How to translate this German idiom into English?
Tough Call!
Decisions, decisions!
Spoilt for Choice!
I guess they all apply when it comes to end-of-year choosing of a particular art review that I consider amazing: interesting writing, learnedness across multiple fields (poetry and literature as well as the visual arts,) an emotional hook added to the intellectual riches, clarity, and a willingness to defy majority opinion. So many to choose from.
I settled on the one linked below, partly because it is about a topic I care about deeply, more importantly because I learned so much from John Yau‘s essays over the years, and most importantly because it checks off on ALL of the factors mentioned above.
The show under review, Anselm Kiefer: Exodus at Gagosian (November 12–December 23, 2022,) is almost over, but since Kiefer’s work is ubiquitous, the general insights apply whereever you see his work next. As my regular readers know, I was never a fan, given Kiefer’s loose relationship with the truth and his self-aggrandizing, although I made one exception at a show in Montreal.
Yau’s review of the current exhibition was poignant in ways I wish I had thought of:
“What does it mean to cover the lack of answers in gold …. Anselm Kiefer is the Steven Spielberg of painting. Both are masters of effect and convinced of their own genius. One cannot help but be impressed by what they do in their respective mediums. And yet, is being impressed enough? “
Photographs from last week captured nature’s gold (silver and brass) of withering ferns, rather than Kiefer’s applied gold-leaf.
***
When it comes to my own reviews of 2022, the choice was pretty easy. By far the hardest to write were Die Plage and The Central Park Five. The former because the Holocaust topic was so traumatic and the wealth of material about the artist and his own traumas required intense structuring and streamlining. The latter because the issue of racism and its horrific entrenchment in the American psyche, history, institutions and legal system is unresolved and painful to face, every single time I get up the nerve and try again
I had some difficulties with familiarizing myself with and appropriately framing Native American Art, but was happy with the results of both major reviews, The Red Shimmer of Remembering and Breathing the High-Altitude Ether of Discovery. I learned much and felt I could stimulate interest in equally uninformed readers.
The reviews I enjoyed most, of art that spoke to me with its intentionality and multi-layered meanings, were Correlations in Corvallis and Ripped Threads. I had zero guidance to go on for either, given the status of the artists, creating all their lives in relative obscurity. I had to rely entirely on my own thoughts and impressions, but also lots of freedom to speculate. I have nothing but admiration for these women even older than I, who never gave up, despite lack of even a hint of support from the established art world. For the latter, I felt there were politically important topics delivered without shock and awe or any other attention-grabbing means, just trickling slowly, subtly, intelligently into your consciousness, coloring your emotional responses. For the former I admired that the process of making art continues even when you have said all you had to say on the intellectual front. It is enough if only beauty flows at times, without pretense. And flow it did.
I very much hope that 2023 provides more opportunities to stretch myself as a writer while having my mind stretched by beauty and/or meaning.
Music: grandiosity, gold, German romanticism – you surely know what’s coming! (The beginning is very subtle, it gets louder soon.)
