• 
• Introduction
• Works and Sections
• Exhibition
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Contact

ALONE VERY OFTEN

Jens Hoffmann

One of the great contradictions of life is that we must interact with others, yet no matter how much we consider ourselves social beings, we are essentially always alone. We are the only one who can read our minds; the only one who witnesses our life from birth to death; the only one who truly knows all our flaws, weakness, regrets, and sins. The German writer Rainer Maria Rilke may have said it the best: “We are solitary. We can delude ourselves about this and act as if it were not true. But how much better it is to recognize that we are alone; yes, even to begin from this realization.”¹

Whereas “loneliness” describes a non-voluntary state of emotional or physical despair caused by detachment, emptiness, or distance, “solitude,” from the Latin solitudinem, describes the condition of being alone by choice. Most humans require solitude from time to time, not only to escape the manic and chaotic world but to follow our own thoughts without restrictions, obstacles, or external judgments. Solitude is a break and a chance to look inside ourselves to understand our place in the world and develop self-awareness and self-confidence. Right now, in a time of mandatory isolation in the face of a not yet fully understood infectious disease, thoughts of seclusion and solitude are inescapable. Labyrinth of Solitude explores these notions against the backdrop of our current realities. It seeks out solitude in works of art and explores how solitude can foster creativity and encourage liberation from the realities of everyday life.

The idea for an exhibition on solitude came to me years ago after a day at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, which houses some of the greatest masterpieces of the Western canon made between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. It was a beautiful August morning, and perhaps it was the gorgeous summer weather that was keeping away all the other visitors. Wandering through the galleries and experiencing such iconic works as Albrecht Dürer’s Self-Portrait with Fur-Trimmed Robe (1500) and Albrecht Altdorfer’s The Battle of Alexander at Issus (1529) without anyone else around was a pungent experience I will not forget. Dürer’s work is a contemplation on the genre of portrait painting in which he idealizes himself, not without irony, as Christ. I was struck by the frontality of it, the gaze directed straight at me. Facing it with no distracting crowds in the way, I had the overwhelming feeling of truly looking into the painter’s eyes. The colors and textures are so vivid and intense that I sensed Dürer himself standing right in front of me, a cheeky smile on his face, amused at my amazement. Altdorfer’s work is a dramatic battle scene showing Alexander’s victory over Darius at Issus in 333 BCE. The enormous attention to detail is staggering, and with no obligation to move along so another visitor could have a look, I became so intensely lost in the thousands of soldiers and hundreds of individual fighting scenes that I forgot that I was even in a museum. I began to mull over the relation between solitude and art—specifically the solitude that these works require for their full effect, and that their creators expected their viewers would have access to. Likely they would be appalled to know that seventeen seconds is the average duration people today typically spend in front of a painting: five seconds to look at the painting, ten seconds to read the wall label, and a final two seconds to hastily compare the text from the label with the work. 

Ever since that particular museum visit, I have had the idea to organize an exhibition that speaks of solitude and can be experienced in solitude. I proposed it to various museums and galleries over the years, and while the first part was usually welcomed, the idea of admitting only one visitor at a time did not find much support. As a curator of exhibitions, I have the privilege to be alone with art more frequently than other people do, and I knew there would be something unique and dramatic about being in a museum like the Alte Pinakothek, the Metropolitan Museum, or the Louvre during regular public hours with no one else around. Now, finally, Labyrinth of Solitude exists, albeit online—and marks my first foray in the arena of digital exhibitions.

About fifteen years ago, the curator Maria Lind and I discussed something we called “soft curating,” in which we would write exhibition descriptions, create lists of artworks and artists, and discuss them, without ever actually bringing the works together in a room. It was about generating concrete proposals that would (seemingly ironically) enable us to think about exhibitions in more abstract ways. One obviously exciting aspect was the possibility to bring together artworks from all around the world and from all epochs—even artworks that no longer existed. There would be no constraints, no obstacles, no boundaries in these imaginary displays.

