The pre-Lent carnival celebrations on Shrove Tuesday in the Alemannic region (in Alsace, Switzerland, and south-western Germany) take many forms. On "Schmotzige Dunschtig" (‘dirty Tuesday’), the "Hohe Grobgünstige Narrengericht zu Stocken" (High and Roughly Favourable Fools’ Court of Stockach) sits in formal session and condemns important figures from political life to supply a penance of one or more ‘buckets’ of wine, depending on the extent of their guilt, by the fourth Sunday in Lent, Laetare – the same punishment that used to be meted out to offenders among Stockach’s citizens in the olden days.
In the ‘five-valley city’ of Schramberg, the carnival celebrators gather on Shrove Monday along the Schiltach river to watch daring Fools inside merrily rigged-up washtubs trying to keep their feet dry along a 500-yard course "da Bach na" (‘down the brook’). Those who don’t succeed and keel over get soaking wet and are jeered at. And anyone who later sings something fine such as the Schramberg Fools’ March for theHansel, the White Fool of Schramberg, may receive a piece of "Bretzelsegen" (pretzel alms) from him:
Meek, meek, meek is the cat
And if the cat doesn’t stay meek
Then your lass won’t like it …
Down the brook, down the brook
With care and with sorrow
You’re on your Ash, your Ash, your Ash Wednesday morrow!
[ash/arse]
In the "Rottweiler Narrensprung" (Fools’ Leap in Rottweil) on Shrove Monday and Tuesday, there is a colourful and merry but gruesome masquerade that parades through the town: the "Gschell" (Bell) and the "Biss" (Bite), the "Rottweiler Mädele" (Rottweil Maids) in their fringed dresses, the devilish "Schantle" (Disgrace) and "Federahannes" (Jack with Feathers), stubborn "Bennerrössle" (ponies) and the lusty "Guller" (Rooster).
In Basle, punctually at 4 a.m. on the Monday morning after Ash Wednesday – the dark winter’s night is even darker because the streetlights are switched off – the carnival groups parade on their morning tattoo through the narrow alleys to the center of the old town. With optional dress regulations (‘charivari’) but masked, they carry lamps on their heads and march behind a grand procession lantern, on which they have written all sorts of oddities and rhymed nonsense from the town’s contemporary history – understood only by Basle locals, of course, and not by the thousands of visitors who have arrived. By the break of day – when most of the spectators have already moved to the old town’s pubs for their "Mehlsuppe" (flour soup) – these glowing fireflies have passed with measured strides through the town, accompanied by the shrill sounds of piccolo flutes and the heavy rhythms of drums.
All of this, and much more, is both peculiar and fantastic and has its roots in ancient pagan and Christian popular customs, as well as in craftsmen’s guild traditions (which is why many of the carnival associations are still known as ‘guilds’) and in the romantic yearnings of bourgeois society. It usually has a lot to do with craftsmanship, but hardly ever with fine art and it certainly has nothing to do with ‘modern art’. But there are no rules without exceptions – and I would like to describe three such exceptions here. All three of the artists discussed are associated with modernism, they have their roots in the Alemannic region and they drew inspiration from fools’ carnival costumes or even included their own art work in the carnival.
The first is Oskar Schlemmer.[1] Schlemmer became well known not only through his painting, but above all also as a teacher at the Bauhaus, where he headed the theatre course, among other activities there. His father was a master baker in Mainz, but was also an actor and a comedy playwright who was involved in organizing the carnival there. His son may have inherited his passion for dance and theatre, as well as for the funny side of life, from him. Oskar Schlemmer took a two-year apprenticeship in an inlay woodwork workshop in Stuttgart and studied painting at the Academy of Art there together with Willi Baumeister. At the Bauhaus, he developed a comprehensive theory of drama that covered every form of presentation – from solemn ritual to clowns’ tricks, acrobatics and masquerade. Together with his students, particularly Andor Weininger and Xanti Schawinsky, he also had a shaping influence on the festive and party culture that was part of life at the Bauhaus in Dessau – it was at his suggestion, for example, that the famous ‘White Party’ was organized. Weininger mainly became well known as the founder and leader of the Bauhaus Band, in which Xanti also played an important part as a multi-instrumentalist. For the fourth figurine in his Bauhaus dances, a kind of grotesque and comical contrast figure, Schlemmer created the figure of the ‘Musical Clown’. His own description of it was as follows:
‘The “musical clown”, deliberately grotesquely exaggerated, with a coverless umbrella, glass-bead curls, goggle eyes, balloon nose, children’s saxophone, accordion on his chest, xylophone on his arm, miniature fiddle, mangy leg with military drum, gauze train, and pointed shoes, adds a sensitively resounding companion to the other three to form a serious quartet.'
