Painting Memory: Remaking Images from the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
By David Schutter
David Schutter.
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"In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or synchronous within the collection's world." - Susan Stewart, On Longing
Restoring time to a kind of origin is a job for the physicist, the historian, or the police detective. It is an endeavor that from the outset explains time as a linear unfolding replete with notions of agency and clear sources. But, in the complex world of the collection it is difficult to apply these traditional ideas about time to ways of uncovering meaning. The world within world that is a collection is abound with metaphor and memory and provides ample room for both the present and the past to overlap and germinate, causing anything but linearity. Specifically, the synchronous time and space of the collection is a location where one can better direct a more phenomenological investigation not about true origins, but about the meaning of the historical present.
The Gemäldegalerie in Berlin is a special collection of art that presents a great many possibilities as vehicle for such a study. As an artist, I am interested in this collection as a concrete residual, or historical reification, of larger cultural metaphors and, in particular, how the Gemäldegalerie's collection-sprung metaphors interact with notions of individual memory. In this upcoming year I will investigate what I view as an emblematic portion of the Gemäldegalerie's collection, a group of seven paintings that have been together since the museum's early foundations and through much of its episodic history. Using this metonymic model as source material, I will make/remake a group of paintings that question traditional ideas about origin, memory, and the collective relationships between institutionally grouped works of art.
Within any collection of things there is a system of classification that governs the way in which we see its components and, respectively, the way in which we process it as a total body. In the realm of the public art collection viewers are submerged in an overt classification system that follows timelines and styles for the sake of education, but often a more tacit institutional/viewer relationship is obscured by the very nature of enlightenment as a principle: museums also exhibit the metaphorical categories in which works of art are to be understood. Perhaps this is one reason why we feel differently before two similar public collections; each institutional project is essentially different. From institution to institution there are cultural differences to consider, forms of display, arrangement and décor, but sometimes, as is the case with the Gemäldegalerie, it is the invisible historical narrative of a collection that can form much of the strange world that resides inside of it. Any collection emits a classification system that is imbued with varied cultural, formal, and historical factors. These categories are often quietly consumed without an awareness that they operate on us, as viewers, at the level of metaphor. In looking through a collection a total picture is developed from these characteristics of surface and substance (e.g. opulence or simplicity, eccentricity or formal organization, historical gravitas or contemporary fashion, personal or institutional, etc.). These factors can build not only semiotic associations, but, perhaps more importantly, perceptual bridges to metaphor as a way to understand what we see, and what we have seen, and ultimately question how it adds up in our visual/cultural memory. The unique metaphorical synchrony of the art collection drifts uneasily between realms of timelessness and the categories of historical/cultural detail. It at once combines the compression of collected time and space with that of our contemporary world while still referring back to the distant location of the individual, original artworks. This mercurial dialectic can define our memory and our experience.
The Gemäldegalerie of Berlin is a collection that exhibits these powerful dialectical phenomena. It is a collection that has run the gamut in forms of notable history (from its foundations of enlightenment ideals, to loss and division through war and politics, to reconstruction and re-unification). When we stand before a group of images in the Gemäldegalerie we are also viewing Berlin's past from our current position. We see, or rather we know, an unseen history. Inversely, one must admit also that we are capable of facing away from that contextual knowledge while looking at a single work of art from within the collection. A painting by Vermeer in the Gemäldegalerie has, intrinsically, nothing to do with Berlin; its conception was wholly isolated from the history that followed it. Yet these seemingly exclusive phenomena can have much to do with the way we process both the whole of the collection and the part of the individual work of art. The rift created by contemporaneously standing between these two opposing comprehensions is a fertile gap from which we can not only question the ideas surrounding collections, but also begin to question conceptual metaphors, such as synchrony, that shade both the institution (the collected group) and the works of art within it (the "original" image). To parse out how the tone of the whole collection is affected, as well as how the meanings of singular paintings are shaded, is a way towards understanding integral perceptions about memory and cultural phenomena.
