Nicholas
Warburg completed his studies at the Städelschule
in October 2020. Since no academic degrees are awarded there, he
painted himself a diploma for his graduate exhibition – in the style
of Slytherin, the house of the evil witchcraft and wizardry students
in the Harry Potter novels. In his exhibition “Graduating
Slytherin”, Warburg combines an ironic
swan song of farewell to the myth of the Städelschule
with the artistic procedure of Hauntology – a “nostalgia
for lost futures”.

The
Städelschule avoids making itself
dependent on institutional regulations. According to the faculty’s
self-conception, the freedom of students and teachers is valued
higher than an official degree. Last but not least, the Frankfurt
School of Art is internationally known for its laissez-faire
attitude. It is therefore diametrically opposite to e.g. US-American
study programs.

Seventy
percent of the students at the Städelschule
come from abroad. It is the only art school in Germany where English
is the lingua franca. Yet with only 150 art students, it is also one
of the smallest. Just under a thousand interested people apply for
thirty openings each year.

This
was not always the case. The school’s
rise from a rather non-profile provincial institution to
international renown began in the late 1980s with Kasper König’s
directorate and continued under Daniel Birnbaum and others. The
teaching staff included and still includes Thomas Bayrle, Hermann
Nitsch, Jörg
Immendorf, Isabelle Graw, Wolfgang Tillmans, Douglas Gordon, Peter
Fischli and Judith Hopf. Artists* such as Gerhard Richter, Isa
Genzken, Martin Kippenberger, and Jason Rhoades have had shorter
guest appearances as teachers.

Well-known
graduates include Tobias Rehrberger and Haegue Yang (both teach at
the Städelschule today), Thomas Zipp, Danh Vō,
Matias Faldbakken, Nora Schultz, Simon Denny, Anne Imhof, Lena Henke
and Hannah Levy.

But
as in every institution, there is not only the official narrative of
incisive milestones, big names and merits, but also the oral history
of colportage: the stories of heroin in the student restrooms; of the
scabies infestation at the school, the spread of which brought flings
to light; of high school-like hierarchies among students (which
forbade those with low social status to address those with higher);
and of professors who held their classes exclusively in pubs. That
was a long time ago, of course. Today everything is more dignified,
more correct and perhaps a bit more boring. The hierarchy among the
students is less manifest, a certain amount of self-sufficiency and
toxic flair has remained. It is not for nothing that the Städelschule
in Frankfurt, like most art schools in their respective cities, is
considered a haven of arrogance. It has also earned the affectionate
name Slytherin from other art students in Germany. Among the
characteristics of the Slytherin student body are cunning and
ambition. The Städelschule is viewed as a
flow heater for art market careers – with all the necessary side
effects: Competitive pressure, envy and the crippling fear of doing
something wrong, which lies in the air with every end of year
exhibition.

In
his exhibition “Graduating
Slytherin”, Nicholas Warburg takes a look
at the myth of the Städelschule as an in-
and outsider. It’s never quite sure
whether the staging of his own persona is the product of his own
narcissism or a commentary on art students in general or students of
the Städelschule in particular. Among
other works, his diploma painted in oil on canvas, a self-portrait as
Marcel Proust, or the cover picture 5: “WE
MUST APOLOGIZE FOR NICHOLAS WARBURG/ HE IS AN IDIOT/ WE TRAINED HIM
WRONG/ AS A JOKE” speak of this
self-referentiality.

While
Warburg had playfully addressed the 1950s to the 1980s in an
exhibition at Anton Janizewski’s in 2019
under the title BRDigung, references to the 1980s to 2010s can now be
found, analogous to the more recent history of the Städelschule.
This is the case in two sculptural works: a stack of towels with a
hundred mark banknote print lying on the floor, forming an oversized
bundle of banknotes; and a pair of vintage 70s sunglasses, as they
were fashionable again in the 90s, with the design of a 1 DM coin
engraved in their lenses.

One
of the more political works (Geisterbahn) depicts the map of
Frankfurt’s public transportation network
from 1986 in oil on canvas and its full size, as it hangs in the
track bed of the subway stations. It refers to a “Past
That Will Not Pass” – the title of Ernst
Nolte’s revisionist speech, which was printed in 1986 in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and launched the Historikerstreit
(Historians’ Dispute). Nolte had planned to give
his speech in the Paulskirche, wich he was denied, however. There,
twelve years later, Martin Walser was able to receive the Peace Prize
of the German Book Trade and, in his speech, spoke of the Berlin
Holocaust Memorial as a “monumentalization
of shame”. In 2017, the Thuringian AfD leader Björn
Höcke revisited this
figure of speech and declared that the Germans were “the
only nation in the world that has planted a monument of shame in the
heart of its capital.”

In
the 1920s, the art and cultural studies scholar Aby Warburg (there is
no relation to Nicholas Warburg) examined the persistence of imagery
since antiquity, through the Renaissance, and into the present.
According to Georges Didi-Hubermann, Aby Warburg follows the “phantom
character” of pictures, which enables
them to make spooky returns. This interpretation approaches the field
of hauntology. The term was coined by Jaques Derrida and in more
recent years was made fruitful by Mark Fisher, in particular, to
describe the return of 1980s aesthetics in current pop music. But
couldn’t a “nostalgia
for lost futures” also be thought of in
relation to the “1000-year
Reich” and its haunting return in the
present, to a past that wants to haunt us?

On
a hand-tufted tapestry in the outlines of a ghost from the TV series
Scooby-Doo, Nicholas Warburg collects central names and terms from
the hauntological cosmos in the aesthetics of a word cloud.

On
a two-meter wide canvas it reads: “MICHAEL
JORDAN/ MICHAEL JACKSON/ MICHAEL KREBBER”. The
typeface as well is based on the horror genre. The three protagonists
named were born around the same time. While Michael Jordan and
Michael Jackson were the greatest stars in their disciplines of all
time, Michael Krebber is a different kind of celebrity. He is
considered an artists’ artist, an eternal
insider tip. He studied painting in Karlsruhe, was assistant to Georg
Baselitz and Martin Kippenberger and from 2002 to 2016 professor at
the Städelschule. His formal gestures and
conceptual tricks often exceed the understanding of art experts. In
many cases it remains unclear, for example, whether his refusal to
produce is due to a lack of ideas or a deliberate bluff. His dandyish
approach finds a resounding echo in Warburg’s
exhibition.

For
instance, an empty display case placed in front of the central window
of the gallery. Warburg comments laconically that he often feels an
urgent need to look out of the window while visiting museums. This
need, however, goes hand in hand with a guilty conscience regarding
the exhibited art. With this work (The Outside), he allows the viewer
to look at art and look out of the window simultaneously. One might
think of Immanuel Kant’s “thing
in itself”, which we cannot objectively
perceive, but only comprehend what it appears to be for us
individually. The totality of these appearances would be the Outside:
ultimately as constructed and fragile and fleeting as art? Or does
the Outside, when viewed through the glass of the showcase, become
art, as it were?

A
work relating to this idea is “book
recommendations from Isabelle Graw”, an
oak corner shelf displaying a biography of Siegfried Kracauer,
Angelika Klüsendorf’s
novel “Years
Later” and Merlin Carpenter’s
still sealed essay “The
Outside can’t go outside”.

With
the display case and shelf, Warburg seems to hint to the “lazy
art” of the end of year exhibition of the
Städelschule (“a
few roof battens leaning against the wall”),
as well as to risk a rather large conceptual leap or tear it down
again, right away: AS A JOKE