O Mensch? Oh lord... Lars Eidinger acts out his delusions at K21
While I didn't see any promised empathy in this one-man-show, there surely is a lot of audacity and self-praise. Both from the artist and the institution.
For my non-German readers: Lars (Gen X, German) is an actor. Or, since we don’t do hierarchies within the arts, Lars is an artist who expresses his art through acting and built a respectable career on it. Apart from acting, Lars has been doing photography for a while. He posted his pics on Instagram until 2022 arguing that “social media isn’t social at all.” And there must certainly be something extraordinary about his photography. How else could the Kunstsammlung NRW possibly justify a solo exhibition for a self-taught smartphone photography artist with an exhibition history reaching back barely five years?
We Live in A Society
The show features around 100 photographs, 12 videos, and a Super8 film Lars made back in the ‘90s. Most works were made between 2019 and 2024. He takes pictures of unusual situations in ordinary places that he passes by. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the pics are bad altogether… even though some definitely are. Like, a Sprite bottle on a bridge? A cookie in a car backseat net? A black swan in a pond? You deadass think you ate with that?
Viewed one by one, Lars does take some pretty decent pictures: A cable phone next to a devotional figure of Saint Mary really does make me wonder who people call when they need help. The Internet sign at a shop points at a doorway leading into a dark corridor. A fun play with video game backroom aesthetics and, yes, the internet really is a scary place sometimes. A cowboy sign covered in smoke towering over a highrise building looks like a nostalgic leftover of the past. A person lying down on a medieval grave in London is ironic. And so is an exhausted soldier blending into the leafy poster on the construction site behind him. And some guy in Budapest walking past and becoming part of an ad featuring the Darwinist evolution graphic shows how little people notice their own environment. Maybe they do, but that’s not what Lars wants you to believe.
Lars wants you to think that the people he photographs have no sense of self or self-awareness. They just float unconsciously in their precarity and misery in between some light-hearted moments. When he pictures a tired woman bending over to her feet next to a play house in Beijing or another one staring at her phone hunched over a chair in front of a street stall selling toys, Lars is essentially pointing at them and saying “Look at those pitiful creatures”.
You might want to argue in his favor that Lars is exposing the exhaustion that so many people face day by day. At the press conference, he really thought he did something when he made fun of smartphones, saying that smartphones are actually “dumbphones” as people get so absorbed by them. What an empathetic take, Lars. People are deliberately letting phones kill their brain cells. I wonder if maybe, only maybe, it would be different if the world we live in right now wasn’t being conditioned for escapism. If only companies didn’t profit from deteriorating communities to sell them consumable remedies (such as films, for instance). Lars’s pictures could have been such a sharp critique of capitalist systems that destroy communities and environments to make people escape into artificial realities. But that would require him to reflect on his own class and social standing. Not through words but practice. But who wants to criticize systems that they benefit from…
Lars is a serious artist. At least that’s what he wants you to know. And to make sure we see how serious he is, he’s not only taking pics of funny coincidences like a baby’s candy blending into a colored wall or a Parisian nun pushing a trash container up the street but plenty of homeless people as well. Homeless people next to ATMs, underneath comfy interior design ads, next to better-off folks admiring jewelry in a storefront. We need Lars to point these things out to us because he’s the one who sees the world to its fullest. We need him to point at the person in the Berlin subway and say “Look at this poor disabled human”. Is the exposure of vulnerable groups supposed to be empathetic? May people with disability catch a break for once and not be made into spectacles?
The picture Mannheim (2014) stood out to me as it seems to be taken in a living room, not a place in transit. A person lies on a sofa, shoes off, two TV remotes nearby. An extremely intimate setting. And this picture is the only one where the photographed person reacts to the photographer: The person holds a pillow over their face, hiding from the foreign gaze. This picture embodies exactly what Lars is: insensitive and intrusive.
The closest that Lars comes to being an actual artist is being problematic. He has the best prerequisites: He's white, male, rich, and he clearly overestimates how much he contributes to the world. He doesn’t use photography to make a valid point. He uses the people in his pictures as a springboard to his artistic recognition.
