Events/
Christine Mehring

Leading up to the 1972 Olympic Games held in Munich, Germany, a number of German and American artists proposed site-specific art projects for the Olympic buildings and grounds designed by architect Günther Behnisch in collaboration with the engineer Frei Otto. While the proposals by artists associated with dealer Heiner Friedrich—Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Mathias Goeritz, Walter DeMaria, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, and others—were ultimately rejected and remained unexecuted, they nevertheless critically addressed a series of vexed historical questions that the accepted and executed art works ignored: What did it mean for the Games to return to Germany, which had last hosted the event under National Socialism? What was the relationship between the architectural designs and their site, a hilly landscape that contained the rubble of much of the architectural fabric of prewar Munich? And what did it mean for German and American artists to work collaboratively in this context? This talk will present these proposals and begin to answer some of these questions.

Christine Mehring is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Blinky Palermo, Abstraction of an Era, published by Yale University Press in 2008, and the co-editor of Gerhard Richter: Early Work, just published by Getty Publications. Her essays on abstraction and postwar European art have appeared in journals such as Artforum, Grey Room, October, and Texte zur Kunst, and in various anthologies and exhibition catalogues, such as Bauhaus, 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity and The Art of Two Germanies, Cold War Cultures. She is currently at work on two books, one on abstraction and design in the 20th century and the other, with Sean Keller, on the art and architecture of the 1972 Munich Olympics....