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Art

Hamburger Kunsthalle

· "L'art est un jeu sérieux" - ·

I lived in Hamburg from 1970 to 1981 with many hours spent in this museum. Today, the freshly renovated and now reopened Hamburger Kunsthalle continues its attempts to showcase women artists who have not (yet) gotten the recognition they deserve. At my last visit it was Louise Bourgeois whose sculptures were prominently placed in the courtyard of the museum (and served as convenient car ports for city tours….)

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This spring it is a retrospective of Rumanian artist Geta Brãtescu to celebrate her 90th birthday http://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/en/exhibitions/geta-brătescu (link in english.) The artist is a renaissance woman when it comes to her choice of and facility with different artistic mediums; she is thoroughly modern, however, in her integration of history, social commentary and, yes, whimsey, into her work. Here is a 3 minute clip that visits the artist in her studio where she refers to art as a serious game. http://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/ausstellungen/geta-brătescu

I very much relate to her intense joy of travel and indiscriminately photographing whatever attracts the eye. And I cherish the opportunity to learn from female role models how to navigate an art world that has been not exactly welcoming. The pigeons, kept at bay by the wire netting at the museum exteriors walls, know of which I speak….

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Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau Dresden

· Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden ·

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Dresden, often called”Florence at the river Elbe,” is a beautiful city, and one of contrasts. Having suffered through one of the worst allied bombing attacks of WW II which cost 25.000 lives and burnt much of its famous architecture, the old part of town is now restored and glorious. The new part of town, on the other side of the river, is vibrant and artsy.  Dresden is, however, also home to the far-right PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the West) movement and a stronghold of the populist party AfD (Alternative for Germany) that scored mightily in recent state elections despite (or because of) its anti-immigrant, nationalistic, and authoritarian leanings.

The upcoming exhibition in the Lipsiusbau (its dome nicknamed the lemon squeezer) is thus a timely look into some of the horrid ideas associated with neo-nazi and other right-wing movements. Surveying the non-human – On the aesthetics of racism explores how racists often tried to justify their notions with scientific arguments. http://www.skd.museum/en/special-exhibitions/surveying-the-non-human/index.html (link in english). Among other things, the project displays an as yet unexamined obsessive collection of pictures by the Dresden ethnologist and anthropologist Bernhard Struck (1888—1971) as well as pieces by Fabio Mauri and Arnold Franck. I am reminded of the fabulous Carri Mae Weems show at the Portland Art Museum some years back. Her work tackled the same issues through photography.

Since today is Yom HaShoa and anti-Semitism is alive and well in some parts of those populist movements, I am adding one of my favorite photos of the New Synagogue in Dresden. Completed in 2001, it was built on the same location as the Semper Synagogue (1839–1840) which was destroyed in 1938, during Kristallnacht. The building stands at the edge of Dresden’s old town, the latter carefully restored in all its baroque  detail, the former refusing to be a replica of what was lost (although some parts of the destroyed synagogue are incorporated into the walls.) It is a dramatically modernist building, built slightly off plumb, to remind of the traditional isolation of the Jewish community from the city.

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Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

· An oasis of art in a city of banking ·

I cannot recall his name for the life of me. He was a Hungarian refugee who had managed to escape after the 1956 uprising and landed in Paris where he became a student of Joan Miró’s. How he ended up teaching art in a public school in the middle of nowhere at the Dutch/German border is anybody’s guess. It certainly changed my life – for a short time anyhow, when I began painting with wild abandon, all of 12 years old, under his tutelage and with his encouragement. When sent to boarding school, a year later, and presenting my new art teacher with a watercolor of blue and purple stone walls her scathing ridicule made me drop the brush for decades to come.

These memories were triggered by reading about the current exhibit of Miró works at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, http://www.schirn.de/ausstellungen/2016/joan_miro/. The Schirn is an interesting, modern building nestled between the cathedral of St. Bartholomew and the Römer plaza. I like the museum – they know how to balance shows of established artists with risk-taking exhibitions of emerging power. When I visited last they had a show of installations and contemporary art from Brazil which made a lasting impression.

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Opening in mid-May is a show of one of our own, NYC-based artist Peter Halley. He’s gone all swirly, it looks like, after so many years of geometric abstracts.  http://www.schirn.de/programm/angebote/eroeffnung_peter_halley_11_mai/ Wish I could be there!

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Deichtorhallen Hamburg

· Halle für aktuelle Kunst/Haus der Photographie ·

Part of Hamburg’s museum mile, these two beautiful structures were built between 1911 and 1913 as market halls. The hall for contemporary art is airy and light and welcoming despite its industrial bones. It is often used for site specific installations; when I was last there, Anthony Gormley exposited a project, Field Horizons, where a mirrored horizontal surface had been suspended across the length and with of the hall. Clad in socks, you could walk and slightly swing in space with light reflecting all around you. It was magical.

