1-Year Plan
Post 22: 9/25/05
Notes from Berlin
[in process]
"Subjectivity is an objective matter, and it is enough to change the scenery and the setting, refurnish the rooms, or destroy them in an aerial bombardment for a new subject, a new identity, miraculously to appear on the ruins of the old." —Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time
[Posted sections as uploaded: 01 / 02 / 03 ]
Jörg Immendorff, "Male Lago—Unsichtbarer Beitrag" (Painted Corral—Invisible Bequest), Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Straße, Tiergarten. Exhibition opening.
Zu seinem 60. Geburtstag richtet die Nationalgalerie dem Maler Jörg Immendorff ein Glückwunschausstellung ein. Oder besser: Immendorff richtet sie sich ein. Der Rückblick auf sein Werk findet in Kammern statt, die der SPD-Sympathisant Immendorff nach früheren Entwürfen seiner "LIDL-Stadt" gefertigt hat. LIDL war die Aktionsgruppe, die Immendorff 1968 mit der Künstlerin Chris Reinecke gegründet hatte—Arbeiten aus dieser Zeit sind ebenfalls dabei. [Zitty]
Lose Combo, "hertz' frequenzen" (Hertz Frequencies), Tesla in Podewils'shchen Palais, Klosterstraße, Mitte. Performance/concert/installation.
hertz' freqeunzen nimmt die bahnbrechende Entdeckung der elektromagnetischen Wellen durch Heinrich Hertz im Jahr 1887 zum Anlass, einigen ihrer Folgen—gerade jenseits des technischen Fortschritts—nachzuspüren, eine akustisch-visuelle Installation, deren Spektrum von unhörbaren Erdresonanzen bis zu unsichtbaren Lichtwellen reicht, öffnet den Raum für paraphysikalische Spekulationen, flirrende Bilddokumente und—rechtzeitig zum 50-jährigen Bestehen der Komposition—ein Konzert von John Cage's Radio Music. [Program copy]
Hertz Frequencies was a live and electronic music composition; light, sound, and architectural installation; and multi-media performance piece constructed as an homage to Heinrich Hertz, 19th-century scientist who studied the physics of wave behavior. It also derived, formally and conceptually, from John Cage's Radio Music, performed by several musicians positioned randomly in the performance space on small radios that they tuned from station to station (or no station). After the initial motif, as it were, was stated, the performers left the room and the piece focused on a rectangular performance area in the middle of the space, which was delimited by a translucent curtain of synthetic material, such that performers and electronic equipment were only partly visible. Somewhere behind the curtain were a theramin player and several other performers on electronic media (whom I never was able to discern) and several large video monitors that went on and off, delivering generally aesthetically pleasing visual static. Lighting was also a factor in the piece; as long, slow, consistent live or electronic frequencies were played (initially, long bowings by the violinists accompanied by electronic tone bands), the lighting shifted from faint purple to deep green to, once or twice, hysterical brightness. As the piece settled in, texts from the letters and biography of Heinrich Hertz were read by male and female text performers, positioned in twin constructed spaces "behind" the audience (which spatially surrounded the rectangular performance area); two video monitors directed visual attention to these spaces, which were otherwise visible only to those positioned immediately next to them. The style of reading was impressive: beautifully articulated German sentences, the text of Hertz's letters and life, which at several instances were syntactically augmented rather than simply sited. The vocal element, then, created an interpretive overvoice for the play of visual and aural frequencies which developed, overlapped, surged, and abated, presenting an "all-over" sensory and conceptual environment. As complex as the piece's construction was, with as many reinforcing elements that all needed to be keep in absolute balance with each other, it intended, and achieved, a unified effect: Hertz's frequencies were at once conceptual, physical, experiential, and aesthetic: an aleatorical play that constituted presence.
24 September Saturday
Schwimmhalle, Ernst-Thälmann-Park, Prenzlauer Berg. [See 29 September]
Galeries in Mitte: Brigitte Waldach, "Sichtung Rot—ein Kammerspiel" (Red Sighting—a Chamber Piece), DNA/Die Neue Aktionsgalerie, Auguststraße. Drawings, installation, photography. Ricarda Roggan, "Attika" (Attics), Galerie Eigen + Art, Auguststraße. Large-format color photographs. Hans-Peter Feldman, "Frauen im Gefängnis" (Women in Trouble), Barbara Wien, Linienstraße. Conceptual photographic installation and book publication. Anton Henning, "Retour de la Conférence," Wohnmaschine, Tucholskystraße. Painting installation.
Vokalparallelen, dir. Rustam Khamdamov (Russia/Kazakhstan, 2005). "Kinoblick-tage des Russischen Films des GUS Länder und des Baltikums," Babylon Mitte, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße, Mitte.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Markt, Galerie Meerrettich im Glaspavilion an der Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. Photographic installation and publication event for truth study center (Taschen, 2005).
