My last visit to the museum of modern art in Vienna. For several weeks it’s been just my impressions scattered in notes and remembered titles of paintings, that I’ve been wanting to put together. If you happen to be in Austria before September, you can still see the exhibition I went to. The Sigmar Polke retrospective where Mary Jo Bang’s poems brought me.
I am hopelessly word-bound. I don’t think I was really conscious of it before going to a yet different exhibit. It was contemporary Korean art. Most of it I completely couldn’t get into. Maybe because I am not an art connoisseuse but a mere museum-goer, but maybe because I wasted a lost of time looking around the rooms for the works’ titles. It’s difficult to see the installations when what your eye desires most is writing. “What do you need the titles for?” asked the friend who was accompanying me. There isn’t any smart answer. Could it be a bit of masochism on my part that even when the artist refuses to put the image into language, I would still want them to throw into my face the eight letters of the word “untitled”?
For a brief moment in childhood I felt I wanted to become a painter. And then it dawned on me that what I like most is book illustrations. I don’t mean to say that ever since that discovery at around the age of seven I’ve been only able to appreciate botanical prints, Audubon, and Tove Jansson’s moomintroll drawings. But I do tend to like artists who seem to be chatting up the eye. Polke’s good at it. His early sketches use recurrent elements, such as objects, characters or short texts. They are like disjunctive anecdotes of the artist’s engagement with people and products.
In his later works, the story changes and Polke nudges you to think what an encyclopedia of art could do in a dressmaker’s workshop. In This Is How You Sit Correctly the superimposed images float on the surface of what looks like a child’s bedroom wallpaper. As if the smiling figure from Goya, balancing a chair on her head, wasn’t bizarre enough.
William Carlos Williams observed that we should not try to explain poems; however, explanation (or attempts at it) helps. As limiting as it may be, my dependence on text made me feel that I can sneak into this crazy dialogue. It was Polke talking to Goya, talking to yet another work of art, unacknowledged in the title (I remembered what it was, but tragically lost it), talking to the silly wallpaper pattern, and lines from Mary Jo Bang’s “This Is How…” interjecting: Anything can become // an object. The smiling girl is not a girl at all. These things are things and enjoy being things.
A finger would point
out a question. So sitzen sie richtig
(nach Goya). The hem of her floor-
length dress raised the tooth
of the surface, each hit of the fabric
made a wickerwork wave
until the motion became an alignment
of doors inside every which was a head
plus a hand, part of a life
The pleasure of ekphrasis is about having your cake and eating it too. Ekphrasis sits in Dr. Williams’s “however.” All that it tells you is that you can walk from one object (the poem) to the other (the work it relates to) along a line of somebody’s insights or non sequiturs. It does not promise understanding.
So after an afternoon at the museum I did not feel like I had a key to Polke’s world, but I was amused and intrigued. What may be given away, may be given away in glimpses. Baron Münchhausen levitates towards the Virgin Mary in Annunciation. Through the transparent background you see how the beams of the frame come together at the center.
The two takes at Dürer’s watercolor Junger Feldhase bring you back to the realm of things. The earlier painting breaks the realist detail of the image to a hasty outline on a white background, which is little more than a stain on a piece of cloth. The later work is perhaps the wittiest and most arrogant among the ones exhibited at MuMok: a plain blue background and on it a bunch of nails connected by a white rubber band. Is it the outline of the hare or a joke about imagination? Because we do want to see Dürer’s hare within the space outlined by the rubber band, it doesn’t take more than the few nails to bolster our efforts. Make your own Dürer, the hungry mind will fill out what was left empty.
Because it’s not about the nail and the rubber band, and because the wit may not be stolen, I didn’t even get a postcard from the museum gift shop. Do I want to make a big statement that memory is fallible and art is great, too great too be compressed, repeated or even recalled? No. I want to say it and make it small. I am remembering this (and inventing as I go) — the exhibition, the splinters of afterthought. Also the last day of February, when in a library copy room I was reading Bang’s poems to a friend. The whirr of the photocopier. The snow.
The snow is gone now. And I have my own copy of The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (signed, which makes me guard it jealously). Because, in some way or other, we are tempted to possess. Well, I am.
