Back in 1998, I was the head of a group of people trying to put an English-language magazine together in the wake of Zitty having killed the one I'd been editing, Metropolis. At one point, we decided to dummy up a cover, and our genius art-director, Tanja, whipped out a nice image, a nice logo, and...all we needed was some headlines. So, looking at the current events around town, I came up with the one above. Unlike some of the other headlines on that cover dummy, there was no article to go with it.
Life imitates imagination, or something: a couple of people have e-mailed me a Guardian article on the latest crisis in the life of this unhappy space, and, after reading it, my response was familiar: who cares?
A little history: Tacheles was an idea ahead of its time, a shopping mall. Europeans were familar with market halls, in which food-vendors gathered in a covered space to protect themselves and their wares from inclement weather, and arcades, covered single-story collections of merchants, were also not unknown: see Leipzig, for instance. But a multi-story collection of varied businesses, including fashion merchants, was a new idea, and it didn't work. Before the bombs damaged the building, it was already derelict, since its promoters had gone bankrupt. And, like most of Oranienburger Str., it stood empty during the post-war DDR era. The communists didn't quite know what to do with Oranienburger Str., due to its Jewish history, other than to use the Neue Synagogue for peace-oriented rhetorical statements.
They also didn't know what to do about various derelict buildings all around East Berlin in the days when it was becoming evident that the government was about to fall. Communists are great when it comes to drawing up plans, less so about executing them. A list of old buildings scheduled for demolition was prepared, but there was a serious shortage of workers to actually perform the demolition. Immediately after the Wall opened, a photocopy of the list was circulated among people looking to squat East Berlin, and a number of prominent squats -- Eimer on Rosenthaler Str., the Italian art-junkies on Auguststr., the complex on Castanienallee -- were the result. But Tacheles was the first, inhabited by people who styled themselves artists. Who knows, they may actually have been artists at first. But by the time I caught up with Tacheles, it was just another squat, albeit one which loudly proclaimed itself for artists.
The thing is, I actually knew a lot of artists, and they didn't take Tacheles seriously -- not past its bar, anyway. The people who lived there seemed more provocateurs with dimly-defined politics than creators of anything serious. At one point, the city tried to normalize its status, offering, according to a long Berlin tradition of dealing with squatters which went back to the Charlottenburg squatters in 1968, for a token rent in exchange for the squatters bringing it up to fire and sanitation code. A split developed in the Tacheles crowd, with some wanting to take the city's offer, and others screaming "Art should be free! Down with the pig capitalists!" Word on the street was that the latter group involved a heroin-dealing ring tied to a larger organized-crime operation, and there were, in fact, several overdoses on the premises during this time.
The provocateurs wound up in Poland, I heard, trying to build a spaceship on a beach somewhere in the north. I also heard that those who stayed had reached an accommodation with a Swedish investment group which had bought the larger parcel of land, and were paying a token rent and improving the place. But, as the Guardian article points out, that deal is due to expire.
A little perspective here: an art-historian friend in Philadelphia e-mailed me some years ago that an artist from that city, armed with some grant money, was coming to Berlin to make some art, and game me his e-mail address so he'd know someone when he got here. He was looking for studio space at the same time some businessmen I knew were looking for office space. When the artist, who'd read so much about Tacheles, insisted on going there to inquire about a studio, he reported that they were incredibly hostile to him because he was American and because he had a grant. They also quoted him a price per square meter that was just under half what the businessmen had been quoted for space in one of the less expensive skyscrapers in Potsdamer Platz. Given that the Tacheles crew was paying a euro a year to Berlin for the property, someone was doing very well.
Thus, I had to laugh at the so-called artist who told the Guardian "This is the last place where you are free to be an artist." Puh-leeze. It might be the last place in Mitte -- except it isn't. When I first came to Mitte twelve years ago, it was heaving with alternative art spaces: Die Aktionsgalerie, Berlin-Tokyo, Haus Schwarzenberg, Eimer, and others which never had a name. Of these, only Haus Schwarzenberg remains, and in very different form due to the real-estate war which they won by going legal and buying their property with funds from an angel. But, much as I hate to break the news to the guy at Tacheles, behind the locked metal gate in Haus Schwarzenberg are a couple of wings in which actual real artists who have a place in the local and international art worlds work on art. No, there's no gift-shop there. They have galleries. And much as one hates to agree with the Berlin city cultural bureaucrat who said "Tacheles used to be a very exciting place with major cultural importance, but it isn't any more," he's telling the truth. About the only real cultural value the decaying hulk has any more is that occasionally Cafe Zapata will book a good band, but, as the article points out, Cafe Zapata and Tacheles only share space; they don't talk.
