Many thanks to Heinrich, who manages to pick up this broadcast all the way from Germany, and who kindly sent some of his own personal impressions of the “Drawn Blank Series” exhibition of Bob Dylan’s artwork in the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz.

Maybe I should begin with some comments on Chemnitz. It’s not too big a city, nor a too fair one. In fact, it’s mostly downright ugly, like many of the eastern German cities, which all suffered from 40 years of socialism. Chemnitz (which btw. was called `Karl-Marx-Stadt’ == `Karl-Marx-city’ during socialism, for no apparent reason) does have a technical university, but I don’t know of any influential mathematicians there, and I wouldn’t like to study there myself. But anyway, the `Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz’ have Bob Dylan, so that cheers everything up. And the staff there wasn’t even as provincial as I expected. Entering there, one may take a couple of flyers, pays a price of a couple of euros (I think I paid 4 EUR, that was special price for students), gets up some stairs and enters the exhibition. Before that, there’s the possibility to get `audio guides’, i.e. portable devices with headphones that can play back some comments on some of the pictures. These comments (entirely in German, thankfully) are the least enjoyable part of the whole thing. For instance, there’s one picture (or rather, one set of pictures, since there are several versions of each) with the the Statue of Liberty and a guy turning the back to it. The plate in the statue’s hand reads `Rape is not Sex’, if I remember correctly. The audio guide tells the story that Dylan saw this scene at some amusement park, where on the plate in the hands of the park’s imitation of the Statue of Liberty someone had put a newspaper with the head line being just that, `Rape is not Sex’. Still, the audio comment goes on explaining how Dylan hereby criticizes the American way of living, capitalism and the difference between the rich and the poor. Well, maybe the comment wasn’t that far-fetching, but the tenor was there.

Another picture, titled `Casandra’, displayed the face and chest of a woman, her breasts visible, and the audio comment dived into a long rambling ending in a comparison with pictures of Virgin Mary. Now while it’s obviously true that Dylan has often connected his love/search for God with his love and search for women, or a woman (the wonderful Precious Angel, or various songs on Time Out of Mind), here the audio comment just got into plain nonsense.

About the pictures themselves I can’t say too much. I am not learned in modern art, and for some pictures I even thought the original black and white version (each picture had a small image of the original at it’s label) looks more pleasing to the eye. Still, the differences Dylan painted over that were interesting: In one case, what had been a woman sitting in the corner of a room became a young, a middle-aged and an old man, in the three versions of the picture. The two sisters with the ring on one version and none on the other you already heard about. Several of the pictures have the beholder look through windows or open doors, which gives a feeling of restlessness. Also, to me the women in the pictures seemed to have the tendency to be a bit plump, if that is the right term. Especially the backsides of some of the women seemed to be a bit bigger than our magazines have women these days. But that may be my pure imagination.

They also had a Bob Dylan discography, a panel of about 4 times 4 meter, which listed most of Dylan’s albums and songs from Bob Dylan to Modern Times, even the Best Of albums and such. However, they didn’t include Shot of Love. What a pity, my fiancée asked me where Every Grain of Sand is on, one of the few Dylan songs she admits to like. However, I couldn’t show her (except of course Bootleg series 1-3), since they omitted that record. I’ve put that into their guestbook, and I also told the lady at the counter, but she didn’t seemed to be too interested. I guess they can’t change that now anyway.

So there you go! I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising that the audio guide, provided by those old reliable “experts,” might include some dubious opinionizing. The story of Dylan’s career (or one story at least) is that of great work burdened by poor commentary. The good news is that the greatness of the work outlives the poorness of the commentary. Not that I have a particular opinion as to how great Dylan’s paintings may be. Obviously there are quite a lot of people who are enjoying seeing them, and I suspect you can’t say much better than that when it comes to the art of painting, these days.

I should note that Heinrich, who kindly e-mailed, has been associated with the incredibly impressive Dylan Chords work (guitar tabs for Dylan’s songs by Eyolf Østrem) and in particular is responsible for the SEAL project.

He also informed me that — based on information given on Michael Gray’s blog — it is possible to order the color catalog associated with the exhibition, which is said to be quite beautiful. If you search for it at this German site you’ll find it, for 49.95 Euros, plus shipping. But I can’t swear whether they will ship it to the U.S. or not, because I haven’t tried to order it. The exhibition is said to be coming to New York next year, so I figure I can wait. In any case, the world being what it is, there are probably other ways of buying the catalog, or else there soon will be.

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