DANCE

I am only prepared to go so far -- to here

the tip of my middle finger if I was to use

my arm but only to here and again you

try and again you take it too far so don't

when I use my arm look at me

when I am talking to you don't you know

how rude it is to not look at the person

talking to you look at where my arm is --

to here this time all the way out to here

look look look at where my arm is now

DESIGN

with principles so rigid so immutable

you would think they were devised by

someone who has spent time in eyes

nowhere else do you see this insistence

on what can and cannot be done with

a line a margin are you sure you mean

that I am asked when a word falls onto

the following page a word orphaned with

all that space is not a waste because the

lines in this poem are one word long

Arden On Dick

"I was talking to some anthropologists the other day, and art historians, and, you know, we basically agreed that Beau's probably the best west coast artist since contact." -- Roy Arden

The United States of Hoodoo (2012)

Playing at the Eiszeit-Kino last night was The United States of Hoodoo (2012). To describe this is an Oliver Hardt film is to invite a serious throat-clearing by its writer-narrator, Darius James, who, along with Hardt, was present at the screening.

The plot: after the death of his father, James returns to the family home in Connecticut (from Berlin), where he forces himself to deal with both dad's ashes and his substantial collection of Africalia. In order to sort through what this collection meant to a man who said it meant nothing (religious), James and a film crew embark on a multi-city tour of the United States (New York City, Glendora, New Orleans, San Francisco, Chicago, etc.) looking for the roots of that distinct blend of European, Indigenous American and African mysticism known as Hoodoo.

While I enjoyed what James opens up on his travels, particularly the Santeria cult in New Orleans (where one of its members, Sallie Ann Glassman, gives a lucid dissertation on the difference between the visible and the invisible), I found his hard-boiled style and camera-mugging sometimes hard to take. Indeed, it was during Sallie Ann's segment that I wondered if the film would be even more compelling (Harald Schmuk's camera-work is exceptional) had James not appeared in it, that it unfolded less through his visible presence than through his invisible (off-camera) provocations.

James is the author of That's Blaxploitation and Negrophobia: an Urban Parable, someone we read in the early-1990s, a successor, we supposed, to Ishmael Reed, who himself was a presence in the late-1960s, when the New Yorker regularly published eccentric short fiction by him and Donald Barthelme. Reed was certainly on my mind as the crew travelled to San Francisco, where sure enough we meet him, and listen as he talks about his writing in relation to collage, relating it less to a modern U.S. literary tradition (Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner...) than to Jazz. (Just as Barthelme was supplanted by Alice Munro as a New Yorker mainstay, Reed was supplanted by Alice Walker as an integral voice of African-America.)

Another voice worth mentioning is one we meet early on -- Val Jeanty, a DJ/drummer originally from Haiti. Jeanty tells us about the presence -- the sustained presence -- of frequencies, how they swirl around us, remain in the room long after the gesture that brought them from one time and place to the next is complete. On that note, the Original Music (Arto Lindsay & Rabotnik) neither drives the film nor determines it. The Sound Mix (Oliver Achatz) is excellent as well.

Marcia Tucker

While visiting the Catriona Jeffries Gallery a few months back, the gallerist, fresh from her trip to Frieze, pushed into my hands the two books she read on her flight home, one of which was an autobiography entitled A Short Life of Trouble: Forty Years in the New York Art World by Marcia Tucker, a book I took with me on my most recent flight to Berlin.

Autobiographies, biographies and memoirs are not generally my thing. At best they operate in the same way portraits do, providing particular kinds of information in a particular kind of way. Gertrude Stein understood this, as did Lucian Freud. That said, what I enjoyed most about Tucker's book is her identification with a particular moment in NYC, when, in the mid-1970s, the MOMA and the Whitney took a breather from contemporary art, and curators like Tucker, who brought with them emergent social issues (feminism) and formal innovation (post-conceptual practices), were pushed aside.

Although Tucker does not make it clear in her book, her forced resignation from the Whitney came not from a museum wanting to refocus on its collection but from (board) pressure after her 1975 Richard Tuttle survey. This would have been a great opportunity for Tucker to expand on artists working in the post-conceptual milieu, the influence of commercial galleries on museums, and the behaviour of museum boards, but alas, A Short Life is less a critical autobiography than a confessional one, built as much for a general audience (the kind of audience evoked by those who routinely fire the Tuckers of the world) as an art audience (all nine of us).

