Lynchmob
HBC, Berlin, Germany
'Lynchmob' installation view. Photograph courtesy: Kollektiv
The last time David Lynch surfaced in Berlin he was involved in a minor diplomatic incident. In a public meeting in November 2007, the American director had to take to the microphone in order to calm a crescendo of outraged objections, after his otherworldly ally Raja Emanuel Schiffgens proposed that their joint ‘Transcendental Meditation’ project would lead to an ‘invincible Germany’. ‘I don’t know what he said,’ interposed Lynch, who doesn’t speak German, ‘but I think I understand that he used a word from the Third Reich, and let’s just look at it this way, it’s a new world now.’
Last week, as Lynch made his way to Berlin once again, this time to source European distributors for a forthcoming film collaboration with Werner Herzog, ‘Lynchmob’, a well-timed group show devoted to Lynch and the Lynchian, opened near Alexanderplatz. Featuring the works of around 30 artists, spread around the rotting architecture of the former Hungarian Cultural Centre, it is not known whether Lynch himself found the time to visit. Had he done so, something like the Marshall McLuhan scene from Annie Hall (1977) may well have transpired.
Installation view. Photograph courtesy: Kollektiv
‘I heard what you were saying,’ McLuhan emerges from behind a prop to chide a pontificating professor in a movie line: ‘You know nothing of my work! How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!’ Similarly, ‘Lynchmob’ does not really offer much insight into Lynch. The exhibition does reference him, citing a few of his signature moves. The box of stale doughnuts included in one installation is one of the fresher of these quotations. There are also a couple of decent works on display: Oliver Pietsch’s found-footage montage Hit Me (2006) stitches together film clips of violence against women and is pertinent, if brutalizing, while the same artist’s cut-up of sleeping and dreaming scenes (The Shape of Things, 2008) employs the same technique to more lushly romantic effect. But the curators’ stated ambition - to ‘invoke in the viewer the same psychological and emotional response as Lynch’s films’ - isn’t achieved.
The opening night of ‘Lynchmob’ saw its art works submerged beneath a free party vibe. By around midnight, cigarette butts and empty Pilsner Urquell bottles had colonized every surface, in a triumph of generic amusement. Meanwhile, DJs spun nothing in particular: no Angelo Badalamenti, no Julee Cruise. All in all, genuine ambition seemed in short supply. If the party is part of the point, why not attempt to design a genuinely Lynchian atmosphere, rather than just throwing something together under his name? Where the curators in fact did take steps in this direction, it was towards exploitation. In an advert posted on Craiglist shortly before the opening night, the following calls for performers were made: ‘WE ALSO NEED MIDGETS & DWARFS !!! to run around we can provide you with DRINK and fun [...] WE ALSO NEED FAT CHICKS Really FAT CHICKS to dance like at Daves place.’ I don’t mean to sound humourless, but this seems pretty grubby. Or as a manager at the Berlin culture centre where Lynch and Schiffgens spoke back in November observed at the time: ‘It’s all a bit embarrassing.’
Daniel Miller
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