Catalogue on the occasion of the group exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein from 08.11.1997 – 11.01.1998.
Udo Kittelmann about the exhibition ca-ca poo-poo: “In recent years, the discussion about painting has experienced an initially unexpected renaissance. In recent years, the debate has been triggered and kept alive by various large-scale exhibitions, most of them were based on what I consider to be a surprisingly narrow concept of painting. […] Painting today, however, is free from fixed boundaries. Painting is changing its forms of organization. Painting withdraws from the rigid dogmatic influence of art history and that means of course the influence of its own culture. […] Well, I finally fulfilled the exhibition that I thought I had been longing for so long, and which should at least question the traditional concept of painting. In order to do justice to the history of painting, however, it seemed necessary to recall the original beginning of pictorial processes as a starting point, to show the right way. I called the exhibition – quite provocatively – ca-ca poo-poo, which is an American-English fecal slang word borrowed from children’s language and simply means ‘shit’. For the first gestural utterance that we need to be interested in this context is that of the child. In other words: the first painting is that of the child! […] And we may remember that when we were children we were not at all interested at first in the way we painted pictures, the material we used, be it spinach, mayonnaise or our excrement, we ‘painted’. It was also completely unimportant to us on which ground we painted. […] A delicious visual example of an early childhood faecal-fixated approach to the production of ingenious painting is shown by Paul McCarthy in his 1995 performance video Painter, which showed only a few works that could be categorized as traditional painting. Perhaps the names of the artists who participated in the exhibition: Angela Bulloch, Tracey Emin, Mike Kelley, Fabian Marcaccio, Paul McCarthy, Mark Milloff, Carl Ostendarp, Steven Parrino, Christian Sery, Lauren Szold, Tony Tasset, Martin Walde, Franz West. […] Painting, as well as art in general, will in future express itself in fractal categories, a methodical and therefore already orthodox organization of the picture will become obsolete. And it will probably be necessary to temporarily forget everything and start all over again, as if a picture had never been painted before”.
Publisher: Kölnischer Kunstverein, Udo Kittelmann
Author: Udo Kittelmann
Text in German and English, numerous illustrations in color
69 pages, paperback
