Apparently we will get to see some of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise next year. SAM's website says that three panels will be on view from 26. January to 6. April, certainly long enough to bring a class or two up to see them. That's cool. The last time I looked into this on the High's site I couldn't find any mention of Seattle, even though the rumor was already circulating that the panels would be here, too. Mark your calendars.
I just spent ten minutes trying to remember the title and author of a reading I wanted to give to a student. This is a significant moment only because what I was trying to remember was M. Fried, "Art and Objecthood." For ten whole minutes, I had forgotten that citation. Marvelous. Will it ever happen again, do you suppose?
I love this guy's work (though not that really that first one, it's too much like Bazille). Partly because it reminds me of work like this and this. That's all for the moment--back to my cave I go.
The Kunstarchiv Beeskow finally has a website of its own (including a completely inexplicable Windows-esque splash page). This archive houses a very large collection of art gathered from state buildings across East Germany: "culture palaces," factories, government office buildings, schools, you name it. There are a few pictures on the site, including one of my favorites, Hartmut Staakex's Schönes Wochenende. But mostly it contains a general description of the collection, the entire baroque Benutzungsordnung, and brief info on two recent exhibitions.
Apparently I could have made it to the Landwirtschaft show when I was in Berlin in the fall, but I didn't know about it, in spite of trying like crazy to find out if there was a show up. For about the last ten years the problem has been that the collection, which wasn't really an archive yet, didn't have its own internet presence, or any presence really. It was just a big pile of pictures out in the hinterlands. The collection had moved around a bit before the Länder established a permanent home for it Beeskow, and with the exception of a few small shows the work was pretty much closed off to the public.
They charge for use of the archive, which is a new one to me, but maybe it's more common than I know? Regardless: now that they're really open to the public, I gotta find time to define a project so I can get in there and do some digging.
The FAZ has some nice shots of the Immendorf show in Berlin, as well as a few choice words. Sounds like you and I didn't miss anything at the opening, but I'm still hoping that I'll get to see this one in person.
Well. She who hesitates. Gisela Schirmer's new book,
möglichst oft die Gleichwertigkeit des sozialistischen Realismus mit den westlichen Kunstströmungen beweisen zu müssen. Sie setzt dabei auf das extrem vereinfachende Muster, dass Kunst in der DDR gesellschaftspolitisch engagiert und also relevant gewesen sei, während die autonome Kunst des Westens gesellschaftsfern gewesen sei, aber auf der documenta als Propagandamittel für die freien Gesellschaften eingesetzt worden sei.*
Sounds less than subtle, but I'll wait until I see for myself. Schirmer's "Parteilichkeit" (the BZ's word) is pretty well established after her biography of Willi Sitte. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, either; we spend all this time gathering evidence, at some point you want to be allowed to make a judgement, or at least to draw some subjective conclusions. Leaves more room for the rest of us to think and draw some of our own. Hm. Doesn't sound very scholarly of me.
*to prove, as often as possible, socialist realism's parity with western art styles. In doing so she banks on an extremely simplified model in which the art of the GDR was socially engaged and thus relevant, whereas the autonomous art of the west was removed from society but was utilized as propoganda for free societies at documenta.
Wozu brauchen wir ein Anselm-Kiefer-Museum? Es ist längst noch nicht entschieden, wie Kiefers Werk vor der Kunstgeschichte bestehen wird.*
Ok, admittedly it does sound a little weird to give Kiefer his own museum while he's still alive, but of all the Big Boy German painters, I think his place in the history of postwar art is pretty secure.
This Grothe guy is no peach, though: he's decided that he wants to sell off his massive collection of contemporary German art, currently on loan to the Kunstmuseum Bonn, which would break up an important cohesive body of work and deprive Bonn of one of the few things that makes it interesting...Plus, given the recent Flick business, if I were the Berlin Senate, I wouldn't necessarily want to deal with another ego-driven collector, either.
* What do we need a Kiefer Museum for? We're a long way from knowing whether Kiefer's work will stand up to art historical scrutiny.
The Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern opens to the public today. The building by Piano looks great, but for those of us who can't make it there just yet, the database of works in their collection is even better. [Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be working quite right in Safari.]
I love Klee.
Last week, Douglas Crimp spent some time in our department. It was wonderful, as if my brain had gotten a spring cleaning. I'd like to write some extensive notes on his visit, but that's going to take a little thinking. For the moment I'll just quote one tiny bit of his "Getting the Warhol We Deserve" (available here), an expert defense of a cultural studies approach to art history:
What is at stake is not history per se, which is a fiction in any case, but what history, whose history, history to what purpose.
