Clinging to the clutter

One of my strategies for motivating myself out of chaos of any kind is viewing a mental image of a very orderly homepage. I have no idea where it came from, but it has been with me since at least 2003 when I was walking the Camino between Borges and Leon in northern Spain. On this monotonous stretch of straight road (and fields into the horizons on both sides) I kept getting this mental picture of a nice laid web page which I should make when I came home. The content was of no importance and it never materialized but still I get this feeling of hope when I visualize it. I guess feeling life being chaotic we - I - long for order (margins, lists, headlines, hierarchies, nice images with nice small sentences below, good looking fonts etc.). Looking around my office I know I need to clean up. I'm clinging to clutter not intentional but because every single piece is nice or pretty or important. On my computer desk top there is a million things from the net I just had to download because I would never come back to the place I saw it. It’s all the important articles about all the interesting topics. They could be part of my mental homepage, as sub pages with links to the front page. I get a really good feeling thinking about it. I'm serious.

John Berger's Ways of Seeing

"The following is an except from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, put out by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1972. It is considered an early and very accessable work of postmodernism."

One may remember or forget these messages but briefly one takes them in, and for a moment they stimulate the imagination by way of either memory or expectation. The publicity image belongs to the moment. We see it as we turn a page, as we turn a corner, as a vehicle passes us. Or we see it on a television screen while waiting for the commercial break to end. Publicity images also belong to the moment in the sense that they must be continually renewed and made up-to-date. Yet they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future.
We are now so accustomed to being addressed by these images that we scarcely notice their total impact. A person may notice a particular image or piece of information because it corresponds to some particular interest he has. But we accept the total system of publicity images as we accept an element of climate. For example, the fact that these images belong to the moment but speak of the future produces a strange effect which has become so familiar that we scarcely notice it. Usually it is we who pass the image - walking, travelling, turning a page; on the TV screen it is somewhat different but even then we are theoretically the active agent - we can look away, turn down the sound, make some coffee. Yet despite this, one has the impression that publicity images are continually passing us, like express trains on their way to some distant terminus. We are static; they are dynamic - until the newspaper is thrown away, the television program continues or the paster is posted over. Continue

Looking at words and eating cake

Knowing art starts with looking, not reading, that might be or probably is, my problem. I love reading. I like looking and want to love it. Liking it is like looking at a cake and not eating it, or looking at somebody else eat it, and the somebody even know the ingredients, some of them even know how to make it, the cake. 

Bertel Thorvaldsen

Thorvaldsen was a super star Danish sculptor in the first part of the ninteenth century. Art historians today agree as far as I can see that he was overrated in his own time. He was not only an artist but became one of the most important symbols in the building of the modern national Danish state. Today the Thorvaldsen Museum is still one of the largest museums in Copenhagen. I guess his position is secured by the history of the country but how is he viewed today in Denmark and abroad? If he was overrated then, why are there still such a big museum in Copenhagen dedicated to his art (and his art collection)? Can the national hero and the national historical aspect keep the museum alive? I guess there must be som kind of art value back to justfy the museum.

The museum itself has become in a positive sense a museum, as most of the rooms stills looks like they did in the ninteenth century. Is this a strategic choice? The letters to and from Thorvaldsen are all  available online in an impressive database. Why? There are greater artists and greater historical figures then Thorvaldsen in Denmark, but non of them have such a great building or this level of online presence.

Even the English Wikipedia article about Thorvaldsen tells the argument that he was more pure classical then Canova, but the art of Canova is still subject to exhibitions around Europe and I am not sure this is the case with Thorvaldsen. So he migh be more pure classical and less artistically interesting today.

Electrical Walk by Christina Kubisch

Wundergrund Music Festival is on in Copenhagen [about] and the long established German sound artist Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walk can be walked in Copenhagen during the festival. You pick up special kinds of headphone (looking BIG and über retro) which detect the city's electro magnetic radiations as sound structures. I kind of looked forward to more variation as most sounds sounded like electrical motors. The most fun part was listening to sounds while riding the train: Differendt bubbling sounds. We did not pass the game arcade in Tivoli (that would probably be great too).  A positive thing was the slowing down and using the city in a new way. Well known streets and shops opened up with new details.  

Is it all about pace?

In what degree is contemporary art formed by the idea about a fast paced society? Not many people (art consumers, lovers, buyers) have or takes time to look longer on a piece of art then the longing for instant gratification makes possible. Is this selling out on the part of the artists? Or is it the same restlessness working in the artists too? Are we all paced up?

In the beginning of November there will be held a conferance in Copenhagen about the role of the art museums in modern times. Earlier the museum conserved history while today the main thing is the contemporary exhibition. The collections collecting dust and becomes a problem.

What is art? Is it all a question about the rule of pace?


The event in Copenhagen:

The Museum and Its Staging of Contemporary Art 

November 6-7, 2009

Venues: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art

The role of the art museum has changed drastically during the past decades. So has the role of contemporary art within the art museum. Once institutions for preserving and producing knowledge for eternity, museums increasingly become arenas for experience and events of the moment. The interest in contemporary art towards re-uniting art and life in ‘micro utopian’ models, such as proposed by Nicolas Bourriaud, makes art works perform in ways not incomparable to the workings of the entertainment industry. The shared tendency between museums and contemporary art towards staging and performing ephemeral events and experiences changes the fundamental functions of the museum within a broader cultural context and might indeed change the very role of art in society as well.

Staring into Amnesia 2 (2008): Private collection / Courtesy of Boers-Li Gallery and ArtShortCut by Qiu Anxiong

Ruskin on Turner's Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On

Click on the picture for larger size.

It is a sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of the sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep-drawn breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges, the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labors amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, – and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.1

1. John Ruskin, Modern Painters in The Complete Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (London: George Allen, 1903-1912), 3:571-2.