The Berlin Biennale, BB4, formed a double context for all of us who participated in the curator’s conference, Fast Forward, organised on the occasion. The task was, on the one hand, to form opinions about the art works on display, on the other, it was to ponder on biennales as such–on the strategies of curation adopted here in particular and in the art world in general. For, the strategies adopted by so many world exhibitions and biennials are not uniform; they are guided largely by their locations and the circumstantial reasons arising thereof.
The arsenals of these world exhibitions are heavy and loaded. They exhibit world culture, or European culture, packaged under one roof. So far so good, otherwise the world culture under this or that rubric does encounter several questions. The first in a series of questions that produces doubt is the question of inclusion/exclusion: the strategies for including and/or excluding either this or that culture are presumably based on a biased paradigm. Second, if it has to be a balanced representation of world culture, i.e. in its northern and southern inclusiveness, then the whole project may put the enterprise under critical scrutiny for a spectre from the bygone era: Orientalism.
In other words, the question of similarity and difference that arose over the last few decades revisits and haunts any public exhibition today. It may be by the common token of ‘Race, Class and Gender’; it could simply be via the difference produced under guilt that is, via the post-colonial situation (or, should we not concede a post-apartheid situation too?).
Germany is in no way a part of the first one of these two, so far as its recent history is concerned, and the fact that this recent history does not go beyond Europe as such.
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Anshuman Dasgupta (L) with international curators in Berlin |
Hence, any German exhibition of a global nature revisits its positional dynamics from within European history–the ethno communal aspersions, persecution and then guilt. Thanks to the efforts of the post-war era artists, the post-Joseph Beuys retinue, and the challenges they threw to the world of art, this world over the last few decades is able to articulate itself outside its past fatalism. There is bound to be some residual grimness, though, if one addresses one’s future via its past; if and especially if, that past has charred marks on its body. Of late, since 1989, another dimension, that of a multiethnic society, has been added to the history of this country. Thus, in its current position it is poised to address the splintered Eastern Europe and the western neighbours together with their specific historical dynamics, their joys, woes and worries.
There are bound to be shades of grimness if you touch upon the recent past of most of the eastern neighbours of Germany, and of Germany itself.
The current show, thus, takes off from the residues of this past where any possible future could only be addressed once you engage these residues. And what is more interesting, considering that this exhibition goes way beyond the limit of a nation-state in accommodating issues that are not specific to its history of belonging, is as to how artists take a cue from the suggested starting point for a global show.
Thus, these large-scale global expositions may turn out to be new grounds for playing off subjectivities in and against history.
Of Mice and Men- the BB4 can be seen as a thematic extrapolation on the John Steinbeck novel of the same name whose strains of thought are in turn, a take-off from the Scottish poet Robert Burns’ poem titled To a Mouse.
On the surface, though, the running theme of the show may seem to be literary, upon visiting the site this idea will change. In effect, the exposition seems to have harnessed a materiality and a mediated immanence; an immanence, which may enclose you in its severity, a materiality that seems past-bound and still struggling for a crossover. To me, this is the dynamic of the current biennial.
Steinbeck’s novel does not deal with the past directly, but all the characters there jostle with fragile presents where there is no end in view and blinding short goals. Reason doesn’t guide them anymore and nothing, almost nothing, binds.
The curators of the Berlin Biennial did issue a disclaimer in their notes accompanying the shorter catalogue, cautioning us against identifying the show completely with the substance of the novel, they would rather that the show is seen as parallel to the novel, as a kind of ‘mindscape’.
Going against this suggestion, I thought, dwelling upon the structure of the given thematic for a while might prove useful; so that we are able to chart the points of take-off.
Steinbeck's novel in its unnumbered chapters goes through the lives of people who meet, decide to draw up a future enterprise and end up killing each other.
He describes the predicament of a couple of drifters, George and Lennie, when they plan a future settlement for themselves on a hot summer afternoon, near the city of Soledad. The author takes us via many people whom they meet–minor patrons, people of unsung origin or petty dispositions, their dreams, conversations and actions, all very mundane and facile. The novel comprises of characters who are masters and/or slaves but none seems to be in control of his/her destiny. At the end of the novel, lives and relations end as pettily as they begin: George shoots Lennie down like Carlson, another character in the novel shoots an old dog in the farm, after a premonitory fairytale event on the bank of a river. People around comprehend the event wrongly and then go out for a drink.
The inconsequential alteration of the drifters, or indifference produced by a welter of differences could be taken as the basic cue to the exhibition governed by absurdist principles, where oppositions work on and they don’t resolve in an expected way, where there is not a rosy or gory end in view.
