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Yesterday after the early morning visa business, I had nothing pressing to do, so resolved to visit some of Frankfurt, walking. 

 

The Last couple days have been this: A lot of ambling, lots of miles. A lot of museums. This is a heck of a city for that. 

 

Where did I go? What did I see? I’ll try to make a little reckoning of it…

 

The Museum Für Moderne Kunst (modern art museum)

 

Great museum. Interesting, light architecture. But mostly I fell in love with the films of this American artist called Sarah Morris, who had the featured show there, called “Gemini Dressage“. She works in a few different media. Here’s from the program. 

 

“Morris’s oeuvre spans across both film and painting, relating strongly to the formal language of the Pop Art and Minimalist movements, expanding and challenging their ovcabulary and placing it in a new discourse [...] Sarah Morris creates paintings and films in which she traces urban and social topologies. She explores both the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics in order to survey how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Morris assesses what today’s architectural façades, urban structures, cities and nations might conceal. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in conspiratorial studies of power, of the structures of control, of global socio-political networks.”

 

Indeed. That’s all kind of a mouthful, but does a far better job of explaining what she does that I could. She had a bunch of paintings and several films. I responded much more to the films. In fact I pretty much flipped for them, truth be told. First I watched “Capital”, from 2000, a kind of composite portrait of Washington DC towards the end of Bill Clinton’s presidency. In my notes I called it “Amazing piece of A/V-impressionist (small-i) political anthropology. 

 

A few pictures of her paintings appear in the first (lower) of the two galleries below. The colorful, geometric stuff is all from a series called “Origami”. 

 

She shoots very nicely composed, kind of mundane looking B-roll and strings it together with a purposeful intensity driven by the music composition of Liam Gillick (who was credited on all the films I watched of hers). Mr. GIllick evidently uses a great deal of found sound, and seems to compose the music to the edit of the film–i would love to be in on the conversations between the filmmaker and composer. 

 

Another film, Beijing, an incredibly beautiful 86 minute film about the 2008 Olympic Games and that city’s response. Quiet, sly, mysterious. Fine Art Anthropology. I was pretty much gobsmacked by this film, sitting riveted in spite of being very hungry and having to pee real bad. 

 

What my love affair with Sarah Morris comes down to is that she has succeeded in realizing a vision very similar to one I’ve been working on and chewing in and turning over in my head and trying to figure out how to make work for a few years. The vision of fine-art anthropology films. Her (or her cinematographer, David Daniel’s) way of shooting is –well, I guess I’d be flattering myself to say it’s like mine, but it’s–familiar. It feels like how I would shoot if I game myself the assignment to make a film like this. 

 

It’s both personal and impersonal, compositionally very deliberate, but not obvious. Smooth. Stylish but quiet. Come see the book, I bought it. You can get a feel for the film. I should shut up about this now. 

 

The Sarah Morris work was the anchor for a show of Pop Art, and the rest of what was there was pretty impressive as well. Which for me basically means I recognized some people’s names, and saw stuff I liked. Some David Hockney drawings for Cavafy poems, displayed together, some Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, Thomas Demand, Roy LIchtenstein. Bunch more I can’t remember. I definitely recommend this museum if you visit Frankfurt. 

 

After the museum visit, I stumbled into the Walther König bookshop–that’s the publisher of the book I bought, and a really great bookstore for art. Ton a good photobooks. Somehow managed to avoid spending a lot of money (I haven’t been buying photobooks lately, and the expense of this unplanned holiday probably helped keep me sane).

 

Had a lovely lunch–do you care?–of pasta with orange pesto and orange filets. “Filets” means segments, peeled of their membrane and superquick sauteed. It was surprising and nice. Not exactly super traditional Frankfurter fare, but what the heck. Nice sidewalk seating.

 

NOTE: Everybody here has a baby, it seems like. I wonder if that’s because Germans are procreating like mad, or because my perception on this matter is distorted by being a father.

