Ahhhhh. Germany. I missed you! In high school, I spent a year as an exchange student in a small town called Rheinbach, which was near Bonn. As it happened, 1990, the year I spent there, was the year of unification. It was a great privelege to have a view of Germany at that time through the window of Germany's (then) capitol. For a long time, I got back to Germany to visit friends just about every year.
Time, inertia and plane ticket costs have scaled that back a bit, but I have a great relationsdehip with a gallery in Cologne called Maxim. It's great getting to bring work to Germany and visit friends at the same time. When Claire and I landed in Germany yesterday, we had a luxuriously long breakfast with Robert, one of my best, oldest friends, then headed downtown to the Dom, Cologne's Cathedral. We met Anja, another of the Maxim gallerists at the Dom, where I was mainly anxious to see Gerhard Richter's new stained-glass window.
The Cathedral has always impressed me...how could it not? When I visit a Gothic Cathedral, I love to transport myself back in time and imagine what it must have looked like to a resident of Europe at the time, who probably lived in a flea-filled, smoky, cramped hut with a thatch roof. The soaring ceilings, sculptures and stained glass windows must have been a bazillion times more overwhelming to the senses than they seem today. It also amazes me to think about the craftsmanship involved....that stone masons made the cathedrals with simple materials like a plumb line, square, compass, hammer and chisel.
Have you heard the This American Life episode that talks about the concept of "Modern Jackass"? If you haven't, it springs from a conversation the reporter found himself having with friends about Moorish architecture, a subject all of them knew JUST enough about to pontificate like Architectural Digest critics for about 5 minutes. One of the people having the conversation noted, "Hey, we sound like we write for a magazine!", to which another person replied "Modern Jackass". Frequent readers of this blog will note that Modern Jackass defines my existence...I know a little about a lot of stuff, and I love to streeeeeetch factoids I remember from a book or magazine article into a larger worldview (or weltblick, if you will).
When we finally found ourselves in front of the Gerhard Richter window, my babbling about voussoirs, tracery and flying buttress came to an abrupt halt. The window was awesome, to be certain--it is a mathematically-derived window made of 72 traditional stained glass colors that diffuse themselves into a larger whole, but the thing that floored me was watching the tourists explaining the window to each other, photographing it and enjoying modern art within the context of this, one of Germany's best-loved historical sites. The German attitude toward modern art has always floored me--the level of interest and connoisseurship that the average person on the street has is pretty staggering (don't think I'm letting you off easy, Germans...you have a lot of Eurotrash to answer for).
When I imagined the window, I hadn't thought about the light shining through it. One of the most amazing things about it is the fact that the discrete blocks of color stay largely intact as the sun shines through it. The floor was dotted with pixels of color. I managed to capture a pretty satisfactory picture (at left). The shining light turned the floor in front of the window into a fuzzy, contemplative spiritual disco....it was fun to watch the little mosaic tiles of light shift as the sun moved.
Gerhard Richter is a pretty smart dude. When confronted with the offer to design a window in the Cathedral, he made a bold choice, but one that makes conceptual and aesthetic sense. Regardless of how you feel about religion, you owe it to yourself to experience it...I recommend experiencing it in full Modern Jackass mode.