One other salient detail. The Guardian's headline calls Tacheles the "last stand of Berlin's bohemians," which is not only hyperbolic, but inadvertantly points out Tacheles' failure. Not to be too pedantic about it, but bohemianism is not a permanent state. It's a stage of development some people go through which may lead to a way of life, usually in the arts. But there's usually a point when each bohemian realizes that it's time to either get serious about their life-project or put on a suit and start looking for work. Tacheles' residents are bohemians, nothing more. They're not artists, no matter how many "galleries" of welded distorted shapes and weird photographs the place has. Bohemians, as residents of Montmartre and Greenwich Village know, are easy to sell to tourists. That keeps the tourists from disturbing the artists.
So Tacheles is soon to close. Who cares? I don't. Well, I do, but only in that what will replace it will be another episode in Berlin's vain chase for the upscale tourist dollar, which is almost certainly bound to fail. Oranienburger Str. has long since lost its hip! edgy! cachet to the pub crawling EasyJetters and mass-market clothing stores. And I care because I have memories of when the area was actually culturally vital, before real-estate speculators moved in and turned Berlin-Tokyo into the Beverly-Hills-on-bad-acid of the Rosenhof. But I've packed away those memories, just like I've packed away the memories of the magazine which was going to bear that headline. As long as Berlin stays poor and cheap, there will be bohemians and artists taking advantage of that fact. And once they've made a neighborhood interesting, the real-estate sharks will move in and the artists will move on and the bohemians will have their tough choices to make again.
Showing posts with label avant-garde. Show all posts
Showing posts with label avant-garde. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Berlin Biennial Bombs Bigtime
A word to the city of Berlin, and in particular the Kultursenat: if you want the world to keep thinking of Berlin as a hip! edgy! place, do yourself a favor and the next time the idiots who keep besmirching the city's name in the guise of the Berlin Biennial come begging, just remember Nancy Reagan and Just Say No.
I missed the last one on early word that it was toxic, but last Sunday, Bowleserised, BiB, Karl-Marx-Strasse and I met at the Kunst Werke on Auguststr. to see as much as we could. I finished the process today with a visit to the one venue we'd missed, the Neuenationalgalerie.
The short verdict: worse than ever. A somewhat lengthier appraisal follows.
KW is the center of this event, although whether it's still partnered with PS 1 in New York I don't know. For PS 1's sake, I hope not. It's not a real good venue for anything, with its steep stairways and small exhibition spaces, getting smaller the higher you ascend. Four floors are open for this show, and yet you can do the whole thing in about 20 minutes, so empty is it of any content or thought-provoking work. For instance, there's the lowest floor, the former cellar. Most of this has been given to Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, who has installed a work he calls "Ground Control." In other words, he spent part of last year and part of this year paving it with tar. It's one of those rare artworks which engages the sense of smell, since the tar's still cooling, but it's still tar. On the same floor is a HD-video installation by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys called "The Frigate," twenty minutes of a bunch of unattractive people staring at each other. I guess you could invoke Bill Viola's name here, but it would be in vain. There's the exciting part: sort of random organ music suddenly swells up, there are a few shots of some industrial product close-up, and then the woman in the group is seen staring at a ship-model which has been painted black.
Apparently one of the stars of this mess is someone called Pushwagner, who has spread out a "graphic novel" called Soft City in vitrines along a serpentine passageway. The subject of this daring work is conformity and capitalism. as it follows a family whose father wakes up and goes to work in a huge corporation just like every other man in the city while the woman takes the baby and goes shopping in a huge store. Like I said, real cutting-edge. Some notes I picked up later at the Schinkel Pavillion (about which more in a minute) says that "it is with a crude attitude and from a dropout perspective that Pushwagner observes the world and its mechanisms." This is art-speak for "not very well drawn."
Looking over the list of other works at the KW, I found I couldn't really remember many of them. There's Patricia Esquivas' two "Folklore" films, where she explains contemporary Spanish art from a chart in hesitant English. There's Michel Auder's four-minute film "My Last Bag of Heroin (For Real)," in which the artist chases the dragon on a piece of foil, reloads, and does it again, and then mumbles about checking himself into a hospital the next day. Fascinating. It was followed by a later work called "Polaroid Cocaine," showing that he'd definitely made progress, if only from one drug to another, but the music involved was so grating I had to leave the little cubicle where it was showing.
On the third floor is the only work worth looking at, although it's hard to do: Kohei Yoshiyuki spent eight years photographing people having sex in a park in Japan, using infrared film, apparently. The series, entitled "Park," has been much shown and much commented upon, as well it should be, since it brings up all kinds of questions about the role of the artist's license to document, invasion of privacy, responsibility in the case of possible criminal behavior (some of these photos seem to document rape -- although perhaps that's just an illusion) and, of course, the morality of exhibiting all of this publicly.
