It’s been a long while since I found myself in a museum or a gallery. I wanted to say “over a year,” as there’s this habit of always starting from the pandemics outbreak. But in fact, I have since been in a few museums. And yet, it’s been a while. There’s a lot of longing for being in presence of art. Something that I never thought about until last year.
I missed big spaces. I missed having nothing to do but walk around and see and listen. Hamburger Bahnhof was my comeback visit today. Things and art pieces that are uncommon and distanced from everyday. Abstracted from the “normal” of daily life and activities — even when they depict the everyday.
“How do you feel about this painting? About this sculpture?…” There is a certain reverence towards simple objects or themes, because they are placed in a museum. Sometimes you can’t tell if it’s a floor decoration or a piece of art. I appreciate it when you can interact with the art. But interaction is not necessarily touching it, climbing on top of it, or mending it. You can touch art with your mind, and more than that, let it touch you. There’s reverence, and then there’s playfulness. That’s what I like about contemporary or modern art — you don’t have to be all serious and philosophical around it. You are entitled to feel whatever it is you’re feeling.
Hamburger Bahnhof has a Joseph Beuys exhibition now. Some rooms left me puzzled, and that’s okay. That’s the conversation around art, you don’t have to be sure to fully get it. You can be left puzzled about it, you can try and find its secret, you can imagine what it is that art is hiding.
A random camera shot turns a simple object into art. And one can argue, that is the very essence of art, an idea that anything can be art, if you pay enough attention, if you treat it like one.
One space had Beuys’s handwriting and drawings on chalkboards. Strange how you perceive handwriting hanging in a gallery. Especially when there’s a whole room filled with it. You don’t read it. Traditionally, writing is something created to be read. But here, you try to take it all in. Not to read, but to watch. In this sense, writing is not to convey words, but to convey images, impressions. You perceive words in their purity, as form that is stripped of content. The meaning is broader than the sum of words. In fact, it’s something different from the meaning of words, and that is definitely part of the artist’s exploration of language.
How do you maintain a chalkboard as an art object? Someone has to care for it, to notice where lines and words are fading, and take a chalk to them. Long after the author’s death, the perishable chalk writings on boards remain.