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THE HANDSTAND |
JUNE 2003 |
Nacht der MuseenA couple of weeks ago I had the good luck to visit an important event in the Düsseldorf cultural calendar, the so-called: "night of the museums." During this evening, in which the galleries and museums are open until 3am, large crowds took part. Early on, big queues developed outside most of the main exhibitions centers and people from all sections of society mixed, including the fir-coat-clad members of the "upper classes"... As well as taking part in observation of art, one could enjoy spending a good proportion of the time just observing the onlookers themselves, as if they were part of one big art installation! The main attraction for many was
the exhibition “Dalí und Die Magier Der
Mehrdeutigkeit” (The endless enigma – Dalí
and the magicians of multiple meaning). This exhibition
focused on the phenomenon of ambiguity and the manner
that skillful combinations of forms can manipulate the
human perception. The exhibition center, the Museum
Kunst Palast, has a permanent collection, which I
looked at first. The manner in which it is exhibited is
rather surprising, as one can find the wonderful
"Venus and Adonis" by Rubens, positioned not
far away from some twentieth century art. A comprehensive
time line has not been followed and they have just hung
things one after the other in some very weird sense of
order, which seems to have no logic at all. Several
Böckhlin paintings are completely separated by rooms
full of other works and suffer as a result of this forced
separation. We quickly moved on to the special
exhibition, which was a much more rational presentation.
This exhibition focused on certain illusions of form and
perspective that were used by Dali and other painters.
One of the main exhibits is the Dalí painting "The
Endless Enigma" (a large globe shape in the middle,
a face partly made of a vase on the right, and a figure
made of a mountain leaning on its elbow on the left). Outside of the Museum Kunst
Palast there was a large crowd gathered around a huge
film screen, on which was projected several short music
videos, evidently created with the aid of advanced
computer animation software. A video with Bjørk all
dressed in white with a red tube, containing a red
substance like blood, coiling around her until she is
completely mummified by it. After watching this, we
went to see the CitiBank Photography Prize 2003 and saw
some of the prizewinner’s pictures. Juergen Teller,
who was the overall winner, made provocative pictures of
fashion models in their not so glorious moments. He
included a rather unflattering, oversized, nude
self-portrait in black and white, in which he is
perspiring as if he had run a mile. However, I thought
the best pictures in this exhibition were in a room full
of wonderful documentary photography of Afghanistan by
the English photographer Simon Norfolk. Most of his
pictures have few or no people in them and concentrate on
the combined effects of several Afghan wars. They are
quite stark in their depiction of the layering of time in
a shattered human society, which is set against the
stunning background of mountain ranges, illuminated by
the beautiful light of the Afghan sky. Norfolk used an
old-fashioned large (4" x 5") format field
camera (used by photographers in the 19th century and
have large negatives with slow shutter speeds that
capture a stunning amount of detail) to make these
images. He writes about his own work: “Afghanistan is unlike
Sarajevo or Kigali or any other war-ravaged landscape I
have ever photographed. In Kabul, in particular, the
devastation has a bizarre layering - I was reminded of
the story of Schliemann 's discovery of the remains of
the classical city of Troy in the 1870s: digging down, he
found nine cities layered upon each other, each one in
its turn rebuilt and destroyed. Walking a Kabul street
can be like walking through a Museum of the Archaeology
of War - different moments of destruction lie like
sediment on top of each other. There are places near
Bagram Air Base or on the Shomali Plain, where the front
line has passed back and forth eight or nine times - each
leaving a deadly flotsam of destroyed homes and fields
seeded with landmines.”(Simon Norfolk) Next stop in our monumental art
trip was a large exhibition of fashion photography by
various photographers. It was quite diverse, including a
lot of pictures that were obviously not fashion at all,
but rather landscape photography and pieces that looked
unpremeditated. The exhibition included a video of a
woman unraveling a white dress made of thick white wool,
which was rather difficult when she got up to the arms,
but in the end she shed every inch and became
naked. In the small hours of the morning we next
visited the Kunstverein to see a video
installation that was made in the UK by the Dutch artist
Rineka Dijkstra. She created a white box in a nightclub
in Liverpool, and asked people to dance in it, thus
removing them entirely from the social event, placing
them in a clinical isolation. This made these individuals
look rather ridiculous and alienated, and there were
certainly quite amusing moments when the entire audience
burst out laughing. Back across the road we got
into the Kunstsammlung Nordhein Wesfalen, K20,
which is one of two massive exhibition centers dedicated
to the art of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries. We went there to see an exhibition of
Joseph Beuys works from their permanent collection.