Since its beginning the Gemäldegalerie collection has been through numerous institutional, political, and circumstantial changes that set it apart from the norm. Most notably, it was nearly dissolved by the events of World War II and its immediate aftermath. These events influence the way we see it as a collected group. With the Gemäldegalerie, historical literature accompanies the most basic of exposures - it is included in gallery guides, websites, tourist books, catalogues, etc. The uninitiated is initiated quickly. Through these formats we learn that museum and government officials, in lieu of Allied Force bomb campaigns, took early protective measures and divided the collection for safety. Many works were stored in the Thuringian and Kaiseroda salt mines; others works in larger formats were placed in the Friedrichshain Flak Bunker within Berlin's city limits. With a divided collection, below and above ground, the wartime gallery had some unfortunate fate. The 434 large works stored in the Friedrichshain air raid bunker survived the shelling, but upon the consequent Soviet occupation of the city fires broke out in the storage facility and over 400 of these works were destroyed. Underground, the jewels of the salt mine collection were commandeered by Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and the U.S. Army. These 149 works were placed on traveling exhibition, a circuit in which they partially remained until 1955 when, after diplomatic and legal action, they were returned. Construction of the Berlin Wall meant further dislocation and division and two museums housed the remainder of the original Gemäldegalerie collection - in the East, the Bode Museum and in the West, the Dahlem Museum (the eventual recipient of the U.S. Army's returned group). A historically Prussian and Northern European collection sat split by a wall, each side cut from a common cultural narrative and history. The destructive facts are ones that in part can be shared with other German institutions, but in the case of the Gemäldegalerie there is also a story of reunification. Today this collection is closer to its original Enlightenment-based intention, unified and displayed in Berlin in a new building designed by Heinz Himler and Christoph Sattler. Built in 1998, the new Gemäldegalerie now houses the complete Berlin collection. It contains everything that has survived, from its beginnings under King Friedrich Wilhelm III to the collection that was splintered during wartime and occupation.
The question that emerges is: What held these paintings together as a "collection" through all of this upheaval and fragmentation? Something, throughout the many changes and turmoil that threatened to dissolve the gallery, remained in tact to make Germans identify it as a fabric of work not to be fully dissolved. Beyond pride and perseverance there is a basic phenomena at work in the Gemäldegalerie's story: collections become, after time, a single work that emotes a steady declaration. Its face is more understood as it is absorbed and remembered by its patrons. Components blur and give way to emit a key tone, or common memory image base. Eventually a collection, like a work of art, can have a mood, speak a sentence, lodge in memory, etc.; the pieces under its cultural roof form a synthesized image of the total. Once its public's memory has formed it, a collection has a historical identity as well as a visual image. As public collections go, the Gemäldegalerie is Van Gogh's "Self Portrait with a Bandaged Ear". Its author's circumstances are weaved into the image as we read it, and in totem each of these contextual phenomena are released onto the viewer to form a considerable part of its identity.
When observing this collection's milieu from inside its walls, it is the relationships built between the art works that is first apparent. One can see how a Jacob van Ruisdael landscape and a Gerard ter Borch genre scene react to one another a few feet apart in the same room. What measures also is the viewer's historical and cultural knowledge of the gallery as they see the paintings; i.e. that these two paintings were part of the salt mine storage and remainders from the lost works, survivors of the wall separating the East/West German collections, and finally, evidence of the will of Berliners to keep it a relative body.
These definitive qualities are unseen, but known factors. In an article for Art in America, art historian Linda Nochlin wrote about such unseen cultural and historical qualities in a critical essay about the success and failure of the then new Musée d'Orsay. In it, Nochlin cites the importance of a more social history of art. She wrote, "The function of a social history of art is to precisely reveal what is invisible". Moreover, it would "challenge once and for all the notion that the art work can exist in some totally independent realm of visual values, one divorced from the quotidian world of power and meaning". For Nochlin, the function of a critical social history is to "reveal that the way one sees a particular work of art is constantly inflected by other discourses - social, political, psychoanalytic." The Gemäldegalerie is, in short, Berlin's metaphorical identity, its picture, and its collectively informed possession.