The rest is so forgettable that, well, I've pretty much forgotten it although it's only been a couple of days. But there are four venues in this year's Biennial, so we found ourselves willing to look at more. We headed toward the Skulpturenpark, located on a swath of former Wall no-man's-land on the border of Mitte and Kreuzberg, but realized on the way over that there was something called the Schinkel Pavilion at Oberwallstr. 1. Just try finding it! It turned out to be on the short bit of the street that comes off of Unter den Linden, through a door and up some stairs. What it has to do with Schinkel I can't tell you, but I can tell you that after all that effort we were greeted with a room filled with a few huge canvases by our old pal Pushwagner. We lasted a minute or two and left.
The Skulpturenpark is almost impossible to find with the aid of the map they hand you. (So, for that matter, is the Schinkel Pavilion). Once you get there, you may wish you hadn't. I'm not convinced we saw all of it -- it's very badly laid out -- but what there was was pretty dull. First, we stopped in a little shelter to see Lars Lauman's 27-minute film about the woman who's convinced she's married to the Berlin Wall. This woman is either a sad, mentally unbalanced person (not impossible) or a performance artist of little talent (less likely). If it's the former, as I suspect it is, Lauman's film is a work of mean-spirited exploitation of the mentally ill. If it's the latter, he's as untalented as she is. Anyway, this isn't an installation, it's an actual documentary film, so what's it doing in this show of alleged art?
Elsewhere, Killian Rüthemann has dug some holes, a piece he calls "Stripping," and Katerina Seda has erected an enclosure which can only be entered via a few stepladders or by climbing up its sides. Don't fall: the interior has huge pieces of broken plate-glass. There's a message here, and I think it's "stay away from Czech artists." From a heap of rubble in the center of the largest part of the "park," a sound installation by Susan Hiller erupts every now and again. Must be fun for the folks in the pricey apartments nearby, although it's just simple tones and overtones.
At this point we were seriously the worse for wear, so while 3/4 of our company headed over to the Nikolaiviertel in search of nourishment I jumped into a U-Bahn station and went home.
But I'd paid €12 for my ticket, and the Neuenationalgalerie portion remained unpunched. I wasn't going to condemn the entire Biennial without seeing the whole thing. After all, one really brilliant piece (by Joao Penalva) had rescued the first one for me, and it's not impossible that it would happen with another artist this time.
But no. The entire ground floor of the museum is littered with mediocrity. There's something called "Pygmalion Workshop" by Nashashabi/Skaer, which would have been brilliant if it had stopped with the reconstruction of a partially-ruined Greek sculpture in shiny Plexiglass on the floor, but blew it with a bunch of side-show exhibitions including painted cloth, reproductions from books, and a very stupid film. Goshka Macuga's "Deutsches Volk -- Deutsches Arbeit" is a glass-and-steel sculpture that at least is well-made, giving an illusion of solidity from dozens of thin sheets of glass. But one piece stood out: Gabriel Kuri has erected four yellow shapes of no particular distinction, and on them he's put coat-check numbers. Patrons checking into the museum may hit one of the lucky numbers, in which case their coats are draped by the appropriate number under the watchful eye of guards. I'm not sure why this appealed to me so much, but it did, maybe because, unlike the rest of the solipsistic, content-free work on display here, it admitted that there was an audience and sought to involve them personally. (This more than the curators deigned to do at the Neue Nationalgalerie, incidentally: there are no signs with titles or artists on or near the works, which I found incredibly arrogant and confusing.)
That's the big problem with the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art: it was curated by a bunch of theory-addled insiders whose only interest, it would seem, is in padding their CVs. That there is nothing of interest of relevance to the outside world doesn't matter to them. The public be damned, although we're spending some of their money, throwing it at our friends. And then, as a final cynical middle-finger, the event is subtitled "when things cast no shadow," which only thrusts the emperor's-new-clothes aspect into the open. Almost none of this art will be remembered, let alone cast a shadow on contemporary practice. Visitors to Berlin while it's open would be much better advised to crawl the gallery districts of Auguststr., Mauerstr., Brunnenstr. and elsewhere, where galleries, knowing they've got the upper hand with artists who care about what they're doing, have put up some of the best stuff they can get their hands on.
Stop funding this joke. Maybe it will go away.
I missed the last one on early word that it was toxic, but last Sunday, Bowleserised, BiB, Karl-Marx-Strasse and I met at the Kunst Werke on Auguststr. to see as much as we could. I finished the process today with a visit to the one venue we'd missed, the Neuenationalgalerie.
The short verdict: worse than ever. A somewhat lengthier appraisal follows.
