Charting Transcendence Through Consciousness
An Encounter with Conceptual Art
As I prepare to spend next week in Los Angeles for Frieze and several other art fairs (please reach out to me if you’d like to look at art together!) allow me share a story about a memorable exhibition I visited in Europe over 10 years ago
Something was Rotten in the State of Denmark
The other night, as I was listening to a rare vinyl recording of Johann Sebastian Bach, it occured to me that something I find so compelling about this 300-year-old music is how it creates a blank and fertile canvas of emotion between divine mathematical perfection, manifested in the intricate patterns Bach wove into his compositions, and the imperfections of the humans and instruments that bring life to the notes.
Please call this space consciousness and allow me to lead you into it.
As I was pondering the substratal meaning of the Bach recording, I recalled an exhibition I saw in a European museum 10 years ago.
A different era, before the post-truth trauma of Trump and all of the confusion that ensued.
On a winter weekend visit to Copenhagen from my home-base in Moscow, I wandered into a contemporary art museum, the 130-year-old Den Frie Udstilling, not knowing what to expect, and started strolling about the gallery.
As I was looking at various paintings, it occured to me: there is definitely something “off” about this exhibition. The paintings didn’t look quite right hanging in this space. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
But I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had no context or connection to help me understand any of it.
Whatever… it happens to me all the time, even today. You don’t have to love the art, or even understand it.
After ten minutes or so in that space, not connecting to anything, I started walking out of the museum. On my way out I stopped to linger just a second or two longer to read something written on the wall.
Suddenly, I understood what was going on. What I was experiencing was challenging my notions of whether what I was seeing was real or fake… and mind you, this was in 2014 — a completely different era from now.
Context was crucial for understanding what was going on. Yet I wonder what I would have missed out had I not stopped to read that wall label.
As it turns out, there had recently been an exhibition in Stockholm — a prize competition awarded every other year — to honor Scandinavian artists. The show was then supposed to come to Copenhagen.
But funding had been cancelled, and subsequently the award would no longer be given. Not only were the prize-winning artists disappointed, the Copenhagen museum found itself with a major gap in programming on short notice.
So, according to their online exhibition archive, Den Frie Udstilling invited the Danish artist’s collective A Kassen “to create a solo presentation, challenge the institutions of art and turn inside out what we understand by such concepts as ‘work’, ‘practice’ and ‘exhibition’.”
That is all the context I could find online about this exhibition ten years later. Perhaps few in the “art world” remember today, but I do, and feel extremely fortunate to be one of relatively few viewers to stumble upon the show’s punchline… namely:
Installation view of A Kassen’s conceptual art exhibition at the Den Frie Udstilling, Copenhagen, Denmark, January 2014. A fairly nondescript, ordinary looking presentation of contemporary art, until one grasps the “punchline.”
A Kassen had created a conceptual work of art for the museum by taking a published copy of the Stockholm show’s exhibition catalogue, featuring the prizewinner’s works that never made it to Copenhagen, and sending it to a forgers’ village in China.
Recent films and articles and have featured several prolific Chinese forgers such as Queens-based Pei Shen Qiang, whose work brought about the fall of one of New York’s oldest galleries in 2011, and Zhang Daqian, an original artist who has been very successful at auction but who is also a very accomplished forger in his own right.
In China, forgery is not only a cottage industry — it’s big business. Endemically it is also considered an accomplished form of compliment, rather than plagiarism.
Yet the artists in the forgers’ village had nothing to go off of but a book of photographs of art (dimensions included) printed the exhibition catalogue, featuring mostly paintings by a dozen and a half contemporary Scandinavian artists.
It then occured to me that this is why some things seemed “off,” or why the art looked “bad,” even though I couldn’t put my finger on any particular reason: the forgers, of course, had zero context on any of the artists’ work, and could not speak or read any Western language to make sense of anything in the catalogue.
They didn’t even have high-quality images to work from, only installation shots of the artwork hanging on a gallery wall in Stockholm.
Perhaps this would not have been the case if the forgers had been asked to copy an exhibition of Monet or Picasso, world-famous artists for whose work there is ample available example and context. But it proved nearly impossible for Chinese forgers not to create something fishy-looking while trying to emulate the work of contemporary artists in far-off Scandinavia based on a few puny photographs.
To this day, this exhibition strikes me as a terrific example of how compelling one can find the space between divine perfection and human fallibility; between what’s “real” and what’s “contrived;” and a perfect example of the conceptual approach that I take to how I lead people through transcendent art experiences.
I don’t think I’ve encountered work by the artists’ collective who put on that exhibition in the ten years since; yet it proved such a singular experience that I still remember vividly the complex emotions that it provoked in me.
The moral of this story reveals a lot about the “art world” and how I’m disrupting it through Charting Transcendence.
Please join me in the coming weeks, and I will show you how I create experiences of consciousness that will challenge ideas of whether what you are seeing in art and in life is “real” or not.
I will show you how to access a deeper exploration of consciousness, which is something that — among art advisors — my brain is uniquely capable of doing in nearly any art gallery or museum.
