Translation from German by the author
I doubt my university subject even though I have been studying it for 7 years. Not a single year has gone by that I haven’t doubted it. The doubts are quite excruciating, because in those 7 years I thought about studying thousands of other things. I went through the phases of thinking about medicine, psychology, and communication studies. The other day I was thinking about computer science. Why? Because I’m not sure if my major is right for me. I feel like I have to have certain opinion requirements to belong in those uni spaces. But I will write about it later.
My subject is being often confused with a craft. Almost every person who asks me what I study replies ‘sounds interesting’ to my answer (usually in an indifferent tone). A third of the people then change the topic of conversation. My grandparents still ask me, ‘What exactly is the name of what you are doing now? Our friends from Siberia ask’. ‘I am an art historian’, I answer.
I have chosen this subject because I went to an art school (art courses are called art schools in Russia) in Russia for 4 years, where I learned how to move my arm better so that a correct line, comes out of my hand movement. A line which is consistent with reality. I had my lessons three times a week with an older little lady who once attended an art academy, wore a narrow colorful scarf (thinner in summer, thicker in winter) and had curly fuzzy hair. She also had long pointed nails and a high-pitched voice, especially when she was angry. She got especially annoyed when someone moved their arm the wrong way, didn’t see colors the way she did, disregarded the rules of perspective, or pressed way too hard on a soft pencil.
I remember the first time my grandmother took me there as I was 12. When I entered the hall, which smelled of humidity and paint, I saw 10 or 15 children as young as me sitting in front of the gray old canvases, drawing. No voices were heard, only the sounds of pencils on rough paper and light rustling hand movements filled the room. I was impressed as the students sitting there were not drawing birds, flowers, or portraits of their parents, which were pretty common subjects of a normal art class in Russian schools. They were drawing a plaster plate in perspective, as it stood in front of a colorful overlaid cloth on a small table. The seriousness of the object surprised me and convinced my grandma that this was a good art lesson.
Over the next years, I learned composition, painting, watercolor, and even how to paint on silk. We also drew studies on certain subjects, which then became A-2 size paintings. I remember how at the beginning of a class our art teacher told us to go to the market to observe life there. After that, we divided our paper sheets into four or six squares and drew a sketch in each square with the scenes in the market that were stuck in our minds. At the time, the task seemed tedious, but I think that was one of the reasons I took up photography later. It was a good exercise that taught us how to observe life and what can become of those observations — art. I saw a woman buying a watermelon at the market at that time. I then drew this memory, but with two figures. I painted a scene of mother with her daughter buying some watermelons. The tones I painted were rather grey, and the watermelons stood out against the gray palette. My art teacher made a few final strokes and the painting was done. But somehow the painting ended up looking different. It looked better, the daughter in the picture had a normal and not too small head again. The watermelons no longer stood out, but became part of the picture. It definitely looked more right, but I felt like the painting was no longer mine and no longer painted by me. I still feel that way sometimes when my assignments are being proofread and the words I read after don’t belong to me anymore.
I remember how much I liked the black color. Even in school lessons I wanted to contour all objects with black to make them stand out from the surface of the picture. As if by doing that I could give them an independent life. In school it was okay to outline with black, but my art teacher from that art course raised her eyes and then her voice at me when she saw me painting with black outlines. I quickly gave up on that because I wanted to belong, to paint well and placed a high value on rules. Following rules was a sign of doing good work. Painting without black lines meant being realistic and being praised for it. Not for having my own opinion or point of view, but for joining the opinion that already existed in the form of numerous rules.
When the rules have been around long enough, it’s not easy to throw them out of your head. I still don’t find it easy. Because even in my bachelor’s degree at the university in Heidelberg, I didn’t even flinch when we hardly got to know any female artists in the introductory course in which we went through all the art epochs, even though the introductory course was held by a female lecturer. Giotto, Michelangelo, Monet, Brancusi, Kirchner. My faculty was called “European Art History.” I got to know artists from France, Germany and Italy. I learnt something about Spanish art after I went to Valencia for a year, but we hardly talked about Spanish or Polish artists at the university. The seminar topics provided something like a framework and there was not enough opportunity to go beyond the framework. Sometimes out of fear of being too critical and rebellious or getting a bad grade. Sometimes out of ignorance. The rules of the game were clear and the doubt subsided somewhat.
A lot of questions came up in Berlin when I started my masters in art and visual history there. In parallel, I also began to doubt myself and my subject again, because Berlin unis (at least the one I’m studying at now) thrive and burn on questions about the canon and genders, the maps and boundaries that are hardwired into art history. I have to admit that it became too much for me. This contrast between Berlin and Heidelberg overwhelmed me. If I enjoyed a quiet university life in Heidelberg, where there were no discussions in the university rooms, I felt overwhelmed by it in Berlin. There were many concepts and many opinions. Hot feminist discussions, questioning of the canonical writings and even of perspective — that prevails in my university seminars and outside of them to this day. I questioned the canon with the other students and participated in hot discussions. We dissected the subject and its history, analyzed the quota of women artists in German museums, and critiqued the very critique that allows some artists to become part of art history and some not. I heard opinions on feminism, critiques of Eurocentrism, colonization, and calls for dispossession. I barely managed to catch my breath between panels to collect my thoughts. I was overflowing with statements that I, as a woman, as a white person, and as a heterosexual person, should represent in order to belong. To be an art historian in Berlin and fit into the scene. If I don’t do it, I’m out. But are these new defaults — feminism, critique, Eurocentrism, colonization, dispossession — does talking about it proofs our freedom of mind? Is criticism proof of intelligence? Or are they, perhaps, simply new rules?
It’s hard for me to form my own thoughts on certain ‘difficult’ topics like Moria, women’s quotas, or being vegan, which label people and divide families these days. At the same time, I’m afraid of not having an opinion. I had thought of an experiment and spoke out differently in a seminar in Berlin during the hot discussions: I think it was about women’s bodies and its sexualization in the works of a Czech photographer. I asked the group if we had any example at all in art of the depiction of a naked female body? Nobody answered, the question was also ignored by the lecturer. Was it already too far, because it went beyond the ‘male gaze’ and asked for opportunities for improvement and didn’t just criticize photographer’s work?
The statements evoke questions. They become unspoken rules. And because I doubt these new rules and topics of conversation where memorized answers are expected, I also doubt my subject where these rules prevail. Where every statement that is made in the seminar has to be agreed with them beforehand. And everyone becomes a loser and enemy of feminism who does not gender (in German you can say Künstlerin for a female artist and Künstler for a male one). Everyone becomes an ignoramus who doesn’t go out on the streets on Fridays. Everyone who paints with black lines becomes a bad artist. These statements flow into the subject, they fill the real and digital university spaces, and they enter the friendship circles. They divide people far too quickly into heroes and ignoramuses and opinion into right and wrong. And if it’s that easy, I wonder why I study the subject where I’m told what to think, like back in art school? These rules can also lead to someone getting a job or a good master’s grade because they expressed a correct opinion without even standing for it. Like in that old fairy tale: If you say those magic words like “feminism,” “Eurocentrism,” and “restitution,” a cave opens up with a hidden treasure and you get everything, or at least what you want.
I need time to get informed. I need strength to decide what my opinion is. Because statements are rules and rules are nothing else than guidelines and regulations. Freedom can also stand for not-knowing or not-yet-knowing. Yes, it can contain the following statement: “I don’t know yet what I think about it”. And then doubt also becomes a normal state, a state of reflection, liberation from the urge to decide and not torment, as it is so often described.