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If you are lucky enough to travel to Hamburg by May 14th, you can attend the opening of http://www.deichtorhallen.de/index.php?id=478&L=1 (link in english) Andreas Slominski’s new installation, The O of the Door. The German title is Das Ü des Türstehers (the doorman, or bouncer, NOT the door!) But independent of lazy translation, I can’t figure out for the life of me what that title has to do with the content of the exhibit  – 100 portable toilet stalls symbolizing urban development – and, for that matter what do they have to do with the growth of our cities? I would probably know more if I could visit and discover the association between port-a-potties and art. I will report in time.

The weblink to the show, by the way, cracked me up – note that the sensibilities of the hanseatic burghers are spared from having to look at urinals – the cover photo shows some plastic tidbits instead.  I am attaching one of my favorite clips of all times that might share my sentiments – the inimitable Molly Ivins on “Ort”  as they call art in Texas.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKckRXKRmRg

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Museum Medley

· Deutsches Historisches Museum ·

IMG_1836 copyIn honor of Zeitgeist Northwest’s upcoming German Culture Week (for details see http://www.zeitgeistnorthwest.org) I will introduce a number of German museums or other cultural icons this week. The Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin Mitte gets first dip.  Of the more than 170 (yes, you read that right) museums in the German capital it has some of the most interesting exhibits. The permanent exhibit is located in the old part, the Zeughaus. The museum’s special exhibits can be seen in the Exhibition Hall designed by the Chinese American architect I.M. Pei, a gorgeous piece of architecture. The traveling exhibits are devoted to formative historical events, epochs and social developments.

 

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If you are lucky enough to travel to Berlin right now you can visit the current show https://www.dhm.de/en/ausstellungen/sticky-messages.html  (link is in English.) The exhibit displays anti-semitic and racist stickers from 1880 to the present making an effort to confront an ugly past as well as present-day dismal political agitation. The German title for this show is ingenious: Angezettelt   – the word consist of the preposition “an” (on) and the noun “Zettel” (note or small piece of paper) denoting the little stickers that you find affixed to public surfaces. The combined word, though, anzetteln, means instigation, or secret plotting or hatching of plans – a fitting description of the purpose of these ancestors of graffiti. It all gets, of course, lost in translation – sticky messages is the best any one could come up with.  More evidence, if still needed, for how unbelievably difficult good translation is.

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Joint Ventures

· The joy of artistic collaborations ·

Lower Manhattan copyI met Steve Tilden, a metal sculptor and long-time Blackfish Gallery artist, a decade ago when I asked his permission to use a photograph of one of his sculptures in one of my montages. We have collaborated on several projects since, exhibited together and, most importantly, stretched each other’s thinking around various topics of shared interest.

A recurring theme in Steve’s body of work is mythology and last year he produced a number of sculptures together with glass artist Jen Fuller focussed on mythological themes with a modern slant. I, in turn, photographed their work and incorporated it into montages around the story of Icarus. My series, Free Fall,  alluded to contemporary flights too close to the sun and the subsequent crashes – each image represented a location where airplane disasters had happened, and each had a bird in it referring to Icarus and his hubris. You can see more of the images and description of the project at www.friderikeheuer.com

I would have never delved into mythology had it not been for these joint ventures. What I learned in school about the Greeks and Romans was forever tainted by having to take Latin for too many years. Through another artist’s eyes I came to understand the universality of the themes and why they still matter for contemporary art. Trying to find interesting ways to make our two mediums intersect proved to be an intellectual challenge – something we both welcomed. But collaboration offers something more: an audience that reacts to your suggestions in a timely fashion, so potential criticism can be incorporated and your work improved. And collaborative feedback comes in a constructive fashion  since you and your collaborator have shared goals.  Today’s montage – Lower Manhattan –  consists of a photograph of metal feathers made by Steve, an Anhinga (ancestor to the cormorant) that I found in a Florida swamp, and the view from the 9/11 memorial in NYC.

 

 

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Pastiche

· A conflicted approach to Emil Nolde ·

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One of my occasional odd jobs during law school was milking cows. The farm had a thatched roof and hunkered down behind a dike and a stand of chestnut trees against the raw North Sea winds. The owner was a god-daughter of Emil Nolde (1867 – 1956) one of the first expressionist painters in Germany. The living room contained a large number of his big oil paintings, all tied down with wires to nails in the wall to protect from theft – they could not afford the astronomic insurance payments.

I was really drawn to the strong colors and fluidity of his paintings and watercolors as a child, but when I learned as a young adult about his affiliation with the National Socialist Party since the early 1920s I had a hard time  reconciling my political disgust with my admiration for his art. Ironically his body of work was declared to be degenerate art by the Nazis despite his sympathies for their cause and his declared anti-semitism.  After the war he found recognition and fame in Germany, all leanings conveniently forgotten.

The farmstead as well as the paintings within it found a tragic ending in a fire that engulfed the thatched roof in the 1980s. They could not rescue much because the paintings were tied down.  My own tug-of-war, on the other hand, had a happy ending. I decided long ago that the art counts, not who produces it.  And today’s montage is an homage to Nolde’s choice of colors, with a photograph of a juvenile bald eagle who just caught a bird for breakfast.

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