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Dear God is not looking just? Theodizée – never mind? About the gradual dissolution of the fear of God through modern art.

Museum Brandhorst, Neue Pinakothek der Moderne and the Haus der Kunst in the long night of the museums in munich.

An empty space, this is something it is not, the Museum Brandhorst. Far more a kind of spaceship in the style of Kubrick - the interior as a reflection of the vastness of outer space. But here in Munich this is what? Geographical distance, intellectual openness - both is hardly so appalling that it would have to be reflected in a huge hall.

The promise of art that will settle in these halls next to the mathematicians at the Ludwig-Maximilian University and the Pinakothek der Moderne? Perhaps ...

The collection's focus on classical and modern art after 45, including quasi corpulent and well-heeled works like the ones by Andy Warhol (standard), Cy Twombly (Original), Sigmar Polke (Yes!) And Damien Hirst (The white shark – Greee-at!) can especially create the suspicion that these spaces of Sauerbruch Hutton Architects should not start sometime to smell like sparkling wine, let alone undrunken and old sparkling wine ....

Even with higher visitor volume, the air in this hall like a ship's stomach can climb far upward to loose itself in the stairs rods and the electronic air conditioning, such that images, even if hanging on the walls unprotected and unclothed, can radiate and feel welfare. The Henkel-nephew's Udo Brandhorst's heritage, who gives his titanic collection of drawings, drowning and numbers to be available to the public in this way, can find himself mirrowed in this beautiful and intelligent use of architecture. On the lower hall is a slightly branched corridor with several rooms, mostly uncomplicated and near - not, as in the adjoining building, separated through long hallways or stairways of a massive entrance hall. Thus, a collection whose treasures almost overflow - even if not even present in real. Inviting, in inconspicuous manner extremely open, as if you had lifted the presentation rooms of the Thyssen-Bornemiza collection at the Lake Lugano from their Italian villa, brightened the wood, the premises minimally stretched, then set into the middle of the Munich city scene. Bumm. Enlarged privacy for all. Well then, thanks. Slainte!

We goose-feet walk without fluctuations to the Neue Pinakothek der Moderne. It's the long night of the museums, we have a press card, shoes well above the 1.70 - border and a felonious well equipped camera around us.There is therefore no reason to be afraid of the complexity of the narrow entrance doors of overcrowding in cafes or the revolving door entrance. Even crushed or falsly stepping we will pass the scattered, always suddenly dodging from the unexpected wardeners, - authorized - and after another rocky path reach the artworks to which all this is dedicated. The Neue Pinakothek der Moderne is perhaps thought to be a reminder of the Louvre where visitors receive somehow a certain apathy, because there are finally far too many of them and they'll cope with anything anyway, if only if in the Louvre it is just easier to find something – at least a beautiful queue. Then, the rest will clear itself by itself - just ask some of the other tourists something like * il faut qu'on ait quel ticket ici?* In the Neue Pinakothek der Moderne this is a little different. You will find yourself under a dome, reminiscent of Michelangelo's recent Court Scenery in Rome, because the love of God then looks with his magical sight indeed directly on the visitor's heads, more exact, on the visitor's crest. (As a beside: Forthcoming article: Were They All Saints? The Literary Avant-Guard tradition of Russia) We mustn't cover anything there, two or three stairs under this eye, you know, don't you.

But how would you know without having asked at least one stupidly whether these films are specific, ticket relevant information or general advertising for the New Pinakothek, flowing around in the basement like artificially refreshed air?

You'll feel how innocent it was, the classical system of direct, visible observation, as it was last staged as a monumental room-installation by Magdalena Jetelová in the art temple H2 in Augsburg: a huge camera as instrument of simple observation in the exhibition hall, taking up pictures most innocently yet supported by mirrors and motion observers, just transforming the visitors in nearly completly scanned visited - who thus without knowing were in a way exhibited instead of visiting something. The observation results could then be watched and considered - like real observers perhaps would do - in a separate exhibition space on a large video screen. This was really beautiful – and for more information you'll find an article about this exhibition here, an interview with Magdalena Jetelova here – and a video of a succeeding event in the exhibition here. Obviously, it was a kind of „looking at“ far more visible than the deconstruction of the visitor by an aesthetics of wardeners and services that jumps into the visitors with an „We are the art“ gesture and let the visitors thus hide away, in a way.

