Welcome! Four thousand garden-dwarves dressed in black and white stretch out their hands to the visitors and bid them welcome to the Munich Opera Festival. Although they are only small, their appearance is appropriate, their presentation imposing, their choreography overwhelming. The visitors to the festival feel at home and smile back at the dwarves. Then, among the thousand-headed horde they discover a couple of anarchic exceptions, brightly coloured figures obscenely raising their middle fingers. A filthy gesture? A dwarves´ revolt? A happening by Ottmar Hörl!

As unexpected and perplexing the parade of the dwarves might be for the visitors, it is an articulate expression of the artistic method of its innovator and director – his "principle of organized anarchy" (Hörl 1982). Whether, as in his ‘Kuhprojekt’ (Cow-Project, 1986), he clothed each of a small herd of cows with a well-fitting cover of transparent polyester, or he had a uniformed police-marksman fire two shots at the glazed front of the Historical Museum in Frankfurt (‘By the way’, 1991), or whether he had a camera filming its own fall from a towerblock including its inevitable destruction on hitting the ground – in all of Hörl`s works one encounters the contradiction of chaos and order, he always lays bare the structural elements of our material and social environment and thinks them through to their logical conclusion until, to use Dürrenmatt´s words, events have taken the worst turn possible. In this way he is able to undermine the ceremonial monotony of the festival opening, to render apparent the natural parallel alignment of cows and the danger that art becomes museumified and also the mechanical logic of the camera as man´s extended arm and extended eye.

The integrity of the material

As a consequence of Hörl´s principle question about the secret rules of order and the multiplicity of the forms of hidden structures his artistic work is not confined to one specific form of expression or style. Thus conventionally defined sculpture, happenings, photographic works and drawings all stand on an equal basis. They are united by Hörl´s specific attitude to the material involved and by the special attention he pays to those objects that interest him. This can be described as respect for the integrity of things and living beings alike. It is of great importance to Hörl that the sculptured form does not arise in conflict with the material but rather out of its formal inherent qualities, according to the intention "to make the use of the material in relationship to the desired results understandable".

The investigation of the world as it is brings with it a rejection of sculptural forms that result from subjective arbitrariness, the respect for the integrity of the material, a rejection of the traditional forms of sculpture, that take their shapes from the forceful wrenching out of a form from wood or stone. In their place Hörl has found that industrially produced plastic, initially for the most part corrugated polyester, as the more appropriate and contemporary material, not only because of its increasing presence in modern industrial society, but also due to its inherent aptitude for serial production.

The principle of the series

The principle of the series, developed on the production lines of the automobile industry and taken up by all aspects of the consumer industry and perfected by the genetics and media industries, embodies a structural element of modern society. Hörl takes this into account in that he integrates it as a constitutive moment in the system of his sculptural concept. The sculpture ‘Zwilling’ from 1986 can be regarded as a quantum leap in this process of perception. With its screwed together layers of corrugated polyester Hörl, for the first time, doubles the form and in this way underlines its structural repeatability and principle availability. For the same reason the police marksman in Frankfurt had to fire two shots at the museum and not just one. It was only in this way that the action became systematical and was liberated from the character of an arbitrary deed and became apparent as a structural intervention.

The definition of the scope of a series is thus a factor not to be neglected and is often an important conceptional element in Hörl´s work. Ottmar Hörl takes great pains to always gain sight of the totality of a social manifestation. For instance, if he reveals what it means, when there is talk every day of the threat faced by numerous populations of the earth and to this end hee presents a complete picture of the cow-population of the city of Passau at a specific moment of time (‘Eine Population’), then he cannot be satisfied wiiith one facet, but has to present the portraits of every one of the 943 cows living at this time in the municipal area of Passau. And also his extremely successful multiple ‘Unschuld’ (Innocence, 1997), a bar of soap in a plastic box, achieves its particular virulence through the fact, that the number made, 82 million, corresponds exactly to the population of germany.

Nature , Art, Society

Hörl´s interventions occur in the tense relationship between art, nature and society. The dialectic of Art and Nature recognizable in his cow-projects, his still-lives and his work with plastic plants is a representation of a thematic variation of the higher question of the relationship of chaos and order. At first sight one might be tempted to equate nature with chaos and art with order. This equation does not however workout. Hörl shows this by making his broom-objects, symbols of the desire for order, out of horsehair, while his proliferating green objects with grass, myrtle and ivy, symbols of nature, are completely made of plastic.

Hörl’s social framework is most clearly apparent in his works for public spaces. It is here that his idea of culture as a "link between a highly developed technology and the completely ignored consciousness of mankind today" finds its most effective place. For this reason Hörl pleads for a new seriousness in the approach to art in public spaces: "Artists must learn to place their fingers on the wounds of the public. That is not possible in isolated galleries and museums." Hörl has shown just how this can be achieved in his numerous interventions in cities. Most striking was his work ‘Street Gang’ (Aschaffenburg 1992), in which he installed the complete range of 20 different rubbish containers according to the catalogue of their manufacturer. The absurd grouping of the partly rustic and partly trendy containers not only takes as its theme in an ironical manner the virulent rubbish problem of our cities, nor is it solely an invitation to a functional and aesthetic comparison, above all it undermines the certainty of salvation of a society that forever presents technological solution to social questions. Just how far Hörl can be seen as an "offensive and direct strategist of a new form of public art" is shown by a serial sculpture ‘Familientreffen’ (Family meeting, 1992) in and around the town of Rüsselsheim: a multiple silhouette of the contemporary family developed from templates for architectural drawings, which in its material (laquered steel), serial nature (industrial production) and colour variety (multicultural workforce) reflects very precisely the sociocultural situation of the car-producing city. And finally when Hörl , in one of his latest works, plants a blue house at a precarious angle on a hill at the entrance to the town of Ravensburg, then he marks by means of organized anarchy the sensitive transition of the countryside to the town – a place which on account of the regular failings of modern town planning is generally dominated by anarchic organization.

Sculpture as a principle of organization

In spite of their principle conception and in spite of the partially rather strange appearance of the materials used, Hörl’s works are marked by a pronounced aestheticism. By isolation and accumulation, arrangement and association, progression and rhythmic presentation he succeeds in wringing new aesthetic qualities from banally functional objects. When pipes are mutated to ‘Sculptures in Gordian style’ (1998), this not only represents the ironic retroactive transformation of the technological world into a mythical age, but also an ability to play with the beauty of the bizarre. However much Hörl’s work deals with the questions of the confrontation of natural and social reality, at the same time it always articulates the art-historical and art immanent correlation. Thus aesthetics, irony and quotation, often to be found in the titles, are essential aspects of his work. In conclusion, if one attempts to define Hörl’s artistic strategy, then one can make use of the phrase he himself coined "sculpture as a principle of organization". This encompasses two aspects: the methods of the artist to order and structure objects of his choice according to their physical and visual qualities in an experimental manner until they begin to shine and the specific interest of the artist to trace the systems of social order, hidden as they are in materials (ready-made plastic parts), tools (cameras, templates) and social functions (opera festivals), and to think them through in the state of order to their conclusion and thus provides at least an initial impulse to reflect upon their inherent sense.