Being alone like this brings me to thoughts of solitary life. Spare me please the apparition of Sister Wendy Beckett, nun artist looming. I'm back to nodding my head up and down looking out the window at the distortions in the glass. Actually it is absorbing, as a metaphor at how one looks at a culture from the outside. Patterns appear but are they really there?
Returning to the Hamburger Hof Museum, I enjoyed eating the sweets from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres installations, (until I got a stomach ache), but even more agreeable was being able to carry away the ‘Please take one' sheets of paper as they will be great for messing about drawings. In the Joseph Beuys galleries, the huge blocks of fat, old machinery, felted violin and other autobiographical objects in glass cases sit dumbly without the strutting egoist himself saying how important they are. Warhol undoubtedly was just as big an egoist, ( as probably every artist is, what moi? saying ‘Look at me, look at me'. Outsider mental patients excluded.), but his "Oh I don't know. Gee whiz." stance is much more agreeable and contemporarily relevant. A Damian Hirst glass case of shelved pharmaceuticals is in the collection. Titled ‘Void', I at first thought they must be sleeping capsules, but looking closer I saw there were a lot of haemmaroid suppositories, and the capsules must be laxatives. So the work isn't shit but it produces… Funny.
