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 art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Monday, September 15, 2008
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Art In The Afternoon
So what's a guy to do after a day's apartment hunting has come up dry, he's a 30-minute walk from his hotel (and in no hurry to return to its barren location on a traffic circle in the middle of nowhere) and he's in the middle of downtown Montpellier? Go see art, of course.
It's not like there's a lot to see. Montpellier is a fairly crappy town for art. Of course, there's the ultra-deluxe, newly-reopened Musée Fabre, which is currently playing host to the Courbet show that the Met had recently played host to (before that was in Paris). I'm no Courbet fan, really, but the place is air-conditioned, and the show's gotten some ecstatic reviews, so I walked down there and paid the reasonable admission price.
It's kind of too bad that this show's been promoted by the "crazy artist" self-portrait Courbet painted in his youth, since the whole story is a lot more complex than you'd gather from looking at it. Courbet, of course, was a great self-promoter, and this image plays right into his "tortured artist" schtick, even though for most of his life he was a great deal less tormented and more comfortable -- albeit fairly revolutionary -- and made a point of entering all the official competitions in Paris. Some of his subject matter was shocking for its realism, and a lot of his technique stretched the boundaries of what the Establishment of his day felt was acceptable, but my take on the body of work shown here is that he yo-yoed back and forth between shocking the old men and sucking up to them.
Of course, what was revolutionary in Courbet's day is hardly so today, but especially in his landscapes, I got the distinct feeling that he, like many other artists of his day, was groping towards Impressionism, which for obvious reasons -- the existence of an Academy, the fact that photography hadn't really been improved yet, the conservatism of collectors -- took a long time to happen. Stare at a seascape, something Courbet rendered masterfully, long enough and you're going to start going Impressionist, not to mention abstract, in your head. His paintings of woodlands, too, are just blurry enough around the edges to make you realize that he's playing with the textures color can make happen as much as he's "painting the woods."
But then there are things like his hunting paintings. It's not just revulsion at the subject matter that makes me dislike them -- hell, anyone who's seen as many German renderings of hunts as I have has gotten used to that by now -- but the fact that they must have been painted to appeal to the bourgeoisie. Who else would be interested? Who else would be so attracted to themes like The Nobility Of The Dying Stag or Nature Brought To Bay? Really, Gustave: nice technique, but the subject-matter is hardly as revolutionary as you make yourself out to be.
See, that's the maddening thing about Courbet: he was always proclaiming that he was totally overthrowing the world of art, but half the time he was backpedaling. Of course, the other half of the time he was, um, totally overthrowing the world of art. Painting nudes, for instance: not revolutionary. Painting two fat lesbians bathing in a river, on the other hand, would tend to bring the squares up short. Not to mention the famous Sleep, which is wonderfully composed, impeccably painted, and very, very explicit.
This is what made people crazy when it came to Courbet: he'd enter something like this in the Big Show in Paris and everyone would have to admit that boy, did he have technique and all, but eeek, the subject-matter! And we won't even discuss his famous Origin of the World, one of the most notorious paintings ever made, and also in this show.
(I note "also in this show" because two of his most important paintings, one of his studio, and another whose subject is a funeral, are not in the show, for some reason, having stayed home at the Louvre. It's a bit disconcerting to read and read about them in the captioning without at least being able to see a reproduction.)
Courbet's end is pretty sad, considering the flamboyant life he led for years. He got mixed up with the Paris Commune, and advocated the pulling-down of a military monument in Paris. It was probably just crazy-artist talk, but the Communards went and did it, and after their revolution was put down, the government went at Courbet to try to get him to pay close to a quarter-million francs for its restoration. He was imprisoned for a number of years, and completed one really great painting, The Trout in jail. His health never recovered, and he died broke.
I didn't anticipate seeing this show, so I didn't take notes. Please excuse the sketchy nature of the above (and below) as a result. In fact, I'd hoped to put it off until a friend who works at the Fabre came back from vacation and could sneak me in for free. But, as it turned out, the Courbet show, even for a Romantiphobe like myself, was worth paying for.
* * *
Thus, having seen it, and with more time on my hands, I decided to see the rest of the museum. Big mistake: who knew there could be that much bad art under one roof? Well, me for one: back in the days when I was roving cultural correspondent for this part of the world for the Wall Street Journal Europe, I'd make it a point to hit the art museum in any given city I was visiting after I'd done reporting what I'd gone to see -- which was often a show at said art museum. And folks, Europe is filled with culture and some of it is just plain awful. For every Gustave Courbet, there were 500 artists with skill and technique and absolutely no ideas at all. One of them was Fabre himself, who decided to remind Montpellier for all eternity that he'd lived there by erecting a museum to house his eye-glazingly dull paintings and those of his pals. This serves as the core, and the guide to acquiring new paintings, for the current museum. You have been warned.
Since the Festival du Radio France was (and still is) going on there, the Fabre has a short-time exhibition of Stradivarius instruments, violins, violas, and cellos only (no guitars -- and he made plenty). And although there were publicity materials for this at the Tourist Office, there wasn't a single sign anywhere in the museum indicating where these were on display. None. I finally asked a guard.
And while we're on the subject of stuff that doesn't work in the Fabre, two more things. Although the Courbet show had played the Met, the English captions are extremely truncated, and don't give nearly the amount of information the French ones do. It seems to me that there must've been ready-made captions available: why not use them? The other thing is ongoing: during the course of my visit, I used a men's room. When I entered, the light was on. As it should be, right? Well, it didn't stay on long, and the room, windowless, was utterly black. I finally managed to bang against the door-handle in my blindness, and the light went back on. That's the switch. You might like to remember that. Also, after I washed my hands, I realized there were no towels. Nor is this an anomaly: walking around with wet hands, I found another men's room. No towels in that, either. Nor are there any of those stupid air-blowers. Nothing. Weird.
* * *
On my first night in town, Miss Expatria reminded me that there was a show of 240 photographs by Weegee for free at the Pavillion Populaire, which is sort of across the street from the Fabre, and on another afternoon of frustration, I decided to see it. In fact, I realized as I walked in, I'd never really seen any of Weegee's work in bulk, just a few gallery shows at a Berlin gallery which represents his estate. Those shows tended to be thematic, and this was more general.
That said, it was thematically organized: the show opens, oddly enough, with images of sleep -- often drunken sleep, since Weegee loved the Bowery. I kept thinking there must be another way to organize this material that's not so damn linear, but haven't come up with one yet. Still, by the second or third room I'd surrendered to Usher H. Fellig's vision (no wonder he called himself Weegee). It's hard not to: just looking at one of his shots is a confrontation. What he's making you look at often isn't pretty, but it's Right! There! in your face. Looking away isn't an option: it'd be a violation of your contract with the photo. And, whether or not what you're seeing is "the truth," you're sure as hell looking at what he wants you to see. Some of it -- the shots of couples making out in movie theaters, done with infrared film -- verges on stalking. Verges, hell: it is stalking. And most of his subjects are stripped naked, even the nudes, who glare at you as if saying "This is me. So what?" There's an erotic frisson, but it dissipates pretty quickly.
Again, I didn't take notes, but one thing really struck me: the captions to each set were as dumb as could be. Only someone who had never set foot in the United States could have written them (they're all in French, if that helps). And in some cases, they're so ignorant that it hurts: there are numerous shots taken at Sammy's, a cabaret on the Bowery that was big with the upper crust who went slumming, with entertainers and characters galore. The caption notes that after Sammy's closed, it was a long time before entertainment returned to the Bowery with the opening of CBGBs, which, it says, featured Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Uh... And the simple captions on the pictures themselves are also suspect: in a series on strippers, there's one of a few girls with op-art designs painted on their bodies standing in front of a rock band with Fender guitars. This is labelled as being from the late 1940s. So late, I'd say, that it was at least 20 years into the late 1940s.
None of this, of course, distracts from the images themselves, and the show's up until September 14. If you're in town, go. It's one of the art bargains of the summer.
Still to come, notes on food.
It's not like there's a lot to see. Montpellier is a fairly crappy town for art. Of course, there's the ultra-deluxe, newly-reopened Musée Fabre, which is currently playing host to the Courbet show that the Met had recently played host to (before that was in Paris). I'm no Courbet fan, really, but the place is air-conditioned, and the show's gotten some ecstatic reviews, so I walked down there and paid the reasonable admission price.
It's kind of too bad that this show's been promoted by the "crazy artist" self-portrait Courbet painted in his youth, since the whole story is a lot more complex than you'd gather from looking at it. Courbet, of course, was a great self-promoter, and this image plays right into his "tortured artist" schtick, even though for most of his life he was a great deal less tormented and more comfortable -- albeit fairly revolutionary -- and made a point of entering all the official competitions in Paris. Some of his subject matter was shocking for its realism, and a lot of his technique stretched the boundaries of what the Establishment of his day felt was acceptable, but my take on the body of work shown here is that he yo-yoed back and forth between shocking the old men and sucking up to them.
Of course, what was revolutionary in Courbet's day is hardly so today, but especially in his landscapes, I got the distinct feeling that he, like many other artists of his day, was groping towards Impressionism, which for obvious reasons -- the existence of an Academy, the fact that photography hadn't really been improved yet, the conservatism of collectors -- took a long time to happen. Stare at a seascape, something Courbet rendered masterfully, long enough and you're going to start going Impressionist, not to mention abstract, in your head. His paintings of woodlands, too, are just blurry enough around the edges to make you realize that he's playing with the textures color can make happen as much as he's "painting the woods."
