Lots of art shows all over town in connection with the sixth annual Berlin Gallery Weekend. We saw two good ones, both with Neu Galerie: Nick Mauss and Tom Burr, both from New York.
We had brunch with our young friend (we have known him since he was about 13 years old), Nicholas Oberhuber, at his gallery, Koch Oberhuber Wolff, now in its second year. The gallery is set in a brilliant, seemingly wide-open four or five story structure of raw concrete and glass, an example of excellent new architecture on a faded street north of Rosenthaler Platz at Brunnenstrasse 9. KOH had a very good show by the photographer Tobias Zielony. The feature was an animation of thousands of digital stills, lasting about twelve minutes. The effect was that of an early cinema in black and white. The stills were shot in Naples at a well-intentioned but now infamous site:
“La Vele di Scampia is a futuristic housing estate in northern Naples and a Camorra* battlefield. Conceived by Francesco di Salvo in the late seventies and widely recognized for their urbanistic design, “Le Vile” (“the Sails”) were squatted by mafia families even before completion. Today, the building complex is a symbol of the Camorra power in the Naples region and a key center of European drug trafficking. Matteo Garrone shot his movie “Gomora” based on the novel by Roberto Saviano on the site in 2008.
*The Camorra is a mafia-like criminal organization, or secret society, originating in the region of Campania and its capital, Naples. A photo of the quarter and an image of the Sails are posted above.
Zielony, in the manor of Sharon Lockhart and others, lived in the complex long enough to become accepted by those living there; thus the intimate shots of mostly teens in their daily routines. The result is a rare but stark and foreboding exhibition, perhaps about the life and death of modernist utopianism.
But the denouement of the weekend came in the evening with the grand dinner of the Gallery Weekend at the Bode Museum. We had come as far from Neopolitan brute architecture as one can come.
The Bode was completely renovated two or three years ago. Built in 1903, it is the northernmost of the museums on the fabled “Museum Island” in the middle of Berlin, and it now houses relics from medieval times through the nineteenth century. The cast were the stars of the German contemporary art scene, with a few French, Austrians and Scandanavians in the mix. We counted about six Americans. Six years ago there would have been 60 out of three hundred. The discrepancy would warrant an investigation in itself, but I have been convinced for some time that the European and American cultures have been drifting apart for more than ten years. Some would point to the high flying Euro, but that is not the whole story.
Wine was served in the magnificent entry hall, with an equestrian Kaiser Frederick the Great, pictured above, towering from the floor to twenty feet or so over our heads. In the next room a splendid buffet was served, and, as has become the custom at such events, there was no seating plan and indeed very little seating. The entire evening became a three or four hour roaming, shoulder-bumping cocktail event, superb for mixing and suddenly coming up on old acquaintances and for gown-watching. We took a couple of detours through the open galleries, very few others being interested, and saw enough ecclesiastical art to convince us once again that we are suffering through an esthetically challenged era, but what the heck. We carried on with syntactically comprensible conversations for three hours or so with couples from Paris, Munich, L.A., Norway and Berlin and any number of local art folks before we folded.
At about eleven we walked somewhat unsteadily out the massive entrance portals, through the legions of cigarette smokers huddled in groups on the marble steps, and slumped into a swank 700 Series BMW Gallery Weekend limo that took us home in about six minutes.
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