Daniel Birnbaum: “Who is me today?”
FORART LECTURE 2004
Part 1 of the FORART Lecture 2004 was given by Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt am Main.
Much art from other centuries – Baroque allegories or religious motifs from the Renaissance, say – emands a tremendous amount of knowledge to be fully appreciated; why should today’s art be any different? Canadian artist Stan Douglas’s most complex installations can certainly be appreciated on a straightforward level, but for the viewer who is willing to delve deeper, the pieces take on much more significance. Douglas is no obscurantist: his writings are crystal clear, and so is his work. At times it is just so multilayered that the ideal viewer – one who comprehends all the parameters involved as well as the artist himself – hardly exists. Is that a problem? Take the video installation Der Sandmann, 1995, an elaborate meditation on the mechanisms of recollection and temporal awareness, and, I think, the most sophisticated work of contemporary art I have come across in recent years. A poetic, visually perplexing attempt to come to grips with the German situation a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the piece can be viewed and enjoyed simply as a dreamlike scenario about the childhood memories of three people from the small, formerly East German city of Potsdam. But to really appreciate the installation requires a familiarity with numerous sources: the German Romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann’s story “Der Sandmann”; Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” and its theory of repetition; certain aspects of German city planning, particularly the Schrebergärten, small plots of land that the poor could lease from the city to grow their own vegetables. These gardens were named after nineteenth-century educator Moritz Schreber, whose son Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness would play a crucial role in the development of Freud’s theory of paranoia. All this is relevant to Douglas’s installation, even if it’s not ultimately what the work is “about.”
Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery, both in Frankfurt am Main. He is also a member of the board of Frankfurt’s Institut für Sozialforschung. For three years (1998-2000), he was Director of IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden). In the 1980s and early ’90s he was primarily involved in academic philosophy and worked as a translator and commentator of books by, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Birnbaum also wrote a dissertation on phenomenology, “The Hospitality of Presence” (1997). He has been an associate curator of Magasin 3 in Stockholm since 2004. A contributing editor of the New York-based magazine Artforum, Birnbaum has published extensively on art and philosophy, in both a journalistic and an academic context. He has organized some fifty exhibitions and was co-curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale and the first Moscow Biennial that opened January 2005. His most recent book, Chronology, was published by Lukas & Sternberg in 2005.
Forart Lecture 2004, press release
Daniel Birnbaum: Other Spaces (The White Cube and Beyond)
Part 2 of the FORART Lecture 2004 was given by Daniel Birnbaum, Director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt am Main.
This is the story about a small white cube, a simple container, constructed behind an old facade in Frankfurt am Main. The facade is the Portikus of the old City Library that was bombed in World War II. The story starts with an empty box …
Daniel Birnbaum is the Director of the Städelschule Art Academy and its Portikus Gallery, both in Frankfurt am Main. He is also a member of the board of Frankfurt’s Institut für Sozialforschung. For three years (1998-2000), he was Director of IASPIS (International Artists’ Studio Program in Sweden). In the 1980s and early ’90s he was primarily involved in academic philosophy and worked as a translator and commentator of books by, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger. Birnbaum also wrote a dissertation on phenomenology, “The Hospitality of Presence” (1997). He has been an associate curator of Magasin 3 in Stockholm since 2004. A contributing editor of the New York-based magazine Artforum, Birnbaum has published extensively on art and philosophy, in both a journalistic and an academic context. He has organized some fifty exhibitions and was co-curator of the 2003 Venice Biennale and the first Moscow Biennial that opened January 2005. His most recent book, Chronology, was published by Lukas & Sternberg in 2005