Lockdown Journal: Dortmund Edition [Travelogue 04]
Saturday 23rd October
Today is essentially a free day. With the exhibition now fully installed and all of the tech stuff working properly, I can spend the day taking in some art elsewhere. I have arranged to meet Sylvia and Christiane at the Dusseldorf U building. What used to be the Unionstraße Beer Factory is now the Dortmunder U Kunstverein. The building is a somewhat progressive mix of the art historical and the contemporary. Over seven floors, including a cafe and restaurant there is the Body and Soul exhibition; two floors with the work of Picasso, Joseph Beuys, Henry Moore, Giacometti, Lehmbruck, Nan Goldin, Fernand Leger et al, a floor of work by students of Dortmund’s University, another floor dedicated to the audio, film graphic work and ephemera of sub-cultures, plus so much more that I did not even get to spend enough time with.
It is a place that feels like it is doing a very specific job of putting art history in the context of, not just the living present, but also the unborn future. Along with last nights experience at the Kunstlerhaus there is a real sense of place for art as part of a future society, a world away from the way it has been talked about during the pandemic.
Images from Iván Argote; Chaflierplatz @ Dortmunder Kunstverein
This exhibition is very much an exhibition for our times, not just in terms of its relevance to coronavirus with old works about touch and human contact, but in terms of how we view, or are conditioned to view public space. Here the artist creates a neologism: Chaflear - to chaffle. The word is meaningless allowing us to confer meaning on it. In one of his films the artist makes suggestions as to what it could be but always counters by saying it is not that. He never tells us what it actually is, leaving it open. The artist wants us to touch everything. A textured floor that he has created to walk on, benches that he has made and painted for us to sit on.
Of course, touch is an outlawed form of social intercourse in the year 2021. To touch someone in public is to be frowned upon as though you had decided to have sex in the street. It is the reverse of Logan’s Run; a world in which all forms of social contact have been removed and are now mediated through video screens. The kind of dystopia that even a seasoned veteran of the genre like JG Ballard would have balked at the idea of creating.
In Argot’s 2010 videos displayed as part of the exhibition, we are reminded of what is currently forbidden as the artist goes around tapping people on the shoulder. In one video he spends time licking a pole in a public place. Of course in relation to the current situation we have seen cases of what could be seen as ‘tongue-touch terrorism’ as the less communally minded amongst us have gone around supermarkets licking items in defiance of the rules.
The Chaflierplatz, if it is about anything, is about taking back the public space, making it a place in which people can gather unmediated, without fear of aggressive marketing to be themselves and be what people need to be. Contemplative, thinking beings.
I bid farewell to my Austrian companions for the next couple of hours and disappear off to a coffee shop to get internet access in order to finish some work for the blog posts. I plan to return later to have a look at the rest of the exhibitions.
Eventually I return to the Dortmunder U for the last hour of the day. In the next building, which consists of seven floors, the work ranges from that of Giacometti and Henry Moore to the current crop of this years University graduates.
Images from Dortmunder U Kunstverein
Jáychim Fleig
Vlassis Caniaris
`Germaine Richier
Jette Flügge
Timo Klos
In the evening we decamp to the Torhaus for a pre-listening event for the audio work that Silvia has produced. She is concerned that it is all in German and that maybe I do not want to do it as I will not understand. I suggest that this is not the case, after all I listen to many songs in other languages and it is never uninteresting. I point out that there are many bands out there who sing wordless songs anyway, whether it the scat singers of the Jazz idiom or bands such as Cocteau Twins or Sigür Ros. In these instances the words are made up and therefore meaningless in any language. The words become pure sound or texture. Meaning can be implied by the shape of the sounds or conferred by the workings of the mind. Sound is rarely boring to me.
As I sit with the rest of the audience and listen in the darkness of the Torhaus by night, with all of the lights out to avoid distraction I am reminded of a moment in the romantic comedy ‘While You Were Sleeping’ where the main family of the story are at midnight mass on Christmas Eve and the Grandma turns to her husband, whilst the choir are singing in Latin, and says ‘It’s so much nicer when you don’t know what they’re saying’. Indeed, this radio play could be about anything; I hear words that I recognise and it is obviously about world events of the last twelve months, but divorced of context it is pure sound. My feeling is one of tranquility, which I am sure is a world away from those listening in German.