KW is the center of this event, although whether it's still partnered with PS 1 in New York I don't know. For PS 1's sake, I hope not. It's not a real good venue for anything, with its steep stairways and small exhibition spaces, getting smaller the higher you ascend. Four floors are open for this show, and yet you can do the whole thing in about 20 minutes, so empty is it of any content or thought-provoking work. For instance, there's the lowest floor, the former cellar. Most of this has been given to Turkish artist Ahmet Ögüt, who has installed a work he calls "Ground Control." In other words, he spent part of last year and part of this year paving it with tar. It's one of those rare artworks which engages the sense of smell, since the tar's still cooling, but it's still tar. On the same floor is a HD-video installation by Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys called "The Frigate," twenty minutes of a bunch of unattractive people staring at each other. I guess you could invoke Bill Viola's name here, but it would be in vain. There's the exciting part: sort of random organ music suddenly swells up, there are a few shots of some industrial product close-up, and then the woman in the group is seen staring at a ship-model which has been painted black.
Apparently one of the stars of this mess is someone called Pushwagner, who has spread out a "graphic novel" called Soft City in vitrines along a serpentine passageway. The subject of this daring work is conformity and capitalism. as it follows a family whose father wakes up and goes to work in a huge corporation just like every other man in the city while the woman takes the baby and goes shopping in a huge store. Like I said, real cutting-edge. Some notes I picked up later at the Schinkel Pavillion (about which more in a minute) says that "it is with a crude attitude and from a dropout perspective that Pushwagner observes the world and its mechanisms." This is art-speak for "not very well drawn."
Looking over the list of other works at the KW, I found I couldn't really remember many of them. There's Patricia Esquivas' two "Folklore" films, where she explains contemporary Spanish art from a chart in hesitant English. There's Michel Auder's four-minute film "My Last Bag of Heroin (For Real)," in which the artist chases the dragon on a piece of foil, reloads, and does it again, and then mumbles about checking himself into a hospital the next day. Fascinating. It was followed by a later work called "Polaroid Cocaine," showing that he'd definitely made progress, if only from one drug to another, but the music involved was so grating I had to leave the little cubicle where it was showing.
On the third floor is the only work worth looking at, although it's hard to do: Kohei Yoshiyuki spent eight years photographing people having sex in a park in Japan, using infrared film, apparently. The series, entitled "Park," has been much shown and much commented upon, as well it should be, since it brings up all kinds of questions about the role of the artist's license to document, invasion of privacy, responsibility in the case of possible criminal behavior (some of these photos seem to document rape -- although perhaps that's just an illusion) and, of course, the morality of exhibiting all of this publicly.
The rest is so forgettable that, well, I've pretty much forgotten it although it's only been a couple of days. But there are four venues in this year's Biennial, so we found ourselves willing to look at more. We headed toward the Skulpturenpark, located on a swath of former Wall no-man's-land on the border of Mitte and Kreuzberg, but realized on the way over that there was something called the Schinkel Pavilion at Oberwallstr. 1. Just try finding it! It turned out to be on the short bit of the street that comes off of Unter den Linden, through a door and up some stairs. What it has to do with Schinkel I can't tell you, but I can tell you that after all that effort we were greeted with a room filled with a few huge canvases by our old pal Pushwagner. We lasted a minute or two and left.
The Skulpturenpark is almost impossible to find with the aid of the map they hand you. (So, for that matter, is the Schinkel Pavilion). Once you get there, you may wish you hadn't. I'm not convinced we saw all of it -- it's very badly laid out -- but what there was was pretty dull. First, we stopped in a little shelter to see Lars Lauman's 27-minute film about the woman who's convinced she's married to the Berlin Wall. This woman is either a sad, mentally unbalanced person (not impossible) or a performance artist of little talent (less likely). If it's the former, as I suspect it is, Lauman's film is a work of mean-spirited exploitation of the mentally ill. If it's the latter, he's as untalented as she is. Anyway, this isn't an installation, it's an actual documentary film, so what's it doing in this show of alleged art?
Elsewhere, Killian Rüthemann has dug some holes, a piece he calls "Stripping," and Katerina Seda has erected an enclosure which can only be entered via a few stepladders or by climbing up its sides. Don't fall: the interior has huge pieces of broken plate-glass. There's a message here, and I think it's "stay away from Czech artists." From a heap of rubble in the center of the largest part of the "park," a sound installation by Susan Hiller erupts every now and again. Must be fun for the folks in the pricey apartments nearby, although it's just simple tones and overtones.
At this point we were seriously the worse for wear, so while 3/4 of our company headed over to the Nikolaiviertel in search of nourishment I jumped into a U-Bahn station and went home.
But I'd paid €12 for my ticket, and the Neuenationalgalerie portion remained unpunched. I wasn't going to condemn the entire Biennial without seeing the whole thing. After all, one really brilliant piece (by Joao Penalva) had rescued the first one for me, and it's not impossible that it would happen with another artist this time.
