Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers

on Annika Eriksson's Shop Front Coherence

2011-11-25T12:28:00.000-08:00

When Berlin Becomes Too Canny

For the moment, Potsdamerstrasse still has a curious charm, the charm of the Berliner Bratwunder (Fried Wonder), the Ave Maria religious knickknack shop, the Surprise Club and Disco, the Pushel Pub. Tatau Obscur neighbors Harb Import-Export and the Turkish outdoor supermarket with its oversized cabbage heads across the street from LSD (Love, Sex, Dreams). It’s the kind of charm that sucked us all into the vortex of Berlin-Mitte many years ago (minus the cabbage heads), the very same vortex that now incomprehensibly sucks flocks of Italians and wheelchair tourists through the bottleneck of the Hackescher Markt, so full of passersby one cannot pass by. Next thing you know they’ll be holding audio guides to their ear with images of the area displayed on their smart phones. But why is that area so beloved by strangers to Berlin? Because it offers them the familiar: the skinny peppermint mocca. Potsdamerstrasse, on the other hand, is the garden-variety of delight. Potsdamerstrasse is uncanny.

I would argue that it is the uncanny that yoked us into this city in the first place, Freud’s uncanny, familiar things made strange, Berlin’s uncanny horizons for the most part, things seen from the level of the street.

To explain: Berlin is a horizontal city. Rather than piling high changes—i.e., the verticality of New York City, Sao Paolo, Hong Kong—changes in Berlin take place along the horizon. Changes are not stacked (1, 2, 3) but rather lined up in a row (A, B, C), without the row being a row. This is what makes these changes so noticeable, no arching of the neck required, nor elevators to scratch the sky.

Recently, I stood in front one of Berlin’s new horizons, Annika Eriksson’s Shop Front Coherence (2011) in the window of the newly relocated Krome Gallery on Potsdamerstrasse. It’s a shopfront window that looks like an objet trouvé, perhaps a window Eriksson found somewhere down the street and transplanted to the gallery. It certainly looks “coherent” with the neighborhood, it jibes with it. But it’s neither an objet trouvé, nor a re-make (appropriation), nor a transplant (readymade). It’s the doubling of the “idea” of an art gallery storefront, and, in specific, the “idea” of a storefront on Potsdamerstrasse. It’s so uncanny, it begs the question: for whom is this window uncanny? You see, Eriksson hired decorators, a window-display firm, to do all the work, and curator Katharina Krawczyk had a heavy hand in helping out. The result is the brilliant conception of what the storefront of an art gallery should look like, created by people in the business of window displays. It is the manufactured simulacra of a nonexistent original. It is coherent yet incomprehensible as its function is reduced to a mere signifier of the thing-in-itself. (The exhibition behind the storefront has nothing to do with Annika Eriksson’s allotted project space).

So what does this “idea” of an art gallery storefront look like? Eye candy. Popping colors. Bright lights. But then one has to consider more closely: the objects on view indicate a workshop, not the finished product. Here is where art is being made, quite literally, with bottles of paints and brushes and easels, to be sure. And a canvas, oddly quaint, with paint brushes nailed to the edges created a variety-show effect, akin to putting light bulbs around a marquee. Scattered playfully across colorful tables stacked on top of one another were the letters spelling out K-U-N-S-T and A-R-T, animated as if dancing across the screen of “Sesame Street.” Naked light bulbs dangling from red cords added the finishing touch; the kind of lighting that screams “This is so Contemporary.” Nothing seemed out of place: and that is what is so uncanny about it. But looking back on it, one has to ask what the red-polka-dotted valise (the perfect case for Crayolas to-go), oversized clothes pins, a small filing cabinet, and a rabbit figurine under a glass cake dish had to do with indicating an art gallery. I absolutely refuse to believe that the valise hints at Duchamp or the rabbit to Dürer or Beuys, no. No excessive associative activity is allowed here. These objects indicated a “coherence” with the neighborhood, the kind of things you’d expect to find in a display window on Potsdamerstrasse. And that has nothing to do with nostalgia for a Potsdamerstrasse soon-to-disappear behind gallery fronts, or for that matter, the disappearance of sex shops, casinos, and the coming of Tofu Bonanza. Rather, in their own odd Potsdamerstrasse logic, they offered up a subtle moment of a coherence with the uncanny, Freud’s uncanny, the diminishing foggy logic which makes Berlin Berlin.

The Collector: Parts VI-VII

2011-10-27T12:15:00.000-07:00

Part VI: Hurt people hurt people.

The last chapter ended with an urgent message, something Louise wants to tell Max. About Nico, he presumes. But why did she snatch Ruth’s cell phone out of her hand? What could possibly be so urgent? Has Louise told Ruth something about Nico? Or about the mysterious girl he woke up next to this morning? It’s making Max nervous. We’re still in the midst of the opening of the art fair and he has yet to see the artwork. His artwork. The green one, he presumes, that everyone keeps referring to for its red. The artwork that the right people are all abuzz about for all the wrong reasons. There’s been a lot of sleeping around, regardless, thank god. It’s time for a sex chapter.

- Hurt people hurt people.

It was one of Ruth’s maxims and the reason why Max and Ruth had decided nearly a year ago to this date that they would keep distance from Louise. Emotional distance. She had a splinter lodged deep and it remained unnamable. “I swear to you. She’s got two life lines. I’ve seen them!” Max poo-poo’d the idea of palm reading, but he believed her, in some way, nonetheless. What Max and Ruth shared was their belief in not making her into an enemy, no matter how vicious or depraved her crimes. She was smart, charming, but more importantly, slippery. She had a nose for who to know, what to know, and how to know it. It was with the danger of Being Louise in mind that Max cut her short on the phone, telling her to wait, he’d be there in two minutes. He was near enough to see who was in the booth. Whatever message she had for him, he’d rather hear in person, and definitely not in front of his gallerist and that Chinese collector.

Ruth grabbed her cell phone back from Louise’s grip, laughing nervously.
-You remember the game we used to play? Remember the evening at the Paris Bar when you picked up Klosterfelde’s phone while he was talking to someone sitting to his right, who was it? I don’t remember. Anyway, you typed in quickly an SMS saying, “I don’t like you,” and then sent it to the first name in his address book. Who did you send it to?

-Agatha.

Agatha was worth a chapter of her own and perhaps she will get one. She was a special breed to the art world, shiny and new, she would have made the perfect dentist’s wife and somehow, now, in 2007, with her good looks and, it must be said, charisma she was able to hobnob with the best of them. Speaking of a famous husband and wife artist pair from Russia, she referred to them as “The Brothers Kabakov” and when she mentioned the well-known institution Kunstwerke, she called it Kunstburger without the slightest hint of irony.

-Is she still with whats-his-name?

-Do you really think that she was ever really “with” him?

-You know what I mean. She was at least always “with him” in the same room, and they always arrived and left around about the same time...

-Right, but never really talking to him. No.
Louise yawned.

-He went back to his wife.

Ruth was glad to hear of it, but she knew that it was better not to comment on it. To Louise. Whatever she said would be conveyed directly back to Agatha. It had taken Ruth a long time to learn just how much to parcel out to Louise to keep the conversation going without providing ammunition for future wars. Even a fish wouldn't get caught if he kept his mouth shut.

-Is she still in Berlin?

-No. She finally got a job, if you could call it that. Director of a Kunstverein in Nicaragua…

-Hard to believe she’d settle for that, or for that matter, that anyone would hire her with her reputation. She knows nothing about art.

-Oh, she doesn’t. But don’t forget, she’s got great hair. I think it gets her places.

Louise thumbed her phone, but carried on:
-And she wouldn’t have taken the position if it weren’t for that panama hat-wearing gaucho that came with the package. She’s usually on the road anyway and the Kunstverein foots the bill. She needed that. What’s taking Max so long?

The art world was small. Same people, different setting. Basel, London, Paris, you’d always end up in the same crowd of actors with the same props in different shapes – and in a different director’s film. Here she was in Basel chatting with Louise about a girl they knew mainly from art openings in Berlin, but even more so through art fair events, not so much Everywhere as Anywhere. Though truly relishing the gossip, Ruth was suddenly struck with the fear of seeing Max in front of the artwork he called his own – which he had yet to lay eyes on. She could see him weaving his way towards them. How would she slip away? “I’ve got to pee.” A closed mouth, as she always said, catches no flies.

With so much attention being showered upon him so early in the day, and with everyone making mention of some mysterious newspaper clipping tacked to the walls, en route to Galerie NN’s booth, Max fantasized the headlines:

Max Decker Makes His Come Back to NYC as Host of Saturday Night Live

Max Decker to Guest Star in Tatort

Max Decker Tours North Korea

When he finally arrived at the booth, he felt he’d been made to be the fool. One look at this pile of destruction and he understood at last what the critic had meant by “investigating the possibilities of the ‘Broken Readymade.’” He walked over to the Italian newspaper clipping, kicking a few of the cigarette butts to the side. He looked at the text spray-painted red on the walls and shook his head. Only one question penetrated the moment, but he couldn't bring it to his lips: Where's Ruth?

Louise pulled Max aside and into the aisle, dragging him to meet an artist who was a "dear friend." She said she had come to know him better when “visiting Tiji,” who had bought a large piece of land in Thailand. The artist had turned this land into a quasi-farm/residency for him and his friends and then called it The Land. She said the word “land” really loud and emphatically, but you could see that she was not saying it to impress Max, but a passerby who was even more important in the New World of titles and price tags. Out of her mouth flowed only first names, or worse, her own nicknames for them – with the assumption, of course, that Max could fill in the blanks. She knew that Max didn't know them, knew that her knowing them would put her in a shining light. What she falsely assumed was that Max would know of them. Gavin, Larry, J.C., they were all anonymous personages who took on weight only because of the drama Louise created by the nature of her telling.

Blathering on about people he neither cared about nor particularly wanted to care about just now, Louise filled the air with her rapid chatter:
-He was supposedly approached by Larry last year in Miami, but J.C. told me that he was sure that his artist wouldn't leave him for a skunk like Larry, so I said, Larry is no skunk, he just makes artists rich, so what's wrong with that, and J.C. told me, Nothing, it's just that he poaches off all of the work that we've done together over the past 10 years.... Anyway, I didn't want to push the issue any further and Larry’s very close to Dascha, you know, so I thought I'd better not say anything more until Gavin arrived. Point blank, I asked him if he was upset about losing Alfred to Larry and he said, Not all of my artists leave me. Those who decide to go are free to go.

Gavin had a knack for making every situation look like he had kept to the high ground. Not unlike Louise, in that matter, at all.

Max looked back to the booth, thinking he'd seen the apparition of Ruth disappearing with the gallerist behind a door, a tiny box of a room for private showings. It was the way the gallerist had taken her elbow that made him feel the pang. He turned back to Louise who was still skating over superficial details, her red lips spitting out 360 details:

-That beard looks so good on Gavin you know, like a sign of intelligence. He's the only one I know who can carry a beard like that and not look like a cop from a bad TV show.

-Louise, said Max, already on the impatient side, what was it that you so desperately wanted to tell me?

A few years ago, she would have held him captive with her know-how. But now that Max was going around with Nico, she’d fallen a notch or two. If she was a Porsche before, she was a Ford Fiesta now, and the only thing she had on him was hesitation, delay, mystery. She began to rustle through her bag, then told him that she had to make just one quick call, would he mind waiting?

As he turned his back on her, he could hear her ask “Oh and what dinner will you be at tonight?” but pretended he didn’t hear her and kept walking. Didn’t it occur to Louise that he might be attending his own dinner just this once? He waded his way through the masses of glittering people in the aisles back to the booth. Increasingly, his disappointment became more pointed. Snippets of conversations picked up along the way didn’t help assuage this sudden feeling of estrangement from the uneasy glitz sans sequins: “… the Steinbach, no, a frightfully difficult decision. In the end, we just didn’t like the Geraniums.”

He saw a handshake and a pat on the back.

The gallerist’s eyebrows arched optimistically…
-Max, let me introduce you!

Horror of all horrors, please no, said his expression, which he tried in vain to suppress.

Had the gallerist sold his work without having an inkling about what it might mean? Where was Ruth? She had some explaining to do. It was not that he didn’t like the damage she had done, but rather that he was irritated at the insouciant air of its being a commodity. The press text hadn’t changed, but it was vague enough to be read in a vacuum, he supposed. It was as if her changes represented a subliminal text between film frames. If there were 24 frames per minute, Ruth found a way of creating a 25th without making it into a video. She’d done something new and instead of being happy about it, Max felt interchangeable, infinitely ersatzable. At this moment, he felt like a glorified interior decorator, a mere foot soldier in the service of wealthy excess. He fantasized that “his” artwork would now end up decorating the foyer of some large glass and steel highrise in Shanghai. The definition of being an artist waffled in his mind. The next step, Max thought, was being commissioned to do the floors, the children’s room, the only empty wall in the hall.