The clown had a full costume, which was heavy and quite awkward. In formal terms, it was a parody of the Bauhaus’s pictorial style: ungainly, asymmetrical, multicoloured, and trivial. Andor Weininger, whom Schlemmer had put inside the costume, must have made a hilariously comical impression in it. The effect depended not only on his clumsy and deliberate movements, but above all on the ‘music’ that he tried to produce on the toy instruments. What was heard was always something different from what the audience expected: when Andor blew into the toy trumpet, tuba sounds were heard. He coaxed the virtuoso solo of a concert violin out of the tiny fiddle. And the little drum produced a military march. All of the sounds actually came from offstage and were played from a gramophone or by musicians behind the scenes. At the encore, everything became even more confused: the fiddle sounded like a trombone, the horn like a fiddle, and so on.
This carnival contribution by Oskar Schlemmer was at some considerable remove from the "Fasnet" (Shrove Tuesday) he knew from home in Mainz, but the link was much closer for the Swiss object artist Jean Tinguely.[2] Even as a child, he had been fascinated – and also scared – by the processions held during the carnival in Basle. He later took up this connection between gruesome fantasy and grotesque comedy when designing charivari costumes for his carnival group, the "Kuttlebutzer". The "Kuttlebutzer" was a so-called ‘free’ or ‘wild’ carnival group that did not keep to the strict rules of the Basle Carnival. "Kuttlebutzer" means ‘tripe-cleaners’ – people who wash the animal intestines needed for tripe dishes, an extremely laborious task. Figuratively, it means someone who states his own opinion very forcibly. In an exhibition timed to coincide with this year’s Basle Carnival, the Tinguely Museum focused on the activities of this carnival group. Jean Tinguely was involved with the "Kuttlebutzer" for nearly twenty years and designed several carnival processions for them, including the ‘Urban Indians’ (1976), the ‘Atomic Police’ (1985) and the ‘Insolvency Vulture Procession’ (1988) – the latter together with Christoph Gloor, a fellow-artist.
When he was a child, Tinguely once said in an interview, the carnival groups seemed like horrific processions of ghosts to him. This recollection haunts his costume designs as well; his ‘Atomic Police’, for example, look nothing like an orderly police squad, but rather like a horde of cannibals – symbolizing a return to an atavistic era after a global nuclear war. He designed a monstrous witch in a wheel-chair as an accompanying figure.
Of the three artists, sculptor Erich Hauser[3] perhaps had the closest relationship to his home town’s carnival. The Hauser Museum in Rottweil has now become a well-known attraction well beyond the local area. In addition to showing Hauser’s own works, the museum also presents his art collection, including a collection of old carnival masks. Hauser had his workshop in Dunningen, near Rottweil, for a long period. He not only celebrated studio parties that have become legendary there, but in 1964 also modernized the traditional masks and costumes dating from 1906 for a local carnival guild, the "Holzäpfel" (Crab Apples). There is a photo showing him in his workshop in front of a steel relief sculpture he is currently working on – standing with legs apart, with two grinding discs in his hands and with the Crab Apple mask on his head. The photo obviously and in a quite natural way links his artistic work with his involvement in the Dunningen carnival. He was equally passionate, precise and obsessed with detail in his work in both fields. In addition to the costume, he also invented a new fools’ leap for the carnival procession, which he and his wife, a music teacher, got everyone to practice until all of the mask-wearers had full command of the correct ‘twitch’.
