Meal Mural (September 2022)

Macon Holt

Two giant triptychs by the Danish abstract artist Per Kirkeby, hang at either end of the semicircular canteen in the Dalgas Have building of Copenhagen Business School. There is a larger individual piece by the same artist in the entrance atrium, which gives the silly, symmetrical building some much-needed drama. But it’s the paintings in the canteen that make me think of the story of Mark Rothko’s Segrum paintings. 

For those who don’t know, back in the 50s Rothko was commissioned to produce a series of paintings for the Four Seasons restaurant in the Segrum building in New York. It was a big commission and it was to be one of his early experiments with dark colours. As a leftist he wanted the painting to throb with an intensity that made the patrons of this luxury eatery nauseous. But on visiting the venue, he decided the clientele was too insensitive to be affected by his work so cancelled the commission and gave the money back. 

The paintings now hang in the Tate Modern in low light as the artist instructed and, as I found in my early 20s, they’ll drive you quite mad if you sit there long enough willing them to affect you. 

If you want to draw a comparison, it’s boring to consider the fact that Kirkeby’s work hangs throughout CBS’s Dalgas Have and that the school speaks of him as a trusted partner and collaborator meaning he is some kind of sell-out. Of course, he is. As am I and many of you reading this. Selling out is not quite the only offer on the table but almost. And eating requires you to take the better offer and try to navigate from there. 

What strikes me about it, eating a lovelessly constructed began in the canteen in front of these monuments to modernism, is the impulse or perhaps compulsion of these very capital-oriented institutions to adorn its walls with abstract expressionism. 

There is the CIA psy op theory, that such seemingly individualistic and politically “empty” work was a Cold War propaganda tool to champion free expression. But that only explains the how not the why. We’ll probably never know the precise why this caught on with banks financial institutions and business schools. 

What strikes me is the dissonance of the capacity of in density of some of these paintings and the apathy of their placement in the institutions that allow them to fade into the background. It’s almost as if the insensitivity of people in relation to these paintings is not their own but a function of the setting they find themselves in. It’s like caring about the kind of life this kind of study sets you up for, which means you have to turn off that part of you that could let itself be moved by something as trivial as paint on canvas. 

Moved here could mean nauseated irritated or ecstasy. Nothing is allowed looking at this, however. There is economics to learn and sustainability to learn how to talk around. There is the mental gymnastics to perform of teaching yourself to believe that wanting to accumulate more wealth than most people could ever dream of is good actually.  It’s as if the insensitivity is a side effect of imbibing capitalist realism to gain the strength Liberal Alliance claims to believe you have. 

For me, it’s the bagel that’s nauseating.