Post titled: "If you don't have anything nice to say..."



While Nadine was at work yesterday I wasn't quite sure to do with myself, which was only a problem for a half-hour or so, because I just hopped on the U-Bahn (Metro) and got off at any stop that sounded good, then walked a few blocks and went back under to the trains, popping up again elsewhere. Before long I had effectively groundhogged a good northern portion of the city in this way. Stumbling back up on Hackescher Markt I decided to wander further through its streets and ended up happening upon a neighborhood full of small art galleries, many of which were worth visiting AND open on Sunday (which basically nothing is, actually.)

SIDETRACK/DISCLAIMER: (Just to get this out of the way) SKIP THIS PARAGRAPH if you'd rather not read me whining about an art exhibit, SKIP THIS POST actually, except the last paragraph I'm mostly just slinging complaints/praises regarding local art exhibits, but there are some good links).

Iäm having way too many observations daily now to actually write them all, so I just try to expand on a few... and touch on the rest.

Get get the worst out of the way: The last temporary-museum show I visited today was ìHannah Arendtî in a place (or was called?) ìDenk Raumî (ìThink(ing) Roomî) and unfortunately, it was unbelievably annoying. I only went to it because I was riding high on the KW wave (stop while you're ahead, duh.) and I saw the name: Hannah Arendt and thought ìHmm, that sounds important, I've seen that name saying important things- (blah blah, stupid presumptuous brain!)î The only saving grace was that I payed student price of 2 euro. (Damn, this international student ID is like gold- you can buy them at STA travel whether or not you're actually a student, which may or may not be legal/ethical, but whatever.)

Upon entry to the dilapidated (literally-every room had paint peeling of the ceilings big times and cracked 1950's-60's patterns of linoleum peeling and chipping off the floor... from the getgo this reeked of silliness that we are supposed to take seriously (a favorite trick of German Academia, I think). Upon entry a chbby band painfully polite blonde boy in his early 20's wearing a too-tight blue suit searched my , taking his job very seriously, as I went through a full-sized airport-style metal detector... (in retrospect, this seems ironically fascist and completely unnecessary). But, the thing was that this so-called art exhibit was really just a building (whole building that might've formerly been some East German Government building or School, hard to tell) this peeling rotting building (an aesthetic I am actually quite fond of under other circumstances) was FILLED WITH WORDS AND QUOTES. Hannah Arendt speaking was the basis of the exhibit, so whether it be:

-two rooms of discmen crudely screwed to painted plywood tables held down by cut sections of bicycle innertube each playing long selections from her lectures

-televisions set up in what looked like tiny soviet alcoholics' living rooms on each floor looping old monotone television interviews with her in black and white

-OR 20 televisions looping 20 professors reading and ENTIRE tome of hers outloud all at the same time

-a reading room on the top floor at the end of the exhibit which offered 100 of her books for you to sit there and absorb at your own leisure

-an entire room full of full page text quotes from her books (citing page numbers, too, mind you) all printed in gray ink on laminator plastic-paper.

it was way way way too much verbal and audio assault, and that's not even mentioning the rooms of poorly thought-out art. I seriously doubt anyone who had anything to do would ever read what I've just written, but if they do, then: ìI know what you were trying to do but it shouldn't have been an art exhibit, it needed an 8-part t.v. Mini-series. Ok?î Oh, and there was a installation room that encouraged visitors to smoke, there were three enormous space-aged chrome-dome ashtrays and the only light was coming from three different colored boxes... a couple chose this room to have their own private make-out session, which was the most interesting thing I saw in the whole exhibit. Enough of that.