In this mode of thought, the biennial under scrutiny could turn out to be a mere imposition on the makers; this, the curators have struggled to bypass. In a way, as we said earlier, to an external viewer the works and the imagined and/or real makers seem like some creatures of indefinite destiny blown helter-skelter by the wind of history, quite dishevelled, quite comfortable and uncomfortable with what they are and where they are, not as individuals but as bundles, as in a haystack (I take liberty to change the neat, awesome and classy Benjaminian imaginary about the Angel of History). If there is to be a continuum traced externally, by any transcendental critical operation in this show, then that is likely to be: in communion we perish.
We can’t forget when we meet the artists, that they are individuals, at times quite fitting, at another not quite so, into the neat packages of the current order. And this applies equally well to artists of diverse origin who, now being invited to several such world expositions, and being placed within the European art world, find new values from within that circuit and circulation.
The significant point about the BB4 is that it was held along a road, the Augustrasse, and was housed in 14 buildings, including a Jewish girl’s school, a post office, a church, a cemetery and several private apartments.
The Augustrasse named after Prince August of Prussia has a long history. It dates back to 1708 when it was called ‘Poor Sinners’ Alley’. It has a consistent relation with German Jewish history. In 1672 Friedrich Wilhelm ordered the setting up of a cemetery on it. Throughout the period between 17th and 19th century, it underwent several material and demographic changes. After that, and during the 20th century, the pattern of living in this East Berlin quarter changed but not to the effect of lifting the squalor. It has a mixed history of Jewish and Christian people settling down simultaneously during the 19th century. Thus, building by building, one can trace the material, spiritual and dissemination culture of this particular street. The schools, churches and synagogues, post office and stables, retain a part of the very recent past of World War II. From the persecuted history of World War II to the centralised administration of the nationalised property, the Augustrasse underwent renovations and changes. Around the 1980s, many apartments grew empty as a result of the state of disrepair they were in. In 1989, after the collapse of the Berlin wall, there were yet new amorphous groups of squatters and artists who changed the configuration and gave it a new look. New galleries were set up along the Augustrasse. The WBM or the housing authorities of the area took over the administration in 1990s and that is reflected in the cultural establishments that are currently housed in this 920-metre long street.
The curatorial reminder may at this point be useful for us; in their note, the curators don’t forget to tell us that the encounters viewers may have with history’s remnants along this street should not be taken for real, in that these have lived many-layered lives. Augustrasse, thus, turns out to be a palimpsest, going by the favourite Moscovite reference to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita; their question is whether the city of Moscow referred to in this novel is imaginary or real. The answer, for them, is- it is both.
As we said before, the public buildings retain marks of both, World War II and subsequent skirmishes; the Jewish girls’ school was relegated to oblivion before it was chosen as a site and the post office which was partly restored after the war has the un-restored parts showing up in the difference in the pattern of bricklaying, or even in the untreated bullet holes. The Saint Johns Evangelical church or, the synagogue, or, the cemetery had all been bombarded partially during the WWII and partly or wholly restored, thereafter. Hence, contemporary works cited there could not be bereft of the contexts of the site. They would produce meanings from their placements which would be time bound or, even arbitrary. I, as a viewer, was especially taken aback at the prospect of the possible change of meanings that opened up on such revisits in a new and unpredictable historical site. This, to me is the most significant question that this biennial may have raised – the indeterminacy of the signified.
The Jewish school could be reached by walking along the Ballhaus (i.e. the dance hall), by encountering the numerous graffiti studded walls, posters advertising forthcoming films, theatres, or exhibitions or, even protests and spoofs of the biennial. The door, without the roundel advertising the current biennial, would not be recognisable, except for when the well-built guards blocked your paths at the gate, at rush hour. Thus from an innocuous walk, your arrival at a well protected but carefully crafted informal space is bound to produce a difference. I would not for a moment suggest that it was alienating. For, to my mind, the current curators took good care not to subject their viewers to the alienation of the white cube. So the building retained its reasonable past-ness, with works either accentuating or, even bypassing the possible impositions from the context.
The exhibits got maximum exposure in places where they were visible together; the Jewish school housed 37 works, the KW compared closely with 23 exhibits, the post office stables housed about four and the rest were in the private apartments, apart from some which were in either the church or the graveyard, or, in a novel attempt, for the first time, housed in the very well known Gagosian gallery, along Augustrasse.
The Jewish Girls’ School
The basement of the Jewish school has a few remnants from the past of this East Berlin quarter–there were portraits of Brecht on the corridor wall, paintings along the stair entrance propounding Proletcult. The room next to the entrance showed Victor Alimpiev’s video from a longer version of the film strip that he had handpicked from the archive. It suggested the holocaust clouds halfway inter-cut, paced up and juxtaposed with a girls’ school scene where everyone finger-tapped and gestured in unison.