Something I wish the book included (and this is a question for the book's editor, Liza Lou) are some of Tucker's essays and letters, particularly those related to her more significant exhibitions, such as the Tuttle survey, which represented a turning point/last straw in the "New York Art World," one that gave us neo-expressionist painting in its place, something Tucker seemed to be parodying (inadvertently or otherwise, though again she does not elaborate) with her "Bad Painting" exhibition of 1978. But maybe that book is coming. Or maybe it came and went.

Today marks the third week of my European vacation. Last time I was away this long was in the late-90s, when Judy was doing her MFA at Bard and we were dividing our time between Tivoli and Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

While I have heard little news from Vancouver during my time away (apart from the heat that arrived the day I left), I awoke this morning to a link from Lindsay Brown announcing that the City of Vancouver had hired a new planner, Brian Jackson, who arrived from Los Angeles via the Greater Vancouver suburb of Richmond.

I read the link then did some searching of my own. Here is what I gleaned from the Globe:

"But some critics say the Vision council is clearly signalling that it wants an administrator rather than a visionary, with its change of title and choice of someone who has been more of an implementer of plans in Richmond.

'That [title] tells you everything you need to know -- it's about development, it's not about planning. It certainly suggests to me that council wants someone who is an effective administrator,' said the former Non-Partisan Association city councillor Gordon Price."

The idea of an administrator, not a planner, reminded me of a trend in the visual arts from about ten years ago, when museum directors were suddenly declaring themselves "Artistic Directors" and, rather than hire curators, where writing job notices for "Exhibition Coordinators". (Indeed, you could say the same of this year's dOCUMENTA, where the Artistic Director activated not curators to work with her but "Agents".)

As much as I like Mayor Robertson, I do see this trend as unsettling, particularly when his predecessor, Sam "Dr. Strangelove" Sullivan, asserted himself in a similar, if not more narcissistic, fashion.

Of course all this is just a ruse, because the person we really have to keep our eyes on, particularly with talk of replacing the Georgia and Dunsmuir Viaducts with an inter-city "super road" (Who is telling us to not call it a freeway?), is councillor Geoff Meggs -- "Colonel 'Bat' Guano" to Sullivan's "Dr. Strangelove".

Ernst Fischer

Future Institutions by Artists Auditions

Last Saturday I dropped by Alex's studio across the landing from Or Berlin to watch videotaped auditions for the Future Institutions by Artists panel Anton Vidokle and Pelin Tan were putting together the following day. (The panel discussion would be taped for presentation at the Institutions by Artists "world congress" in Vancouver this October.)  Those auditioning were asked to say a few words from the future and stand by for questions, most of which came from Vidokle (pictured above, in a photo by Lauryn Youden).

It was hard to get a sense of where the five people I watched were coming from. Seems all of them knew that this was an art project and some acknowledgement of the visual art culture was required (be that through vocabulary, proper nouns). As for content, that varied. During my two hour visit I witnessed an earnest manifesto, an excerpt from Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, a riff from someone who had done too much (unsupervised) reading on astronomy, and the most entertaining audition of the day, a Withnail & I-like duo from the "Ernst Fischer commune."

Unfortunately I could not record the duo's entire discussion. Below is my montage:

Two men, mid-30s. The Englishman is slow and sinewy, built low to the ground, a rugby player who has read Harold Nicolson; the other is a U.S. American -- taller, leaner, wears his hair and his sunglasses like Joey Ramone.

AMERICAN: We're a team.

VIDOKLE: Are you artists?

AMERICAN: We used to be. It's such a...tricky term.

ENGLISHMAN (gesturing to his teammate): I'm just here to introduce him. But actually, we are from the Ernst Fischer commune.

AMERICAN: I am Raphael Amadeus Frankenstein, composer.

ENGLISHMAN: The Fischer experiment worked until the incident of 2025.

AMERICAN: What we call The Drop.

ENGLISHMAN: There was a community.

AMERICAN: We didn't think, Let's get bigger. It was like, Let's get smaller -- until we are invisible.

ENGLISHMAN (to Vidokle): Where were you in 2025?