Exactly. What a guy.
I hate this kind of thing:
So ist das eben mit der Kunst. Das, was man sieht, ist nicht das, was es ist. Und deswegen muss es erklärt werden. Müsste es nicht erklärt werden, wäre es vermutlich keine Kunst.
[That's just how it is with art. What you see isn't what really is. And that's why it has to be explained. If it didn't have to be explained, it probably wouldn't be art.]
From the Spiegel Online "review" of the RAF show. I would quote more of it, but it would probably make me ill to do so. It's fine, it might even be necessary, to write a negative critique of the exhibition (I haven't seen it, so I can't say). But do it with some class. Don't just use a snort of derision to mask your own ignorance. Ugh.
Kriston writes good stuff about art and sometimes about Texas. I was just looking at this post (and this shorter, earlier one) about art in/and/outside of Texas, apropos of Turner-prize winner and ArtPace alumnus Jeremy Deller.
Kriston writes
I'm as fascinated as those voyeur Brits by this stuff, but because I lived in Texas for years, I know that an accurate pictorial presentation would involve a lot of pictures of Staples, Chile's, Walmarts and what have you, suburban housing subdivisions, cacti and mesquite. Pretty dull. For the kind of quasi-photojournalistic art Deller practices, the urge to take exciting photographs of interesting stuff competes with a certain obligation to accurately describe what is primarily homogenous and boring. (I think so, anyway, though let me admit that I'm not well versed on the ethics of photography.)
Even after ten years here (nearly. Yipes.), I feel exactly this everytime I see pictures of Texas. I suspect it's the same in any place, anywhere in the world. And I suppose, too, that images of Texas that are expressly banal can be made pretty (I use the word advisedly). See Mike Osborne's photo series of interchanges, for example (I can't find Mike's work online for some reason, just this one from our show last summer), this, this, and this, or maybe Brian Bowers' pictures of West Texas. Texas through the eyes of Texans.
(I got a nod at the end of that post, which was nice. I wasn't sure anyone'd read my essay except the parties involved.)
Thinking about industry and painting lately. Haiko Hebig posted this photo which I think is quite beautiful (and maybe not kitsch? What do you think?); it reminded me of this creepy painting by Karl Hofer ca. 1950. (Actually I had a slightly different Hofer in mind but can't find an image of it.)
[via Vasili]
Hanno Rauterberg's review of the Flick Collection is the best I've read. A few excerpts, with an English translation below the fold:
Überhaupt ist die Vergangenheit nur in den wenigsten Werken präsent. Die Ausstellung hat den Menschen als solchen im Blick, blendet aber das Gesellschaftliche, das ihn formt, weitgehend aus...Es zog [Flick] zu einer Kunst, die weniger aufs Zeitkritische zielt und mehr aufs Überzeitliche. So kann man die Ausstellung in dem Gefühl verlassen, dass der Mensch seit jeher ein Geworfener gewesen sei. ... Wo jedoch, so wie hier, alles Wut, Schmerz, Getriebenheit ist, da erscheinen mit einem Mal auch die NS-Verbrechen kaum mehr absonderlich. Da wirkt es, als gehöre Peinigen und Demütigen zur anthropologischen Grundausstattung, als sei selbst das Quälen von Zwangsarbeitern etwas Unausweichliches...Nicht dass die Sammlung etwas leugnete. Sie pflegt nur ein furchtbar argloses Verhältnis zur Vergangenheit...
One line stands out: The head of the SMPK Klaus-Dieter Lehmann's statement, "dass die Ausstellung Hitlers Schatten kleiner mache," causes Rauterberg to note, "Spätestens da merkt man: Die Trennung von Kunst und Geschichte ist unaufhebbar. Die Debatte über Sammlung und Sammler bleibt eine deutsche Debatte."
Indeed, the past is present only in very few works. The exhibition has the human being in mind but to a large extent it fades out the the social conditions which form him/her...Flick was drawn to a type of art which aims less towards critiquing a specific time and more towards the timeless. Thus one leaves the exhibition feeling that the human being has always been a cast-off. (Not sure about that one)
...
But when, as is the case here, everything is fury, pain, melancholy, all at once the crimes of the Nazi regime hardly seem strange. It appears as if torment and humiliation are part of our basic anthropological configuration, as if even the agonies of forced laborers are something unavoidable...Not the the collection is denying anything. It just tends to have a terribly guileless relationship to the past...
...
Klaus-Dieter Lehmann's statement, "that the exhibition makes Hitler's shadow smaller," causes Rauterberg to note:
Here, at the very latest, one notes that the division between art and history cannot be abolished. The debate over collection and collector remains a German debate.
