Day Five: Lecture by Toni Greenbaum & more exhibitions!

Today we began by attending Toni Greenbaum’s lecture ‘MAG to SNAG: American Studio Jewelry, 1940-1970’ at the Pinakothek. I found the lecture interesting, particularly Greenbaum’s discussion of the role soldiers’ recreational activities played in the dissemination of jewellery making skills in communities that went on to produce studio jewellers.

After the lecture we jumped straight back into the exhibition list. We saw fifteen  shows today. They were The Postcon Project : Contemporary Jewellery teaching re-furbished at Windfall GmbH; Other Delights by Flora Vagi; Union by Jose Bravo and Nelly van Oost; Paper-Plastic-Metal-Stone at Super + Centercourt Gallery; Winner Winner Vertical Dinner; Equilibrium at SAFFEELS; Digitata at Atelier von Gierke-Berr Adansonia; The light side at Kleines Spiel with 84 GHz; Beloved Strangers by Nicole Beck at Atelier Sunkler; Ojala at Café Clara; Hibernate at 84 GHz; Hang; Returning to the JEWEL is a return from exile at Galerie Biro at Munich’s Residenz, Einsaulensaal; Zeichen der Zeit-Time Perception  at Kunsthaus Maximillian; En Transio at Institut Cervante; and finally ANSWERING PRAVU as guest at Hefnerstrasse 11.

The exhibitions I particularly enjoyed today were Union, Winner Winner Vertical Dinner, Beloved Strangers by Nicole Beck, Hibernate and finally ANSWERING PRAVU. Today I had an ‘ahhaah’ travelling moment, it might fade a bit but it will be kept in my mind’s eye like a polaroid, one of the defining moments of my travels. ANSWERING PRAVU was the last show we saw, my feet were aching, I was tired, hungry and I had mucked up the ending times for a show we all wanted to see so we had missed it! I was feeling very over it and down in the dumps… we bumped into Karin on the train out to see the last show on our list. Once we got to our destination train stop we spent another 25 minutes wondering around looking for the street, asking people directions who had no idea where our street was. Eventually we walked up the looming set of stairs that… inevitably, of course, we were going to have to walk up. After what felt like one million stairs and getting sweaty under all our winter layers we topped the mountain. It was beautiful. We were so late it was sunset, there was a church steeple and sweet rows of neat houses with white doors and picket fences (from memory but I may have been delirious). We saw a group of people standing around an unassuming house at the end of one of these sweet streets. ANSWERING PRAVU had all of it’s artists in aprons, ushering in it’s guests to have a sit down in their pop-up café, some coffee or tea and a lovely piece of cake made by David Clarke (swoon). We had Karen Pontoppidan introduce us to the project: several artists and one philosopher (Pravu) had come together to interrogate the assumption that words are more inherently truthful than objects, which are more often viewed as subjective. The project initiated with a question from the philosopher to the artists, who, individually responded with an object for Pravu to interpret. He followed up with several more questions, each eliciting an object-response from the individual artists who did not share their responses with each other so as not to cross contaminate their ideas. After a sit down and some cake, visitors were invited to examine the table of object-responses each numbered to correspond with a question on the café chalk board. The questions themselves related to the object, the idea of a vessel and they eventually pushed the artists to reconsider the edges of how we perceive the world around us. Pravu drew in diverse categories of knowledge; he challenged the artists’ definitions of vessels by asking them to consider quantum particle theory, pushing them beyond their particular material expertise. The whole exhibition came at the right time for me. My honours research in time and quantum particle theory gave me a small window in to the ideas Pravu was offering to the conversation – but the nature of the conversation itself, a challenging discussion which wound between words and objects, pushed me to consider how I read and digest both of these ‘vessels’ of information. 

This show made my brain hurt, and after a long day of exhibitions it marked a sharp change of direction, it asked me to think in a different way. For this reason I was grateful we made it out there. It was my winner for the day – maybe the trip! Looking forward to seeing Pravu’s lecture at the JMGA conference in Sydney in July.