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Seeing the Wood from the Trees - The Open College of the Arts

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Seeing the Wood from the Trees

This September eight students from the OCA visited Berlin for a whistle-stop tour of its museums and art works from the Northern Renaissance to the murals on the wall.
One of the more surprising aspects of this year’s OCA trip to Berlin was a growing sense of deja vu. I think it was the shaggy, bottle-brush trees that started it. There they were in the first Gothic Cranachs that we saw at the Gemalde Galerie; then again in Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes in the Alte Galerie and finally in the heavily-worked forests of Kirchner’s Expressionist paintings. On the other hand, it may have been the skulls – Durer, Bochlin, Kirchner again – or the combination of angst-ridden figures and storm-tossed lake or mountain scenery that began to repeat themselves. After three days, five galleries and a tour of the world’s most photographed murals, it was starting to feel like a merry-go-round. Yet we were also beginning to recognise what was so different and so intriguing about German art.

Gemaeldegallerie, (3)

And it was not just the iconography that seemed so ubiquitous. Many of the artists that we saw displayed an ongoing fascination with materials that ranged from their early experiments with oil paint to Beuys’ symbolic use of felt and tallow. In the same way their use of hard-won processes such as engraving and wood-carving gave a sombre quality to their drawing style that was apparent in the angularity of their contours. Often, as in the Die Brucke group’s deliberately anachronistic imitation of Durer’s printmaking techniques, this stylistic continuity went hand in hand with allusions to Germany’s long struggle for unity and national identity. The culmination of this was Anselm Kiefer’s masterpiece ‘The Ways of the World’s Wisdom’ at the Hamburger Hof, which combined references to the German forests with Romantic philosophy, traditional woodblock engraving and the Holocaust. The work also referred to an obscure victory by the German tribes over the Romans in 9AD. Significantly, much of the public art that we saw shared its triumphant militarism and its ongoing guilt about its consequences. This was true of a column celebrating early Prussian victories, which Napoleon re-sited after the French invasion of 1806, and of a war-chariot, which was temporarily removed from the Brandenburg Gate after Germany’ s defeat in 1918. The latter was merely a stone’s throw away from a commemoration of the Holocaust in a huge outdoor sculpture nearby.

Anselm Kiefer

By far the best-known example of public art that the group visited were the murals that artists had painted on a surviving stretch of the wall. However, most of us were less than impressed by the sentimentality of their slogans, by their hippy flowers and peace-doves and by their unquestioning revival of American comic book imagery, Disney cartoons and graffiti art. Hence it came as no surprise when a well-dressed film crew politely requested us to step aside in order to make way for yet another grungy shoot of the wall with a couple of edgy young lovers in the background. In contrast some of us found far more interesting political statements in our independent visits to the Bauhaus, to an exhibition of Paul Klee and to a display about archaeology in Berlin at the Pergamon. One of the most moving pieces in the latter was a vitrine displaying coloured glass from a synagogue destroyed by the Nazis and a glass necklace that had melted in the RAF’s fire-bombing of the city.
Similarly, some of the most powerful pieces that we saw in the galleries were installations by contemporary artists. Bruce Nauman’s Dante-esque Room with My Soul Left out that Does not Care at the Hamburger Bahnhof was probably the most impressive. For here the group found itself in a shadowy intersection between four dark tunnels whose identical spaces were repeated above and below us. The work that probably caused most discussion, however, was an installation by Dieter Roth, which he had assembled in a seemingly random fashion over a twelve year period. Its seemingly chaotic accumulation of greenhouses, plants, rain water and garden tools both redefined the nature of the artist’s role as a creator and questioned where one part of the piece ended and another began.

Dieter Roth

Dieter Roth’s work had an additional resonance in seeming to poke fun at the Germans’ veneration for nature and environmentalism. Yet by the time that we saw it, we were already used to watching the grand narratives of classical, religious art and popular art sent up in the work of Kiefer, Twombly and Warhol respectively. We had also witnessed Baselitz’s debunking of the self-serious monumentality of German art in his crude parody of Expressionism. In addition we had come across some superb post-modernist interventions. None more so than in one artist’s division of a piece of cardboard packing material into tiny corrugated pieces and their reinvention as a progressively diminishing spiral that resembled the heroic architecture of a Roman amphitheatre.
On our first visit to the Gemalde Galerie we had the opportunity to compare Italian art to Northern Renaissance painting and to mark its later manifestations in Dutch and English art. On our final visit to the Berggruen Collection, we were able to compare the now-familiar mannerisms of German art to the work of Picasso and Matisse. After three days of gloomy forests, tortured saints and political agit-prop –sustained in my case by a largely unvarying a diet of red wine, coffee and apple strudel – it was almost a relief to be confronted by such unapologetic hedonism. Male chauvinist and bourgeois apologist their detractors might call them, but at least those guys certainly knew how to enjoy themselves.


Posted by author: Gerald

4 thoughts on “Seeing the Wood from the Trees

  • WOW ! Did we really do all that !
    We also saw the tremendous architecture while travelling (very easily) across Berlin. If there’s a visit next year and you’re on it you won’t be disappointed .
    Alan
    172856

  • I don’t think I have ever looked at so much art in so few days – fascinating and amazing and at times overwhelming.

  • I agree with Rotraut. I was amazed and enjoyed the trip enormously. However so overwhelmed so that all my pictures, little booklets and other stuff I acquired in the various museums have been just lying dead still for a few weeks, but now — I start to feel I can begin to go back and relive the experience!

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