But then there are things like his hunting paintings. It's not just revulsion at the subject matter that makes me dislike them -- hell, anyone who's seen as many German renderings of hunts as I have has gotten used to that by now -- but the fact that they must have been painted to appeal to the bourgeoisie. Who else would be interested? Who else would be so attracted to themes like The Nobility Of The Dying Stag or Nature Brought To Bay? Really, Gustave: nice technique, but the subject-matter is hardly as revolutionary as you make yourself out to be.
See, that's the maddening thing about Courbet: he was always proclaiming that he was totally overthrowing the world of art, but half the time he was backpedaling. Of course, the other half of the time he was, um, totally overthrowing the world of art. Painting nudes, for instance: not revolutionary. Painting two fat lesbians bathing in a river, on the other hand, would tend to bring the squares up short. Not to mention the famous Sleep, which is wonderfully composed, impeccably painted, and very, very explicit.
This is what made people crazy when it came to Courbet: he'd enter something like this in the Big Show in Paris and everyone would have to admit that boy, did he have technique and all, but eeek, the subject-matter! And we won't even discuss his famous Origin of the World, one of the most notorious paintings ever made, and also in this show.
(I note "also in this show" because two of his most important paintings, one of his studio, and another whose subject is a funeral, are not in the show, for some reason, having stayed home at the Louvre. It's a bit disconcerting to read and read about them in the captioning without at least being able to see a reproduction.)
Courbet's end is pretty sad, considering the flamboyant life he led for years. He got mixed up with the Paris Commune, and advocated the pulling-down of a military monument in Paris. It was probably just crazy-artist talk, but the Communards went and did it, and after their revolution was put down, the government went at Courbet to try to get him to pay close to a quarter-million francs for its restoration. He was imprisoned for a number of years, and completed one really great painting, The Trout in jail. His health never recovered, and he died broke.
I didn't anticipate seeing this show, so I didn't take notes. Please excuse the sketchy nature of the above (and below) as a result. In fact, I'd hoped to put it off until a friend who works at the Fabre came back from vacation and could sneak me in for free. But, as it turned out, the Courbet show, even for a Romantiphobe like myself, was worth paying for.
* * *
Thus, having seen it, and with more time on my hands, I decided to see the rest of the museum. Big mistake: who knew there could be that much bad art under one roof? Well, me for one: back in the days when I was roving cultural correspondent for this part of the world for the Wall Street Journal Europe, I'd make it a point to hit the art museum in any given city I was visiting after I'd done reporting what I'd gone to see -- which was often a show at said art museum. And folks, Europe is filled with culture and some of it is just plain awful. For every Gustave Courbet, there were 500 artists with skill and technique and absolutely no ideas at all. One of them was Fabre himself, who decided to remind Montpellier for all eternity that he'd lived there by erecting a museum to house his eye-glazingly dull paintings and those of his pals. This serves as the core, and the guide to acquiring new paintings, for the current museum. You have been warned.
Since the Festival du Radio France was (and still is) going on there, the Fabre has a short-time exhibition of Stradivarius instruments, violins, violas, and cellos only (no guitars -- and he made plenty). And although there were publicity materials for this at the Tourist Office, there wasn't a single sign anywhere in the museum indicating where these were on display. None. I finally asked a guard.
And while we're on the subject of stuff that doesn't work in the Fabre, two more things. Although the Courbet show had played the Met, the English captions are extremely truncated, and don't give nearly the amount of information the French ones do. It seems to me that there must've been ready-made captions available: why not use them? The other thing is ongoing: during the course of my visit, I used a men's room. When I entered, the light was on. As it should be, right? Well, it didn't stay on long, and the room, windowless, was utterly black. I finally managed to bang against the door-handle in my blindness, and the light went back on. That's the switch. You might like to remember that. Also, after I washed my hands, I realized there were no towels. Nor is this an anomaly: walking around with wet hands, I found another men's room. No towels in that, either. Nor are there any of those stupid air-blowers. Nothing. Weird.
* * *
On my first night in town, Miss Expatria reminded me that there was a show of 240 photographs by Weegee for free at the Pavillion Populaire, which is sort of across the street from the Fabre, and on another afternoon of frustration, I decided to see it. In fact, I realized as I walked in, I'd never really seen any of Weegee's work in bulk, just a few gallery shows at a Berlin gallery which represents his estate. Those shows tended to be thematic, and this was more general.
That said, it was thematically organized: the show opens, oddly enough, with images of sleep -- often drunken sleep, since Weegee loved the Bowery. I kept thinking there must be another way to organize this material that's not so damn linear, but haven't come up with one yet. Still, by the second or third room I'd surrendered to Usher H. Fellig's vision (no wonder he called himself Weegee). It's hard not to: just looking at one of his shots is a confrontation. What he's making you look at often isn't pretty, but it's Right! There! in your face. Looking away isn't an option: it'd be a violation of your contract with the photo. And, whether or not what you're seeing is "the truth," you're sure as hell looking at what he wants you to see. Some of it -- the shots of couples making out in movie theaters, done with infrared film -- verges on stalking. Verges, hell: it is stalking. And most of his subjects are stripped naked, even the nudes, who glare at you as if saying "This is me. So what?" There's an erotic frisson, but it dissipates pretty quickly.
Again, I didn't take notes, but one thing really struck me: the captions to each set were as dumb as could be. Only someone who had never set foot in the United States could have written them (they're all in French, if that helps). And in some cases, they're so ignorant that it hurts: there are numerous shots taken at Sammy's, a cabaret on the Bowery that was big with the upper crust who went slumming, with entertainers and characters galore. The caption notes that after Sammy's closed, it was a long time before entertainment returned to the Bowery with the opening of CBGBs, which, it says, featured Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie. Uh... And the simple captions on the pictures themselves are also suspect: in a series on strippers, there's one of a few girls with op-art designs painted on their bodies standing in front of a rock band with Fender guitars. This is labelled as being from the late 1940s. So late, I'd say, that it was at least 20 years into the late 1940s.
None of this, of course, distracts from the images themselves, and the show's up until September 14. If you're in town, go. It's one of the art bargains of the summer.
Still to come, notes on food.
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.
Saturday, November 24, 2007
Ginglish On Musemsinsel
So while I'm looking for a new place, life, and work, goes on. In recent days, I've picked up a guidebook gig, and one of the chapters I have to do is museums. Which is great: I love museums, and if I had it to do all over again, I might well give in to the impulse I had in my teens to go to musem school and wind up making some dough. I've always loved the way a museum, properly done, is an alternative way of arranging knowledge. I'm used to doing it with words, but museums have to do it with objects. Just as there is with a book or essay, there's an implicit agenda in a musem's ordering of objects: a curator is arguing a position, and the viewer is obliged to sort out the information and react.
I started on Tuesday with a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum because although I've been to a bunch of shows in its I. M. Pei annex, I had yet to see the new permanent collection in the main building itself. Plus, I woke up that day feeling depressed and decided, on the principle of the blues, that immersing oneself in another's misery might make me feel better.
Dunno if it worked, actually; I left the place feeling like my head was going to explode. But that's getting ahead of myself. The permanent collection is divided in two: Roman times to World War I upstairs, and postwar through reunification downstairs. Right off the bat, there's something odd, in that prehistory isn't even touched on, and, thanks to the Neander river valley, if nothing else, Germany has a starring role in that. And anyway, those Germanic tribes must've come from somewhere. But you're only a few meters inside by the time the Christians come on the scene, and the long road to the Holy Roman Empire isn't far away. And so you stroll, as Teutonic knights head off to the Holy Land, Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door (an event the captions claim almost certainly didn't happen), the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight the French, the Austrians fight the Turks, the Swedes fight the Poles, the Germans fight the French, the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight with themselves, and here comes the Congress of Vienna! Pretty soon it's time for the Industrial Revolution, paintings give way to photographs, there's a nice little pair of rooms up a flight of stairs with Jugendstil stuff in them, with a film of German soldiers jamming into trains on their way to the front playing on the downstairs wall just inches away. Next thing you know, you're back on the landing and it's time to go downstairs.
I went through the downstairs rather quicker than I would have liked to; closing time was looming in an hour or so, and I also knew this part of the story better than I did the other half (not that I knew the first half much better after a couple of hours with it, for which I blame my education as much as anything). I also had more tools with which to assess the artifacts, and I have to say, the collection is amazing. Also, the way they partition the post-war stuff the way the country was partitioned is done extremely well; you can see the stuff on the other side, but getting there is another matter, although it's easily enough achieved, of course. (I should mention, though, that the struggle to end the DDR is infinitely better-presented at the almost-unpronounceable-by-non-Germans Zeitgeschichtlisches Forum Leipzig, which is almost reason enough to visit Leipzig all by itself).
But as I walked out into the dark of Unter den Linden, I was experiencing a sensation not unlike vertigo because of all of the captions I'd read. Now, there was a time when all of Berlin's museums' captions were in German only, and there was no way to know what was going on unless you could read German. (Lest this seem a bit of xenophobia, I invite you to go into your nearest American museum and see how much information there is in any other language but English). Now, however, as Berlin's museums are slowly integrating collections divided by the Wall, bilingual German and English captions are showing up. The weirdest of all, though, are in the DHM, which erupt into inexplicable italics every now and again. And it's not because the words are untranslatable German ones like Heimat or Lebensraum, because they're not. They're just random words italicized (a practice I've now demonstrated enough and will cease; you're welcome), in both the German and the English texts. I don't get it, but it sure does slow you down.
