Aug
16
This week I made it to the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city's museum of contemporary art. The space is absolutely beautiful -- a former train station, with a glass roof similar to that in the Musée d'Orsay. Lots of natural light filters into the galleries through fogged windows and muslin shades, so the art doesn't have reflections like we saw in the Met (which was beautiful in its own way, but terrible for viewing the art). The façade of the building is decorated with fluorescent blue bars by minimalist Dan Flavin. (Is it not peculiar to decorate with minimalist art?) They had a room exclusively for Joseph Beuys, another for Warhol, and another for Cy Twombly. As I was alone, I decided to pick up one of the audio guides. I found it really helpful for the paintings by Rauschenberg (such as "First Time Painting," 1961) and Twombly ("Free Wheeler," 1955, "School of Fontainebleau," 1960, and "Thyrsis," 1977), neither of whom I have studied much. In the central gallery were several large sculptures and three-dimensional paintings by Anselm Kiefer, whose incredible painting "Athanor" in the Toledo Museum of Art I fell in love with this past year. In the central gallery of the Bahnhof, they have his "Volkszählung" (roughly, "Population Census") from 1991. The installation is a room, a library of oversized iron books sitting on oversized iron bookshelves. Three shelves, stacked on top of each other, reach about 15' high. Look at my pictures on Flickr to get an idea of the scale of the shelves and books in comparison, as well as their texture. Embedded into the pages of the books are thousands of little dots, little peas or seeds, perhaps to represent individual people not to be reduced by the act of conducting a census. I know I'm not alone, but I find Kiefer an intelligent, aware and most importantly, wholly sincere artist. Too many contemporary artists are obsessed with postmodern culture and can't produce anything of substantial merit; there is much to be learned from artists like Kiefer or Richter, theoretically and aesthetically.There was another gallery showing works by Bruce Nauman and Matthew Barney, a couple pieces from Rachel Whiteread (the mattress, the underside of a table), several minimalist sculptures by Donald Judd.
The two special exhibitions showed sculptor Alicja Kwade (winner of the Piepenbrock Förderpreis, 2008) and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (winner of the Turner Prize, 2000). Kwade's work impressed me very much. She questions the authenticity of what we consider something's "value" or "worth." For one piece, she took 100 pebbles and stones from the street, shaped and polished them like gemstones, and scattered them on a low, rectangular pedestal. In another, she took over a hundred bricks of coal and plated them with 24-karat gold. She also plates wall and desk clocks with silver, so that they are no longer functional (the time can no longer be read). One of the first pieces in the exhibition was a gracefully poured pile of sparkling green dust -- created by smashing and grinding bottles of champagne.
Tillmans's show was supposed to be the highlighting exhibition. However, I found it too self-indulgent. The show itself was too large, containing way too many pieces. I personally enjoyed the curatorial creativity with which some of his photographs were displayed. And the tables of collaged newspaper clippings and photographs. But too many of his photographs I found too... empty. In one of his statements, Tillmans said that he hoped through his work to reduce all the physical value of his subjects, to make clear that all objects have the same physical value, weight. While I admire this ambition and think his photographs accomplish this, I feel that this fact is also inherent in the photographic medium. I could make the case of a few artists who work with the opposite, who rely on their composition and color to create varying distributions of weight and form. But Tillmans goal has already been reached by many other photographers before him. He doesn't articulate it in a special way. Interestingly, I actually felt a void when viewing most of his work. It was non-photography -- but not in a provocative way. It sounds a little ridiculous, I know, but in my notes I wrote that "he should not be allowed to explore so many topics in one exhibition." There were some great works, but in this particular context it was too much work to seek them out. My favorites might have been from his "Lighter" series (2007/2008), in which the high-gloss images of color fields are bent and crinkled to reflect light and change the hues. These I found very lively and engaging -- perhaps because they were so glossy that it was impossible for the viewer to avoid looking at their own reflection. I also liked: "Tapestry" (2006), the series of the total solar eclipse, "Springer" (1987/88), "Faltenwurf II" ("Submerged II," 2000), and "Kneeling Nude, Dark" (1997). "Kneeling Nude" is a very dark photograph (as it was taken at night), and the viewer has to get very close in order to make out its subject -- a young, nude man wearing a mohawk and nipple pinchers, kneeling so that he faces the viewer, grabbing his dick. I also really liked the "Memorial for Victims of Organized Religions" (for the title, if for nothing else), which is a series of perhaps 48 dark, high-gloss photos arranged in a corner so that they reflected each other, forming a cross or some sort of wheel.
On one of the museum's walls was a quote of Kiefer's, taken from Isaiah: "Grass will grow over your cities." I fully support the truth of this statement. It also reminds me quite explicitly of Weisman's "The World Without Us," which I started reading on the cruise, have yet to finish, but am still recommending to nearly everyone I meet.
My visit to the Bahnhof led me to write up a list of my favorite artists. Here is how it currently stands: Hesse, Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Claes Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Sugimoto, Kiefer, Twombly, Rothko, and Cézanne (and Braque and Picasso and the other late 19th-early 20th century modernist masters, of course). There are too many, I suppose, as this list is already so long and yet still not fully comprehensive. And what about Cai Guo-Qiang, or Richard Serra, or all of the amazing contemporary artists I have only encountered once... I just don't know where to stop. How about right here.