After a not entirely satisfying afternoon of art tourism in the Chelsea-like district of Mitte, we stopped in an outdoor cafe in Auguststraße to take stock and calculate our next move. I had just picked up a catalogue of the Leipzig painter Neo Rauch's early work (1994–2000), published by the Honolulu Art Museum but for some reason on sale on at Eigen + Art, a gallery where several of the Leipzig School show their work (Rauch being the most prominent). The current show was a series of large-format photographs of attics in abandoned farmhouses in the former East by Ricarda Roggan; the work was predictably high-tech, perspectivally ambiguous, and aesthetically compromised—playing the social reality of abandoned farmhouses and their history against the market value of high-end aesthetic technology in the West without further complicating the issue. Rather, the viewer was able to experience, virtually and at a historical/cultural remove, the absence and loss of the farmhouse attics as a form of commoditized and even desirable experience. There is, it turns out, a market even for old attics when they have been upgraded to aesthetic form; I was reminded of the post-Soviet conceptual artist Dmitrii Prigov offering me, in San Francisco in the early 90s, a selection of Soviet military watches from the inside of his coat. The Rauch catalogue made up for that; in his work, a complex meditation on the discontinuities of social space in the period of the devolution of the Cold War is made conceptually available and aesthetically provocative. Carla and I discussed a possible ways of thinking about Rauch's logic of displacement in terms not of American parataxis—in a collage artist like Rauschenberg, one has essentially a paratactic logic of placing/displacing one thing next to another—but German hypotaxis, founding representation in the conceptual containment (spoken in sentences, no less) of the unrepresentable; George Hartley's The Abyss of Representation is the preeminent guide to this logic in a philosophical tradition that leads from Kant and Hegel to Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Spivak. I'm looking forward to developing ideas on Rauch's paintings more fully later, but for the moment there was a delightful overlap between the space of his paintings and the simultaneous overlap of many spaces, with entirely different logics and uses, of the outdoor cafe we were in. The cafe space itself was configured as several discontinuous areas of tables, some on the grass, some on a raised platform, some under trees; the space of the garden in turn was set off from the street by a fence that was no more than the frame, demarcating a boundary that was visually porous while conceptually defining; immediately behind the framing boundary were a number of construction projects in various unfinished states, with road equipment, cement-pouring frames, and dumpsters full of trash in evidence; and behind them was the space of yet another cafe, where patrons sat under umbrellas and chatted away, making their own spatial logic. The entire scene was framed by the space of reconstructed Berlin, with some buildings as they were at the moment of die Wende; others entirely renovated and redesigned; and empty spaces (like the one were in) standing for the unrepresentable.
Our immediate aesthetic decision was between a double bill of American film noirs or new Russian films with English subtitles. Walking from Auguststraße through the packed weekender/tourist districts, to Friedrichstraße, where we paused to watch the crowds of former but visibly still East Germans streaming out of a performance of Casanova at the Friedrichspalast, the premier entertainment venue of the old regime which still caters to an audience that has only grown more settled in its aesthetic habits; to the Spree River and Berliner Ensemble, where we were able to get decent but cheap seats for the only Brecht the ensemble would be doing this month; to the Friedrichstraße S-Bahn station, passing the line of aggressive punks with their horrible-looking dogs who usually hang around the "Palace of Tears," former emigration station and now nightclub, we discussed our choices, opting for the unknown and contact with the Russian exile community in Berlin. We were not to be disappointed in the film itself, but the Russians turned out to be another matter. Vokalparallelen was a nonnarrative, high-budget attack on the New Russian economy that indulged in the most flagrant cultural irrationalism (far beyond avant-gardism) now available on this planet. The filmmakers had located half a dozen of the most renowned and accomplished opera singers, in the European tradition, in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan; these women had had substantial careers, as evidenced by the many recordings of their vocal accomplishments played throughout the film, but also stood as ancient embodiments of Soviet-era monumental culture. The cultural logic of this premise could not have been depicted in more brutal terms—and yet it was, through the figure of a New Russian hard-core Garbo-clone vamp, complete with cigarette holder, whose presence itself was meant sadistically to humiliate these women as they performed, via lip-synching, the peak moments of their careers, often in "native" Asiatic costumes. The film was shot in abandoned factories and on the steppes of Kazakhstan; there were several moments of absolute surrealism, as when two of the opera singers performed a famous duet in a biplane (a quote from Alexander Dovzhenko, Aerograd, 1935?) flying over the steppes. Hysterical laughter from the audience of Russians in emigration in Berlin punctuated the film. Later, as we were going over program material in the lobby to learn more about this film, we were surprised by first one then another loud crashes about a foot or so to the side and the back of where Carla was standing. It turned out some of the Russians (?) on the balcony had gotten carried away and were throwing pop bottles into the crowd; one had missed Carla by no more than eighteen inches. "I think we'd better leave," she said, and we did—to find ourselves on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and entering the context of an edgy, dark-clothed, ultra-leftist opening of the photographer Wolfgang Tillmans (Turner Prize, London, 2000). The event was both for a conceptual photographic installation titled Markt (focusing on markets but also the larger, perverse, social logic of the market itself) and the publication of truth study center, a gorgeous collection of conceptual photography just brought out by Taschen (on sale only 19,99 EUR). Beer bottles were on every available surface; the crowd, large, partly drunk, and buzzing, was in for the long haul, which might continue in clubs like the nearby Roter or Grüner Salons, located on both sides of the imposing Volksbühne (People's Theater), a late-GDR (or a simulacral approximation of same) showplace for socialist aesthetics. Across the street from the theater, as well, was the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, now home of Die Linke, the newly resurgent Left party made up of disaffected Social Democrats, community radicals, and socialists from the former East who had just won 8.6% of the vote and over 50 seats in the Bundestag, even as they don't want to join with Gerhard Schöder in a Rot-Rot-Grüne coalition (he doesn't want them either). The affect of the space of the entire scene, however, was unmistakable: this is the Left being enacted as a cultural project, with its logic of social positions and historical events being entirely taken into account. Only a long-term negotiation between counter-cultural aesthetics and Left politics could have brought this about, but it seemed immediately available. On the other hand, the post-Soviet or New Russian film we had just seen—as well as the asocial behavior witnessed—could only create an undertone of skepticism. The German Left, in any event, is proceeding with confidence that it is not just a periodic eruption of negativity, and that its position is fully interpretable as a social logic in the present, not a celebration of the past. One can only wait and see.
25 September Sunday
Fulbright orientation meeting, day 1, Park Inn Hotel, Alexanderplatz.
Teatro Oficina (Sao Paulo), Krieg im Sertao, part 5, Volksbühne, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.
