The United States’ newest museum of modern art opened on January 2 to much fanfare locally, and very little notice on the national level. One can only speculate as to the reasons why. Perhaps the proliferation of contemporary art museums, with numerous institutions dedicated to living artists in every major city, has clouded our memory that something great happened before our narcissistic era. Perhaps many of us still haven’t overcome that ridiculous prejudice of the late 20^th century that a penchant for Modernist art denigrates one as aesthetically-if not politically-conservative. Whatever the case may be, the news that one of the world’s richest and most unique private collections of mid-century European art has found a home in a region of the country where there are very few significant museums dedicated to any kind of art should not be overlooked. Equally impressive is the building itself, a hulking, monumental terra cotta structure by Mario Botta, who previously only accepted one other US commission, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The opening exhibition features 109 of some 1,400 works endowed to the city of Charlotte by Andreas Bechtler, who inherited most of the collection from his parents, Hans and Bessie Bechtler. The Bechtlers began collecting in their native Zurich in the 1950s. It is an idiosyncratic collection in the sense that it dates from a pre-speculative era, refuting both period trends and canonical gap-filling, instead reflecting the collectors’ individual tastes and their personal engagement with an artist’s oeuvre. The Bechtlers’ extensive Giacometti collection is case in point, spanning the artist’s sculpture, paintings, drawings-and very often, many of the preparatory drafts of a finished work. It is as though the Bechtlers had a frantic need to intimately absorb every step of the process that led to a work’s completion.

Rather than usurping a traditional historicizing arrangement, curator Michael Godfrey has formed an impressive symphony highlighting the diversity of the collection, whose greatest attribute is its concentration on the Bechtlers’ milieu, including notable works by Jean-Paul Riopelle, Karel Appel, Max Ernst, Georges Rouault and Nicolas de Staël.

This, in fact, is the most important aspect of the Bechtler collection - at a time when the achievements of European artists were being completely overshadowed by the chauvinistic asserts of the Abstract Expressionists and their vast support networks, European Modernism continued to evolve. But its history, at least in most American collections, seems to terminate with the rise of the New York School.

Not anymore. For a city better known as the home of NASCAR and the headquarters for Bank of America, with a reputation for constantly playing second fiddle to nearby Atlanta, the opening of the Bechtler Museum is cause for celebration and should eventually earn Charlotte a pinpoint on the art world’s map.

TONIGHT, 27 January, SLUM presents

DISCOSALOPE, a performance by Marc-Andre Casavant

DISCOSALOPE is not completely a man and not exactly a woman.
Refreshing, amusing and disturbing…Marc-Andre Casavant’s spoken word-interactive-theatrical performance about the craziness of over-consumption in society will not leave anybody indifferent!!!

Before&after set by DJ Goddamnit.

SLUM - Berlin’s anti-art salon

Every Wednesday at

Ficken3000
Urbanstr. 70
Berlin

Doors open at 22:00; show starts at 24:00.

A woman hits something in her car and becomes free from rational existence. It is the sort of freedom she doesn’t want. She wanders through the film in an amnesiacal daze. She is surrounded by people. It is hard to tell how each character is related to her — particularly the men. Is he her brother? her lover? her husband? Is the horny teenage lesbian with hepatitis her niece or the daughter of a friend? We can’t tell because the woman doesn’t know anymore. She has lost her head. She has to dye her hair to cope with it all, to become a new person.

You can watch this film several times and still not “get” what’s going on. John Waters sums it up best in one of his quintessential one-liners, selecting La mujer sin cabeza as one of the best films of 2009 in December’s Artforum:

“Bleached hair, hit-and-run accidents, in-laws with hepatitis? Huh? I didn’t get it, but I sure did love it!”

This ambiguity is precisely what makes it worthwhile as an endeavor in narrative art. All over the Internet, people are publishing their theories of what the film means; this implies that it’s already become a sort of cult hit. I wish more writers would study this film. Like all great novels, La mujer sin cabeza is fundamentally not “about” anything. It is anti-about. Rather, it seeks to investigate a phenomenon that is so specific and personal that it winds up encompassing larger societal issues — such as class in Latin America — almost despite itself. The main theme, however, is easy to decipher. La mujer sin cabeza is a film that tackles the weighty philosophic issue of disappearance. The headless woman is suddenly confronted with an awareness that not everyone’s life is perceived to be worth the same. The child she thinks she ran over might as well be a dog; she is wealthy and educated, the child was one of the poor masses. She cannot deal with this sudden knowledge; dissociation becomes the answer.

In the end, she gets her head back, in a way. She is reassured by all those around her — both people she knows personally and those she has encountered but doesn’t know — that none of the events she experienced actually happened. In finally allowing herself to believe them, she is allowed to wear her head once more, even though it may be empty of all its contents. This is one version of freedom, perhaps.

There will be a screening of Mark Ther’s video work on January 20th at SLUM, the anti-art salon I co-curate with Tennessee Claflin every Wednesday night at Ficken3000, Urbanstr. 70, Berlin. Doors open at 22:00; the screening will start at 1:00. The evening includes a before & after set by DJ Goddamnit.