The next day I went to the Bode-Museum, which is practically my next-door neighbor. I had no idea what was in it, because back before it got dome-to-dungeon redone, the best anyone could tell me was "coins and stuff." Well, the coins are still there, but so is a load of Byzantine and medieval and early renaissance sculpture, painting, and bits of architecture. I made the acquaintance of the amazing woodcarver Erasmus Grasser, who flourished in Munich between 1474 and 1518, and was boggled by an entire room of stuff by Tilman Riemenschneider, whose ability to represent facial expressions and even emotions is unparallelled in his time. The Bode is all about space, which is why it's particularly good for sculpture; there are two domes letting daylight in, and a gigantic "basilica" with "chapels" on the sides which allow for the display of groupings of renaissance and baroque religious statuary, paintings, and altars.
Here, the captions weren't annoyingly italicized, and for the most part the English was pretty good. Well, until the one where it really wasn't. My eyes were glazing over on the second floor, what with an oversupply of baroque bronze sculpture, but I did stop to read about how they were mass-produced, and I came upon this: "The bronze-smith then prepares the metal to be porn into the mould at this time." The "then...at this time" is bad enough, but...ummm... The piece used to demonstrate this is a naked statue of Mars, anatomically correct, and the first thing that came to my mind was that it isn't porn til it's poured.
This leads me to give voice to what I'll call Augustine's Complaint, because it's been voiced over and over by reader and commenter here Steven Augustine. There are tons of underemployed writers and editors, native English-speakers, here in Berlin. Pay us to proofread this stuff, and we'll turn it into idiomatic English that won't embarrass you. Really. We may not have doctorates in English, but we do read and write it quite fluently, idiomatically, and we offer really, really affordable rates. However, time and again, it's the "qualified" Germans who render this English text, and it shows. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who wrote for a (now defunct, I hope) terrible magazine published by Berliner Tourismus und Marketing for distribution in hotels which were BTM members, called Berlin|Berlin. It was German and English...sorta. My friend, a journalism school graduate, raised bilingually in America, and veteran of some of America's top magazines, wrote an article for them and was told by the editor that her English was terrible. The "corrected" article, of course, was a total howler.
At any rate, I ended this week's museum-going at the Pergamon, whose holdings aren't of as much interest to me, although it's swallowed the Museum of Islamic Art from West Berlin, and you can't help but be awed by a museum that contains not just artifacts, but whole complexes of ancient buildings and a huge hunk of the city wall of Babylon itself. There, the English captioning is often inscrutable and nearly always polished for maximum dullness. They're going to do renovations there in the not-too-distant future, and I wonder if this will mean dealing with this problem. Probably not; they have a reputation to uphold, after all.
I started on Tuesday with a visit to the Deutsches Historisches Museum because although I've been to a bunch of shows in its I. M. Pei annex, I had yet to see the new permanent collection in the main building itself. Plus, I woke up that day feeling depressed and decided, on the principle of the blues, that immersing oneself in another's misery might make me feel better.
Dunno if it worked, actually; I left the place feeling like my head was going to explode. But that's getting ahead of myself. The permanent collection is divided in two: Roman times to World War I upstairs, and postwar through reunification downstairs. Right off the bat, there's something odd, in that prehistory isn't even touched on, and, thanks to the Neander river valley, if nothing else, Germany has a starring role in that. And anyway, those Germanic tribes must've come from somewhere. But you're only a few meters inside by the time the Christians come on the scene, and the long road to the Holy Roman Empire isn't far away. And so you stroll, as Teutonic knights head off to the Holy Land, Martin Luther nails his theses to the church door (an event the captions claim almost certainly didn't happen), the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight the French, the Austrians fight the Turks, the Swedes fight the Poles, the Germans fight the French, the French fight the Germans, the Germans fight with themselves, and here comes the Congress of Vienna! Pretty soon it's time for the Industrial Revolution, paintings give way to photographs, there's a nice little pair of rooms up a flight of stairs with Jugendstil stuff in them, with a film of German soldiers jamming into trains on their way to the front playing on the downstairs wall just inches away. Next thing you know, you're back on the landing and it's time to go downstairs.
I went through the downstairs rather quicker than I would have liked to; closing time was looming in an hour or so, and I also knew this part of the story better than I did the other half (not that I knew the first half much better after a couple of hours with it, for which I blame my education as much as anything). I also had more tools with which to assess the artifacts, and I have to say, the collection is amazing. Also, the way they partition the post-war stuff the way the country was partitioned is done extremely well; you can see the stuff on the other side, but getting there is another matter, although it's easily enough achieved, of course. (I should mention, though, that the struggle to end the DDR is infinitely better-presented at the almost-unpronounceable-by-non-Germans Zeitgeschichtlisches Forum Leipzig, which is almost reason enough to visit Leipzig all by itself).
But as I walked out into the dark of Unter den Linden, I was experiencing a sensation not unlike vertigo because of all of the captions I'd read. Now, there was a time when all of Berlin's museums' captions were in German only, and there was no way to know what was going on unless you could read German. (Lest this seem a bit of xenophobia, I invite you to go into your nearest American museum and see how much information there is in any other language but English). Now, however, as Berlin's museums are slowly integrating collections divided by the Wall, bilingual German and English captions are showing up. The weirdest of all, though, are in the DHM, which erupt into inexplicable italics every now and again. And it's not because the words are untranslatable German ones like Heimat or Lebensraum, because they're not. They're just random words italicized (a practice I've now demonstrated enough and will cease; you're welcome), in both the German and the English texts. I don't get it, but it sure does slow you down.
The next day I went to the Bode-Museum, which is practically my next-door neighbor. I had no idea what was in it, because back before it got dome-to-dungeon redone, the best anyone could tell me was "coins and stuff." Well, the coins are still there, but so is a load of Byzantine and medieval and early renaissance sculpture, painting, and bits of architecture. I made the acquaintance of the amazing woodcarver Erasmus Grasser, who flourished in Munich between 1474 and 1518, and was boggled by an entire room of stuff by Tilman Riemenschneider, whose ability to represent facial expressions and even emotions is unparallelled in his time. The Bode is all about space, which is why it's particularly good for sculpture; there are two domes letting daylight in, and a gigantic "basilica" with "chapels" on the sides which allow for the display of groupings of renaissance and baroque religious statuary, paintings, and altars.
Here, the captions weren't annoyingly italicized, and for the most part the English was pretty good. Well, until the one where it really wasn't. My eyes were glazing over on the second floor, what with an oversupply of baroque bronze sculpture, but I did stop to read about how they were mass-produced, and I came upon this: "The bronze-smith then prepares the metal to be porn into the mould at this time." The "then...at this time" is bad enough, but...ummm... The piece used to demonstrate this is a naked statue of Mars, anatomically correct, and the first thing that came to my mind was that it isn't porn til it's poured.
This leads me to give voice to what I'll call Augustine's Complaint, because it's been voiced over and over by reader and commenter here Steven Augustine. There are tons of underemployed writers and editors, native English-speakers, here in Berlin. Pay us to proofread this stuff, and we'll turn it into idiomatic English that won't embarrass you. Really. We may not have doctorates in English, but we do read and write it quite fluently, idiomatically, and we offer really, really affordable rates. However, time and again, it's the "qualified" Germans who render this English text, and it shows. I'm reminded of a friend of mine who wrote for a (now defunct, I hope) terrible magazine published by Berliner Tourismus und Marketing for distribution in hotels which were BTM members, called Berlin|Berlin. It was German and English...sorta. My friend, a journalism school graduate, raised bilingually in America, and veteran of some of America's top magazines, wrote an article for them and was told by the editor that her English was terrible. The "corrected" article, of course, was a total howler.
At any rate, I ended this week's museum-going at the Pergamon, whose holdings aren't of as much interest to me, although it's swallowed the Museum of Islamic Art from West Berlin, and you can't help but be awed by a museum that contains not just artifacts, but whole complexes of ancient buildings and a huge hunk of the city wall of Babylon itself. There, the English captioning is often inscrutable and nearly always polished for maximum dullness. They're going to do renovations there in the not-too-distant future, and I wonder if this will mean dealing with this problem. Probably not; they have a reputation to uphold, after all.
Friday, November 02, 2007
State of Mindless
I promised, so I deliver.
I managed to go to the New York State of Mind exhibition in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt this week, and even surrendered five euros to see it. I have to say, having covered similar events for six years for the Wall Street Journal and having been to plenty of others as a civilian, it's been a long time since I've seen a show as incoherent and empty as this one. Since it closes on Sunday, I'm saving you the trouble of going.
Now, someone who grew up in New York like I did can be expected to be prejudiced when it comes to a show like this. You can bet that there will be expectations unmet. You might also expect that observations will be put forth with which a native New Yorker will disagree. And, reviewing a show like that, you have to take all of that into consideration yourself and work to block those prejudices. So that's the attitude I walked in with.
But...what was this show about? I wasn't offended, didn't disagree, because I honestly didn't understand what the hell it had to do with New York City. You see, any museum show should allow any reasonably intelligent member of the public to walk through it and understand what the curators were thinking, what they decided to show, and, perhaps, evaluate the degree to which they succeeded in presenting the material at hand. If there weren't signs telling you this show was about New York, you'd never catch on.