Apart from the details of bureaucratic organization (how to anmelden at the local police station; how to get a 3-month's visa), the Fulbright orientation was an opportunity to meet others taking up various assignments in Germany at the outset of their stay. We met two senior fellows doing things in theater—one working on musical comedy and German vernacular theater, the other working on eighteenth-century theater before Goethe (and including his lesser known works, including his erotica). Performance theory was a topic of interest, as well as possibilities for theater in Berlin, where there are now more than 300 operating theaters. Erik Mortenson was there as well, ready to get going at Erlangen. We thought it would be appropriate, then, to skip the buffet dinner at the Park Inn and head over to Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, where the Volksbühne was staging—better put, permitting to be staged—the last day of a five-day epic theater cycle from Sao Paulo, a politicized "people's" reenactment of a late-19th-century uprising and establishment of a slave republic in the interior of Brazil. The uprising was, of course, brutally put down—there is no present Republic of Sertao—and the fifth episode, then, would reenact its destruction and draw moral conclusions. The audience itself contrasted sharply with the building the spectacle would be staged in—a San Francisco Mime Troup audience from anytime during the 60s to the 80s in a social realist neoclassical temple built by the GDR. There were some interesting modifications to the theater itself—the fixed seating was replaced with rough plywood benches, and a sloped brick pavement led the audience from the foyer to their seats. One had, then, to cross the boundary between audience and stage to enter the theater; also immediately noticeable were the several video projection screens that worked to decenter the action away from the center of the traditional stage. In the central area was a table with two law books and two glasses of water. A gradually welling sound of group singing and foot stamping was heard from behind the stands; video cameras recording the Dionysian preparations of the theater group, led by a charismatic white-haired actor—very likely a cult theater as well as a performer, it would be hard to tell the difference—who led his minions of half-castes, fallen women, former slaves, defrocked priests, and cashiered soldiers out onto the stage, all plaintively singing the song of the Republic of Sertao as they circled the theater space. The next gesture should have tipped us off, when Prospero, our name for the charismatic leader, made the audience rise and join in a round of ritual hand clapping, making sure that the exercise was repeated until everyone got it right. Having achieved a state of being in unison, we could sit down; what followed was a script reading of a didactic historical account of the massacre of the republic, translated into German by an actor in a soldier's uniform and accompanied by a few slides of historical evidence. At the appropriate moments, women covered their heads in shame and wept; men tore their hair; and soldiers fired into the crowd. The most interesting moment was a sustained round of very loud rifle fire: this was the massacre. Then more didactic prose about the destruction of the people, only to be followed by—the carnivalesque! The author was unmasked (he took his mustache off), the women bared their heads, the script was tossed, and finally Prospero lifted his robe to reveal his incredibly white and aging body! Then the song of the people could begin in earnest, with the actors soliciting, demanding the audience join with them in a collective stomp. Prospero himself went into the audience to collect recruits, including apparently us, who were looking for the nearest available escape exit. But no, he had us figured out—as I went into duck-and-cover position (an American response), Carla glared at him, and he fell onto Erik, who had no choice but to grab onto him as he wiggled and rolled around. Needless to say, we got out of this aesthetic Jonestown, just as the purple Koolaid was about to come out, with the quickest possible speed. Es lebe die Linke!, I yelled, as we finally hit the streets. This was the Left at its moment of catastrophe: the destruction of the people as its collective affirmation. Apparently, this was a moment the German communists understood well, and could relive via Brazil. In the end, we were glad we went; the event did provide plenty of conversation, punctuated by flashbacks of "Prospero unveiled" at key moments.
Fulbright orientation meeting, day 2, Park Inn Hotel, Alexanderplatz.
Bertolt Brecht, Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe, dir. Claus Peymann, Berliner Ensemble, Schiffbauerdamm, Mitte.
The second day of the Fulbright Commission orientation turned serious, with presentations by representatives of the American Embassy, specifically the Minister Counselor for Political Affairs, Consular Section Chief, and Deputy Cultural Attaché; later we were toasted by the Minister Counselor for Public Affairs. This was the second time I had encountered representatives of the state outside its territorial limits, the first time being in Leningrad in 1989; that is to say, the second time I observed the state apparatus from outside its boundaries and identified with being outside it. In both cases, I experienced a high degree of political "A-Effect" in trying to comprehend how such an entity as the state could be reducible to its representatives and their immediate speech acts. Here, it was obvious that, in sending four embassy representatives to the orientation, the American government was expressing a concern about the relation between Americans and Germans in general, and ourselves as representatives of the US in particular. Relations, we heard, had never been worse after to the refusal of Germans broadly to support American policy in Iraq; however, there was the possibility of a change for the better—as witness the downplaying of the Iraq theme by Gerhard Schröder in the recent election. Germany is the number one ally of the United States in the war against terrorism, we heard, and German and American interests have more in common than not. We were to understand that our presence here was important in the battle for "winning hearts and minds" and for mutual understanding. With the appointment of the new Ambassador (CEO of Timkin Industries in Ohio; maker of billions of ball bearings sold throughout the world; frequent contributor to Republican campaigns; and credited for the delivery of the state of Ohio and thus the last election) and Karen Hughes (George Bush's press secretary when he was Governor of Texas and a resilient spokesperson for the Bush administration's view of the world) as the new State Department Undersecretary for Diplomacy, one can see the importance that improved international relations has for the Bush administration. Karen Hughes has created a policy of "the four E's" (the Cultural Attaché could not remember them all, but the most significant were "engagement" and "exchange") and is working to increase "people contacts" as a basis for comprehension. We also were briefed on the German election—the disappointment in Angela Merkel's failure to gain a majority over Schröder was scarcely concealed—and were given some key statistics on the number of American troops in Germany, most of whom are now in Iraq. While one could be impressed by the diplomacy involved in presenting the administration's case to the assembled scholars, there was also surprisingly partisan framework to these diplomatic assertions. The word "we" in the discussion meant, for instance, precisely those Americans who supported the administration; could we also imagine a briefing where the fact that a majority of Americans do not agree with the administration on Iraq could be stated as a fact? Such transparency would argue well for the politics of exchanges such as the Fulbright program: that most Americans do not agree with the administration could be seen as a signal benefit of scholarly and cultural exchanges in a country where a vast majority of citizens do not agree with American policy. From my perspective, it seemed evident that the Embassy representatives were presenting what is currently a minority position, initiated by a government that operated, at the time, as a minority government. With the exception of one scholar from Massachusetts, who brought up a recent visa refusal of an Islamic scholar traveling from Germany to the attaché's attention, the audience took in this presentation with nervous silence, as might be understandable given what were very likely the majority politics of those assembled and the majority politics of the host country. In any event, it is clearly in everyone's interest to maintain scholarly exchanges no matter what the differences in policy. This should be done in Cuba, Iran, even North Korea. In the very long run, the truth will out; it is important to understand the strength of that position in the presence of the spin doctors.
