first order of business! i love Berlin. knew i would. want to move back here. though i have to say, all this city jumping is really making me appreciate montreal and toronto because they are (in some, not necessarily aesthetic, sense) pretty comparably interesting and exciting places to live. with lots of bikers. not as many as in holland -
sidenote: was in south-east holland visiting my old roommate last week (fun and funny for a number of reasons, one being we ate with her quite-conservative-old-world-euro parents twice, where they alternated between carefully distanced sentences in english and gabbering in dutch, and her dad told me very important things like 'north americans are too stupid to work (with martine, at the university)' and vegetarianism is dangerous; perhaps that's why i look so 'peaky'...i suggested it had something to do with not sleeping in the same bed for more than two nights for close to a month.) but also! martine and i did quite a bit of biking and i made note of some important facts that contribute to holland having a larger population of bicycles than people - 1. they are huge, heavy, easy riding machines there - no one locks them to anything, they just lock up their back wheels and assume no one would be so silly as to exert the effort to carry such a machine very far, therefore finding a parking spot is not too difficult, - 2. biking is favourable because it is a seriously social activity - they ride very close to one another and chat and laugh and chat and chat and chat. i found this very stressful especially since i was using martine's roommate's bike which was of course much, much, much too large for me (tall dutch girls - it's not just a stereotype), my feet barely stayed on the pedals while i was riding.
- but still a lot.
anyways. i want your opinions, not on cycling through rural holland (which looks convincingly like southwestern ontario, actually) but on this ahem, performance piece i suppose, i went to my first night in berlin
so the whole point of me being in germany at this particular time is because the berlin biennale is on just until sunday, which i really wanted to come to so i could pretend to be a part of the international art community (can i be? i have been to a remarkable number of galleries in the past month) and see some hopefully interesting work. the biennale is being curated by adam szymczyk & elena filipovic and is called 'when things cast no shadow'. it's supposed to have this sort of day-night dichotomy thing, but i haven't really been feeling much of that besides the fact that things are going on both in the day and in the night.
i've been really enjoying myself, but blah blah i don't really want to go into too much detail about the good stuff because i want to talk about this thing i went to a couple nights ago! i got into the city around 5 30 and had planned to go to this opening at the Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum, an area between the old east and west of the city that is an 'urban wasteland,' if you will. broken pieces of wood and cement in a dry and sandy little bit of land, shoved between new high-rises and old duplexes. i guess it's been at the centre of a lot of property right discrepancies since the fall of the wall and now has been claimed by a small collective of Berlin artists who are using it during the biennale as an "ambiguous site [that] exemplifies specific dialectices of change and standstill in post-unification Berlin...an odd urban void that will stand as a temporary space of possibility and a test site for research," a "reminder of a dramatic past and also a monument to failed urban development in conditions of sluggish economic growth and as a locus of investor fantasies."
i'm really excited about it, i love the public movement to reclaim supposedly private space, i love how interactive this particular space is, however! this thing i went to was just ridiculous! and it was put on by the guys from the collective so i was un poco disappointed. it was called \LANDREFORM\ and was supposed to "resort" to the Woody Guthrie song 'This Land is Your Land' to generate hypothetical strategies of action. this is what it was. in the middle of this big useless field was a wooden teepee. around the teepee were 8 black BMW sedans attached to one another by white rope with red flags hanging from them in a circle delineated by pieces of broken cement. from the car radios was a sample of the song broken up about every three minutes by a buzzer or a voice counting down from 5. for probably 4 hours the BMWs drove around the teepee stopping every three minutes and idling while the people in the cars (observors like me) got in and out, taking turns riding around and around and around. gleefully hanging out of the windows and taking photo after terrible photo, waving to their friends, waving to strangers, drinking their 2 euro beers, smoking lots of cigarettes. being very excited when it was their turn to ride. about an hour and a half in, two of the artists lit the teepee on fire. and the cars kept driving around. and more people took bad photos.
and i stayed for a very long time, a little bit grossed out by it all. it was strange and egotistical and, i thought, an incredible wasteful use of the wasted space. 8 huge cars were running for like 5 hours, just driving around a fire (which was a beautiful fire, i have to say, and something about it was appealing with regards to this whole reclamation of public space thing), and everyone there felt a little bit famous when it was their turn to get in a car...strange. sick?
hm. actually i'm having some positive feelings about it all of a sudden.
maybe my reaction is sort of useful.
oh man.
i've actually been dying to talk about this for days, but haven't really met anyone that i thought wouldn't run away once i started moving my hands and shouting in a very excited manner about it all.
okay, actually, seems that i need to sit on this for a little bit longer.
please leave comments!!
postscript - need to write more later about the luxury of the body, performance art and the matthew barney "drawing restraint" exhibit i went to at the Kunsthalle Wien. i essentially had to be taken away by security guards when the gallery was closing. there's such a fine line between arrogance and originality in creative work like he's been doing for years. i have to say, i think you're probably just jealous if all you see is self-indulgence in his art. me lo gusta mucho.
miss most of you, but don't really have any desire to come home. come to me!
