Art in America - March 2016_

EXHIBITION REVIEWS ART IN AMERICA 153

LONDON

“INTELLECTUAL BARBARIANS:

THE KIBBO KIFT KINDRED”

Whitechapel

ON VIEW THROUGH MAR. 13

he Kindred of the Kibbo Kift serves as one of the more fascinat-

ing minor episodes in 20th-century British history. Part of the

interwar ferment of experimental lifestyles and youth movements,

the Kindred was founded in 1920 as a camping and woodcraft

organization, whose members—male and female, young and

old—loosely styled themselves as a romantic cross between

Native American shamans and back-to-nature medievalists (the

name Kibbo Kift, meaning “proof of strength,” comes from an

archaic English dialect). Originating as a kind of splinter group

of the Boy Scouts, which the Kindred rejected as too imperialist

and militaristic in nature, the organization espoused utopian and

progressive ideals ofpaciism, universal fellowship and spiritual

enlightenment.he members saw themselves as an elite (never

numbering more than a few hundred at any one time) who were

destined to liberate a degenerate, increasingly urbanized society.

Yet ultimately the growing dominance of radical politics within

the group, particularly the controversial economic theory of

Social Credit—a socialist scheme to equalize spending power and

thereby erase poverty—led to their decline and eventual transfor-

mation into a fringe political party by the early ’30s.

“Intellectual Barbarians,” a small but enthralling exhibition

of Kindred artwork, publications and archival material in the

to become more and more abstract in her art and that music
was the ultimate abstraction. hus, beginning in the 1980s, she
began converting her date formulas into musical notes.
he central room in the show was taken up byKulturge-
schichte 1880-1983(Cultural History 1880-1983), 1980-83.
his major work consists of 1,590 collaged sheets of paper
in identically sized wooden frames along with 19 sculp-
tural objects, such as display dummies (dressed inoutits
including 1980s sportswear and medical gear), a bust of
Western Germany’s irst chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and
a merry-go-round horse on a pedestal. Among the elements
in the collages are pages or covers from Germany’s weekly
magazineDer Sternand self-designed postcards stamped
“ubiquist” (everywhere), which she also sent to family,
friends, artists and gallery owners. Photos of ilm and pop
stars are paired with pictures of a camera on a tripod; dull
photos of New York doorways also appear.Kulturgeschichte
1880-1983ofers no particular argument. he material is just
too disparate. Visitors can either get lost in details or admire
the regularity of the patterns formed by the hang.
he centerpiece of the Bonn showing was the large instal-
lationKinder dieser Welt(Children of this World), 1990-96.
It consists of hundreds of children’s school exercise books
presented in vitrines, Darboven’s musical scores hung on the
walls, and a vast array of children’s toys, most notably a bunch
of characters from the Kasperletheater, a German equivalent
to the “Punch and Judy” show. here were also 10 diferently
dressed dolls seated on chairs and stools. his installation was
interpreted in the show’s press release as Darboven’s reaction
to the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the diferent skin tones of
the dolls supposedly symbolizing an optimistic new begin-
ning. here is no need, however, to impose this interpretation
on the work and thus make Darboven a igurehead of the
changes in 1989. As hinted at in the accompanying wall text,
it can as easily be seen as the artist’s conception of lifelong
learning, where steady writing exercises are as important as a
childlike sense of play.
In Munich, the curators successfully presented Dar-
boven’s colossal endeavor in terms of cultural analysis. he
Bonn show was less convincing. It even seemed to trivialize
her work by giving too much space to obvious, maybe even a
bit cheap, installations, such asOst-West-Demokratie(East-
West Democracy), 1983. Here, her date calculations covering
the years 1949 to 1983 appear in rows on the wall along
with national lags: U.S. lags in the upper row; those of the
former Soviet Union in the lower one; and a row of lags
from the Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of
Germany framed together in the middle. But this lapse was
remedied by the presentation of Darboven’s meticulously
kept private pocket calendars, which not only record practi-
cal necessities but also served as sketchbooks and contain
irst ideas for her works. hey ofered invaluable insight
into the mind of this artist’s artist, showing that her almost
maniacal tracking of the world around her extended even to
the most basic of daily routines.
—Karin Bellmann

Kibbo Kift:Surcoat

(Herald),ca.1923,

fabric, 39⅜ by

27½ inches; at

Whitechapel.