...just btw, there are three new things at Die Zeit of Flicky relevance:
Rauterberg's review of the show, with the world's best opening line,
some thoughts on Schroeder's speech at the opening, and
an expose of forced labor and its relation to the Flick business.
In the NY Times today, Michael Kimmelman writes about the Flick show. One sort of offhand comment he makes is, to me, a significant aspect of the whole thing; he writes that Flick's collection is "astonishingly long on cruel, cold, black-humored art."
Of course I'm making this observation remotely, and I can't claim to have a direct impression of the collection, but a good illustration of this is offered by Paul McCarthy's Apple Heads: a little bit of funny, a lot of icky. From my lofty and distant perch Flick demonstrates a leaning towards art that is uncomfortable-making or even downright gross (witness, also, Duane Hanson's Motorcycle Accident). He bought these things in the space of 7 years; 2000 works in 7 years. That's quick. It has produced what Hanno Rauterberg at Die Zeit says is a "collection more concise and strongly-conceived than any other."
BUT: given that incredibly short span of time, what does it say about Flick's intentions, conscious or not, in building his collection? What impulses was he responding to within himself, if, as he says, he was acting "from the gut?" These are rhetorical questions, mind. But I am tempted to return to Kippenberger's Beim besten Willen etc. here (see yesterday) and wonder whether we're not meant to read the entire endeavor as a sort of underhanded razzing, whether of contemporary German Erinnerungskultur or of Society As a Whole.
Ah! To the contrary: let's compare the causes and effects of the Flick Collection, specifically the government's unequivocal acceptance (or even its protection) of Flick, with the recent success, such as it was, of Der Untergang. Heinrich Wefing at the FAZ writes:
Deutschland ist unübersehbar dabei, in eine neue, nicht weniger schwierige, aber vielleicht weniger hysterische Phase der Erinnerung einzutreten. Eine Veränderung, die Folgen für die Formen des Gedenkens, aber auch für die Machtbalance der Erinnerungspolitik haben wird. Es dürfte diese Erkenntnis gewesen sein, die Flicks Kritiker zu Härte und Heftigkeit getrieben - und zugleich die relative Folgenlosigkeit ihrer Einwände befördert hat.
[keep reading for English]
Germany is unmistakeably in the process of entering a new, not less difficult, but perhaps less hysterical, phase of memory. This is a change which will have consequences for the shapes which memorializing will take, but also for the balance of power of memory politics. It was likely this discovery which drove Flick's critics towards severity and ferocity - and, at the same time, resulted in the relative lack of consequences from their objections.
Another thought on the Flick Collection, this time from Sebastian Preuss at the BZ:
Martin Kippenbergers sarkastisches Gemälde "Ich kann beim besten Willen kein Hakenkreuz entdecken" war noch im letzten Jahr in einer Ausstellung unter ganz anderer Provenienz zu sehen. Flick kaufte das Bild also ganz bewusst für den Hamburger Bahnhof, wo es mittlerweile viele Besucher als schonungslose Anspielung des Sammlers auf seine Familiengeschichte, ja als emblematisches Werk der gesamten Kollektion empfunden haben. Jetzt aber erfahren wir, dass dieses Bild in letzter Minute und offenbar voller Kalkül integriert wurde. Am letzten Dienstag hatten alle Festredner gemahnt, die Kunst nicht für eine politische Debatte zu mißbrauchen. Was aber, wenn der Sammler selbst die Kunst in solcher Weise vereinnahmt? Mag sein, wir tun Flick Unrecht und er war Kippenbergers Bild schon lange nachgejagt - es bleibt ein fragwürdiger Aspekt.
[keep reading for English]
Last year, Martin Kippenberger's sarcastic painting, "No matter how I try, I can't find a swastika" was seen in an exhibition bearing a totally different provenance. That means that Flick bought the picture intentionally for the Hamburger Bahnhof, where, in the meantime, many visitors have interpreted it as a merciless allusion by the collector to his family history, even as an work emblematic of the entire collection. But now we discover that this painting was integrated at the last minute and in an apparently calculated way. Last Tuesday all the speakers at the opening warned against abusing art for the purposes of a political debate. But what happens when the collector himself does this very thing to art? Perhaps we are unjustly accusing Flick, maybe he's been chasing Kippenberger's painting for years - it remains a peculiar facet [of the exhibition].
I've been sitting on the subject of the Flick collection for two days, but this morning I see that a woman smashed up two works by Matta-Clark. Ugh. (The police say she's been in for property damage and assault/battery before, and they don't think that the attack was politically motivated.)