5 comments:
hey em...
nice post...
how's berlin?
how's london/holland?
as far as the bmw carousel goes...
was it to have fun and play in a reclaimed space and to create something obnoxious and capricious?
was it a pisstake?
it seems like a total pisstake to me.... basically "reclaim" the space for an art project but woo people into being destructive regardless... it must be...
i'm going to find some more about this... sounds interesting nonetheless... and that barney exhibit is amazing...
safe travels...
jb
Ok, so...
Last year when I was working on the Homelessness marathon at CKUT, I took up the idea to find people using public space as a vehicle of artistic expression, so I found this collective (strangely similar sounding...) that had "invaded" this old church in st henri and put on a show there. When I first got in touch with them I was really super excited because they seemed very sincere (over the internet, which is of course a difficult way to judge sincerity).
When I did interview them, though, I realized hwo totally inappropriate their "reclamation" of space was to the unifying intent I was looking for. Rather than "breaking down the gallery walls," so to speak, they were creating news ones...and in the process actually displacing people who were living in this church! The interview devolved when I discovered that they took an almost fanatical pride in the fact that the cops came...like as though their action was drawing attention to some unknown artistic repression happening in the city. The reality was that the cops presence jsut made it more difficult for homeless people to take shelter in this abandoned church...I bring it up because of the whole "being famous" comment...I find that this was a big part of what disturbed me abotu the attitude accompanying the reclamation because it's the antithesis of what public space should be, to me. It proves to what extent people tend to internalize the "gallery wall," I think.
Plus...yours sound ridonk, the cars and the fire thing is just ridiculous. I dunno, doesn't seem like much of statement. and even if it is, I don't find it effective.
It sounds like you're having an awesome time!! take picturrrresss,
chesley
Hmmm, reclaiming the space, a historic abandoned space, by riding around in fancy cars around a fire....I'm sorry but LAME. First of all, if they're driving around in a bunch of BMWs, what does that say about WHO is reclaiming the space? Second, what sort of symbolism if burning a teepee? If you look at it literally, it's essentially burning the natives and shouldn't it be natives/people of the area, the neighborhood, of Germany,that reclaim the land?
I suppose the whole thing could have been a comment on how stupid people are to unquestioningly jump into some fancy car and ride around a burning teepee (was is an actual teepee or a teepee of wood?), but if that's the case then, I would never want to meet these people because I'd probably shoot them for their self-indulgent, better than thou attitude.
But maybe the whole thing was about making people feel like they had the POWER to reclaim the land. Riding around in fancy cars around a huge fire.... and you said that people felt like celebrities. A faux coke high if you will, that possible left the riders with their cameras feeling like they were somebodies.
Either way, I suppose it was effective regardless of their message, which is sometimes the frustrating or beautiful, depending on how you look at it, wonder of art.
LOVE
G
i think the idea of reclaiming the space and then "making it worse"
-driving bmws
-burning teepees
it's a joke...
the idea of burning teepees makes me think of indian's getting their land "reclaimed" and the idea of these gas guzzling BMW's ( a sign of capitalism, the rich, etc.) driving around polluting, wasting, etc...
it's amazing!
and then to have all these people hopping on the circus carousel to circle the burning teepee and party... amazing!!
was the artist collective BGL?
i think i'd feel much the same about it as you did...
while i was there i likely would have been disgusted by the "pointless" pollution and waste of the BMWs driving around for all that time. also, depending on what this teepee actually looked like and all that, i may have had some concerns about the fire as well...
BUT that said, i think afterwards i may have come to like it somehow. obviously we can't know exactly what the intentions of the artists were, but i think what's striking about it is that it would have been impossible for me to come away from such a piece feeling ambivalent. i think that often people feel ambivalent about public spaces, that is, unless they are made angry about the use of them. there are those relatively rare occasions where you see a large number of people upset over the use of public space (i.e. ROM crystal)...I get the feeling that maybe the point of all this is to make people FEEL something about the spaces they inhabit and to make them think seriously about what it is they want to see done (and what they do NOT want to see done) with those spaces...
and that, i like.
Post a Comment