The first thing you see when you walk into the main room is one of Marcel Duchamp's multiples, where he packed miniature versions of his Greatest Hits into a box, which he then sold through a gallery. No explanation is given for this object's presence. It's true that Duchamp spent time in New York and made his breakthrough at the infamous Armory Show in 1913, but he's alone in representing his generation and pretty much everything else he stood for here. The other works in the room vary wildly in quality, although for the most part they're mediocre at best. Exceptions are a wall of photos by Mary Ellen Mark, whose little girls with Batman photo is one of the images being used to sell the show on its posters. There's also a video by Gordon Matta-Clark which caught my eye, but it's mounted at floor level with the sound turned way down, so I had no chance to experience it.
Other than that, this main room contains numerous photographs by a German photographer of various lectures and conferences and panel discussions he attended in New York -- hardly riveting stuff -- and a couple of charts purporting to show the march of art and the march of Carolee Schneemann, who is also represented by a bunch of stills from her performances. You'd think she was the only important New York artist around from the attention she's given here. There's also documentation of a couple of performance pieces, like the Chinese artist who lived out of doors in New York for a year, and someone else who apparently distilled and bottled his own sweat. There are some grainy videos, and one by a Berlin artist shot from his bike as he rides the wrong way in traffic in New York, New Orleans, and Berlin. Above the main exhibition area is an installation involving spilled paint and potting-soil bags with Martin Luther King's face on them.
There's also another area where there lives a large, loud installation that's very disorietning, which I guess could be argued is also a simulation of New York City at its most bustling and confusing. Next to that is a room with photographs by German photographer Josephine Meckseper (who, admittedly, lives in New York), including one of two icy blondes in a ridiculously luxurious apartment, one wearing a necklace with the letters CDU and the other wearing one with CSU. Now, that's New York! As you leave this area, there's a video installation about Rome.
Like I said, if the signs everywhere didn't tell you this was about New York, you'd never guess.
What it is, as far as I can tell, is Theory run amok. German intellectuals are big on Theory as the wellspring of all action. It never occurs to them that some creative people just create, nor does it occur to them that sometimes theorizing is a dry and sterile action. Someone got so carried away with the theory behind this exhibition that it escaped the bounds of gravity and soared into the intellectual stratosphere, away from any bonds tying it to the subject matter at hand.
Ah, well, I should complain. It appears that the New York end of this is mostly about classical music. Whether that's all they could think of, or whether it's all they were offered, I don't know. But if New York State of Mind is a preview of what the new, improved Haus der Kulturen der Welt is going to offer, it's not going to be a place I visit very often.
I managed to go to the New York State of Mind exhibition in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt this week, and even surrendered five euros to see it. I have to say, having covered similar events for six years for the Wall Street Journal and having been to plenty of others as a civilian, it's been a long time since I've seen a show as incoherent and empty as this one. Since it closes on Sunday, I'm saving you the trouble of going.
Now, someone who grew up in New York like I did can be expected to be prejudiced when it comes to a show like this. You can bet that there will be expectations unmet. You might also expect that observations will be put forth with which a native New Yorker will disagree. And, reviewing a show like that, you have to take all of that into consideration yourself and work to block those prejudices. So that's the attitude I walked in with.
But...what was this show about? I wasn't offended, didn't disagree, because I honestly didn't understand what the hell it had to do with New York City. You see, any museum show should allow any reasonably intelligent member of the public to walk through it and understand what the curators were thinking, what they decided to show, and, perhaps, evaluate the degree to which they succeeded in presenting the material at hand. If there weren't signs telling you this show was about New York, you'd never catch on.
The first thing you see when you walk into the main room is one of Marcel Duchamp's multiples, where he packed miniature versions of his Greatest Hits into a box, which he then sold through a gallery. No explanation is given for this object's presence. It's true that Duchamp spent time in New York and made his breakthrough at the infamous Armory Show in 1913, but he's alone in representing his generation and pretty much everything else he stood for here. The other works in the room vary wildly in quality, although for the most part they're mediocre at best. Exceptions are a wall of photos by Mary Ellen Mark, whose little girls with Batman photo is one of the images being used to sell the show on its posters. There's also a video by Gordon Matta-Clark which caught my eye, but it's mounted at floor level with the sound turned way down, so I had no chance to experience it.
Other than that, this main room contains numerous photographs by a German photographer of various lectures and conferences and panel discussions he attended in New York -- hardly riveting stuff -- and a couple of charts purporting to show the march of art and the march of Carolee Schneemann, who is also represented by a bunch of stills from her performances. You'd think she was the only important New York artist around from the attention she's given here. There's also documentation of a couple of performance pieces, like the Chinese artist who lived out of doors in New York for a year, and someone else who apparently distilled and bottled his own sweat. There are some grainy videos, and one by a Berlin artist shot from his bike as he rides the wrong way in traffic in New York, New Orleans, and Berlin. Above the main exhibition area is an installation involving spilled paint and potting-soil bags with Martin Luther King's face on them.
There's also another area where there lives a large, loud installation that's very disorietning, which I guess could be argued is also a simulation of New York City at its most bustling and confusing. Next to that is a room with photographs by German photographer Josephine Meckseper (who, admittedly, lives in New York), including one of two icy blondes in a ridiculously luxurious apartment, one wearing a necklace with the letters CDU and the other wearing one with CSU. Now, that's New York! As you leave this area, there's a video installation about Rome.
Like I said, if the signs everywhere didn't tell you this was about New York, you'd never guess.
What it is, as far as I can tell, is Theory run amok. German intellectuals are big on Theory as the wellspring of all action. It never occurs to them that some creative people just create, nor does it occur to them that sometimes theorizing is a dry and sterile action. Someone got so carried away with the theory behind this exhibition that it escaped the bounds of gravity and soared into the intellectual stratosphere, away from any bonds tying it to the subject matter at hand.
Ah, well, I should complain. It appears that the New York end of this is mostly about classical music. Whether that's all they could think of, or whether it's all they were offered, I don't know. But if New York State of Mind is a preview of what the new, improved Haus der Kulturen der Welt is going to offer, it's not going to be a place I visit very often.
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Excuses, Excuses
Thanks to Kean for connecting the dots on this one.
I've suspected Potsdamer Platz was in trouble for some time. An early symptom of this was when the strange "music experience" show downstairs closed precipitously. Not long after, a Sony Records person I knew from the States came over here to find out why Sony Records Germany employees didn't want to move to Berlin and work at the Sony Center. Apparently morale was horrible, but it did, it must be admitted, pick up: Sony, at the start of merger negotiations with Bertelsmann, moved to Munich.
That's right: besides the fancy branding-store there, there's no Sony in the Sony Center.
Nor, apparently, is there any Daimler-Chrysler in the Daimler-Chrysler Center these days, since this article hints pretty strongly that both the Sony Center and the Daimler-Chrysler complex are on the market. And that's mostly what there is to see at Potsdamer Platz these days.
Besides the architecture -- which I think is best seen from afar, for the obvious reason that you can't see a skyscraper when you're standing next to it -- there just isn't much at PotzPlatz. There are the cinemas, of course, which are essential to the Berlinale, and the don't-call-it-a-mall-or-we-fire-you Potsdamer Platz Arkaden, and a few luxury hotels, which are also essential to the Berlinale -- or at least the egos who attend it. But the place has been a bust when it comes to commercial space. And why not? There's commercial space everywhere here, most of it cheaper than PotzPlatz.
Let's face it: the city's in trouble. At this point, even the city is admitting it. The link to the PotzPlatz article came after Kean sent me an almost unreadable exerpt from a speech due to be delivered in Sydney by Adrienne Goehler, identified as "a former senator for arts and science in Berlin." I have no idea which party she represents, and she could be a CDU-er sniping at the SDP's leadership, but if I discern (through what may be a lousy translation) correctly, she's right in scoring the unemployment (17% overall, but, as she doesn't mention, well over 33% is some parts of town), debt (€60 billion), and what she calls an "old-boy network" and I call entrenched anti-entrepreneurialism as problems.
So woo-woo, we have a lot of artists. Frau Goehler even admits that there's a lot of art made here but no way to sell it: for that you have to leave town. I'd actually advise her to take a look at what's in some of these galleries here. She might not be so optimistic if she'd take a walk around some of the galleries I see every day, too. And yeah, I know, there are a lot of artists who rent cheapo space here so they can build their stuff and ship it out without showing it here.
Ah, well. At least she admits "As impressive as the numbers are which officially document the strengthening of Berlin's creative industries, it is equally visible to the naked eye that there isn't and won't be enough paid work in this city to counter the jobless rate. For some years now, this shortage has forced mainly jobless artists and academics into new forms of working and living that arise from a lack of money and a simultaneous surplus of ideas." Which sort of doesn't make me feel too bad that nobody I know can make a living here, myself included.
But unlike Sony, I haven't made a sale or a merger that allows me to put my apartment back on the rental market. Yet.
I've suspected Potsdamer Platz was in trouble for some time. An early symptom of this was when the strange "music experience" show downstairs closed precipitously. Not long after, a Sony Records person I knew from the States came over here to find out why Sony Records Germany employees didn't want to move to Berlin and work at the Sony Center. Apparently morale was horrible, but it did, it must be admitted, pick up: Sony, at the start of merger negotiations with Bertelsmann, moved to Munich.
That's right: besides the fancy branding-store there, there's no Sony in the Sony Center.
Nor, apparently, is there any Daimler-Chrysler in the Daimler-Chrysler Center these days, since this article hints pretty strongly that both the Sony Center and the Daimler-Chrysler complex are on the market. And that's mostly what there is to see at Potsdamer Platz these days.
