It’s kind of a weird thing to do, relative to the other activities that fill our days. A bit like meditating, an unavoidable question seems to be: “what the hell am I doing here?”. This problem becomes especially acute due to (a) the deterrent pretension that crackles through the air at so many gallery openings and (b) the esoteric, self-referential bubble that the actual work seems to be trapped within. Add to that gooney art scenesters checklisting your scruffy appearance and practicing an eastern religion starts to look a lot more self-explanatory.

Looking at architecture is something that’s comparatively simple, if only because it’s a lot easier to make a statement about it without sounding stupid. It seems a given that we’re all entitled to an opinion about the buildings we live in and around -a basic tenet of this very publication’s existence. Architects and their works are somehow easier targets than artists and theirs, primarily because we think we know what the hell it is they’re doing, often times better than they do. There’s a legitimacy, even a moral obligation, in making a very base, or even obscene, criticism about an edifice with a corresponding appearance. And the work of architects seems to have some kind of effect on every moment of our lives, while art must first seduce us or offend us to be noticed in the first place.

“Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions”

The title of Hella Gerlach’s show up at Studio commands and seduces us in equal measure, and in doing so initiates a necessary rupture from the profanity of everyday life and all the messiness of its architecture, physical and otherwise. This chunk of language is weird and at the same time totally(?) accessible, a kind of textual gateway that might give cause to investigate something that sounds kind of fun. On the other side of an exhalation and a sheet of plate glass is an offering that coaxes a closer look and, following the directive of the title, an emphatically meditative attitude. All of the elements and objects inside are both autonomous and at the same time the constituent parts of a bizarre phenomenal aggregate. The red cabinet, perfectly level, is actually balancing on its spindly legs as precariously as it appears to be…so be careful breathing out!

An untitled ceramic ball that was mistaken for a tomato, sits on the floor just to the right of the entrance.

Element I and Element II (Studiolo) are hung from the gridded substructure of the gallery’s semi-dismantled acoustic tile ceiling.

The semi-transparent ramie and viscose fiber walls of the three Element pieces have pockets in which objects were placed.

At the invitation of the gallerist, I dug the work Stab out from a pocket on one of the fabric walls. Also made of ceramic, it was uncannily heavy; it felt like a bone until I took it from its sleeve. “Stab” translates to “rod” in English, which is what I first thought the title was supposed to mean. Yet the shape of this thing could definitely be used to put someone into a world of pain.

Teil für Zwei (Piece for Two)

Further into the gallery are three more of those ceramic balls, one of which has been smashed. It was actually here that I first realized the ball in the front wasn’t a tomato. It all has something to do with a Greek housewarming ritual, I was told. The attempt was made to smash the balls all around the gallery just before the show opened, but they were fired to such a high strength that three of them survived.

Handstück (Hand Piece)

and

Schulterstück (Shoulder Piece)

were both cast from the artist’s body. But the visitor is free to try them on as well. These, I take it, are the “elastic impressions” mentioned in the title of the show.

This inconclusive set of objects, spaces and associations is like an architecture of the subconscious. That makes it difficult to talk about in any rational way, but I see the work as operating on the fuzzy line between art and architecture. Like a building, the show doesn’t presume anything of the viewer/occupant; it seems to be actually unable to. A pre-knowledge of what the work is about would if anything preclude understanding it for what it is, I think. As such, the work operates at a very base level, in spite of its elegance. Something down there, back there, at the beginning of architecture, seems to be making its presence known.

Take A Slow, Deep Breath! Elastic Impressions is on view at Studio, Adalbertstr.96, 10999 Berlin, until November 26th.

“Every single art form, the Chinese landscape, Egyptian sculpture or the Gothic counterpoint, exists only once, never to return again in its soul and symbolism.”

Oswald Spengler – Decline of the West

Word! This art form is certainly staying put, left to steep in its own atmosphere of 80s transpirations. Well, most of it must have escaped through the array of vent holes on the left by now. Rarely has Spengler’s point been stressed as succinct and as well as with this redundantly framed description of an art work at Spichernstraße underground stop on Berlin’s U9 line, as if trying to heighten the distance in soul and symbolism one might already feel looking at the space invaders era art work by Gabriele Stirl, which looks like Atari but is much more cerebral.

My suspicion is that sometime in the 90s, they realized that that flimsy ‘86 frame, though crafted with much care, would hardly suffice to shield its content from the vicious edding dildo attacks by alienated urban yoots with some time to spare that ripped through Germany’s metropolitan landscapes in the 90s.

