Sunday, July 31, 2011

Nibelungenlied

I am off to the Rhine Valley tomorrow to wake her up.


Brünnhilde

Friday, July 29, 2011

Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow

I’ve been following him for years. Tracking his paper trail. Writing about him in my journal. Googling him late at night. Imagining living with him on a sweeping ranch in southern France. No, not Robert Pattinson. Anselm Kiefer. I just can’t seem to get enough.

I saw Kiefer’s (Donaueschingen Germany, 1945) work at the Hamburger Bahnhof this past week. Here’s the short list of why I can’t move on:

  1. He makes water look like dust. The seas in his paintings (loosely labeled as they are mammoth constructions of lead, dirt and straw) evoke the powerful swelling, cresting motion of waves that drown and flood. Yet, just as you are about to dive into the expansive image before you, your mouth begins to water as if you haven’t had a drink in days. You realize that if you reached your fingers out to it, the surface would crumble at your touch. It is split and cracked. Parched. A dead sea. It is simultaneously a churning river and the dry riverbed it will become. In this way, it holds two separate times suspended. Even more improbably, parts of it are scorched. At once water and fire. Their cyclical battle of destruction and rebirth is endless and still.


Hoffmann von Fallersleben auf Helgoland, 1983-1986

  1. He builds things to knock them down. It’s part of his philosophy about life’s ephemeral nature. For a while he had his very own multi-acre universe on which to build towers and raze them with bulldozers. (Which we will all get to witness in HD when “Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow” comes out in August! http://www.hulu.com/watch/260400/movie-trailers-over-your-cities-grass-will-grow)

I have a hard time being reckless with my work. My studio neighbor was incredulous when I told him how deeply I felt about Kiefer. He didn’t think our work had much in common. Although my response at the time was to scream ‘We are the same person!’ and stomp out of the room, upon reflection, it is those differences that keep me mesmerized by his process. They prevent me from ever fully understanding his work, at which point the well of usefulness would dry up. I can’t copy his work like I could an old master painting (the giant slabs of lead would do me in), nor could I ever fully decode it. In a way, it is comparable to having a relationship, perhaps with someone of the other gender, where the momentum comes from striving to understand each other across an insurmountable gap of difference.

  1. He digs myths. Literally. He mines old stories (biblical, mythological, historical) with stores of wisdom from previous generations, powerful time-tested tropes and layers and layers of interpretations. By taping into them, Kiefer harnesses their strength. When you are confronted with his piece about Lilith, for instance, no matter how far you dig (symbolically, historically) you can’t find the bottom.

Okay, so why doesn’t every artist just reference an old story in their work, if through that reference they harness its power? (Let’s nerd out for a moment on this one.) If you channel this kind of heavy-duty magic you’d better be wizard enough to wield it. Otherwise, it can overpower your purpose with its own, causing highly unpredictable consequences and interpretations. Also, the story could remain closed to you if you don’t know how to properly unlock it and what to look for once you do. You may be denied access to its rich insides and be left to poke around its cheap cliché -riddled exterior. Worst yet, as described by Lev Grossman in ‘The Magicians,’ the immense energy could overwhelm your system, making you at once supremely powerful and fatally unstable, and you could burn up as a niffin. (Many musicians have gone out this way.)

The point being, Kiefer has done his homework. He is hyper aware of his country’s emotional state, historical trajectory, literary and artistic background and the place he’s carved for himself in all of it. That’s why he gets to carry the big guns.


Lilith am Roten Meer (Lilith on the Red Sea), 1990
Both photos taken by me at the Hamburger Bahnhof.

  1. He looks to the trees to talk to the people. Birch, oak and ash -- each heavy-laden with German cultural significance – are often the figures in his work. Sometimes, by etching names into the wood or posting heads as leaflets to the bark, we know the names of these characters. Other times, they are anonymous sentinels or vessels for the viewer.

Some of his landscapes include actual earth or bark from the place he is describing, allowing him to harness its true colors and something less tangible.

In “Landscape and Memory,” Simon Schama explores why Kiefer’s use of landscape to speak about the human condition is so effective. He explains the complex connection, of which Kiefer is acutely aware, that humans have with their environment. Schama proposes that we see the landscape around us as a reflection of our inner, emotional terrain. Therefore, it is a highly subjective view and largely composed of what we project onto it. He quotes Thoreau, “It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream.” Then, of course, there are the physical scars of our actions on the earth. And the influence goes both ways. Schama proposes that each culture around the world has been largely shaped by the way it has survived in, adapted to, and revered its natural surroundings.

