Splinter of Distrust
Who knew that Barbara Becker was a midget?
A very cute one, mind you. But short, yes, incredibly so, and she was wearing high-heels! But gosh, she was a beam of light in a gallery full of mushrooms. More popular than Scarlett O'Hara. (That's not a series of bad metaphors. It's the truth.)
We were celebrating in grand fashion the second opening of Sylvie Fleury's "Hypnotic Poison." The first opening the night prior was a rather staid affair involving a bunch of people standing around in a dark room. The drinks ran out early, and hey, "Who refused to turn on the lights? The artist?" I asked the gallerist. "Yes, the artist," said the gallerist. Then I asked the artist (as any good fact-checker should), and the artist said, "I don't know who's in charge of the lighting... they're like their own artwork, not mine." She was pointing out the lighting fitting to the architecture, a sixties DDR revamp of a neoclassicist pavilion originally built by the man who made Unter den Linden famous, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. We decided to explore the garden, a walk in the park in the dark, so to speak, and when we returned, someone had dared to turn on the lights. But the party was over.
Sylvie Fleury's mushrooms
The lights that wouldn't come on at the Schinkel Pavilion
The next night, we returned to the scene of the non-party to p.a.r.t.y., Van Halen-style. "Hypnotic Poison" party no 2 promised to be a raver with mushrooms, champagne, and a D.J. on the agenda. My friend Stefan Heidenreich and I began scoping out the crowd, looking for models and not-models, famous ex-girlfriends and yacht owners. What we found were not models, but the hot model chic-look-a-like-assistants from Contemporary Fine Arts who are on the verge of moving into swanky new museal accommodations (catty-corner from the Pergamon) that David Chipperfield built. I don't remember anything they said, as shortly after bumping into them, I bumped into the man handing out the hypnotics. All along, I kept seeing Miss Popularity wearing a coat of green. Everyone who walked into the room, paid homage to the Lady-in-Green (who, in turn, knew the Barbara-Becker look-alike, who was at this point still too short to be the Barbara Becker).
CFA's new gallery by David Chipperfield
Ms Fleury introduced me to the Lady-in-Green, but before she could say the name, I interrupted--the hypnotics were beginning to have a strong effect--"Wait, don't tell me! My husband and I were debating whether or not we could guess who you might be and we thought very possibly an editor, yes, with such a handbag, an editor from British Vogue, possibly...? So first you must tell us what you do and not who you are." She replied, "I'm a hausfrau." "Then you must have a very famous husband." "I do! And you know who? Mr Sam Keller," she teemed with pride. Indeed. Leider, my "husband" - who was not my husband but rather my friend who is writing a philosophical treatise on money for Merve Verlag - was hard of hearing and failed to note the Queen VIP of VIPs in our presence. She then turned the game back onto us and demanded that she have the right to guess what it is that we do. Her guess: "Collectors!" Cheshire grins on our faces, we didn't answer and she seemed pleased. (It was too fun pretending to be filthy rich, and not just high on hypnotics.)
Art or Not Art
So I was having dinner with RothStauffenberg, Sophie of Austria (an artist working behind the desk of Luhring Augustine), and her friend Alexander, an artist from Hamburg (I didn't catch his last name). Alexander got all huffy when I mentioned the project Wolf Guenther Thiel had described to me briefly on the phone, something about how the Danish provocateur Christian Hornsleth had bought out the rights to the names of some African villages and then issued new passports to the villagers.... What? How's that work? ...
Alexander (shouting): That's Not Art! That's politics, politically incorrect ones at that!
Christopher Roth: Politics? How can you call it "Not Art"? Anything an artist points to as art is art.
AEL: Not true. You need a consensus, a constituency of followers.
Christopher Roth: Or maybe you're talking not about Art or Not Art but about good art and bad art?
Alexander and Christopher continued to bark at each other and the argument was going no where fast, so I interrupted as the referee and said, "Can we talk about Plato (the shadow of the thing vs the thing) vs Schopenhauer (the world of art is my idea of the world of art) vs Hegel (art and other-than-art)?"
"Or Adorno," Wolf-Guenther Thiel would have said. In order for good art to be good art, one needed a "splinter of distrust." Or at least that's how I interpreted my afternoon of tea and philosophy with Thiel. "Art is a blurry idea. It's not just an idea but a simulacrum. Wir haben die Kunstbegriff so verschliffen, das die unscharf ist." ("We've sanded down the concept of art so much so that it's become all fuzzy.")
More on my mind was the eternal question of Party or Not-to-Party at the munzclub? The re-opening of the munzclub saison was, in short, strange, not knowing more than a handful of guests. No matter. Munzclub parties would not be lacking, and I may not have "ear cancer" yet, but I have a definite deficit of memory (the human kind, not the chips), and I cannot for the life of me remember how many years we have been p.a.r.t.y-ing at the munzclub. We took up the opportunity, killing 2 birds with 1 stone, for a sub-meeting of the Verein der Freunde von Katze und Hunde: Thomas Demand was there, so was Wolfgang Staehle (long proclaimed to be a fortune teller with his webcam on the Twin Towers), and the fortune teller who once told me that I had no clue how to handle money (duh). She entertained us all ... for free. Who needs hoards of friends at a party when a fortune teller is at hand? On my hangover walk the next morning, the writing on the walls writ large read, "This city is sold out"; an omen, perhaps, but more likely, just an aching head reading too much into the signs and portents of graffiti.
'This city is sold out'
Bruce LaBruce and David Woodard
I spent a great day looking at the colors of my own mind with the Dreammachine and its maker, David Woodard, who introduced the Dreammachine magic to the pornographer Bruce LaBruce... but I'll just have to think about that tomorrow. David's büro is at the crossroads between "Celebrity Center Berlin" and "Celebrate Life"--his new plan to takeover the Empire of Pre-Death.
Kris Martin
Kris Martin
And now for my Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers fortune-teller tip of the week: Sofia Hulten. At the moment, Kris Martin is on the lips of many. His famous work involving the breaking and repairing of an antique Chinese vase from 2005 is very similar to a work Hulten (niece of Pontus) did in 2001, only she did it with hard-rocker flair. She's working on a new work provisionally called P-A-R-T-Y. Meanwhile, 'Fuck It Up and Start Again' editions from 2001 are nearly sold out. Now that's one hot kartoffel.
April Elizabeth Lamm
April Elizabeth Lamm is a writer based in Berlin since 1998. Her reviews and articles have been widely published in many newspapers and magazines, but what she enjoys most is contributing fiction to artist catalogs (and curating fictional exhibitions). She has also edited several books including '...dontstopdontstopdontstopdontstop', the selected writings of Hans Ulrich Obrist (2006). Currently, she is working on a collection of short stories called 'The Ministry of Leisure'.
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