The Center of Contemporary Art

A couple of years ago I read Miami, Beijing, and Berlin, listed as the current centers of the contemporary art world. As I was just on my way to Berlin, a friend said that on my return I should be sure and tell her what I found out about the center of art.

Yto Barrada’s multi-media exhibition, Riffs, at the Deutsche Guggenheim Museum turned out to be one of my favorite shows during that trip. Riffs was the first large-scale exhibition in Germany of the work of Yto Barrada, who was Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year that year. Barrada’s photographs, films, publications, installations and sculptures specifically speak to her hometown, Tangier, Morocco. The films were mesmerizing, and I watched them carefully enough to remember them.

Also in Berlin, I was very entertained to find that Minnesota artist, Alec Soth’s show, Broken Moments, was just about to open at Galerie Friedrich Loock, near the Hamburger Bahnhoff, a former railway station now functioning as a museum of contemporary art, and part of the Berlin National Gallery.

Two weeks ago at The Walker Art Center, I was looking for the (not currently on display) Glenn Brown painting, You Never Touch My Skin in the Way You Did and You’ve Even Changed the Way You Kiss Me. I passed a large doorway decorated by two miniature theater replicas I recognized. Album: Cinematheque Tangier, a project by Yto Barrada including films, art, and artifacts about her hometown, Tangier, Morocco, is currently showing in Minneapolis.

Where is the center of contemporary art? The world is shrinking with every transportation and communication advancement. Alec Soth in Berlin. Minnesota is present in that center of art. Yto Barrada at The Walker in Minneapolis. Where is the center of art? Wherever it is, that center is clearly a moving target.

In the Real World

My first introduction to the contemporary German artist, Albert Oehlen, came in May, 2011, at Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (Paintings 2004-2005). The canvases included in that largely abstract collection of colorful paintings contained mosaic and representational figures partially concealed beneath varied dark smudges and layers of what appeared to be beige house paint.

Rasieren 2005
oil, paper on canvas
230 x 290 cm

I was reminded of a conversation with our friend, the Chicago artist, Andrew Holmquist at the time of his two-thousand-nine show (Big Mess) at The Golden Gallery in Chicago. According to Holmquist, his process began with randomly applied paint. Then, he placed the canvases where he could watch them until forms began to take shape, when he would re-enter his paintings, eventually to finish them.

Inside Out

2009

Oil on Canvas

20″ x 24″

At Galerie Max Hetzler I thought how much I prefer a process that begins randomly and arrives at something meaningful. Isn’t that our traditional Creation story? Who wouldn’t prefer a world where order follows disorder to one where meaning is blurred by intervening layers of smoke and mud? Often it takes time to come to intellectual and spiritual peace on a subject. Clarity does sometimes follow chaos in the way I like to hope the world works. But, it is also at least equally true that understanding and vision are blurred. Confusion and all kinds of other emotions follow intervening information and events.

Albert Oehlen

Skyline

2005
oil, paper on wood
268 x 195 cm

Invisible Current

Every time I think I can explain why I agree with the St. Olaf Senior Dance Concert creators’ assertion that sometimes Words Can/Not, and why, I run into poetry. When I read or hear an inspirational poem, my reaction (as I said last week) is always emotional. I can almost never recite a poem from memory, even the ones I wrote. I might or might not even remember the poet’s name, but the thing I am certain to remember is how the poem made me feel. We people live in an emotional realm as well as an intellectual one. The two domains are related in the same way as our hearts are related to our stomachs.

I agree with The St. Olaf Senior Dance Concert creators. Words cannot express the full spectrum of our human experience. Neither can dance; neither can painting. We, the living, are always largely a puzzle to ourselves, and only partially correct in what we think. Aspects of this lovely and terrifying life more closely resemble electric current than lamps or stoves (the animated things). When we talk in the mysteries that travel more efficiently between our feelings than our minds, the messengers are artists, dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and sometimes also the writers.

Another Word for Unforgettable

The poetry I remember longest doesn’t come back to me by title or phrasing; it returns as visual imagery accompanied by recurring physical responses. As I remembered it, the seven year old Image Journal cover featuring the Odd Nerdrum painting, Flock, presented a cluster of young women facing left before a blue background.

When I returned to that image now, I discovered male figures facing right on a black and rust field. Facing west or facing east, male or female, that image, both seven years ago and now in two-thousand-fourteen still animates a whole host of physical reactions for me, to include fascination, alarm, vulnerability, loneliness.

Recently I read that art should be felt and not understood. In a September, 1998 speech, Odd Nerdrum declared himself a kitsch painter, a tag usually associated with shallow work invested with minimal emotion and little original thought. It turns out that Nerdrum was not speaking lightly, nor was he devaluing his work. Nerdrum was speaking out against the presently held world view that the most effective practice, interpretation, and value in art, all lie in the intellectual realm. As E. J. Pettinger stated in his December Two-Thousand Four article on Nerdrum in The Boise Weekly, The art Nerdrum champions is the kind that can only be created sensually.

When music reminds me of something from the past, I always remember the feeling before the situation that accompanied it.  This is why I remembered that Image Journal cover after all these years: I remember feelings better than thoughts. Nerdrum is fighting for art that is appreciated and understood in the whole body, not just the mind.