So there it lies, encased in the past and behind two layers of glas and somewhat defused, as a kind of encrypted Schneewittchen code, the art form of the 80s, irrevocably lost to us in context, in soul, in symbolism, leaving us with the strong desire to delve into the thick smokey atmosphere of a 1986 West Berlin bar, if only for a moment, and eavesdrop on some banter by the perpetrators of this lost art form over a glas of afri cola, perhaps. Shit, I’m late for my appointment with my accountant in Friedenau.

You can link to the gallery site at this address, but please be aware that a flash animation is embedded that may cause seizures to be suffered by people diagnosed with epilepsy:

http://www.kaihoelzner.de/

For those of you that don’t want to brave that test of speed reading in German, here is a tickling frame that was furnished to me in the press release for the show:

As our more steadfast readers already know, the Berlin townhouse is a subject that is both seductive and perplexing to us, going all the way back to Ian Warner’s piece from November 2006, ‘Upper-Middle-Class Homes for the “Classless” Society’, as well as Karen Elliot’s seminal follow-up from one year ago, ‘A Whiff of Density’.

So now let’s see where this conversation is going, should be an awesome thing to check out this weekend. From 7:00pm on Saturday, July 17th at Galerie Kai Hoelzner, Adalbertstr. 96, 10999 Berlin.

Was reading a fascinating interview with the artist Cyprien Gaillard last night, in issue 7 of Pin-Up Magazine. I really dig what this guy is doing with architecture: recycling brutalist housing into stone gravel-ways (La grande allée du Château de Oiron), transplanting monuments from site to site (Le canard de Beaugrenelle), reflecting on spring break tourists puking on Mayan ruins. See his portfolio here.

“In about two minutes a jet of water is going to shoot out of the hole. It’ll be about 20 meters high,” he explained. Although I was still a little confused, it became apparent that this was theater, and not some impending natural disaster. Slightly dissapointed, I stuck around to see what would happen.

Click to enlarge

The artificial geyser didn’t quite reach 20 meters, but for a couple of seconds the possiblility of an awesome drenching did seem quite real. Two other technicians clarified the situation further: the geyser is part of a four-day “theater spectacle” called The Giants Arrive, by the French theater group Royal de Luxe. Huge mechanical puppets will roam the streets of Berlin until Sunday, playing out a mythical, fairy-tale version of Berlin’s divided past.

It occurs to me again that the center of Berlin is becoming less and less real, whatever that might be. The building on the left in the photo is the Temporäre Kunsthalle, which is currently clad in an inkjet print of the façade of the Palast der Republik. It’s an installation called Echo, by artist Bettina Pousttchi, and is probably supposed to be evocative and eerie, but for me falls way short of being engaging in any way whatsoever. It seems tired. Sometimes simple things are good because they’re simple; and sometimes simple things are dull because they’re trying too hard to be good by being simple.

So what’s the center of Berlin about? It’s about simulation, reflection, ironic comment, symbolic gesture, detached recontextualisation, artistic intervention and nostalgic whitewashing. The old GDR parliament building is gone. A hammy rehash of the old Prussian palace is to be rebuilt at vast cost. An increasingly unused lawn now covers the site like a tragic bowling green. A pneumatic geyser, built by theater technicians, errupts from the location’s substrata which, not 100 meters distant is the object of study for archeological teams. And a wooden art barn, built to be dismantled, finds meaning by dressing up in clothes it can’t afford to wear.

Am I having fun living in a metaphor?

Where’s a French post-structuralist when you need one? Maybe it’s time to reread Baudrillard. Except we still wouldn‘t understand it.

Above and below is Finnish artist Eemil Karila’s Surface Values, currently installed in Program, an architectural project space in Berlin.

The typical austerity of the white exhibition space is shifted in this installation by the periodical switch from standard white neon lighting, to ultra violet black light. The swirling forms on the floor are the traces of UV ink mixed into the cleaning fluid of the gallery’s cleaning lady.

Vernissages are peculiar things at the best of times, but the opening night of Surface Values was particularly disorientating. On opening nights the art in question is of little importance. It must take second place behind the social gathering in which communication is reduced to a blur of distracted introductions punctured by neurotic who-else-is-here gazes over shoulders. What was interesting here though, was the same thing that eventually drove me out of the place: the room was making me feel terribly ill, and the single bottle of beer I had drunk, felt more like ten.

The performance was curated by Collegium Hungaricum, and kicked off the 2nd annual Cinema Total meet. Greenaway started with a rousing speech about the changing nature of cinema, delivered in the type of booming, effortlessly authoritative English accent which should underpin all documentaries, and leaves you feeling thoroughly impressed without really knowing why.