Duly informed and toasted, we hit the streets for a performance of the only Brecht the Berliner Ensemble will be performing this month, Die Heilige Johanna der Schlachthöfe (The Holy Johanna of the Slaughterhouses). The A-Effect rule again as a response to Americanism, here the Chicago of the Great Depression, and the color red, referring to the slaughterhouse as much as to the rise of trade unionism, was the dominant motif of one of the most effective mis en scenes I have seen in theater. What was most interesting was the director's (Claus Peymann) use of color codings to identify various groups of persons (the owning class, the jobless workers, the Salvation Army, the buyers and sellers of meat, etc.) and then to use them to construct spatial relations between groups as a part of the articulation of the drama. The stage itself was a red plane with white parallel lines extending back into the rear of the stage, tilted slightly upward to achieve a foreshortening effect between players positioned at the front or the back of the area. Above the stage floated a honky-tonk lighted crucifix; behind opened a void between the platform and the wall—a simulacrum of religious hope, above, juxtaposed with the material depths of despair behind. The script itself—on sale in a redacted version in the lobby in a broadly constructivist gesture—was heavily cut to bring out the greatest contrast between the different social positions and spatial locations of the players. Language, as a result, fused with the dynamics of movement to create a nearly operatic rendering of Brecht's morality play. It was interesting, as well, to experience Brecht in an audience that was as close to Brechtian as contemporary culture allows—dozens of highschool students, most of them girls, obviously there on assignment. The fact that some of them could have cared less only added to the pleasure of the dawning consciousness of those who did; Brecht anticipates the constructive potential of divided audiences in the larger framework of his theater. The students fidgeted and squirmed, but then settled in and gave the Ensemble's first-rate performance a prolonged and spirited ovation.
27 September Tuesday
ZenMan Improvisations, Ulrich Maiss, cello and electronics, "Unerhörte Musik," BKA Theater, Mehringdamm, Kreuzberg.
Florian Werner is an experimental fiction writer (Wir Sprechen Uns Noch/We're Still Speaking) and collaborator/performer (Mein Leben als Fön/My Life as Hairdryer). We proposed to go with him to see this week's installment of "Unerhörte Musik" series, which has been running in a cabaret theater space in Kreuzberg. There, one can hear hard-edged new classical and electronic music while sipping one's drink in overstuffed leather chairs. Due to the amount of manic talking we had been doing, from Prenzlauer Berg on the U-2 and U-6 lines to Kreuzberg, we arrived a bit late—to find ZenMan into his second improvisation, which used looped sequences, keyed by a foot pedal, built up from sampled bowings. Each of the ten commissioned pieces (two of the composers were present) was played in a forthright and musical way; in only a few of them was there any interest in exceeding the bounds of the given framework, which compared to the American sense that one has to get beyond the initial premises on every occasion was refreshing. Each of the ten pieces was set up, as well, using a particular combination of techniques, ranging in interest from standard computer-generated sequences to composite live and electronic tone clusters that built up a series of additive arrays. In one piece, ZenMan left behind most of the electronic effects (except for low-level amplification) and played the cello, Eugene Chadbourne-style, as a material object that could be tapped or struck anywhere to form quick rhythmic patterns. But the hand otherwise was mediated by the machine, leading in the finale to a work of swelling, composite noise zones that mixed astronomical static from Titan, one of the moons of Saturn, with straight-ahead, aggressive bowing on the cello. The capacious, intensive sound environment that resulted ended up positioned squarely between music and noise. While we all thought there were some limits to his inventiveness, the aesthetic effect overall, in my hearing, correlated directly with the definition he brought to each piece. ZenMan was also a rather large man, with a shaved head, a good listener, impressive.
28 September Wednesday
Last day of intensive German course, Goethe-Institute; class dinner with Adnan (France), Carmen (Spain), Emmanuele (Italy), Inbal (Israel), Ingrid (Norway), Karima (Morocco/France), Kenneth (Norway), Luis (Spain), Oleg (Russia), Sindre (Norway), Studenten, and Ulrike (Germany) Lehrerin, Oranienburgerstraße, Mitte.
Und die ganze Welt hoch! toasts a minor character in War and Peace, possibly right before the sacking of Moscow. What we had here, however, was an inspiring experience of Bildung as, literally, a "brave new world that hath such people in it." For the last day of the class, conducted as an open-ended, free-form, chaotic, multi-voiced conversation in a language that each speaker only partly understood, Ulrike asked what we would like to discuss. After her presentation on the modern history of Berlin, from the Stunde Null (zero hour) of May 1945 to die Wende (the change) of October 1989 that opened up the divided city, the discussion turned to the politics of globalization. The students were positioned roughly along a great divide between those who saw the market economy or Wirtschaftshorizont as the only viable option (Carmen) and those who wanted to pursue alternative cultural politics (Karima), though there were significant variations on these: Ingrid's frustration with anti-globalization politics fused with an attraction to punk nihilism and interest in Bukowski; Oleg's vision of a global Realpolitik of nonhomogenous spheres of influence, Russia being one; Sanjida's skepticism about a politics of representation in the face of material conditions in Bangladesh. Would the real materialist in the room please stand up? might have been one of the themes of our discussion. Then I asked Ulrike to say something about her teaching method, which I found entirely impressive. It involved three elements, she said: first, holistic or ganzheitliches Lernen, based on the educational reform movements of the early twentieth century and, from what I could tell, involving a focus on a Gestalt of language as experience; second, Themen, die jeden betreffen, the use of personal experience as framework for speech; and third, specific activities, individual study, and Fragenstellen, the use of a dialogic methodology. That would certainly count as a modernist pedagogy, I suggested, but isn't there an element of the postmodern in the indeterminate, open-ended, and multi-perspectival experience of language that results? Yes, she said, what we have is Lernen as konstruktive Tätigheit (learning as a constructivist activity). Bingo, das ist ganz klar, I said; at the student dinner I told her title of my book and we discussed constructivism in the form of the paintings of Neo Rauch and the global horizons of the dual economy in China. After the dinner, the students stood outside the restaurant and chanted, "Ulrike! Ulrike!" as she made her way down the street.
