A sculpture called Roses made of decoration paper and a few coloured ribbons here and there, accompanied by watercolours of flowers. Nothing much, you would say. Rosemary Mayer would agree, "another way to almost not make a sculpture".
You can't pin down a flower for very long is an exhibition of the New York artist Rosemary Mayer (1943-2014) at Chertlüdde. Let me expand here a bit on Chertlüdde because visiting this gallery is always an experience. It starts with the signage on the outside, this time decorated with the graphic Divided Planet by mail art artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. You can respond to the work and send it in to be part of Wolf-Rehfeldt's archive at the gallery (I already sent in mine). Then there is the bookstore, which is dangerous. I only glance at it sideways. And in the back of the gallery there is the "bungalow" for emerging artists. Chertlüdde is also a gallery that makes new collectors, like me. I left the gallery with an art work, Imagined Clouds (Berlin) by David Horvitz. It costs only 10 euros, but you know how it goes once you get the taste for something...
My good intentions at the bookstore were in vain. I had to go back a week later to buy the beautiful Rosemary Mayer catalogue. I kept thinking about those Roses in cellophane: there was something in this delicate sculpture that made me turn around, and turn around once more. I tried to photograph them but that didn't work.
So I went back to get the catalogue and see if my fascination would hold. Mayer was also a writer, and her sister was the poet Bernadette Mayer, of whom the correspondence with Rosemary has been published (I will probably have to go back to buy this too). In a typed text entitled Passing Thoughts, Mayer talks about what she called her Temporary Monuments. "The art work should not be still, unmoving and independent of its circumstances." she writes, "Nothing is."
Mayer's art was festive: sculptures made of balloons are drifting with orange, red and yellow fabrics in the sky, with Crocus Return, Iris Return, and Hyacinth Return written upon them to celebrate spring. "Thinking about what is possible to celebrate, how and where. Artists' one time purpose as decorators at festivities, memorialisers of the dead, catchers, even, of passing beauty. How to do these things now? To celebrate one must make an occasion."
So in winter, Mayer was brooding about impossible balloon sculptures floating over NYC buildings and festive tents upon the roofs next spring. "Thinking about what pleasures are possible," she types, "why people don't kill themselves. This winter I'll make some sculptures from snow, I'll write alot... about women in time and barbarism."