Berlin as of July 3, 2010: Art show and a club scene

Report from Berlin, July 3, 2010:

We arrived in Berlin on the evening of June 29 and were immediately immersed in an uncharacteristic heat wave. Everyone on the street has been is various stages of incomplete dress, except the young businessmen-looking types, all of whom are always disgustingly tall and thin and have either been sporting ties or sharply creased open collar shirts. The street tempo is Berlin is always a bit slower, say, than London or New York, but it has been a bit more syrupy this week. Languor becomes most people at least some of the time, and the Berliners this week have been no exception.

Thursday evening saw a major opening of a show designed and curated by John Bock, an artist whom we have known and collected since 1998. The show is called “FischGrätenMelkStand” (herringbone milking parlor), not an unusual name given John’s exotic, odd-ball practice. John is originally a rural fellow from the environs of Hamburg, where the English form of names are used. It’s pronounced “Yohn,” with a long “o.” John designed and built a rickety-looking three story structure made entirely from scaffolding, with open exterior walls and partially open interior walls, some made of strung together used tires, long bandoliers of tied-together stuffed sweat-socks, odd, splintering planks of various dimensions and everything else other than duct tape. One room had two walls of rows of 12 inch burned pizzas, which were special ordered at reduced prices by the producer of the show, the lovely Agnes, who is the significant other of Franz Ackermann, a great Berlin-based artist and a good friend of fifteen or so years. Once inside the structure, in many cases you go from room to room and up stairs on narrow, perforated steel tracks in the sky with the distinct feeling of crossing a gorge on a rope bridge. Nothing collapsed the first night, and nobody slipped and fell on the obstacle-course floors.

This Swiss-cheese structure is entirely enclosed within the Temporary Kunsthalle building. According to a review in Artdaily.org, John “has developed a masterful meta-structure within which he installs works by 63 artists, architects, and composers. Besides installations, films, models, and sculptures, there are also historical film props, music scores, books, and fan items.” The included artists are mostly unknown or barely emerging. The best piece in the show, however, upon our very preliminary viewing is by Matt Mullican, an artist we have known and collected since 1986.

The Temporary Kunsthalle (of art exhibition space, non-collecting) was initially funded and sustained for two years by a redoubtable, older figure of the Berlin art world, Mr. Dieter Rosekrans. Rosekrans is best known for having donated a large, red, neon sign that hangs in the front of the classical columns of the Altes Museum on Museum Island in the middle of Berlin, the venue for Berlin’s vast collection of ancient artworks, and which proclaims “All art has been contemporary.” In typical philanthropic manner Rosekrans funded the building of the temporary structure and paid for operations for two years. That magnificent gift made possible several outstanding exhibitions, but he had stipulated that someone else would have to take over after two years. Alas, the City is now broke, and no more philanthropy has been found, so this superlative cultural effort is closing down. At the outdoor party outside the building in the very warm dusk, the young art crowd was drinking, chatting, listening to the obligatory speeches thanking sponsors and staff and generally chilling. We chatted amiably with 25 or so locals. No one seemed concerned that in this new era of a straitened economic situation we would see more and more cultural institutions closing down, as government aid ends and no tradition of philanthropy or private funding is there to replace the greatest sugar-daddy of all, The State.

Last evening we were privileged to be invited to a small dinner honoring John Bock given by his Berlin dealer, Martin Klosterfelde. Old friend Matt Mullican and his wife Valerie attended, and that was the occasion for a lot of reminiscing about the obviously superior old days in the New York art world when Matt’s studio was at Grand and Mulberry in downtown Manhattan. (Matt and Valerie were introduced to each other by none other than Jeff Koons, long ago.) After a good dinner in the seventh floor restaurant of something called The Soho Club, near Alexanderplatz (avocado salad, swordfish and a yummy banana éclair) , we walked upstairs to the eighth floor, which features an outdoor bar and the open-to-the sky swimming pool of this ostensibly private club. There we were confronted with forty or so young ladies, crowded together mostly in very short skirts with very high heels , very bleached hair and very high energy, all arrayed around a couple of bars or tactically splayed on divans, with a slightly lesser number of unshaven young men hanging about. All in all, we guessed, the typical club scene these days. Wimbledon was playing on two or three monitors, and, typical of the prevailing world situation, both players had Slavic names. We had a couple of drinks, and then started to fade as the witching hour approached.