Along the corridor grew plants in two rooms- filled almost up to the windows with soil- with the profile visible through the transparent surface block. The soil is supply from the prison compost.
The third room contained a video projection depicting a horse at night and the housings across the street by altering focal length. This video effectively produced a certain sensation of time. As the horse stood still, occasionally tapping its hooves onto the ground, the camera slowly changed focus away from the foreground, to the back. The spots of light got in the centre, and were then blurred with the spectre of the horse. Then the camera focused forth and the action resumed only to be looped back again.
As we went up the stairs, there were works with marked spatial overtures but mostly with the signature of time, a cue and a teaser the curators carefully hid (if we want to assign a determining task to the curators which they, avowedly, are eager to relegate to the unforeseen viewership).
There were the likes of Thomas Bayrle, who had superimposed images of the Autobahn upon surfaces of textile and enclosed these in a head, in a digitally animated archive. His subjective engagement as an evolved sixties’ rebel is that of a viewer now; to check out as to how much you can take in from the outside world. The statements, from personal conversations, very organically revealed how deeper engagements with the experiential, or lived spaces come to interact with the surfaces of the virtual, that is the available format for today.
The works of Marcel Van Eeden were similarly of a double register– of the fictive and a possible reality of the fictive. He invents a character, places him in various imaginary circumstances, as in documentation of a mock heroic life. He uses the academic skill of drawing for a seriality that closely compares with a detailed story-board of a full length feature film. His entire enterprise here- called Encyclopedia of My Death- was filled with an existential wry humour. The narrative was positioned two years before his birth (i.e., 1965). It was, in this new cycle of drawings, devoted to the life of an imagined character, K.M. Wiegand. The narrative was stalled or, punctuated by close ups of documents–letters, notices, tabloid, broadsheet, reflections–that may or may not relate to the main line of the narrative flow. His choice of this medium is, according to him, guided by the uncertainty of his own artistic career. In a personal conversation he revealed: ‘I can be homeless tomorrow, then what you need to continue doing your art is just a pencil and a few pieces of paper. I want to keep myself prepared for that’.
There were other significant works throughout the journey. Michael Borreman’s combine with a video, called Weigh;he framed a video titled ‘Weight’ in a picture frame as though it were also a painting. In it, a girl dressed in a mid-thirties dress turned on a rotating platform only to make us realise that she didn’t have feet, her fingers and eyes gave the only indication of her being alive;beneath their nostalgic and placid world lay another world that was sinister.
Bruce Conner, a veteran in video art was represented by a video titled ‘Crossroads’, made in 1976. This featured the post-war atomic test at Bikini Atoll. He took us through archival footages strung and then looped together, 27 times from various angles and at varied pace.
There were video works by Tacita Dean and Felix Gmelin, expressing different concerns. Felix Gmelin’s 2005 video called ‘Sound and Vision’ featured a classroom sex-education session with visually impaired children videographed in 1970. The children press on the organs of a healthy couple in apparently quite an unfeeling manner, being guided by an elderly tutor, before we, to our surprise realise their state of blindness.
These simple and innocuous looking works contrasted with rather grim and layered contradictoriness, together in this building.
Pravdoliub Ivanov hung flags sullied by mud from the former Bulgaria, in effect referring to the changes and witness factor that the history of that region has brought to bear on the people.
Tadeusz Cantor, similarly used puppets as a sign of powerlessness, as a sign of the long lost childhood of current students, in an installation titled ‘The Boy in the Bench’, from 1983.
Matthew Monahan explored the uncanny aspect of the figurative in his multi-layered combined installation titled ‘Twilight of the Idiots’ 1994/2005. Monahan’s psychographs explore the fragments of the psyche that appear before us in the form that he gives them, ‘as you go up close’, he states.
KW Institute
At the KW Institute, the official organisers of the Berlin Biennale, the event looked pretty up close. It had Anthony Burdin, who explored spontaneity and grace; Mircea Cantor, who in his videos deployed visual feints to refer to a wider landscape of exploits; a wolf and a deer dwell in the same gallery space, leaving you puzzled over the outcome, which never happens.
There were Benjamin Cottam with his miniaturised subjects, Oliver Croy and Oliver Elser who had made architectural projections into the future, tied to these lay Roberto Coughi’s project of masquerading as his father–he called this series ‘pictures for evaporation’.
Attempts to defy the laws of nature could be seen in the works of Gino di Dominicis. He played with phrases like of god and of mine. Loud male laughter resounded from under each entrance to the now-closed studios along the KW entryway.