VIDOKLE: I was in Asia -- Shanghai. But what happened?

AMERICAN: Well, you know -- The Drop.

ENGLISHMAN: People got very visual through The Drop.

AMERICAN: I'm not here for history.

ENGLISHMAN (gesturing to his teammate): Condescension -- it's his schtick.

AMERICAN: We lost a lot of people in The Drop.

VIDOKLE: Is this what happened to Gilbert?

AMERICAN: Gilbert and George?

ENGLISHMAN: How do you know Gilbert?

VIDOKLE: I met him in Shanghai.

ENGLISHMAN: When this is over everyone should come back to our place.

AMERICAN: You don't have to wear pants.

WHEELBARROW

the introduction of colour into the poem

is its reconsideration as design no longer

a skeleton we clothe but a wheelbarrow

whose adjective is redundant replaced

by what so much depends upon printed

in the colour the adjective describes I try

this without writing it and the poem still

moves with the grace Williams gave it

the rain enhanced by a glossier finish

chickens whitest between each word

My Local Rathaus

Throughout the day I am reminded of the time by the ringing of the bells at the Rathaus down the street. I forget how powerful these instruments are, how difficult it is to both record them and play them back (note the distortion coming from your speakers). As mentioned in a previous email, Adrian Villar Rojas cast -- but most importantly -- filled a similar set of bells for dOCUMENTA (13). What might Rojas be saying about time, recurrence, remembrance and memory?

Pfaueninsel

Today's tour of Schinkel architecture took us to Pfaueninsel in Potsdam, where Antonia Hirsch and I communed with the peacocks and wondered why we could not find any male mallards. After that, a lunch so massive I thought I might need to be airlifted home.

dOCUMENTA (13)

Three days at dOCUMENTA and of course I did not see everything. Main difference between this exhibition and the previous two I saw (in 2002 and 2007): while there is more work in this iteration (and certainly more of it in the Karlsaue) there is more room between things. Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev seems aware of this with the placement of Ryan Gander's "breeze" piece flowing through the bottom-left and -right rooms of the Fredericianum, at the centre of which is her own specific display: an exhibition-within-an-exhibition that she refers to as the "Brain."

Time is another theme that flows through the exhibition, from Adrian Villar Rojas's solid concrete bells under the Weinbergterrassen to the time it took him to make his flayed sculptures that wind their way towards them. Another concerns the increased level of sophistication in the integration of video and sculptural installation. While I am not a huge fan of William Kentridge, I am impressed with his piece at the Hauptbahnhof, which also contains a "breeze" (as breath). Clemens Von Wedemeyer's three-sided temporal monument earns its sculptural/video interface, while Gerard Byrne's does not. Willie Doherty's piece would have been better suited (given its content) in Omer Fast's hut in the Karlsaue, while Omer Fast's voluminous crowds would have benefitted from the space given to Doherty at the Hauptbahnhof (this might have happened had Doherty not been so insistent on when -- and when not --people could enter his screenings).

I could go on if I were not so exhausted. Suffice it to say, the pieces that resonate most for me are Mark Dion's cabinet at the Ottoneum, Pierre Huyghe's installation in the Karlsaue (a work that had me wondering if I was suddenly on the set of Tarkovsky's Stalker), Tino Sehgal's breathtaking song-and-dance extravaganza and Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller's outdoor sonic sensorium, also in the Karlsaue. No doubt I will recall more as time passes, but in the meantime -- Morpheus!

oCCUMENTA

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Alan Kane at BQ

As it turns out, the problem with my bike was not a sticky brake pad but my ignorance of the bike's construction. I learned this the hard way, having taken the bike to a nearby shop where one of the technicians shook his head when I pointed out the "problem" and left me to find another who spoke the kind of English a simpleton like me might understand.

"Your problem is not the brake," he began. "In fact, it is not a problem at all. The reason for what you call 'stickiness' is the dynamo in the front wheel that powers your headlight. If you did not feel stickiness while riding your bike last night you would have been unlit, invisible to cars, and perhaps hit by one. So instead of complaining to me right now, you might be complaining to a doctor instead."

This from a teenaged bike technician.

