I went to the new Brandhorst Museum in Munich, devoted to the contemporary art collection of Udo and Annette Brandhorst. It only opened a few weeks ago. It's a great triumph of gallery architecture. You feel elated just being there. I wish I'd taken more photos -- here are a few. I only thought of taking any when I was already on the way out.
Brandhorst exterior
The Brandhorst exterior is a stripy angular box, with thin narrow vertical strips of colour, ranging from purple to yellow, made of ceramic rods.
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The lobby has a lot of fabulous glass walls so daylight floods the space, and when you sit in the cafe or look around the bookshop there's a pleasant feeling of being half outdoors. You go in the museum proper, and there's a pure white light everywhere. There are vast beautiful polished oak floors, light soft brownish ochre, and angular magnificent staircases of the same material. The shapes of the rooms are different on each floor, some of them epic, some more compartmentalised. A lot of Twomblys occupy the upper level. Elsewhere there are the type of things you expect to find in any swanky collection: Nauman, Polke, etc.
 Kounellis room (Chamberlain in background) |  Beuys room |
There's something glazing about this range of art. The eyes glaze over at the sight of the catalogue. It has Twombly on the cover, I think. (I didn't bring one back with me.) It's a generic object. At the same time it's a devotional object. Looking through it you know you're taking part in a ritual, the religion of Polke-art and Beuys and Kounellis-art etc. The catalogue-Bible, with its daft drivel that someone highly trained has earnestly stayed up nights writing, and the pictures of the objects that Udo and Annette Brandhorst bought over the years: objects with headline meanings, but no psychic dimension other than the obvious and immediate -- and then the blankness.
Polke-Kounellis-Twombly-etc objects. Not radiating anything, but letting you know you're in the presence of the new psychic-blank wall art-religion, with its ironic commentary on modern matters that we all often think about in a glancing way. The art offers us a reminder that we have that capability of being absent minded. How will the cult be presented in this new Brandhorst shrine? What aspects will be highlighted?
On the lower level -- vast, vast -- a beautiful metal thing by Damien Hirst gleaming for miles, it has thousands of different-coloured pills on long, long shiny reflective shelving: each pill is actually a pill cast in metal and then painted the appropriate pill colour, because real pills would look dull after a while (I think -- I believe I read this once anyway). And Jeff Koons's fantastic bear from his 1988 "Banality" series, nearby, with its curly yellow hair and big blue eyes, and pink letters spelling AMORE, and a button with the words I HEART YOU. I really do find that ceramic bear impressive: white, silver, shocking-pink, blue, yellow -- he's a super-aesthete with these "Banality" things. And the Hirst pills too, that work is amazing. Hirst has done so many very strikingly visually successful things in his life, and a lot of boring ones. A boring one is here: some TV sets with video clips of pain killer TV ads playing on them, and some heavy vitrines with medical junk in them. But I don't judge anything at this museum, because these architects are making me happy with their thoughtful spaces. A Warhol piss painting. Some other objects: Kounellis, Franz West, Robert Gober, Bruce Nauman, Georg Bazelitz, Eric Fischl., Christopher Wool. Eyes glaze over. Maybe yours don't but mine do. But on the other hand, here is the stuff beautifully arranged and presented, and anyone can come in when they feel like it, and one day something might mean something to them, and even if it doesn't, the thrill of the spaces is the thing.
Where am I? Spatial grandiosity. The feeling of an army of cleaners with PHDs in dusting, and the sheen and polish of beautifully presented shiny books with theological creed-like incantatory writing, the pages illuminated like Bibles with colour finessed repros. Light fills my eyes. It's the contemporary art gallery experience.
Many people don't expect contemporary art to be about beauty, but we're still human and the hunger for beauty is part of being human, like the tendency to be religious. The surroundings are where the action is -- not the art but the stuff around it, is where beauty is. The contemporary art cult has all the voodoo mysticism of religion, but the cult members let the cult off religion's other traditional task of providing rich, all-encompassing wisdom. Instead you get mental conundrums. Just as religion lingers on in art after religion is no longer at the centre of social life, so beauty lingers on in contemporary art when contemporary art is perfectly fine about being ugly -- or nondescript or visually arbitrary. It's in the beautifully designed surroundings that the human appetite for beauty is satisfied.
Religion and art go together. With the magic rituals of the cave men, art specials up the space. With contemporary art, the space specials up the art. The beauty of nature is celebrated in art through the ages. In the contemnporary art experience the gallery design takes over the nature-referring job. Glacial whiteness. Snowy vastnesses. A crystallised and amplified version of mountain air purity.is offered by vast clean streamlined whiteness.