But no. The entire ground floor of the museum is littered with mediocrity. There's something called "Pygmalion Workshop" by Nashashabi/Skaer, which would have been brilliant if it had stopped with the reconstruction of a partially-ruined Greek sculpture in shiny Plexiglass on the floor, but blew it with a bunch of side-show exhibitions including painted cloth, reproductions from books, and a very stupid film. Goshka Macuga's "Deutsches Volk -- Deutsches Arbeit" is a glass-and-steel sculpture that at least is well-made, giving an illusion of solidity from dozens of thin sheets of glass. But one piece stood out: Gabriel Kuri has erected four yellow shapes of no particular distinction, and on them he's put coat-check numbers. Patrons checking into the museum may hit one of the lucky numbers, in which case their coats are draped by the appropriate number under the watchful eye of guards. I'm not sure why this appealed to me so much, but it did, maybe because, unlike the rest of the solipsistic, content-free work on display here, it admitted that there was an audience and sought to involve them personally. (This more than the curators deigned to do at the Neue Nationalgalerie, incidentally: there are no signs with titles or artists on or near the works, which I found incredibly arrogant and confusing.)
That's the big problem with the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art: it was curated by a bunch of theory-addled insiders whose only interest, it would seem, is in padding their CVs. That there is nothing of interest of relevance to the outside world doesn't matter to them. The public be damned, although we're spending some of their money, throwing it at our friends. And then, as a final cynical middle-finger, the event is subtitled "when things cast no shadow," which only thrusts the emperor's-new-clothes aspect into the open. Almost none of this art will be remembered, let alone cast a shadow on contemporary practice. Visitors to Berlin while it's open would be much better advised to crawl the gallery districts of Auguststr., Mauerstr., Brunnenstr. and elsewhere, where galleries, knowing they've got the upper hand with artists who care about what they're doing, have put up some of the best stuff they can get their hands on.
Stop funding this joke. Maybe it will go away.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
His Berlin
I've known John Rockwell ever since I wrote a story for Us magazine, back in 1978 or so. At the time, the magazine was owned by the New York Times, and Rockwell worked for them. They'd asked me for a story on "Women in Rock," which I thought was a great idea, since punk had finally liberated female rock musicians from the "chick singer" slot, and so I interviewed Joan Jett, Debbie Harry (a chick singer, true, but somehow different), Patti Smith, and Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth (who provided me with one of my favorite quotes ever: "Naked, I look sorta like Rudolf Nureyev."). They didn't like the first draft I submitted, so I rewrote the story. They still didn't like it, but were itching to go to press with it, so without telling me, they plagiarized a bunch of stuff from Ben Fong-Torres' interviews for Rolling Stone and a story Rockwell had done for the Times on Linda Ronstadt. I was horrified when I saw the magazine -- for which it was the cover story -- and even more horrified when the plagiarism was spread by the New York Times Syndicate to several dozen daily newspapers across America under my byline. The resultant uproar (Us refused to print a retraction or apology) effectively ended my career for a while and I took a job as a secretary at the Levi Strauss Corporation, which was all my skills could get me in San Francisco at the time.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Both Fong-Torres and Rockwell were very angry, naturally, but Rockwell and I had a friend in common, who arranged a dinner (I cooked) so we could meet and I could plead my case. John was appalled that the Times would do such a thing, but believed me. So we've been in touch ever since.
Ironically, we've seen more of each other since I moved to Berlin than in the years previous because of his work at the Times and, for a while, as director of the Lincoln Center Festival. John has never needed an excuse to come to Germany: he's one of the most unabashed Germanophiles I've ever run into. And, because he moved here when he was five and has lived here on and off since, he never needs an excuse to come to Berlin, where he still has old family friends dating from his father's posting here as an administrator of OMGUS, the Office of Military Government, U.S., from 1945 until just before the Berlin blockade.
So it was no surprise to hear his voice on the phone a couple of weeks ago telling me he'd accepted a short residency at the American Academy in Berlin. Usually, fellows at the Academy live there for six months while they complete or research a book, but John took a shorter stay in exchange for simply giving a lecture, which was going to be entitled "My Berlin."
Naturally, I had to hear this.
Last Thursday, I found myself walking down one of those mansion-encrusted far West Berlin streets near the Wannsee U-Bahn to hand my invitation to the gatekeeper and walk to the former villa of banker Hans Arnhold, where a mixture of Academy fellows and local intellectuals of both the German and American persuasions had come for the talk. John saw to it that I was also invited for the dinner (duck liver pâté on sherry-apple gelée and lamb's lettuce followed by wild boar sirloin medallions in chestnut sauce with jerusalem artichoke purée and broccoli romanesco -- not a million miles from what one would encounter at a place like Guy), where I was seated next to the director of the Dresden Philharmonic and a cultural attaché from the American Embassy and across from the director of the Radial System arts space and not far from a woman who thought for the longest while that I was Ed Wood. Heady conversation ensued.