As always, when Max felt stilted, he took to the streets. Walking made it easier. En plein air, he could ponder the duplicity of art and its uneasy slip into decoration. He made a dash for the door. Past the mechanical bull underneath a chandelier, past the oversized sunglass stand, past the robot vacuum cleaners sucking up glitter littering the floor. How had he completely missed Gallery Box’s most recent “Stressed Situationist” when he made his way down the aisle before? Basel was like that. You’d think you’d have your exit strategy all laid out and then boom, some booth you hadn’t seen before would throw you off the mental track. He had to get out of the fair and fast.

The sun was pounding down, high noon. He looked to the pavement and saw a laminated piece of paper stuck to the ground announcing the title to the piece accosting him, “Insulting the Audience.” A performance artist standing on a makeshift soapbox was shouting out questions to the meager crowd of three in front of him – “What does art mean to you? Why are you here?” …

Beyond that was a sculpture emitting a blaring horn in fifteen-minute intervals, meant to “comment” on the noise of urban life that ended up simply adding to it. Max chanced upon it at exactly the wrong moment (or right moment, if one believed in the artwork’s intention). He could see Nico and another woman getting out of a car, or rather what resembled a car in function but looked more like an armored tank in form. They were clutching their ears and making terrible faces. The one with the Standard poodle perm must be Nico’s mother.

What would he say to Nico? He had already said so much about the artwork that was plainly not there. And her mother, Frau Mutter Bibi von Stroheim? He had yet to meet her and this was bad timing. Something Nico had said to him in Venice while standing in front of the Hungarian Pavilion was still bothering him. They had just seen a video (labor practices in the third world) which they both liked. At the same time, Max had just received a call from Pepe in Basel who was being paid 25 bucks an hour for sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for a crate which had yet to arrive, and it made Max worried. Back in the day when Max was an assistant, assistants commanded no more than 10 per hour. Now the good ones were so in demand, one had to shell out what was a mini-fortune for Max. He had tried to get in touch with Ruth, but she had a different SIM card just for Italy and Max had lost the number somehow. In any case, a distracted-Max was not the Max-Nico-wanted, so she said quite fleetingly, and what Max perceived as rather harshly, “Don’t you have enough free interns to do this kind of work?”

It made Max swipe back:
-You mean unpaid sherpas, like the ones we just saw in the film?

He hopped on the first tram that came and took it just a few stops into the anywhere that wasn’t the fair. The shattered glass door of the Post Office – which looked like it had been penetrated by a gargantuan warring worm – seemed like the right place to get off. Who had wanted to rob a Post Office and, holy smokes, what sort of instrument had they used to penetrate its door? A barring ram in the middle of medieval “downtown” Basel? It was only then that he began to read the signs, quite literally the shop signs lit up in neon at night, more closely. Whether the signs were a signal of insistence or indecisiveness was impossible to discern. On one short block alone, the signs seemed to double back on themselves, bumblingly uncommitted:

Restaurant Café

Bauermensa Cafeteria (the farmer’s canteen cafeteria)

Café Cucina (the café kitchen)

Bäckerei Café (the bakery café)

Grillhaus Bistro (the grill house bistro)

Multi-shop Kiosk (not a freestanding “kiosk” at all, but rather a 24-hour quick shop)

At the Hoppe Repro Bistro Edel Café Bratkartoffeln Copyshop, he grinned: why decide on what you want to be at all when you can be everything at once? Why only one girlfriend and not two? Somehow, he’d work out the details later. Not that he need advertise it, but he saw no reason not to delve into the multi-shop kiosk mentality at least for now, today, this afternoon. Why make a problem out of a situation? He saw the tram approaching. Half-way up the steps, he stepped out and hailed a taxi. “Kurzstrecke. To the Messe,” he said.

But even in the short time it took for him to arrive back at the fair, he’d had time to regress into the cabinet of second thoughts. From the taxi window he saw a bike leaning against a wall, a donkey bike bogged down with plastic sacks similar to the one that Nico owned (the 80,000 dollar artwork). Similar but not the same. The taxi driver pulled to a stop and Max asked for a receipt. For 4 Euro. Before he could say “never mind” the driver handed him over the small slip of paper. To compensate, Max handed him over a 10 Euro note as a tip while glancing at the glamor-seeking artist he could see in the distance. There he was, Edward Scissorhands, hard at work. The ancillary work necessary to an artist these days, courting collectors, seeking funding for larger projects. He was in the outdoor fair café having cappuccino with the collector Agnes Troublé (agnes b.) and waving to Courtney Love at a table nearby. She was being interviewed by a journalist who didn’t dress the part of a journalist per se, but the Art Unlimited bag handed out at the press office gave him away. Mid-sentence she returned Scissorhands’s wave with a blown kiss. Was this the kind of life Max yearned for? Or was it rather that he yearned for it out of spite? Out of spite for his more successful colleagues and former cohorts, the ones he drank with night after night at Bar 3, the ones like Edward who talked to Max only when he was a) talking to someone important, or b) scheduled for a show at a venue where Edward wanted to show too.

Max showed the guards his pass while nodding to the fair director. Bald and definitely bored, his pale freckles gave him the air of eternal youth necessary to deal with the tedious art advisor rattling off to his client: “A foolproof color would be something monochromatic: If your dining room is orange, then you’d want to pair the paintings with a hue and a shade from the same slice of the color wheel. Again, I wouldn’t recommend anything flamboyant but those stripe paintings we’re about to see do match with a variety of interiors….”

Back at the booth of his own gallery, Max stared at the cigarette butts, evidence of Ruth’s digressions into seven-and-a-half minute pleasures. Pauses for thought. Obviously, doing what she did was not an easy thing for her. She’d given up smoking, after all, some three years hence. Where was she now? He wanted to see her, to confess, to ask her for time, for permission to “pause.” He couldn’t make up his mind now and surely she’d understand that. “I’m a multi-shop kiosk,” that’s what he’d say. She knew the way he worked, better than he did himself. His meanderings, his inability to commit. “Channel-surfing even in your career,” she once half-sincerely joked. Even preparing for this chance to show at Art Unlimited was marked by an ambivalence. Was it too early in his career to be offered such an opportunity? In his studio, he'd dilly dabble in one work, and then lose patience in lusting for the next, a series of repetitive one-night stands in which each night he'd eliminate all of the work from the night before. Each canvas, each sculpture, each piece was a chalkboard of equivocation. "That is not what I meant at all."

Hurt people hurt people, he said under his breath before approaching Louise, who was still in limbo nearby Galerie NN. “No, she did not buy a cell phone for her dog, I promise you. Do not, I repeat, do not put that in print.” With her telephone wedged between ear and shoulder, she thrust an envelope in his hand. He opened it thinking that he’d find the money that Louise owed him for the piece she sold nearly 18 months ago. Instead he found a riddle scribbled on the Trois Rois La La hotel stationary: “Tiger, tiger burning bright, ask the Lion whom he slept with last night.”

He remembered back to the day not long ago when he had delivered Nico’s underwear and Louise’s warning, “I wouldn’t go up there if I were you.” Slowly, paranoia set in. Recently, Nico had acquired a work from an artist who later won the Lion’s prize at Venice. Is sleeping with that artist, the “lion,” is this what Louise is hinting at? It could be true, he supposed. He and Nico had yet to have that discussion, the awkward one, the one about possible fidelity. At least for the short term. Not that vows had been declared or needed to be, but they had exchanged a lot of I-like-you-a-lots. His assumption that they were possibly beginning a relationship might have been just that: his assumption.

He remembered back to her parting words in Berlin, the ones that had given him hope.

I like you a lot, said she.

I like you a lots too, said he.

Lots?

Yes, a lots! I like you a lots.

Then I like you a lots too, said Nico with a giggle.

The joke was lost on poor Max. The extra “s” on lot was the reason she had repeated herself. Not that she wanted to emphasize, but rather that she was enjoying her private joke on her new German friend which she repeated often enough that it made Max believe that she actually felt something large for him. The plural of lot.

He needed to find Ruth. The someone he had liked a lots for a really long time. Where had she gone? In search of sculptures, no doubt, for her “bad art” collages. Paul McCarthy’s chocolate butt plug dwarf inside a James Turrell light projection? He was pulled out of his reverie by the sight of bad hair. Not his. Hers! The mysterious “her” between Venice and Basel. Shit.

“Hey du,” she said cheerily, kissing him on both cheeks. “Looks like you didn’t get a haircut yet after all,” she said, referring to his hair, not hers.

He pulled back before her hands could reach up to ruffle his, yes, still uncut hair. How would Sheena know that he was feeling bad about having bad hair? And why was she being so cosy with him? It suddenly hit him. Sheena? It was Sheena’s hi-lited head that he had seen underneath the duvet. He remembered that she had been at the party that night, he remembered her lounging on a couch in a position not conducive to that of wearing a lycra miniskirt, no matter at what angle one was standing. But he could not remember the sex. If he had had sex with Sheena he would have liked to have at least remembered it – for the sheer horror of it. The memory was vanished in a vacuum. A vacuum sucking up glitter. Had he worn a condom? Oh Gott. He couldn’t believe that he had done something so bad and not remembered it at all. He’d strayed from the path dependency. The editor of his film had left a slice of his life on the cutting room floor.

-Maxi, why are you being so distant? And what dinner will you be at tonight?

Didn’t it occur to anyone that he would be given a dinner of his own by his own gallery? He stood silent, hurt. Sheena took him up by the arm and pointed in Larry’s direction.

-I’m with Larry. Should I introduce you? He’s a huge fan of your work.

Suddenly his having slept or not having slept with Sheena was not such a bad thing after all. If Sheena was sleeping with Larry too, it didn’t surprise him. What surprised him was that such a fact might even help him. Certainly Louise would know more. Not that he would ask her. He tried suppressing his worries about his erratic sex life and tried to ignore the number looming just behind his forehead: 90. He calculated a 90% chance that his first words with greenbacks Larry would botch his chances of showing at his gallery.

Part VII: Supressing the Relevance of a Well-Placed Cornichon

We’re still at Art Basel and Max is all a muddle about his relationship to Nico and uncertain he wants to meet her poodle-hair mother, especially now. Louise has handed him a riddle: “Tiger, tiger burning bright, ask the Lion whom he slept with last night.” Meanwhile, he’s still unsure of whether or not he “slept” with Sheena last night or if he just slept with her, or if it was Sheena at all. In any case, Sheena’s about to introduce him to a gallerist whose name connotes more than just a gallery.

Were you really naked all the time?

Those were not Max’s first words to Larry Gagosian, that much he knew of the known knowns to himself if not to others.

Do I really want to show with Larry Gagosian?

This was the question forming an invisible wall between him and the man standing almost nearly in front of him. He would have asked Ruth had she been there, right there, right now, right next to him, that much he knew of the known unknowns.

Was Larry really interested in showing Max? Did he think Max’s work was worth showing? What were Larry’s criteria for choosing an artist anyway?

These were the unknown unknowns.

In Max’s eyes, getting a show with Larry was a shortcut to Easy Street: endless production funds for artworks that would be placed in the best collections. Max Decker’s Didada sold at Sotheby’s for gazillions.

But if a question had formed an invisible wall, then it was a discussion Max had had with Ruth late one night at Bar 3, not too long ago in Berlin, that formed the muddy trenches.

