Tag: Hamburger Kunsthalle

This must be one of the museum’s most optimistic projects, an artwork which will only be finished in five hundred years. The set-up, which is in its own room at the gallery, involves collecting rain water from a roof gutter which then goes through carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate before dripping onto a marble plate.

The artwork was installed in 1996, so we’re already 23 years into the project, and the aim is to get the stalagmite to be five centimetres in height. The underlying context is to get visitors to think how much will happen over five hundred years, whilst very little is happening to this artwork.

It’s rocketing along…..

I meandered around the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the city’s main art gallery, and wondered why nearly every single painting had glass in front of it. The gallery has had a brilliant idea in having a series of rooms explaining the scope of their collection and also answering why they have some of the policies that they do.

And, to my surprise, they actually answered the question about why they have glass in front of paintings, so I imagine it’s been asked many times before. The answer is quite simple, they have been putting it there for decades as the smoke from the neighbouring train lines was causing a build up of soot and grime on their paintings from the steam engines.

They do explain that from the 1970s they’ve made efforts to ensure that the glass is anti-reflective, colourless and offers protection from ultraviolet radiation. I’m not sure that they’ve got the anti-reflective glass quite perfect yet, but I’m just pleased that there’s a reason for doing it.

But care has to be taken with glass, as the photo at the top of this post is of the glass which was in front of this painting. It seems that the glass was put on too soon in this case, but it’s still amazing how much of the image transferred to the surface of the glass.

I think I like this, even though I have no clue what it is actually meant to be other than a large number of flints in a defined heap. The artist is though of international acclaim and there’s an interesting summary of his work on Wikipedia which reads:

“Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over. In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.”

I like the idea of giving meaning to walking and its impact on the natural environment, so the underlying thought behind his works sounds intriguing.

The only slight limitation I have with this is that I don’t have a bloody clue what this artwork is trying to tell me. Insomuch that I carefully stood there and searched for the artwork on-line it worked as I wanted to find out more, but I’m just a little disappointed that I can’t get any real meaning from this. I could add my own meaning, but I could do that to anything and it’d likely just involve me imagining it’s a road to Greggs which the walker cannot stray off of.

The artist is still alive and, to my knowledge, exhibiting and creating artworks and I did think of going as far as contacting him and asking him about the work. But I couldn’t find any contact details and so I didn’t. Which is probably for the best, as I have no idea what I’m talking about at the best of times.

Since my expedition to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia I’ve been intrigued by Rodin’s works, especially given how there are strict rules on how many copies can be made of each work. This sculpture is one of the individuals which formed the Burghers of Calais, aiming to capture a young man walking into what he thought would be certain death.

There are different versions of this sculpture, one where the model is clothed and the other, like with this one, unclothed. There are other versions of the one at this museum at the Rodin Museum in France and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York.