Not, however, as heady as the talk which followed. John was introduced by Pamela Rosenberg, the managing director of the Berlin Philharmonic, an old school-chum of John's and a fellow Germanophile, who talked about his youthful enthusiasm for German opera and his immense record collection, both of which I can verify from personal experience.
Finally, John took the podium for his speech. He started by acknowleding his Germanophilia, while noting that this is always intertwined with the question of German culture and evil. Sensibly, he noted that although Wagner was an antisemite, the critical industry of going back to his operas and finding antisemitism in every one of them was a deplorable instance of post hoc ergo propter hoc, which I found refreshing. There is, after all, not even a Shylock or Fagin in Wagner. He did a lot of reminiscing, and I began to figure out where what I'd always considered an odd quirk had germinated. When you're five years old and you've got cultured German musicians playing in your house, playing German classics right up where you can see them, you're going to get fascinated with the music and the musicians. Furthermore, you're going to make the association, once you're back in the States, with that other place, Germany, where this happens. And that's going to lead to a fascination, not only with the music if you're so inclined (and John clearly was), but also with the country. So it's not surprising to see him doing graduate work in German topics, or hanging out in Bayreuth seeing Wagner operas over and over and over -- and returning year after year to see different producitons of them.
That he also wound up being a music critic, first at the Los Angeles Times, then at the New York Times is hardly surprising, but that he wound up as the New York Times' chief rock critic -- and did a bang-up job of it -- is what has made him a unique figure on the American critical landscape. He was doing both jobs during the great Downtown Renaissance of the late '70s -- ie, the rise of both CBGBs and Steve Reich -- and got to witness (as did I, although not as frequently or as up close) the greatest American musical revolution of our age. He's got a perplexing fondness for Linda Ronstadt that I don't share, but he's on the money a lot of the time.
As the talk continued, though, I began to see very clearly where we diverge. It comes down to one crucial juncture: romanticism. A whole lot of musical appreciation, whether some people want to admit it or not, comes down to making a soul connection, feeling a resonance within yourself to the music being presented. If you don't feel it, you gotta fake it, like the man said, but you can't fake it in print, not for long. And romanticism has never rung a single bell with me. I'm right down with the whole history of European classical (or so-called) music from Machaut through Haydn, but the minute Beethoven stalks onto the scene, I take a vacation until Stravinsky and the boys show up 80 or so years later. And even then there's a lot of stuff I can't stand, and most of it refers straight to romanticism, right down to Arnold Schoenberg and Elliot Carter.
"Romanticism is about extremes," John said, adding later that "I like romanticism with some constraints." Well, you don't have to know much about European culture to know that romanticism wasn't just music, and that its theoretical and practical origins are just about 100% German: Goethe, Schiller, and on and on. And that stuff just glazes my eyes over. I've never been able to read it, don't much like its painted or sculpted manifestations, or find any resonance in its literature or music. Is this a blind-spot, a defect in my orientation that needs fixing?
Well, naturally, I don't think so. But the equation of German culture with romanticism, or maybe just my realizing how inextricably knotted together the two are, opened my eyes just a little more. When I went to the Academy, I was still seething with an "I hate Germans" vibe I'd picked up at this year's Green Week, which had exacerbated my nagging, years-long, realization that I've just been here too long and need to move on. And maybe it was the musical clue which was responsible for a realization: once we're past the 19th Century, my musical touchstones, from Stravinsky (Russian, but it was very much a francophile culture) through Copland (studied with Boulanger in Paris) through Glass (ditto), not to mention Ravel and Poulenc and all that electronic music I was so crazy about as a teenager, are French! I felt I'd been absolved of my visceral dislike of Germany. I don't get it, never have, and don't have to.
This is the point where I make the obvious disclaimer that I don't expect France to be the magic pill which solves everything. If anything, their bureaucracy is as pig-headed as Germany's, only lacking the tiny bit of efficiency that German Ordnung brings. There's an arrogance, cultural and political, which is annoying, although as an American I guess I'm inured to a lot of that. And I won't bother expatiating about the values I find there which are more congruent with my own when it comes to esthetics or sensuality.
Coincidentally, the morning after John's talk, I got an e-mail from a guy in Berkeley who reads this blog, who'd been here the weekend before and was still a little drunk on the experience. He's planning to buy a place here and live here part-time, and had been in the Kollwitzplatz market at the same time I had been there, and was going on about how wonderful the place seemed to him. I wrote him a rather scathing reply, and suggested he read this article that Bowleserised had passed along.
We all have our Berlins. John has his, the guy in Berkeley has his, and I have mine. Your Berlin isn't superior to mine, mine's not superior to yours, at least not if either of us has come to our Berlin by serious thought.