Authentically Fake
The photographs in the show are enlarged. I think it reflects exactly what’s going on: They are made a bigger deal than they actually are. Not all shots are framed vertically, given that the show includes some horizontal SLR camera pics. I think maintaining the phone perspective would have been the interesting factor, art historian Claire Bishop (Gen X, British) said “We see through our phone like through a third eye”. But Kunstsammlung NRW had to make a choice here: Either select the more relevant works or argue that Lars has been working for a longer period that would at least somehow legitimize his exhibition there. Guess what they chose.
The press release claims that Lars refrains from any “aesthetic twists”. And curator Doris Krystof (Baby Boomer, German) defended this wording in the press conference. Really? No aesthetic twists at all? What about composition? And the fact that several photographs are black and white? You sure want to log that in as your final answer?
Let’s not get it twisted: The moment you even think of pulling out a camera, that’s when aesthetic decision-making starts. And don’t get me started on candid photo-dumps: There’s nothing candid about a candid shoot because even if the pictures aren’t manipulated through apps, they are made to look “natural”. Even if you closed your eyes and started to randomly snap pics because you don’t want them to be staged, you’ve also made an aesthetic choice. And just like you can’t not communicate, you can’t not make aesthetic choices. Because not caring about what something looks like is in itself an aesthetic decision.
Also at the press conference, I asked Lars about the “aesthetic twists” phrasing. And to my surprise, he actually responded with awareness of how his chosen medium is limited and that he understands how pre-selected settings and filters already make an objective image impossible. And that’s where he almost got me. Lars showed the most basic level of artistic self-reflection that any art student is required to have from day one and wants to be applauded for that… The bar is low and it’s getting lower…
When I heard there would be found objects, I got war flashbacks to the Starbucks cup Lars had in the middle of the Old Masters Collection in the Hamburger Kunsthalle (he bought it from a woman in Nuremberg who collected money in it). And what do I see here? That same damn Starbucks cup. Like I know, brands really permeate the social landscape and people under existential threat end up ironically advertising for them. Is there any more original point you tried to make beyond what is known already?
The other “found object” was a red skydancer, goofily bouncing while surrounded by the videos and photographs in the room. During her speech, Kunstsammlung NRW director Susanne Gaensheimer (Gen X, German) was sooo close to putting Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968, French) and Lars’s name into one sentence and I’m so relieved she just left it at Lars “working in the tradition of found objects”, even though that’s already quite a stretch: The point of a found object or a readymade in the arts is that you take it out of its intended purpose to make it something new. Instead of advertising for companies on the streets, the skydancer now fulfills its very same marketing purpose for Lars, for and within the exhibition.
The haikus, we need to talk about the haikus. Yoko Tawada (Baby Boomer, Japanese) joined the show with short poems she wrote for selected works. She’s not presented as an actual co-exhibitor though, but a byline in the exhibition text, which serves as a reminder of who the “real star” of this show is. The haikus are handwritten with a pencil in German next to the chosen works. I get a déjàvu back to the romance show at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf: In combination, it’s giving instapoetry on instastories. It’s neither bad nor groundbreaking.
There’s a whiff of pretentiousness to the curation. The exhibition pretends to be down to earth with pixelated images, partly frameless hanging, and handwritten poetry. The show is cosplaying as an off-space to conceal how misplaced it is in the halls of an elitist white cube. I need to address K21 directly once again: Accessibility doesn’t look like wearing torn baggy jeans and an Aldi bag that are actually designer… Wait, didn’t that actually happen somewhere?
It was so funny when the representative of the sponsoring Sparda Foundation said that Lars’s pictures first look like “I can do this too” but in the end, “who actually takes out their phone when they see something interesting?” Like M’am, I hate to break it to you, but basically everyone does.
I love it when Gen X and Baby Boomers underestimate how much screen time younger people have because actually, people do take pictures of unusual situations, like have you never heard of the Gen Z crop? And they have been doing that with their phones for a while. The whole premise of Instagram is to share “instantaneous” pics. Snapchat was even more spontaneous in its design. People used Vine (Rest In Peace) to share seven-second clips, not only skits but also unusual fun situations as they occurred at the moment. I sure was around when #YouHadOneJob threads blew up, so no, Lars’s pictures of tree roots disrupting sidewalks and architectural mismanagement do not impress me. And I am way too deep into #corecore on my TikTok For You Page to be surprised by any dystopian-looking snapshots. I know, the Internet is Neuland for all of us, don’t worry.