The problem, for example, if you are send to the gifts with a pointer to the diagonally opposite wall, this will be referring to a whole cluster of tables next to each other, such that you'll find there exactly at least two funds - counter services? - because the walls in the entrance hall, under the gaze of God, are formed like his eye's pupil would be if he had human stature. The / The service colleague therefore can not express him/herself more exactly but has to adapt the sanctity of the temple and is just only allowed to type just slightly significant, silently, to let the visitor recognize the right direction. It is as in Maths in Bavarian secondary schools: The enlighted one will understand. And of course, the enlightenment does not come from the mundane service area - the bavarian dislike this as excessive effort - but always from God. From the cellars, the abysses of the service area, we therefore will not speak. The toilets present in chrome, what you should not touch with the little finger: sinks without a clipboard. Well yes – let's throw the purse or whatever we have with us, simply on the dingy floor. A hygiene area, which invites to remember books such as "We Children from Bahnhof Zoo" - who is already kicked, will be inspired to pull one more track on the handbag mirror .... while in the Louvre easy questions create nice conversations with experienced tourists, the New Pinakothek der Moderne seems usually not to be overcrowded, so the service forces underchallenged and full of energy they apparently use to discipline the already desperated visitors. The cloakroom attendant therefore a far too venturous dragon, with the result that in the coming hours we will feel terror and fear, that our bag and jacket will be dislodged out of their unsealed lockers and be given to a general storage service at the end of the city, for example, to a municipal office in Pasing (the far west of munich) with regular opening times....

Nevertheless. The ticket opens the door to the hundred steps on the palace staircase, which leads us to the collection field. On the walls along a narrow floor behind the balcony and in pretty small rooms around the two – seemingly three floored prayer hose of the hall (as a thought sparkled metaphor: the womb of God) works of contemporary art, classical modernism and modern art after 45. Nothing surprising, then, would however be hastily and unjust ! The presented pieces are not even bad, although some are just that, but in interesting ways. Do they show a kind of Munich-style?

The long night offers the last opportunity to see some special pieces "Female Trouble", contemporary works by female artists, from collections of likewise female collectors like for example Ingvild Goetz, who is currently almost more popular than the artists she collects. Besides reports in the journal „Elle“ about her collection in general, she has just an exhibition at the Edith Russ House for Media in the far north of Germany's contemporary art spread, that is completely provided with her possessions. LINK

Some Shermans, known from dozens of familiar images, can be compared thus with the real raw - and at this archetypes Sherman shows, how she is a deconstructivist and not a creator of illustrations often seeming to be loyal or just reproductive in respect to old masters. Her Maria's high forehead has scars and skin imperfections in the thick stratified Make Up, which are not even acceptable on a theater stage but declined at most a few hours after a plastic surgery.

On the other hand she comes close enough to the historical model to be able to document how arises a standard with the mixture of visual representation, ideological (self-)assuring and ornament, that can just state to be visually realistic, but of course measured in daily life, stay completely unattainable. Cindy Sherman stands next to Valie Export for the targeted sexual provocation - the exhibition documents Export's performances of the 60s, for instance the Tapp and Tastkino (1968), with its showing of the tangibility of naked breasts - not against the theoreticity in the dialectic of enlightenment but staged as parallel experience – this, *experience* now a term almost frowned upon, again connected with the effort of a seemingly obsolete left wing orientation, because although we can not deny Auschwitz, we like to be again just quickly blinded like our parents and grandparents between 1933 and 1945. To say, regardless of any political party the orientation of the 60s and 70s (the "68ers", at least approximate their intellectuals) on experience was very well founded in the fact that historical blindness as a conscious instrument has become undeniable, against even magazines like Ökotest or ARTS_On. are helpless :)). But back to exhibition - next to Export's „Tastkino“ and presented almost like a delicacy by the just-mentioned problem in the very latest contemporary art by women - Export's "Action Pants genital panic" of 1969 is shown, a photograph of the artist, a machine gun and her vagina. The item on loan from the Lenbachhaus fits well with the title "Female Trouble", suggesting everything to be attractive as teasingly. The large-size photograph at least raises the question, under which perspective it is staged in the exhibition - media exaggerated terrorism as a product of visual synekdochs, 1969 as the successor of the South American RAF models, suddenly standing on the stage "Tupamaros West Berlin", as a wild actionism using the possibilities of visual and symbolic representation, in this suggestion as a typical increase of chauvinism in politics, overemphasizing the genital to a symbol, preferably equal it to a weapon?

