by Steve Rockwell
A reading of the Curated Content #2 group of images may require the passage over something that Maurice Blanchot calls the “empty deep.” The Richter Scale image in the group had been the cover for the Fall 2002 edition of dArt magazine, featuring author Bruce Bauman’s review of Gerhard Richter’s exhibition at the MoMA in New York. Bauman conceded that seeing the retrospective forced him to reevaluate why he wrote about art. Bauman’s full article here.
In his search for, what cannot be put into words, Bauman arrives at what he calls, “the necessity of art: the search for that space in each individual for the longing for the lost god, for meaning, for beauty, humanity – the quest for truth which is our soul. In falling into that empty deep we can truly confront that terribleness of human history, the horror and little cruelties that live within us all.”
A tiny antagonist buzzes over the skull of Paul Pretzer’s Dead Idiot. The painting was part of Mortality: A Survey of Contemporary Death Art. Curated by Donald Kuspit, and assisted by Robert Curcio, the exhibition was to be held at the American University Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2020, but was terminated due to Covid-19. Since the exhibition catalog had already been produced, the show’s virtual life was extended as the 2021 dArt cover feature, in the sense that the Curated Content project had also breathed life into it. If Pretzer’s Dead Idiot is a focus on mortality as an individual struggle, the Otto Dix Card Players (1920) in panel four exemplify its residual collective trauma. The black card with Julian Schnabel’s portrait of a scarred Andy Warhol, deals the irony of someone who survived an assassination attempt, only to fall victim to a scalpel in the hospital.
A.R. Penck’s stick figure with outstretched arms embodies survival, literally here a trial by fire and tightrope in his 1963 oil Passage. The work was part of Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures (article by Emese Hajagos) and addresses the wider sociopolitical impacts of war, whether hot or cold.