Apparently Beuys taught in the art college in Düsseldorf
and he accepted anyone who wanted to be in his class. He
had a lot of students, and in the end they fired him
because he wanted to admit 50 students that had already
been rejected. We saw some of his conceptual installation
type pieces, where he uses different materials like metal
and fabric to create an environment for his ideas. There
were a lot of drawings and several small pieces, like two
red ceramic crucibles (implication of once containing a
poison) and a used hospital drip, which is supposed to
depict the link between nature and how the essence (blood
stream) of nature is affected by poison.
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Standing in front of this painting one
gradually becomes aware that forms blend into others, as
new forms emerge from the canvas, and are slowly
perceived by the viewer. This presentation is very
interesting, as they also exhibit the drawings that Dali
made when he was planning the picture. There is a small
computer screen nearby with a reproduction, in which they
isolate the different components of the various forms,
and one can compare it to the actual picture. There were
a lot of other works by artists such as, Max Ernst,
Escher, Magritte, Sigmar Polke, Man Ray and Andres
Tomkins showing similar visual deceptions. Further into
the exhibition was a room full of Renaissance fruit
paintings by Arcimboldo, in which the fruits are used to
make portraits of human faces. This is to illustrate the
historical connections and the foundations of this method
in previous eras. The exhibition demonstrates how artists
created illusions with form, making pictures that could
be read in different ways, depending on what the eye of
the viewer concentrates on. The best examples are Escher
drawings, such as his anticlockwise-flowing, looped
river, that flows uphill to become a waterfall back down
onto itself. There are also other examples of
Dalí’s fascination for playing with form, such as
his painting "the horse woman." In the
background of this picture there is a face made of small
blue, lightly painted figures reclining on yellow
sand. In the foreground there is a strange
misshapen human figure supported by several forked
sticks, which takes on the shape of a horse. Looking at
these pictures, one realises that a large part of each
form has another form skillfully concealed in it. Another
strand to the exhibition are visual puzzles that
challenge the viewer to find the concealed image. Quite
amusing were some rather vulgar little cards from France,
each with fold-up middle sections that reveal provocative
sexual poses when lifted! One is of a Nun at prayer with
a caption underneath: "prayer," and when the
bottom half is lifted up, it becomes a nun receiving
cunnilingus from a canine beast and with the
caption:" humanity.” Also
“pitiful" in the exhibition was a video showing
a selection of Victorian toys that had similar amusing
image alterations, but of a more inoffensive kind.... As
the time progressed the numbers inside the gallery
swelled and the queue outside seemed to stretch even
further and further, so it was time to move on. 
Another room containing several
huge stones, that once again is linked to nature and the
sheer power of rock that dominates the environment of the
room. In the same gallery there is an extensive permanent
collection, including several rooms full of small Paul
Klee drawings and paintings. I have read, “Paul Klee
valued the "primitive," and especially the art
of children. He envied their polymorphous freedom to
create signs, and respected their innocence and
directness.” This is certainly reflected in his
simple abstract experiments with form and colour, which
have an almost musical fluidity. I subsequently learned
that Paul Klee played the cello and was considerably
influenced by music: “Music had a special influence
on him. He believed that eighteenth-century counterpoint
(his favourite form) could be translated quite directly
into gradations of colour and value, repetitions and
changes of motif; his compositions of stacked forms,
fanned out like decks of cards or colour swatches, are
attempts to freeze time in a static composition, to give
visual motifs the "unfolding" quality of aural
ones.” (Robert Hughes) 
In other rooms there are
Kandinsky paintings, German expressionist paintings, and
also their collection of Picasso works. I especially
enjoyed looking at two paintings by Chagall. One is a
very subtly coloured painting of light blues and greys
depicting a Jew standing in a room holding a lemon in his
hand. The second picture, of a fiddle player with
peasants in the background, has the stunning
characteristics that make Chagall paintings very
distinctive. His use of symbolism and of colours, such as
alizarin-crimson, cadmium-red and ultramarine-blue, which
I find quite striking, as it is an effect that grabs
one’s eye from a far distance.