Besides the architecture -- which I think is best seen from afar, for the obvious reason that you can't see a skyscraper when you're standing next to it -- there just isn't much at PotzPlatz. There are the cinemas, of course, which are essential to the Berlinale, and the don't-call-it-a-mall-or-we-fire-you Potsdamer Platz Arkaden, and a few luxury hotels, which are also essential to the Berlinale -- or at least the egos who attend it. But the place has been a bust when it comes to commercial space. And why not? There's commercial space everywhere here, most of it cheaper than PotzPlatz.
Let's face it: the city's in trouble. At this point, even the city is admitting it. The link to the PotzPlatz article came after Kean sent me an almost unreadable exerpt from a speech due to be delivered in Sydney by Adrienne Goehler, identified as "a former senator for arts and science in Berlin." I have no idea which party she represents, and she could be a CDU-er sniping at the SDP's leadership, but if I discern (through what may be a lousy translation) correctly, she's right in scoring the unemployment (17% overall, but, as she doesn't mention, well over 33% is some parts of town), debt (€60 billion), and what she calls an "old-boy network" and I call entrenched anti-entrepreneurialism as problems.
So woo-woo, we have a lot of artists. Frau Goehler even admits that there's a lot of art made here but no way to sell it: for that you have to leave town. I'd actually advise her to take a look at what's in some of these galleries here. She might not be so optimistic if she'd take a walk around some of the galleries I see every day, too. And yeah, I know, there are a lot of artists who rent cheapo space here so they can build their stuff and ship it out without showing it here.
Ah, well. At least she admits "As impressive as the numbers are which officially document the strengthening of Berlin's creative industries, it is equally visible to the naked eye that there isn't and won't be enough paid work in this city to counter the jobless rate. For some years now, this shortage has forced mainly jobless artists and academics into new forms of working and living that arise from a lack of money and a simultaneous surplus of ideas." Which sort of doesn't make me feel too bad that nobody I know can make a living here, myself included.
But unlike Sony, I haven't made a sale or a merger that allows me to put my apartment back on the rental market. Yet.
Sunday, July 15, 2007
Pain Hurts
I'll admit it, I'm weak. I've been looking for someone who's interested in art to go to museums and galleries with ever since the last person I knew who liked to do that moved, so when I noticed that the Hamburger Bahnhof has a free admission policy from 2 til closing at 6 on Thursdays, I mentioned it to a young woman I knew and she actually seemed enthusiastic, so we made a date for this past week.
My interest was primarily in the Brice Marden retrospective because I'd read a great review of it by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, yet I've never "gotten" Marden at all. (True trivia fact: for a number of years he was married to Pauline, Joan Baez' older sister.)
Her interest, though, was in pain. Or, rather, Pain, the current blockbuster occupying both the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Charité's Medical-Historical Museum. Well, she's a health professional, I said. At any rate, we got there at 4 on Thursday, and went in first to the Marden, which she didn't get, either, and which is so large that I knew I'd have to dedicate a whole trip to it in order to break through the surface.
Thus, we clomped up the stairs to Pain. Now, at its heart, this is a good idea. Western art is filled with images of pain, from warriors slicing into their foes to probably the most famous and universally-distributed image of pain, Christ on the cross. It's this image which the show starts with, cleverly mixing art history with science -- or at least pseudo-science. Apparently there have been dozens of works written over the centuries about Christ's wounds, and certainly there have been plenty of representations, not only of the crucifixion itself, but the scourging beforehand, the lancing of his side on the cross, and, of course, the procession to Golgotha, wearing the crown of thorns.
Right down to the present day, there have been scientists -- or perhaps "scientists" is a better way to put it -- investigating the exact method by which a crucified person dies. In the past, they've used cadavers, but there's a guy in upstate New York who's invented a painless cross on which he can fix his volunteer subjects and wire them to measure their stress levels in various organs and muscle groups. Some of his apparatus is on display here, and it looks like something out of a very specialzed S&M club.
The Bahnhof wusses out, however, when it comes to presenting an actual crucifix. If you want to see pain and agony represented, you go directly to the experts, the Spanish. Their crucified Christs bleed, drip with gore, twist in agony, and wear facial expressions that are disturbing. The closest this show comes to that is a tiny wax model whose chest comes off to serve as a kind of guide to the internal organs for the medieval doctors it was created for; it isn't even as big as it appears on your screen on the exhibition's website. But in order to get a Spanish example, the museum would have had to engage in a loan, and pay for transportation and insurance, and, as we all know, the city's culture funds are broke. Hence, there not being a Spanish crucifix in Berlin, apparently, we get a German one. Small potatoes. Further (and more salutary) Germanness is a room in which Dürer's engravings of the Stations of the Cross are on display with little stands containing a miniature score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion showing how Bach indicated pain in his score, which excerpts you can listen to on headphones. I will, however, take exception to the wall caption stating that the Passion is universally regarded as the greatest piece of music ever written, or some such balderdash.
It could hardly be said that the show wusses out much more, however. The end of the Christian part has Francis Bacon's renowned Crucifixion, a sordid, gory piece of self-loathing that is nonetheless extraordinarily powerful, once one works out its iconography. (In case you're having trouble, the cross has apparently toppled over, and Christ is lying on his back on the ground, still attached). You won't miss the Nazi armbands or the two guys sitting at the bar, either. More subtle is Bill Viola's video Observance, in which actors slowly move to the foreground, looking at something tragic, which is a cousin to the piece of his I saw in Rotterdam six years ago which re-enacts Hieronymous Bosch's painting of the crowd mocking Christ as he carries the cross, and was similarly extraordinary thanks to the actors' skills of facial representation of emotions.
Then it's on to the rest of it, and a painfully mixed bag it turns out to be. A room-length spread of surgical instruments. Votive offerings, little wax representations of "where it hurts" which were left at shrines or in churches, so that divine intercession might relieve the pain. A film about scarification. A cartoon from the DDR about a guy with a pain in his knee. A vitrine with medical specimens preserved in formaldehyde. And the hard-core room, in which we get to see police photos of men who've died in auto-erotic situations, more photos of devices confiscated from S&M clubs, a rather sedate martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Tiepolo's Martyrdom of St. Agatha, whose breasts were sliced off (she's pressing a bloody cloth to her chest, but the breasts are sitting on a plate like twin puddings), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler's Aktion Nr. 6, which may or may not show the artist slicing off his penis (all of the online sources I've found are coy about this, although all debunk the story that it caused his death, which was actually from jumping out a window). Oh, and a video of Josef Beuys boxing a television screen. I have no idea why this is included, except there's probably a law in Berlin that no major art show can be mounted without something by one of my nemeses, and its connection with pain is probably explained somewhere in a 75,000-word essay referencing loads of arcane theory. (At least there's nothing by Pippilotti Rist, who is a pain).
On the way out, you can try your skill at the Painstation, a Pong game rigged so that it ceases to operate if either player moves his hand from a metal plate. Keeping your hand there, though, subjects you to whipping by a rubber-clad piece of wire or heat from the plate when you miss a shot. People were thronged around it, waiting to try. I saw it at Ars Electronica some years ago, and passed then, too.
All in all, I thought the show more sensationalistic -- and meretricious -- than enlightening. That the crowds were thick didn't surprise me in a city which celebrates guilt and punishment as much as this one does, and I left, convinced that next year's blockbuster will be Suicide, with guest performance artists from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Sri Lanka all competing for a posthumous prize. And nobody, no matter how good-looking she is, will get me to go to that.
Anyone up for Brice Marden?
My interest was primarily in the Brice Marden retrospective because I'd read a great review of it by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker, yet I've never "gotten" Marden at all. (True trivia fact: for a number of years he was married to Pauline, Joan Baez' older sister.)
Her interest, though, was in pain. Or, rather, Pain, the current blockbuster occupying both the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Charité's Medical-Historical Museum. Well, she's a health professional, I said. At any rate, we got there at 4 on Thursday, and went in first to the Marden, which she didn't get, either, and which is so large that I knew I'd have to dedicate a whole trip to it in order to break through the surface.
Thus, we clomped up the stairs to Pain. Now, at its heart, this is a good idea. Western art is filled with images of pain, from warriors slicing into their foes to probably the most famous and universally-distributed image of pain, Christ on the cross. It's this image which the show starts with, cleverly mixing art history with science -- or at least pseudo-science. Apparently there have been dozens of works written over the centuries about Christ's wounds, and certainly there have been plenty of representations, not only of the crucifixion itself, but the scourging beforehand, the lancing of his side on the cross, and, of course, the procession to Golgotha, wearing the crown of thorns.
Right down to the present day, there have been scientists -- or perhaps "scientists" is a better way to put it -- investigating the exact method by which a crucified person dies. In the past, they've used cadavers, but there's a guy in upstate New York who's invented a painless cross on which he can fix his volunteer subjects and wire them to measure their stress levels in various organs and muscle groups. Some of his apparatus is on display here, and it looks like something out of a very specialzed S&M club.
