Ritcher blows my mind...again.

The Sunday before last I was cleaning the house and while leaned over the bathtub turned some wrong way and pulled a muscle in my back. I laid down for a bit but went ahead and finished some things up that day. On Monday morning though my back hurt worse so I stayed home from class. I found this a bit frustrating since I have been fairly good about keeping up with my working out schedule...and that is suppose to help, not hinder your physical well being, right? Perhaps there is no connection with that but I can't imagine it not being a factor.

So, I took the rest of the week off from working out and spend most of the time I was home laying down in bed. This ultimately helped and I was mostly fine by the next weekend and pretty much totally recovered this week. I started back with exercising (carefully) on Sunday. All that laying around made lots of time for reading though, which was great because I had brought a small pile of books that needed cracked.

When planning our move to Germany, R and I allowed ourselves to bring 5 books each. We have many many books (they filled a large percentage of our moving trailer) and so deciding which books to bring was a hard and very significant decision. We knew that it would be the perfect time to tackle lengthy and difficult books but, also, we knew there were key books that are nice to have around for reference.

The five books (each) we picked were:
R: 'Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings' by Walter Benjamin, 'Utopia Deferred: Writings for Utopie (1967-1978)' by Jean Baudrillard, 'Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939' by Georges Bataille, 'Untitled [Experience of Place]' essays by various authors, and 'Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975'
mmm...I never realized before these are all collected writings.

S: 'The Portable Nietzsche' [can't move to Germany without it], 'The Order of Things: An Anthology of the Human Sciences' by Michel Foucault, 'Painting as Model' by Yve-Alain Bois, 'Phenomenology of Perception' by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and "The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque' by Gilles Deleuze.

So, last week I was able to break into a couple of these, mainly 'Painting as Model' and 'The Order of Things' which are both fantastic. I have also watched a lot of movies and documentaries over the last two weeks including 'Control', the movie about Ian Curtis of Joy Division, which was somewhat of a letdown, and 'The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford" which was surprisingly good. 'Jesse James' was about James' late life and his murder by close companion and distant cousin, Robert Ford. Jesse James is played by Brad Pitt and most of the movies takes place near Kansas City and around Missouri so that was a nice combo and of personal interest. What was surprising perhaps was the really unconventional cinematography that reassembled both Daguerreotype style vignetting and art house abstraction along side an excellent performance by Casey Affleck. It wasn't the most amazing movie ever or anything but I think worth watching if you get the chance.



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Last Thursday we went to the Fashion Aginst AIDS concert with Chicks on Speed that R mentioned before. It was pretty fun but not as 'shocking' as they would have hoped I think. R observed that videos of them running around naked slapping each other on the ass was more endearing than anything else. Also, we spent part of the concert trying to stay out of the way of the two couples making out in front of us. At what one point it got kinda heavy and when I stepped back and I accidentally stepped on the persons foot behind me. When I turned around to apologize I discovered the people behind us were making out too...so somehow we ended up in the make-out corner of the dance floor.

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The weekend before last we had our normal brunch and tried to make it to the Neue National Gallery before it closed, but didn't make it. That made us decide to pick a separate day to go see art in the city, so we didn't have to rush our Saturday and we could start earlier. So, for now, that new art day is Friday.






We decide to go back to the Neue National Gallery on (last) Friday. It is by Potsdomer Platz which is pictured above. Potsdamer Platz is the epicenter of new German architecture in Berlin. It was the area first developed after the wall came down. If you look at the first pic you see a row of buildings...but on closer inspection (see second pic) you realize two of the buildings are not even real, but billboard facades. R read about this phenomenon on Slab-Mag, who coined the term Fakeytecture for it. His article shows pics from the back sides too.

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This time at Neue National we had plenty of time to look around and it was fantastic. Modern Art was such a politically charged and driven phenomenon that it is extremely insightful to compare the way collections are organized. For example, the real corner stone room at Neue National is the Bauhaus room. It seemed to say, this is where early Modern art became high Modern art. They also have a whole room dedicated to COBRA painting, which I never even had heard of before.



However, the painting that completely blew me away...in a way that I haven't experienced for many years, was the above painting by Gerard Richter. Maybe it is the narrow way he is talked about in US art academia, or the way he is curated in America, or my own real ignorance of his work...but before this painting I always thought of Richter as more of strict conceptualist who played off the tension of handmade-yet-photographic/mechanical in appearance against mechanically created-yet-handmade/expressionistic in appearance paintings. Here are two specific and exemplary examples:



Even his own website divides paintings into two sections: photographic and abstractions. This painting, the one I saw on Friday in the Neue National Gallery, was a (literally) giant clue that this was far from the entire story. There were a myriad of paintings that he made, especially during the early 80's, that defy this strict division...and have *gasp* almost expressive gestures.

On one level, this does completely change how I view all of Richter's work. I can now see him exploring the entire spectrum of painting in a much broader sense. This does make that specific conceptual tension a little less intense...but ultimately I don't think my opinion of his work has suffered...it has actually provided me with a lot of questions to figure out how to answer for myself.