It's goat cheese or asparagus. I know people who just cannot stand asparagus, and I can't understand that at all. But I also know people -- French people, especially -- who are serious connoisseurs of goat cheeses. It's understandable: there are a lot of them, and there are a lot of serious artisans making them, pouring their expertise into the job, and I honor them for that just as I honor winemakers for doing essentially the same thing with a different product. It's just that, for whatever reason, I can't eat it. My throat literally closes up, making it impossible for me to swallow it in the unlikely event that I've gotten it past my nose. I have no idea why this is -- it's not as easy a problem as decoding German culture through romanticism, after all -- and it may be due to biochemistry or genetics. As may be other people's asparagus problem, I don't know.
But at least now I think I have a firmer grip on my Germanophobia, thanks to John's Germanophilia. I'm still skeptical about the view both he and Ms. Rosenberg have that Berlin at the moment is a hot-spot of creativity -- it seems to me that that train left the station long ago -- but I'm glad to have a clearer vision than ever of why I need to move on.
Monday, September 24, 2007
PopKomm Ate My Brain, and other music news
Hmpf, I thought I'd have a lot more to say about PopKomm this year, but it was almost spectacularly uneventful. The trade show was put into larger quarters, which meant there were larger stands, but except for Sony/BMG, which had a huge, almost empty area all done in sparking white, none were terribly notable. There were almost no freebies (this is usually when I recharge my cigarette-lighter supply, but no luck this year), and almost no gimmicks, although the light-up martini glasses some Swedish company was using for their drinks were cool.
Overall, it seems attendance at the conference and trade-fair was down, and a number of countries whose export agencies are usually quite visible -- most notably Ireland -- were missing. For those of you who are interested, the export agencies are, obviously, government bodies in charge of promoting goods made in a given country to potential customers in the outside world. In a number of countries, particularly in Europe, pop music is perceived to be one of these potential exports, which means that a band or performer working abroad can, at least theoretically, get some support from the export agency, since any success will mean money for live shows and/or records coming into the country. It's a good idea, and has worked well for Holland and France, to name just two.
In fact, the main event during PopKomm was one that didn't happen there: Steve Jobs came to Berlin to hold a press conference announcing the iPhone partnership with T Mobile, and to talk about iTunes' German store. (Hey, Steve, what about that Apple Store that's been supposed to be opening here for the last five or six years?) This event is such a natural to have happen at PopKomm that I can only wonder why it didn't. Has PopKomm got so little visibility in the international tech and music worlds that nobody at Apple knew about it? Is it visible but considered unimportant? It's inconceivable that an event like that would ignore SXSW, the folks I was working for at PopKomm, because events like this are where the early adopters are -- not to mention that iTunes is a music-biz behemoth.
Which brings me to yet another gripe, although not a PopKomm one, for the most part. Once again, the list of attendees with their contact information was on a CD-ROM, which is a bad idea because it's so easily scanned by spammers, and once again that CD-ROM was Windows only. So was the DVD given away in the bags, called See the Music! Berlin's Music Industry in a 3D City Model, developed for music-in-berlin.de by Berlin Partner, the Berlin KommunikationsForum e.V., the Senat's Department for Economics, Technology, and Women's issues, the Senat's Department for Urban Development, and funds from the European Regional Development Fund. Any of whom could have walked around the room and noticed the disproportionate numbers of Macintosh computers in use, and most of whom, I would think, would also know that it doesn't cost any more to put together something like this in a hybrid form. A complete and total waste of money the city doesn't have. Which I'd probably also be saying if I could play the damn thing.
As always, I skipped the live music in the evenings and went home to rest up for my 7-hour shift at the SXSW stand during the day. PopKomm never brings in anything I want to see anyway (hell, I'm not interested in 90% of the stuff at SXSW, either; aging does have its up-side), and this year was certainly no different.
* * *
Meanwhile, Tesla, whose troubles I outlined earlier, has decided to fight back. Here's the latest press release from them, orthography and all intact:
call to action
in light of the current threat to t e s l a 's existence, we call upon artists, audience, and colleagues, to communicate to the state of berlin what the city risks to lose with this decision. learn more about the current situation at http://www.tesla-berlin.de , write a letter or an e mail to mr andre schmitz, the state secretary for cultural affairs, and please remember to send a copy to t e s l a , as well, for our documentation. you will find the necessary addresses at the end of this mail.
rather than generic protest letters, we particularly encourage qualified statements on the meaning and importance of media art, on the need for venues for artistic production, presentation, and reflection, on support for media art in berlin, and on t e s l a 's role in both a local and international context. in the coming months, we will increase our efforts to attain support from the state of berlin for this branch of the arts, and we hope that this action will make it clear that a real need and a broad interest exists.