The Bahnhof wusses out, however, when it comes to presenting an actual crucifix. If you want to see pain and agony represented, you go directly to the experts, the Spanish. Their crucified Christs bleed, drip with gore, twist in agony, and wear facial expressions that are disturbing. The closest this show comes to that is a tiny wax model whose chest comes off to serve as a kind of guide to the internal organs for the medieval doctors it was created for; it isn't even as big as it appears on your screen on the exhibition's website. But in order to get a Spanish example, the museum would have had to engage in a loan, and pay for transportation and insurance, and, as we all know, the city's culture funds are broke. Hence, there not being a Spanish crucifix in Berlin, apparently, we get a German one. Small potatoes. Further (and more salutary) Germanness is a room in which Dürer's engravings of the Stations of the Cross are on display with little stands containing a miniature score of Bach's St. Matthew Passion showing how Bach indicated pain in his score, which excerpts you can listen to on headphones. I will, however, take exception to the wall caption stating that the Passion is universally regarded as the greatest piece of music ever written, or some such balderdash.
It could hardly be said that the show wusses out much more, however. The end of the Christian part has Francis Bacon's renowned Crucifixion, a sordid, gory piece of self-loathing that is nonetheless extraordinarily powerful, once one works out its iconography. (In case you're having trouble, the cross has apparently toppled over, and Christ is lying on his back on the ground, still attached). You won't miss the Nazi armbands or the two guys sitting at the bar, either. More subtle is Bill Viola's video Observance, in which actors slowly move to the foreground, looking at something tragic, which is a cousin to the piece of his I saw in Rotterdam six years ago which re-enacts Hieronymous Bosch's painting of the crowd mocking Christ as he carries the cross, and was similarly extraordinary thanks to the actors' skills of facial representation of emotions.
Then it's on to the rest of it, and a painfully mixed bag it turns out to be. A room-length spread of surgical instruments. Votive offerings, little wax representations of "where it hurts" which were left at shrines or in churches, so that divine intercession might relieve the pain. A film about scarification. A cartoon from the DDR about a guy with a pain in his knee. A vitrine with medical specimens preserved in formaldehyde. And the hard-core room, in which we get to see police photos of men who've died in auto-erotic situations, more photos of devices confiscated from S&M clubs, a rather sedate martyrdom of St. Sebastian, Tiepolo's Martyrdom of St. Agatha, whose breasts were sliced off (she's pressing a bloody cloth to her chest, but the breasts are sitting on a plate like twin puddings), and Rudolf Schwarzkogler's Aktion Nr. 6, which may or may not show the artist slicing off his penis (all of the online sources I've found are coy about this, although all debunk the story that it caused his death, which was actually from jumping out a window). Oh, and a video of Josef Beuys boxing a television screen. I have no idea why this is included, except there's probably a law in Berlin that no major art show can be mounted without something by one of my nemeses, and its connection with pain is probably explained somewhere in a 75,000-word essay referencing loads of arcane theory. (At least there's nothing by Pippilotti Rist, who is a pain).
On the way out, you can try your skill at the Painstation, a Pong game rigged so that it ceases to operate if either player moves his hand from a metal plate. Keeping your hand there, though, subjects you to whipping by a rubber-clad piece of wire or heat from the plate when you miss a shot. People were thronged around it, waiting to try. I saw it at Ars Electronica some years ago, and passed then, too.
All in all, I thought the show more sensationalistic -- and meretricious -- than enlightening. That the crowds were thick didn't surprise me in a city which celebrates guilt and punishment as much as this one does, and I left, convinced that next year's blockbuster will be Suicide, with guest performance artists from Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and Sri Lanka all competing for a posthumous prize. And nobody, no matter how good-looking she is, will get me to go to that.
Anyone up for Brice Marden?
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Writing On The Wall
So why do you suppose Berlin has so much graffiti? Does it contain large gangs of disaffected black or Latino youth? That's one demographic from which graffiti springs in the States, and although I do think there are some Turkish-German posses behind it, that's only a part of the answer.
And why do you suppose so much of Berlin's "graffiti" actually falls under the rubric of "street art?" Sure, there's a large contingent of international artists who work in this fashion, and even the suddenly oh-so-fashionable Banksy has his rats around my neighborhood, but that, too, is only part of the answer.
And I'd say that another part of the answer that's being ignored is simply this: because Berlin's official public art sucks. Really: I've never been in a place with so much bad outdoor sculpture, eye-straining murals, and, of course, all those damn bears.
So I want to spend just a minute here examining three works of art. The first is public:
This sucker sat under a tarp for I don't know how long before being unveiled at the Hauptbahnhof a few weeks ago. It should have stayed there. There's a plaque on the side, which explains that it's a memorial to the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof which used to stand where the Hauptbahnhof now does, and was created by a Prof. somebody or other using stainless steel and "high-tech elements" to symbolize, ummm, this and that. The horse has a clock-like face set in its side with bad mask-like faces which revolve, so I guess having an electric motor is high-tech. Underneath, in the base, are various gears the "artist" has modified with more faces, as well as bits of the brickwork from the old Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, although whether they're original brick from the old building or part of the multi-million-Euro reconstruction which was torn down a couple of years after it was finished is hard to tell. The whole thing, towering over an outdoor eating area, is of such amazing ugliness that it's breathtaking. Hard to figure how the Ponyhof missed something this size.
Now, Exhibit B is a very small piece, currently hard to find because trees obscure it.
Yup. Nike again. What's disarming about these paintings, besides the lack of formal skill, is the feeling one gets when one comes upon them, always in an unexpected place, and almost always cheering you up by the very act of discovery. That's something I think public art should do, and it informs my own reactions to things like, say, the wall rabbits or the long-gone, intricate cutouts by the New York master (mistress?) Swoon.
And then there are the works which proclaim mastery:
I have no idea who's behind this (and another one I've found), but a huge Russian icon-on-acid popping up on the corner of your street (this is at the end of Torstr. at Oranienburger Tor) is something you notice. It's taller than I am, and, needless to say, many times wider. The palette of color is quite basic, but used with the kind of skill any commercial artist would envy. And the subject matter, well, it makes you think.
If I were running this city (and there's a nighmare I've yet to have) I'd discreetly channel funds to the likes of Nike, Swoon, and the Acid Iconist in hopes that they'd continue to beautify what's not a very beautiful cityscape. The more obscure the place beautified, the bigger the fee. Meanwhile, it's encouraging that you don't actually have to walk past the Iron Horse to catch your train, although it's hard not to cast it a glance if, as I do, you take the bus to the Hauptbahnhof (well, when I have luggage I do, anyway). And it's further encouraging that these other artists are out there, continuing to surprise us.
And why do you suppose so much of Berlin's "graffiti" actually falls under the rubric of "street art?" Sure, there's a large contingent of international artists who work in this fashion, and even the suddenly oh-so-fashionable Banksy has his rats around my neighborhood, but that, too, is only part of the answer.
And I'd say that another part of the answer that's being ignored is simply this: because Berlin's official public art sucks. Really: I've never been in a place with so much bad outdoor sculpture, eye-straining murals, and, of course, all those damn bears.
So I want to spend just a minute here examining three works of art. The first is public:
This sucker sat under a tarp for I don't know how long before being unveiled at the Hauptbahnhof a few weeks ago. It should have stayed there. There's a plaque on the side, which explains that it's a memorial to the Lehrter Stadtbahnhof which used to stand where the Hauptbahnhof now does, and was created by a Prof. somebody or other using stainless steel and "high-tech elements" to symbolize, ummm, this and that. The horse has a clock-like face set in its side with bad mask-like faces which revolve, so I guess having an electric motor is high-tech. Underneath, in the base, are various gears the "artist" has modified with more faces, as well as bits of the brickwork from the old Lehrter Stadtbahnhof, although whether they're original brick from the old building or part of the multi-million-Euro reconstruction which was torn down a couple of years after it was finished is hard to tell. The whole thing, towering over an outdoor eating area, is of such amazing ugliness that it's breathtaking. Hard to figure how the Ponyhof missed something this size.
Now, Exhibit B is a very small piece, currently hard to find because trees obscure it.
Yup. Nike again. What's disarming about these paintings, besides the lack of formal skill, is the feeling one gets when one comes upon them, always in an unexpected place, and almost always cheering you up by the very act of discovery. That's something I think public art should do, and it informs my own reactions to things like, say, the wall rabbits or the long-gone, intricate cutouts by the New York master (mistress?) Swoon.
And then there are the works which proclaim mastery:
I have no idea who's behind this (and another one I've found), but a huge Russian icon-on-acid popping up on the corner of your street (this is at the end of Torstr. at Oranienburger Tor) is something you notice. It's taller than I am, and, needless to say, many times wider. The palette of color is quite basic, but used with the kind of skill any commercial artist would envy. And the subject matter, well, it makes you think.
If I were running this city (and there's a nighmare I've yet to have) I'd discreetly channel funds to the likes of Nike, Swoon, and the Acid Iconist in hopes that they'd continue to beautify what's not a very beautiful cityscape. The more obscure the place beautified, the bigger the fee. Meanwhile, it's encouraging that you don't actually have to walk past the Iron Horse to catch your train, although it's hard not to cast it a glance if, as I do, you take the bus to the Hauptbahnhof (well, when I have luggage I do, anyway). And it's further encouraging that these other artists are out there, continuing to surprise us.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
April Crumbers
One of the true joys of living in Berlin is the upbeat, positive attitude that is constantly being forced on us lucky inhabitants. A few years ago, there was the memorable academic get-together called The Power of Negation, which was such a groovy time that it had its own program of death-metal bands. Last year, the big art show -- sold out, lines, extended because of popular demand, the whole bit -- was called Melancholie. This year's just opened at the Hamburger Bahnhof and the Medical History Museum at Charité, and it's called Schmerz, thoughtfully subtitled by its curators in English: Pain.
