September 21 – October 19, 2013
Art in General
New York, NY, US
Artists
Helena Almeida, Germaine Kruip, Jochen Lempert, Alexandra Leykauf, and Eva Löfdahl
An Art in General New Commission by Lisa Oppenheim & Lisa Tan
Installation view with Eva Löfdahl, Helena Almeida, and Germaine Kruip
Installation view with Eva Löfdahl, A Nothing to Overcome, 1998,
Styrofoam bocks with hanging stirrups on the far wall, Germaine Kruip, Square Kannadi, 2012
Styrofoam bocks with hanging stirrups on the far wall, Germaine Kruip, Square Kannadi, 2012
Germaine Kruip, Square Kannadi, 2012, Metal handcrafted mirror, wooden base, wax and detail of Eva Löfdahl, A Nothing to Overcome, 1998
Installation view with detail of Eva Löfdahl, A Nothing to Overcome, 1998 and Jochen Lempert, Fire, 2007
Jochen Lempert, Fire, 2007, 7 black and white silver gelatin photographs
Helena Almeida, For an inner enrichment, 1976, 9 black and white photographs with blue acrylic paint
Alexandra Leykauf, Kerman, 2012, 35 mm transferred to video, 2 min loop
When she came looking for B’s grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou, A found nothing. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. “It was not to be found,” she wrote S shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of B’s traveling companions, Frau G had paid out seventy-five pesetas for the rental of a “niche” for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after B died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets.
Yet name or no name, the place was overwhelming.
“The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean,” wrote A. “It is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.”
S was not impressed. Years later he seemed downright dismissive, bringing his book-length memoir of B to an end with these words: “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” It was an abrupt and sour note on which to end the story of a life, as if the dead man and therefore we, too, had been cheated of an ending, and what we had gotten instead was a suspension, a book whose last page was missing.
Michael Taussig: Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Edited and altered by Lisa Oppenheim.
Photo credit:
Steven Probert