[more: The Zürich Tages-Anzieiger reports that the woman yelled out, "Flick, now I'm satisfied!" and that she did a back handspring (called a "Flick-Flack" - get it?) over one of the works. Eeps.]
I had planned to write a longer review of the reactions to the opening ceremonies on Tuesday, but it doesn't look like I'll have time. So instead I thought I'd link to Patrick Bahners' essay on the show and its opening ceremony at the FAZ. It's a fairly nuanced commentary, and I particularly like the way that Bahners analyzes the language of the speeches held by various people.
The FAZ also has this special topic page, which includes some overview material and a short photo tour (with a few shots of the art itself).
The FAZ has a nice montage of MoMA photos, mostly interesting for the shots of the hordes in front of the Nationalgalerie.
The Flick Collection premiers at the Hamburger Bahnhof annex on Tuesday. To provide some historical context which may or may not be missing from the SMPK's installation, the Prenzlauer Berg Museum is currently featuring a small show, "Forced Labor: the Flick Example." The show is an expansion of an older exhibition on forced labor in Berlin (2002).
Thomas Medicus at the FR wonders why it was left to a "second-class regional exhibition to provide the documentation."
The ever-marvelous Menil Collection is opening a Beuys show next month. In cooperation with the Tate. I'm pretty excited about this, even though I always have the feeling, when looking at Beuys' objects, that I'm missing out on the main thing. The bits that ended up in the museum seem like pale shadows of the projects themselves. But I'm not complaining...
Looks like a few drives down to Houston are in order. Maybe I'll finally make it to Ikea, too.
Gerhard Richter has given 41 paintings to the state art collections in Dresden. This looks like excellent news; it is a significant bolstering of the postwar collection of the Galerie Neue Meister. It also means Richter is, in some form, back in the city in which he was born and studied before leaving for the west in the early 1960s.
Some reactions from the taz, MDR, and the FAZ.
At the FAZ, a lengthy essay by the art historian Werner Spies on the MoMA in Berlin show. He comes to some surprising (or not?) conclusions, which I am just going to quickly note here and then think about a little bit more. The basic idea is that the MoMA show presents a particular type of canon, one which places US postwar painting ahead of that of Europe. I'm saving most of my analysis of this for later, but here are a few of his primary points.
The show is divided into two periods: pre- and postwar; in the first, the Europeans dominate, while in the second they are all but ignored:
wir treffen in den Sälen, in denen die Kunst der Nachkriegszeit ausgebreitet wird, auf kein einziges Werk von Matisse. Dabei hatte der greise Künstler mit seinen Papierschnitten die Amerikaner zu einer geradezu revolutionären Befreiung aufgerufen. Wir finden nichts von Max Ernst, obwohl dieser, wie Masson, noch zu Beginn der fünfziger Jahre dank der Spontaneität der "écriture automatique" eine erkennbare Wirkung auf die New Yorker Schule ausübte. Vergeblich sucht man Dubuffet, Fautrier, Giacometti. Nicht einmal der späte Picasso, der in den sechziger Jahren dank seiner expressiven, existentiellen Malerei überall auf der Welt eine beispiellose Aktualität erreichte, hat auf diesem amerikanischen Parnaß Platz gefunden. Über dem, was sich hier abspielt, liegt wie ein Fluch der Schatten des Großkritikers Clement Greenberg. Seine ebenso formalistische wie chauvinistische Rechthaberei hat das historische Denken für Generationen versaut.
[Just a quicky translation of that last bit: The shadow of the great Clem lies over the second half of the show, "His formalist, chauvinist, dogmatism has screwed up historical thinking for generations." Here I have to interject something: I am not a Greenberg apologist or anything, but it seems simplistic to me to blame the composition of a BLOCKBUSTER show on him, especially after years of hostile and not especially well-informed reaction against formalism. Really. Besides, this was a show meant to make money, not to teach the people of Berlin their art history. But I digress.]
...
Lest we think there were no Europeans at all in the second half of the show, Spies points out that, in fact, it ends with a very important work of European art: Richter's 18. October:
Dieser Ostrazismus der europäischen Kunst leistet sich eine, man muß sagen, gravierende Ausnahme. Gerhard Richter erscheint mit fünfzehn Bildern. Der Zyklus "18. Oktober 1977" bildet das eine Ende der Schau. Warum diese Wahl? Richter dient als Exempel: Die Entscheidung, die europäische Kunst der letzten fünfzig Jahre allein durch den Baader-Meinhof-Zyklus zu illustrieren, verweist auf Terrorismus, auf ein nicht geheures Europa, das nur als Überbringer der schlimmen Botschaft erscheinen darf.