we thank you for your support. we hope that this campaign will reach those responsible for cultural politics and demonstrate to them the vital need for a competent center for art and media in berlin. please forward this call trough your mailing list. please address any questions to moritz von rappard (pr and press) at 030. 247 49 788 or public@tesla-berlin.de.
andreas broeckmann, detlev schneider, carsten seiffarth
Herrn Staatssekretär André Schmitz
beim Regierenden Bürgermeister von Berlin
Senatskanzlei - Kulturelle Angelegenheiten
Brunnenstraße 188 - 190
10119 Berlin
andre.schmitz@senwfk.verwalt-berlin.de
t e s l a
media > art < laboratory
podewils'sches palais
klosterstraße 68
10179 berlin
public@tesla-berlin.de
I gotta say, I wish them well, but I've been here long enough to suspect this protest will be given polite attention and then ignored.
Overall, it seems attendance at the conference and trade-fair was down, and a number of countries whose export agencies are usually quite visible -- most notably Ireland -- were missing. For those of you who are interested, the export agencies are, obviously, government bodies in charge of promoting goods made in a given country to potential customers in the outside world. In a number of countries, particularly in Europe, pop music is perceived to be one of these potential exports, which means that a band or performer working abroad can, at least theoretically, get some support from the export agency, since any success will mean money for live shows and/or records coming into the country. It's a good idea, and has worked well for Holland and France, to name just two.
In fact, the main event during PopKomm was one that didn't happen there: Steve Jobs came to Berlin to hold a press conference announcing the iPhone partnership with T Mobile, and to talk about iTunes' German store. (Hey, Steve, what about that Apple Store that's been supposed to be opening here for the last five or six years?) This event is such a natural to have happen at PopKomm that I can only wonder why it didn't. Has PopKomm got so little visibility in the international tech and music worlds that nobody at Apple knew about it? Is it visible but considered unimportant? It's inconceivable that an event like that would ignore SXSW, the folks I was working for at PopKomm, because events like this are where the early adopters are -- not to mention that iTunes is a music-biz behemoth.
Which brings me to yet another gripe, although not a PopKomm one, for the most part. Once again, the list of attendees with their contact information was on a CD-ROM, which is a bad idea because it's so easily scanned by spammers, and once again that CD-ROM was Windows only. So was the DVD given away in the bags, called See the Music! Berlin's Music Industry in a 3D City Model, developed for music-in-berlin.de by Berlin Partner, the Berlin KommunikationsForum e.V., the Senat's Department for Economics, Technology, and Women's issues, the Senat's Department for Urban Development, and funds from the European Regional Development Fund. Any of whom could have walked around the room and noticed the disproportionate numbers of Macintosh computers in use, and most of whom, I would think, would also know that it doesn't cost any more to put together something like this in a hybrid form. A complete and total waste of money the city doesn't have. Which I'd probably also be saying if I could play the damn thing.
As always, I skipped the live music in the evenings and went home to rest up for my 7-hour shift at the SXSW stand during the day. PopKomm never brings in anything I want to see anyway (hell, I'm not interested in 90% of the stuff at SXSW, either; aging does have its up-side), and this year was certainly no different.
* * *
Meanwhile, Tesla, whose troubles I outlined earlier, has decided to fight back. Here's the latest press release from them, orthography and all intact:
call to action
in light of the current threat to t e s l a 's existence, we call upon artists, audience, and colleagues, to communicate to the state of berlin what the city risks to lose with this decision. learn more about the current situation at http://www.tesla-berlin.de , write a letter or an e mail to mr andre schmitz, the state secretary for cultural affairs, and please remember to send a copy to t e s l a , as well, for our documentation. you will find the necessary addresses at the end of this mail.
rather than generic protest letters, we particularly encourage qualified statements on the meaning and importance of media art, on the need for venues for artistic production, presentation, and reflection, on support for media art in berlin, and on t e s l a 's role in both a local and international context. in the coming months, we will increase our efforts to attain support from the state of berlin for this branch of the arts, and we hope that this action will make it clear that a real need and a broad interest exists.
we thank you for your support. we hope that this campaign will reach those responsible for cultural politics and demonstrate to them the vital need for a competent center for art and media in berlin. please forward this call trough your mailing list. please address any questions to moritz von rappard (pr and press) at 030. 247 49 788 or public@tesla-berlin.de.
andreas broeckmann, detlev schneider, carsten seiffarth
Herrn Staatssekretär André Schmitz
beim Regierenden Bürgermeister von Berlin
Senatskanzlei - Kulturelle Angelegenheiten
Brunnenstraße 188 - 190
10119 Berlin
andre.schmitz@senwfk.verwalt-berlin.de
t e s l a
media > art < laboratory
podewils'sches palais
klosterstraße 68
10179 berlin
public@tesla-berlin.de
I gotta say, I wish them well, but I've been here long enough to suspect this protest will be given polite attention and then ignored.
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