Dedn I

Artist Georg Ettl (German, 1940-2014)

Datec. 1972

MediumAggregate, plexiglass

Dimensions19 × 14 × 15 in. (48.3 × 35.6 × 38.1 cm)

ClassificationsSculpture

Credit LineGift of James Pearson Duffy, 1992

Object numberUAC1319

DescriptionThough he lived in Detroit for fourteen years, German-born artist Georg Ettl was something of an artistic outsider here. Like other Cass Corridor sculptors he used industrial materials in his work, but rather than grungy scraps and found objects, Ettl’s sculptures featured Plexiglas, For-mica, stainless steel, and other off-the-rack construction supplies. His piece Dedn I is a cin-derblock-sized study in contrasts featuring two competing kitsch tonalities: the cool, frictionless black void of the tinted plastic comprising the trapezoidal box, versus the jagged texture and py-rite sparkle of the pinkish commercial aggregate glued to three of its sides. Though closer to min-imalism than the expressive works of his Detroit peers, Ettl’s art flouted the strict tenets of the Minimalist movement as well. As Julia Myers notes in the catalog to the 2013 exhibit Subverting Modernism, while the basic form of Dedn I might have appealed to the Minimalists, the distract-ing texture of the gravel would have violated their commitment to pure form. An ArtForum re-view of a 1990 Ettl retrospective attributes this state of neither-this-nor-that in the artist’s work to his “esthetic of ambivalence” rather than to an attempt at irony. Still, Cass Corridor artist John Egner remarked on the “many layers of tongue in cheek” in Ettl’s work, and on how it poked fun at high art and low culture alike.

Text by Sean Bieri
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Born in the Bavarian town of Nittenau in 1940, Georg Ettl first came to Detroit in 1959 to work as a toolmaker and technical illustrator. After traveling to New York and Paris to study, he re-turned to Detroit to pursue degrees at Wayne State, earning his MFA (1972) while also teaching at the university. He returned to Germany in 1973 with his Detroit-native wife and their daugh-ter. Known for spare, minimalist works since the ’60s, by the ’80s Ettl had begun to develop a signature style marked by simplified silhouettes of people, animals, and architectural elements; they appear in many of his works, from paintings and silkscreens to laser-cut plywood dioramas and stained glass windows. The artist’s own grave marker in Bavaria includes two such silhou-ettes, a man and woman facing each other under a stylized crucifix; Georg Ettl died in 2014.

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