-Ok, so if an artist is offered a show with Larry Gagosian, does he show there?
-Ruthie…
-What? I’m serious.
-Why wouldn’t an artist show there?
-Maybe because it’s not about making money but about having your existence, your work be what you want it to be and not dictated by some need to create a series of works, which bores you…. Producing one after the other, like a factory. Socks, socks, and more socks. This time argyle camouflage.
-Warhol did it, but he did it as a commentary…
-So the question is, if they were given the opportunity to actually sell works but it would mean that they would have to sacrifice content or their own desire…
-Wait, why would they have to sacrifice content?
-Cause they’d have to produce works that actually could be sold. Richard Prince’s Nurses for instance. That painting would be just as good if there were only one in existence, but because one sells for X millions on auction, it makes sense that the artist produce a series of Nurses which can be sold by the dealer thereafter at a higher price.
-Its value having increased as the demand is greater.
-Not that the demand is greater but that the product itself has a higher value placed on it as it was deemed being worth six figures by the auction public.
-A public, which is to say, at least two people.
-Right. That’s nuts.
-Two people can create an astronomical value for a painting.
-Totally nuts. An 8000 euro painting turns into one that is worth 600,000 because of the demand created by two people. Two!
-And one of them is Larry Gagosian.
-So wouldn’t it be easy for Larry to convince someone to bid against him to create an artificially high value placed on any particular artist that he might be dealing with or plans to show?
-Exactly! But it’s not just Larry. There’s a whole ring of players out there.
-But let’s not get into that. The point is, your artworks could be over-valued based on the desire of one person who can create a hype.
-Once one work gets sold and it’s headline-breaking news, the rest falls into place. The world loves the sensational easy buck.
-And everyone’s then interested in getting in on the game. Collectors always want whatever other collectors have already. Buy a work from a dealer for 50,000 with the promise of turning it over on auction for 500,000 in two year’s time, let’s say hypothetically.
-Which is an entirely new situation…
-Again, that’s another discussion altogether, let’s not go there. The question remains, if offered to show at Larry Gagosian does he say yes? Is it really a good gallery?
-It depends on what your definition of a good gallery is, and if the artist has to pay rent.
-Let’s say a good gallery provides you with a family of likes, a place where you can experience what you want to experience.
-Experience is immaterial violence.
-Whoa. Wait a minute. Where’d you come up with that?
-I just did, just now….

A pause ensued. They kissed. Pauses like this happened less and less of late, and Max had attributed it to the stress of preparing for Basel. The bar was getting too smoky. It was time to go home.

-I mean, how many artists show there, what 50, 100? How much attention can an artist get if he is one in a hundred being shown by the gallerist, how well does he know his dealer, how much of a relationship is there?

The discussion continued on the walk home, with both Ruth and Max pushing their bikes through early morning puddles and falling into bed with a series of dangling thoughts in the speech bubbles above their heads. The immaterial experience of conversation. As long as they kept talking, they’d never part. Or so they thought.

***

Everything was happening too quickly that morning. With resolve, Max repeated to himself: I am a multishop kiosk. But he was unsure of why he needed to define himself with an “I am…”. And did he need to be a multishop kiosk in his choice of gallery too?

It dawned on him that he need not make a problem out of a situation again. It was a productive problem. If Larry wanted to show his work, he’d make showing at Larry’s gallery the overarching concept of the show. He didn’t know how, but most of his work originated in a question to himself and this one seemed big, vague, messy, smart yet dumb enough to be interesting.

Just before Sheena could introduce Max to the famed gallerist, Wayne Borius of Vienna came bumbling between them, extending his hand, which Larry didn’t take. Nervously, Wayne retracted his hand but held it midair like the limp leaves of a bundle of carrots and blurted out:
-I wanted to show you a project you would be interested in…
Scrambling in his rumpled backpack, he muttered,
- I am very corrugated.
-Like cardboard, said Max. Wayne misfired words that had been misfiled. His vocabulary was large yet its application misplaced.

Wayne made the segue to meeting Larry all the easier. Larry liked jokes.
-I meant coordinated.
-If you’re coordinated, then … I am the Deutsche Bahn.
No one said anything. Larry looked confidently blank yet busy, and Sheena’s intent stare was directed to her phone. No one cared what Wayne was doing. So Max continued:

-Benjamin said that the duty of every leftist thinker is not to ride the train of history but to apply the brake.

-I don’t know if I dare ask what that might mean? (God, these Germans can be weird.) Oh sorry, it was good to meet you. Max, that’s your name, right? Sorry, but I have to take this call.

Coitus interruptus, the vibrating apparatus intervened again. Or did it vibrate at all? Though it might have been a guise, in any case, the first official meeting with Larry Gagosian was called to a close.

Max was left standing with Sheena alone. He wanted to ask her, but what? What would he ask? Are you the girl I found in my bed last night? He couldn’t bear it. There was a 50% chance that he was completely wrong. Maybe it wasn’t Sheena. There was a small chance indeed that he was one of the few who hadn’t slept with Sheena.

-I’m curating a show for Larry and maybe you have something that might fit in. Let’s talk about it later, ok? See you at the Kunsthalle later tonight, right?

He calculated that the 30% chance that she was telling the truth was enough to not send him into a complete and utter depression. In the end, he could “show” with Larry without really showing with Larry. No solo show but a group show curated by Sheena. It depressed him. Or rather there was a 70% chance that this depressed him. He wondered if the artist list would be composed entirely of her former bedfellows.

Turning the corner, “I am the Deutsche Bahn” nearly collided with Nico and her mother bending over to read a label. He looked at what they were looking at, a painting of a woman in a grass skirt in a gilded frame. Nico had raved about her mother to Max, her bohemian mother Bibi. “In Nantucket, she’s always naked. Totally naked all the time," said Nico to him one night under a serious moonlight in Venice, "and my grandmother too." It was an image completely incongruous to the mother standing now in front of him. She had hair like a doorstop. He couldn’t decide if it were more a wedge or a cube of the tightest curls he’d ever seen.

After Gauguin, said her mother out loud slowly, only she said it in an accent incomprehensible to Max who parroted her back:
-Gowjewin? You mean…
-Yes, the painter, he does all those Tahiti paintings. We saw them all at the d’Orsay.

At least she was able to pronounce the museum name correctly, he thought. She bent back down to look at the label again, her bangles of gold jingle jangling, no doubt in search of the price. But he was already bending over himself to doublecheck the label and they nearly bumped heads (or rather hair-dos). It was an odd exchange that left them both with the mutual conception that the person standing opposite was a moron. For the moment she was willing to overlook the fact that this friend of her daughter did not know one of the 20th century’s most important painters—he looked shabby, poor, state-educated—and he was willing to overlook the fact that she could not pronounce Gauguin—she was American, after all. He supposed that this was not the right time to spring the question, Were you really naked all the time?

At every booth they entered, dealers would spring out of their Bertoia chairs, bored by the parade of hoi polloi to attend to the needs of the von Stroheims. The von Stroheims, you see, were part of the nouveau mega-collectors grazing the planet for the new, the emerging. It had been reported that Mrs von Stroheim dolled out some three mil’ per year on (mostly contemporary) art and she didn’t like advice or advisors. She bought according to whim and wind, and trusted mostly the whims of her daughter, who was no small fry in the tiny world of top-dog collectors herself.

Following them around for a few hours, he could only hear snippets of their conversations, reactions to artworks that made him cringe:

-Look here, Nico, isn’t that just snazzy?
She pointed out a square panel covered with mirror tiles, a disco ball that lost its ball, but wasn’t disco either.

-Well, said Max, I guess you could see it that way. I think it rather resembles an ironic grammar of historical form.

Nico gave him a look like a semicolon in front of the end of a parenthesis.

Max continued:
-My approach is quite simple: to think through some of the metaphorical, relational and historical parameters of one of the signal discursive clusters with which work engages.

Of course, when he needed to speak like this, he never did. It was wasted on an audience of ellipses. Or a parenthesis hugging a question mark? Bingo, he thought, her wedge of curls were manifest question marks spurting out from her skull. This, too, he considered best unvoiced and grinned instead.

Turning towards a chandelier placed on the floor, Bibi motioned to her daughter an excited yes. We don’t have one that big. This would be great in the foyer.

Nico nodded in accord.

-He’s an award-winning artist, I’ve met him in Berlin. He’s from Vietnam. But won’t it come into competition with the Calder mobile?

Collecting art is a hit or miss game. But when your shopping buffet is Art Basel, it is hard to miss. Despite the platitudes coming out of their mouths, it was hard to deny that the von Stroheim collection was one thing: Great. Max chimed in, cheerful, happy to help, when they came across a series of shelves upheld by various decapitated bric-a-brac,

-What you are seeing here is more of an archaeology of the self…

- An archaeology of the shelf. I like that.

-But what I said was “the self.” It has nothing to do with the shelf.

Bibi pursed her lips. She gave him a stubbornly mute stare.

Max’s thoughts floated again above her hair, which he decided now was more like a shelf, he thought, an empty shelf for flower arrangements and bibelots, not books. The dealer approached them, eager to elaborate. Somehow Max had to figure out how to get Nico to the side, so that he could ask her about the lion, Louise’s riddle. Touching her elbow, he bent towards her quietly. He wanted to show her something.

-There are twenty-five worlds out there and I’m wondering if we’re in the same one.
-I’m here Max, what is it?
-Did you fuck the lion?
-Excuse me?
-Did you fuck the lion or did you have fun with the lion, I don’t know. Or did the lion fuck you?
-What kind of question is that? Are you jealous?
-Of course not.
-Ok, then why does it matter?
-I don’t know where you want to go with this…

Her mother’s comments kept coming in from the background like a bad infomercial.

-Sumptuous!
-Stunning!
-Oh, I’m gonna have to indulge myself. It’s got such personal touches! Nico, dahling, come look at what I’ve found for you! It’s the gift of a lifetime, honey.
I like it because it’s got such unique characteristics. Isn’t this just the ultimate luxury? Standing in front of a truck-size triptych painting, Nico rolled her eyes, her emotions unvoiced, which her mother read as criticism.

-I wouldn’t worry about its size. You can customize it to your heart's desire, I’m sure.

A group of pale and haggard installers passed by in the aisle wearing t-shirts that read FREE FINNISH LABOUR. They looked tired. This was no work of a leftist hobbyist. It was a productive distortion of the once revolutionary strategies of conceptual art. He could bear it no longer and wanted to find Ruth. He’d made a terrible mistake. He was not a multishop kiosk. He was Grill Loyale.

Nico had taken her mother to the side with a look of reproach.
-Mom, I would never even consider undermining aesthetic autonomy of the artist. It’s outrageous that you should suggest so. You’re embarrassing me in front of Max and I want for you to behave.

He turned to the champagne cart rolling down the aisles and asked for 3 glasses.
-That will be 48 Euro, sir.

Max dutifully brought the champagne to the ladies von Stroheim, who were joined now by Mackenzie. Beach blonde and tan without the slightest hint of Miami vice. Mackenzie’s tan conveyed less tan, more terracotta. Enhanced happiness. She was always laughing. Always, that is, when she wasn’t coughing up last night’s fun. At 32, she had the salty voice of a 62 year-old smoker. Mackenzie took up the third glass of champagne and took Max to the side with a vertiginous warning about what Louise told her about what Ruth had done. “Chocolat or choque au lit, as the French Swiss say, eh Max?” Then, without even waiting for a response, an excuse, some form of defense or mystification on his part, she offered him “the rest” of what she found in her purse, a high-tech mood booster. Max refused. He liked to schedule his artificial substances, he said. In the middle of the fair? No. Later. No. Ok. Yes. She slipped it into his hand unnoticed.

He spent the rest of the afternoon roaming the hall from one booth to the next, no plan, taking in as much as he could but talking to no one. Buzzed, half-articulated ideas on the tip of his tongue but too paranoid to move it. He kept the cavity encasing it squeezed tight. Coordinated collaboration within the realm of the applied fantastic, maybe that’s my line.

When he ran into Mackenzie again, she was still gallivanting about. He could overhear her explaining her unexpected exit from some gala dinner, leaving her place and two others at the round table of six empty. “It was like a Hong-Kong gangster film.” Something about having escaped through the kitchen window with x and x artists trying to escape, among others, Edward Scissorhands sucking up to Moby.

Max wished he could be as entertaining as Mackenzie. But her mood booster had rendered him mute. He ducked behind a black curtain. In the dark, no one could watch his determined efforts to relax his clenched teeth forming the frontier between him and embarrassment. A sunrise with subtitles, a donkey in a nondescript terrain, he was unable to concentrate on what he was seeing.

He ducked out and then quickly into another blackbox adjacent. A Xerox machine upclose, a play of light, nice. But he was not alone. A figure in a baseball cap growled at him, which Max took as a compliment. When the sliver of light was at its strongest, he could faintly make out the source of the growl, the astronaut who’d lost contact with Major Tom. Max had worked as one of her scared-stiff assistants for exactly seven days before a getting a stipendium. He’d witnessed the tentative tenure of working for this great artist, whose temperament was legion, her glance leaden. One morning he watched her dismiss an assistant for failing to procure the right toy dinosaur. “That’s a minute newt. Get out.”

His happy tank needle nearly indicated empty. He ducked back into the bathroom for another quick dose, then headed out to the center courtyard for some air while checking for messages on his phone. He thumbed, I am a cappuccino latte, but Ruth snuck up behind him before he could press send.

-Not all bad comes from bad.
-She gets her nails done at the Soho House, he blurted out, then tried to keep his jaw from moving by adopting the thinker pose, forefinger nooked in the crook of his chin, thumb pressed under it, hoping to keep his bloody mouth shut.