29 September Thursday
Schwimmhalle, Ernst-Thälmann-Park, Prenzlauer Berg.
The Ernst-Thälmann-Park was and still is a well-designed, modernist housing project occupying a two-block square area of the neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg. It was named for the head of the KPD (Communist Party) from the early 1930s until his death at the hand of the Nazis during the war. Thälmann is famous for his party's refusal to join with the Socialists in the 1932 election that brought Hitler to power (the operative epithet for Socialists in the period was "social fascists"), as well as for his fate at the hands of the real fascists. It is not hard to imagine which event, and for what reasons, made him a household word in the GDR; a Berlin friend, in conversation, told us of growing up with children's tales of "Teddy" in the resistance. It also led to the naming of the park and one of the few GDR-era Socialist Realist monuments remaining in Berlin; in one account, the Soviet-designed sculpture has a heated nose so that snow will not accumulate on it, and was not destroyed not because anyone liked but because it was so big. There is a complex politics of naming practices in Berlin, which in the 90s tended, except in the most terrible instances, to fall to local district councils; most Weimar-era Marxist names and many GDR-era names are preserved, and not only the East. On first visiting the Thälmann Park I missed the statue, in fact, but was impressed by the ecopolitics that built the amphibian park nearby, where a perfect environment for frogs has been created. From there, one finds sweeping lawns and vertical towers reminiscent of the landscape of H.G. Wells's Time Machine, though here both Eloy (young families) and Morlochs (jobless beer drinkers and punks) share the grass and park benches. Squarely in the middle of this development is the Schwimmhalle, which anyone can use for 4 EUR a swim. At 50 meters and with a stainless steel tank, it is one of the most aesthetically satisfying swimming pools I have used (with the exception of Spieker Pool at UC Berkeley) and tops anything available in Detroit. Also noteworthy in Ernst-Thälmann-Park is the GDR-era planetarium, where one can still take a tour of the starry firmament, presumably without ideological baggage.
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Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence, libretto by Jonathan Safran Foer, music by Karim Haddad, Bernhard Lang, Cathy Milliken, Jose Maria Sanchez-Verdu, Annette Schmucki, Miroslav Srnka, and Larisa Vrhuncseven, Komische Oper, Unter den Linden, Mitte.
Above all, this neo-retro-pomo simulacrum of a attempt at innovation in opera raises a deeply political question: Who gets to have their performances staged, and at what budget, in what venue? For inside each of us, this production demonstrates, is an opera that only needs tremendous amounts of funding, a fantastic support staff, a terrific space, and vast aesthetic tolerance to be staged in a major world capital and earn only dismissive to tepid reviews. Such is life, that some of us get to stage their operas. We were, of course, still eager to see what seven composers and this amount of cultural capital would do with Jonathan Safran Foer's libretto, and given the opportunity most of the previously untried composers came up with something credible and at times inspiring, given the despicable writing (available for all time in a slick, minimalist program which printed the whole thing, along with e-mails among the various collaborators negotiating their roles in the piece). Jonathan Safran Foer is, we learned, a current Wunderkind of the novel—he's published two, both in German translation and well-regarded; I imagined the Frankfurt Book Fair was very helpful in making the connection between neo-retro-post Blank Generation and the Komische Oper. Somehow all the pieces came together and he was given a chance to stage his work, and selected the several composers to write their individual adaptations of a section of it. At the outset, we heard a taped explanation of this process, along with what seemed to be an attempt to reground the result in the author's intentions, which were in fact hard to perceive. All that was left was the language and a few characters: "Authority" and a collection of "Inmates" who are trying to escape but Authority won't let them. "Authority: Above the gates of hell is a sign. / Abandon hope. / Third Inmate: I want to abandon hope. / Authority: It is your hope. / Third Inmate: I want to abandon hope. / Authority: What if the wall is infinitely thick? / What if the world is a wall / Surrounding us? / Third Inmate: I want to see what I believe. / Authority: But then you wouldn't believe. / Third Inmate: I want to abandon belief." This was so bad it threatened autonomic responses (sweats, fainting, rapid pulse); it would better have been sung in Tibetan, Hebrew, or Icelandic. In spite of that, several of the interpretations—which departed from the text as fast as possible, never to come back—were thoughtful, nuanced, well-performed. A modest neo-classicism, somewhere in the ballpark of U.K. composer Thomas Ades, would describe the musical idioms employed, with elements of jazz, rock, and performance art thrown in. At times a rapid switching between idioms created interesting effects; in section 3, the "pop singer" (as Authority?) alternated between expressively belting out songs and turning into an automatic text machine; and in section 6, the initial blues motif was extended into long melodic lines punctuated by bursts of "original" cacophony employing saxophone, electric guitar, and trap drums. Everything was worked to use the performance space itself—the "magazine" where the props and sets from the Deutsche Oper's repertoire are stored—whose industrial-scale elevators and platforms were used to create maximally differentiated spaces for each section. In one, for instance, performers sang while projected diagonally, after the manner of Yves Klein, into the central space at a precipitous height; in other, performers peaked out of holes in the platform while stage smoke drifted down over the orchestra. All these devices were intriguing as long as the music held out, but the moment the text became predominant, they lost all interest and turned into just another gimmick. This was particularly the case in the opera's concluding section, when a personification of "Silence" was cast as a huge projected text on the wall that gave the audience instructions on how to respond and when the work would be over. In the end, this was a piece about Authority and what it takes to escape, which is just what we did, passing hundreds of people waiting in line for the Goya blockbuster at 11 PM on our way to Oktoberfest beer and tapas.
1 October Saturday
Shopping, Hackesche Höfe, Neue u. Alte Schönhauser Straßen, Mitte.
Goya (GDR/USSR, 1969), dir. Konrad Wolf, from the novel by Lion Feuchtwanger, Babylon Mitte, Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße.
