Читать книгу Tal Sterngast. Twelve Paintings - Michael Eissenhauer - Страница 7

The world as I thought to know it came to an end in late 2016. The result of the Brexit referendum in Great Britain in June activated my reality principle as a distortion. That year’s swelteringly hot summer in Berlin clarified, too, that irreversible changes on a global scale would dictate our lives from that point on. Finally, in November, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, complementing the sense of reality-as-nightmare. Realness lingered away from life, or rather, unrealness penetrated it so much, blurring the difference between all categories. Nevertheless, life seemed to go on.

All of this indicated a profound break in the paradigms of representation in this moment of time. A collapse informed by the dissolving of reality into “reality,” but also by the transgression of what we consider human: in the interfaces between organic and inorganic, in the invasive character of social media and in variations of the “return of the repressed” (which renders shame obsolete and breeds populism), either as a symptom of a major crisis or as the crisis itself. Not unconnected to that, the fostering and acknowledgment of the inner merits of artworks seem to make more and more space for external values—political, cultural, or sociological—that now dominate almost all areas of contemporary art making, writing, and exhibiting. Suspicion and mistrust in images coincide with suppression and a redefinition of what is allowed and what is forbidden, as new sensitivities inherit the old ones. The more uncertain facts in reality become, the more vague, unfamiliar, or terrifying they and their prospects are; and the more uncertain it becomes what images are and what purpose they serve. Why are artworks still being made and exhibited? Who needs them? Who are their viewers?

At the end of that year, a feeling of being repulsed by current affairs led me to the Gemäldegalerie, a place that was brand new when I moved to Berlin in late 2000 and that still preserved a specific sense of the city, hardly detectable now in other parts of Berlin. Almost a decade after the Berlin Wall had fallen, the building, housing the reunited Berlin state collection of European paintings from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries completed in 1998 (planned by the Munich architects Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht) was placed at the top of the Kulturforum’s hill. This “piazzetta,” a Brutalist slope of cement and granite, leads to but also separates the former West Berlin culture conglomerate from the street and passersby.

Planning for the museum complex began around 1967 and was constantly interrupted by controversies, still noticeable in the fractured ensemble. Meant to serve as an ersatz for the cultural holdings left behind the Berlin Wall in the early postwar days of Berlin, the district’s architectural beacons were also meant to mark West Germany’s return to the family of free nations, and no less, a defiance of the German Democratic Republic. Most prominently, it first included the New National Gallery pavilion (1968) by Mies van der Rohe, a modernist icon of steel and glass meant to house twentieth-century art.

According to Hans Scharoun’s original vision of the district, the Philharmonic Hall (1963) and the State Library (1978)—both with golden metal mesh draping their facades with elaborated curved compositions—created a soft backdrop that meant to harmonize with the forested front of the adjacent Tiergarten park and to serve as a complex but pluralistic place for everyone. In contrast, Rolf Gutbrod’s Brutalist layout from 1967 suggested a built landscape that exposed its own construction, in the few buildings remaining of his initial plan. The new Gemäldegalerie rejected this historical urban planning context and rather sealed itself from its surroundings.

Intentionally reminiscent of Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Altes Museum (Old Museum), the building corresponds to an aristocratic palace, with an enfilade choreographing the viewers’ pace chronologically along the north-south axis in a two-kilometer sequence through seventy-two rooms, colored velvet coverings for the walls, and paintings arranged in a salon-like hang. A large empty hall bisects its center, representing the Alpine frontier in a spatial gesture, one of several that were perhaps meant to be generous or grand but ended up being simply slightly odd. To me, the Gemäldegalerie seemed as worldly as it was local, pretentious as it was humble. Its architectural denial of recent history (with its wounds and scars) and its very surroundings created an island that remains, in a way, like the collection itself, not organic in its environment, and preserving palpable artifice.

If the present seemed to move toward such an unprecedented brink of change, what did it still share with the older worlds that this collection represents? While the corpus of knowledge and discourse regarding contemporary art seemed to reference almost only the near past, Old Masters were mostly left to forensic scientists and art historians. Perhaps restricting myself to this specific, local collection for a while would offer some latitude. One by one, I chose twelve works hanging in the galleries, already carrying a certain patina, as objects of observation in order to return to the present, better equipped. The essays, each dedicated to one painting, were first published in the weekend supplement of the German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, on a roughly monthly basis, starting in November 2017.

In the breadth of this selection, painting can be seen as it discovers itself along dichotomic coordinates—the optical and the tactile, the geometric and the organic, illusionistic and spiritual, religious and atheist—and becomes a medium through which modern subjectivity formulates itself. Each painting in focus unfolds its own emergence and concrete pursuits as they also reflect, presumably, something of today’s concerns. Two temporal and spatial (geopolitical) axes cross my selection: first the east-west axis, divided by the Mediterranean Sea, where routes lead from the ancient to the modern world and from Greco-Roman to Christian hegemonies, from Orient to Occident; and second, the art-historical north-south axis, with the southern Renaissance at its core radiating from Italy to beyond the Alps.

Every painter, Gilles Deleuze wrote in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (1981), needs to recapitulate the history of painting, and thus each writer may recapitulate painters’ recapitulations. I approached the paintings like the contemporary art I have been writing about for the past fifteen years. I wanted to treat them as an art critic would. That is why the fields of ideas surrounding the artists and their work are considered, and the essays jump from high to low resolution, from bold generalizations to very specific details. The choice was guided by my current concerns and tastes. It does not necessarily reflect the emphases of the Berlin state collection.

When the general director of the State Museums of Berlin, Michael Eissenhauer, suggested that we collect these essays in a book, it was the most generous, appealing invitation and proposal for both me as a writer and for these texts, allowing them to become more than sporadic publications in a newspaper. A text is also a space, and writing is the process of creating this space and getting lost in it at the same time. The writing is only completed by the reader, who by observing it from outside ends the writing. So, last but not least, this compilation is also a journal of sorts—of my expeditions to the Berlin gallery, but also into writing itself; to what these twelve paintings taught me about the possibilities of writing and thinking about art.

It was an honor and great challenge to allow these essays to be turned into chapters within a broader story. This would not have been possible without Ulrich Gutmair, who carefully translated the texts from English to German and edited them first for the newspaper and then for this book. The transition from articles to essays in this publication was also skillfully mastered by the book’s English editor, Kimberly Bradley. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to both of them.