Claire Fontaine
Liam Gillick
Art Berlin Contemporary was so much fun! The organizers had obviously thought hard about what could make the large-scale commercial art event less tedious. For instance: rides. On Thursday evening, John Bock's room-on-an-axel was rotating like a hamster wheel, stopping periodically for visitors to get inside and be tumbled around. People were lining up! The packed vernissage felt less like the by-invitation-only event that it was billed as, than a "high school reunion", in the words of one artist. But, she said, she meant it in a good way. The event marked the beginning of Berlin's gallery season; it rallied Berlin's local art crowd and an international one besides (so maybe it was more like a back-to-school-dance). In between the people some very big, and more than a few very strong artworks were holding their own. The effect was sort of like Art Basel's Unlimited - without the tiresome art fair attached. Additional improvements: there were four bars, a kids area, very attractive t-shirts, and a performance by Peaches.
Abc, which ran from September 4th to the 7th, was a venture initiated by a group of seven Berlin galleries that founded the city's annual gallery weekend some five years ago. Gallery Weekend has become an institution - it aims to attract collectors to Berlin and charges galleries fees to participate, though the organizers point out that its format distinguishes it from a "fair". The same semantic argument has been made and rejected with regard to Art Berlin Contemporary, which some see as a functional challenge to next month's Berlin Art Forum.
Whatever else it is, abc, like Gallery Weekend, is an experiment, and the strategy is as follows: invite 44 Berlin galleries to contribute single works by one to three artists each, to be gently massaged into a harmonic whole by curator Ariane Beyn. Beyn's statement revealed that what had been billed as the abc's "theme" - "sculpture, installation and the projected image" -- was really more of a formal constraint, inspired by the fact that the former post-depot where the event took place, has few usable walls. As one might imagine, the de facto theme was anarchy - but Beyn's massaging skillful and rational. One gallerist characterized the method as John-Cage-esque. "It's not an art fair, it's a badly-curated exhibition," commented another, less amiably.
Maybe scattered crankiness among participating gallerists is forgiveable. Whether or not the event was a fair, each had paid 4000 euro to take part in it, and still had the responsibility of organizing an exhibition at his or her respective gallery, to open in concert the following night. Perhaps owing to the large size of many of the works, rumor was that not a single work in the exhibition sold on the first day, (it is unconfirmed by the organizers, and sales apparently picked up as the weekend went on). Meanwhile abc has received mixed reactions in the notoriously colicky German press, whose list of criticisms of the event included that it was "too commercial."
Carsten Holler
Yet none of this seems to have dampened enthusiasm among visitors: by almost any standard attendance over the weekend was superb - especially for an event in its first year. (The opening alone attracted 3000 guests, all presumably desirable ones.) From the beginning, organizers had been emphasizing the sociability angle - in July dealer Martin Klosterfelde as a spokesperson for abc explained to the daily Tagezeitung "we want to offer an alternative, where artists, gallerists and the public come together". In that the experiement succeeded grandly. Most interestingly, disenchantment among gallerists seems to have been the exception to the rule. "For those who were expecting a sell out, it was certainly difficult," noted Esther Schipper, "but I did this with long term expectations." (Schipper showed Carsten Holler, Gabriel Kuri's Thank You Clouds, and new text based work by Liam Gillick, inspired by the artist's own lectures at the United Nations Plaza here in Berlin last year.) The feeling was widely shared: Buchmann gallery cheerfully reported that they hadn't necessarily expected to sell the single work that they were displaying - a dining room-sized fluorescent pavilion by David Buren -- but that showing the piece had been well worth it for the interest it had generated, particularly among institutional curators and collectors.
Exhibition view
Evidently Berlin's galleries are less preoccupied with the moment's financial uncertainty than their New York and London counterparts. Berlin may be somewhat isolated from the Anglo credit crunch; meanwhile in comparison to those financial centers, the city's "scene" has flourished via a somewhat different route. Berlin's anemic economy and cheap rents have drawn artists, galleries have largely followed and the city has attracted international collectors only gradually. In any event, commentary among participating gallerists remained pretty doggedly high-minded. Giti Nourbakhach, another of the seven initiators, noted that "for a time at the end of the 1990s there was such intense competition among Berlin galleries." To her the abc experiment represented "progress": it was exciting that the city's galleries were finally collaborating actively, supporting one another, etcetera.
But Medhi Chouakri, who showed Sylvie Fleury's sound-based installation Walking on Carl Andre, may have come closer to the point when he noted that the unconventional event was successful in "highlighting the energy in Berlin." The rhetoric of cooperation among Berlin galleries likely has everything to do with what is seen locally as the city's world-historical ascendance as the cultural, if not the financial, capital of contemporary art. Buchmann's representative expressed the conviction that abc's format was avant garde, and that it was indicative of "where things were going" in art fairs - though he declined to say why. "I don't know if this is glamorous, but I know it's ambitious," concluded Nourbakhsch. Only at that point did I note the propaganda-value of Paris-based collective's neon sign, which had been installed in overlooking the Postbahnhof's courtyard where we sat. It reads: CAPITALISM KILLS LOVE (price inquiries to Galerie Neu).
Aleana Egan
In the short run, there was one group that seems to have decisively benefited at abc. It was the explicit aim of the organizers to showcase younger artists, and it was well-served. Dualisms II and Dualisms III, a two-sided video projection by incorrigibly American artist Stephen G. Rhodes (b. 1979) attracted excited interest among critics and children alike. (The humor in Rhodes' works be enjoyed on any number of levels - English-speakers will appreciate that in both form and content the twinned pieces are focused on duels.) Theodora Djoradjze's subtle carpet assemblages got a little bit lost between a pier-sized Carl Andre (titled Throne) and an equally monumental cylindrical tent made of shirts by the Brazilian artist Marepe (courtesy of Max Hetzler). But like Aleana Egan's Marshalling Them, which was tucked in the corner, it held its own. Egan's piece was clearly among those created specifically for the space - a graceful jacob's ladder of elongated hexagons, hung coolly over one of the trusses of the Postbahnhof's ceiling. Like the piece the artist showed earlier this year at the Neue Nationalegalerie, Marshalling Them nearly disappears from certain vantages - only on closer inspection does it reveal its odd but winning combination of formal power and scrupulous craftedness. Both Egan and Djoradjze were among the young locally-based artists whose work was included in most recent Berlin biennial. Their inclusion in abc served to create continuity with the events that drew crowds of visitors to Berlin a few months ago, to bolster the city's claim to contemporary relevance -- and to gesture, naturally, toward its future.
Alix Rule
Alix Rule writes on art and politics. She has worked for In These Times and Dissent magazine, and her writing has appeared in a variety of other publications. Alix grew up in New York and studied at the University of Chicago at then at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating she worked briefly as an organizer of low-wage workers in London, UK. Alix is interested in interior and outer space, organizing communities, "social entrepreneurship" and above all, clothing. She has recently moved to Berlin. You can contact her at alix.rule@gmail.com.
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