ikea furniture. It's not elevated, but enjoyed and used to further his knowledge and experience.
He has donated works to several including the Kunsthalle Hamburg and the museum of visual arts in Leipzig, and has helped put his native city on the art map. In the long term, Falckenberg says, he might start a foundation to keep the collection as an independent entity linked to a national or international institution. He does not want to compete with museums, nor is he interested in building a personal monument. The pleasure is in learning more about oneself, not unlike the motivation of the artists he collects. “What I love about art collecting,” says Falckenberg, “s that it makes you much more aware of yourself, and of the time you spend on this earth.”
