Backbone > Lucid Dreaming

Building Better Bridges
By Beth Elaine Wilson . Photo by Nancy Donskoj

The concept of the potluck is foreign in Germany. Members of the Arts Society of Kingston discovered this in May of 2002 when they hosted a group of German artists from the Kunstlerinnenverbund Erftkreis/Köln (kek), a group of professional women artists based in Cologne, for two exhibitions here in Kingston, at the ask and Coffey Galleries. Five or six kek members made the trip to be here with their work for the opening, and their local hosts threw a potluck dinner to welcome them. The women were amazed at the concept of having everybody bring a little something in order to create a communal dinner—there’s not even a word for it in German—but they loved the concept, and returned home vowing to use the idea themselves.

Hopefully they’ve created a bit of context for the idea by now. This month, three separate exhibitions will be opening in Cologne and its suburbs, featuring 123 works by 28 ask member-artists. The work ranges so much in medium, subject matter, and meaning that it seemed sheer folly to invent an overarching theme to embrace all of it; as a result, the powers that be at ask are calling it “American Potluck,” and have left it up to their German hosts to figure out how to translate it for the art audience there. Who knows, maybe it will be the start of a new German fad!

It’s been interesting for me as an art historian and critic to immerse myself in the local art scene here over the years. As a discipline, art history likes to identify specific period styles, building a narrative by watching particular forms emerge and develop, making links between the cultural context of the art object and the way it looks. This approach has become outdated now, in the globalized, “anything goes” atmosphere of the 21st century. Form has become ephemeral, lighting down here and there, but resisting any effort to bring it to ground. As Marx once put it, “all that is solid melts into air,” especially stylistically now.

Out of this new condition of culture—it is no longer possible to construct an aesthetic stereotype of a particular place or period—arises a new set of possibilities. The importance of the Rhine-Kingston exchange set up by ask and kek lies not in some world-shaking aesthetic influence carried from one side of the Atlantic to the other, but in its people-to-people content, the complex of relationships and cross-cultural understanding that it builds. From the first half of the exchange, a number of the Germans have already become acquainted with artists in this area, and several have since set up regular correspondence amongst themselves, outside the direct purview of their respective organizations. The 10 or 12 local artists traveling to Germany to complete the circle will no doubt make their own new friends, especially as they’ll be staying in the homes of various kek members—it’s impossible to find hotel rooms in Cologne due to the crowds gathering for international Art Cologne art fair, scheduled to take place at the same time.

The absence of any primary, identifiable contemporary art movement is a condition that has come to plague the international commercial artworld. Without a convincing, unified aesthetic creed, critical judgment is reduced to an endless series of cross-references abetting the rise of the curator as the seer of larger, often overextended thematics. The end art experience for the casual observer often winds up feeling alienating and incomprehensible.

By contrast, the heterogeneous approaches employed by the artists in the Rhine-Hudson exchange can be seen as a positive example of globalization, one in which the participants encounter each other as equals, building bridges between people that create greater understanding, and that oddly enough wind up emphasizing the power of place for the respective artists involved. The ask contingent is made up of artists who are fundamentally grounded in our area—sure, some of them might wish they could “make it” on the New York scene, but I think all of them easily recognize the advantages of the supportive community up here, which eschews the vainglorious one-upsmanship that so often characterizes the closed circle of the commercial artworld. Living and working here, getting to know other local artists, and working together to create fantastic international opportunities such as this—on their own!—opens up a whole new realm of possibilities, a different model for creating a satisfying life as an artist, one that doesn’t place New York City at the absolute center of the universe.

In return, these exchanges open up the chance for the communities involved to transcend the artificial limitations often erected by institutions and governments. Since the time of the German exhibitions in Kingston last spring, there’s developed a huge rift between Berlin and Washington over the preemptive war declared by President Bush. In light of worries expressed by some of the participants, ask president Vindora Wixom inquired with the German hosts about how much of a problem anti-American sentiments might be during their visit. “If we don’t mend what the politicians have damaged,” came the reply, “then what are we doing? Isn’t that the job of artists in the first place?”

I couldn’t have put it better myself. I’m sure that the response of the German audience will be warm and appreciative, embracing the ask artists as the inquisitive, imaginative individuals that they are. This cultural exchange is a process that enriches both sides—a resurrection of the practice of the potlatch, the ritual exchange of elaborate gifts that signals the esteem that two different tribes hold for each another. And ironically enough, it’s theorized that our modern term “potluck” is a linguistic derivative of the “potlatch.”

...

I recognize that by writing about the ask exhibitions in Germany, I’m recommending exhibitions that virtually no one in the Chronogram readership will be able to attend. As fate would have it, opening this month at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is a traveling exhibition of prints, drawings, and sculptures by the early 20th-century artist Käthe Köllwitz, first organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Her work is highly emotional and dramatic, often expressing her deeply held pacifist objections to the barbarity of war and social injustice. Many of the drawings, loaned primarily by the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, have never before been seen in the United States, making it an oddly appropriate substitute for those who can’t make it to the ask openings in Cologne.

AMERICAN POTLUCK. Opening October 17 at the Abtei Brauweiler, Pulheim, October 19 at the Bürgerhaus Stollwerk/Galerie im Turm, Cologne, and October 26 at the Kulturzentrum Löhrerhof, Hürth, Germany, through mid-November. For more information on the Arts Society of Kingston, call (845) 338-0331 or go to www.askforarts.org.

KATHE KOLLWITZ: The Art of Compassion. Open October 3 through December 14 at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, 124 Raymond Avenue, Poughkeepsie. (845) 437-5237 or www.fllac.vassar.edu.