Scanning the various catered tents rimming the courtyard, Ruth said:
-I want a bowl of Captain Crunch.

Max’s interim grin was quickly replaced by an absurd attempt at a serious face. Could she tell he was high? He furrowed his brow.
-You cannot very well be a Marxist and be with someone who does that, can you?
Ruth seemed absently present. She was there, but she wasn’t saying enough. She pulled her hair out of its ponytail, keeping her steady gaze on the completely forgettable and utterly unremarkable crowd surrounding them.
-I don’t think it has anything to do with nail polish. I just think you’d get bored with her fast.
-Boredom is not necessarily negative. It’s a… precursor to creativity. Or procreation?
Did he just say procreation? There was a 10 percent chance that he didn’t say it. He didn’t want to ask her, fearing he’d give himself away. Surely she thinks I am sober. I hope she thinks I am sober. Jesus.

An amused smile curled between them as FREE FINNISH LABOUR walked by.

-That’s the second time I’ve seen them today. Do you think people are getting it?
-It’s great that someone’s daring to do a work like that. If you can call that work, of course.
-[…]
-Thank you, Ruth.
-Thank me?
-You were right about not taking the safe route.
He felt sober. He sounded sober. But he started to feel his jawline jitter.
-I’ve seen way too much high-definition video.
Ruth stared at a sparrow jabbing the pavement, not unhappy, quiet. She no longer wanted a confrontation. She was just glad he was there.
His emotions felt low-tech, analogue, even though they were spiked.
-My dinner. Are you coming? You are, of course, I mean, will you come? Please?

Nothing said could express the true remorse coursing through him. Things had gotten out of hand and he seemed unable to control himself. He put his hand around Ruth’s back while being confronted by an unpleasant flashback of the evening with Sheena. His hand was shaking, so he pressed it firmer into her back. But he couldn’t press the image out of his memory. Sheena had been standing next to the buffet table when Max had approached her. Too much prosecco. She had taken a cornichon in her mouth and placed it in his ear.

-I’d like to visually thwart what’s going on in my head right now.

Ruth agreed but a heavy silence reigned between them. At least for her. She was looking at Mackenzie standing amidst a power throng, enthralled by her stories. The best gossip in Basel, no doubt. For a second, Mackenzie returned Ruth’s stare, nodded and smiled, then returned to her shared conspiracy of “news.” Max’s next sentence broke her out of her paranoid reverie.

-You know I met Gagosian today.
-And?
-And nothing. Thank God. I was looking for you. I met him twice actually. Once in the bathroom. You figure guys like Larry don’t use the fair toilets. It’s like, where’s their private jet bathroom, right? Whatever. I still think that guy shits in a Bentley. Anyway, I got all clammy and weird stuff came out of my mouth. And our Gogo discussion came back into my mind.
-We all pay rent to Bill Gates now.
-I’ve just decided that I don’t know if I’ll ever be a communist. I don’t know if I can do too much more art fair either. It’s like being on a package holiday.
- It’s all too much, though I’ve only been here for the last hour. Let’s go to the river.
I was there all afternoon, naked.

The Collector, part V:

2011-04-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

Event Horizon

“In Basel, you like even people you thought you hated.” Once best friends forever, Louise and Ruth meet up at the fair to find that they both need each other in order to get revenge on Max. It’s a game of Chinese Whispers: Ruth feeds lies to Louise hoping that whatever she tells her will be the talk of the town by the end of the day. Max, in the meanwhile, has yet to see his own work and continues to meet with people at the fair whose comments befuddle him.

It was shortly before 10am, and Louise was orbiting the entrance to Art Unlimited. She was of firm belief that she could activate her telekinetic powers to move the pawns into place, her mission being to get into the preview before opening, to download the info needed to execute a plan. For Louise, her cell phone was less an instrument of communication, than an instrument of remote control. But that the slouchy female figure crouching against the cement wall with a plastic bag in front of her could serve Louise’s purpose in entering the commercial space she so desired was a frequency she had neglected to tune into.
- Louise, why are you circling?
- I’m not circling. I’m circumgyrating.
Louise, clever girl, was a space cadet in the emergency zone imputing thought waves into one of her three phones.
- Where were you last night? I didn't see you at the Kunsthalle. Not that I was there for long myself, but…
Still focused on her three handheld beam-me-in devices, Louise was looking for a way in, before the in-crowd was allowed. No time for small talk, the moment was dedicated to short-message-services. But it was as if Ruth had pressed the auto-seek button on the radio. She tuned into Louise’s station.
-You want in? Should I show you what the devil did? I have an extra worker pass so I can get us in now if you like.
In Basel, you like even people you thought you hated.
The two ex-friends thus waltzed together through the turnstiles towards Galerie NN’s stand whose pink neon light guided the way. But as soon as they had made it past the guards, Louise said:
- You stink.
- What? Oh right, I’ll explain that later. What I want to show you is… well just wait. You’ll see.
Past the robot vacuum cleaners sucking up glitter littering the floor, past the oversized sunglass stand, past the mechanical bull underneath a chandelier, they arrived at the outer edge of Gallery NN’s booth, to gaze at the mess. Louise began to decode the signs in silence, her thoughts as haywire as the heap in front of her. It looked as if Max’s signature work had taken a new turn, and if it mattered before it screamed of anti-matter now, and that was an exciting thing. Or was it just a mess?
- And now? The opening is now. Who’s going to clean all of this up?
- You don’t get it, do you?
Instead of answering, she looked at an incoming message on her phone: “Who are you?” Poker-faced Louise maintained her poise in front of her former friend and said:
- Listen, Ruth, where’s Max? I just got an important message that I should show him…
- Max is not here. He had nothing to do with the work.
- You mean to tell me that you did this?
- Yep. And, no, sleeping overnight in the artwork is not part of the “process” of the artwork. Though maybe it should be… but how? How would we mention that?
Ruth walked away as if she were seriously contemplating bringing in some relatively irrelevant theory (Somaesthetics?) into the mess in front of them.
- All by yourself, you did this?
- It was late and I couldn’t find Pepe and whatshisname. So yes, I did this, but of course some of the ideas were Max’s, I mean, the work is still his. I just “edited” it.
Louise stopped in front of the beer bottles in the far corner, then looked towards the newspaper clipping, careful not to step on the cigarette butts scattered across the floor, on tiptoes. Ruth sniggered.
- So nice of you to take such care, Louise. The rest of these idiots don’t realize that those cigarette butts are made of porcelain. It was Max’s idea. You know, sure, it’s copied from another artist, not sunflower seeds but just a few cigarette butts made out of porcelain – it’s not a bad idea, you have to admit. So anyway, I didn’t just overnight here because, well, because … I had to guard these butts. I was afraid the clean-up man would come around and sweep them all away.
Ruth could barely keep a straight face. Porcelain cigarette butts? The ah-ha moment in Louise’s face: a new twist in Max’s work. Her mind began to churn. Handwork. An a-sculptural form? Or put in a more banal way, merely a part of the folk art ceramic craze? Put it in ceramic or bronze and it’s gotta be worth something. Low (folk) or high (expensive), it added a hook for the critic to latch onto.
- It’s like, said Louise, musing out loud and holding her fingers to the air, quote unquote, “… Not similar to something, but just similar.” Or like the appreciation of a photograph that was not a photograph, but a “critical” document of process. A no-longer existing handmade sculpture, paper and scissors, process and destruction of the original.
- Eggsactly!
And well, no, she thought to herself. The artist was the one that Max and Ruth had always referred to as Edward Scissorhands. They called him Eddie, in their private code. Eddie was also a “critical” artist, loitering between two mediums. The sculptures he made were based on places with a political charge: the bathtub of a drowned politician, the stairwell where Andreas Baader once slept, the front door of a serial murder’s mobile home. In the end, all that was exhibited was a photograph of a bathtub, a stairwell, a door – and you had to read the label or look closely to see that it was actually a photograph of a structure made completely out of paper.
Louise didn’t bother to check on the butts, taking Ruth for her word. As for her overnighting in artwork, well, that explained the bad breath. The half-open crate with bubble wrap trodden flat to the ground, an empty coffee cup, a grey blanket used for shipping. Now the signs made sense, practical sense.
- I think it’s great, and I’m going to tell Nico. She should be collecting your work, you know, and not Max’s.
- But that’s not the point, no, no…
Louise jumped to another topic altogether:
- How was Venice for you? I didn't see you at Militardis’s party...
- Oh, of course, I didn't go. I had a small dinner to attend and a case of Retarditis rewarditus.
Ruth’s last words indicated a small and not insignificant sonic breakdown in their bitchiness. At one point, they had been the closest of friends. Retarditis rewarditus was one of their many private jokes, something which they had said most of the artists of Gallery Box had suffered from. A whole gallery with artists who had psychological issues: bestiality, incest, patricide. Serial killer art. Psychastheniacs, the whole lot of them. The “Stressed Situationists.”
But despite their shared history, neither Ruth nor Louise was willing to lower their guard. Not yet.
It was shortly after 11 now, and the hall was beginning to fill up with the invited preview VIPs. The gallerist made a gesture of approaching them, but then quickly turned, making a beeline for the powerpack, Gagosian and Deitch, heading towards the booth. In Basel, the hierarchy was clear. Ruth and Louise were clearly defined by the categories: assistant to an artist and assistant to a collector. You had to be nice to them, but the etiquette of being unpolite was one that they would “understand” when they saw whom he would be talking to: A-list dealer and A-list dealer cum Hollywood Museum Director. It was all in the interest of Max’s career, and wasn’t that what they all lived for?
Try as they might, Louise and Ruth couldn’t hear a word they were saying. But the smiles and laughter and the way Galerist NN brushed the dandruff off Larry’s shoulders was enough to know who was the Alpha dog.
- It’s easy to tell who the ruling rooster is here, said Louise.
- Rule of the roost, you mean.
Louise’s telephone beeped again, and Ruth meandered over to the next booth. It was a message from Nico. She wanted Louise at the front entrance in a half an hour, and why was her driver late?
Ever since witnessing Max’s sexual congress in Venice, Louise had a plan in mind that she could only execute if she was sure that she could control all of the strings. If Ruth had created a Gesamtzerstörungswerk then Louise was sure to do the same to his love life.
A curator, who was now out of a job but was once someone, approached Louise.
- Hey Louise, did I just see you and Ruth talking? Like old times, eh?
- Oh no, she just wanted to borrow money from me. Again.
- But there are more bank automats in Basel than in Moscow, he said, before turning to greet a curator who was still someone.
She turned her gaze back to one of her phones and nearly collided with the gallerist, who had a Chinese collector in tow.
- It’s a real breakthrough, a new genre even…
- I’m very interested in creative art.
- Creative, yes?
- Yes. Bed art.
- Uh-huh, so what have you seen this morning that has taken your interest?
- An elephant made of cow skin and an elephant made of incense sticks. Chinese…
- And Indian, I see…
But the Chinese collector kept repeating and smiling,
- Bed art.
Taking out his pocket notebook, he said,
- The titles are “The Elephant of the Alamo” and “The Skin Is a Scent.” He chuckled.
The gallerist laughed nervously.
The collector bent down, sticking his head deep into the packing crate.
- Bed art?
- What did he just say, said the gallerist in an aside to Louise in German. Ruth, who had wandered back at this point, overheard and clarified it to them both:
- Bad art! Of course, yes, you mean this is “bad art”!
In the near distance, she caught a glimpse of Max. He was on the phone and at that moment her own cellphone began to ring.
- There you are.
- Where?
- Never mind.
There was a long moment of silence. She took a deep breath and tried to concentrate on what was in front of her eyes instead of the invisible emotional soup stirring her head. Ruth knew that if her first contact with Max were to become a shouting match, if she were to begin in anger, he’d hang up. So instead, she threw him a curve ball.
- Listen, Max, I had this idea…. I’m thinking of working on a series called “Bad Sculptures,” and it would be a series of collages that bring at least two “bad” sculptures together…
- Living or dead? Why collages? Why not reenact the sculptures in a space by using live actors? You know, Gilbert and George gone slapstick?
It was as if everything was ok between them when they talked only about ideas. Like a game, they bandied about fictional artworks as a way of communicating between the lines. Their fiction was one that outsiders wouldn’t follow.
- You mean then that the collages would be considered the “drawings,” or drafts of the proposed performances? No. The first thing that came to my mind was putting together, say, the Kiki Smith sculpture, the wax one with that long stream of piss coming out of her legs, you know, the one where she is on all fours?
- Ja. But what would you combine it with?
He was hardly listening at this point and had poked his head into a bad video booth.
- Let’s say, I put Schwarzkögler cutting off his penis behind her…
- Bad. That’s not a sculpture.
- Does it matter?
- Of course it matters if you want to call it “Bad Sculptures” then it cannot be a sculpture and a photograph of a performance…
- But all performances end up getting photographed anyway, so what does it matter?
- I’m just saying that if you want to call it “bad sculptures” you should stick to bad sculptures. I also don’t think that Schwarzkögler work is bad.
- It becomes bad when you combine it with the feminist work.
- But are you making fun of feminism? Ruthie, I don’t get your point. Where are you anyway?
- I don’t know what kind of game you think you are playing here with me, as if I didn’t know what was going on…
She was doing loops, at this point, around the elephant made of cowhide. A video monitor was turned on its side depicting an oil rig in the middle of a desert. A small model of the Eiffel Tower was perched on top.
- What’s going on then? You’re coming up with bad ideas for bad artworks?
Louise snuck up on Ruth from behind, snapping away her phone.
- Max, this is Louise. There’s something I have to tell you…

Work-in-progress on THE COLLECTOR, a novel

2011-02-18T10:07:00.000-08:00

PART I: The Laundrette
Max is at the apex of his career. His artworks have been placed in the world's best museums and private collections. Hopping from one exhibition invitation to the next, Venice, Basel, Beijing, he lives in Berlin and keeps a pied-à-terre in New York. The road to success is a crooked path. What happened in the last five years -- what brought him from a Berlin basement apartment to being listed on the Art World's Power 100? After his ex-girlfriend Louise introduces him to Nico, an art collector on a grand scale, his life takes a turn into a collective chaos of Machiavellian machinations and manipulations of Max's social space.

