A Berlin exhibition is dedicated to vanitas artworks by young artists and claims: “Nothing is eternal anyway”. The ephemeral has always exerted a great fascination on artists. For a long time, they depicted transience – drawn, carved, painted on wood and canvas. Sometimes the decay of the body was the subject and motif, sometimes death peeked out as a reminder […]
A Berlin exhibition is dedicated to vanitas artworks by young artists and claims: “Nothing is eternal anyway”.
The ephemeral has always exerted a great fascination on artists. For a long time, they depicted transience – drawn, carved, painted on wood and canvas. Sometimes the decay of the body was the subject and motif, sometimes death was just peeking around the corner as a reminder. In the great still lifes of the Baroque period, art celebrated exuberant life and used small hints, shimmering insects, attractively arranged skulls and the odd slightly withered stem to depict the threat of transience as a small, pretty gesture. But if such a work is really in danger of fading away, restorers help to preserve it.
The artists’ attitude to the disappearance of their own work has, of course, changed fundamentally. Food, flowers and ephemeral objects are no longer just depicted, but used – even at the cost of the direct, physical death of the artwork. Dieter Roth, the artist who worked most intensively with food, completely rejected restorations: “Works of art should change like people, grow older and die,” Roth said. Consequently, many of his works are now just indefinable heaps – past and lost for exhibitions. However, a rabbit figure made of rabbit dung, “Karnickelköttelkarnickel”, is well preserved and can be seen in the exhibition “Vanitas – Ewig ist eh nichts” at the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin. It is one of the oldest examples of art that thematizes decay shown in this exhibition.
Because the exhibition wants to show: The theme preoccupies artists of all generations – even the youngest. That is why the Sculpture Museum had no difficulty in finding works by younger artists and inspiring some of them to create new works. For example, there are Mona Hatoum’s hand grenades made of hand-blown Murano glass that shimmer like precious objects, a self-portrait by Thomas Schütte reminiscent of death masks or the skeleton-like figures by Pawel Althamer. They are all concerned – in a rather traditional way – with the passing of time as a process of life.
Making the passing of time visible, on the other hand, plays no role for Alicja Kwade. She has already ground up a grandfather clock and neatly separated its powdered individual parts into jars according to color. Anyone who can do such work will make little work for restorers in a hundred years’ time. Japanese artist Kei Takemura has taken on her task completely. She restores broken everyday objects such as spectacles, glasses and crockery using the old, almost forgotten Japanese kintsugi technique. In this technique, the broken parts are reassembled using Japanese lacquer and gold foil. Takemura then covers the objects with a fine gauze fabric and embroiders the covered breakage points with a silk thread so that they are visible from the outside.
The process-based artworks by Luca Trevisani and Reijiro Wada, which can be repeated at any time, render practices of preservation and conservation completely superfluous. Each new exhibition of the work “Freeze” by Japanese artist Reijiro Wada requires fresh fruit, which is arranged between glass plates. Their decay is part of the work. It is the same with Luca Trevisani’s flowers, which hang in front of white fabric panels as a work of art called “James Hiram Bedford” and first blossom and then fade in the course of their exhibition. With the title of the work, Trevisani alludes to the psychology professor James Hiram Bedford, who had his body frozen in 1967 – in the hope that he, who was suffering from lung cancer, could be brought back to life and cured through new research.
Of course, with a work of art like Tomás Saraceno’s, one can only be glad that it only exists for the moment and does not need to be preserved. For his work “Omega Centauri 1 Nephila Kenianensis 4 Cyrtophora citricola”, Saraceno had two different species of spider spin their webs on top of each other. In the darkened, black-lined exhibition space with a light island and live spiders, the delicate structures are created for the duration of the exhibition, illustrating the theme of transience in one of its most fragile forms.
The title of the exhibition “Eternal is nothing anyway” could certainly be understood as a challenge to the work of restorers. However, it is merely an expression of the mood of the times, which, according to curator Nathalie Küchen, is expressed in YOLO, the youth word of the year 2012. YOLO stands for “You only live once”. Who would disagree with that?
Berlin, Georg-Kolbe-Museum, until August 31, catalog: 18 euros