Vintage Greenaway: The Draughtsman’s Contract

Citing a date in 1983, Greenaway refered to the introduction of infrared TV remote controls into the living rooms of the world; gadgets which allowed us to zap through multiple channels and surf a sea of pictures. The remote control helped usher in the jump-cut era of MTV, and arguably quickened our ability to sort and evaluate visual information, but also shortened our attention spans. Greenaway’s point though, was that this has left us with an innate ability to digest multiple information sources: the past, the present and the future, simultaneously, with only the loosest of narative threads. And this, he insisted, is what people want, and what might shape the cinema of the future.

Vintage Greenaway: The Belly of an Architect

But what followed was a 60-minute barrage of short film loops, indiscriminately distributed across the screens. Most of the time the same loop was to be seen running simultaneously on one or more neighboring screens, making the five beamers pretty much redundant from a dramatic point of view. Just as there was no interaction between screens, no attempt was made to incorporate the architectural quality of the Collegium Hungaricum building or the surrounding urban space. Night trams, however, occasionally trundled along between the stage and the building, providing occasional but much needed absurd interlude.

The audio coupled to each film loop was fed mercilessly into an echo effect for the entire duration of the set, which might have served to merge one clip into the next, but the result was a cacophony of repeated accoustic phrases as disjointed as the visual onslaught. Far from representing the future, it sounded like an embarrasing throwback to the early days of political sampling in mid 1980s hip-hop or early 1990s industrial music. Every so often a beat would emerge out of the soupy mess, as if to remind us of the enduring relevance of rhythm and syncopation, linearity and digression.

Yonderboi (l) and Greenaway (r) on stage

Due to multiple simultaneous communication channels, the typical office worker these days can only expect to enjoy a three-minute burst of concentrated work before the next interruption. In this context, the thought of a new form of cinema, in which plot and dramatic arc are traded for more of the same, seems like a nightmare.

True to my picture-trawling principle, I dumped it straight into a specially designated folder on my hard disc noting neither its source, nor referencing its content. In moments of inspiration-deficiency I peruse this folder, unbiased by a sense of context.

But today (what luck!) I came across the author of the installation purely by chance. It’s the work of artist Pablo Valbuena.

Valbuena augments architecture with light. In some installations, as above, the underlying geometric form of an object is distilled through the superimposition of precise animated projections. The material itself seems to fade away. In other, grander undertakings, Valbuena punctures and extrudes whole buildings. The feasibility of these fantastic augmentations lies in the artist’s appreciation of the structural logic of the underlying architecture, and an intuition for something you could call architectural-tempo.

The artists’s website: www.pablovalbuena.com

Enough said. Here’s something to watch:

Pablo Valbuena: Augmented Space @ TodaysArt 2008 from casper on Vimeo.

Plaza de las Letras from tv.edgargonzalez.com on Vimeo.

Initiated by artist Adrian Kondratowicz, the project is as simple as it is poetic: in selected city blocks, normal black plastic rubbish bags are swapped for colourful polkadot versions, effectively turning whole neighborhoods into bright urban sculpture gardens on rubbish collection day.

This is one of those ideas which makes you ask basic questions about the familiar. Why are rubbish bags black, for example? What happens to a place, and people’s sense of place if they’re pink polkadot? And will people think differently about rubbish, and the amount of rubbish they produce daily, by drawing attention to the bags on the street? I’d love to think so.

In honor of Lacoste’s 75th birthday, KaDeWe (Berlin’s answer to Harrods) invited the fashion label to celebrate in its department store. Then, under the title «12.12 Gallery», Lacoste invited eleven artists living in Berlin to decorate the shop windows with original works of art which were then to be auctioned off for a good cause. One of these artists was Brad Downey, who, like his ten other colleagues, submitted a written proposal in which he made it quite clear that «something outside will turn green». So far so good.

So on the 22nd May, Downy loaded up a fire-extinguisher with Lacoste-green children’s finger paint, approached the store front, and proceeded to give it a good dowsing. Shortly afterwards KaDeWe and Lacoste suffered from a sudden, synchronous sense-of-humour-failure. First the paint was removed as quickly as possible, and then Downey’s name dissapeared from the banner out front promoting the artistic intervention.

True to his word: «Something outside will turn green». [Photo: Richard Schwarz]

There’s something deliciously embarrasing about Lacoste and KaDeWe’s behaviour in the aftermath of this event; something almost endearingly timid about their failure to distinguish between the artwork they commissioned and an act of stray vandalism. As a public relations excersize it pretty much capsized, and whilst Downey can claim innocently to have fulfilled his commission, it’s interesting to note where and how clearly the line has been drawn between the mainstream and the subversive. Bluntly said: put something daft behind a window and you’re okay; put something daft onto the window and you’re not. And this is a simple question of territory: of encroachment and of assimilation.