All this is to say that when Kiefer paints a wounded, frozen forest, he is not just painting trees. He is painting about the Battle of the Teutoburger Wald when the Germans first defeated the Romans with a treacherous, forested home court advantage and he is painting about the war that took place there two centuries later. By remembering these things through the landscape, it eases some of the pain. Whereas some of the more recent wounds that Kiefer unearths, such as internment camps, racial violence and the Holocaust might be searing to look at straight on, the forest reminds us of the bigger forces at play and the merciful way nature has of growing things out of scorched earth.

Monday, July 25, 2011

I ♥ Berlin (or Why I Can’t Stay)

On Saturday, Martha and I decided to brave the chill, gusting rain and the impermeability of a new art scene and go to an opening. We got a tip from a friend to check out the Horton Gallery in Kreuzberg.

We tried the classic “Come here often?” approach on a few lone hipsters to no avail. Luckily, a dog walked in. He was a whippet -- a skinny little thing with expressive round eyes who was strapped into the same drab green trench coat that half of the gallery clientele was sporting. The uniform for a class of art survivalists. Long, rainproof armor for those who weather a lot worse than a summer storm to stake their flag at this cultural watering hole. The dog introduced us to his owners and we were in.

She was a Polish artist whose crocheted still-lives were hanging in the show. He was a musician and sound engineer from Cincinnati. We stepped out of the bright gallery into the courtyard to talk with Martha and their painter friend from Dublin. “It’s nicer out here,” the musician said. The gallery-goers huddled around puddles, encircling them in halos of smoke. The air was savory from the spicy sausages and corn that sizzled on the grill despite the rain. I was wearing my only jacket over my heaviest sweater and I was cold. I nodded. Nice.

Dragonek the whippet followed us out but turned on his heels when he felt the rain and pranced back inside. He did one spastic shake to dry himself.

“You are smart to come here in the summer!” the textile artist said. Her delicate features always electric -- vacillating between delight and concern without stasis. She leaned in close to me and lowered her voice. “My husband gets very sad in the wintertime. He is not used to it.” But before I could respond, she was flocked by fans and whisked back inside.

I thought back to Ohio winters -- certainly nothing to scoff over. Having spent January term at Oberlin working on an independent study, I know how the whole landscape drains of color and warmth – the steely sky fusing with the pavement, the concrete buildings, the frosty ground.

Her girl friend from Dublin, the only woman in heels, nodded. “I moved here two years ago during the worst winter they’d had in thirty years. We didn’t see the sun for three weeks once. Just an endless twilight that would brighten and fade.”

“Yes,” the musician agreed. “That was the time when we had icicles on the insides of our windows.”

“Do you remember that New Years?” the Dubliner prodded.

“Oh God,” he recalled with disgust. “On New Years here everybody -- and I mean everybody with two legs -- gathers as many fireworks as they can carry and brings them out into the streets. Then they set them off in any direction indiscriminately. They don’t put them down or anything, just launch them from their hands. Big mother fuckers too. I don’t leave my room.”

“Yeah,” the Dubliner said. “I got hit in the arm. Right here,” She massaged her shoulder. “At close range.”

“By the end of the night it looks like Berlin 1944.” He shook his head. “Missiles and debris everywhere. Broken glass and rubble. No one can clean it up because the next day it starts snowing.”

“It started snowing that night!”

“You’re right and in a few days there was a foot of solid ice above it all. This much.” He shows us how much with his hands impressively far apart. “A clear block of ice. And no one does anything about it because the city is too poor.”

“No salt?” I implored.

“Are there snowplows?” Martha ventured.

They looked at us with kind pity.

“I fell 6 times in 5 months that winter,” the Dubliner said. I knew not to question her figures.

“So many accidents that year. It was dangerous just walking Dragonek. The seasonal depression was severe.”

“Elevator suicides,” she added. (I don’t know how these are orchestrated but am going to go with messily.)

“Icicles killed many people. Then, in April, when everything started to melt, the smell was unbearable. Wretched dog crap and soggy New Years paraphernalia everywhere. It took two or three weeks for anyone to pick it up.” His eyes glazed over for a second as if lost back in that time. Then he hunched his shoulders in a slight shutter.

“When I fist came to Berlin,” he continued, “I was touring with a band that had festivals here for three months during the summer. I thought -- this city is fantastic, all this art and music and cafes and reliable trains and the people are so free and there was all this weird shit. Like, no matter what your tolerance for weird, they had something four or five nights a week.”

“Yeah,” I confessed.