Goya is world masterpiece of film that never made the final cut. Literally, as the film conveys an increasingly unfinished quality, with numerous inexplicable narrative gaps and convenient jump-cuts in order, one may assume, to cover over material that was never shot or to mask production difficulties that were never resolved. Perhaps this was a result to its political emergence as an East German/Soviet co-production, using German actors and dramaturgy and Soviet production and international logistics; the release date of 1969, a period of maximal political stress between the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, may also be a factor. Whatever inquiry into film's production may disclose, there is an evident relationship between its "impossible" realization and its ambitious attempt to map a global revolutionary politics onto the question of the social nature of art. As world-making artist, Goya begins as the self-satisfied court painter of the Bourbons who is interpellated by history, which takes the form, in turn, of a woman, revolutionary crisis, and madness, thus entering into the political unconscious and producing the works that qualify him as a revolutionary artist, from the ironic court portraits of the Bourbons to the dark paintings, Capriccios, and anti-war drawings. In the larger view Goya reveals, through the transformations of art, the historical desire to become a world-making revolutionary in and as a desire that can only fail as history; in other words, history just is this failure to realize revolutionary ideals. The question that immediately arises, thus, is the relation between the "inner" material of the narrative, which directly takes up the question of narrating an unrepresentable historical trauma in the gaps between political systems (Inquisition/Bourbon Spain and the French Revolution) as the unrealized revolutionary moment, and an "outer" series of the work's construction between the two production teams/states that reflects unrealized, belated, or even bad-faith revolutionary politics of both at a moment of global upheaval in the late 1960s. Had Fredric Jameson or Slavoj Zizek been available to the makers of the film, one might be able to align a theory of impossible representation with the film's lack of representational coherence; in their absence, a painful truth of revolutionary politics surfaces in the film's status as a symptom, in Zizek's terms its "tarrying with the negative." Yet 85 percent of the film is really brilliant: to begin with, the acting (particularly Goya and the Bourbon queen), the mis en scene (in the high degree of authenticity and spontaneity in the crowd and flamenco sequences and an impressive use of panoramic shots of barren Spanish landscapes with, in the foreground, individual actors and, in the middle distance, the palace of the Escorial as virtual historical irony in itself), and cinematography, which incorporates but advances from Eisensteinian montage, particularly in its realization of conflicting registers of action and space in the same shot. As impressive as it is to watch the film's cinematographic vocabulary build up to the complex world that produced Goya's art, it is equally fascinating to watch the breakdown of the film's logic as it nears the impossible moment of revolution itself. This begins with the eruption of a passionately political street singer, Maria, who, after La Pasionaria in the Spanish Civil War, directly represents the desires of the Spanish people and is not afraid to sing them. Unlike many socialist representations of such desire, her singing is truly world-class, particularly in the scene in which she is condemned to death by the Inquisition and responds by singing the song of the people in the church itself. This is the first revolutionary moment, while the next is more private, for Goya—his interpellation at the hands of a high-born woman with deep cleavage who imagines herself to be the catalyst of Goya's genius, which of course will require his betrayal. Dark paintings begin to issue forth, as well as Goya's masterful depictions of the decadence of the Bourbon court; desire undermines static orthodoxy to disclose the truth. A second revolutionary moment, then, is the unveiling of Goya's court portrait before the Bourbons, with the queen's immediate and self-condemning praise of it (the triangle of women involved in Goya's psychic make-up—queen, lover, and mother—awaits further analysis). Goya is then summoned by the Inquisition for the second time; the terrifying dialogue between inquisitor and artist, in which Goya basically is being asked to name his desire before the law and refuses, leads to the unfolding of his madness and transformation of his art to a truth that matches that of the repressive force of the law. From this point, the narrative of the film itself begins to unravel, and we have numerous unmotivated jumps, elisions, oddly intense moments of focus, and the use of distorted images to represent Goya's trauma; these devices may have begun as intentional but they are not in control at the film's end, which cannot finally narrate the eruption of revolutionary politics into the social space of the film itself. The Spanish-French war that led to Goya's antiwar images, thus, is reduced to random piles of bodies and close-ups of his "horrors of war" work. At one point, as we headed toward denouement, I thought the projectionist was screening the film in the wrong order (as happened once in Paris with the four-hour Soviet production of War and Peace; the projectionist came out and apologized to the audience)—not likely, as this was a reconstructed digital version. One left the theater, however, thinking that something had been left out, that we had not seen the entire film, that an important element of its narrative logic was missing. And of course, it is my thesis that this is precisely history, in the form of the politics that, in the East German/Soviet co-production, would come undone under pressure of the late 1960s. A social logic that led to Jameson and Zizek, thus, is available here in aesthetic form.
A note on shopping, which in the consumers' paradise created by the BRD can approach the status of a work of art. In fact, at the Pinothek der Moderne in Munich, half the floor space is devoted to fine art and half to product design; the much debated "great divide" separating modernism from mass culture is architecturally bridged by the building itself. So it goes for the current horizons of Kulturwissenschaft: it would not be possible to separate the preceding productivist account of he DDR version of Goya from the current marketing of Goya in Berlin (where crowds are lining up until 3 AM every night as the show goes into its final days) and the recent release of Carlos Saura's Goya in Bordeaux, currently playing in theaters here. That having been said, there have been territorial compromises that have allowed the terrain of the Great Divide to be productively developed. For the movies this would be the presence of venues like Babylon Mitte, where low-end techno-inspired digital cinema played in the large-capacity theater (one that would have been subdivided into several spaces in the US), while Goya was being screened to about 35 people in a small, well-designed studio theater. On Neue Schönhauser Street, a "trendy" shopping area reminiscent of Chelsea in London or Queen Street in Toronto, the tension is visible between the incursion of chain stores (Mavi, Diesel, Tommy Hilfiger) that is putting pressure on local clothing and design stores. I patronized a "new German" design store that marketed Berlin style informed by the current rage for Ostalgie (postcards of the East from the 50s; remakes of typical consumer goods from the period), a clothing store where I bought a cement-colored jacket lined and waterproofed with iron filings (perfect for current weather), and a hair frisör where the hairdresser worked on her English (I taught her the word slick) and we talked Detroit techno and election politics. In an area that was massively neglected in the GDR period to one that witnessed one of the more immediate onslaughts of investment capital, one could only appreciate the present as a moment of transition, hopeful in its new possibilities for alternative shopping.