Acting Up
We get back to the beginning: We can conclude that it’s not Lars’s unique perspective or technique that got him the solo show at K21 but the name he made for himself as an actor. Lars repeatedly highlights how he wants to stay in the background and keep his work the center of attention. It’s giving Shia LaBeouf putting on that I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE paper bag. He could have chosen an anonymous title à la Banksy if that was really the case. But Lars, Kunstsammlung NRW, and I know that it’s his name tag that makes his work work. Earlier in August, Philippa Snow asked for Plaster Why do so many celebrities get the art calling?:
“[T]heir intention is for us to shift our focus from their looks to (to put it somewhat loftily) the content of their souls. The celebrity art career is, in other words, a convenient way for a very famous person to make visible the creativity and hard work that – when it is more typically applied to their bodies, faces, and personas – is meant to remain invisible, and ideally unacknowledged.”
While self-imaging does play an important part in this trend, there’s a financial one as well. There’s this idea that when an artist has proven themselves in one field they get to use that built-up credit and don't have to start from scratch in the new field. In entertainment, managers want to go the safe route and popularize their money-makers not only as singers or actors (not without failing like in the case of Kate Winslet’s singing career) but also as dancers, designers, influencers, or currently, artists. Art went from gatekept luxury to flaunted commodity and even though the buyer circle didn’t necessarily grow, the audience to cheer the art world on surely did.
Although storytelling is Lars’s bread and butter, he can’t stick to a narrative: He wants to be taken seriously as an artist, but doesn’t want to follow the path that artists have to master. He wants to decenter his persona from his work, yet puts his name on the exhibition like it’s a Broadway show. He claims that he’s not trying to do something remarkable, yet wants to be praised as if he does. He doesn’t claim to picture something sublime, yet chooses a title with a Friedrich Nietzsche reference of overwhelming pathos and kitsch. He doesn’t want to be labeled as an actor, yet makes references to the theater: The picture of the skull in the plastic bag could have been interesting if only I couldn’t hear him in my thoughts: “You know I used to play Hamlet, right?” And there’s another skull pic in case you didn’t notice the first one.
The Uniqueness of the Ordinary
Susanne also said at the press conference that the Bel Etage where Lars presents his work is reserved for exhibitions that question the current state of the world. Lars said that he doesn’t want to call to action or make people do anything. He just wants people to think about who they are. But is this an adequate platform? Is the intensity with which his art is amplified appropriate? Is Lars really THE position that best reflects our world right now? The person who used to DJ as Autistic Disco (still DJing but without the name), wear grills, and take pics with designer bags underneath bridges with homeless people? Is that the one with the most self-reflection to show us what the world is like? I feel like Kunstsammlung NRW is tired of all this exhausting diversity stuff that requires them to do research and change structures so that showing Lars must have felt like a tiny bit of comfy familiarity.
Artistically, Lars is heavily invested in precarity porn. What about rich people being dystopian? I bet Lars is frequenting those circles enough to get a load of interesting footage. But I guess that would have hit too close home…
I would have had absolutely no issue with an exhibition of this kind at NRW-Forum. NRW-Forum is the institution that addresses broader audiences with a pop cultural focus using more experimental approaches. Kunstsammlung NRW is the place you get to once you’ve already proven yourself, it’s not where you try to prove yourself (and five years with barely 10 institutional shows proves nothing yet). It’s necessary to have institutions that provide these different levels and approaches. But I guess Lars found that beneath him…
Kunstsammlung NRW probably believes to address a broad audience with Lars. But they don’t consider that what they see as remarkable is only remarkable for their generation… Oh lord… That guy really got a solo-show at K21 for the equivalent of being able to rotate a PDF file. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling Kunstsammlung NRW what to do. I’m just holding them to the very same standard that they’ve set for themselves over decades. A standard that they are pushing lower and lower with every new show.
You can feed into another white man’s ego by visiting Lars Eidinger: O Mensch, through January 26, 2025, at K21, Düsseldorf.
Kunstsammlung NRW - K21
Ständehausstrasse 1
40217 Düsseldorf
Website
Instagram: @kunstsammlungnrw
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See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic
I downloaded substack just for this review and it was worth it
Thank you very much for watching the show, so I don't have to. My smartphone would have stayed in my pocket, I suppose. Keep up the good work!