[Again, briefly: showing Richter last here casts all of European art (not German, but European, even though that whole painting project was explicitly about Germany) "points to terrorism, to a suspect Europe, one which may only appear as the bearer of bad news."]
So just some quick general thoughts: The MoMA show was put together in order to make money. It is a collection of greatest hits, and I don't think it's surprising that this involved a less than nuanced selection of works. It's not altogether different from ANY survey textbook, by the way; this is something that has always bothered me as a postwar European specialist NOT working on the Situationists or Richter/Kiefer: no one cares. Yes, that should change, but it's not going to happen in the kind of show you throw together to make a quick buck while your building is being finished.
The MOZ reports that the MoMA in Berlin show has reached 700 000 visitors, which was the projected total for the entire run of the show. This comes months before its closing date of 19. September. This means they've more than recouped the initial cost of 8.5 million Euros; they estimated covering that with 550 000 visitors, so I guess they're in the clear. Remarkable.
Update on the whole Flick collection thing. The head of the Berlin museums has put his foot down:
'Wir sind das Moratorium. Wir sorgen dafür, daß die Sammlung sieben Jahre lang in Berlin zu sehen sein wird. Sieben Jahre lang wird diskutiert werden.'...Ihm liege daran, sagte Schuster, 'unsere Besucher über die deutsche Geschichte und die Geschichte der Familie Flick nicht unwissend zu lassen, ihnen aber auch nicht die Folie der deutschen Vergangenheit überzustülpen'. Er fände es 'ganz unangemessen', beispielsweise 'die Arbeiten von Bruce Nauman auf eine Familiengeschichte von Flick zu reduzieren'.
Hmm, well, check out the 1967 Nauman above (at the NGA of Australia); it reads, "The true artist helps the world by revealing mystic truths." Perhaps those truths will be revealed through this project. And people will pay to see them.
Ostblog notes the passing of Wolfgang Mattheuer, one of the more famous artists of the GDR. [Here's a memorial story at the Märkische Allgemeine.]
I feel a conflicted empathy of some mysterious kind towards the artists I "work on:" I just finished a draft of a paper on the Nationalgalerie's Kunst in der DDR, thinking a lot about Western perceptions of Eastern artists and their work, and the self-definition of Eastern artists. Perhaps because of that temporary, extra-deep immersion, Mattheuer's death hits me extra hard.
[I'm purposely avoiding, for now, the debates around M's position as a favored artist in the GDR. Will do later, though, maybe after the panels on Ostalgie this weekend.]
It's a busy week for me. I'm hoping to finish a rewrite of my earlier post about Der Watzman sometime soon, but I thought in the meantime I'd link to the Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste (English language page):
The Koordinierungsstelle für Kulturgutverluste is Germany’s central office for the documentation of lost cultural property. Its main task is to register and document search requests and found-object reports about cultural objects taken from their owner(s) in connection with Nazi persecution or relocated as a result of the Second World War. Publication on the Internet makes it possible to search for these objects and the circumstances of their loss world-wide. In this way, the Office seeks to assist the locating and identification of these objects and to facilitate their return.
The site includes a searchable database which "contains data on cultural objects which as a result of Nazi persecution or the direct consequences of the Second World War were removed and relocated, stored or seized from their owners, particularly Jews, or on cultural objects where, because of gaps in their provenance, such a story of loss cannot be ruled out as a possibility."
A fun, if a little snippy, review of the Baselitz retrospective at Deutschland Radio [German]; the show's press release [in English]. More to follow...
Caspar David Friedrich's Der Watzmann is back in the collection of the Berlin National Gallery, although it never really left. The painting was recently established (or let's say the Berlin museums recently recognized this fact) as having been a "Notverkauf," a bail-out of sorts. The original owners, the Brunn family, sold the work to the National Gallery in 1937 and then used the proceeds to pay the "Reichsfluchtsteuer," the fee extracted by the Nazi bureaucracy for leaving Germany. In compliance with a 1999 declaration of the foundation in charge of Berlin's museums, the museum returned the work to the heirs of the original owners (this is the second case in which they've done so) and the work was then promptly purchased by the Deka-Bank, who turned the painting back over to the National Gallery in the form of a permanent loan. Here's the government's coverage of the presentation of the painting to the Gallery, complete with smiling politicians. The implication in some of the coverage of this process is that in the future, it's going to be up to sources other than the state to preserve Germany's "cultural history;" in this particular case, the SMPK, the organization of Berlin museums, could never have afforded the multiple millions of Euros needed to buy the painting from its new/old owners.