He was barely buttoned up when she burst back into the room saying, “In New York, all Londrettes are run by the Chinese.” At least that’s how Max heard it. Before he could protest, she had thrust a perforated blue ticket into his hands, cutting short his fleeting fantasy of a petite London-ette being dragged by her ponytail through the streets of Chinatown.

Although Berlin was only Nico’s second residence, it was increasingly becoming her first, especially with the advent of minor amenities previously unknown to the post-Wall minimal-amenity city. Miss Ping’s. In her mind, everything was a copy of something that already existed in New York. And the Chinese Laundrette, or so Miss Ping’s had come to be known, copied in its own fashion the many dry cleaners that freckled lower Manhattan. Only instead of a price list tacked up high behind a few neon lights, in Berlin, the price list was to be found by deciphering a series of picture-lightboxes featuring photographs of Miss Ping’s daughter and son decked out in various Chinese garb. If a 12-year-old in a long satin dress was meant to be understood as “evening gown for 19 Euros,” it was a matter of logic learned by trial and error. Miss Ping’s answer was always and inevitably a benevolent yes. In that way she was more Indian than Chinese.

For the Germans, Miss Ping presented a yes-saying conundrum. For Max, even more so. For him, everything was a Yes that day, even though that Yes appeared to be backwards or in reverse, he couldn’t decide, on that sunny Tuesday in Berlin. That he, and not her assistant, was picking up her clothes. That they were her clothes and not his. That they were her underwear and not her clothes. That his underwear had been left on her terrace for her to find and not the maid (Tuesday being her day off). That the second “her” in that sentence was not the “her” of the first four, the former being the collector and the latter being “her” assistant. Yes, it was Louise who would find his sundecked underwear that morning before he could even remember that he ever had any to put on, as was often the case with Max, who preferred wearing his jeans in the buff, unten-ohne, especially in the summer heat of June. Her terrace was, of course, “hers” and not Louise’s. Louise, of course, having a balcony and not a terrace.

That he had forgotten to duck when going down the stairs, banging his head on the red sign with golden Chinese characters, on which someone had chicken-scratched with a black marker, “Watch Out!” was nothing unusual. That he was picking up the underwear of Nico von Stroheim, was.

The phone in his front pocket was vibrating. Ruth again. He put it back where it came from, unable to answer. He was next in line. He handed over the ticket to the fine lady with the proprietor’s name pinned to her smock.

- Under what name?
The vibrating phone kept niggling his nerves. Why’d she need a name when she already had a number?
- Pansies, pants, panties, underwear... I mean, lingerie.
That Max could spew out a veritable lexicon of undergarments was a true showing of how his mind worked when under pressure.
Who had the idea of constructing a contraption that would vibrate in your pants pocket? More of these things should exist. The haptic had always been close to his heart. Contact conveyed a connection. But now it was the wrong time. Instead of pressing red, he pressed green. A connection with the wrong contact.

What could she want right now? He thought he could better deal with the situation by turning it into a delayed situation. Later, not now, no now, not later, now. He could make out Ruth’s scratchy voice.

-It’s me.

-I see.

Listen, Ruth, I have to call you back later.

Ruth was his girlfriend. That was why he could hang up so quickly without the usual niceties. Ruth would understand. Ruth was an artist too and Basel was soon.

He pressed red just in the knick of time for the return of Miss Ping, shaking her head.

-Lingerie is unknown, sir. Very sorry. Next!

-Wait, I mean, not Lingerie, but von Stroheim or simply Stroheim. V or S, I don’t know. Does it matter, today, I mean, do you really put your laundry under “von” if you are a “von” or do you defer to democracy?

A man behind him kept saying “Man.” Like a mantra. To make him move faster, think faster, talk faster, panic faster.

Miss Ping shook her head in doubt, saying yes, yes, yes, almost as if Miss Ping were a priest and Max standing in the confession booth. She could see into his mind and what was there was not easy. She returned soon enough with a package of ladies’ underwear and bras. Underthings. In a see-through plastic sack. The phone began vibrating again, but this time under the sign Unknown. He picked up. Jittery. Buzzed. Hungover and silly. He hoped it was Nico.

But no sound came from the other side of the line. Miss Ping pushed the laundry towards him.
- 45 Euro.
- For 6 thongs and 3 bras? That’s 7 euros per piece!
-Yes, said Miss Ping, ever unwavering. Math not a strong point for either.
Holding the phone in one hand, he tried prying open his wallet with the other.
- Max? Where are you?
There wasn’t a trace of suspicion in Ruth’s voice; rather, it sounded like pure worry as he sounded rather frazzled, like he might have been talking to a handworker at the studio about the high price of tongs these days.
He didn’t have the 45 Euro.
Without waiting for an answer, Ruth continued,
- The people in Basel keep ringing. All morning. I thought you might have fallen asleep at the studio last night, so I tried reaching you there, but your battery must have gone dead. Anyway, I have you now…

Basel? His work for the fair was done, as far as he was concerned. Why should he be bothered with taking care of every little detail? With an assistant, maybe two, yes, with teams of assistants traveling around the world to set up his exhibitions, that was the future.

- Max, they need the measurements again. Can you give me the numbers?
Miss Ping was waiting for the money with a starched grin.
- 45? He grumbled.
- Special treatment. Stains, said Miss Ping, pursing her lips together.
- Why 45? Height? Width? That can’t be. What are you doing?

-Man, Man, Man!
He couldn’t figure out where the microphone was on his (now) stupid phone. He wanted to whisper aside, Put it on Stroheim’s account, super suave. If he had only read the instruction booklet, he would have known which hole was the right one. Which hole betrayed his voice.
- The connection is really bad. Ruth, Ruth, are you still there?
He slipped the phone into his jacket pocket, which kept spitting out her voice on loudspeaker.

He leaned on the counter towards Miss Ping so that he could see her kitten high-heels and the ginger candies tucked under register. She leaned forward into the smell of dry cleaning fluid and rice noodles. He whispered,
- Can I put it on Stroheim’s account?
He fumbled to pull the telephone out of his jacket.
- Max, where are you?
- I told you already. In the studio.
- Then go to the thing and give me the measurements.
He stepped to the side and pressed his nose to a calendar on the wall featuring nouveau concrete Chinese cities. Twelve of them, all with an instant population of over 10 million. The month of June depicted a collection of nondescript high-rises grouped around a bus stop, a few crippled trees dipped in fog, definitely autumn. He found a few numbers in-between other undecipherable signs on a billboard at a generic intersection.
- You there? 87 by 52 by 115.
He held his breath.
- Ruth?
Maybe it was the right moment to tell her.
- Yes. I’m here. Sorry. Someone keeps ringing under Unknown on the landline.
He liked her voice. Like fine-grained sandpaper. He couldn’t say it, but he said it in his head, slowly. Ruth, I am leaving for Venice tomorrow. That part of the sentence was easy. It was the prepositional phrase that was the killer: With the collector.
It was the muted detail.
-Max, those numbers make no sense.
-It’s an installation anyway so why do they need to know?
- Maybe for the catalog, I don’t know why. Wait, I’m coming over to help you. You sound overwhelmed.
In his fast-forward world he rewound to yesterday’s conversation. Year-before-last, he was in Venice with Ruth. Looking forward to this year’s promised extravagance, Ruth had asked him innocently if he had booked out a room in Les Bains for them. Yes, I mean, No. You know I’ve got my hands full with Basel. I can’t, he had answered vaguely, before running out the door. The words were there, but the meaning was missing.

The Delivery

Nothing was crossed off his to-do list. And there were certain unknowns that had yet to be known, or even listed. And certain knowns that he was uncertain of. He had passed the "Kua-fur" on Torstrasse on the way out the door this morning and wondered if he'd trust them with his mop, a known unknown hairstyle. He was unwashed, unshaven, nothing was packed, and his hair was in a funny phase: at least those were the known knowns. But what was he going to tell Ruth, when would he tell it to her, and how? These were the known unknowns. But that he'd be popping corks on a yacht tonight with les boatpeople, as Ruth once snidely called them, rather than stuck to a beer garden bench in Berlin was a known that he was uncertain of.

The way to Nico’s was paved with obstacles. People he knew, everywhere he looked, dark patches from his past. Lavender lace underwear on wire hangers in see-through plastic is a magnet to attract every last alcoholic critic and B-list artist you ever once bared your soul to with the coming dawn. He stopped for a numb moment, staring at a tattered old balloon in the street. Ruth was on her way to his studio, the collision moment would be soon. A pin-striped, cashmere and ascot figure of perfection jerked him out of his panicked yet paralyzed reverie with a cheerful slap on the back, whom he later recognized as a well-known London gallerist whom he thought he was sure he didn’t know. He smiled and let the fellow rattle on, facts and figures, “23 Million for a work from a living artist, good heavens!” Max had little to say to the matter, grinning now because of the trophy in his hands. No work of his had yet reached the astronomical sums of the auctions. It was “too conceptual,” a dealer once told him at a dinner. His attention, nonetheless, remained focused on the balloon, but he resisted putting in his pocket. It would have been the last thing that he wanted Nico to find on his person.

Turning the corner was like turning the century forward. Two years ago, he’d barely taken notice of her sky-top palace. He’d seen the cracks in the pavement rather than the fringe of a rooftop garden. He remembered how he’d stopped exactly at the same spot with Ruth on the day he found out that his first work had sold. She had taken his head in her hands like a telescope directing it towards that other world.

-You see. The collector who bought it lives up there.

He remembered the distinct impression that he should have seen something where there was nothing to see. Nothing extraordinary, at least, except for a bit of greenery draping over the terrace edge.

From across the street, one could nearly get the distance necessary to see that the building looked like a skinny man wearing an oversized bowler hat made of glass. Bubble-headed. Extreme.

What had made him not refute her request? Saying No was no option for Max when it came to Nico. The silly sound installation in her corridor embodied Max’s dilemma. Pressing one’s ear to a loudspeaker, he could make out the faint sounds of a congregation of old men endlessly affirming and denying an unknown situation: Ja, ja, ja, ja, ja, nee, nee, nee, nee, nee.

It wasn’t Nico who greeted him but Louise.
- Ach. It’s the delivery boy.
- You could at least thank me.
She pressed her hand against his chest and said,
- I wouldn’t come in if I were you.

PART II: The Elevator
Run, run, run, and always with the mobile at hand. In New York, all laundrettes are run by the Chinese. But why must our protagonist run for the underwear of his new American collector Nico? Max, a successful artist in Berlin in the year 2007 (perhaps), is confused: bubble-headed buildings with Beuys installations in the foyer and purple lingerie in plastic sacks are but just a few of the new things in Max’s tumbleweed life. Let the Grand Tour begin here with Part Two, when Max leaves for Venice then Basel. He’s already carrying one suitcase too many: a girlfriend, an ex, and a newbie, or at least he thinks so.

