I had a rather extraordinary experience today. I would like to preface the following statement with a little backstory, a defense, if you will. I have been in art museums all my life, and I generally have a great appreciation for them. When my family travels, we go to museums- I actually had to talk my father into "just wandering around" in a neighborhood while in Paris, because ordinarily we go to multiple museums in a day. Exhibit A is the three/two and a half days I spent with my dad in Berlin before this began, in which I made it through all three floors of Alte Nationalgalerie while jetlagged (though I will admit I started dragging by the second half of the second floor), followed by Gemaeldegalerie (I keep using ae/ue because I'm technologically challenged and can't figure out how to easily insert a letter with an umlaut...) the next day, which, in the same day, was followed by Kupferstichkabinett (I spelled it right on the first try! Hurray!). (The other day had no art museums, just the Airlift memorial and Tempelhofer Feld which has enough signs about its history to be a museum... and it's awesome.) So, that long preface being said, erm, written... here goes (my stomach just did a little flip):
Is all of this b___s___? Who the f___ says this is art?
Yes, I realize that's probably highly inflammatory. So, a little MORE context. I, admittedly, tend to be conservative in some ways in my taste in art. Today, at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which is one of several museums of contemporary art, I found myself downright repulsed by some of the stuff in the museum. But not repulsed in a this-challenges-me-to-face-something-I'm-uncomfortable-with kind of way. Not in a Hamlet-eating-dirt/Frau-Luna-completely-baffling-me way. More of a, well, profanity-laced, what-the-(bleep)-(bleep)-is-this? sort of way. I get it, contemporary art is not about being pretty. Fine. But if you're not going to make it with a (sorry, I'm pulling Michael Chekhov out on this one) sense of beauty (and not just in a pretty colors and pretty subjects way), then at least say something. In some ways, I left Hamburger Bahnhof in a similar cloud as cast by Elektra. I feel like a lot of contemporary art is what Ai Wei Wei's series of pictures of his middle finger around the world, just a big ol' f' you to the audience, an art-because-it's-weird attitude. And we've talked about how that goes in theater. I was glad our entry was free to this museum, because I felt like it's only art because we've been told it's art and it's been placed in a museum (and this coming from the one who felt bad about going through the museum so quickly and not reading all the signs).
And in all honesty, I've felt that way about two productions we've seen, which everybody else seems to have loved. With Death in Venice, I at least had respect for the precision of execution, and could respect the fact that it was done with a sense of beauty, even if it had no particular effect on me the way it seemed to with everyone else. With Hopskotch, I was completely gone. I was actually a little shocked that everyone else loved it so much. I had more appreciation once I knew it was all improvisation, but it felt sloppy and meandering (and not in the way that PE can have a non-linear story and still move in a direction, even if it's not a straight line). I didn't understand what the point was, or what, if anything, was being said.
And I struggled to articulate these feelings because I'm in a group of artists, essentially, who (mostly) are all saying how wonderful it was. So I found myself wondering... am I an artist? Do I belong here? Not a completely unusual thought for me, nor for many people I should think, but it led me back to a repeated topic of discussion, which is the idea of "preciousness." How is it that I found something "precious" (to the point of actually thinking during a production, "really? you're really doing this?") when so many others clearly did not and found it to be the complete opposite? What makes something art? Does "art" even exist at all? Do I just not "get it"? And if I don't get it I'm sure I'm not the only one...
The experience has been a complete turn around from what it was with the first week, when I felt so moved and inspired, and like this trip was some kind of art pilgrimage. I hadn't written as much about it because I felt like I didn't want to spoil it by trying to put it into words... and now I don't like writing about it because I don't want to admit what it has become. Perhaps it's art overload, as I've experienced toward the end of a semester at Mason Gross, when I've forgotten what the rest of the world is like and become jaded because I'm in the art bubble (whether anyone else will deign to label it art, I will, because there's a binary for me between inside/outside and art bubble/not art bubble... which also has to do with identities assigned and unassigned to me, but this blog post is going on for FOREVER so I'll spare that whole explanation-- just humor me and use art liberally).
Don't get me wrong, I still love Berlin, the city. And I still think that every show provides some insight into what I personally make and care about. But I'm constantly a fence-sitter, which I think is useful, but which has gotten me in trouble in the past because I'm somehow supposed to abandon one half of my brain for the other so I can be wholly on one side. I'm never quite in the clique. But the advantage of sitting on the fence is the vantage point-- I can see the inside and the outside. The economic and the artistic, the bigger picture and the detail... and the artistic and the average person/American's take (Sarah Palin's Joe the Plumber, anyone?). Maybe that makes me less of an artist, but what the hell is art anyway.
And now my brain hurts, so that's going to have to be a good enough parsing... And after this many paragraphs I congratulate anyone who made it to the end of this.
No comments:
Post a Comment