Arts
A real work of art
by Philip Temple
In which the author – currently the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writer in Residence – considers the quality of masterpieces.
Hundreds jostled against one another in the freezing night air as they crowded between the pillars and up the curving steps to squeeze through the half-opened doors of the baroque portal. Inside, hundreds more jammed the marbled foyer, busting for a pee or gagging for a drink but determined to be first up the stairs to the galleries.
There were droning speeches from unseen people, hidden by the crowd of shining bald pates and tatty black hats. Everyone was dressed in black as if anticipating a wake. But it was the opening of the Third Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art, hyped up at an equally droning press conference that oozed that peerless German combination of high seriousness and trendy self-satisfaction. You know, the director wore a collar and tie, but the top button was unfastened and the tie knot was loose and pulled down about 20 millimetres. Fifteen years ago, such people went around in jackets too large for them, with the sleeves rolled back.
Maybe it was a wake, after all. For the end of art. I yawned my way around the rooms whose ceilings were somehow more exciting than the exhibits. This was sociology masquerading as art, with video as vision and sundry electronics standing in for excitement. There were so many explanatory words on the walls that maybe – I slapped the side of my head, of course, Dummkopf! – the documentation was the art. No one else seemed any more stimulated or amused than I. They were there, after all, to be seen to be first, in outfits sometimes better than the stuff on the walls.
But maybe I had missed the whole point. Maybe somewhere in there were the first stirrings of tumescent genius, the first scrawls (or flickering images) of a masterpiece. And I had missed it, I had missed it! And was my idea of a masterpiece too narrow or clapped out or even, my God, bourgeois?
Later, I mulled over a list of five works I had seen or heard over the past few months that did seem to me, well, masterpieces. So was I right or was I right?
MASTERPIECE ONE
You will have missed at least 10 percent of your experience of Berlin if you don’t go and hear the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra playing at the Philharmonie. Barenboim’s anniversary concert was sold out. It was difficult to get into a Simon Rattle event. But I managed to book a good ticket for a concert under the baton of that old war horse Bernard Haitink.
Or rather he was riding the old war horses of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto Op 64 and Dvorak’s Seventh Symphony. The people with unfastened collars and loose-knotted ties call this museum music. But I hadn’t heard a decent performance of the Dvorak, and the Martinu Double Concerto for strings, piano and timpani was new to me. The Martinu turned out to be good, marvellously resonant of the Munich Crisis times in which it was composed; and the BPO managed to make the second half of the Brahms-boring Dvorak memorable. Nothing they play could ever sound bad.
But how many times had I heard the Mendelssohn? The first time as a spotty sixth-former when Campoli rendered it at the Royal Albert Hall with the LSO (yes, I know, that’s nearly half a century ago). Yehudi Menuhin with the Philharmonia. Numerous versions on vinyl and metal. Ho hum, I thought, as Frank Peter Zimmermann walked to the podium, looking far too crisp and efficient. What followed was a performance of such technical magnificence, such exhilarating energy that, from the “museum” of composition, a musical masterpiece was lifted from the prosaic of the familiar into the full flight of renewal. Germans don’t have so much difficulty using the word as we do – Freude. I was filled with joy. Nothing less.
MASTERPIECE TWO
It was raining in Rome and I was feeling crook and lonely and not sure how I would lift myself to perform a new text with images at the Teatro Belli in Trastavere alongside English writer Philip Hensher and a dramatised performance of a short story by Antonio Pascale. Fresh air and exercise maybe. So I went with my umbrella to the park Villa Borghese, and found a way through the puddles along the Viale Pietro Canonica, the Viale delle Magnolie, the Viale dei Cavalli Marini. The names themselves were a balm.
The villa galleria was baroquely ostentatious and many of the artworks just clutter-glitter. But there were Caravaggios, Canova and the odd Raphael. And then there were the Berninis.
The figure of David about to let fly seemed pretty damned good to me, but there, through the next doorway, was the masterpiece: Dafne being turned into a laurel tree before Apollo could do his worst. He seems merely curious, she is caught in the orgasmic shock of transformation, leaves and twigs sprouting from her fingers and hair, roots beginning to trail from her toes. The marble is almost translucent. Elevated, life-sized, the sculpture is full of frozen energy and undiminished eroticism, capturing movement in perfect balance.
Like the Mendelssohn, it is flawless. I felt a sense of real loss. Just as the concerto had to end, I had to leave the sculpture behind, too.
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