To Paint and Not to Paint: The Art of Blinky Palermo

This is a historical and critical study of the work of the German abstract painter Peter Heisterkamp, known as Blinky Palermo (1943-1977). Its central argument is that Palermo created a historically resonant mode of abstraction. As such, Palermo's art constitutes a nuanced matrix for an understanding of German art of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter 1 traces Palermo's early formation in the class of Joseph Beuys at the Dusseldorf academy and examines his so-called objects in relationship to the work of his teacher as well as in the context of their reception as Romantic, expressionist, and 'spiritual.' Palermo's objects engage with, yet increasingly undermine these historical legacies of abstraction which in the postwar German art world were coded as specifically German. Chapter 2 examines Palermo's cloth pictures and the ways in which they intertwine essentialist, self-reflexive painting and the market, thus reflecting on the context of the German economic miracle and the rising German art market. As such, Palermo's cloth pictures also point to the kinship of American Pop and Color Field painting and are related in that sense to the Signal Art prominent in the German 1960s. Chapter 3 argues that Palermo's wall-paintings project a skepticism towards a utopian project of enhancing the viewer's consciousness by interweaving three different readings: as perceptually destabilizing in the context of concurrent environment art, as banal in the context of German Pop, and as decorative in the context of a New Ornamentalism. I further propose that Palermo's wall-paintings engage abstract painting in its own history by exploring its ambivalent relationship to decoration. Chapter 4 concerns the metal-pictures that Palermo made after his move to New York in 1973. These works collapse, that is to say both preserve and overcome, national boundaries and definitions of art in an increasingly international art world. They do so by engaging in a specifically German misreading of isolated and nationally defined characteristics of American art, while at the same time commenting on and leading away from the hermetic aesthetic discourses that characterized the New York art world in the late 1960s and early 1970s.