Auf Wiedersehen

I just want a new tripod

As I walked out of the studio building and onto the street, I noticed a man grappling with a large American flag whilst in a phone box. Another man held the phone box door open, whilst another filmed proceedings with a small dv camera. A woman was crouched down close to the guy with the camera, watching and commenting. As soon as I passed them they folded up the flag and walked away.

Finding video equipment here is proving harder than I thought.
“Well if you don’t stock it, could you recommend somewhere that does?”
“Where? In Berlin? No!”

The Art Fairs have moved here for this week and the openings begin this Wednesday. After checking out Preview Art Fair’s website it was confirmed that this blog is post zeitgeist. On the front page is an excerpt from a documentary film from 2007 which is also called "Berlin – arm aber sexy".

This 1 min 27 second piece shows a series of speeded up beautifully controlled tracking and panning shots of Preview’s Preview 2007. These are followed by some real-time static and crane shots which include details of some art works, shots of people looking unnerved by being filmed and a young child in it’s buggie. The sound track accompanying these images is an electronic piece that repeats the vocal sample “love, love, yeah”.

Isn't that the performance artist who often dresses up like a bookie, taking direction on a shoot for a commercial?

Home is where the work is

I was back in London for a load of meet, greet, meet and meet.

“Did you study history?”
“Me? No.”
“There is so much history in your work, that your works will be relevant to many people for a long time”.
“I didn’t make them to last forever”.
“What?”

Art Fairs, Performances, Lectures, Openings, Dinners, Exhibitions, Conversations. Snippets from the week: "selling out, missing artwork, the moustached one, generosity, inspiring, brand, collector, marathon, we have met before, duo, your card, important political work, glorious, guest pass, fixity, glue, protect," and "arrogant."

I met a woman at the opening of ‘Fake ID’, the London exhibition that I have a video work in. She told me her friend stayed in my current Berlin residency studio three years ago, and that her time there was miserable cold and friendless. I assured her I wasn’t.

At a post opening dinner a man called Mad stared at my breasts every time we spoke. It was so extreme I had to stop myself from laughing out loud. Then there was the one about the artist who beat the shit out of his brother at the opening of his exhibition in a church near the Freize Art Fair location. He was exhibiting a huge wax Lucifer covered in fairy lights.

l'ultimo pasto all'aperto di quest 'anno

A closer look

Met C at Box Gallery at Kreusberg, an elegant space with an equally elegant show. The post opening excursion was Italian food at a restaurant at the corner of the street. I sat across from a press photographer. His mannerisms reminded me of südlichen Deutsch J, whom I haven’t seen since Documenta.
“Oh, so you are Irish. You sound normal to me.”
We discussed which Scottish accents we consider the most impenetrable and going on drinking parties with journalists. S thought his calzone had meat in it. The photographer did warn him.
“It’s folded, how will you know what you are eating?”.

The appearance of a professional video camera with tripod, shotgun mic and headphones has stopped people in their tracks. They politely ask if it's okay to pass in front of the camera lens. While I was operating the camera, a passing family asked me to take their photograph. This struck me as odd as I presumed I looked as busy as I was.

Last week in the park I was out numbered by photographers with medium format cameras. It was a beautiful bright warm day and one photographer had turned his attention to the pond. Then he spotted me on the bridge. With our lenses pointed towards each other from a considerable distance a photo/filming stand off ensued which lasted quite a while. A passing amateur also took part, sauntering down to where the photographer was standing to grab a few a snaps of me as I stood beside my camera laughing.

S gave me the address of a second hand bike shop where she bought one for €150. She said she had sold it back to him four weeks later for €100 which she considered to be a good deal.
“No, no, we have nothing for under €230”, he said to me dismissively.
I took the €230 bike on a test run around the heavy populated cobbled square. It seemed to be a nice bike from what I could tell, though I don’t know much about this kind of thing.

A glance to the left

Palaces and prisons

S made me a Palace of Butter. This was prior to visiting the gardens of Schloss Charlottenburg. There was an impressive range of different kinds of park benches and a very tall obelisk style contemporary art sculpture there. The sculpture was carved at the base on all sides in four different languages. The text said something about how March 11 could be a significant day.

