Notebook: Best-Laid Plans
"Notebook: Best-Laid Plans," by Richard Rhodes, Summer 2006, pp. 40-43
The 4th Berlin Biennial offers an urban renewal for art
Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz would not look out of place in Mississauga or North York. Wide arterial roads frame corporate buildings crowned with familiar global brand names. At street level, more brand names hover over store entrances. From the centre of the square, you have a clear view of landmarks like the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag building and the soon-to-open central railway station, which lie along an axis to the north. A canopied stairway leads down to an underground shopping mall and subway system. The area feels like a downtown in waiting, a post-reunification urban core on a new compass alignment that is an expression of wishful civic thinking for the future. Only the backdrop of open space registers differently than it would in Canada. It weighs in with a past only Berlin can claim. You aren’t seeing vestiges of farm fields; you are where the Berlin Wall once stood. Tomorrowland has been built on no man’s land—a place where, in the last century, other human hopes and wishful thinking repeatedly came to naught.
Civic scars define Berlin, sometimes literally. Museum Island, with its neo-classical treasure houses, is only a kilometre or so from Potsdamer. The facades that you pass as you walk there wear the evidence of the Soviet assault on Berlin in the closing weeks of the Second World War in Europe. Cratered and marred from rocket fire and bullets, they are the textural back-story to the Cold War gash that cuts through the city. The neighbourhoods of the former British, French and American zones of West Berlin have a modest, low-slung, insular look that makes them seem an extension of small-town Germany, less perhaps an absence of urban style than a deliberate form of architectural therapy: calming for a geopolitical hot zone. Across the Spree River, East Berlin presents a dialectical riposte—a very tall Soviet-era television tower that marks the edge of Alexanderplatz. Built in the late 1960s, in its heyday it would have doubled as a symbolic stanchion for the Iron Curtain. Berlin carries a charged topography for a city on a plain, and most of it is man-made.
Today, however, you find a new Berlin evolving apace through a network of once-dour GDR streets. This is hip Berlin, young professional Berlin. If the city’s imaginative core resides anywhere, it’s here, not Potsdamer Platz or the upscale, west-end Kurfürstendamm. In the East, a growing international art community, ensconced in affordable studio spaces, works in proximity to many of the most notorious shadows, sites and ruins of 20th-century history. Berlin may have visions for the future, but it is still a place where the 20th century registers as ongoing. Amid the plethora of construction sites and dumpsters, you feel history lean on the present with standing needs for reconciliation and restitution. To walk the streets is to walk with thoughts of unfinished business, of history put behind but not resolved.
The fourth Berlin Biennial, which ran from March 25 to May 28 under the title “Of Mice and Men,” addressed this atmosphere marvellously. Its curators—the artist Maurizio Cattelan, the curator Massimiliano Gioni and the writer Ali Subotnick—created an exhibition in which the city figured as an active creative trope. They installed the show along a single street, Auguststrasse, in a series of adapted venues. Auguststrasse is where contemporary galleries have grouped over the past decade; sidewalk sightlines flicker with the spherical silver pod of the telecom tower and the blue-and-gold patterns on the dome of the New Synagogue, a building first opened in 1866, burned during Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, then restored under the Christian Democrat government in 1995. The handbook produced for the exhibition contains detailed historical notes on each of the venues.
The itinerary begins with a church at 90 Auguststrasse. During the Second World War, Allied firebombs damaged the steeple and the streetside gable; in 1978, the declining congregation, at long-standing odds with East German authorities, finally dissolved. Inside, the Georgian-born artist Andro Wekua offered an installation called Do you want to play with me? The piece involved a high black cube structure placed near the altar with a realistic sculpture of a masked young woman standing on top, poised at one corner like a carnival diver or a self-possessed suicide. Across the solemn stone interior of the church, you could hear the clatter of another installation, by the Belgian artist Kris Martin. He had hung a mechanical flip board of the kind you see at train stations, but this one was painted black—as the tiles slapped over, you saw only a succession of blank track numbers and destinations.
Further down the street, you are introduced to 24-25 Auguststrasse, a building reopened only a year ago. German officers are rumoured to have run a wartime casino here; once, someone dropped military maps out of sight down the ventilation shafts. The curators held their crowded press conference here. Upstairs, in the old mirrored ballroom, the German artist Tino Sehgal presented a work called Kiss. And for other venues the information went on: notes on the old post-office horse stables, the numerous residential uses of a private apartment, the conversion of an old margarine factory into the KW Institute for Contemporary Art (which organized the biennial) and finally, a short history of the Old Garrison Cemetery at the end of the street, where projects by artists born in the 1960s and 1970s—Tobias Buche, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Jorge Queiroz and Susan Philipsz—joined crosses dating from the early 18th century.
The exhibition was a tour de force of context and an exemplary exercise in scene-setting. This was a biennial conceived not as a launch pad for art-world careers, but as a sound post resonating with contemporary art’s creative engagement with the world, at least the world as expressed through the template of a Berlin street in 2006. The curators offered a précis of their interests:
So do not expect statistics or sociology in this show. Do not concentrate on issues of gentrification or real estate: It has nothing to do with our show. It might very well be that all this has been made possible due to some economic function, but we believe reality and our surroundings can be described with, and therefore transformed by, much more complex and enchanting words and images.
