by Peter Chametzky
The
first book to examine multicultural visual art in Germany, discussing
more than thirty contemporary artists and arguing for a cosmopolitan
Germanness.
With
Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art, Peter Chametzky
presents a view of visual culture in Germany that leaves behind the
usual suspects--those artists who dominate discussions of contemporary
German art, including Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, and Rosemarie
Trockel--and instead turns to those artists not as well known outside
Germany, including Maziar Moradi, Hito Steyerl, and Tanya Ury. In this
first book-length examination of Germany's multicultural art scene,
Chametzky explores the work of more than thirty German artists who are
(among other ethnicities) Turkish, Jewish, Arab, Asian, Iranian, Sinti
and Roma, Balkan, and Afro-German.
With
a title that echoes Peter Gay's 1978 collection of essays, Freud, Jews
and Other Germans, this book, like Gay's, rejects the idea of "us" and
"them" in German culture. Discussing artworks in a variety of media that
both critique and expand notions of identity and community, Chametzky
offers a counternarrative to the fiction of an exclusively white,
Christian German culture, arguing for a cosmopolitan Germanness. He
considers works that deploy critical, confrontational, and playful uses
of language, especially German and Turkish; that assert the presence of
"foreign bodies" among the German body politic; that grapple with food
as a cultural marker; that engage with mass media; and that depict and
inhabit spaces imbued with the element of time.
American
discussions of German contemporary art have largely ignored the
emergence of non-ethnic Germans as some of Germany's most important
visual artists. Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art fills
this gap.
