1. Klaus Rinke’s water installation at the entrance to ECA Main Building
For SGA, Rinke created a huge installation in the entrance vestibule to Edinburgh College of Art. This involved a water tank and a giant hose that spouted water out of the doors of the main building as the public were walking in.
The first artwork to ‘greet’ the visitor to Strategy: Get Arts was by the artist Klaus Rinke (b. 1939).
Rinke trained as a poster painter in Gelsenkirchen from 1954 to 1957. He then studied painting at the Folkwang School in Essen from 1957 to 1960 and had various studios in Paris and Reims from 1960 to 1964.
He moved to Düsseldorf in 1965 and would work with the likes of Joseph Beuys and Bernd and Hilla Becher.
From 1974 to 2004, Rinke was Professor of Sculpture at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
Water tank installation, Klaus Rinke
In the early 1960s, he started experimenting with body and performance art and he saw himself as a sculptor in the broadest possible terms. This included experimenting with water as a sculptural element.
For SGA, Rinke created a huge installation in the entrance vestibule to Edinburgh College of Art.
This involved a water tank and a giant hose that spouted water out of the doors of the main building as the public were walking in.
It was a work that did not attract police attention, but it did annoy other city authorities, who sought to prohibit the use of the fire hose on the grounds that it was a misuse of a fire appliance and that a large amount of mains water was being wasted.
Curiously, blasting members of the public with water was not considered to be an issue.
Newspaper critics responded more favourably to the humour of Rinke’s water installation.
Giant German happening floods the Art College […] as you enter, keep a sharp lookout for Klaus Rinke’s water snake.
Rinke was very present at SGA and he appears in a number of photographs by George Oliver, sometimes with his partner, the artist and photographer, Monika Baumgartl.
Baumgartl took some of the most striking photographs of SGA, using a camera and tripod.
From 1970 to 1976 she organised performances and joint exhibitions together with Rinke.
Rinke twice exhibited at the documenta and twice at the Venice Biennale and has had solo exhibitions all over the world, including at the Pompidou, MoMA, and Tate Modern.
C.W.