On Quotations

 

Werkbund Ausstellung Cöln, 1914, exhibition plan

Many dislocations, replacements, translation processes and relocations can be observed at this year’s berlin biennale. A good third of the works shown are somehow related to a strenuous site-specificity, if not made for the space, then referring to the space in its larger sense (geographical location, historical parameter, etc.); one is the sculptural installation of Goshka Macuga engaged into a specific critique of history-making. History-making; as indeed she is reconstructing one-to-one exhibition displays designed in the 1920s and 1930s within the framework of the Werkbund (German Organisation of the Art and Crafts, created to support the German industry via German artists and craftsmen) exhibition by Mies van Der Rohe, the architect, the predominant male figure of the Neue Nationalgalerie, and his professional and private partner Lilie Reich, rarely mentioned in official history of course.

The biennial curators’ decision not to include title and names of the artists within the exhibition may cut off the questioning Macuga would like to highlight, but could focus on the tensional tradition of self-contained artwork versus the concept-form rhetoric. One of the structures she presents is a cute glass furniture, designed for a less sexy purpose: the display of different kinds of glass. The two other pieces are big frames responding fairly enough to the steel and glass structure of the museum itself, with some textiles draped on them: the textiles to quote directly Lilie Reich, the textile designer from the Bauhaus, educational product of the Werkbund.

A dialectic Goshka Macuga uses endlessly is the one of titles, titles that are only given in a vague exhibition leaflet. Here, these are referring to many aspects of the Werkbund, and of course its major figure, Mies van der Rohe. But I doubt every viewer could actually relate to them directly. The two glass and steel frames ornamented with textiles hold the title “House of the Woman”, that refers to a 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. The organised group of designers and artists decided to have a pavilion within this exhibition showing exclusively works by the female members of the Werkbund, and be designed by the few members themselves; segregating within their gender, rather than discipline. While the title of the glass structure is referring to an exhibition organised 1934 by the National-Socialists called “German Folk, German Work”. This exhibition took the same vocabulary than the Werkbund, and even asked the former members of the Bauhaus (dissolved by the Nazis as well as the Werkbund 1933) Matin Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Lilie Reich, to design the exhibition of this ideological event. For sure I could go further into the theory behind all this, or through one of my readings of German history and the picking-up of cultural figures; but I would rather focus on the processes of reconstruction and relocation, frequently observed in art spaces.

To quote the biennale itself: the Polish artist Paulina Olowska is reproducing b/w reproductions of original paintings, while the Portuguese artist Pedro Barateiro is placing into Berlin’s urban landscape relics of what used to be glorious communist daily-life infrastructures. Further than being a trend on the art market, this use of reconstruction could be understood as being a strategy of semantic storage, which is the process of transcription. Macuga is only playing on the visual level of the Werkbund by commissioning young German designers for the textiles. She creates a vocabulary made out of spaces between communicative and cultural memory, and what has been lost within these blanks. While the cultural memory usually operated in the written form, to be understood by individuals of a certain social framing (generation-wise), the communicative memory used very simple procedures of first-person communication, that is mainly in telling. The natural process from the communicative to the cultural is mainly a one of writing, of sourcing, of referring on paper, of quoting. This process is the same than the one used by many artists at the Neue Nationalgalerie: Macuga is quoting the author of an object by reproducing the object, jointing bits and pieces of memories into an historical reconstruction. Then the sculpture acts as medial, as an image-medial tool of memnotechnique that becomes the transcription itself.

Icelandic Love Corporation at Ard Bia Berlin

The Tent Lady’s Hospitality, video still, 2008, Icelandic Love Corporation

It is said Heinrich Boll’s love-letter to the west coast of Ireland, Irisches Tagebuch (1957), brought innumerable numbers of Germans to the region in the latter part of the last century to “play truant from Europe”. Different, but commonly pervasive myths about the particularities of place, draw innumerable artists and cultural practitioners from all over the world here to Berlin. One of the new arrivals is Ard Bia Berlin, a sister-enterprise of Ard Bia gallery in Galway, from the same region of Ireland that Boll once wrote so lovingly of, albeit now a radically different place in all meaningful regards.

Ard Bia Berlin offers a studio residency which has attracted a large interest from Irish artists wishing to practice in the city for a short length of time. In addition the space hosts a gallery exhibition programme, currently showing the work of the Icelandic Love Corporation, who are momentarily also resident in the studio apartment. The show is entitled The Tent Lady’s Hospitality, and is structured into two parts. In one gallery room, an installation; the other hosts a single video work representing a staged performance. The Icelandic Love Corporation’s practice has a strong performative dimension, and Arb Bia Berlin’s co-ordinator (Rosie Lynch) informs me that for the opening weekend they performed in the first gallery space. I won’t attempt to write of their performance background, largely because I am frequently non-plussed by performance in general – or more correctly, fairly ignorant of both the history of the form, and personal experience of good examples – but also because I am more interested in the fact that I missed that aspect of the exhibition.

