“There is a similarity between detective stories and visiting an art exhibition: in both we are looking for clues. This is how art criticism turned me into a voyeur or you could also call it a detective figure. It made me enter an exhibition with an interrogating eye, accompanied with a feeling of being undercover. It trained my eye to see more. And it didn’t take long before I was looking away from the artwork. Who put the vase with flowers in the same room as the art? Where
are the drinks?
Soon I was also listening away from the art work. From the nibbles and treats at the art opening, my attention was drawn to the snippets of conversations around the art. Followed by the people who said them. I added the artists I met in or outside their studio. The hotel were I stayed. My walk around town. I also took my voyeurism back home, to Berlin, when I was in the library, had a coffee, or took a stroll in the park.
The surroundings of art have so far been excluded from art critical writing. Only recently, we have started to include ourselves: the way we feel or how our bodies move in an exhibition. Sometimes we even venture outside the art space, describing how we got to there or what happened after we left. But we could include much more: nature, people, things. In the end, art encompasses everyone and everything. Like a detective, we have to observe the whole picture in order to understand it fully.“