The two areas of his work have little in common aesthetically. His silvery steel sculptures are abstract, part of his contribution to the modernism of the 1950s, which received recognition through his participation in the Documenta in Kassel. But still, they also have a thread of comedy running through them sometimes, particularly the gigantic ‘Metal Worms’ and the steles shining in glaring sunlight – abstract steel knights pointing their sharp extremities like daggers, swords, or lances in all directions.
By contrast, the Crab Apple masks and the costumes that go with them have a realistically folklore design. Despite this, the overall impression made by the costume is not antiquated, but modern. The colours are clear and above all the crab-apple head shines with such a crisp freshness that you feel you’d like to bite into it – even when you know that the Dunningen apples are hard and bitter, better for making apple-juice with. Incidentally, the chubby red cheeks of the smiling apple face are strongly reminiscent for me of the Baroque puttion the pulpit in the chapel in Rottweil. Hauser himself probably had Mona Lisa’s smile in mind, however.[4]
Hauser also made the accompanying accessories and equipment needed for the processions and Fools’ Courts in the same casual and easy way, but always with solid craftsmanship, functionally well-designed and aesthetically conceived to create a consistent overall picture. In addition, he modernized the traditional knot-wood masks and the costume belonging to it. Hils described the new design as follows:
‘The rustic carving in the old knot-wood masks did not appeal to Hauser. For the Carnival in 1965, Hauser had a knot-wood costume made for his wife Gretel out of hessian material with painting showing branches, leaves and apples. He carved a new mask for Gretel’s costume, with fine grooves, sawn-off branches, knots, etc.; even in its uncarved state, the mask already had a demonic appearance like that of African cult masks. The choice of paint for it was not easy, and finally we agreed on a dark brown background. The finely carved grooves were given a verdigris patina, the parts round the mouth were in pure ultramarine blue, and the rings of the eyes, the mouth and warts had a red patina. The sawn-off knots were natural-coloured. As the mask was hand-carved and the fine grooves were close together, it was not possible get the desired chiaroscuro contrast, but Hauser was delighted with it. The mask is in Hauser’s mask cupboard in the black house in Rottweil.’[5]
In contrast to modern art, in which – as the term already implies – fashion always plays a role to some extent when ‘eternal values’ are involved, Hauser created in his crab apple and tree costumes in Dunningen a very special monument that is rarely encountered in contemporary art, and one that has acquired a different kind of permanence as part of folk art and local tradition – a permanence that comes from the stability of rural customs.
And so they continue to leap and stride every year afresh, merrily and thoughtfully: one leap with the left leg, one leap with the right leg, one stride with the left leg, one stride with the right leg. And so on.
[1] Born in Stuttgart on 4 September 1888, died in Baden-Baden at the age of 55 on 13 April 1943.
[2] Born in Freiburg/Fribourg on 22 May 1925, died in Berne 30 August 1991. Also known as Jeannot, Tinguely was a Swiss painter and sculptor associated with Nouveau Réalisme.
[3] Born in Rietheim-Weilheim on 15 December 1930, died in Rottweil on 28 March 2004.
[4] At least, this is what is reported by the painter Herbert Hils in his recollections of Erich Hauser (typescript in the ownership of Alfred Grigas, Dunningen): ‘The masks were not meant to have different facial expressions as they had had previously, but were to be presented with a slight smile like the Mona Lisa. Hauser was capable of carving freehand any facial expression he wanted. His masks have an E.H. monogram on the inside. One of the finest masks by Hauser is a child’s mask, which he carved at the last minute before the Carnival for his assistant Hans Bloch’s little daughter. The laugh lines round its eyes make the mask unmistakable.’
[5] Ibid.
The Author:
Michael Cornelius Zepter, born 1938 in Cologne, artist und author.