“The second time I came to this city was in late November, back on tour with the same band. I was psyched. Got off the plane and boarded the U8 train, ready to jump back in. It was one of those trains with big glass windows. I could see all the way up to the first car and down through all of the cars behind me. But something was wrong. Everyone’s head and eyes were downcast. Their shoulders stooped and their faces so deeply crestfallen I thought I was being put on. Not a glimmer of life from the lot of them. I thought it was a joke. That maybe I was on candid camera and at any moment someone would jump out at me and yell, ‘Gottcha!’ But people boarded the train and people got off and nothing changed.

“So then, five or six years pass. One morning I’m riding the U8. Midwinter. We go under a tunnel. The windows go dark and turn into mirrors. Suddenly, I can see my face -- the grimace, the dead eyes -- and I know I’ve become one of them.”

We nodded solemnly.

Just then his wife returned, talking so quickly I couldn’t make out the language, and her smiles shook us out of our state. She held up a postcard of patterned wallpaper to Martha and me. “You are coming here?” she asked. Martha and I looked at each other. I pictured the Gilman story.

“No. I don’t think we are,” Martha said cautiously.

“Oh but you must! You will come with us!”

So we piled into their car and found ourselves at another opening, this time among friends with whom we could debate the work, the seductions of selling out and the time-consuming nature of our artistic processes and we did so until Dragonek, having had his fill of sniffing shoes and winning the hearts of all manner of alternative folk, walked over to where I stood and collapsed on my feet with an ungraceful thud. His parents took the cue. We headed out into the night, pulling our jackets tight around us.

Wild Renata

When my roommate pictures someone named Renata, he sees a green-eyed girl with short, bright red hair, piercings and ripped tights. This is the club version:











Also of note, my apartment is adjacent a mask store. When I told them I needed something to wear to this venue, the boy with an asymmetrical quaft of white hair behind the counter informed me that the bouncers regularly outfit here and that the dj got his Venetian mask from them just the other day. Current window display:


Saturday, July 23, 2011

D7 to F4

The only superfluous things in my room when I got here were a chess set in a wooden box and an antique round table with a checker board beneath the glass.

Yesterday I saw a painting at Berlin Art Projects by Bernard Ammerer where some kids are standing on a white gridded plane. Graphic trees denote a forest off to one side with the text “Wald” overlaid. The paint handling is descriptive at best, but I was interested in the digital quality of the space – sterile and boundless. A chess set with an infinite possibility of coordinates to jump to if only you knew the right combination of > s and # s.

If cyber space is a white checkered playing field, then all moves are possible. One can compose anything from the endless store of re-combinable pixels. This is the idea at the core of Second Life, where you construct an alternate online persona and environment from scratch. Their website entices, “Who will you meet in Second Life? Where will you explore? Who will you be?”

Yet, in the painting, the boys are portrayed as real while the landscape around them is just a stand-in. To me, its artificiality undercuts the wonders of exploring and manipulating it. Why pour time into constructing something that is a mimic of the real? In terms of Plato’s forms, wouldn’t a virtual world be one further away from the world that we experience – a shadow on the wall of the cave? Or am I missing something?

In the painting, instead of exploring the forest, one of the boys lifts up the side of a white square, like a ceiling tile. Below, it is dark and hard to make out but one gets the sense that the underworld is rich with dirt and growing things.




(Sorry for hyper-crappy photo of newspaper reproduction of painting. No the sky isn't wrinkled. I'd go back and photograph it in person but it's a gale storm out there and I can't risk it.)

The digital playing field in Alexander McQueen’s 2005 show, “It’s Only a Game,” is a stunning computer/reality hybrid. I was mesmerized by the video when I saw it at the MET recently. The fashion show entails models decked in Alice in Wonderland battle garb playing chess. Their board is lit up like a monitor with squares that brighten to direct the players. An omnipresent computer generated voice calls out each move – D7 to F4. The outfits are a stunning combination of sports gear, Marie Antoinette ornament and storybook filigree. One by one, the pawns are captured. Although their feet obey each command, defiance burns behind their butterflied eyelashes and they stomp rather than strut offstage. Instead of humans dressed as objects, they feel like robots that have developed a little too much attitude and are getting tired of being remote controlled.

The title, “It’s Only a Game,” rings sardonic. The pawns’ semi-consciousness paired with their absence of free will is unnerving. The voice has absolute power but no face. It calls into question who or what is playing chess and what are the stakes?


