gerhard richter

Art - visual art - is a tricky thing. Particularly modern art. My experience of viewing a lot of modern/abstract/post-modern/post-post-modern/post-abstraction/abstraction-modern-post -art is to feel like it's twee, or scrabbling to be clever - I almost never feel as though it resonates with me emotionally - it will twang a little on my intellectual sensibilities, or, if it's particularly grotesque or violent, it'll impact viscerally. However, by and large, emotion = no movement there.



Today, that wasn't the case. I went to the Gerhard Richter (1932-still alive) exhibition. It spun my head and heart and stomach and wibbly bits upside down and all around. It was to all other contemporaneous art I've seen lately what e e cummings (or, if you don't like e e cummings, insert personally appreciated poet here) is to the emo wrist-slitty poems a 14-year-old girl writes in the back of her exercise manual during study period because Chad McDreambot, the studly outsider she secretly yearns for, doesn't like her and her parents just don't understand her.


By the end of the exhibition, I was jubilant, sad, visually overloaded, and a little headachey from the entire experience. It was a total thrill; a happy-making kick in the head. If you ever get the chance to check out his work at all, I urge you to. Here is a link to his website, but it correlates to the experience of the exhibition the same way that rubbing the underbelly of a carp matches up to rubbing a woman's clitoris: it just isn't the same (so I'm told).

http://www.gerhard-richter.com

Yay! It was a big-thought day, then. Later, as I read the guardian, I found this R A W quote, and it too made me rather happy:

"Cynics regard everybody as equally corrupt; idealists regard everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves."

Go Thursday! High score for you!