If you visit Cologne, Museum Ludwig has to be on your shortlist. It is hands down one of the best collections of modern and contemporary art I have ever seen. I spent almost an entire day at the museum, and it still was not quite enough. One of the highlights was the temporary exhibition the museum is currently hosting named “Art into Life! Collector Wolfgang Hahn and the 60s.” As its title suggests, the exhibition presents works from the collection of Wolfgang Hahn, who was the head of restoration at the Wallraf Richartz Museum and the Museum Ludwig during the mid-twentieth century. During the 1960s he attended pieces of Performance Art and Happenings, and began to assemble his impressive collection of works of Nouveau Réalism, Fluxus, Happening, Pop Art and Conceptual Art. The exhibition includes works from all of the movements listed previously, and is divided thematically so that works from different movements are placed into conversation. The twelve different thematic sections, ranging from music to public spaces to individual mythologies, created links between the different movements that give the viewer a really good sense of trends in the art world during this period.

There was one piece in the section “performance, event, concept” that I was particularly struck by: the Fluxus artist Emmett Williams’ poem Do You Remember (For Alison Knowles), 1966. The poem was displayed unobtrusively, typed out on two adjacent sheets of paper, so I am lucky I did not miss it. I returned to the unassuming piece multiple times as I made my way through the exhibition, and kept thinking about it after I left. What I find so fascinating about Do You Remember is that it manages to rather absurdly explore the processes of iteration and repetition, while simultaneously evoking vivid imagery and a mysterious narrative. It is this juxtaposition of the methodical with the fantastical that had me returning to the piece over and over again.

 

The foundation of the poem is a sentence template composed of six words, in the sequence pronoun, verb, adjective, adjective (color), noun. For each of the six words in the template, there are a limited number of options that are listed at the bottom of the poem in a note. The poem is the result of the artist writing down phases based on the template, changing out the words in each iteration. With this rigid structure, the poem seems like the solution to a math problem about combinations. It is as if Williams did not know a formula for permutations, and decided to write out combinations until he found the solution. However, it is a math problem that is seemingly impossible to decipher because of the senseless nature of most of the phrases. Some of the combinations make more sense than others. For instance, the phrase “and I loved mellow blue nights” seems more coherent than “and you hated hard pink valleys.” But, it is the juxtaposition of all of these seemingly absurd phrases that makes the poem so evocative. Trying to imagine the objects and environments the phrases evoke is like experiencing a sensory overload. There are so many colors and textures and emotions to process. Yet, somehow they all come together to form a narrative.

The poem begins with the phrase “when i loved soft pink nights,” which introduces both the sentiment of nostalgia that pervades the poem and the idea that the rest of the poem is a narrative about a memory. The subsequent phrases all start with the conjunction “and,” each one fleshing out the memory even further. The subject of the phrases also alternates between “i” and “you.” This alternation reveals that the poem is about a relationship. The mystery surrounding this memory of a relationship is intriguing. It is likely that the “you” in the poem refers to Allison Knowles, to whom the poem is dedicated, but it is not plainly stated. The fantastical images evoked by each phrase seem like pieces of a code that you have to solve to understand the memory. They call upon the viewer’s imagination, so that each viewer will have a different understanding of the what the memory is.

It is this sense of intimacy paired with the absurd repetitive structure of the poem that made me keep coming back to this work. It draws you in. Also, the poem is not displayed alone. In fact, it is paired with Allison Knowles’ piece Do You Remember (For Emmet Williams), 1968, which is, in effect, her response to the poem. The work consists of prints of different images, each one with its own color, on a large canvas. Each image reappears multiple times, mimicking the repetition of the poem. Also, the colors of the prints mimic the color characterizations in the poem. The conversation between the two works in the exhibition replicates the relationship in the poem, bringing it outside the aesthetic sphere and into a more tangible reality. Witnessing the conversation between these two artists made the poem alone even more poignant. Before visiting this exhibition, I had never heard of Fluxus poetry, and I only left wanting to read more.