The denouement came as we were riding down on the elevator and noticed by the numbers for each floor that the sixth floor was the situs of “Bedrooms” one through five, the fifth floor was the situs of “Bedrooms” six through ten, and on down the various floors. We began to wonder just what kind of club this is. In the lobby we skirted around something that looked like a check-in counter and noted that a young man we know from the art world was standing there, chatting with a clerk, a woman at his side we knew was not his wife, who we think is pregnant. We avoided eye contact.

We then started asking: (1) What’s this world coming to? and (2) have we been hanging around in Berlin too long? and (3) is it time to leave all of this to younger people who can handle it better?

Mark Dion's "The Library for the Birds of New York"

The following entry pertains to an artwork owned by Mr and Mrs Ptolemy and recently sold to a buyer in Germany. The sale was necessary, as it was time, but wrenching nonetheless:

Mark Dion’s “The Library for the Birds of New York”

We purchased the “tree” at American Fine Arts, the historic gallery owned and operated by the legendary Colin DeLand, in February, 1996. “Everyone” in the New York art world came to see the tree. On the day we bought it, Roberta Smith, the critic, Dennis Adams the conceptual sculptor and Mrs. Brice Marden, a painter, had come to the gallery to see the work.

At the time, Dion’s work was not widely known, especially in the United States. Dion’s work at that time was said to be made with a purpose not known in the art world. Dion had the goal of explaining the environment, science and the history of science to the general public, and he believed that much of such knowledge was better and more understandably transmitted by a knowledgeable artist in the form of artworks than by scientific discourse transmitted by technical people. The work is in this sense educational, even didactic.

Dion’s primary artistic innovation was to apply organizational techniques of science to the creation of artworks. The simple thesis is that all art is the organization by an artist according to aesthetic criteria to raw data and materials found in the world. In a painting, the artist takes ordinary materials like paint and canvas and arranges them on the surface of the canvas. Dion would walk through the fish markets of Chinatown in lower Manhattan, buy the fish, sort them by species, put them in jars and display them in a configuration that would be like that of a marine biologist had the latter arranged the jars. The rigorous method of organization would almost always result in a superior work of art.

In the case of the “Library,” Dion undertook to organize the collective knowledge, opinions, sentiments and mythology of the Western civilizations concerning birds. In short the work is an artist’s replication of what Michel Foucault might have called the episteme of the Western World about birds. Most of this is embodied in the books about birds, all meticulously chosen to mark the development and present state of the episteme. The work is organized according to categories, for example, the philosophy of nature shelf (on a separate limb of the three) at the top, because our culture privileges philosophy, which includes Foucault’s seminal work, “The Order of Things,” and other shelves devoted to history, mythology and ornithology. Other shelves are devoted to Rachel Carson, the first popular environmentalist, while others include works by authors such as Paul Ehrlich, an early alarmist about the growth of world population.

The work includes the physical accouterments of the bird culture, such as the bird cages, the English naturalist’s collection bag, for which Mark searched London shops for three years until he could find the “right” one, the shotgun shells, pictures depicting Audubon (who had a terrible reputation as a destroyer of many birds in the course of collecting specimens) and Alfred Hitchcock of the popular culture. The tree displays a snake and rat that have been tarred and feathered, an old punishment from the American frontier that preceded banishment. The snake and the rat are being punished for their destruction of birds, but the irony is that while human beings rarely harm birds directly we are responsible for moving rats and snakes into positions where they can harm birds – an aspect of unintended consequences. For example, there were no rats in the Western Hemisphere until they were brought over by European ships. The net bag of vegetable are there to remind us that there is nothing more environmentally destructive than vegetarianism because of the chemicals required to grow vegetables.

The tree itself is a cedar. It was felled and dragged out of a forest in northeast Pennsylvania near the farm where Mark lived at the time. The trunk was split vertically, and the entire tree was then soaked in fiberglass to strengthen it and to kill the remaining bugs. The books were collected over a five-year period.

As in the ending of “The Order of Things,” where Foucault looks forward to the death of “man,” Dion’s tree follows the Heideggerian principle that man’s Cartesian reckoning of himself as an “I” separate from nature outside is not only wrong but ultimately responsible for an unjustifiable exploitation, and often destruction, of nature. The bird episteme depicted in the tree is predicted by Dion ultimately to collapse and fail when man becomes sufficiently enlightened to see himself as one with nature and not separate. Just as the tree once lived but is now dead, so is the culture depicted on the tree destined to collapse. This is shown by the pile of secondary and simple books about nature and birds, all culled from college and high school libraries, scattered meaninglessly at the bottom of the tree.

In any event, the owner of this grand work must be prepared to allow birds flying overhead to alight on the tree, to rest and to read about what people think about them. The owner’s relishing of this irony is the prime benefit from owning it.