Nothing but riddles: in the north wing of the Residenzschloss Dresden, the exhibition The Things of Life / The Life of Things by the philosopher Wolfgang Scheppe is now being presented. It is guided by the legendary, but often enigmatic-seeming concept of the American art historian George Kubler (1912–1996) and looks at a single type of object – the bowl, as archaic as it is contemporary – and traces how it passes through epochs and territories as the changing solution of a practical problem and – in the words of Kubler – represents the shape of time.
Now a largely forgotten figure in his field though highly present in the discourse of contemporary art, Kubler developed a revolutionary new theory of art history in his 1962 treatise The Shape of Time. It transcends the Eurocentric perspective, introduces the concept of a networked model in the humanities and rejects the idea of linear progress in time as well as the distinction between art, craft and industrial products.
Ninety-nine bowls were selected from the depots of all the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, including the Staatliche Ethnographische Sammlungen Sachsen (Saxonian State Ethnographical Collections), and placed in a formal developmental sequence. They are confronted with a series of conceptual photographs by the Italian artist Franco Vimercati (1940–2001) that are likewise dedicated to a bowl. The riddles are solved: ordering in space yields conceptual relationships by way of the intuition. This is the very reason why the museum puts things on display.
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