In a sense, Labyrinth of Solitude is an example of soft curating. It is properly an exhibition, I would argue, yet in real life the Met would likely never present contemporary paintings alongside canonical works from its collection. The presentation strives to turn fundamental constraints such as this—not to mention the fact that most museums in the world are currently closed—into advantages by bringing together works that ordinarily would be impossible for a young commercial gallery to present, for instance historical paintings by Edward Hopper, Pablo Picasso, Mary Stevenson Cassatt, Lee Krasner, or Edvard Munch. Those are some of the anchors with which the newly made works by the living artists dialogue.

The thought to connect contemporary paintings, most of which were specially commissioned for Labyrinth of Solitude, with historical artworks from the Met’s collection has several origins. There is, first, the playful idea of what the Met’s masterpieces are doing during this time of lockdown. Without an audience to admire them, are they enjoying a much-needed rest from rudely staring eyes? Or are they suffering from separation anxiety? Do they have conversations among themselves? And if they could speak, how would the masterpieces react to being juxtaposed with works by young and emerging artists? There was also the idea that 56 Henry and the Met could not be more different places to present and view art. One is an intimate, if not tiny, gallery in Lower Manhattan showing untested and cutting-edge art, while the Met is one of the most prestigious museums in the world, home to many treasures of Western civilization. Its vast spaces could house ten thousand 56 Henrys. Yet despite their obvious differences, both typologies are vitally important to New York’s cultural landscape.

Even though Labyrinth of Solitude is an online exhibition, decisions about the display still had to be made, and it was decided that all works would be “installed” in two gallery spaces replicating the ones at the Met, which would include wall texts and captions mimicking those in traditional museums. Yet the online gallery spaces lack a typical entrance or exit—we can only enter or leave by opening or closing our browser window. The idea was to create an isolated and unescapable entity, a point of utter seclusion. An exhibition that is itself in quarantine, digitally on a server somewhere. 

Short-term solitude is a condition artists often seek out voluntarily, to work with focus and concentration. Solitude can also be triggered by a vicious virus or psychological depression. Solitude can facilitate spiritual enlightenment, freedom, and creativity, yet it also evokes reclusion and social apathy. To reflect this, the presented works look at different aspects of solitude via themed pairings of one contemporary and one historical work: Solitude and Idleness, Solitude and Nature, Solitude and Impulse, Solitude and Death, Solitude and Dreams, and others. While most of the artworks in the show are representational, two explore the relation between abstraction and solitude. These works by Lee Krasner and Yanyan Huang propose solitude in pure form.

Solitude as a state of mind has been central to my existence, and I have found like-minded individuals among not only artists, but also writers, and the bibliography that accompanies the show reflects my favorite works from the plethora of literature that exists on the notion of solitude. To paraphrase the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa: “Literature (and art) are the most agreeable ways of ignoring life.” The US author Edward Abbey frequently described how an absence of interaction with other humans enables a stronger connection to the natural world—a relation in which nature becomes the human’s companion. (It is a sentiment shared by the eighteenth-century Romantics, as represented in this exhibition by Julius von Leypold, a German painter who throughout his career remained in the shadow of the great Caspar David Friedrich.) The Belgian American poet and novelist May Sarton pointed out, “That is what is strange—that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone.”² One of the best literary treatments of the subject of solitude appears, unsurprisingly, in the work of Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Beckett pushes the question of the solitary state to its limits—to a point of absence of meaning, utter silence, loss of faith. Beckett wrote about a self without identity, with crippled or amputated body parts and a barely existing consciousness, in a way that links to the notion of alienation and the act of dying, or as Beckett put it, “rotting with solitude.”³

The title of this exhibition is inspired by the book The Labyrinth of Solitude (1950) by the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, who stated: “Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition. Man is the only being who knows he is alone, and the only one who seeks out another. His nature—if that word can be used in reference to man, who has ‘invented’ himself by saying ‘no’ to nature—consists of his longing to realize himself in another. Man is nostalgic and in search for communion. Therefore, when he is aware of himself, he is aware of his lack of another, that is, of his solitude.”⁴

Notes