Things have been quiet around here recently. There are reasons for this. I can’t tell you if they’re good or not, but they are reasons.
- I’ve been traveling (first visit to London and a quick stop in Hamburg). Though I have seen plenty of theater (London: Kafka’s Monkey – Young Vic, Much Ado and Doctor Faustus – Shakespeare’s Globe, Richard III – Old Vic; Hamburg: the improv group Schiller Killer, and Peer Gynt – Thalia Theater), travel is often a bit too overwhelming for coherent thoughts. Actually, that’s something I should get over.
- I’m leaving Berlin on July 12. Ladies and gentlemen, that is 11 days from now. And it’s put me in a very strange state of mind. Mind you, I’m going back in order to work on and see some very exciting things and people, and I am going to be back in Berlin again in November. But four months is a long time to spend away from a city that really feels like home.
With those thoughts of leaving and coming back, and my ongoing struggle with the question, “Is it feasible/desirable for me to make Berlin my home? And for how long?” – the modern art exhibit based in Berlin, showing from June 8 – July 24 in Atelierhaus Monbijou and other places, came in on a hauntingly appropriate note. Yesterday I wandered through the Monbijou studios. Typical Berlin gallery: old and unclean, whitewashed walls bare and bumpy save for art, in some rooms mold or piss assaulting the nasal palate. A scrappy, unadorned collection from artists with one thing in common: Berlin is their artistic home.
Visual artists have one less barrier to working internationally than theatermakers: language. At the least, that barrier is more easily crossed or circumvented. Still, it was comforting to me to see the work of my nomadic brethren from the world over who are living and creating with a good degree of success in this city.
Unsurprisingly, I’m most drawn to artwork that has an element of the performative. So Trevor Lloyd’s Mom sticks in my mind: Lloyd’s nomadism brought him to Berlin without a picture of his mother, and instead of asking her to send one, he drew her, over and over, from memory – left-handed, with closed eyes, and while standing on his head. He writes something about feeling that this is the way he can best access his subconscious, but to me this performative act recorded in the drawings that are on display is more interesting seen as a metaphor for memory: topsy-turvy, bizarre, associative, uncontrollable.
And my friends over at Yinzerspielen will find Matthias Fritsch’s multimedia crowdsourced piece We, Technoviking interesting: it’s built by the artist from the multitude of viewer re-creations of Fritsch’s original video Kneecam No. 1/Technoviking, taken in Berlin during the Fuckparade in 2000.
But my favorite moment was climbing to the top of the rickety metal platform outside of the studios. Flight after flight in a light rain, gray day, not knowing what I’d find. Turns out: a plain surface housing three SUV’s, like a personal and inescapable parking garage. A strange trio of ready-mades, unremarkable except for the fact that they’re there – how did they get there? And what are they doing at all in this flat, cobblestoned, urban landscape, these hardy gas-guzzlers made for leaping up mountains and plowing through streams? But they’re there nonetheless, unfazed, looking calm and blank-eyed over a city where they shouldn’t belong.
Tags: exhibits
