Berlin Highlights

Some highlights from a busy Berlin Gallery Weekend. The gallery scene of Berlin has grown so much in recent years – quantitatively, and in terms of being scattered all over town – that it’s impossible even within a couple of days to see everything; so this is inevitably fragmentary and subjective (and to be continued). What I like about these kinds of events is that galleries simply do what they always do – they show art, whether good or bad – and that people gather, simply, to share the experience of that (sure, a lot of business and social networking and parties and dinners too, but that’s not what would be so special or interesting about the art world, or Berlin). Anyway, here we go – highlights:

1. The sleeping commuters in Mark Wallinger’s show of strong works at Carlier Gebauer (_The Unconscious_, all works 2010). Gleaned off the Internet (i.e. usually photographed with a phone) and blown up to train-window size, these are images of people in a state of utter exhaustion and complete unawareness, which oddly makes them look ecstatically orgasmic, or peacefully dead. Both Pierre Bourdieu and George Bataille, for very different reasons though, would have loved these. Class reality and incarnated otherworldliness wrapped into one. The numbered stones of different sizes scattered across the floor equally hovered between straightforward ordinariness (just stones, just numbers) and a looming sense of encryption (is there some weird or wicked plan behind it?) (_Steine_). I also liked the video compiling unpopulated scenes of sorcery (cups and plates dancing about, drawn by invisible threads etc.) taken from Bewitched, the US 1970s comedy series about a husband and witch (_The Magic of Things_). And the entire content of The Oxford Book of English Verse 1250 –1918 printed on wallpaper and filling an entire wall, without any punctuation or titles, so that your eyes wonder about aimlessly, and you come across fragments of a poem as if they emanated from a wall of fog (_Words_). According to Mark fills the adjacent space with 100 second-hand chairs (all of different design), with the first name of the artist written on the back like on a director’s chair, while from each chair a single white thread leads vertically up to one single vanishing point on the rear wall, as if artistic authority itself was residing there like the holy spirit. Which was the right kind of irony to offset the reverence and meditativeness built up in the first room.

2. The beer-bellied, bald-headed guy in wife-beater shirt who lives in the run-down house right next to Haunch of Venison’s Berlin gallery, where on Friday night a show of works by Damien Hirst and Michael Joo opened. He seemed to take special delight in putting himself on display as the proverbially grumpy proletarian Berliner, sitting on a chair at the entrance to his building with a bottle of beer in his hand. He complained about the two Maybach limousines double-parking outside the gallery blocking the traffic, which drew my attention to how extremely ugly in fact these ultra-luxury cars are (and incidentally also ultra-slow-selling; Mercedes allegedly consider terminating the brand in the near future), bulbous and bulky. As opposed to the anorexic and/or surgically enhanced ladies of course that came with chaps that looked like the ones that Jeremy Deller had in mind when he once said that the art world is a great place to meet retired arms dealers (only that these probably weren’t retired). All of which was of course like some entertaining TV program for our beer-bellied, bald-headed guy. I’m not sure he bothered to venture inside the gallery though, where people where piling up between art piling up; the show looked a bit as if Damien Hirst and Michael Joo had conceived it separately, and then just had superimposed floor plans, so that the result looked a little crammed, like an outlet sale or food court. Marinated zebra, anyone (_Incredible Journey_, 2008)? No thanks not just now, and the inevitable question when someone would put a dead person on display to up the ante, was, funnily answered, in the separate second space nearby, not by Hirst but Joo: a life-size glass mannequin iceman-version of Martin Kippenberger (_M/S/G_, 2010), fully clothed and displayed on a freezer pedestal, with a prehistoric elk-antler hovering above. Cryogenic fugue, certainly, but of what? Not of Kippenberger, he’s well and alive in his art.

3. The brilliant, brilliant mirror piece in Olafur Eliasson’s huge show at Martin-Gropius-Bau, his first institutional show in his adopted hometown Berlin. It’s almost a crime to give it away before you’ve come across it unaware, but anyhow: it’s a huge mirror installed on a scaffolding right outside one of the grand windows of the building, creating the illusion at first that what you see is another part of the building across a small alley or yard, until you realize, of course, that it’s you and the people around you that are in the windows across that alley or yard. But the actual punch line is that you become very aware of the highly ornate façade of the building with its neo-classicist take on Italian Renaissance, as you are inside looking outside looking in. That piece alone with its gentle, unobtrusive take on the grand gesture of artistic architectural intervention is worth the show alone. And it’s interesting to see how the simple intervention of the window piece to me meant more than the huge mirror funnel installed in the atrium of the building (_Microscope_), or the foggy sauna with its light effects (_Feelings Are Facts_). I had to think a bit of Victor Vasarely, whose building in Aix-En Provence I once visited, and whose ideal was to use abstract optical effects not only as abstract optical effects, but as emanations of a utopian vision of planetary folklore (see article in frieze from 1998). This is what gives Olafur Eliasson’s show a slightly didactic, museum of natural history kind of air (the building, with its circular succession of rooms lends itself to that), but I have no fundamental problem with that. My kids loved the show dearly (their favourite piece was the dancing water hose).

4. The building in which the Elisabeth Peyton portraits were shown. 18th century Prussian baroque, smaller than the usual 19th century Berlin blocks, which once housed a high-class textile warehouse; you could still see, underneath the indoor balcony, the recesses in the wall where the bolts of fabric used to be displayed. Slightly dilapidated, and beautiful. I recognized portraits of gallerists Burkhard Riemschneider of neugerriemschneider (the gallery hosting the show in this temporary space) and Alexander Schröder of Neu (reclining, with silk scarf – late casting call for Visconti); and of Jeremy Deller.

5. The conversation over a beer I had with Nathaniel Mellors, who had given a lecture about the connection between language and physicality as part of L’école de Stéphanie, the three day talks project at Kunst-Werke (KW institute) initiated by Stéphanie Moisdon. One of his examples was this. Enjoy:

6. Talking about machine-wrapped-with-butter: Monica Bonvicini’s video No Head man (2009), based on a 2006 performance at the Sao Paulo Biennale, at Max Hetzler. Four men in suits are strolling, in that typical serious-viewer-way, through an otherwise empty White Cube; until one of them switches to fumbling around with his dick (it looks positively silly rather than pornographic), and then, even more surprisingly, suddenly hits into the plaster-wall like an ostrich into sand, with all of his extremities – while the other gentleman also partly vanish into floor and walls, to the slapstick sound of balsa wood crashing; there is a sample here.

Which gave the other central parts of the exhibition a weird and funny twist – the blinding light of the suspended nightmare of a modernist chandelier, Light Me Black (2009), as well as the grand staircase with chains leading up to the top of a free-standing wall , so that seen from the direction of the video, single heads of single visitors appear, as if in replacement for those of the ‘No Head Men’.