In this chapter we introduce Louise (who thinks, like Copernicus, that the world revolves around her! Or wait, is it the other way around? If she's not Copernicus, then who? Ptolemy, right, sorry. Now that really sounds pretentious. Can we begin again?).
In the elevator Max was full of doubt. In the mirror he saw a man with messy hair. Rumpled. His portrait betrays much of his former life, not much of the new. He will have to give up a few things if he is to install himself upstairs. The elevator began to move. In the Renaissance, the hair illustrated the soul. His soul should be wild, no question. Momentum was the most important thing. It carried him upstairs. But the mood could change in an instant: a bad detail, a wrong word, a crooked look, a dumb snapshot, an illegitimate child. The world was a precarious place.
He felt a light pressure in his head as if it were shrinking some millimeters. When he was a child, someone had told him that his brain was a sponge (beige, not yellow or blue) that sucked up ideas and impressions. One day on the way home from school, while he was thinking thoughts (math homework), he began to hop on one leg, then two, jerking his head about erratically in the hopes that he could replace those thoughts with others (painting the cat’s claws with his sister’s collection of nail polish).
It was during his early childhood Storm and Stress period that his parents had presented him with various painting utensils and watercolor boxes, charcoal, and creative tools (a spoon), in order to excite his experimental energies. After such indoctrination, it took quite a while before he realized that the heroes and geniuses of our time are not artists, but those who produced sellable products or sold unsellables. It didn’t matter if it were gas station nozzles, hair volumizers or power window-openers. These are the things that distinguished Max from a millionaire. Gladly he would have dropped the senselessness of making art to sell liverwurst and pickle sandwiches on Oranienburgerstrasse, or to thrust himself into the market for making hand-carved TV towers (out of oak, spray-painted silver) in order to conquer a new niche for making money (Schmerzensgeld).
In the end, he would remain a visceral realist, an ethereal industrialist, a walking-talking theorix whose concatenation of thoughts led to a proliferation of ideas over images and objects. Who would have thought that what began with his miraculous horse-head sculpture (context: parental interpretation) in the foam of the bathtub at age three would lead to an intangible vocation to produce art? He’d check the details in his dog-eared Vasari later. He’d underlined a detail or two, a detail he could implement in his own life. Did Gigiotto marry his “collector,” his patroness, morphing his main squeeze into his main squeeze?
He was under the impression that as a child he had seemed to be more conscious of things, more conscious, at least, of time, of duration. He even remembered that at the age of five he had thought his life had lasted too long already. He had had the feeling that he would soon disappear from the earth. The elevator ride seemed an eternity now in comparison to those first five years. Retrieving his own underwear before Louise would discover it was the immediate goal he’d nearly forgotten.
The telephone rang pulling Louise back to her desk, as if on an invisible leash. En route to pick it up, her heels click-clacking on the marble of her office, she said hurriedly, “That must be Tim.” Tim was one of Berlin’s better gallerists.
- Didn’t Nico tell you?
Entering Nico's penthouse was like entering a soundproof recording studio. The carpet was a deep purple and it swallowed anything that came near it. Moonwalking was rendered impossible. The lilies in the oversized vases flanking the elevator on both sides overwhelmed the senses. He was standing now alone, face to face with a large canvas covered in bubble wrap, leaning against an antique Chinese armoire. Through the plastic, he could make out a haggard bunch of children's scribbles underneath. If the painting were smaller, Max could have stuck it under his arm. Criminal energies coursed through him if only in fantasy. Further along the long corridor, a round table covered in a heavy tapestry served as a pedestal for family photos: Nico as a child, snow-plowing down from the top of Piz Nair, her father kneeling in front of a dead rhinoceros in some high African grass, a flashed snapshot of her mother sitting next to Elizabeth Taylor at an AIDS gala.
Louise was nearby hammering out details on the phone. Her commando tone echoed in the adjacent room, a steady background of muzak made mad.
- Where is the machine? Not tomorrow, and not only today. Now. Pronto. Presto.
Max stopped dead in his tracks. She wasn’t talking to someone as great as “Tim,” but rather to a lesser species, in her eyes, an assistant, a lackey, an intern, a one-euro worker. She was talking about Venice, about the plane. He looked around, nowhere in particular, and saw himself standing in the Venice airport with nothing but a plastic bag in his hands. No toothbrush. Great and not great, but then again, almost heroic. His plans for the afternoon were shot, the list was nixed. A haircut? Remeasuring an artwork? Momentum stood in its stead.
- At 10. Who says that? Where? In Vicenza. No, I can’t do that. I can’t get another flight, the call came in just this morning. Yes. On the yacht. No, she’ll be alone.
Max swallowed hard. Two days ago, Nico had invited him to come with her to Venice, raving about the suite she had secured, something about a Doggie, she said, “A palace!” He stood in the hall with the lingerie in his hand.
Louise stepped back into the doorway, hand perched on her hip.
- What are you still doing here?
Ignoring her, he turned and headed for the stairs.
- Max, you can’t go up there, I told you already before.
Her hair was pulled back into a bun, tight and uptight, more so than usual. The impulsive, yes, strangely childlike movements of her body had evolved into those of an extremely regimented working girl.
- Didn’t Nico tell you? Listen, Max, I’m under a lot of pressure here and I need to talk to Tim. If you want to visit me then you should come by another time.
Max shook his head and held his tongue. Visit Louise? Why? Because of the piece she sold and never paid me for? He didn’t dare say anything out loud. He just stared at her blankly. Whatever he said, she’d turn around to use for her own benefit. If he said something about the money she owed him, she’d tell Nico that Max was in need. Nico would walk into the room and Louise would say, could say, most definitely, would say, “He’s only here for the money.”
He had to be careful. Louise laid bombs.
At this point, the social plastic of Max's immediate surroundings is unclear. We think we know that Max has slept with Nico, Louise, and Ruth but not necessarily in that order. What Max doesn't know is that Ruth slept with Louise and also with George, Max and Ruth's professor, but not necessarily on the same night. Whether Louise and George ever slept together was presumed but not necessarily true. Did Max ever sleep with George? He couldn't say.
* * *
Hair uncut, Max arrived in Venice considering a color. He attempted a relationship-system diagnosis.
“What are you thinking about?” Ruth asked. Far away, beyond the lagoon, the towers of Venice plucked the haze and heat of sweaty June.
Late last night he had passed by the studio to watch everything disappear, packed into bubble wrap and crates destined for Basel. He would have liked to have done something, anything to the why of it: packed, painted, playdoughed, rubbed and rounded out, plussed and minused, something, anything to make the work more resistant, not resistant to critique but critically resistant to the norms applied to its whatness. He left it alone with its anxiety of communication.
He tried to convince himself that it was so much better to be in Venice with his girlfriend, Ruth. The ferry pulled forwards then backwards, while Max pulled his arm away from Ruth and answered, “Nothing, I'm just a little tired, that's all.” They were sitting in the back of the ferry where the wind put Ruth's hair into disarray. It smelled of gasoline. Max pulled his mobile out of his pocket.
Nothing was there. He shook the phone with two hands like an automat that had refused to spit out a gumball. Still nothing. He held the phone high in the air, hoping to catch a better wave of reception. Still nothing.
- You need an antennae extension, said Ruth.
- I wanted to meet up with Liam at the Bauer at some point.
- There's that party at the Greeks.
- I can't say yet if I want to go.
- Do you mean you don't know what you want or you cannot say?
It's complicated, he thought.
- Only if we go with a water-taxi.
- We're supposed to meet up with Ana and the others on the Rialto Bridge, and from there it's only a five-minute walk.
Once in their hotel room, he began to remember the endless discussions with doormen, make that back-doormen, two years before. The truly important guests arrived via the canal. The era of using the alleyway entry is over, Max pronounced to himself firmly, loudly, and at the same time came in a beep, a notification of a notification of the whereabouts of Nico, while shouting, “Now!”
But he didn't want to pick up his mobile now to read Nico's message in front of Ruth. As soon as she disappears into the bathroom, he can finally check. He stepped over to the window to better receive his instructions from a higher power, like a corner painted black. The SMS read: "Welcome to Italy. Roaming calls cost only .51 cent/min….”
- What’s now? I know, I’m hurrying as fast as I can, she said while undressing.
- Is there such a thing as a Greek Pavilion?
- Maybe it's the Albanian.
- How should I know? There's a party at the Palazzo Papaharalambos. Remember, the one with the gigantic lily pad pond with red frogs where we came for that collector Trotzki's party?
- She wasn't called Trotzki, she said, while running out of the bathroom, cold feet on the marble floor.
Standing naked in front of him, she added, “The Greek Pavilion is just a temporary project.”
He looked at her dumbly, thinking that's not the only thing that's temporary here. But the look was exchanged for one of “what are you doing?” She was putting on her jeans without any underwear.
- What? We’re late and you’re not going to start dictating me about.
Two hours and 8 SMSs later, there was a convergence of Berlin in Venice on the bridge, not only Ana and Jan, but also a host of former collaborators and neurotics, Horst, the director of the next Peruvian Biennale, Sarah, and oh god, the Gorilla, her ex, which was going to make this really uncomfortable. Two others stood quietly at the edge of the group, names unknown, nonetheless having formed their own community by wearing stripes, vaguely French Nouvelle Vague.
- The temporary pavilion, yeah, Tsoriasis is doing it.
- You mean that party Alexis Dannakis does every year?
Max listened, had heard the names somewhere before. His brain, he noticed, was trying to send him an instant message. Two circles appeared in front of his eyes, one red, the other blue, one hers, the other his. The space where they overlapped, the purple part, was getting smaller and smaller.
The synopsis, no, the synapse, no, Max knew the syntax of the connection: the collector Miltiades.
Miltiades was the guy who had resold his work to Dannakis who had sold it to Nico, six months ago. He had thick glasses and eyes the size of eggs that stared with difficulty into the tiny peepholes Max had drilled into his artwork. He had been selecting work for the Greek Pavilion, yes, now he remembered….
- All pavilions are temporary, he said, while thinking that at least this one might contain a Nico.
Her last words to him in Berlin had created a perceptible zone of hope.

PART III: The Stairs
At the end of part II, Max was on his way to what promised to be a mediocre party at the temporary Greek Pavilion in Venice; a party, however, where he thinks he might bump into Nico. We left him with his thoughts of her last words to him in Berlin. Here we travel back in time, when Max – confronted with a series of “if-then” situations – pretends to be a spy in Nico’s penthouse, daring to climb the stairs despite Louise’s warning, “I wouldn’t go up there if I were you…”

Upstairs had long remained a mystery to him. Not that there was an upstairs, per se, but what was upstairs, that was the mystery. Many had been upstairs, Max included, but for a long time, Max had only seen others going upstairs but had never been upstairs himself. He had also seen many coming downstairs, but had never been coming downstairs himself as he had yet to go up. Now that he had been upstairs, a new chapter could begin and Max liked new chapters. He liked beginnings and endings. It was only the middle that ever gave him trouble.

Nico wasn’t exactly what you would call a party-girl, but she was famous for her parties. Not Holly-go-lightly parties where ladies’ hats catch fire, but parties of 300 or more officially invited guests, none of whom truly knew the hostess, for to Berlin she was new. Max would only learn later that she’d hired a public relations firm to handle her personal relations firmly. Making decisions about whom to invite required political party thoughts, as the pie chart of the art world was a difficult demographic. It was not that she was too lazy or naïve. She was of the belief that in order to be accepted in the art world she had to do the right things, collect the right works from the right (leftist) gallerists. She had consorted with a number of her Frankfurter friends, for example, before hiring the right p.r. firm.

Max had crashed several of her parties with a success rate of 4:1. Crashing parties required the consideration of many factors. If you knew host x and were not invited, you were unlikely to attend. If you didn’t know host x and had not been invited, you were more likely to attend. That is, two negatives yielded a probable positive. But there was an “if-then” constant which negated the above considerations: if an uncertain variable of friends were going which might approximate a quantity known as an infinity, then adding yet another uncertain to the equation was inevitable. Even though he didn’t know x and the number of his acquaintances among the attendees by no means approached an infinity, he hadn’t been anxious about crashing Nico’s first party, until he saw the night-shift concierge, who nonchalantly waved them off to the 12th floor. The feeling was that of having run across a pothole in comparison to the true anxiety that washed over him when stepping out of the elevator. No Nico was there to greet them, but instead awaiting each guest were a man and woman holding clipboards, wearing the uniforms of flight attendants.

First he tried arrogance: “I’m Max.”

Then silliness: “Max Horkheimer.”

The attendant didn’t blink, but instead searched out the page dedicated to the letter H.

It wasn’t until his third time there – or fourth if you count two steps into the foyer and a pencil-tapping rejection – that he had discovered the stairs to her interior upstairs at all, let alone the stairs to the rooftop. Max was someone who would go to a party and hang on to one guest for the entirety of the evening, not moving any further from the front door or the bar than absolutely necessary. But at the last party, he had been dragged beyond his path by Ruth, more the peripatetic voyeur than the talking statue.