[Coverage at the Tagesspiegel and the Morgenpost.]
Der Prignitzer reports that Dresden's Kupferstichkabinett has returned to its original location in the residential Palace. The collection of nearly 510,000 prints had been stored in the decorative arts museum while the Residenz was being renovated. The inaugural exhibition will open at the end of April.
"Oh, Rosalind, Barbara, Michael, and Annette et alia, how foolish and arrogant you all were. Some of us knew it then, but now it is confirmed in your own words..."
John Perreault at ArtsJournal reviews Amy Newman's Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974. Perrault sums up:
What blood was spilt! What spleen was spewn! (Or whatever you do with spleen.) And it continues. But who now cares? It just makes a good, mean story. Some may wax nostalgic for a time when a handful of people called the art-world shots, but I don't. Did we really want Fried and Krauss deciding what great art was? Someone had to be the opposition, so Earth Art could emerge. As we see, it certainly did emerge in the person of Robert Smithson. Smithson, as several report, somehow managed to rescue Leider from the clutches of Clem.
I was rereading the Berliner Zeitung's article on waiting to get into the MoMA in Berlin when I was struck by this vignette: an "elderly lady" standing in front of Agnes Martin's entirely white canvas, "Red Bird," moves away from the circle around the docent, nods affirmatively and murmurs, "Now I understand. The artist wanted to retract his ego, that's why there's nothing on the painting. Fine fellows, these modern artists."
[...nickt anerkennend „Jetzt verstehe ich“, murmelt sie, „der Maler wollte sein Ego zurücknehmen, deshalb ist auf dem Bild nichts drauf. Feine Kerle, die modernen Künstler."]
Rough translation. But anyway, the striking thing here is just how much the attitude towards the MoMA show in the press resembles the way documenta was treated in 1955. Welcoming back modern art, ushering Germany into the international artworld; sketches of the "average guy" (often in fact a little old lady) and his commendable attempt to understand the modernist work he's looking at.
And then there's the Cold-War-esque US-German relations motif. Johann Michael Möller, a columnist at the Morgenpost says "Das deutsch-amerikanische Verhältnis hat zwar an Pathos verloren. Doch das geistig-kulturelle Fundament war nie gefährdet. Dafür sind wir uns zu ähnlich."
[The German-American relationship has lost some of its pathos. But its intellectual-cultural foundation was never in danger. (The cultures) are too similar for that to happen.]
He likens the MoMA experience to the re-introduction of Modern culture in the "progressive West" after the war. Keep reading for a lengthy quote.
Es ist dies eine Moderne, die vielfach die Signatur Amerikas trägt und doch immer auch Teil des europäischen, des westlichen Fortschritts war. Dessen Ton war uns 1945 fremd geworden, als ihn die Amerikaner zurück in unser Land brachten. Es war ein ungewohnter Rhythmus, ein neuer Klang, der da aus den Lautsprechern der Besatzungstruppen kam. Wer ein klassisch ausgebildetes Gehör hatte, verabscheute die "Blue Notes". Das waren unreine, ja schmutzige Töne und doch von einer unheimlichen Faszination. In den gebildeteren Kreisen las man damals Geoffrey Gorers völkerpsychologische Studie über "Die Amerikaner", um herauszufinden, wem man denn da gegenüberstand. Die Antwort wäre sehr einfach gewesen: Sich selbst.
From the Frankfurter Rundschau, a quick report on the early success of the MoMA guest show in Berlin:
Die "MoMA"Ausstellung in Berlin hat an den ersten beiden Tagen schon rund 11000 Besucher in die Neue Nationalgalerie gelockt. Allein am Samstag kamen nach Angaben der Veranstalter knapp 6000 Kunstinteressierte. Für Sonntag wurde mit einer ähnlich hohen Besucherzahl gerechnet.
11 thousand in two days. Holy smokes. Why on earth are all those people crushing into the galleries? It's going to be there for more than half a year...
Ammend.: ok, having read more at the Berliner Zeitung, I see that they're only letting 1000 people into the gallery at once. Sounds reasonable. And with the Wurst-man coming by every so often, I suppose even the 2-hour wait isn't so bad. Bring a thermos of coffee and some mittens.