For the installation simultaneously contains aspects of the tableau, the mise-en-scene, and qualities of the relic. There is a here-ness in the considered materiality of the objects that inhabit the space: inflatable balloon-chairs reminiscent of 70’s Spacehoppers, a mirrored medicine cabinet that seems to hold both a dress (or tent?) repair-kit and a disposable camera, a bizarre crocheted pair of leggings on the wall. A silver tea set and serving tray is positioned in the centre of the room under a fabric canopy, whose gaudy red and white striped patterning is repeated on all the walls. There is a distinct creepiness in the (literally) rose-tinted perfection in the space, and its allusion to old children’s film and television. In fact, something about it reminds me distinctly of the 1968 film Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang, and I look over my shoulder half-expecting the Child-Catcher to come though the door. I remember how my own childhood fear of the film arose not just from this isolated character, but also the entire creepy, colour-co-ordinated, and garish claustrophobia of the fictive Vulgaria.

On closer inspection, the silver tray of the tea set reveals the inscriptions of an Ouija board.

My co-presence with the objects is temporally disrupted by a sense of the to-be-ness and the there-ness within the installation. There arises, via the theatrical composition of the space, a notion of being in a place awaiting activity: a kind of empty anticipation. Simultaneously there is a sense I am witnessing the aftermath of something: an action, a performance. I remember a critique of Roman Signer was that his sculptures were merely relics of his far more potent actions. I don’t see this dynamic as a devaluing mechanism. I think there is richness in the dissonance between objects being both contemporaneous and residue. But there is certainly a tangled but forceful feeling here, and it is synthesised from my sense of having missed a thing (an event), the relentless ubiquity in the stylisation of experience, and the childhood references strongly present.

Wunderkammer

Lars Laumann’s video work Berlin-Muren (2008), was without a doubt one of my favourite pieces in the Berlin Biennale. Even still, I always had certain reservations about it, which were confirmed by my developing unease while watching the artwork.

Laumann’s 27 minute long video traces a part of the life of Riitta Berliner-Mauer, who professes physical and emotional love for the Berlin Wall, to the extent that in 1979 the two were ‘married’. Berliner-Mauer has objectophilia – the sexual love of objects, which she calls objectúm-sexuality. In the video she discusses in depth her complex sexuality, her belief in the existence of a soul within objects, and the history of her relationship with the Berlin Wall, including her devastation in 1989 when the wall was largely demolished. She goes as far as to mention having sex with the Wall, which she claims is not masturbation, as masturbation involves objects of fantasy: which do not have souls. The video piece has prevalent characteristics of the documentary, or perhaps more specifically, the confessional. For the voice is always Berliner-Mauer’s (except for a brief segment introducing a second individual with objectophilia who shares her love of the Wall), and in fact her entirely off-screen narration is derived almost totally from the text of her own website. This fact perhaps complicates my initial reservations: are we being invited simply to laugh at the subject?

I must say that my initial reactions were to chuckle, laugh outright, or watch in amused disbelief, along with most of the audience it seemed. While I had the benefit of prior knowledge about the video’s origin, I’m at least sure some of the other audience members took this for a fiction; a spoof. But our collective amusement made me more than uncomfortable as I left the constructed screening room at the Skulpturenpark. At its root, the sense perhaps of participation in a soft exploitation. Actually, for me at least, Riitta Berliner-Mauer comes out of the work in a highly sympathetic light. Its hard not to like her, even if she puts her passion for the Wall’s survival before the lives of those who it helped oppress and divide; but as she argues, it was not the Wall’s fault – it did not ask to be built anymore then you or I asked to be born. In the end, she seems simply as a person with highly unusual aspects to her lifestyle, but who is unashamed to talk of it, and in result is tolerant of difference and individuality.

So what role then has the artist, and what role the audience? Does the subject’s collaboration in, and complicity with the artwork, mean she is not being exploited for entertainment value? It could be said Berliner-Mauer is the primary creative force here. She is the creative agent of her own fascinating character, and the scriptwriter of the artwork’s narration. Laumann is the recorder, the connector, the framer, a silent commentator maybe. An exploiter? I’m not so convinced: at least not one of Riita Berlin-Mauer. I can see that he is merely highlighting (as he often does in his work) contemporary culture’s own fascination with the perpetual wunderkammer that the Internet provides – the emailed youtube videos, the strange and amusing websites passed between co-workers and friends, the windows into lives of social Others. What role have we here then, the art audience – the freak-show gawkers?