It was only then that he discovered that Nico’s penthouse was a penthouse duplex plus rooftop. He watched the steady stream of curators and what looked like other young collectors go upstairs. They did come down, not to make a mystery of that, it’s just that they came down differently than they went up, usually stuffed with all manner of things that would either slow or speed up their journey. Standing there with Ruth that evening, there seemed to be an invisible scrim holding them back. Rather, it was a pretentious silk tasseled cord that blocked entry into the mystery upstairs. “Your artwork must be up there,” said Ruth. “I’m not in the mood to cross the line.” “Look. There’s Sheena! She’s been bragging to everyone that she slept with Jocelyn Wildenstein!“

Seeing expert-crasher Sheena go up the stairs gave Ruth all the guts she needed. Ruth began ascending the stairs behind her. Max held his ground, looked doubtfully around. He was stuck in the conference room of his mind, in search of a memo, to, from, regarding. From the top of the stairs, Ruth screamed down: “Max! I found it!”
* * *
Louise’s shrill tone snapped Max out of his reverie of last night’s party and back to the daytime reality show of Nico’s empty penthouse. “It’s not like I am asking you to dig a hole in the ground to catch a cow.” It was her humor that had dug the trap of his falling for her, he remembered now.

Max lightly kicked the bicycle that was leaning against the wall, as if he were kicking himself, mindlessly in all manner of mild frustration. But to call it a bicycle is to hark back to the origins of this Thing, which had become more of a donkey on wheels. Sagging with the pain of overstuffed plastic sacks hanging from every existing hook or bar, it resembled more of an object that used to be a bike without changing the definition of it excepting, of course, its net worth at 80,000 Euro. Max couldn’t stand it, this “it” being the artwork: not because it wasn't good, but because he hadn't thought of it first.

Standing in front of the silk cord, he felt like a serf who has been made into a servant of the court, waiting downstairs until he is called for. A circumstance that seemed more a chore, the longer he waited. If only he were as cheeky as the artist who had made the bicycle. He lived in Hamburg and for his exhibition in Frankfurt he had simply taken a taxi for the almost five-hour journey. When he arrived, he handed the museum director the bill, and even worse, he left the taxi just outside the museum entrance and removed a wheel, so that the taxi was going nowhere, but the meter was still running. (Didn’t he turn the engine off? Yes, and the meter was left running, like a ticking time-bomb.) That was momentum. For the taxi-trap artist, Max thought, there would have been no hesitation.

With this in mind, Max climbed three stairs, then quickly back down two. Then up four stairs and back down five. Now he was standing on the other side of the rope. He ducked underneath it to the eternal return of the downstairs, the place where he was, pacing, waiting, hoping. A cigarette could give this in-between time a purpose, a way of doing something without doing anything, but he'd long ago given up the habit. Nico or Ruth, today or tomorrow, Venice or Berlin: it was the "or" that was weighing him down when he would have been happy with an upper "and." Did he have to make an "or" situation out of an "and" situation? Could he go with Nico to Venice and still be in love with Ruth in Berlin? He shook his head. He was a new man, but not that new. Upstairs was quiet. No, he said to himself, and then quietly, drawing a hardline with his foot on the floor: I am leaving.

He pressed the elevator button, just once, as if not to summon it too urgently. What was his inner hubbub all about anyway? Why should he make such a fuss? Two years ago, he had been with Ruth in Venice. They spent the night spooned together in a sleeping bag placed in the narrow corridor of a friend’s place in Mestre. At five a.m., they were woken up by drunken friends stumbling over them.

He was downstairs from the downstairs now, out the elevator and out the door, back to the past with his back to the future, standing in front his own bike, the bike he had left here last night. It was his own. Ruth had found it at a flea market and had given it to him with a grin one day pointing to the writing on the bar in bright yellow cursive, the single word, Adventure. It was time that he should buy a new bike instead of having this bike in quotation marks, this inside joke between him and Ruth. Adventure!

He pressed the buzzer twice. “What’s wrong?” Louise said. “I forgot something.” “What?” Good question. What had he forgotten? He had forgotten to think of that. He had forgotten himself. Louise didn’t wait for his answer but buzzed him in anyway.

Upstairs everything was the same. Louise was still on the phone: “I sent the fax three times already. Should I scan, email, and DHL it too?”

Another phone began to ring so loudly it resounded in the hall like an alarm. He stood for a moment in the elevator, hesitating to leave its mirrored abyme. Then, like in a film, he sprung out just as the doors were closing, securing right, securing left, imaginary handgun in his hand, he would take this place by force, stealthy, like a cat burglar. He snuck past the office door where Louise was still rattling into the phone and stabbing her pen onto a block of sticky notes. He mounted the stairs, hopping two or three at a time without making a sound.

He felt like Roger Moore. This was his new life and a new life needed a new gadget, a new mobile phone with eighty different functions from toasting bread to boiling eggs, from sanding to shellacking, from putting out fires to pumping air into tires. Something with a heat-detector to distinguish the living from the dead, to distinguish the living from the mannequins wrapped in brown plastic tape he stood facing now. He had met the brown-tape Bataille artist at the party last night, and all he could remember were his horn-rimmed glasses and how he kept going on about the democracy of the destitute in a funny Swiss accent. To his right was a life-like figure in a suit with his head stuck in the wall. Nico’s penchant for artworks employing the human form made navigating the second floor (at night, at least) a little creepy. There were clothes scattered everywhere, but this was no artwork. Obviously, the cleaning lady had taken the day off, or maybe Nico was nearby, engaged in the work-in-progress of unpacking her closet into packed bags. Behind a door was a long corridor leading to the bedroom. Max stood quietly and listened to the dead air. No voices, just the daunting sound of empty space. Footsteps swallowed by the plush rug, he crossed the room to arrive at the Florida room drenched in sun. Max stepped up to the French doors leading to the rooftop garden. He stretched his arms upwards. He could feel at home here, get rich, get fat. Mornings he’d read the papers and have fresh squeezed orange juice brought to him with two croissants, still warm. No more muesli, he said to himself in a whisper.

From far off he could hear the muzak version of “Caribbean Queen,” Nico’s mobile tone. He stood still in his tracks looking towards the TV tower, like a beacon of meaning whose signals lacked a receptor. Then he heard Nico’s voice, coming close, tense. “Louise, I'm not in search of the miraculous!”

It reminded Max of his first close encounter with the collector. Late in the night as the last guests were parting from Max’s party crash no 2, he finally exchanged words with her. She was gazing at him gazing at a series of blurry photographs of a man on a boat.

“I wonder why he didn’t title it with a more secular wording, ‘mind-boggling’ or ‘inexplicable.’ Why do you think he resorted to the religious overtones of the ‘miraculous’?” Her question, though intelligent, was borrowed not bought.

“I don’t know what this ‘mind-bottle’ is, but what I always wanted to find out was the point in time when someone who has gone missing is officially declared dead. The point in time where an overdue boat, becomes a mysteriously sunken one. The point in time where the unknown is relegated to the known, where the uncertainty of the uncertain becomes certain, as if one could pinpoint that anguished moment when a late-arriving dinner date becomes a stood-up one.”

Max stepped back, unsure of how his adventure should end. If he should hide behind a door like a court jester or if he should disappear as mysteriously as he had arrived, before making his mayday connection to another identity? “Is this a secure line?” he wanted to whisper into his mobile.
Nico approached the terrace doors, but screamed in the direction of the stairs: “Only Max. Find him. Now!”

PART IV: Basel
In part IV, we finally get to meet Ruth. Max has gone missing in Venice and so she’s left alone to finish up the installation at Art Unlimited in Basel. At the end of part III, Max was confronted with a series of “if-then” situations – here, he’s only confronted with a series of questionable realities.

Ruth pulled her bags out of the train and into the tram. The hotel booked in Basel was for a double with Max, the last person she wanted to bunk up with – and she was so fraught, she decided that she'd head straight for the fair and throw herself into the work. She'd sleep overnight on a bed of bubble wrap if she had to, but she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep anyway, so what was the point in trying to find another room?

Inside she ran into Max's gallerist who was on the phone, doing loops around the empty booth. She couldn't hear what he was saying. He mouthed something mysterious to her. She wondered if he knew already. The halls dedicated to the Art Unlimited section droned with drilling and the staccato shouts from men with hammers and screwdrivers hanging from their primary colored overalls, red, green, blue. They pushed crates here and there on dollies but it was the huge crane nearby that seemed to generate most of the noise. Pop, pop, Ruth stepped on top of a mountain of bubble wrap to shout at the crane operator:
-How much longer is that going to take?
The answer came back in unmistakable Schwizertitsch:
- bis dass dr Ruedi’s gfötälät hät.

She walked back to the booth wondering why Dr Rudi might need to feed the artwork, wondering when she would ever learn Swiss German or if she even wanted to. Imagining what you heard was just too good.

The gallerist approached her, still talking to his phone, air kisses from the man who seemed completely oblivious to the high costs of "roaming," he thrust a paper into her hand. The work description. She scanned it quickly:

"... beyond the Zeitgeist, time and space meet here in a discourse dedicated to a social practice which the spectator engages with differently, each time they approach the work."

Normally she would have re-written it, but this time, no. Let Max sink in his own alphabet soup.

There was an empty space where Max’s work was meant to be installed already. Two scaffolds stood there like the skeletons from the infamous anorexic twin artists. A few lamps were hanging already, colored lights that made the cigarette butts on the floor look like cigarette butts on the floor and nothing more.

Back in the spring when Max was planning the work, she had warned him that it seemed as if there were too many neon artworks out there,
as if bright-lights sold better, the Kosuth (the dictionary) or the Flavin (religion), and, more recently, the witticisms: neon words (Strike) or neon on the floor (political deconstructivism). But then the Portugese collector Pinteaux had bought a neon work of Max’s last spring – “an attempt to constitute a discourse, which though political does not efface the dimension of the personal.” After that, Max decided he’d make the same work but in green. Series, he said, a series. Ruth despised the idea of doing anything safe. Success made artists conservative.

She shook the scaffolding and a neon fell down. She tried to catch it, but it was too late. Before it could crash, the electric cable cut its fall short as it now dangled before her, strung up instead of hung.

She found Max's assistants sitting outside in a plot of grass smoking a joint.
- Matterhorn doesn't have a horn, you dork.
- It doesn't matter man, that thing is gonna blow its top soon. François told me he saw a documentary about it on YouTube.

It was sunny and her sunglasses veiled swollen eyes. Nothing veiled the redness of theirs. Glassy, they looked happy … until they saw her.
- A box is missing. It wasn’t delivered.
- You guys are aware that the collectors arrive for the Preview tomorrow at 11?
- Ja, so? What should we do?
– Think of a solution, said Ruth, unable to keep her temper.
Neither of them responded and Pepe took another toke.
* * *
Basel was too expensive for the "just looking" art fan club. They'd arrive with the rest, tomorrow. She'd been to Basel before, knew where to find the chutes and ladders, the hammer for 75 Euro an hour. Her ex-beau Tobi had also exhibited here and she'd helped with the installation, sanding and sanding late into the night before washing up in the public toilet, her wet head under the hands dryer. The build-up to opening day were the best nights out ever: all artists and their assistants who were usually artists, no collectors, no career stress....

She drank that evening, perhaps too much. Instead of heading back over the German border to find a Zimmerfrei with lace curtains and dwarves in a garden of geraniums, she snuck back to the hall just before they locked up at midnight walking, sneaking in behind the delivery of Max’s last crate. Back in the booth alone, she grabbed a crow bar and pried it open just as the lights began to flicker out like a flag half-mast, and silence reigned supreme.

Max had disappeared in Venice. He had sent her a cryptic SMS (On way to Palladio Villa on the river Brenta). With whom, whatever, she hated it when he did this. Since then, he’d been unreachable, but at least he'd paid their hotel bill. She pulled out her phone to call him again but what would she say? I’m here in the hall alone with your work locked in for the night don’t worry ‘bout me?

Ruth, who was brought up never to touch a banister, would be sleeping in the halls of Art Basel. She heard the voices of two workers approaching.
- Art sure is ugly.
- Shows how much you know about art. The uglier, the more it's worth.
- This must be worth more than a picture of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby, man.

She was awake early the next morning with the vague aftertaste of a dream, Max having a penis like an electric eel and every time it penetrated Louise’s ass, she'd scream in pain. From the inside of the crate she could see her bag, which she pulled in and pulled on fresh clothes. The hall was still closed and the only sounds were her own, the cracking of a bulb under her full weight, things pulled out of the new crate and thrown about haphazardly. The sounds of spray paint. She put two empty beer bottles in the corner for decoration and as a finishing touch, hung her bra on one of the unlit poles and tacked a clipping from an Italian newspaper to the wall. It looked great. Nothing safe about that work at all.

