In Friday's Berliner Zeitung Eckhart Gillen asks,
"Verschenkt die Nationalgalerie mit der kontextfreien Kanonisierung, mit dem Verzicht auf historische Zäsuren, Auf- und Abbrüche, auf das Politische schlechthin, nicht gerade die Chance, das Besondere, ja das Aufregende dieser Kunst herauszuarbeiten?"
This has been the question I've posed to myself many times in considering the show. On the one hand, I understand the importance of finally allowing these works to function as, well, works of art. But they are so bound to their historical situations. As is any artwork. The wall texts never gave me enough information--and I already know most of this stuff. But maybe that's part of the strategy: assume that your audience has a certain level of knowledge about context and eventually, it will?
Gillen is an art historian deeply involved in writing the history of GDR art.
Read more: Selig in überzeitlicher Aura
Comments
One of the things I like about your work is the way you turn the developing discourses around East and West German art around; and part of this is the notion that we tend to see the political circumstances of cultural production as the determining factor in the East, whereas the West is more often seen as politically neutral. At any rate, I like what you wrote here, in that it brings up the complexity of the reception of this art. On the one hand I hate the aestheticization (obviously it's aesthetic -- perhaps I mean commercialization and the heightened importance of a work's formal properties which tends to happen in a gallery) and de-clawing of any art. On the other hand, I can't help but think that this art has just as much right to live in that formal, de-clawed space as any other. So, yeah, maybe this show will help lead to a more complex dialogue? Seems like it's certainly broadening the audience for it....
Posted by: Libby at October 20, 2003 03:24 AM