It would probably be a commonplace to say that Martin Honert is a private person. It seems that anyone who knows anything about the artist knows that. But anyone who has only seen his work might be surprised to learn quite how private he is. This is not because of the work's subject matter, but because of its presentation, which is so smoothly and so effectively realised that it takes a step away from the private individual and succeeds in becoming worldly.
For about twenty years Honert has produced a relatively small number of extremely resonant pieces. Largely made in three-dimensions, they work as images; images which are transferred from the artist's past into our present. They are, in this sense, literally iconic.
If Honert's motivation is primarily to capture and fix the spaces and sentiments of his childhood, his work is nonetheless rooted in a sophisticated manipulation of visual means. His sensitive co-relation of how we remember images from the past, and how we make them, gives his work its poignant combination of innocence and experience.
Martin Honert's siblings were so much older than him that he effectively grew up alone. His brother was ten years older, and as a child Honert wanted to be like his brother. This meant that he wanted to go to the boarding school where his brother had gone, and so he was sent there of his own accord. The six years which Honert spent at this boys' boarding school, from 1965-1970, have provided the visual framework for this exhibition, and indeed for much of Honert's work more generally.
The school was a catholic school, but a moderate one. Contrary, perhaps, to our expectations of how a catholic boys' boarding school might have provoked a boy to become an artist, Honert speaks of the school as middle-of-the-road, and his dominant memory as boredom. Perhaps then we need to understand his imagery as the result of long periods of unchanging routine. These are the conditions which work their way into our unconscious, and which, moreover, give us occasion to dream.
Very little material evidence survives from the artist's schooldays. He has a handful of photographs and a page from a school prospectus. His work, then, is partly an exercise in providing the missing documentation. It is so meticulously realised, and so punctilious, that we might be forgiven for taking it at face value. In fact Honert works from the slightest of clues – rather like a forensic scientist – to build up as convincing a picture as possible of a place where he spent great swathes of time, all those years ago.
The prospectus represents the boys' bedroom as utilitarian but pleasant enough. Each room had five beds and two wardrobes. The plain windows, with inset radiators below, are typical of post-war German buildings. The plants and pictures shown on the prospectus did not survive the transposition into everyday reality. A surviving snap, taken by a classmate, shows the young Honert in his pyjamas, carrying a section of his striped mattress, watched by a teacher and set against a roughly textured wallpaper. This is the partial evidence which provides the basic information on which Honert builds his case.
When we see Honert's Schlafsaal we think of night. It is night when we sleep and the room seems to be dark. But a closer inspection reveals inconsistencies. The bed is not made up. The room is empty, and may indeed be uninhabited. Perhaps for some time. And in the night-time gloom the furniture is glowing. Is this a boyhood fantasy? The truth is both more mundane and more resonant. We are looking at a scene in negative, and in a period negative, in the Kodak colour negative film of the 1960s.
We know how negatives work, even if we rarely see them nowadays. Everything that is brightest – the window, the sun on the carpet – becomes black; those things that are dull start to glow; the shadows under the furniture become the brightest parts of the room.
At this point we need to shift from an over-ready interpretation of Honert's childhood to a more considered appreciation of his training and interests as an artist. Honert studied at the Dusseldorf Academy as a pupil of Fritz Schwegler, and a fellow student, whose work has become better known in this country, was Thomas Demand. I don't want to insist on any particular influence,
but rather to consider the work of the two artists in parallel. Both create fictive documentation of 'real' spaces. Both are assiduous and devious in the methods they use to create a credible reality. But whereas Demand starts with 3D construction and ends with 2D image, Honert starts with the 2D image, and ends with 3D construction.
Honert's surfaces begin in photography and are then developed on computer. With a modelling programme he creates the spaces he remembers, and then works on details, such as the wood grain of the chair or the bed-head, or the texture of the wallpaper, in order to provide a scan which can be printed up as a sheet which will be applied to the acrylic forms which make up the furniture, or to the plywood frame of the walls. Only the mattress in the new commission for Bloomberg SPACE has actually been 'hand-made'.
Honert's Schlafsaal might be set in a given period – it is probably clear that it comes from the post-war years, and perhaps even identifiable as German – but in another way it is timeless. Part of the effectiveness of his work is this tight combination of specific and non-specific time and place. In this way it leaves the space of his imagination and enters ours.
Honert is fascinated with what he remembers, and how it represents what he knew and did not know at the time. His interest in the extent of his own understanding reflects his interest in a wider historical consciousness, of what was known, of what was not known, and what lay between the two, deliberately or not, consciously or not. We are, after all, positioned here in post-war Germany, in the newly emerging affluence of the west, within a Catholic boarding school and a traditional family of whom Honert (b.1953) was by far the youngest. This might well be seen as an example par excellence of a situation caught between past and present.
Honert had wanted to go away to school to be like other boys, to play team sports and to be manly. He loved reading stories set in boarding schools and describes himself as 'infatuated' with the ideology of school. Although in his first years away he experienced a narrow and authoritarian regime, later on he and his classmates shied away from the group ethic and embraced the more libertarian individualism which marked these years more generally. Honert knows now that his own evolution represents something wider, as post-war Germany gradually put behind it a pre-war ethos which had proved surprisingly tenacious. But what Honert doesn't know, and what he wants to be careful about, is what he knew and didn't know at the time.
So Honert's oeuvre works on several levels, and the Schlafsaal embodies these in a very consolidated manner. It represents a moment which is frozen, between past and present, between image and reality, between the unconscious and the conscious. It is a kind of knowing and unknowing, embodying the innocence of the boy and the ignorance in which he, and his kind, were allowed to grow up, along with the sense of an awakening, an embodiment of something which can grow, and change, and move on.
Honert talks of the brief solidity of memory, like the dream which seems so real for a few minutes on waking. If the 'Proustian moment' is too often invoked, in this case it seems justified, for this moment is very real for Honert, who literally wants to hold on to and give form to the sudden manifestation of times past. He wants to do this as if he were a child, 'through the eyes of the child', even if his visual language, its means and its capacity, is highly developed. However they are constituted – and they are largely visual, with light playing a key role – he wants to find a way of allowing those Proustian moments to happen again, and again. Whether he is doing this for us, as well as for himself, is perhaps unclear. But it is also unimportant, if it works for us, and we too can enter this strange in-between space, a space which has arisen out of a deeply personal fascination with the nature of remembering, and its interface with our visual literacy, but which, in its very concern for authenticity, reaches out more widely and speaks to us both personally and politically.
Penelope Curtis
Penelope Curtis was until recently Curator of the Henry Moore Institute, which showed Martin Honert's work in the exhibition Private View at the Bowes Museum.