On 11 March in Stuttgart in 1976, a second post-mortem was conducted on the body of Ulrike Meinhof’s at the request of her sister Weinke Meinhof and the Baader-Meinhof defence lawyers. The presiding examiner, Dr. Werner Janssen, issued a statement after the examination: "...Frau Meinhof suffered death by hanging. The findings of the examination so far available give no grounds for suspecting any extraneous factors.”

‘Der Baader Meinhof Komplex’, a 2008 film about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, has been in cinemas across Germany since September 25th. It’s release has been controversial here and there have been mixed reviews. Unsurprisingly in a film that spans almost ten years of German history there’s a lot of information, a multitude of characters and story twists. The film makes clear that Gudrun Esslin was the most powerful and ruthless member of the group and I almost felt sorry for her that her name was not immortalised in the gang’s title rather than her boyfriend Andres Baader and the journalist Ulrike Meinhof.

In an interview in June 2007, Mia Bloom, assistant professor in the School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Georgia, answered questions relating to women involved in global terrorism in which she stated: “There are several examples of women's leadership in such organizations. The most famous is Ulrike Meinhoff after whom the Baader-Meinhoff group was named. But the actual leader of the group was named Gudrun Esslin.”

In 2002 German director Christopher Roth entered his film ‘Baader’ into competition at the Berlin Film Festival. Critics of the film stated that Andres Baader and Gudrun Esslin were given a hip, Bonnie and Clyde style treatment. The festival audience were said to be totally astonished by the directors decision to stage Baader’s death as a sensational and heroic one by hail of bullets, when in reality he had committed suicide in a German prison cell in 1977.

Bottle disposal

Went to M’s (that’s M no. 3) opening at Autocenter. The gallery is above a Lidl in Friedrichshain and for what I have come to expect from a non commercial space, it’s huge. M said that one of the guys who runs it also runs a local bar and he puts all his profits into running the gallery.

The large corridor and balcony outside the exhibition area were good for hanging around. There were two guys serving beer from a deli style counter, complete with glass front. One of them, a skinny thirty something, had a thin moustache and a short curly mullet.
“Thank you”, I said when he handed me two bottles of beer.
“Your welcome”, he laughed.
On reflection he was probably laughing because I had paid him the required €5 for the two bottles of beer. They were Becks beers.

Becks beer is the most popular beer at openings in Berlin. It is a brand of the brewery Brauerei Beck & Co which is based in the north German city of Bremen. Becks are former sponsors of Becks Futures, the Contemporary Art Prize organised by the ICA which ran from 2000 until 2006 in the UK. Before Beck’s Futures, Beck's had sponsored several exhibitions of contemporary art in Britain by providing free beer.

Some openings start and end much later than the usual UK gallery schedule. This often cuts out an en-masse trip to the local bar or pub. It also means the gallery has to have a duel function on opening night, as both as exhibition space and party room. I find that the lighting conditions are not often conducive to both.

The following night I met M(no.4) at the opening of a group show he was in at 'The Forgotten Bar Project' in Kreuzberg. This show was the last in a series of one day exhibitions that had been running at the bar since July. The space was long thin corridor made up of two parts, these being divided by three steps up to the second half at the back. The bar took up one half of the front space. Being a bar, there was a broad selection of bottled beers for €2.50 each. Everyone sat outside and the majority of the clientele were the artists in the show and their friends. The bar owner looked exhausted.

Bier Halle on Gordon Street in Glasgow’s city centre is a Pizza restaurant. The direct translation of Bier Halle from German to English is Beer Hall. On the one occasion I was there, Bier Halle had run out of most of the beers listed on it's extensive drinks menu. The pizza was very popular and that night they were offering two pizza’s for the price of one. I was dining alone. The Bier Halle’s manager, an irregularly pierced, bald Glaswegian man, and I argued. This was because I attempted to give my second pizza to a complete stranger who had just sat down across from me in the restaurant.

I met a Greek Artist who said he could not sleep the night before as he had been so inspired by the sight of M’s show at Autocenter. When I told him I was doing a residency in Berlin he said:
“At the Bethanien?”. This is a common question.

The Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, runs an established International Studio Programme from it’s premises in Kreuzberg. Funding for the residencies is provided by a number of International organisations who support artists from Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Hungary and Belgium. There are currently no British or Irish based organisations working with the Bethanien.