There were works by Clara Linden, from Stockholm, who performed her theatrics in trains and in public before the stony gaze of people. Jan Mancuska from Prague explored the parameters of language and space in his conceptual installation called ‘the space beyond the wall’, he attempted to demonstrate that time and memory are manoeuvrable and non-linear. The personal story becomes universal parable of human perception.
Jerry Mccorckle and Otto Muhl showed the aspects of the most mundane as well as the most intimate and intimidating scenes of the labour of giving birth and of a untamed libido, which, referring back to Muhl’s age (b. 1925) could as well be read as a symptom of aging.
Here, there were superheroes from the bygone eras: Bruce Newman in his latest project called ‘Of Rats and Bats’, from 1988, worked out an image of a maze through which a rat ran to an indefinite destiny, juxtaposed with an angry man’s image in action- beating a duffel bag with a baseball bat. The ambiguity produced was at the point of reaction from the audience who are left equally perplexed as to whether they would share the predicament of the rat or not!
Private Apartments
Among the private apartments, the strategic location of No.17 seemed most intriguing–for, this had been used as a transit point for deporting Jewish people to Auschwitz, during the Nazi regime. After that, since 1949 it had been the Soviet Union’s local office. Then it was used for Jewish grievance settlement. Later this building turned into a rental quarter which is what it is it still.
Norbert Schwontkowski lives in one of its flats when he is in Berlin. He is a painter, largely living and working in Bremen, who invented a mixed media- using enamel with oil on canvases, to get surreal and arguably romantic and mysterious overtones. As a result of this, the hugely patinated surfaces of his works and the resulting imageries of rustic life refer to a past-ness.
The front house- 23, Augustrasse has had a similar, albeit less sinister history of exchanges, between its previous and the current owner. It changed hands from a locksmith to a butcher and is currently occupied by a journalist. It housed a doctored series of photo albums by Aneta Grzeszykowska, one of which became the emblem of the BB4. It also housed the site-specific works (furniture, in this case) by Damian Ortega, where objects defy their usual functions.
In 24, Augustrasse, Tino Sehgal, of Indian parentage, used the mirrored ballroom next to the Ballhaus Mitte for his demonstrative conceptual/ performative work called Kiss. Tino in his previous works had been fairly subversive and had questioned the status of objects of art, their institutional position and exchanges, hence this piece, also seemed to have potential for such crossover.
Church, Synagogue, Cemetery, Stables and Containers
Crossing the street made us encounter three or four different states of reality–in the church, the synagogue, the stables, the classy Gagosian gallery and the wayside containers along the same grand Augustrasse–within which some more works were placed.
Eric von Lieshout chose to house his video in a container, born out of his impulsive and artistic bicycle trip across Germany in 2004. He kept a diary, sent postcards as record of his journey to the curators and did the video on display. The said video recorded the fundamental questions of life, death and love that he asked people he encountered in the course of his journey; the answers he gleaned are not so reassuring, though.
The cemetery, which also has a chequered social history as the rest of the places chosen, was once part of a church, which then evolved to be a cemetery; during the dismal years of World War II, it was a mass grave; and turned into a park. The photographic and allegorical work of Tobius Buche, an artist from Berlin, perturbed and teased the viewers indefinitely to turn back on themselves, as a middle ground between the self and time: the photographic moment.
Berlinde’s work referred to materiality and its spiritual opposite- transcendence, while Susan Philpz from Glasgow and Berlin worked out a sound installation. The main theme of these works was transposition- the shift of context for the sound.
The Gagosian
Finally the Gagosian, which seemed to, by every pragmatic counting with respect to the show’s spread, tell a different contextual story- that of a white cube; yet, in an interesting departure, the curators had chosen this as one of the sites for the biennale. In keeping with the spirit of this young people’s city, this unusual gallery supports projects, even outside the possible commercial ventures that galleries generally affiliate themselves to and had promised to put up a new show every month. In a move against the grimness of the Berlin Biennial, they had organised a show on Happiness earlier and this time housed these two artists–Dorothy Inaone and the well-known Ulf Aminde. Aminde’s work at the biennale was an ongoing musical project called ‘life is not a listeners’ request program’. He filmed street musicians from varied backgrounds, playing notes allocated to them by the artist. What they made out of it was up to them. He then re-fictionalised them through editing.
We thus traverse this terrain of containers and cubes only to realise as to how they potentially could burst forth into the living world, into the world of flippancy, flux and uncertainty of lived times and spaces, where engagement could even mean a temporal backward looking gesture.
“Wee, sleeket, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,...
... But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain
For promis'd joy.
Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But, och! I backward cast my e'e
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear! “
Robert Burns: To a Mouse
Berlin/Shantiniketan
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