There's no requirement that contemporary art objects should have any visual richness. No requirement that they should be beautiful. They can be. (Like the Twomblys at the Brandhorst, well, a bit anyway -- he headlines a concept of beauty as something very airy, fast and breezy; it's not very satisfying to go on looking after five seconds.) Or they needn't be. And they might connect to the architecture of the building, as church art used to, or they don't have to. They don't have to radiate anything, because the surroundings are doing all the radiating that's considered necessary.
The wow effect: Wow you think, all this space, just for me. The new familiar atmosphere -- the white sheer cool space is the natural space. Unknowable and perhaps dubious but dryly amusing objects seem to naturally belong here -- just as staggeringly beautiful pictures of religious wisdom used to naturally belong in the places of religion.
We can all walk into these places, like people before could walk into the greatest cathedrals on holy days. But what's distinctive about now is that beauty has migrated off the art objects and into the surroundings. And while the art is whatever it is, the surroundings really are something.
Anthony Gormley's One And Other, 2009
Taking a pill from Hirst's shiny wall-thing I was mentally transported to London's Trafalgar Square where Anthony Gormley has this on-running event happening called "One & Other": a person stands for an hour on a thing in the square known to Londoners as the fourth plinth -- it's a plinth for a statue that never has a statue on it, for some obscure Victorian reason, and over the last few years trendy artists have been allowed to put something on it for a year. Gormley's offering is this live human event. Round the clock, an ordinary person stands on the plinth. You have to apply, and the names are chosen by chance method. The thing itself is nothing different to usual in conceptual art. The distinction is the talk surrounding this event, it's blithering nature: the amazing stuff people have been spouting in the media about "modern Britain," "democracy," "individuality," "human beings," "the right of anyone to be up on a plinth, not just posh people in history."
Magritte, 'The Reckless Sleeper', 1928
Oil on canvas, 1160 x 810 x 20 mm
I was glad when the pill wore off and I was back at the Brandhorst. Or was I? No! I was at Tate Modern looking at Magritte's Reckless Sleeper from 1928. The late twenties is Magritte's great period. He is a master of greys. This was when he did the best ones, and he had his best ideas about signs and language. A man dreams -- he dreams of ordinary objects, a hat, a candle, a pigeon, a blue rubbon tied into a bow, an apple, a hand-mirror. They're only signs for objects, but then, he's only a sign for a man. Oh God it's philosophy -- where do you begin? Where do you end?
A joke, or a philosophy, with no particular new insight in the end, but everything is ordered very neatly and with a nice visual buzz -- visual pleasantness -- you want to look. More than pleasantness -- beauty -- of a weird kind, morbid -- but it is beauty -- a surprise about what beauty in art can be. In the painting one thing beautifully echoes another. A head-like shape below: a definite head above. Tonal variation in the dark blue below, tonal variation in the wood pattern above. A shallow space above, another one below -- the idea of a man's inner world above, and grey stuff like a joke on ectoplasm below, containing things that are like a joke on ordinariness. And with these ordinary things, there is a beautiful weaving of colours -- the grey-blues of the hat, bow and pigeon, and the yellows of the candle, apple and mirror. A form of a man, obvious and recognisable, above, but deliberately ill-defined, as if he isn't very solid, and, below, a form that doesn't exist, which is carefully defined so it has a definite solidity -- a blob that rather miraculously visually echoes everything set into it equally, even though each thing (hat, candle, etc) is a very different shape. In fact the sense of equal-ness everywhere throughout the picture is perhaps the most eerie thing about it.
Picasso, 'Three Dancers', 1925
Oil on canvas, 2153 x 1422 mm
When Picasso shows you something ('Three Dancers', 1925, round the corner from the Magritte, in Tate Modern's present hang), which is all ruptured, fractured and abstracted, he's rocking tradition, saying you can't just keep obeying tradition. But compared to Magritte he is still quite traditional. Picasso says here's a thing -- real women in a real room dancing -- it's just that you're seeing it differently to usual. It's beautiful in a savage way that's a bit conceptual too. All those rough textures and strong colours are all in the service of a surprise that delights you. But with Magritte you can't even be sure it is a thing. It's beautiful in a jokey way, and it seems to be all conceptual. Ultimately it is a painting, it's visual. It's just that those perfect relationships are all in the service of a surprise that unhinges you.