While happy to hear that my bike was okay (a little red button disconnects the dynamo), the problem was now the weather. Too wet to ride up to Orienstrasse, I replenished my supply of dinkelbrot at the Bio Store, along with a few other things for dinner, and returned to Innsbrucker to finish my review of the Ethnologische Museum show (which should be on the Canadian Art website next week). From there, a couple of corrections to my Steele and Tomczak essay, and then the preamble to my piece on Gareth Moore's dOCUMENTA installation, which I will be visiting (and sleeping in) tomorrow.

A piece I would like to write, one I may or may not have time for, is on Alan Kane's BQ exhibition, where, in the larger space, the artist filled the room with 27 4'-high white plinths (3x9) and placed atop them, beside them and before them objects he had asked visitors to bring with them for the opening (stamps from the Phillipines, a potted cactus...). In a smaller room, on whose walls were affixed shelves (one wall had 8 shelves about a foot apart, the other only one), he displayed ceramic bowls and cups from a collector friend in England. In an even smaller room, an eye-line row of at least ten Michael Jackson Bad albums -- again, from another collector.

In considering the ceramics I was struck by how harmonic the arrangement was, both in colour and form -- to the point where if these vessels were to arrive in padded boxes, with instructions to arrange them in a manner entirely devoid of conflict, this is what you would get.

The idea of a collection resulting in a singular array -- the only array possible -- is intriguing to me, one that goes against everything I have learned about the mutability of art. When I asked Alan about this, he nodded, said we think too much, and that he wanted to make something without thinking, something composed intuitively, curious (I suppose) as to what the viewer might make of it.

Where the Streets Have Names

Another marathon biking session yesterday and for the first time got lost riding home, taking Otto Braun when I meant to take Lichtenberger. Complicating things: a sticky brake pad. What should have been an 8km ride from Alan Kane's BQ opening felt more like 16.

Schoneberg is like Santa Monica to Los Angeles's Silverlake -- if Mitte was Silverlake. Twenty years ago I would not dream of riding a bicycle from Santa Monica to Silverlake (you would be taking your life in your hands), but while in L.A. last summer I noticed a lot more cycling than in past years, with towns that had once melted into the greater sprawl (Los Feliz, Atwater Village, etc.) becoming neighbourhoods, where people not only live, but live and work and play.

I was hoping to get my bike repaired today, but since it is raining I might take public transit instead. A visit to the Or Gallery Berlin on Oranienstrasse, and from there, who knows?

Cafe Sur

The steepest hill in Berlin is a 2% grade that flows north from Hauptstrasse down Akazien to Belziger. At the southwest corner is a small, warm-walled joint called Cafe Sur, where I stop for beer or coffee, depending on the time of day.

Yesterday I arrived at around three and had two Beck's; the first on my own, the second with a young Korean student who had arrived in Berlin the day before ("for three years") to learn English and German so that she might learn Arabic and become a translator back home.

Our conversation started well, with the student in charge. However, it soon became apparent that she had run out of rehearsed content and was resorting to stock phrases from a businessman's travel guide. "Know any good bars?" she asked, and I told her about Slumberland. "Do you play golf?" But before I could answer, she added quickly, "I do not."

Native American Modernism: Art from North America

Collector Nicola Flossbach arrived in Berlin yesterday to introduce me to her former classmate Peter Bolz, curator of the North American Ethnology collection at the Ethnologisches Museum in wealthy Dahlem. Peter and his assistant Claudia Roch were kind enough to tour us though the museum's Native American Modernism: Art from North America exhibition, as well as the more artefact-oriented installations on the lower floor, featuring a cedar bark hat and masks collected by Captain Cook (1780) in the "Northwest Coast" section.

While taken with the exhibition's "Southwest" coverage, I was most impressed with the three Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun paintings Peter had acquired shortly after his hiring in 1989 -- Native Winter Snowfall (1987), I Have a Vision that Some Day All Indigenous People Will Have Freedom and Self-Government (1987) and Downtown Vancouver (1988). But even more than that, the lengths Peter went to to convince his then-director that works of Native American contemporary art, while definitely not artefact, had a place in a museum devoted to just that.

