IT MAY BE TRUE, as Aldous Huxley once
wrote, that "a large city cannot be experientially known." But we
can still seek out its stories. For the second year running, Artforum
asked writers and artists, each from a different point on the globe—New York, Los Angeles,
London, Paris,
Berlin, Moscow,
and Tokyo—to
reflect on local currents in 2005. Here, Matt Saunders and Midori Matsui
weigh in on Berlin and Tokyo, respectively. To read the other
five contributions, see December's Artforum.
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Mark Wallinger, Sleeper, 2004. Performance
view, Neue Nationalgalerie,
Berlin. Photo: Stefan Maria
Rother.
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MY YEAR CAME INTO FOCUS in someone else's flashback. At a summer
party in a socialist-era tower on Karl-Marx-Allee, the British artist Mark
Wallinger reminisced about one of his performances at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie
the previous October: It's sometime after midnight, and he's shuffling
about inside Mies van der Rohe's iconic structure in a mangy bear suit, his
sight framed by a snarling mouth (which is the only family resemblance
between this creature and its intended cousin, Berlin's mascot, ursus
rampant). The suit is sweltering, and Wallinger pauses his performance
for clandestine time-outs in his boxers to escape his private sweathouse.
Tonight he can see no audience as he stands looking over an empty plaza at
the stagy skyscrapers (lit up but largely unleased) of the new Potsdamer
Platz, where, presumably, people crowd the few tourist restaurants and twin
megaplexes. Suddenly, Wallinger later recalled, none of it made sense. All
the steps leading to the moment were clear, but he couldn't imagine what he
was doing there at the very center of the city, somehow so strange and
unmoored.
From the balcony at the party where Wallinger told his
story, the city looked unspeakably appealing, glittery and distant. I
mulled over his experience: just another Brit in a bear suit. Funny because
during the performance he had seemed a sad and mysterious figure, no longer
a national alien but an otherworldly one on whom we could project our
fantasies and expectations. Yet Wallinger's private experience of his piece
strangely evoked my own—and, I'm sure, many artists'—experience of Berlin, a city of
disappointments and random surprises. A site for public discourse with room
for eccentricities and solitary epiphanies. A place of boredom and
disjunction. And, by the way, Wallinger's poignant Sleeper rightly
marked—albeit a few months early—the start of a sleeper year.
Berlin
has apparently clung to its status among the world's art capitals. At least
people keep arriving. Many are drawn—as I was a few years ago—by hopes of a
messed-up city, a supposed site of possibility. (And, of course, you've all
heard about the rents, the Zeno's Paradox of Berlin being that no matter
how high they rise, they never quite reach expensive.) Moving here we
expected to join a party in progress, a city with a local scene rocketing
forward. What we found was a slump, a pleasant place where afternoons of
coffee or beer could stretch and devour studio time, if not our bearings.
Instead of a city in the process of becoming, Berlin just is, forever spinning
in a sloppy cycle of retooling and renewal. Countless articles will tell
you that the city is in flux, so the artists love it, and I can't dispute
the boilerplate (it's true that any egoist can make rent here), but that's
not enough. The hard part has been making a way.
Even back in the golden '90s, Berlin was foremost a
magnetic ruin—always more import/export than homebrew—and by now,
internationalism is part of the city's self-image as a crossroads for the
art world. What would it mean to be a Berlin artist? It's hard not to be
struck by the fact that this year three of the four nominees for the
Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art (Berlin's
attempt to copy the Turner) were non-German, one in residence for barely
over a year. "Local" is whoever happens to be in town: artists
who have come on grants like the DAAD and settled, out-of-towners doing
shows or just plain showing up. Even the many German artists who call Berlin home are often identified by other pedigrees: Leipzig, Dresden, or Hamburg. Berlin is a base,
rarely an origin, which can make the city feel ungrounded, at times
painfully intractable. As the years turn over, whole circles of friends
come and go. (Sure, everyone passes through eventually, but only for a day,
a week, a little residency or two.) It's glamorous occasionally—if you
romanticize coal heat, gray skies, and smoky
parties you could have skipped—but often it's just boring. Leave Berlin, however, and you'll hear of the scene and a
dozen artists who live here (and you had no idea!), and that, of course, is
the slip that keeps Berlin
in play. A friend who recently moved back to Los Angeles now reports a renewed buzz of
hype in his ear. Berlin
glows again with unfulfilled expectation, and it depresses him to think he
has already used up his allotted time there. In ways, Berlin exists best as an option, a
potential energy. It's the Schrödinger's cat of hype, always both dead and
alive, as long as no one looks inside the box.
In this regard, 2005 has been exemplary. For a while,
Schröder himself was the political living dead, and it's been a year of
transition and uncertainty all over Germany. Here in the
"Culture Capital," we saw the Beuysian equation of Kultur=Kapital
tested as the city wearily pondered its lack of real capital. Weekly
protests against Hartz-IV (the government's program for cutbacks in social
welfare) passed close to the Palast der Republik, the former East German
parliament, which is slated for demolition to make way for a reconstruction
of the old royal palace. The building has become a rallying symbol for the
idea that Berlin
needs to resist total renovation, to preserve its layers of historical
ruin. A regular procession of last-ditch exhibitions and events there
seemed to delay, but never banish, the fleet of cranes. In August, artists
and architects built a synthetic mountain of scaffolding and tarps, which
filled the gutted assembly hall and burst out the roof. Far from a radical
squat, the effort, tellingly, was a bureaucratic maze of logos,
collectives, and design firms; and while the kids have their clubhouse, the
Prussian heritage people have the money. Yet, throughout the year, a few
projects there did manage to eloquently formulate this nineteenth- vs. twentieth-century
preservationist dilemma. Lars Ramberg's huge sign of the German word for
"doubt" made a fitting graphic crown for the shabby former
statehouse, while a film by Tacita Dean, shown at the Venice Biennale,
transformed the reflections in the building's copper-tinted windows into a
sober reverie on time's passing. By this time next year, the Palast may
finally be gone.
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Left to right: Lars Ramberg, Palast des Zweifels
(Palace of Doubt), 2005, aluminum and
white neon tubes, 24' 7" x 128' x 6' 6 3/4". Photo: AP/Roberto
Pfeil. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Linienstraße 160 (Neue
Mitte), 2005. Installation view, Galerie Klosterfelde, Berlin,
2005.
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