Some art exhibitions inspire you, some make you really jealous that you didn't have the idea first, and some are just really rubbish, and then, I discovered this week, there are some that scare you to the point of wanting to get the hell out of the room. A darkened room, with possible trip hazards, like your long dress, and bits of gravel, yep, art can be scary so it seems...
Yesterday, after too many days indoors, I took myself to Glasgow for an afternoon of art. One of the galleries I visited was the CCA Glasgow, It has that amazing art studio smell inside, I don't know what it is exactly, but it made me feel like I was back at art class in college and it made me feel really excited to see what was in the exhibition. I've never gone from excited to disturbed in such a short time before; I was there to see the British Art Show exhibition, but as I wandered up to the first floor I found a door with a bit of a makeshift entrance sign on, next to it were some information sheets describing the exhibit behind it, It was called Entartet, and was described as a reflection of the exhibition of degenerate art which took place in Munich in 1937 (click here fro more info). I got even more excited because I'd heard of the exhibition but never really looked into it in any depth, basically government officials had raided works of modern art at public collections across Germany , an exhibition of these works was arranged with the intent of ridiculing the art and the artists, branding them "degenerate" My love of history and art meant that I was getting stupidly excited at this point about what was behind the door and didn't even bother to read on....big mistake.....
I opened the door into a really dark room, thats always bad for me because i get disorientated really easily in the dark and get convinced i'll trip over, it was also a bit weird going in alone because you've no one to turn to to say "this is a bit weird isn't it" and it was, well, a lot weird.
In the darkened room were 3 other people who I guessed were all visitors like me, and there were lots of boxes on plinths at head height, i could hear recordings of someone talking but no idea where they were coming from, someone was sat on a group of chairs in the corner so i thought i'd sit there too, and sit back to see if i could make more sense of the installation that way....as i got closer to the chairs it turned out the woman sat on one was speaking out loud whilst looking down, which was really creepy and it took me a while to figure out if it was someone really into the art or someone who was meant to be there as part of the art, either way, i decided not to sit next to them...it was then that i decided i should read what the exhibition was...a space to listen to the text of the guide book for the 1937 exhibition of degenerate art....so the crazy woman was part of the exhibit,,,and it turns out each plinth had a button to press to hear audio recordings...i pressed a few but couldn't hear because of the crazy reciting woman in the corner, i persisted, hoping for some kind of epiphany moment where i would really understand what was going on...i even stayed in the room when the other 2 people left...just me and the crazy woman...as I sat behind what can only be described as a shower curtain, with some rather nice theatre style lighting shining down on me, thinking, if anyone knew where i was right now they'd think i was such a pretentious loser, so, i'd like to clarify that even though i was sat in some mental art installation on my day off, i spent most of the time reading the leaflet that went along with it, wishing i could just see some of this degenerate art and not have to sit listening to a woman reciting something id rather have read myself on the train home, i only spent one year at art college, but one was enough to introduce me to the world of art students dressing up installations or abstract paintings with justifications that used so many long (and i'm convinced made up) words that no one but themselves had any idea what they were talking about in their crits, and it seems like those art students then went onto produce work for galleries...
The shame about entartet, i thought, was that the subject of the exhibition is so fascinating(well, for art geeks like me anyway), and i think the audio aspect should have worked, if the reciting woman was made redundant and there was something visual because it made me really frustrated that i couldn't see any of the art.... on the plus side, the frustration i felt meant that i came home and did loads of reading on the degenerate art exhibition, which made me happy because i love learning new stuff about art that i can bore people with...
Incase, by some miracle, this post has made you wonder what degenerate art was on show at the 1937 exhibition here are some examples....
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