The FIRST place I hit up was a sweet little place called Circle Culture Gallery. Current exhibit was of many small imp-like circle creatures on wood panels which, when I realized they'd been silkscreen I laughed (clever boy!) because there were hundreds of them, and the random splatters and forms in the cloud-like background paint fooled the eye into thinking that each figure was actually drawn, but silkscreening made for a uniformity which was offset by the random placement and overall chaos of these many characters. Heck, there were even 4 snowboards for sale with his designs, not bad really, several of the pieces had sold, good deal. I was tricked for a split-second into thinking that Sophie Ellis-Bextor (when she had brown hair) was sitting behind the desk. Must´ve been the jetlag plAYING TRICKS ON ME AGAIN. (NOTE: LATER DISCOVERED ON THEIR WEBSITE THAT THE EXHIBIT WAS IN correlation with the Pictoplasma show which Iäm totally kicking myself for not attending because it ended two days ago, scheisse!)



Next: KW (Kunst Werke) which is a HUGE building full of well-done installations that I'd almost completely forgotten about just because it is so far out of the way... but it is pretty great actually.

In the lobby on their magazine shelves they had a copy of Umelec, a Czech art magazine I really like (because of its sheer weird-ness) but hadn't seen in years.

The building consists of one main level- a room of convention-sized proportion and 30-foot ceilings, full of motion-sensor timed projection and video installations by Natascha Sadr Haghighian which were text-based, but potent. Favorite quote was:

"In such a war, a war against idolatry, ridicule will be our best tool... Acting like sh*ts will only make us become sh*t"

Also on this floor was a 15-minute film called Hospital Bone Dance by Judith Hopf and Deborah Schamoni which I think might've been about the German (socialized) healthcare system. If you've seen the Daft Punk ìAround the Worldî video- some scenes were vaguely similar, where seriously injured people get up and dancing to crazy aphex-twin-ish music and I found myself laughing out-loud alone in this huge room at the ridiculousness on screen. (I think it was supposed to be funny-?)

Lots more video and sort-of interactive work on the 3 upper floors, including an entire room of 12 projections of college-age American boys on the beach all singing ìWe had fun,we had ___ we had seasons in the sun, but the time that we had- etcî all life-sized. Third floor was build small, the ceiling and floor were rebuild to be only 6 feet tall, and after going through several rooms and hallways one encountered this bizarre film about out-of-control bread dough going through various mechanisms and coached along by a seriously obese hawiian woman and her co-workers. The dough traveled through the ceiling, dropped to a palate, grew, outweighed the palate, kept growing, then when through a hole in the floor and was passed along to a black rubber conveyor belt and finally vacuum-packed and shipped out in doughballs. The sequence somehow ended in acid dripping off the hawiian woman's toe, but then in real life it came through the ceiling of the first room of the exhibit and kept burning a hole in the linoleum floor in another tiny room. I haven't actually invested so much time in watching the entirety of each film since the Bill Viola show at the Getty in LA back when, which it a good sign... however I still find myself questioning whether or not people know what the hell they're really going for using this medium... but that goes with every meduim, I suppose.



In the Alexanderplatz U-Bahn station there was a huge weird homemade shrine to Ingeborg Bachman who died in 1973... I have no explanation for this, but will include a foto when I remember... who? Why? Some poet, but why in the u-bahn? Was she killed there? But who kills an old woman in the Metro station?



Also wandered the Orangienburgerstraße and Gippstraße, and one other- encountering many a charming cafe (the kind that would be cliche in a movie but are just cozy in reality) and a full-on old-school ballroom with crumbling building front and uncollected luch plates and beer glasses on the little round lawn tables, wish I knew how to dance for real...

Today Nadine and I started an exciting little project, but spend the most of the afternoon hunting down an art supply store that was actually geared toward landscape and architectural model-making, which was actually amazing, hadn't seen anything quite like it before. We bought small sheets of thin-ish corrugated zinc and plastic, foam-rubber balls, clear plastic balls, a lightweight white modeling clay, strips of thick colorful felt and a several rolls of bizarre colored plastic-paper, and went home to build and sculpt for the rest of the evening into the night. Good stuff. Now it is 4 in the morning, I'm back in the kitchen sleepless from either jetlag OR the sleepless matress, I'm not exactly sure.

Either way I got a great short story half-written, based on my old landlord from the 1602, hopefully if ends as well as it began. I haven't written a short story in years...