Today the “tree” finally arrived in Berlin. The “tree” is from our art collection, a large sculpture made from the trunk and limbs of a cedar tree, felled and dragged out of a woods in northeastern Pennsylvania by the American artist, Mark Dion, late in 1995. Mark soaked the trunk and limbs in fiberglass to kill the bugs and strengthen the wood, split the trunk vertically and reassembled it around a steel armature and then filled each scraggly branch with books. All the books depict the “episteme,” in Michel Foucault terminology, of Western Culture about and around birds. Which is to say that we know nothing of birds, we only know what our culture says about birds. There are shelves on the history of birds, the mythology of birds, ornithology, Rachel Carson, Audubon, Hitchcock, and on and on. The work is entitled “The Library for the Birds of New York.” The idea was that birds flying over New York who needed a rest could alight on the tree and read up on what human beings in the Western World had ever thought or said about them.
the tree is a big piece. We became art collectors the day we bought it in February of 1996 because we bought it first and then went home and measured the ceiling. At eleven and a half feet high, and six or seven feet at its widest extent, the tree cleared the ceiling of the playroom in our house in Woodside by six inches. Until you spend several thousand dollars on a stunt like that you are not an art collector; you are just decorating your home.
We agreed with neugerriemschneider, a prominent contemporary art gallery in Berlin that the gallery would try to sell “The Library” this coming weekend, known in Berlin as the Gallery Weekend. That meant dismantling the tree in San Francisco and air freighting it to Berlin through the volcanic cloud. The dismantling , packing and crating were a monumental task and getting Lufthansa to grant some priority to the shipment in light of their crushingly crowded loading dock at SFO was even harder. With more luck than sense, the tree arrived by air in Munich Tuesday in two crates, each about 12 by 6 by 6 feet in size, and was trucked up to Berlin. We walked into the gallery space as the pieces of the tree were being unpacked. The tree required re-assembly from about 60 photos, as each book, birds nest and picture that hang from the trunk or limbs must be precisely in the right place. Miraculously, by the end of the day, the four or five person crew (Dutch, American and German) of young people had assembled the tree. Faith in the young generation renewed. The oohs and ahs from all the people working on the opening of the gallery’s show Friday as the tree neared completion of its re-assembly in a room of its own were ample reward for the anxiety – and expense - of attempting such a foolhardy task. We now hope that “The Library” finds a good home in Europe, while at the same time somewhat despairing that a great work by an American artist seems to be appreciated mainly by Europeans. The piece had been offered for sale in New York on and off for two years. This speaks poorly of the cultural faculties of Americans compared with Europeans, but it’s been this way for about 300 years.
In the afternoon we spent a pleasant hour and a half at the svelte, modernistic gallery of Mehdi Chouakri, a streamlined, dapper, “young” Algerian, Gallicized to the gills, elegant enough to make you want to go on a stiff diet right now. Mehdi was showing Hans Peter Feldman, one of the original European pop artists. Our new friend and fairly recent artist-find, Luca Trevisani, a 30 year old Italian from Verona who is working in Berlin - except he is now on the ladder (we can only hope) to stardom, so he has fellowships to work in New York and other venues – was in the gallery, having just installed two new sculptures. Against all reason, we swooned over the new pieces, even though there can’t be more than 25 people in the whole world who would agree. We left the slick, shiny and buttoned-down environs of the gallery and walked on through the warm afternoon through the dusty, gravelly and broken pavements of the East Berlin neighborhood back to see how the installation of the tree was progressing.
Last evening the big art event of the Berlin season arrived: The Olafur Eliasson restrospective opened at the Gropius Bau. This building is a monument designed by Martin Gropius, father of Walter of Bauhaus fame, around 1900. It is ponderously elegant. This is not the space to describe the art of Eliasson except to say that he works to simulate natural phenomena through glass, mirrors, white and colored light and mist, among other things. Olafur, of Danish/Icelandic heritage, is one of the most prominent and excellent artists in the world, and he is based in Berlin. This, however, is the first chance that Berliners have had to see the work. We own a print, a photo and two sculptures, and we have had the privilege of knowing Olafur, albeit at some distance, since the late nineties.
The show was publicized and anticipated for days in all the Berlin newspapers. We walked over about eight in the evening and waited in line for a half hour to enter the building. There was no admission charge, and thousands must have filed through the show. It was even more spectacular than ever. It is art made from mathematics and light that captivates everyone from knowledgeable art people through the casual visitor. The opening was a grand celebration, and it made everybody there happy.
We capped off the evening by taking the U-Bahn to Alexanderplatz for a party at a vaguely disreputable establishment on the twelfth floor of an ugly East German high rise known as the Weekend Club. This was the inevitable post-opening party, billed to start at 10 p.m. and go on indefinitely. It was an elite affair for about 300 people of various ages, all dressed in black and gray. First you hear the breastbone throbbing techno beat from two DJ’s as you enter a very dark forty by seventy room with a view over the lights of the city. Then you wait twenty minutes to be served at a your-elbows-crushed-together bar by a skinny bartender (free drinks) who is fast and double-jointed (an amazing show in itself), all the while trying not to cry from the clouds of cigarette smoke pushing into your tear ducts.
We recognized only three or four people until we met and went through the ritual hugs and both-cheeks kisses with a glamorous, raven-haired woman we know well, an Iranian-American raised in Corte Madera who heads a prominent contemporary art foundation in Mexico City. This woman knows everybody. When I complained that we had recognized hardly anybody there in the packed mass of party people and that the crowd seemed shy of eminence, she informed me that I had literally been leaning against Countess Francesca von Hapsburg for five minutes. I turned around and stared blankly. It isn’t every day one rubs shoulders with aristocracy.
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