Even in the context of "Female Trouble" this piece designates the issue more clearly than the Tastkino (compare with „Tastkino“ the interesting work of Stephanie Trojan, with similar fisticuffs, without exaggeration on interpersonal relations and hetero-sexuality), the theme that Daniela Rossell with her photographs of Mexican Upper Class Girls designs so well that we now know what standard we currently subject: The genital has to be explicitly feminine in its gesture, spreading, scrubbing semantical fields like a Kantianism, mainly covered and supported by foreign, mostly paternal nets.

The allegedly on television soups oriented girls look on these photographs like from glossy magazines or from Hollywood films, such rich of incredible pomp to distance the meager endowments of series sigificantly and to show the association with lower genre to be only the suggestion of a pseudo-critical interpretation. The placement of beautiful daughters, nearly achieving the ideal of their class through genetic selection of mothers over several decades and perhaps cosmetic help is sometimes implicitly indecent or gently alludes to topoi such as the femme fatale - when a white-clothed fur princess is posing between hunting groomed victims of her father as a mixture of animal and decorative authoritarian not caring about the suffering creature - or two girlfriends in a frivolous rosa room indulging themselves with chess games. The surface's conviction rate is just such weighted that self-animalization, prostitution correspond to the degree of wage and the product aesthetics. This world is "okay", so in no way "out of fugue" (groove, joint, splice....), but with visible Dux and Comes, and the misery begins with distortion or even at the alternatives that are probably missing or are miserable. That was indeed a problem in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach - in comparison to the example of Carl Philipp Emanuel. It could be poety jammed, „a fixed grid is our ...“ and it is quite different than what we may feel in the uterus of God, and what these real Mexican luxury women with a real feeling of ornaments, almost oriental, in the groove of scrubbing the world,. the ...Orient... the eye of the Orient ... ...

Thus the end of the "Female Trouble". We scuffle on eight centimeters to the art after 1945 section. And are torn from sleep by De Kooning, who after his wild years apologizes for his „Excavations“ its viewers with multicoloured kitsch in large formats (XLII Untitled, 1983) for his "Excavations" . After all, the other sex, so the men, are always in the lead, thus too in adaptation and affirmation even of previously fought attitudes. Beside the De Koonings, Warhol seems to try a reminder on NS military times for the quite unsimilar Joseph Beuys. But Beuys is in the Neue Pinakothek particularly interesting and not Nazi-like, as „the whole of Austria [and South Germany]“ (Th. Bernhard & U.R.].

The thinking of Beuys, who was in his youth probably quite geared to nature mysticism, found its turning point perhaps even by a reasonable evoked repulsion, triggered by the deformation of the war widows and women whose experience of total misery, strength and independence of experience, were in the post-war century squeezed in waist lengths of 58 cm and swopt up under Make Up carpets in order to leave this level of experience and historical facticity to the returning antiheroes.

Consider that even Rainer Werner Fassbinder's films about this period stage the glamorous and esoteric - super model charism of Hanna Schygulla – and are quite unlike Helma Sanders-Brahm's „Deutschland, bleiche Mutter“, the only sensible movie about this time but as feminist nearly ostracized and by relevant commissions for the distribution of film and cultural history not recommended, nor judged as "classics" of the film after 45 because its "feminist" perspective is not distanced and Eva Mattes in the film sometimes just looks honky. Other art-works by Beuys (from the collection Klüser) as „Jason II“ from 1962 / 1980, and „Hirsch“ 1959 (cast iron in 1984) reduce the deer to a metallic board, not too dissimilar to an ironing board, on wooden floors (!) show again "domestication" in any material adjustment, laying it out, shouting.

Beuys was just not only hares Mammy and the silent hero of the German literary modernism (Schmidt etc. you know ...) but FEMINIST. The collection Klüser has, perhaps unconsciously, collected under this wonderful perspective - even though Beuys is really everywhere, where German art of the 20th century is, the two corner rooms in the Neue Pinakothek der Moderne, show especially this real aspect in his work, that was perhaps an initial conception of the total.(The table as a connecting because universal piece of furniture, combined with cakes in its literal sense, in the work of Beuys, is to be seen from 27^th of Novembre (Opening) in Augsburg at the Neue Galerie Höhmannhaus, when the collection Greisinger owner of the traditional, today vintage coffee house Drexl, equippes an exhibition there.