Initially, this seems contrary to Susan Stewert's notion of the collection as a synchronous, timeless thing, but I think it is not so far off. The historical events that have shaped this collection have all the more made it into an independent realm with few relative contemporary counterparts. With all of its institutional transitions and past transgressions, it can be argued that it is the collected group, fused to Berlin's subjective attachment, that now serves as its virtual house, or in another way, as a constant collection of the memory and imagination. The mnemonic relationship established between the pictures is the structure. Its new housing in the Himler-Satler building is simply a frame for a collection that is, in itself, a strange and independent entity, concomitantly a participant in Stewart's phenomenological synchrony while being of Nochlin's social, political, and psychoanalytic world of meaning. It is from within this dialectic that I would begin my studies.
I have selected a small group of paintings to use as a project vehicle. I have tried to choose the most historically relative and unique group, selecting seven paintings by 17th Century Dutch masters that were collected together. The group consists of two paintings by Johannes Vermeer, a genre scene by Gerard ter Borch, a Franz Hals' double portrait, a Peter Paul Rubens child study, a Rembrandt van Rijn's biblical narrative, and a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael. This portion of the collection is most representative of the Gemäldegalerie's episodic history. All were acquired during the tenure of Wilhelm von Bode, the gallery's early director, who, with the exception of the Rubens and Rembrandt, acquired the lot in 1874 from the private collection of a German industrialist. The Rubens and Rembrandt were added within a short time during Bode's tenure. Each of these seven paintings have survived together throughout many of the gallery's trials and have been shoulder to shoulder in each of its numerous homes- dark and light, in saltmine-hiding and in museum showcase, on display together in the early Gemäldegalerie, West Germany's Dahlem Museum, and on tour with the Eisenhower group. Collected nearly all together, they have a relationship like few other paintings in Germany.
Because of this group's ties to memory I would like to investigate them from that very base, making a series of seven new paintings from the Dutch Master originals, each executed from memory. This re-making process will entail studying the paintings directly in the museum, making small drawings, writing notes and impressions, only to work on the re-made "memory" paintings (away from the originals and the compiled source materials) in a separate studio setting. Memory is the form in which these paintings have been preserved as a collection and it is in that form that I would like to re-form, investigate, and ultimately transport them from their original metaphorical setting. With this in mind I would hope for the newly re-made paintings to be activated palimpsests in a memory process that may shed new light on what it is that phenomenalogically ties these works together, find out how individual memories can affect the notion of original work, and to uncover the historical present of the collection in the process.
As an artist, I have been working with the subject of memory and how it influences perception for the last few years. Particularly how historical forms of knowledge (cultural and aesthetic) play a large role in how we both see and make visual art. I think that we are reticent in our everyday experience actively turn towards the past. In our contemporary age we often block the possibility of gleaning information about being from art, even though a trip to the museum is a visit to place loaded with time, memory, and metaphor. We see there centuries of compressed time in the collection and receive information in a multi-layered, slower form than we do in the outside world. It is easier to remain within the limits in our quotidian realm, but this seems contrary to how we often actually operate in the basic outside world. Constantly, through perception, we are navigating through a visual terrain packed full with questionable empirical models, personal memory, and language. This interaction requires a tremendous amount of attention to the past and its indelible tie to our present - something the French phenomenologist, Henri Bergson, would call living "in the duration", or overlap, of time. Yet in the museum we hold the potential to go flat and ruminate on the outward position of the object, the surface. I think we need to question this tendency and possibly look toward investing in the past as a way towards ourselves, and resist the compartmentalisations we use to make opaque and strange our own collective knowledge. In the coming Humboldt year, I hope to raise some new questions in this direction with seeing and painting.
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