2 October Sunday
Shirin Neshat, "Recent and Earlier Works"; "Fast Nichts: Minimalistische Werke aus der Friedrich Christian Flick Collection," Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße, Mitte.
Paradise Now (Palestine/France/Germany/Netherlands, 2004), dir. Hany Abu-Assad, Kino in der Kulturbrauerei, Schönhauser Allee, Prenzlauer Berg.
The consumer's paradise turned ugly when we decided to take in a current "problem film" concerning Palestinian suicide attacks, now showing throughout Berlin, at a multiplex theater in the reconverted Kulturbrauerei, former East German brewery that is now home to a range of youth-, art-, and community-oriented projects of all kinds, from the commercial (cinema and supermarket) to the countercultural (clubs, bicycle rentals, the Kulturwerkstatt). The first curiosity of German consumerism was the sale of beer in glass bottles at the refreshment stands, which numerous moviegoers bought and took with them into the theater. There is also a considerable habit of consuming beer in bottles on the streets, and not only among the dissolute; fresh-faced youth on their way from one club to another will take their beer bottles onto the streetcars, resulting in a more continuous experience of consuming (probably also keeping costs down, as they can buy beer in grocery stores along the way). We arrived at the film exactly at 10:30, on time, which was a mistake—there was absolutely no one in the large, plus, multiplex theater. So we had good seats. The next 30 minutes, by the clock, was a nonstop barrage of some of the most invasive advertising I have ever witnessed, with only about 10 minutes of that time reserved for trailers. Particularly obnoxious were the cigarette ads, on a scale that we Americans no longer have to see, aiming to inculcate myriad associations of youth, glamor, travel, masculinity, sexiness with cigarettes, to be followed by the obligatory message from the health minister: "Rauchen kann tödlich sein" (smoking can be deadly), which clearly doesn't work. There was one witty ad, about the superior safety of French cars in which a series of national food items are crash tested against a concrete barrier—Bockwurst sandwich, sushi, hamburger, and finally baguette; the baguette sustains the least damage. Then followed an ad for H&M (the chain department store) jeans that featured an MTV-like fantasy narrative of an American inner-city black woman/diva singer whose boyfriend has just been gunned down on the streets. The narrative recounts how totally sexy he looked as he was shot down in great jeans. One can only speculate about the degree of racism in this train of associations, though they also certainly involve misinterpreted cultural codes. After trailers came the movie, which was supposed to be "OmU" (Original mit Untertiteln) but was dubbed on the cheap. The acting was TV-level as well; in one scene, the sympathetic young man who has been told his number has come up has a light-weight conversation with his mother in the kitchen that sounded very like the dialogues I had to listen to at the Goethe Institute. The same translated unreality characterized the entire film and its attempt to the penetrate the reality of the politics of the West Bank in narrative terms a Eurocentric audience could understand. Certainly we were not expecting to be entertained. We were back on the street in two seconds flat, and not any happier for it.
The Hamburger Bahnhof is simultaneously the most elegant and astute museum in Berlin, among many dozens. The space itself, a former train station, has been so meticulously brought to the level of exhibition quality that almost anything shown in it looks like it just popped out of hyperspace to appear magically in the present. If there could be such a thing as a "museum of the present," this is the space where it would be. Today, the new work on display (see the [to come] account of Bernd and Hilla Becher show) was three video installations by Shirin Neshat and minimalist work from the Flick Collection. Neshat, I felt, was a bit overexposed and predictable. It was good to see Rapture (1999) again, a dual-screen piece that puts the viewer squarely in the middle of the "discursive construction of gender" in a hyperrealized, nonnarrative, symbol-laden landscape. What works politically in this piece is its indeterminate cultural logic and the way in which there is no safe or certain place to stand between masculine and feminine, Occident and Orient. In the two more recent installations, the focus on a feminine protagonist/subject position works, in a logic perhaps contrary to the artist's intentions, to stabilize identification with the central figure in a way that separates her from cultural context, thus reassuringly positioning her in the gaze, no other way to put it, of the West. In Zarin (2005), the protagonist, a sex-worker in a brothel, begins to have delusions that the men who patronize her are faceless monsters. Rushing from the brothel to the baths, she violently tries to wash away her shame and humiliation, violating codes on display of the female body. The next scene positions the woman, in a digitally enhanced blue robe that separates her visually from the more black-and-white context, with a group of mourning women, with whom she cannot finally identify. Mourning women and faceless men thus become the cultural alternatives that she must reject in order to become subject, seeming to bring her well into the domain of a Eurocentric identification with the loss of culture. Mahdokht (2004), which I did not view carefully, seem to lyricize a decontextualized subject position, again by the use of digital highlighting of visual elements to provide coherent patterns of identification, here the yellow dress of a grown woman and young girls, whose ebullience prefigures the older woman's sadness and loss. The possibility of such a clichéd narrative, in any event, discouraged me from viewing the entire piece, a choice that is, of course, a possibility of video installations. Narrative must be available in viewings of less than the entire work, where the viewing begins and ends whenever. The resulting redundancy may well be an important part of the genre, but in Neshat there seems to be an overdetermined lure of the fictive to hold it in place. The second major attraction was an entirely adequate but not definitive collection of minimalist art. Here, as with the Dia Museum in New York, the vastness of the surroundings provide an unpleasantly commercial framework for the exhibition; if exhibition space is capital, works by Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, or Lawrence Weiner would best know how to fill it. This is unfortunate for the original intentions of the Conceptual Art movement, which importantly aligned with the politics of the critique of everyday life from its origins in the 1960s. The On Kawara reading of the dates of One Million Years (Past) in this sense seems more to specify the exhibition space as sublime than to provide an encounter with numbers beyond our comprehension. Conceptual Art, more than any, suffers from reification when it is reconstructed in the spaces of collectors and exhibitions. On the other hand, the show was an opportunity to see the best Bruce Nauman in years (Mapping the Studio I [Fat Chance John Cage], which uses infrared lighting and digital editing to create a hyperrealized "event horizon" in his studio where mice, cats, and moths flicker through the space, the intervening time being edited out, and to see Robert Smithson's film The Spiral Jetty for the first time. I had never understood the degree to which The Spiral Jetty is a film (in other words, the spiral itself is a film unwinding), which is made evident by its filmic counterpart. The entropic degradation of both installation and film occur along parallel tracks; our co-presence with Smithson's evanescent and disintegrating masterpiece thus became another opportunity to witness his genius.
