Central to last week’s Berlin art world hustle and bustle was a strange, contradictory experience of contemporary art between restraint and abundance. On the one hand, there was the ‘abc’, the art berlin contemporary show, organized by Berlin galleries (but also including galleries from other places, all in all 64) at the beautifully Modernist Akademie der Künste in Hansaviertel. It was a concentrated, clear, manageable affair, largely thanks to a simple (anti-)curatorial premise: that all of the works should be displayed on, or within the range of, an Egon Eiermann table measuring 1×2 m. The implication was also that this could be possible models for urban sculpture, hence the title of the show, ‘def’, ‘drafts establishing future’. The results proved that limitations can foster conventional reactions: many pieces used the table simply as a pedestal for drop sculpture models, or as material for punk gesture (Pawel Althamer’s destroyed tabletop, Jörg Herold’s scenario of a table used as a shield against gun pellets). But there were also some very convincing ideas: Sadâane Afif for instance presented a striking model of the skeletal structure of the Statue of Liberty (put on a small bier with handles, ready to be carried around, thus turning the table into even less than a pedestal – a temporary parking area), exposing its surprising, and phallic, resemblance to Tatlin’s Monument to the 3rd International. I also liked Henrik Håkansson’s suggestion for a Buried Forest: mini-trees sunk into the tabletop like an Ethiopian church cut into the ground. But all in all, this welcome experiment in how you can do a show that is curated and yet not curated also proved that an all too rigid structure can cancel out any sense of tension.
On the other hand (to come back to the contradictory experience), as opposed to the restraint on display at the Akademie der Künste, there was the sheer abundance of gallery exhibitions that demand, and probably mostly warrant, being visited, however turning any attempt to come to terms with the onslaught into an uphill battle. Friday evening alone there were at least 20 openings that would have made sense to go to. Berlin has seen hundreds of galleries open over the last few years; and even if you count only the ones that are largely seen as relevant (whether because of past or present achievements), you still have a situation that mixes New York (many many galleries) with London (also many galleries, but spread out over almost the entire city, forcing you to spend ages getting from one to the next). I can’t really complain, since I live here, and can catch up on what I missed in the coming weeks. In any case, a few fleeting observations on what I saw in the galleries last week:
A new gallery house in Marienstraße in Mitte was opened with solo shows by veteran conceptualist Jiri Kovanda at Krobath (the Viennese gallery’s first exhibition in their Berlin branch) and Roman Ondak at Johnen. Kovanda had great early 1980s A4 collages involving media fashion images (confusing the assumptions about the inexistence of this kind of approach in Eastern Europe, CSSR in this case), and a new makeshift pieces with crayon pencils stuck in piece of wood, with one colour missing – red, though the sentence “red is missing” (in Czech language) scribbled on the wall, with a red pencil… Ondak presented early work from 1996-2001, minimalist interventions transplanting elements from other domestics space into the domestic space of the gallery space – complete with sockets fixed with metal rods above the floor, simulating the dimensions of the original room; all in all a very convincing layering of different spatial experience that adds a new layer also to the performative work that Ondak has become well known for in recent years.
Sabine Hornig’s show in the new space of Barbara Thumm was confident, a reformulation of her post-Minimalist language of walls, windows, architectural fragments in a kind of warped take on the Dan Graham-type layering of framing, semi-transparency and reflection. The group show at Meyer-Riegger included new, charming pieces by Eva Kotatkova – my favourite was a metal construction reading device that positions sets of books in front of the torso so they can be read simultaneously – a kind of knight’s amour for bibliophilists. Swiss sensibility of material and form was in the house both at Wentrup and Luis Campana: at Wentrup David Renggli http://www.janwentrup.com/exhibitions/dichte_fichten_dichten_dich/ shows nice-enough assemblages of bent laundry racks or skeletal umbrellas, but the most convincing piece is a series of collages, each including catalogue reproductions of Van Gogh’s Fifteen sunflowers in a vase (1888), wildly varying in size and colour, absurdly combined with cuts from Mad magazine’s ‘Spy vs. Spy’ – as if to highlight the contradiction between the endless reproductions of modern art and the endless confrontation of paranoid opponents in the Cold War era. Emil Michael Klein’s presentation at Campana is even more modest and restrained but there are subtle hints at humour that warrant his approach to minimalist objects: plinths with cheese holes in them (ouch, sorry to play on another Helvetian cliché), double crosses attached to the wall empty, then lined with rectangular drinking glasses thus turning it into a shelve, etc.
Modesty aside, it was great to see Erik van Lieshout exhibit in Berlin again, at Guido W. Baudach’s vast Wedding space. Lieshout’s video editor Core van der Hoeven was recently very ill with an infection. Worrying about the health of his longtime collaborator, but also left to his own devices in regard to his production, Lieshout decided to do a piece in homage to him, a rough, dark installation of wood panels and black drawings, including a lifesize reconstruction of van der Hoeven’s hospital bed. The central element however is a short video, a rough-cut animation with little pieces of wood as human figures buzzling around on a makeshift revolving mini stage, connecting the issue of sickness with the struggle of workers in a coalmine – a first time for Lieshout, who otherwise always stars in his video as agent provocateur of hilarious confrontation. It sounds weird, but it has a strangely mesmerizing effect, and it’s kind of moving to experience how Lieshout’s talent for slapsticky humour even shows through in the most grim, depressed, abstracted context.