The distinction between art and artefact was the premise behind Doris Shadbolt's 1967 The Arts of the Raven exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where Haida artist Bill Reid acted as both consultant and bridge figure, linking the 19th century carving and painting of Haida artists such as Charles Edenshaw (1839-1920) to Thompson/Coast Salish artists such as Lawrence, who emerged some twenty years later. Unfortunately Doris's exhibition was not listed in the "Appendix" of Peter's catalogue ("Chronology: Milestones of Modern American Native Art") -- in it's place, "1969: Kwakiutl artist Tony Hunt opens his Arts of the Raven Gallery in Victoria, British Columbia."

After a siesta, I jumped on my bike and once again cycled up Martin Luther to the Tiergarten, where I paid my respects to the angel before arriving at the northeast corner of Torstrasse and Prenzlauer Allee, also known as Soho House, to dine at a long table with Nicola's sexy friends in the former department store-cum-DDR-archive-cum-"private members" club. It was there that I recalled Peter's words about the Ethnologisches Museum's upcoming move to Humboldt Forum and, as a result, if its former building (an exquisite bit of mid-60s modernism) would convert to something just as "private".

Line Describing A Cone (1973)

A leisurely cycle through the boroughs this morning. Up Martin Luther, through the Tiergarten to the Hauptbahnhof, where I purchased next week's passage to Documenta. Then the Anthony McCall show at the Hamburger Bahnhof, only to find that the artist has given up the smokey bar feel of filmic works such as Line Describing A Cone (1973) for the digital cathedrals of Leaving (2009) (no kidding!) and the erroneously titled Meeting You Halfway (2009). From there, I crossed into Mitte, where I always feel a chill, to my old stomping grounds along Rosenthaler, where I picked up some dinkel food at the Bio Store and found the Williamsburg/Silverlake Effect in place. Then Hackescher Market, where, for the second time in my life, I was almost hit by a train at that scary hairpin. To Karl Liebnecht, from which the Brandenburger Tor beckoned, its gauntlet of buskers, before escaping to the Tiergarten, to the trails this time, from which I could see nude middle-aged men lying face down on the lawns, reminding me that the Tiergaretn was, and still remains, a male place. Back on Martin Luther, a wrong turn on Litzenburger, then home, where I hung up the laundry to dry.

Contempt
BY ELFRIEDE JELINEK

TRANSLATED BY MICHAEL HOFMANN

my puppet-strings are the

sweet decaying lamps I flutter round.

I am as immense

as a black kid with a spinning top.

drowned tripper fat

crawls into hollow cuffs to be sewn up

like hot cats

cracked soft caryatids in tails.

I'll force you all to your knees

your dirty muzzles will squawk

out of your faces.

and I will continue to climb

I'll spread my thin arms along the queer walls

till they bleed.

I'll reach into threadbare velvet

so that you bash yourselves like poor moths

on corners of night.

the reason I'm here is

to scratch all the white bellies

squatting down there.

your stupid silence I will  just

toss up in the air.

I am as sky high

as all your staring regards laid end to end

on the ground somewhere

lies my broken smile.

Source: Poetry (November 2007).

Lidl

The supermarket down the street is a Lidl, one of the bigger chains in Germany and points beyond.

During my Sunday trip to Lidl I saw a lot of hung over people buying coffee and bacon, which they have in abundance, along with beer, sausage, cheese and, more than anything else, cleaning products. I asked an older woman in the line-up about this and she deadpanned, Germans like to clean.

As for the kid, he's funny too.

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Slumberland

The business immediately south of Akazienkiez's Hot Dog and Burger World (see previous post) is Slumberland, a bar frequented by U.S. writer Paul Beatty while he was living in Berlin (on a DAAD Residency) and the name of of his 2008 novel.

Here is what Patrick Neate had to say about Slumberland in the Guardian:

Jukebox sommelier

Patrick Neate on a literary freestyler with brio to burn

Not so long ago, hip-hop was the first musical genre since jazz whose nomenclature could plausibly be followed by the word "culture". People talked about hip-hop cinema and fashion, politics and argot; even hip-hop literature.

In so far as the last of these existed, a key book was Paul Beatty's 1996 debut, The White Boy Shuffle; a dazzling satire of the African-American urban experience, its diversity and lack thereof. Understandably, Beatty took little pleasure in the "hip-hop novelist" tag.

