Deutsche Denkfehler kill art
Obsession with process, order, and authoritarianism on full, albeit unwitting, display at Berlin's Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art.
Berlin has great and many museums. Indeed, they are one of the highlights of living here. On the weekend, I went to Hamburger Bahnhof, which is one of my favorites even though exhibits there can be very hit-or-miss.
Such is the risk you run with contemporary art. As they say around here: Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg? … Is this art or can we get rid of it? When it’s good, though, it can be fun and engaging. Or at least weird.
Take the current offer: “Dreams have no titles” is classy, romantic, and more than a tad subversive. “Simple facts” will throw your sense of perspective into question with nothing more than some yarn. A wonderful way to spend a couple hours in the afternoon while summer storms are passing through.
Then there’s the central exhibit currently occupying the main hall: Eva Fàbregas’ “Devouring lovers.” The title alone is enough of a turn on to put up with the line and get you through the door. The optics take it from there.
Who doesn’t want to play in what is essentially a bagged-up ball pit evoking larger-than-life sex toys? And that is pretty much the point of it. The Barcelona-born Millennial made this specifically for the museum to “expand the boundaries of sculpture, inviting visitors to a sensual, spatial experience.” The artist “embraces tactile engagement, physical intimacy, and sensory relations, where touch is the primary source of knowledge.
“Her work is about learning through one’s fingers.”1
Now for the punchline: However much the artist might “embrace” physical interaction with her art — and as a central purpose of her art — is irrelevant. The museum doesn’t.
“We hadn’t anticipated so many people to come and want to. Too much touching will damage the exhibit,” the museum guard explained, as he alone lazily policed the entire hall for rebellious visitors with the chutzpah to fulfill the artist’s vision. Meanwhile, he had to awkwardly rationalize how a fully permissible, even encouraged, act was simultaneously forbidden.
Allowed in theory. Banned in practice. Welcome to Germany.
It is high tourist season, and one of Berlin’s most central and popular museums did not think many people would come? Leave it to German Officialdom to bemoan success.
Also leave it to German Officialdom to obsess over process, with few cares left over for content. A set of rules are developed, within which a work can be developed for the explicit purpose of fulfilling a specific and preordained outcome. Deviations or experimentation are frowned upon. We will destroy the thing to save it, if we have to, but it will perform as we expect it to.
You, on the receiving end of the work, are free to experience it, but only in the limited way we have determined is appropriate. Thus the freedom-authoritarian axis is preserved.
To enforce these rules — or, as we see here, non-rules for a made-up problem — fake authority is bestowed upon middle management types (here, guard). Bystanders, with no authority other than their own over-eager sense of compliant do-gooderism, not only obey, but become willful force multipliers. In this case, a young woman visiting the museum thought she was doing the world a solid by warning against touching the art before the guard himself got around to telling you not to touch the art that was there to be touched.
To be fair and more precise, it’s not that “interacting” with the art was outright off limits, only unfettered interaction left to the visitor’s discretion. Ultimately, the museum was in control of the extent to which interaction was both permissible and worthwhile.
“Maybe just choose wisely the one place and time you want to touch it. That’s OK,” the guard added.
A cultural environment like this may have served Volkswagen well, but it is hardly one where play, ideas, and innovation flourish. Lots of public money is spent on the arts in Germany, which looks commendable on the surface, but more often reinforces established methods and structures rather than taking a risk on anything new.
Even when, as with “Devouring lovers,” the commissioner specifically asked the commissioned for it. If the art gets destroyed in the process, that sounds like a success. Only in the Teutonic Imaginary, is it obviously a failure.
Ed.: Italics mine.
Great observation and analysis of social dynamics, a sort of reverse bystander effect. I experience this from Germans in various situations, even the gym, where policing gets subconsciously outsourced. I also had a weird museum guard encounter at the Secession exhibit where the guard went around telling women, me included, to close any compartment of our tiny purses (that were allowed in) as if we would suddenly magically pull out a bag of soup to throw on the art? I had my phone in a side pocket so I left it open for easy access and that was somehow offensive. How middle management or rather, the lowest level leads to abuse has a long history in these lands.