3 October Monday
Circumambulation of the Teufelsberg, Heerstraße S-Bahn station, Charlottenburg.
Tag der deutschen Einheit (Day of German Unity), Brandenburg Gate and Reichstag, Mitte.
Wintermärchen (Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale), dir. Robert Wilson, Berliner Ensemble.
On the Day of German Unity, we climbed the Teufelsberg—an enormous pile of rubble from what had been Berlin transported by rail and piled up at the edge of the Western zone. Over 90 percent of Berlin was destroyed by Soviet tanks and Allied air raids at the conclusion of the war. There are several such sites surrounding Berlin, of which this is the largest: several hundred feet in height, several square miles in area, it is visible from the air as a highly unnatural outcropping, a demonic volcano rising from the Green Belt surrounding Berlin and topped with a Cold War-era radar listening post which is eventually to be torn down and replaced by a resort/casino. The rubble was hauled to the Teufelsberg by rail and dumped; picking up its trail on the north side of Grunewald forest, one notes the bits and pieces of brick, masonry, steel, concrete being exposed wherever processes of erosion are at work. After a climb of a couple of hundred feet, we reached a level plateau to one side of the summit, where dozens of children and adults had gathered to fly kites—a perfect site due to the winds that come up the slopes and the view of all Berlin in the distance. It was a cloudy, photogenic day and we wasted trillions of pixels recording the display of national unity on the rubbles of history. Then we climbed the summit itself, notable for the Green conservation efforts and climber's rock on its side, and also the bits and pieces of Berlin that were continuously disclosed in the distressed and eroded landscape. What Detroit could learn from this site! While we are too new to Germany and to German to really gauge the extent to which such dancing on the ruins is a moment of historical self-consciousness, at the summit we encountered two grandparents explaining—what happened?—to their grandson. My conclusion, overall, is that Germans are in no way in denial of their history, in spite of minority eruptions of unconsciousness; that there is a continuous effort at least in Berlin to provide ways of reflecting on what happened; that the political imperative against militarism and war that led to Schröder's refusal to support Bush, and even Merkel's inability to make support for the U.S. an issue, is a consequence of a public refusal of denial. This refusal of denial, of course, had to be fought for and has only to a relative extent been achieved, and perhaps some of what I perceived is really the defamiliarization of my own encounter with the historical landscape. But compared to the American processing of bad history in all its current and bloody reality, this seems like an advance. At the summit of the Teufelsberg, in unstated homage to the Buddhist practice of pilgrimage around Mt. Meru, we circumambulated the enormous, abandoned radar station, whose side panels creaked in the wind. The Cold War seemed frozen at the moment of its abandonment here; the radar station, with its concrete, fencing, observation towers, and living quarters joins a series of such sites—the Wall included—as witness to an urge to total destruction that, for 45 years, ran our lives.
Whatever celebrations there were in Berlin seemed likewise subdued; this was more of a day off than a stressed affirmation of national identity. Here, have a Currywurst, it's echt Deutsch: the public space outside the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag looked more like the Michigan State Fair than a national festival. The conversation on national characteristics could have easily touched on what it meant to be a New Zealander or Norwegian, as it did with our new friends Tim Corballis and Ingrid, novelist and scholar from New Zealand who are in Berlin for a year. We shared a beer and went home to get ready for the theater. At the Berliner Ensemble, Robert Wilson's much-anticipated production of The Winter's Tale, played in German, which might be said to have figured precisely a postmodern aesthetic space between nations. This was particularly the case with the score by Hans-Jörn Brandenburg, which juxtaposed elements from the Renaissance, minimalism, jazz, Brecht and Weill, with musical jokes keyed to visual gestures. The text worked the ground between the original and German, which was represented in the "national" space outside the court where the abandoned Perdita is raised and finally returned to her father: "Germans" are produced in this space. Wilson's contribution as "American" was spatial as well: in his gorgeously sculptural staging and lighting; the use of silhouetting to define characters and a sharp contrast between fixity and movement; and a highly constructed set of idiosyncratic performance styles that worked to define characters as separate and distinct. What was most remarkable about the piece was its precision: three hours of flawlessly choreographed speech, movement, gesture, and lighting. While earlier productions of his that I had seen employed temporal registers that tended toward the redundant and even self-indulgent, Wilson really came into aesthetic focus in Brecht's house: definition and clarity ruled. In the fourth act, where a certain amount of material not directly in the script was added, we were given a condensed essay on Brechtian theater reinterpreted as Robert Wilson, such that the modern epic's focus on the "gestic" became one style among many, as in the contrast between of Chinese folk theater, one of Brecht's sources, and Berlin cabaret represented in the two central comic characters. Overall, the production shifted from abstract neoclassical fixity in the court scenes to postnational stylistic pastiche in the countryside to create a work that was aesthetically never static, always inventive, and played to precise and exacting standards. This was the most accomplished postmodernism I have ever witnessed, a confirmation that, in continuing negotiation with its historical precedents and contexts, such an aesthetic can be constructed.
4 October Tuesday
Leave Berlin for Tübingen, Tegel Airport.
[To come.]
Bild der Heimat: Die Echt-Foto-Postkarten aus der DDR. Introduction by Erasmus Schröter; text by Peter Guth.Berlin: Schwarzkopf and Schwarzkopf, 2002.
Donath, Matthias. Bunker, Banken, Reichskanzlei: Architekturführer, Berlin 1933–1945. Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2005.
Ladd, Brian. The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.
[Text and photos copyright © Barrett Watten 2005. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]