Robert Rauschenberg, 'Charlene', 1954
Then I was in the photography studio of the Stedelijk museum in Amsterdam -- the museum is closed until next September (hey mad cult-fans, it opens with a big Mike Kelley show), but I wanted to film a painting by Robert Rauschenberg in its collection, for a TV documentary on beauty in art, so they set it up for me in this studio.
It's from1954. It's made of bits and pieces that he's put together - rubbish basically. Red wood, red paint, red fabric, a gauze umbrella some parts of which he's painted red - and he balances red with green and white and yellow, among other muddier colours. Some of the materials are personal - a letter from his mother that he's stuck on, in which she tells him that his sister has just been made a beauty queen; his own un-beautiful vest. But most of it is random, and the impression of randomness is important to the energy of the thing.
Umbrella in 'Charlene'
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Vest in 'Charlene'
The 'personal' - so what?
The 'personal' is a joke when it's just something personal you've stuck on. But the 'personal' is extended into something a bit more interesting when it's the personal way you've sploshed a bit of white on. Or the personal way in which the eye sees a mark somewhere, and then requires an answering mark somewhere else -- Rauschenberg's white splosh over the vest, and then the angular red, emphatic, hinge-like mark up in the left corner of the painting. The whole painting is made up of such relationships, and they are what makes the painting beautiful, but they're not just joie-de-vivre chaos, they're the result of selection, selecting one thing to do rather than another. It sounds either too obvious and basic or too trivial, but "selection" is the principle behind the beauty of the painting, not sentimental feelings about somebody's life-story, or reverential feelings about art history.
I couldn't care less about Rauschenberg's autobiography when I look at this, and I don't think he's really caring about it exactly, either, I think he cares about chance and order. He throws things in he has around him but then he has to organise them. It's a pure abstract arrangement of circles and rectangles - there are circles everywhere, and rectangles everywhere, made out of pure random rubbish, It's incredibly beautiful. He makes randomness into freshness, and he doesn't do it by piling on chaos, but by having an eye that's interested in selecting one thing rather than another.
He selects the junk that will work with the junk that he's already selected: the glow of a light bulb, the gloopy distorted shape in a plastic mirror -- they connect visually. A yellow streak, a yellow glow: they connect. Junk is smeared but also separated and compartmentalized: some junk here and some there: it's rubbish talking to rubbish visually.
He must be working quick, in a frenzy, I can't imagine this took more than a few hours -- but he is making decisions about what to put with what, based on looking: why is a red multiplied into a lot of reds, why not go on varying red forever, why contrast it to another colour at a certain point -- because at another point elsewhere there's a contrast with a similar sort of sting, and the two stings now guide your eye around the shapes of the whole painting in a way that's exciting, whereas red everywhere is unified but monotonous.
Chaos is monotonous, rubbish is monotonous -- this art is rubbish, but actually it doesn't seem so limp and dispensable and overlookable and avoidable as rubbish. It has a lot of focused intensity - shapes, rectangles, subdivided into small rectangles, colours shaped by the kind of material they're made of - stretched fabric, a sheet of old plastic mirror, paint untreated except by the physical force that's necessary to get it out of the tube or the tin - so it lies there with no more significance than just a bit of stuck on newspaper or a piece of wood.
The selection principle is behind any artwork, really. Any artist's job in creating something beautiful is to make meaning out of experience. You're always faced with everything. What you have to do is find relationships between elements so there's a spring between them, a tension -- and now it's not just anything but a visual order. So with this painting, his organising eyes are seeing not just a bit of old fabric or plastic mirror material but an object charged with certain visual characteristics, for which he finds complementary characteristics in other objects. It's called "Charlene." "Charlene" was the name of a dancer he knew. He was friendly with a modern dance group. That information really is quite random. The title doesn't do anything. The selection does it -- it makes the painting not random but beautiful.
Matthew Collings
Matthew Collings is an artist and writer who lives in London. He studied painting at the Byam Shaw School in the 1970s and at Goldsmith's in the early 1990s. He has written several books including 'Blimey!' and 'This Is Modern Art'. He has written and presented many TV programmes, including the series, 'This Is Modern Art,' which received several awards including a BAFTA. His most recent series, 'This Is Civilisation,' was on Channel 4 in November 2007. A book to accompany the series has been published by 21. Collaborative paintings by Matthew Collings and Emma Biggs can be seen at the Fine Art Society, London.
To watch Matthew Collings's Channel 4 TV series, 'This Is Modern Art', click here.
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