Knoebel based his decision to use this material on his rejection of the canvas as being an expression of traditional painting. In his view the hardboard already gives the impression of a ‘finished painting’. The compilation of elementary pieces, hardboard cubes and squares, circular segments, rough canvas stretchers, floor segments and hardboard tiles in their studio room became known as the installation ‘Hardboardroom’ or ‘Room 19’, 1968/92, which Knoebel exhibited for the first time at the Academy’s Open House in the winter semester, and in different forms up to the last time 1997 in Berlin. This installation is always mentioned as a key work, and Knoebel ended by permanently installing it in 1992 at Hessia’s State Museum in Darmstadt. It shows all the essential features of his art, his formal vocabulary that developed over time step-by-step and his precise way of working.
The reduction of forms and the elimination of any individual trademark style as well as a lack of any claim to originality are all reminiscent of Minimal Art, whose reception in Germany began in 1968 with important exhibitions in Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne and Eindhoven. Knoebel has here taken up the discussion that the artists of Minimal Art began on the relation of the viewer to the room and to the artwork. Whereby the relations of the objects amongst each other and to the room, as well as the relation of the viewer to the object and the room, are decided according to the autonomous design principles of scale, proportion and light. Via optical and haptic perception, the recipient develops an awareness of his or her own physical existence in its relation to space and to the sculpture. However, Imi Knoebel has assembled elements such as a canvas stretcher, moulding and panels that play with the idea of the room as a stand-in for unpainted pictures, and this goes far beyond the intentions of the American Minimalists, who negated any ideas of traditional or abstract painting.
‘Darmstädter Raum’, set up in a dialogue with the ‘Beuys Block’, was installed according to Knoebel’s instructions as a slightly modified replica of ‘Raum 19’, through which the viewer had to pass to get into the Beuys suite. While Knoebel himself built the objects in the ‘Hardboardroom’ and the first installations with striking care – which is evidence of the spirit of the Applied Arts School and its insistence on high quality craftsmanship – the 1992 Darmstadt replica was produced in his studio by carpenters following his instructions. The contrast between the commercially-built forms of the hardboard room and the decaying substances heavy with meaning in Beuys’s glass cases makes the different artistic approaches strikingly clear: while Knoebel strives for radical non-representation and the exclusion of any allusion to transcendent meaning, Beuys requires interaction with the viewer that goes beyond sensual perception, including a new understanding of the mythical dimension of life, in order to restore the original unity of man with nature.
While the ‘Hardboardroom’ goes back to a random arrangement of materials, the principle of layering and stacking the objects and colour panels within different spatial situations evolves into a well thought out procedure. In contrast, in Beuys’s installations the consideration of purely proportional dimensions and the relation between work, room and light as constituent elements are all subordinated to the semantic tie-in. Beuys does not simply place the objects behind or next to each other, but according to strictly defined principles such as doubling, polarity, asymmetry and symmetry, or he engenders counterparts derived from the materiality or from the actions framework from which the objects often originate. Beuys deploys rules of design that have come about from his engagement with Fluxus, such as the precise treatment and experience of time and space. All of which flows into the actions, whereby the factor of movement in Beuys always implies the possible consequence of a change in the existing circumstances. Beuys’s instinctive approach to the placement of objects and the development of a fully defined feeling for a spatial area is what Knoebel recapitulated when in 1987 he installed Beuys ‘Fond’ works in New York’s Dia Art Foundation: ‘You have to know how it works. It is set down. Beuys, too, did it this way… You have to understand his principle; many have difficulty with it.’