This equation of place + history + art resulted in one of the freshest exhibitions since the Belgian curator Jan Hoet organized “Chambres d’Amis” in the city of Ghent in 1986. In that show, Hoet substituted private exhibition spaces for institutional ones and re-energized an art-delivery system that had grown stale in its habits of cool, minimal, neutral staging. His new exhibition code was sensitivity to context—a show with existential foundations close to the world of artists and their collectors. In “Of Mice and Men,” Cattelan and crew engaged again with the idea and pushed it further. They assembled art and made it seem like it didn’t require an institutional art world. The exhibition was an amalgam of local circumstance and personal practices that engaged its audience in a matter-of-fact way, a cultural experience as responsive and immediate to life as a song on the radio, a paperback book, a second-run film or a DVD rental. It overcame the social geography isolating contemporary art as something rarefied and from a space apart. The only stretch of the exhibition that flagged was in the KW Institute itself. There, even sparkling works—Klara Liden’s video of an impromptu dance performance on a commuter train, Corey McCorkle’s flashlit birthing photos, Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley’s film stills from inside a burning house—dimmed. By then, it was a surprise to actually see conventional gallery lighting in conventional gallery rooms.
The most notable exhibition space was at 11-13 Auguststrasse, the former site of a Jewish elementary school for underprivileged girls. Opened in 1930, the school operated until 1942, when all Jewish schools in Germany were ordered closed. After the war, the red brick building became a high school named for the radical playwright Bertolt Brecht (his portrait, a mural painted by students, still hangs in a ground-floor corridor). When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the school was returned to the Jewish community, but closed again by 1996 for lack of enrolment. It was registered as a city landmark, but its doors remained shut, walls peeling and gathering damp, until it was reopened for the biennial.
As the curators write, “We left the spaces untouched, just as we found them. Many lives have been here before us…Have we really become too jaded to experience a moment of the sublime?” Certainly not amid what they offered in the former Jewish School for Girls. In an undertaking that could have been a tasteless intrusion on a memorial site, the curators presented a remarkable sequence of works and installations. You could hear the slamming doors of Paul McCarthy’s Bang-Bang Room even as you passed through the security checkpoint at the entrance. McCarthy’s piece is a mechanized stage set depicting a domestic room. While the doors slammed, the walls flapped freely, flinging themselves outward in Dionysiac abandon. The piece dates from 1992 and an altogether different context, but here it represented an inversion and perversion of the idea of home. Its crazed, explosive undoing became a metaphor for the turbulence of the Nazi era. The piece was installed in a gym, so there was good reason that a change room would be nearby. As you passed its open door, the shower heads in the communal washroom registered as a trace and preview of the camps that lay in wait for the school’s first students. This was in some respects the raison d’être of the venue, and it was crystallized upstairs by the young Polish artist and stage designer Robert Kusmirowski, who exhibited an exact, to-scale rendering of a cattle car like the ones that travelled to Auschwitz.
Themes of mortality, youth and family life held sway throughout the building. Down the hall from McCarthy there was more noise, this time rumbling from a video by the Russian artist Victor Alimpiev. He filmed Russian schoolgirls drumming their fingers on their desks and fused their images with a panoramic scene of a nighttime electrical storm. The girls were drumming rain, but it had the sound of a strident, pagan, Rite of Spring rain, a Bob Dylan Hard Rain that fell on the girls who once filled these classrooms. Next door, the Albanian artist Anri Sala added more night imagery with a video called time after time. The screen shows a roadway in Tirana, the Albanian capital, with modern apartments in the background. In profile, tethered in place and filling most of the foreground, is a bareback workhorse. The night is cold enough to see steam rising from its back and heat whorls under its belly. As the camera moves in and out of focus, swelling then shrinking halos of light from distant windows, a few cars pass. Then a massive tractor-trailer bursts by, startling the horse into the equivalent of a fetal crouch. The video ends with the animal returning to calm. You thought of innocence, vulnerability and fearsome modernity.
In this site, the curators established a remarkable synergy between the art they assembled and the space they chose. Works by 40 artists were installed in the school (81 in the overall show). While many had been made for entirely different projects, they drew out the history and texture of the space and framed it for the present. The work acquired what seemed an added representational function, a renewed public function. These weren’t just objects and installations; they were guides, agents in real time, layering experience of the site with the considered complexity of art. Martin Creed’s in-situ lighting had never turned off and on so poignantly, or scarily. Felix Gmelin’s found sex-education film from 1970, showing the hands of blind children touching the bodies of naked models, carried an added, unspoken resonance in a place where children never got the chance to become adults. Paloma Varga Weisz’s small portrait busts, out-of-time sculptures of a woman at prayer, a young Buddhist monk and a pet dog, opened onto Northern Renaissance history, other cultures and, again, childhood. Whether by Ian Kiaer, Thomas Zipp, Tomma Abts, Michaël Borremans, Nathalie Djurberg, Diego Perrone, Bruce Conner, Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel, Saul Fletcher or Mark Manders, the work at the school had exactly the right pitch—zero bombast and maximum commitment.
At the close of their introduction, the curators write of their artists: “It is hard to detect any shared credo or belief, or even to capture a sense of community. Their isolation mirrors our sense of diffuse insecurity, or maybe it’s just a sign of the ominous atmosphere of fear that pervades our present: it is time to retreat, and hide inside.” The words protect the ideal of pluralism and resist the subjugation of art to theory or any single-minded purpose. As they say, “Art has to defend its ambiguities…” But you wonder, fear? What fear? “Of Mice and Men” is a clear success, so why the image of artists hiding and retreating when they’ve done the opposite? Again, maybe the answer is that the approach here is indifferent to the usual art-world measures. This show is engaged with wider terrain. Given the setting of Berlin and its legacy, perhaps the pervasive fear they sense is a learned fear rooted in what we are capable of becoming. This is not the fear of collapsing environments and teetering economies, but the fear of human agency and its capacities for deliberate regression. Any future must begin in a reckoning with that. When was the last time the art world sent you home on terms like those?
Summer 2006
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