Yes, and then there was still in the museum - an empty second-third floor, the bottom edge of the eyelid, relatively dry. In addition, two or three outstanding issues in the permanent collection: A Baselitz room with accumulations of effort for unraving depictions of military or quasi-military force ( A kind of "secondary violence"? :)), in which a picture with a kind of swastika gets the entire attention – quite like other, forbidden toys. Whereas, Export's „Aktionshose“ unlike Baselitz does not trigger talking hot adn theory burning, but only muffled watching and inconspicuous creeps. And finally, a cabinet with naked, classical modernism à la Kirchner, the painter Heinrich Maria Darringhausen (1894 - 1970) who was born in Aachen, but allowed to die in the noble Nice because he produced for his whole life pleasurable back and front views of female nudes in a pretty mixture of Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionism. This is on display at least in the Neue Pinakothek der Moderne, which so popular imagines what their collectors, who also belong to their audience, have to offer. Overall, then the figurative and interpretability still dominates, and let you feel definitely not to be in Berlin.

from 1992 to 1994, documents photographically attacks on refugee homes in Bielefeld, Thale and Solingen, and the disputes about them, as far as photographically possible. Actually, the work shows better, how photographs of such events can not state anything really clear. All focusing on persons but without crowd, unspectacular and showing just individuals, but without the events to locate them - whether victims or perpetrators. Thus, the images lead mainly on their own schedules, as we implement visual information into categories: such are the perpetrators like in this case, and these, the victims, and so on.... Well, euh, surprise, surprise? Or are we going with the artist in the Adorno problem of despair about the non-communicability ? Or refer from the art to the controll of the regulatory authorities, as important, far more difficult problem concerning everybody, while the art appeals only weakly?

Your author now: Inwardly not agitated, but more affected by foot pain, the car far away at the station balancing to the Haus der Kunst. In recent times this has – jepeeh - after decades of acquired collection presentations become a clandestine anti-temple, although - how it belongs for a Bavarian art institution - almost everything revolves around religion, but through the intervention of soft and aberrant or just the artists this rotation is such, that the issue for other believers or infidels (non-Catholic and anti-Catholic or Protestant) is interesting. The traces of the sanctity or "Traces du Sacre" by the Haus der Kunst in conjunction with the Center Pompidou (Paris, as a touring exhibition) geared into the tradition of individual concepts of religion in the arts, continues some works of munich's Gilbert & George exhibition, although this time we miss the warning at the entrance the G&G exhibition wore like a Federal Order of Merit for freedom in art, thought and science. In der Mitte der großen Ausstellungshalle ein turmähnliches Gebilde, an eine Weihrauchschleuder erinnernd, nur wegen der Überdimensionierung noch grotesker, quasi Symbol für die „Empfindung“, die die Individualisierung des Religiösen mit sich bringt – die Bedeutung fällt, sobald der Kollektivzwang fällt, das individualisierte Symbol ist einfach ein mit persönlichen Bedeutungen aufgeladener Gegenstand. In the middle of the large exhibition hall a tower-like structure, remembering an incense catapult, just because of the excessive size even far more grotesque, a quasi-icon for the "sensation" that the individualization of religion implies - when the collective compulsion stops, the individualized symbol is simply an object charged by personal meanings. At its best, it dissolves into live near ethical behavior and disseminated, as a beacon, more guidance than slingshot effects.

The three quarters in the exhibition that limited us to a superficial glance, which also fixed on the still known and popular, so simply shifted into high spirits. Not only the 60% of the Bavarian Black heads are history, but also Catholicism and strict credulity become unacceptable and increasingly incompatible with the "elite" (Brandhorst leb!) of contemporary art. The House of Art, recently really multiperspectival, leads above the Bavarian horizon.

Well, then – just to let people know who think the author is too small, too tousled or to poorly dressed - I have quickly been asked - maybe because of the 8 cm Stilettos without plateau (never again), if I like to come into the P1, which is so wonderfully pseudo New Yorkian under the house of art and still open by 2 clock at night a.s.o.

So as genuine info: the PS1 to which the P1 alludes somehow belongs to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is located there as center for contemporary art.