Empty Center: Reflections on Postmodern Art
Empty Center: Reflections on Postmodern Art
I think it’s lame to complain too much about how bad postmodern art is, if only because it’s been done to death, and besides that I don’t think that all postmodern art is trash. “Nothing is ever absolutely so,” as Theodore Sturgeon once said, and he’s probably right. Amorphous blobs of paint selling in Manhattan galleries to stockbrokers and their phony philanthropist arm candy is a bit of a travesty, but I like Basquiat, whose work has been called everything from neo-expressionist (which is technically early postmodern) to primitivist (which I think he took as an insult).
Jokes about how a child could finger paint as well as this or that famous artist are probably true in some cases, but as mentioned earlier this was old hat even back when an episode of Murphy Brown was based around the concept.
That said, I read an article recently in the German news (maybe at Spiegel) that was a pretty good example of how low postmodernism can sink. And it’s another reminder that if you don’t have artistic talent, but want to make a living in the arts, the visual arts are still the way to go. Postmodernism can be used as a way for the well-off to really con the hell out of rich people in ways that have very little to do with art, except at the conceptual and theoretical level. Art should explain itself, not have massive glosses that require more effort to create than the piece itself.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, which houses some of Monet’s works, among many others, is in desperate need of repairs. The ceiling is undicht, as the Germans would say, meaning there are leaks in the structure. The museum is going to undergo general repairs, but in the meantime, there have been some on-the-fly cosmetic measures, which in their execution are literally one or two steps away from using electric tape and hoping for the best.
To give you an idea of how the problem is being handled, staff have dealt with one obstinately dripping leak in the ceiling by placing a bucket on the floor of the gallery, where it can collect water, which can periodically be emptied by the guards making the rounds.
Apparently, though, the bucket itself has started drawing a crowd, and inviting people to take photos of it. When a member of the museum staff went to retrieve the bucket, he was puzzled by the group hovering around the water-collector-turned-eyecatcher. One of the people who was staring at the bucket turned to the guard and remarked that it was an interesting piece of installation art. Perhaps they thought the bucket capturing water was meant to symbolize the duty of the museum to preserve masterworks, which would be otherwise pass as transiently as water onto the floor, without a receptacle to retain them.
Who the hell knows what the people gathered around the bucket who mistook it for an exhibition were thinking? All I know is that when what your brand of art can be conflated with a maintenance issue on the grounds of an art gallery, you’re in trouble.
In college I remember reading about some douchebag (or pair of douches) whose great artistic feat was to throw some kind of tarpaulin over the Reichstag building and call it “Wrapped Reichstag.” The draping of the material was meant to cast a cloak of impermanence over the Reichstag, in order to highlight the mercurial whim of history, underlining how the building could be burned, bombed, and undergo various physical changes just as Germany absorbed the shock of so many terrifying historical epochs, or something along those lines.
If the Reichstag was experiencing a pest problem at the time (and Berlin is an old city built on what is essentially swampland), then maybe two birds could have been killed with one stone were the draped cloth made of something impermeable enough to allow fumigation to go on inside.
I guess those are my two main takeaways from the postmodern movement. Buckets collect water, and tents trap gas. So, the next time you call a repairman and he fixes your refrigerator or air-conditioner, make sure to pay him what he’s worth: something on the order of seventy-two million dollars and change (it’s what Mark Rothko’s “White Center” sold for).
I think it’s lame to complain too much about how bad postmodern art is, if only because it’s been done to death, and besides that I don’t think that all postmodern art is trash. “Nothing is ever absolutely so,” as Theodore Sturgeon once said, and he’s probably right. Amorphous blobs of paint selling in Manhattan galleries to stockbrokers and their phony philanthropist arm candy is a bit of a travesty, but I like Basquiat, whose work has been called everything from neo-expressionist (which is technically early postmodern) to primitivist (which I think he took as an insult).
Jokes about how a child could finger paint as well as this or that famous artist are probably true in some cases, but as mentioned earlier this was old hat even back when an episode of Murphy Brown was based around the concept.
That said, I read an article recently in the German news (maybe at Spiegel) that was a pretty good example of how low postmodernism can sink. And it’s another reminder that if you don’t have artistic talent, but want to make a living in the arts, the visual arts are still the way to go. Postmodernism can be used as a way for the well-off to really con the hell out of rich people in ways that have very little to do with art, except at the conceptual and theoretical level. Art should explain itself, not have massive glosses that require more effort to create than the piece itself.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld, Germany, which houses some of Monet’s works, among many others, is in desperate need of repairs. The ceiling is undicht, as the Germans would say, meaning there are leaks in the structure. The museum is going to undergo general repairs, but in the meantime, there have been some on-the-fly cosmetic measures, which in their execution are literally one or two steps away from using electric tape and hoping for the best.
To give you an idea of how the problem is being handled, staff have dealt with one obstinately dripping leak in the ceiling by placing a bucket on the floor of the gallery, where it can collect water, which can periodically be emptied by the guards making the rounds.
Apparently, though, the bucket itself has started drawing a crowd, and inviting people to take photos of it. When a member of the museum staff went to retrieve the bucket, he was puzzled by the group hovering around the water-collector-turned-eyecatcher. One of the people who was staring at the bucket turned to the guard and remarked that it was an interesting piece of installation art. Perhaps they thought the bucket capturing water was meant to symbolize the duty of the museum to preserve masterworks, which would be otherwise pass as transiently as water onto the floor, without a receptacle to retain them.
Who the hell knows what the people gathered around the bucket who mistook it for an exhibition were thinking? All I know is that when what your brand of art can be conflated with a maintenance issue on the grounds of an art gallery, you’re in trouble.
In college I remember reading about some douchebag (or pair of douches) whose great artistic feat was to throw some kind of tarpaulin over the Reichstag building and call it “Wrapped Reichstag.” The draping of the material was meant to cast a cloak of impermanence over the Reichstag, in order to highlight the mercurial whim of history, underlining how the building could be burned, bombed, and undergo various physical changes just as Germany absorbed the shock of so many terrifying historical epochs, or something along those lines.
If the Reichstag was experiencing a pest problem at the time (and Berlin is an old city built on what is essentially swampland), then maybe two birds could have been killed with one stone were the draped cloth made of something impermeable enough to allow fumigation to go on inside.
I guess those are my two main takeaways from the postmodern movement. Buckets collect water, and tents trap gas. So, the next time you call a repairman and he fixes your refrigerator or air-conditioner, make sure to pay him what he’s worth: something on the order of seventy-two million dollars and change (it’s what Mark Rothko’s “White Center” sold for).
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