I guess the art part is at the Bahnhof (whose central collection, particularly the Beuys, is painful enough), and the actual infliction-of-pain-and-relief-therefrom part (I hope that last part's included) is at the Medical History Museum, a place I've yet to see. They're walking distance from each other, across a bridge that was an important German-German checkpoint while the Wall was still up (the Hamburger Bahnhof, being smack up against the border, was maintained, but rarely used: I saw the awful Garland Jeffreys there once, surrounded by a display of vintage airplanes someone had rented the space for), and the path is lined with little poster-kiosks donated by one of the sponsors, Wall Advertising, each of which shows a picture of someone in pain or a means of inflicting pain.
Yup, I guess springtime's in the air in Berlin, all right!
* * *
In line with the theme of pain, commercial forces are making themselves felt, too. All over town, billboards showing athletes in pain have gone up: woman collapsing into the arms of friends, guys writhing on the ground -- all courtesy of Reebok. They're not claiming their sneakers will keep you from hurting, just urging a little moderation on the exercise front, with their Go Run Easy campaign.
Living, as I do, in a neighborhood in which you can sometimes actually see people exercising -- a far more uncommon sight than it is in the States -- I have yet to see anyone pushing it much past an amble, let alone collapsing from torn ligaments or whatever. That said, there's one thing every German jogger considers essential: the proper costume. Back when I lived on the edge of the Tiergarten, I used to exercise walk (just cardio-vascular stuff, nothing fancy) there, and would get the blackest looks of contempt from Germans who'd trot by, clad in hundreds of dollars worth of lycra, spandex, Gore-Tex, Nike, and so on. I had the temerity to wear normal sweat pants and a t-shirt or sweatshirt, depending on the weather. These days, an inspection of the contents of my iPod would, I guess, be another mandatory test -- although I don't own one and hope never to, but that's another discussion entirely.
* * *
Just about a year ago I wondered about the building on the corner of Torstr. and Prenzlauer Allee, and, thanks to my great network of readers, had the answer almost immediately. Given the ghosts and other Burden of History appurtenances inherent to it, this article (also sent in by an observant reader) ought to make your skin crawl. The thing is, what evidence is there that there's any demand whatever for something like what these Brits have planned for the building? The last real-estate bubble I lived through, in late-'70s/early '80s Austin, featured a couple of joints like this, but they went bust practically before they opened (although not before robbing Austin's great painter/poster artist Guy Juke of about six years' worth of paintings, in one case). My prediction: despite the noises they're making right now, the new owners will quietly change their plans and it'll become mixed-use office and residential space. Meanwhile, just cleaning up the pigeon poop is going to be a major project.
* * *
And on the neighborhood restaurant beat, two additions. Bandol on Torstr. has opened, looking very, very authentically French. However, it's going to be a long, long time before I set foot in there. For one thing, the menu is only available in chalk, written on the walls. This means that you have to actually be inside the place to figure out what's on the menu at any given time. Not that they actually want you in there; there's a huge, thick reservation book prominently placed at the entrance, something I've never seen in a Berlin restaurant -- or one in my neighborhood, at any rate, and the minute you approach, you start to get the fish-eye from the guys working there. From what I've gleaned walking past the place, which I do nearly every day, the prices will run around €40-50 a person, with wine (no wine list in evidence, although presumably once you're seated you get one). It seems to be doing well late at night with a bunch of West Berlin-looking folks, the sort one used to see around Grolmannstr. in the old days. And, given that the first main dish I saw written on the wall there was a cassoulet made of fish, I'm not in a particular rush to go there even if I do stumble upon the money. Fish??
But I hope they never get a website, because I get about 35 hits a week from people looking for them.
The neighborhood's other addition is as light and airy as Bandol is dark and crowded. Alpenstueck (no prissy umlauts for them!) opened in a hurry on the corner of Gartenstr. and Schröderstr., hardly a high-traffic area, in a space that was first a jolly DDR chess-club bar which was rudely turfed out to make room for a succession of eye-blindingly awful art galleries, the last of which lasted something like three years, and caused me to dub it the Gallery of Mildly Talented High School Students. I'm not sure what's going on at Alpenstueck, which is austerely undecorated and offers chairs that look like they were lifted from a high-school cafeteria. They're not taking any chances by offering southern German food, although I do like the fact that the kitchen seems to be open to the dining room, which is very unusual in this country (although maybe there's a law against it, knowing the German food-phobias). Dunno if I'll ever be in the mood for it, with Honigmond so close at hand, and the sourish middle-aged crowd it draws not looking like the most congenial company.
Berlin's best pizza, too, has, whether temporarily or not I can't figure out -- new quarters for the summertime, at least. Pizzeria la Rustica, the low-priced member of the stunning Muntagnola restaurants, has moved into an S-Bahn bogen on the edge of Monbijoupark. They have more than pizza there at all times, too, so this partnership with the Ampelmann folks looks like a win-win situation. I haven't checked it out -- hell, I haven't been to La Rustica in a long time, sad to say -- but allegedly there's info here.
Oh, and one last tantalizing sight: the place next door to Kuchi, the "extreme sushi" joint on Gipsstr., which is called -- get ready... -- "Next Door To...", has stuck up four articles from a Japanese magazine showing four regional styles of ramen. It's a tiny space -- it's where M. Vuong started, in fact, all those years ago -- but it'd be nice to have another ramen joint in the 'hood.
I guess the art part is at the Bahnhof (whose central collection, particularly the Beuys, is painful enough), and the actual infliction-of-pain-and-relief-therefrom part (I hope that last part's included) is at the Medical History Museum, a place I've yet to see. They're walking distance from each other, across a bridge that was an important German-German checkpoint while the Wall was still up (the Hamburger Bahnhof, being smack up against the border, was maintained, but rarely used: I saw the awful Garland Jeffreys there once, surrounded by a display of vintage airplanes someone had rented the space for), and the path is lined with little poster-kiosks donated by one of the sponsors, Wall Advertising, each of which shows a picture of someone in pain or a means of inflicting pain.
Yup, I guess springtime's in the air in Berlin, all right!
* * *
In line with the theme of pain, commercial forces are making themselves felt, too. All over town, billboards showing athletes in pain have gone up: woman collapsing into the arms of friends, guys writhing on the ground -- all courtesy of Reebok. They're not claiming their sneakers will keep you from hurting, just urging a little moderation on the exercise front, with their Go Run Easy campaign.
Living, as I do, in a neighborhood in which you can sometimes actually see people exercising -- a far more uncommon sight than it is in the States -- I have yet to see anyone pushing it much past an amble, let alone collapsing from torn ligaments or whatever. That said, there's one thing every German jogger considers essential: the proper costume. Back when I lived on the edge of the Tiergarten, I used to exercise walk (just cardio-vascular stuff, nothing fancy) there, and would get the blackest looks of contempt from Germans who'd trot by, clad in hundreds of dollars worth of lycra, spandex, Gore-Tex, Nike, and so on. I had the temerity to wear normal sweat pants and a t-shirt or sweatshirt, depending on the weather. These days, an inspection of the contents of my iPod would, I guess, be another mandatory test -- although I don't own one and hope never to, but that's another discussion entirely.
* * *
Just about a year ago I wondered about the building on the corner of Torstr. and Prenzlauer Allee, and, thanks to my great network of readers, had the answer almost immediately. Given the ghosts and other Burden of History appurtenances inherent to it, this article (also sent in by an observant reader) ought to make your skin crawl. The thing is, what evidence is there that there's any demand whatever for something like what these Brits have planned for the building? The last real-estate bubble I lived through, in late-'70s/early '80s Austin, featured a couple of joints like this, but they went bust practically before they opened (although not before robbing Austin's great painter/poster artist Guy Juke of about six years' worth of paintings, in one case). My prediction: despite the noises they're making right now, the new owners will quietly change their plans and it'll become mixed-use office and residential space. Meanwhile, just cleaning up the pigeon poop is going to be a major project.
* * *
And on the neighborhood restaurant beat, two additions. Bandol on Torstr. has opened, looking very, very authentically French. However, it's going to be a long, long time before I set foot in there. For one thing, the menu is only available in chalk, written on the walls. This means that you have to actually be inside the place to figure out what's on the menu at any given time. Not that they actually want you in there; there's a huge, thick reservation book prominently placed at the entrance, something I've never seen in a Berlin restaurant -- or one in my neighborhood, at any rate, and the minute you approach, you start to get the fish-eye from the guys working there. From what I've gleaned walking past the place, which I do nearly every day, the prices will run around €40-50 a person, with wine (no wine list in evidence, although presumably once you're seated you get one). It seems to be doing well late at night with a bunch of West Berlin-looking folks, the sort one used to see around Grolmannstr. in the old days. And, given that the first main dish I saw written on the wall there was a cassoulet made of fish, I'm not in a particular rush to go there even if I do stumble upon the money. Fish??
But I hope they never get a website, because I get about 35 hits a week from people looking for them.
The neighborhood's other addition is as light and airy as Bandol is dark and crowded. Alpenstueck (no prissy umlauts for them!) opened in a hurry on the corner of Gartenstr. and Schröderstr., hardly a high-traffic area, in a space that was first a jolly DDR chess-club bar which was rudely turfed out to make room for a succession of eye-blindingly awful art galleries, the last of which lasted something like three years, and caused me to dub it the Gallery of Mildly Talented High School Students. I'm not sure what's going on at Alpenstueck, which is austerely undecorated and offers chairs that look like they were lifted from a high-school cafeteria. They're not taking any chances by offering southern German food, although I do like the fact that the kitchen seems to be open to the dining room, which is very unusual in this country (although maybe there's a law against it, knowing the German food-phobias). Dunno if I'll ever be in the mood for it, with Honigmond so close at hand, and the sourish middle-aged crowd it draws not looking like the most congenial company.