Since then, of course, the genre has gone mainstream. Hip-hop is pop music, its films are just films, its fashion just fashion and its slang just slang. And politics? Where once hip-hop might have been regarded as a performance of racial consciousness, it is now just performance. The symbol has become confused with that which it symbolised. Scarily, therefore, hip-hop is too often regarded as synonymous with the African-American urban experience. Scarier still, this is all too often conflated with blackness itself.

Ostensibly, Slumberland, Beatty's third novel, seeks to debunk such monolithic and monotonous racial myth-making. Indeed, his protagonist and narrator, Ferguson, aka DJ Darky, an African-American beat junkie with a "phonographic memory" (he can remember every sound he has ever heard), says as much on the first page. "Don't they know . . . that the charade of blackness is over?" he asks. "Everyone, even the British, says so." And yet Slumberland is a novel of precisely this "charade", a story of stereotypes abused and archetypes reclaimed which delights in racial essentialism even as it decries it and dismisses hipness using the hippest touchstones Beatty can lay his hands on.

We meet Darky in a West Berlin tanning shop in 1989, just before the collapse of the wall. He enjoys the fake rays, genuine stares and local colour. He meets a black security guard who observes, "Germany is the black man's heaven . . . You just have to let them love you." The security guard is described as belonging to "the long legacy of freak show blackness including the Venus Hottentot; Ota Benga, the Congolese pygmy displayed as the missing link in the Bronx Zoo; Kevin Powell and Heather B, the first two African-Americans on MTV's The Real World; and myself." Beatty likes triangulating meaning through lists. Often they are smart, but they don't always open up the subject he's riffing on.

Darky's on the trail of "the Schwa", a mysterious old jazzman ("Charles Manson, Squeaky Fromme, Big Bird, Huey Newton and Henry Kissinger were all big fans") whose contribution will complete - and therefore validate - the DJ's almost perfect beat. All he knows about the Schwa is that he scores East German porn films, including one particularly momentous sequence that accompanies a man having sex with a chicken.

While hunting the Schwa, Darky works at a bar called Slumberland as a "jukebox sommelier". He selects the soundtrack for the diverse clientele - black men (mostly foreign), the white German women who want to sleep with them and the white German men who tag along to watch.

At its best, Beatty's writing is shockingly original, scabrous and very funny. I particularly enjoyed the footnote description of Oprah Winfrey as being "in the process of buying the rights to the life story of every black American . . . as a way of staking claim to being the legal and sole embodiment of the black experience". Unfortunately, he also likes to dally in arcana and obfuscation. At one point Darky compares love to "reading Whitman and fighting the urge not to express your aesthetic superiority". That I don't understand this sentiment is not in itself a problem. That I haven't enough interest in the character to try to figure it out most certainly is.

I wanted to like Slumberland: Beatty has brio to burn and that is rare enough to be cherished. But I fear this novel, with no real people to care about or plot to cling to, is simply a flawed undertaking. Darky wants to move beyond the hip black narrative but finds himself locked in a series of vignettes unified by little but how black and hip they are. I would be doing DJ Darky (and, perhaps, Beatty) a disservice if I told it other than how it is - it is like watching a jazz virtuoso overdo the freestyle; after a while, you just wish he'd play something you can hum. Or, to put it another way, a hip-hop tune - I mean, a real roof-burning, wall-sweating, "ladies, follow me please" hip-hop tune - is more than the sum of its breaks.

-- Saturday 6 December 2008

Two Markets

Two markets this morning, both very different.

The first took place in front of the Shoneberg Rathaus, whose clock tower I can see from our balcony at Innsbruckerstrasse. Close to a hundred tables of mostly old things -- clothes, jewelry, tools, books, records, games and my favorite, photographs, of which I purchased seven.

The second market was located a mile or so northeast -- east on Belziger, then north on Akazien to Winterfeldtplatz. Here the goods are new -- new from the garden and new from the oven. New clothes, new jewelry, new toys… From this market I purchased a ciabatta, a cucumber and basket of strawberries.

Not sure what lies ahead for the rest of the day, though Judy mentioned Catherine David has curated an exhibition at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where they will be showing films this afternoon. As much as I would like to ride my bike there (up Martin Luther, then east on John Foster Dulles), Deutscher Wetterdienst is calling for a Gewitter!

Public Art

German Elephant

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Singing Some English on It

Sara Lee demonstrating the melismatic note.

What English Is