It's one of those days when the metro doors close right in my face. When every girl in the room is pretty and I'm the only inappropriate one. When they steal my whole unopened carton of milk from the fridge. When I'm late for classes and when although it was snowing all day, it starts raining as I go outside. Even so, I loved it.
I didn't have a very nice sleep. I woke up at some point and was in a delirium for the next hours, somewhere between annoying repetitive senseless dreams and stressed out about the world awake. But somehow I've made it through and the sky was bright. Well, at least for the next half hour, before I got to see the sun, it was already well-hidden. I couldn't finish more than half of my lunch. I didn't finish my readings and didn't work out as much as I planned to. But at least I did bits of each and I ran around six to the museum.
I am so sorry I did not take a camera with me. As I was going out of the metro station, snowflakes were all around me, before I even got to take a look around. I had to wait for almost 40 minutes for the tour to start, because they were serving drinks. I did not touch a drop, as I am on a four week self-discipline exercise of being alcohol-free. But then my group got the pretty curator assistant who showed us around. Thomas Ruff is indeed a fascinating artist. He can play with war and color and porn. The thing I like most about contemporary art is that it is so much centered around a discourse and devoid from that, it loses meaning. There is of course one thing or another that catches your eye, but without the story, it is not worth that much to you. My strongest reaction was to a newspaper photo of an old Ceausescu. That particular room just reminded me of how we need to put images in stories. Well, some of us. But there is a constant trade-off between our stories and the images. I'll try to move through the exhibition step by step, but I feel I cannot do a very good guide job. The first large room had works that were somewhat psychedelic, but which actually just talked about the color essence of images. They were actually several manga drawings superposed and printed on Plexiglas. Then there were some tri-dimensional games of curves, processed by computer after mathematical functions and printed to canvas. They were a more playful thing, a game of photographers trying to reach a tri-dimensional representation of space. I also liked the jpegs that were taken from different smaller photos and enlarged to an extent where you only had in front of you a pixelated image... and the point was to see that the image was beyond the photograph, and that the photograph does not grasp reality. There were two series of portraits. One that made Ruff famous, was of random people with no specific expression. I guess that was a way of underlining the actual lack of identity the photography entails and also that we are not that different to a camera. The second was another playful experiment, of taking elements of faces and making portraits out of them, sort of like the guy that takes sketches for the police. My personal reaction was that I knew every single one of those people. They all looked like somebody I could not put my finger on. I mentioned the newspaper photos, which taken away from the text, are actually good photography. They are also full of meaning and I believe there was one to create a feeling in every person who saw the exhibition. I also liked the camera surveillance-like photos, where the viewer is intimidated by his power of night vision over others who cannot see back. They are void landscapes, kind of creepy, kind of homely. The porn works were more than daring. It was blurred photos of images taken from the internet, a discourse on how we are all addicted to images and how they have power over us. And, nonetheless, the stars... ah, the stars. These were taken using telescopes at different times and the closer you get, the more stars you see. It is for me a way to feel tiny and amazed by all that's out there.
When I saw the brochure, I did not imagine you can live such an exhibition and also not that it can teach things. I am not the artsy type, but I did get a taste for it and I want more.
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