Berlin's best pizza, too, has, whether temporarily or not I can't figure out -- new quarters for the summertime, at least. Pizzeria la Rustica, the low-priced member of the stunning Muntagnola restaurants, has moved into an S-Bahn bogen on the edge of Monbijoupark. They have more than pizza there at all times, too, so this partnership with the Ampelmann folks looks like a win-win situation. I haven't checked it out -- hell, I haven't been to La Rustica in a long time, sad to say -- but allegedly there's info here.
Oh, and one last tantalizing sight: the place next door to Kuchi, the "extreme sushi" joint on Gipsstr., which is called -- get ready... -- "Next Door To...", has stuck up four articles from a Japanese magazine showing four regional styles of ramen. It's a tiny space -- it's where M. Vuong started, in fact, all those years ago -- but it'd be nice to have another ramen joint in the 'hood.
Friday, February 23, 2007
Scary Movie
Some years ago, Berlin had the first of its Biennales. I went, looked, and wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal Europe, because that was my job at the time. A few weeks later, an art critic I knew from Philadelphia came through to check it out. I caught her leaving the Postführamt, where the show was, and asked her what she'd thought. "Aaah," she sneered. "A lot of one-liners." An apt description, I thought. "Except...well, there was this piece by this Portugese guy..."
Oh, yes. It was called Kitsune, and it made me confront a lot of my ideas about art at that time. Basically, it was what's called a video installation, although, unlike most video installations, which can be seen for as long or short as you feel like in order to get the idea, this one was linked to a narrative, which meant you really had to sit through the whole thing. It was worth it. The visual was fairly static: Japanese mountains, over which fog was coming and going. The text was read by two Japanese radio actors, in Japanese, and there were English subtitles. The story was simple: two old men are waiting out the rain in a teahouse, and, although both are rather shy, eventually they begin to talk, and wind up telling each other ghost stories. I loved it.
And because I'd loved it and said so in print, and was apparently one of the few people who reviewed that exhibition who didn't zero in on the super-trendy but empty stuff there, the artist, a guy named João Penalva, contacted me about getting a copy of the review. He lives in London most of the time, and one of his dealers, Volker Diehl, is in Berlin, so he's here from time to time. That's where I met him almost exactly three years ago, at the opening of another video work, Bahnai. He's short and round and has a great sense of humor, as I discovered when we had lunch at the Vietnamese place down the street.
So when I got an invitation to the DAAD Galerie for the opening of his latest piece, The Roar of Lions, on Feb. 2, I made a note to go see it. I was extremely busy at the moment getting some book proposals ready, so I didn't make the opening, and although I used the invitation as a bookmark for what I was reading at the time, I'm ashamed to say it took an e-mail from him asking if I'd seen it, and, if so, what I thought, to get me off my butt to go see it. I used to have several friends here who were always up for gallery-hopping but they've all moved, so I don't keep up as much as I'd like. But I found time to walk down to Zimmerstr. yesterday to take a look.
It's another amazing piece. It starts with a couple of flashlights moving around in the dark, and then cuts to a scene of a frozen-over lake, the Grunewaldsee here in Berlin. The text this time is in Mandarin Chinese, which, as with Kitsune, means you have to pay attention to the subtitles. This time the story isn't so easily described, nor do I want to give any spoilers, but at the start the narrator has just witnessed a bloody car accident involving a woman and a girl, and is talking to the policeman at the scene about what he saw. The policeman thanks him, tells him there were other witnesses, and checks his papers, perhaps a little closely. At this point, a note of dread enters the story, although you don't quite know why. It gets worse when he gets home: unlocking the door, he finds the same policeman and a guy in civilian clothes inside his apartment, although how they got in he can't figure. The dread gets a lot thicker at that point, in part because of what happens, but in part, also, because we can't tell where this story is taking place or what the stakes are.
Meanwhile, we are watching the scene on the ice, as ordinary folks are walking on the ice, some (but only a few) skating, and a lot of them are out with their dogs, who are not at their best slipping around. Imperceptably, the sort of brownish-green of the video acquires more and more color, to the point where someone in a red jacket really stands out. But as the story being told gets odder and more infused with fear, the colors start bleaching out again, something Penalva also did with Bahnai. But the story has gotten so gripping by this part that you're likely not to notice this right away, and it also undergoes a complete metamorphosis in its last few lines so that by the time the credits roll, you're even more unsure of what you've just sat through than you could have imagined.
Suffice it to say that the walk home was completely different than the walk to the gallery. It was the same street (Friedrichstr.), but the experience I'd just been through had changed it utterly. The Roar of Lions was done while Penalva was here in Berlin with a DAAD grant, and if it reflects his experience here, then that might well explain my reaction. There's also the disconnect between the images of the people out walking and playing on the ice and the narrative overlaying it, much of which occurs in the narrator's small room. I'd really have to see it again to say anything more intelligent about it, but there's one thing I can say:
If you get the chance, go see this. The gallery is open from 11 until 6 every day except Sunday, the piece is 37 minutes long, and screenings are every 45 minutes. The show closes on Mar. 10, so you've got two weeks. I'll probably go again, so if anyone wants to join me, let me know. Just don't expect any light-hearted banter afterwards.
Oh, yes. It was called Kitsune, and it made me confront a lot of my ideas about art at that time. Basically, it was what's called a video installation, although, unlike most video installations, which can be seen for as long or short as you feel like in order to get the idea, this one was linked to a narrative, which meant you really had to sit through the whole thing. It was worth it. The visual was fairly static: Japanese mountains, over which fog was coming and going. The text was read by two Japanese radio actors, in Japanese, and there were English subtitles. The story was simple: two old men are waiting out the rain in a teahouse, and, although both are rather shy, eventually they begin to talk, and wind up telling each other ghost stories. I loved it.
And because I'd loved it and said so in print, and was apparently one of the few people who reviewed that exhibition who didn't zero in on the super-trendy but empty stuff there, the artist, a guy named João Penalva, contacted me about getting a copy of the review. He lives in London most of the time, and one of his dealers, Volker Diehl, is in Berlin, so he's here from time to time. That's where I met him almost exactly three years ago, at the opening of another video work, Bahnai. He's short and round and has a great sense of humor, as I discovered when we had lunch at the Vietnamese place down the street.
So when I got an invitation to the DAAD Galerie for the opening of his latest piece, The Roar of Lions, on Feb. 2, I made a note to go see it. I was extremely busy at the moment getting some book proposals ready, so I didn't make the opening, and although I used the invitation as a bookmark for what I was reading at the time, I'm ashamed to say it took an e-mail from him asking if I'd seen it, and, if so, what I thought, to get me off my butt to go see it. I used to have several friends here who were always up for gallery-hopping but they've all moved, so I don't keep up as much as I'd like. But I found time to walk down to Zimmerstr. yesterday to take a look.
It's another amazing piece. It starts with a couple of flashlights moving around in the dark, and then cuts to a scene of a frozen-over lake, the Grunewaldsee here in Berlin. The text this time is in Mandarin Chinese, which, as with Kitsune, means you have to pay attention to the subtitles. This time the story isn't so easily described, nor do I want to give any spoilers, but at the start the narrator has just witnessed a bloody car accident involving a woman and a girl, and is talking to the policeman at the scene about what he saw. The policeman thanks him, tells him there were other witnesses, and checks his papers, perhaps a little closely. At this point, a note of dread enters the story, although you don't quite know why. It gets worse when he gets home: unlocking the door, he finds the same policeman and a guy in civilian clothes inside his apartment, although how they got in he can't figure. The dread gets a lot thicker at that point, in part because of what happens, but in part, also, because we can't tell where this story is taking place or what the stakes are.
Meanwhile, we are watching the scene on the ice, as ordinary folks are walking on the ice, some (but only a few) skating, and a lot of them are out with their dogs, who are not at their best slipping around. Imperceptably, the sort of brownish-green of the video acquires more and more color, to the point where someone in a red jacket really stands out. But as the story being told gets odder and more infused with fear, the colors start bleaching out again, something Penalva also did with Bahnai. But the story has gotten so gripping by this part that you're likely not to notice this right away, and it also undergoes a complete metamorphosis in its last few lines so that by the time the credits roll, you're even more unsure of what you've just sat through than you could have imagined.
Suffice it to say that the walk home was completely different than the walk to the gallery. It was the same street (Friedrichstr.), but the experience I'd just been through had changed it utterly. The Roar of Lions was done while Penalva was here in Berlin with a DAAD grant, and if it reflects his experience here, then that might well explain my reaction. There's also the disconnect between the images of the people out walking and playing on the ice and the narrative overlaying it, much of which occurs in the narrator's small room. I'd really have to see it again to say anything more intelligent about it, but there's one thing I can say:
If you get the chance, go see this. The gallery is open from 11 until 6 every day except Sunday, the piece is 37 minutes long, and screenings are every 45 minutes. The show closes on Mar. 10, so you've got two weeks. I'll probably go again, so if anyone wants to join me, let me know. Just don't expect any light-hearted banter afterwards.
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