Before moving on to Thursday and the second half of what was an eventful art week in Berlin, I should not forget the tail end of Wednesday. Because Koons, after the press opening of his show at Neue Nationalgalerie, also had another opening that evening at Max Hetzler Gallery on Zimmerstraße, with a set of new paintings – digital Pop porn collage, as always meticulously transferred to canvas by his busy team of helpers (the more graphically pornographic elements of the image being obscured by being heavily print-type-dotted and/or being covered by abstract painterly doodlings, safe for a blunt vulva that bawled to be read as a contemporary travesty of Origine du Monde). Went to the opening early on with Sarah my wife and Helio and Selma (5 and 2 years old), our kids, who didn’t seem to care much about the paintings and opted for mopping the floor with their clothes, giggling like in some freak-out get-together (they know how to make me nervous in a gallery opening). Before the next step would be taken (i.e. them testing the soles of their shoes on the white wall) I preferred to navigate them next door to DAAD gallery. Shahzia Sikander’s show there – highlighting her contemporary playful reworking of the Indo-Persian miniature painting tradition, transferred to delicate murals, drawings and a computer-animated video – could keep my kids busy for a moment, transfixed as they were wearing headphones for the video animation, a sort of abstract fireworks of organic ornament. But as soon as I contemplated the cool static video portraits of Laos monks and novices (a new, if a little unimaginative departure in Sikander’s work) my daughter shouted across the room: ‘Papa, I need to shit!’ (a very helpful exhibition guard showed us to the lavatory). Thankfully she and her brother were fast asleep by the time I went to the party for the presentation of the shortlist of the National Gallery Prize for Young Art. The shortlist: Annette Kelm, Omer Fast, Keryn Cytter, and Danh Vo – looks like a nice selection to me (the first jury included Massimiliano Gioni, Beatrix Ruf, Jessica Morgan, Janneke de Vries and Bernhart Schwenk, the second jury will decide on the winner in October 2009).
Thursday
Opening of Art Forum Berlin, then on to Julian Goethe’s exhibition opening at Galerie Daniel Buchholz’ new parquet floor town house space on Fasanenstraße, that old West Berlin centre of pre-war grandeur (Robert Musil lived on this section of Fasanenstraße, as did Danish silent movie star Asta Nielsen) and post-war art (Galerie Springer and Galerie Bremer where the most important galleries in post-war West-Berlin, and the latter’s famed Scharoun bar, designed by architect Hans Scharoun in the mid 1950s, was also booked for Julian Goethe’s after-show party, which I skipped in favour of a small dinner with friends and an early night’s sleep). Goethe had put up what was possibly his best show to date: his black sculptures, large odd hybrids between Tony Smith pieces and flamboyant flacons, dominated the rooms – the highlight being one that looked like a contraption of a mad, 1920s Tesla-type scientist, an oval neon shape with black desk lamps going off in all directions like misguided, oversized earpieces of an antique telephone.
Friday
We first went to Sigmar Polke’s opening at Julius Werner. The highlights of the ‘Linsenbilder’ (Lens Paintings) were the ones already presented last year in Siegen (see my article in frieze), with more paintings using the same technique (a semi-transparent silicon-type surface that undulates colours applied beneath and on it like the DIY-version of a lenticular motion picture). The Siegen pictures still looked fantastic, while most of the other ones where a little less convincing, the smaller formats looking more like slightly slapdash studies. I saw Werner Spies (doyen of German art criticism and close friend of both Picasso and Max Ernst), Herbert Grönemeyer (biggest German pop star, imagine a more down-to-earth Peter Gabriel) and Nina Hoss (German actress, leading role in director Max Färberböck’s latest picture Anonyma – A Woman in Berlin) entering the gallery within the course of 30 seconds, which created a very particular German mix seemingly having shown up to meet the famous artist, who, despite the gallery having announced he would be present, of course, did not attend (he apparently had cancelled a couple of days beforehand). Next stop was the inaugural exhibition at Capitain Petzel, the new joint space of Gisela Capitain from Cologne and Friedrich Petzel from New York. Already from the street the building dominated: the light highlighting the silhouettes of the many visitors against the background of a 1964 GDR modernist glass box, which used to house a presentation of socialist applied arts for home decoration entitled ‘Kunst im Heim’ (Art at Home). Artists associated with the two galleries presented their take on this pre-history, with findings by Tris Vonna-Michell or Christopher Williams displayed in vitrines. It might have been misleading to see this exhibition during an opening packed with people, but seeing glass cabinets inside a huge glass cabinet highlighted what will be the huge challenge of this space that is anything but a White Cube: to show anything else but, well, vitrines, or large freestanding sculptures (that said, there is a large basement space).
Finally we went to Albert Oehlen’s fantastic exhibition at Max Hetzler’s large space in Berlin-Wedding, one floor up from Baudach (where there was an ambitiously huge show of Bjarne Melgard’s bad-boy paintings and installations, and where I fittingly ran into my favourite bad boy Erik van Lieshout, who recently, in a stunningly anti-cyclical move, has relocated from Berlin to Cologne). Oehlen had a simple but conceptually striking idea: to fit the space with freestanding display walls that, seen from one side (the gallery entrance side) featured a series of new paintings – oil paint on large Spanish advertising posters collaged onto the canvas – while seen from the other side, there was a series of works from 1991, that, counter to the more playfully fragmented new work, was completely dense with layers and layers of abstraction (get a glimpse here). The dinner was set right into this vast installation; in honour of Oehlen, there were toasts by Max Hetzler, Jeff Koons, and Benedikt Taschen of Taschen publishers. Koons recalled some bar night in early 1990s Cologne, which was probably an easier connection to make than between his art and Oehlen’s, and Taschen must have felt the urge to deliver something in that spirit of the old days when late Martin Kippenberger was still around, elaborately telling a lame joke about bachelors and brown toast (the reaction was lukewarm, as half the audience probably didn’t get the joke, and the other half felt it wasn’t very funny). Nevertheless Taschen’s gesture by way of awkwardness exposed a change in climate since the aggressive embarrassment’n’slapstick days of the ‘Hetzler-Boys’ (i.e. the early days of the ‘Bad Painting’ scene around Hetzler gallery), and we were left to wonder whether that was for the better or the worse.
Saturday
Spent most of the day at the zoo (Knut was not very boisterous that day, as opposed to my son and daughter). Attended a dinner at COMA gallery in honour of Reynold Reynolds, whose video installations of a female protagonist either being subjected to scientific scrutinization or the darkness of her own subconscious (as visualized through plants and chaos invading her home) are expertly filmed, and eloquently evoke musings about non-linear time, science, Muybridge, Foucault, and Freud, but nevertheless can’t help being dominated by the sheer sadism of the camera tracking all of this. Finally, went to Silberkuppe, where Mathilde Rosier conducted a set of performance the first part of which I had missed (her playing piano two-handed, with a secretly planted recording inside the piano making it four-handed). The video projection, despite technical difficulties, featured hauntingly dramatic music set to a mesmerizing in-and-out-zoom of a full moon over a dark park, until… (I won’t give away the unashamedly romantic denouement). In any case I didn’t stay until sunrise, as Sarah called to say that Selma had thrown up three times already. After a week of art events in abundance, the imponderability of everyday life had taken its toll.
