Anselm Keifer: Take one: Small Spaces

 Small Spaces:

     Last semester I went to the Gagosian gallery in NYC where they where exhibiting "Next Year in Jerusalm" which exhibited a number of pieces by Anselm Kiefer. For me this wasn't any old show; I had been looking at Keifers work since art became a large part of my life. Yet I had never seen any of his works in person, which until this experience I had never realized how important it was to see art in person. Naturally I much anticipated seeing this exhibition. His work after all has been a major influence in how I work, how I experience the making process and also informs much of my own asthetic. It wasn't until nearly the end of the trip that I finally got to see the show. I walked in and the gallery was packed with people, but more so it was unbearably filled with Kiefers work. Art that was on a scale I could had never fathomed before, to me these paintings where the sizes of houses. I meekley entered the gallery (for some reason, fearful that some one would take one look at me and say "what the hell are you doing here! You don't belong here!") and stood infront of the first piece and stared, not even knowing at first what to think, or should I say I simply could not think.

The sheer magnitude of the work towering infront of me was beyond any art I had yet to experience. I had no idea that the work I had been looking at all this time in books, was so much more than what I could see on those minescule pages. It was here, standing in this room filled with people I didn't know, and filled with work I had never "seen" before, work I didn't know could exist, that I began to cry. I cried because I had been living under the presumption that I knew Anselm Kiefers work better than any one, that I had seen it all and yet infront of me was this thing I had never imagined, I had never seen this. Not only did I feel ignorant and powerless, but I also realized that this was art. To me this was the kindling to the fire that drives what I define myself by, yet I knew nothing about this art. I continued throught the gallery examinging every mark, every fire carved in to the hill scapes, one painting/sculpture after the other I would stand and pull in every inch, stund at its power, conflicted with enigmatic jealousy. This is the art I wanted to make but had no idea how to. Tears would fall with each piece and all I wanted was to consume every ounce of unabated intensity. I started getting frustrated with this gallery space filled with people who couldn't see what I saw; Frustrated by the fact that I couldn't move to a place where I could engross the work with my whole mind, the space was far to small to withstand this sort of power. I couldn't move, I couldn't see, I couldn't think and so as the dissatisfaction built in me I finally left when I could not bare it any longer.

 I roamed the streets of New York City in a haze. I had atleast two hours left before I had to leave this wonderful city, I had hundreds of gallery's I could have gone to, but I couldn't stand to go into one more gallery, too look at another piece of "art", that would have been an intolerable dissapointment. So I sat and waited for the bus that would take me back to this small town I called home most of the year, and for the first time since I had lived in this place I did not want to go back.

       Since then the show has gone in and out of my mind, poping up as reminder of what art can accomplish. Looking back and thinking about the space that frustrated me so much, I realize that the intolerance towards the people there should be directed more to the fact that the space no matter how large in comparison to the other gallerys I went to, was too small to exhibit all of the work that it did. I felt crowded because it was. There was no place to step back; To walk from a far and let the works unveil themselves as the viewer is enticed closer and closer until its no longer an image, but becomes a structure of overwhelming marks and surfaces just as intricate as the structures of DNA that make up everything that lives. That being said, I also have realized once again the importance of experience. For example to others the work may have been powerful but not so much as it was for me. This was, after all, my first pilgrimage to New York City. This was my first time going to a gallery that was more than the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, which is an amazing gallery... for Rochester. These where gallerys that people talk about the world round and held works from artists that I have, just like Kiefers work, only seen in books. Works that I saw, such as... Jasper John's Flag, or Mark Rothko's No. 5/No. 22, or Louise Nevelson's Sky Cathedral and Lucien Freud's Naked Man, Back View, no matter how much influence these artists have had on me none could compare to the effect that Anselm Keifer has.

       Experiences are key in the way that any given person views art. For example, when I changed high schools after my parents divorce, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, I had no goals and there was nothing that made me consider what the future could be for me. This was when I met Bill Stephens, the art teacher who worked at the school I just transfered too. The very teacher that when I had an indepentendent study with for painting, told me where the brushes and paints were and that was the only instruction I got (even though I had never painted before that). While I was working, Bill saw what I was doing with the medium and handed me a book on Anselm Keifer's work. With Bill as my guide and Keifer as inspiration I found something that ment more to me than anything else before, it was Art. This is why no one else in that gallery was wandering from painting to painting with tears in their eyes, they hadn't had the same experience with the art that I had. Once again Keifer has impacted me from a far, and maybe one day I will meet the man who has instilled such inspirating in me, but until then I will have to settle on two life changing experiences.


*Images provided by the Gagosian Gallery, MoMa and MET websites.

The Artful Teapot

I have my own memories in tea- stories my mother would tell me about my Gigi holding afternoon tea with all the glory in place settings and biscuits, the blood thirsty games of Scrabble that would inevitably follow.  There is a picture roaming around the house of my Gigi and a three year old me sitting in a sun room dressed up in the Sunday best savoring in afternoon tea. Even more recently (and perhaps less fastidiously) I find my self drinking tea after every meal and just before bed in the very least. It is amazing to think just how often tea partakes in our lives.  And I use "our" as a term encompassing everyone, and when I say everyone I mean to say every human being on this planet is some how connected to tea.  How! How has this come about, it's not something you would commonly think about, that is the history of how tea became tea.  Perhaps we take it for granted that tea has always been around, as if cave men would stop their day for a cup of earl grey and a hint of cream; but earnestly I have been drinking gallons of tea with out ever stopping to think where the beverage I was consuming came from.  So this past week I began reading the Artful Teapot which talked of the brief history that is tea.  The adventure starting in China, and how it was used as a monetary form as valid as a ten dollar bill, and when the Europeans got a knack for it they tired of only importing and started trading opium filled pipes for tea filled teapots.  And just think, that without the essential brick of tea changing to loose leaf tea there would be no teapot at all.  Not to mention that when the Europeans got a hold of tea and heard of the Japanese tea ceremony, that derived from a tea drinking ritual in china, after noon tea and all of the tea trays, cake plates, creamers,tea tables, sugar tongs, strainers, infusers, tea dresses..., all of these things invented in order to accommodate one substance. The substance that I drink from now, and for some reason I can feel that history with every sip, and its getting stronger with every sip, every line read and write. 

The teapot represents all these things, from etiquette, social conversations, rituals, addictions, all from years of experience and history.  Thinking about the stories and pictures my family has all based around tea.  The collections of tea, tea pots, cups and saucers that roam my home, which rarely end up being used but it's our collection of history.  A collection of memories and conversations that all happen around these illustrious objects that are not only based in function but in moments as well. How does an object elicit such history, how can it possibly entice memories and conversations? How can I make these objects seduce us back to the last art of the afternoon tea, high tea, tea ceremonies etc... Perhaps by harbouring an event of the creation, by making the object inveigle its history. An object that seems to reincarnate itself in every new making.  Letting its self be rediscovered again and again by individuals around the world. But what is the teapot to me? How can I make a form that is a mix between sensibility, ostentatious romanticism, something of valor, silly enough to be serious; Yet always about conversation and taking the time to talk to the people who inhabit your life.  How can I make something that makes you want to find the time for yourself to just ponder everything.  These are the things I'm interested in forming into that oh so familiar shape of the breathing bellowing mother of ceremonies.