DIRECTOR OF WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY'S KEMPER ART MUSEUM
Can a German curator, director and scholar find happiness near the banks of the Mississippi? Definitely! (Laughs.)
By Eddie Silva
A native of Germany with an abiding interest in artists of exile, Sabine Eckmann arrived here as curator of Washington University's Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in 1999. She came to a city with a deep German heritage and numerous collectors of modern German art--and to a university whose artistic legacy includes German-exile painter Max Beckmann and German-exile art historian Horst W. Janson. (If you studied art history in college, you probably used his textbook.) Eckmann was just named director of the museum, which will have a new home in the $60-million Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, scheduled to open next fall. Eckmann already has a major exhibition planned for the new space: Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, which is scheduled to open in the spring of 2007.
You have a new facility about to be built, which means great opportunities and great challenges. What do you see as the new gallery's relationship to the university and to St. Louis? We want to explore the relationship between art and visual culture, their importance to the hard sciences and their relevance in today's world. We will also ask how you can bring together different realms of the visual and why this is important. As a university museum, we want to make these insider discussions transparent to a broader audience.
What are you thinking about when you acquire art? What is good for the collection? That's my starting point. Every curator will try to buy works that illuminate what art means in relation to contemporary life: how art addresses issues of perception; how it frames us as human beings. Acquisitions are not based on subjective taste; we don't buy art just because it looks good. An artist doesn't live in some autonomous space and do whatever his creativity tells him to do. In some way, his work has to be related to what other artists do and to what artists have done historically. Those are questions I'm interested in--I'm not going out and buying because I think, "Oh, that's interesting," and I'm not buying a name. I look for interesting positions that are very complex, that add to an understanding of the world in which we live.
Reality Bites sounds like an exciting exhibition. What will people find there? First they will find a whole new generation of German artists who are not known in St. Louis. Many of the artists who are included were in their mid-20s when the Berlin Wall came down. It's an exhibition that consciously asks the question "How did German art change after the unification of Germany?" All of a sudden two different cultural traditions became allegedly unified, and everything changed. I was interested in how that was addressed by a new generation of German artists who grew up with these changes. They produce new and very experimental art forms, which reflect on a new relationship between art and reality.
Are all the artists in the exhibition German? Oh, no. Berlin has become an international center of art. All exhibitions in the United States, but also in Germany, focus on German art shows that only include German artists. I am not doing that. This exhibition also includes international artists who produce works in Berlin or in Germany. There are French artists in the show, American artists, artists from Turkey. I want to open toward an international perspective that will show the impact of globalization.
What are the show's themes? We have three sections. The first is about redressing Germany, which means interactions of the artists with this new Germany. Then we have another section that deals with globalization and shows how Germany, like all other countries, is also a global country. That section will show how the impact of global technology is addressed by artists. We have a lot of interactive projects with computer art in the exhibition. Lastly, the exhibition deals with trauma and traumatic histories, pushing into a transnational, global presence. I'm excited about it.
Where did you grow up? I grew up in Nuremberg and, later, Cologne.
Was there art around you? I grew up with art. Nobody in my family was a visual artist, but my father was originally an actor. My family is originally from East Germany. They moved, after the Berlin Wall came up, to West Germany. My father was a political refugee; later he worked as a journalist. He was very interested in visual art. We had a huge library of books about art at home. I went to museums constantly. As a child I was a specialist in how to set off alarms in museums.
Do you ever go to Strassenfest? I never go to Oktoberfest in Germany; why would I go to that here? What has survived from that German culture are folkloric elements. German culture came to St. Louis very early, so these very old-fashioned German traditions, which don't take an important place in German cultural life, are what have survived here today.
There are certain traditions that can survive better in a foreign culture than in their own culture because in their own they get changed. I think I went once with my German friends in L.A. to something like Strassenfest, but we just laughed. We would never go to something like that in Germany. I'd rather go to an American movie.