Watch “It’s Only a Game”: (If I knew the first thing about computers I would be able to plop this video down right here in the blog. Baby steps.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5gY5DXrb48

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

The Space Needle and the Spire

Last night I dreamed I had a glass of wine with one of my new roommates. We climbed up many flights of stairs and passed through many strangely angled rooms until we were high up in one of the turrets of an old stone building. He pulled at the handles of the French doors and they swung wide to reveal a balcony. We leaned against the wrought-iron fence and looked out over the courtyard – our faces catching the rain. The grounds were veined with rivers, opaque and churning in the gray drizzle. One ringed our building in a sinister moat -- rushing up the walls with a spray that met the rain at our feet and receded.

“It’s not always a river,” my roommate explains – his accent German. “Only when there is rain. When there is sun, it is a park. Good for reading.”

“Okay,” I say, filing this as fact among the many other unbelievables that come with a new place. This is how German lawns work.

Then we are sitting in a music studio and he’s playing the clarinet and I can’t sing through all the bubblegum in my mouth… but that’s beside the point.


My apartment building

I wake up in the semi-dark and survey my plywood roost. In the black notebook by my bed, I jot down my dream in chicken scrawl and check my alarm clock. Noon. Oops. I turn back into my pillow. A disco ball sprays light on neon branches behind my eyes – a ghost image from the night before. It’s tempting to sink back there, but the guilt’s taken hold. With a groan I stumble down the narrow ladder from my lofted bed.

I don’t live in a tower, but my legs burn by the time I get to my floor and my roommate does have French doors that open onto a small balcony. The building is a stately brick and concrete holdout from 1884. Its gray façade is cracked like a desert floor. The large vines trained up its sides, faded trompe-l'oeil molding, and gilded stairwell mirrors lend it a castle-like appearance.

Our flat is one floor. Eight bedrooms are built out from the sturdy walls with simple beams and plywood. There are few right angles. It’s a home-improvement project without a master plan. Layers of additions perch awkwardly one atop the last. The bedrooms curve around a common space with a King Arthur-style picnic table in the center, built to seat fourteen. The shelves lining every wall are brimming with glass jugs, tubs of grain, dishware, electrical wires and spices.

My room has a playful quality to it. Our critic in residence at MICA stressed the importance of play, especially for artists. It exercises your creative muscles, setting boundaries to expand into and resist. The stakes are lower, failure is more fun and the possibilities of actions and consequences aren’t confined to the ‘real.’

Worktables run the length of my walls – the rough kind that you can really work on. A claw-foot ceramic bathtub on wheels lives under one. My bed is like a kid’s fort – the sheets were designed for a young boy with red and blue shapes. The duvet cover is slightly too small for the duvet and the duvet just a tad too short for my legs.

Fernsehturm

I spent part of today making pilgrimages to the two towers I had seen when walking Berlin. They stood out in my mind as two city sentinels -- one futuristic and one medieval – watching over two very different neighborhoods in the city. The Fernsehturm (television tower) in Mitte and the Wasserturm (water tower) in Friedrichschain. Technological and elemental. Sci-fi and fantasy. Both out of this world.

We like to climb towers to get oriented to the surrounding landscape and gain perspective on our relationship to it. But we don’t always like what we find up there – sometimes the height makes us dizzy. In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, (the definitive source on any kind of travel) a capital punishment on one planet involves showing someone his size relative to the rest of the universe. Strapped to a state-of-the-art super planetarium, his mind is blown as he shrinks and shrinks in comparison to the ever-expanding space.

Anselm Kiefer often uses an attic in his work to connote headspace. As with many other artists and writers, for Kiefer the different levels of a dwelling correspond to different parts of the body– the basement represents our base animal instincts and a tower is a space for our philosophical voices to gather.


Wasserturm

Towers are a staple setting for fairytales. Somehow, it’s always a girl who is locked up in one. Often, such as in the Grimm’s version of Rapunzel, she is not kept there out of ill will, but a desire to separate her from the rest of the world. Parallel to those in an extended sleep, she exists in a state of arrested development and innocence. But even though she's not mistreated and has a great view, she always wants down. The story can only progress when trouble finds her (usually in the form of a man), she gets her hands dirty and moves on. Rapunzel is caught trying to escape, beaten by the sorceress who held her captive and abandoned in the woods. Her prince is thrown from the tower and blinded. It is years before he stumbles upon her, now with twins, and they reunite in the forest.

Maybe it makes sense to seek high ground when you first find yourself in a foreign land. A good defensive strategy for sure. A safe but lonely place. But I’ve read enough fairytales to know girl can’t stay up here forever.

Fernsehtum seen from Friedrichschain