 

Spent the rest of Friday going to the airport to try to change reservations. 

 

Saturday I did hella stuff. Went to the Städel Museum, which had what seemed like a pretty great show “Caravaggio in Holland”, showing how C influenced the painters in the low countries. As a self-taught photographer, I find myself learning (too slowly, but) more and more to appreciate the tremendous devotion to and consequent understanding of light that these guys display. I came away with notes to check out Gerard Van Honthorst’s work.

 

There was also a show of about 80 prints from Edvard Munch. A) That guy’s badass. B) Prints? What a cool artform. 

 

Another good museum? The Museum für Kommunikation. Lots of telegraph machines and mail sorting equipment and telephones and radios and stuff, but also a bunch of random good photography: Martin Parr, from “Phone Book”, Peter Menzel from that eating thing he did, and some really lovely black and white environmental portraits of people and families eating, by a guy called Veli Granö. 

 

Brief visit to the cartoon museum. Nothing to write home about. 

 

Strolled up and down a long (1km?) second-hand market on a closed street. Mostly crap, just like swap meets at home. But different crap. Somewhat interesting scene, to be sure. I saw an African immigrant guy who was selling shoes just berating this Gypsy woman who I think was trying to get some free shoes. My German’s not great, but I’m pretty sure he said–and he was kind of shouting her down as part of his tout–”there’s nobody worse than a Gypsy. Not even a Jew or a Turk is a Gypsy!”

 

On this same note, I’ve several times seen people taunt Turks on the street. I think there’s a pretty swirly dynamic of cultural and racial tensions here. 

 

Also went to the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, and there saw two shows. One was GREAT: “The Making of Art”, in which are collected artists’ responses to the art world. Good stuff. Some of it was of course predictable and whiny and self-conscious, but some was just great. Some brilliant photography: Candida Höfer large format portraits of gallery people and spaces, some more Martin Parr, from work at Art Basel in Miami, and a couple other brand names I can’t think of right now, dumbly. 

 

TA lot of the art in this show/idiom seems to be about the artists either tricking themselves into being better businesspeople , or tricking would-be buyers into buying ‘this piece’ because if they own a piece of meta-art they’ll be IN THE CONVERSATION. Maybe it’s not a trick at all?

 

There was an artist I hadn’t heard of, called Nedko Solakov, who had a featured installation piece called “Leftovers”–ingeniously consisting of a lumber-and-plywood storage/display unit probably 20′x10′x10′ with several display cubicles. Each featured some of his art that for whatever reason hadn’t sold before.

 

He took and kind of linked all the art together, loosely I guess, by writing a kind of story in sharpie on the wood. A commentary on the piece, on the fact of it and the content of it. He also threaded tiny subtle drawings and notes on many of the pieces themselves, as new additions to old works–sometimes explaining, sometimes adding to the work. Sometimes just doing its own thing. 

 

This I found very charming. Not so much the work itself, but the innovation and intimacy and transparency of it I found surprising. 

 

The other show there was “Triumph”, by Aleksandra Mir. It was like 2500 tropies–shiny cups and figures on polished metal and stone stands–in a big, light room. Some lined up, some stacked, some on pedestals, some in a big pile. It was kind of a short-lived quick hit thing–you pretty much know the whole thing as soon as you hear the setup–but it was fun to photograph nonetheless. There was a pretty dense artist statement, and, yeah, I think it did work in all the transformational-transitory ways the artist intended it to as well. There’s a few pictures of this one in the gallery below…

 

This morning I had a nice stroll around the botanical garden. Not totally my bag, but what the heck. Lots of people like it, and I got time to kill…

 

Man, all this touristing. Ma feets hurt. 

 

I think now I’m going to head over to the part of town where they keep the olde tyme beer halls. Gotta turn in early tonight to get good sleep on account of tomorrow I might get to go to India! Wish me luck.