I wanted to go back to my last entry and think about Hanno Rauterberg's closing bit on the Berlin-MoMA collaboration:
„Das sind Bilder, die lange eine heile Welt meinten“, sagt Angela Schneider, die Leiterin der Nationalgalerie. „An denen konnte sich die frühe Bundesrepublik orientieren.“ Und ihr Chef, Peter-Klaus Schuster, schwärmt, die Ausstellung offenbare „zehn Jahre nach dem Abzug der Alliierten eine fast schon legendäre Sympathie, welche Berlin und New York immer füreinander empfunden haben“. Im Zeichen der Kunst geht’s zurück in die Zeit der Luftbrücke – das MoMA in Berlin ist das MoMA der Nostalgie.["These are pictures that suggest a safe/intact world," says Angela Schneider, head of the NG. "Years ago, the Federal Republic was able to orient itself on them." And her Boss, Peter-Klaus Schuster, gushes that the exhibition reveals, "ten years after the Allies' withdrawal, the almost legendary sympathy that Berlin and New York have always had for one another." Under the auspices of Art, we return to the time of the Airlift - the MoMA in Berlin is the MoMA of nostalgia.]
It strikes me that, if we compare the NG's last big show, Kunst in der DDR, to this guest show from NY, there really are interesting parallels to be made. Does the MoMA show represent the Cold-War West, where KidDDR was the Cold-War East? Interesting that Rauterberg brings in nostalgia; there were so many accusations of that during the GDR show. More on this later.
Hanno Rauterberg at Die Zeit offers some nice critiques of the MoMA show. Again, here it's not so much about the art as it is about the show itself. A few tidbits he offers:
The NG is hoping for 700 thousand visitors; it needs 550 thousand in order to cover the 8.5 million euros it spent to rent the show (that's 11 times what it spent on Kunst in der DDR).
"Statt El Greco, Holbein oder Tizian, Gerhard Richter oder Andreas Gursky, die andernorts Publikumsrekorde brechen, nach Berlin zu holen, kauft er lieber Fertig-Ereignisse ein: Er gefällt sich als Sammler der Sammler...Berlin könnte also tatsächlich glücklich sein, dass nun mit dem MoMA endlich etwas Großes die Stadt in seinen Kunstbann ziehen will. Und doch ist auch dies Große wieder nur eine Art Fertigprodukt."
[Instead of bringing to Berlin El Greco, Holbein, or Titian, Gerhard Richter or Andreas Gursky, who break records in other places, [NG Director Schuster] prefers to buy ready-made exhibitions: He sees himself as a collector of collectors…Berlin should, then, be happy that with MoMA, Berlin will finally be bewitched by something great. But even this is only another pre-made art product.]
Rauterberg wishes (and I agree) that German art historians had been given a chance to write for the catalog, to see if there might be differing views on Picasso et al. And wouldn't it be great if the MoMA's Beckmanns could be compared to those already in Berlin?
On the "american season" (see below), he registers some skepticism; it is "ganz so, als seien die Helden der MoMA-Sammlung, Picasso und Matisse vorneweg, allesamt uramerikanische Künstler gewesen." [as if the heroes of the MoMA collection, in particular Picasso and Matisse, had all been prototypical American artists.]
And noone would think to start a "german season" in DC if the NG there showed Cologne's collection of pop-art; "In Berlin hingegen wiegt offenbar die Lust an der Anbiederung stärker als das Selbstbewusstsein." [But Berlin's need for ingratiation is stronger than its self-confidence.]
Woah: New York once again spreads the modernist love, this time with a traveling show from MoMa (this is the same show, I think, that was just in Houston). The Spiegel writes
1958...brach gerade die eisigste Phase des Kalten Kriegs an, und im geteilten Deutschland herrschte, dies- und jenseits der Grenze, große Skepsis gegenüber experimentierfreudiger neuer Kunst.Amerika gab auf seine Weise Nachhilfeunterricht: Das berühmte New Yorker Museum of Modern Art, kurz MoMA, schickte - nicht zum ersten Mal nach Kriegsende - eine Auswahl seiner Bestände nach Deutschland. Den Westdeutschen sollte, mit dem Wohlwollen der CIA, die Abstraktion wieder nahe gebracht werden. Der Realismus war in den USA verpönt, denn er galt als Pflichtstil solch feindlicher Regime wie der Sowjets. Ein weiteres Unwort hieß "Verprovinzialisierung", und dieser sollte in Deutschland mit Farborgien von Jackson Pollock oder Mark Rothko entgegengewirkt werden.
Die Zeiten haben sich geändert. Kunsthistorische Nachhilfe ist nicht mehr nötig, provinziell möchte Berlin aber auch heute auf keinen Fall wirken.
I'll be following this one up, since the parallels to my research are just too close...
(Note the photo of the Rousseau and Boccioni coffee mugs with the label "Merchandising mit Matisse" under it.)
Ok: yesterday I learned through Ostblog that Harald Metzkes is celebrating his 75th birthday. Metzkes is one of my favorite artists, not just because he and Elrid Metzkes were incredibly kind to me during a visit and interview.
