The Art of

161
I
Boris had pledged to smoke less, and therefore placed the pack on a small
cupboard next to the bathroom door. For each cigarette, he had to stand
up and go around the table into the dark hallway to the bathroom. These
brief, compulsory breaks structure our conversation. We speak German.
A few days after arriving in New York in 2004, I called Boris Lurie and made
an appointment to meet him at his home on the Upper East Side somewhere
in the sixties later in the evening. He greets me as if we have known
each other for a long time. Friends have told him about our events connected
with NO!art in Leipzig; the program booklet is lying on the table.
He serves tea in large plastic cups. We sit across from each other, he in his
reading chair next to the television set and the brand new DVD player, given
to him by a filmmaker friend, and me on the narrow couch between tall
stacks of newspapers. I have a view of the kitchen at the other end of the
quite long and sparsely lit ground-floor apartment, and in front of it to the
right, the desk of his secretary, who comes by to organize things with him a
couple of times a month. Above it on the wall, newspaper images and family
photos.
02
BORIS LURIE
“Anmerkungen zu
Kunst, Leben und
Politik,” in: Neue
Gesellschaft für bildende
Kunst, ed.
NO!art: Kunstbewegung
in New York
1959–64, Berlin: nGbK,
1995, p. 127.
“But I managed, I bet you I’m the only one; I managed to bring a
whole pack of photographs through all the ghettos and concentration
camps . . . I don’t even understand now how I managed to do it,
I was lucky, I wasn’t searched or whatever.” 01
In between them: a portrait of Josef Stalin.
“But, if it weren’t for Stalin, I wouldn’t be alive today! And, yet, communist
neophytes keep on badmouthing him!” 02
One poster announces a NO!art show, another advertises an exhibition by
Wolf Vostell in Gera in 1993 with the avant-garde formula “Leben = Kunst =
Leben” (Life = Art = Life).
The state of Boris Lurie’s apartment has been described many times. The
person who lives here does not like separating himself from things, preferring
to leave them to mature on tables and walls with the aid of planned
coincidence. Part of his oeuvre was created in just this way.
01
BORIS LURIE
in: optimistic | disease |
facility: Boris Lurie,
New York—Buchenwald,
a documentary by
Naomi Tereza Salmon
(Germany 2003), time
code 00:08:51.
“I’ve been sticking photographs with articles cut out of newspapers
and journals on the walls of my workroom for years, so that I don’t
forget the present, which becomes the past. The clippings yellow,
fall down; I then tape them up on the wall again. It creates collages
that age with time . . . .” 03
03
Ibid., p. 126.
EIKO GRIMBERG