Harald Metzkes' work from the '50s and early '60s is powerful and beautiful and the "Berliner Schule" group as a whole is extremely intriguing, despite the fact that they are being somewhat romanticized now, post-Wende (see Kunst in der DDR). I know I should expand this to discuss some of Metzkes', Schroeder's, or Böttcher's work but instead I want to continue with today's thought:
Along with the news of Metzkes' birthday Web.de posted this interesting image:
How, after all my digging around in Berlin and my dwelling on the GDR in the Fifties, did I miss this? It's the cellar of the old Akademie der Künste building on Pariser Platz which Metzkes and a number of other later-to-be famous GDR artists covered with murals. I'm thrilled to hear about it, it's basically a discovery to me. Apparently everyone else already knew about it.
Freitag reports that Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, an independent conservator, intervened when the Hotel Adlon planned to destroy the paintings in the process of expanding its underground levels. It seems the Fundus hotel group has put up the money to save the murals, which in itself is a good thing.
The slightly icky thing is what it intends to do with them. Any guesses? That's right, incorporate them into the hoity-toity hotel's restaurants. Not the formal dining area, though; Harald Metzkes' Die Tafelrunde beim Wilderer will be reinstalled in a brand new, casual space in which one can get "Take-Away-Coffees, Sandwiches und leichten Gerichten in vielen Variationen..." I guess that increases my chances of getting in to see it.
But what will be the name of this new cafe?
I am not kidding.
Ionarts comments on the Guardian's review of a retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work at the Louisiana. I admit that I'm not a big fan of Lichtenstein, but must agree with ionart's assessment of the heavy-handed and grumpy analysis of the Guardian's reviewer. I find it hard to believe, for example, that there's no irony in Lichtenstein's work, although perhaps that irony dissipates somewhat in a one-artist-show, when it's seen with only itself as a reference.
Then there was this from the Guardian reviewer: "This kind of art—a painting of the back of a painting, a cast of a beer can—has always fascinated Americans. At once naive and sophisticated, it speaks to a culture both materialist and self-conscious." Not sure how to respond to that; wouldn't want to trade with some equally pointy jibe against British artistic habits.
Just back from family visiting in DC, where we were able to spend a morning at the National Gallery, primarily to visit the Romare Bearden show.
What an excellent body of work. Montage is probably my favorite medium (why, then, am I not working on it? Great question), and Bearden developed such an incredible language...I highly recommend the show, and hear that the audio guide was also good.
The show will be in Dallas this summer, but I'm glad we were able to go see it in DC, where public transport, while not perfect, still is doable. It beats a drive up I-35 any day.
I just finished teaching Early Christian art in my survey, so Ionart's post today about a recent discovery in Arles came at a great time. What a find; why did I choose to become a "Modernist" again? And lucky for me, with my unpolished French, Ionarts translates the original text. (I suppose I should be doing that, too, when I post German things.)
I'm slowly trying to familiarize myself with a current art debate in DC. It's been a while since I followed the news there, but ionarts discusses an interesting debate over the Corcoran's J. Seward Johnson, Jr. show. I'd sort of like to see this for myself: is it art or pedagogy? The larger question is, what are the responsibilities of the state-funded museum?
(site mostly in German)
This is quite an improvement over the old site design. Includes book reviews, an exhibition calendar, and the all-important "career-outlook" page (for German jobs, natch).
Portal Kunstgeschichte
What's the state of feminism and art? Artforum tells all.
Adrian Piper's contribution made me think it would have been fabulous to be a fly on the wall during the discussion from which the 9 essays were reworked. Huh.
The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist, according to some at e-flux, which is offering opinions on the subject by various artists. I had a look at Martha Rosler's:
Right now there is a protracted tussle within the art world over a basically conservative aestheticism, a refurbishment of Kant, and the more conceptual-rationalist work from the latter part of the past century. So far, this aestheticism is less hysterical and precious than the other fin de siècle aestheticism, but its intentions are just as revanchist, and pernicious. Documenta needs to evade this temptation; the last two curators did a mostly excellent job of this, but this job is obviously too big for one person, and there are always sub-curators, assigned to sub-regions, I suppose. This means regional factionalism and favoritism, inevitably subverting the grand design with outrageously extraneous inclusions.
It's a big hairy job.
Ariana wonders, ...WWGD? Which is to say: What would Clement Greenberg do? I'm not sure I think this does the old guy justice but it's still funny to me; and what would be even funnier is if, as she suggests she might, she presents us with WWGD sometime soon (Must have Griselda!).