* * *
- Where are you?
Max sat up in bed and looked out the window. Mountains. Who was the lady on the other end of the line who wanted to know where he was? And why with such agitation?
- Are you here in Basel yet?
He hung up.
Basel? That’s a clue. Was he in Basel? Was he still on the Greek’s yacht? He had spent most of his time during the Venice Biennale on the yacht of a collector he’d only heard of by name. There was a plan, he remembered, to make a stopover in the Swiss Alps before heading to Basel during the three days between the two events. Between Venice and Basel are 500 kilometers of mountains. He supposed that he was somewhere in between both kilometers and days, 250 kilometers and 2 days?

Underneath the thick duvet, something was moving. The phone began vibrating again on the side table.

- Ja, ja, what, who’s there?

- Gallery NN.

But the line was breaking up and he was unsure of what he'd heard. He bent over the mysterious curve at least to try making out the hair color. Mixed blonde, not natural. It didn’t occur to him immediately to whom this head might belong. NN, nomen nominandum, “not knowing the name,” anonymous. The gallery assistant at NN had similar hair.
- Who am I speaking to?
- With the assistant.
Max remembered the lady that they had hired about a half a year ago. He imagined her face. The blonde hi-lites definitely would fit to her multi-toned head. He never would have landed with her in bed, or so he thought on second thought, decapitated maybe. She had, let’s say, other qualities. But the last few days were a blur, a mistake. Like neon in daylight. He couldn’t remember a single artwork from the biennale. Did he ever even make it to the Giardini? Memories of the last biennale and the one before that came immediately to his mind. But what interested him was what was under the duvet and if the woman next to him was the gallery assistant?
- When can you be in Basel?
Something was not right. How could she be calling him if she was in bed next to him? Was that possible? He hung up.

Whose bed he was in? He tried to wake up, sober up, or at least pretend to. The first word that came to mind was the word pfadabhängigkeit, path dependence. He opened his eyes hoping to determine which mountains he was looking at. Then he looked at the hair strewn across the pillow case. Picking up his phone again, he saw that he had 62 missed calls and 279 unread SMSs. He opened the browser to Wikipedia, typing in "path dependence”:

Path dependence explains how the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant.

It didn’t help. Either it was about taking one path or others. When there are alternative paths, those paths are plural. And it’s only a path once I’ve gone down it, not before, he thought. It must have been a path. His telephone vibrated again. The person in bed next to him moved. He caught himself in the act of dreading that this sleeper might wake up.

An hour later he would be on a train from Zürich to Basel. As he shut the door behind him he looked down at the names on the buzzers. Just in case. He’d found a path, but none that he believed he’d been down before.

Basel Badischer Train Station, arrival 14:35, footpath to the fair, ca. 8 minutes.

The first person he bumped into was a critic:
- There's certainly a lingering potential there, a field of tension, deconstruction and construction like I've never seen before in your work.
Max had no idea what he was talking about.
- Are you ok? You seem a little scattered.
He quickly ducked into the crowd, dodging further conversation with the critic. But it seemed like there were swarms of critics around him. He bumped into yet another, who said,
- Max, hey, loved the work. You know, there are artists that deal with life as if it were a dart board, but your work tends to open up a much wilder field that brings ghosts back. Did it really all begin with that clipping from the newspaper on the wall?
- Uh...
- The one with the woman who died of a tongue piercing? I had to laugh about that.
Max pretended to know what he was talking about by nodding his head and giving him his best grin. The next person he bumped into was a writer-turned-curator of one of Germany’s better Kunstvereins, who was on the phone, but motioned to Max.
- When you’re interested, you should propose something to us!
Max wanted to slip past him, hoping to get a glimpse of the work it seemed everyone had seen but himself. The Kunstverein man interrupted his phone conversation again.
- One minute, sorry… Max, hey, I really thought that was great. You've really encapsulated all of the conflict of what it means to be involved in a collaboration. All that red – and were you being serious about the non-profit educational group?
Basel was a landscape of opinions, none of which seemed to make any sense or in any relation to his work.
- Um, for me it was more about a kind of "applied fantastic," yet it when I was doing it, it seemed created out of necessity more than out of any particular events. I like to encounter the work without a strategy, still working within the non-narrative modes....

At last, the short, bald, dwarf-collector: he thought he'd have it easy, here. This guy was more for the dance floor than for any arching critique.
- Fashion as class camouflage? Max, really, you've really outdone yourself this time. Nice work!
The more people Max met, the more he began to feel like distressed leather. Acid washed.

Opening at the Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin, 3 March - 4 April

2011-02-15T03:04:00.000-08:00

There Was an Old Lady

(Films in a pecking order based on the nursery rhyme):

fly / Douglas Gordon
fly / Lucy Powell
spiders / Anri Sala
snail and worm / Ulrike Heise
sea horses / Jean Painlevé
frogs / Henrik Håkansson
octopuses / Jean Painlevé
newt /John Smith
finches / Carsten Höller
crow and pigeon / Julieta Aranda
chicken / Lucy Powell
ducks / Franz Stauffenberg
sloth / Christoph Keller
pussy / Fischli/Weiss
monkey / Christoph Keller
deer /Franz Stauffenberg
donkeys / Douglas Gordon
horse / Anri Sala
bears / Werner Herzog
buffalo / Massimiliano and Nina Breeder
elephant / Douglas Gordon
rhinoceros / Christoph Keller
lioness / Nina Pohl and Patricia Woerler-Horzon

Is it possible to employ an animal as a readymade?

These films, selected by April Lamm, demonstrate the quasi-scientific mind of the artists in the act of observing animals – as if the news program “No Comment” were to focus its lens on the animal kingdom. Combined in a two-hour loop, the order of the films is based upon the nursery rhyme and memory game “There Was an Old Lady.”
There was an old lady who swallowed a fly. I don't know why she swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die. There was an old lady who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her. She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don't know why she swallowed the fly. Perhaps she'll die. There was an old lady who swallowed a bird. How absurd to swallow a bird …

Like a monitor playing the “breaking news” in a bar, the concatenation of animal films does not demand the visitor’s complete concentration; rather the situation provides an opportunity for some much-longed for slowness, or, in local parlance, a sing-along. There will also be musical intervals including “The Labyrinth Scored for 11 Different Cats” by Terry Fox and Marcel Broodthaers’s “Interview with a Cat.” Guest host Rocky the turtle will be present, albeit on the quiet side.

Additionally, a catalogue will be published by Sternberg Press, gathering together absurd animal stories collected by Clara Meister and other nonsensical things edited by April Lamm and designed by Quentin Walesh.

There was Douglas Gordon who swallowed a fly. I don't know why he swallowed a fly. Perhaps he'll die. There was Lucy Powell who swallowed Douglas Gordon and his fly. I don't know why she too swallowed a fly. Perhaps she'll die. There was Anri Sala who swallowed Lucy Powell and a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her who swallowed the fly hitting the camera rim (how dim!). There was Franz Stauffenberg who swallowed a nutty duck who swallowed a hypnotized chicken just to eat the wriggly spider inside her. Then there was Carsten Höller and Julieta Aranda, who swallowed some birds and some birds that swallowed some birds. How absurds (!) those birds, who chanced upon Ulrike Heise and the worm (and snail!) that squirmed. There was Henrik Håkansson who swallowed a frog not on a log, thank dog, which was swallowed by Fischli/Weiss who swallowed a cat. Imagine that(!) to swallow a cat. Perhaps they'll die. There was April Lamm who swallowed a dog. What a hog(!) curator to swallow a dog to swallow a cat to swallow those absurd bird-eating-birds and a frog! But what happened to John Smith’s newt? How astute not to swallow that newt, being Big and all. There was Christoph Keller who swallowed a sloth to swallow the monkey who would swallow the dog-hog and that was all too much so he puked up Anri Sala who had swallowed a horse, who had swallowed Franz Stauffenberg fat from his deer and puked up Douglas Gordon who then swallowed a donkey. Werner Herzog came to the rescue by swallowing some pooping bear who swallowed Massimilian and Nina Breeder who swallowed a slow buffalo who swallowed Nina Pohl in her ever-changing role and Patricia Woerler who swallowed a lioness tail twirler or was it the other way around? But who swallowed the rhinoceros, how preposterous (!) or the elephant? Surely not the turtle (turtle? Clara Meister, the tell-a-tall-tale turtle? No, that doesn’t rhyme even for a dime!) so surely, that’s not what we meant, Mr Elephant, how forgetful of you….

Donald Judd, 1984, complains....

2010-07-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

"I plan to lambast art critics later, but want to say here that one reason art criticism is so bad and irrelevant is that it is extremely badly paid. Now and then someone sensible comes along, but it is soon gone, while permanently there are Barbara Rose and Hilton Kramer, two critics whose mediocrity I'm sufficiently sure of to mention. Art criticism could be a necessary and interesting activity; for this there must be professional critics with integrity. It takes at least a month to write a good article for an art magazine, for which, I think, the critic gets around five hundred dollars, which multiplies to $6,000 a year, $8,000 if they moonlight." -- Donald Judd

Failed Fashionista No. 4 (working-class)

2010-07-13T00:48:00.000-07:00

Contradictions:
Fashion Highs....er...Lows

While at the showroom of Vladimir Karaleev the other day, I asked him if he named his wittingly ripped-torn-shorn pieces. The Andy, the Mickey, the Sue? (Thanks, Sam!) The tug? The yank? But wait, what’s Karaleev’s trick? How does he make a rip look romantic? How does he make it look Parisienne and not partisan New Jersey? It made me begin to think of the language used to describe so many of this year’s favorites.

Jersey, it would seem, has taken over the scene. Of course, it’s better when it’s not just jersey, but “sheer” jersey. Or if it has an uneven hem (bad seamstress) or side vents (‘cause when you’re working it can get hot). Perhaps it’s an indicator of the “democratization” of fashion jargon. In fact, many of the recent season’s fabrics and cuts have a direct relationship to the parlance of class conflict. What we are witnessing is a subtle Bruce Springsteenization of the fashion world. It’s a way of getting a little closer to the People by wearing working-class gear, cargo pants or “distressed” leather. (Though “distressed” does sound rather Jane Austen in comparison to the ordinary “stress” of Charles Dickens.) The favored jumpsuit (or, fully ironic, playsuit) is not a far cry from a gas station attendant’s overall.

And almost everything has to be “oversized” which made me refer to a recent shopping trip as an exercise in buying potato sacks with belts. Why diet anymore if there are no zippers or seams to control our cravings for cookies? You have to be rich to wear these things. Rich people eat cookies and pay someone to vacuum out the fat out of their stubby knees.

And those purposeful wrinkles, those ordinary indicators of a pleb, what are they called? “Ruched” indicates a puckering of fabric that looks like the ruffled seam of a lettuce leaf. “Let them eat cake,” cried Marie Antoinette, and in this case, I decry, Let them eat lettuce! Give me your tired, your poor, your Salad days, so that we working plebs can find a better way of fitting into our slouchy pants. Either way you look at it, fashion jargon seems to compensate for the guilt one might feel in a world strangely absent class conflict.

-- April Lamm, 11 July 2010

The Anarchist Journalist

2010-03-08T13:16:00.000-08:00

http://www.taz.de/1/berlin/tazplan-kultur/artikel/?dig=2010%2F03%2F06%2Fa0054&cHash=c1814faa51

on NPR!

2010-02-19T02:21:00.000-08:00

http://berlinstories.org/2010/02/12/april-lamm-on-picturing-america-from-afar/

Failed Fashionista No. 3 (Watch Out)

2010-02-04T11:06:00.000-08:00

Watch Out
By April Lamm

What could be sexier than sporting an accessoire still spotted on the wrists of Hungarian businessmen in mauve? I’m talking about the digital watch. Trendsetters could be seen sporting them years ago –see Prada’s brown Bakelite version, Spring 2005 -- but we have yet to witness the blockbuster comeback of the digital watch.

In the era of the handheld databank gizmo and its accompanying motion – the two-finger swoop – wearing a watch is like wearing a monocle. But the digital watch is what makes others watch you. It sets you apart from the complicated crowd of swoopers with apps. You know where the next bookstore is because a friend told you. Leave your handy cell behind. It will only make you late. And let this be a plea for the importance of being on time.

I remember the heyday of the digital watch, how awed we were that we could tell time, the exact time, in the dark. The favored form was a flattened octagon, quasi-Buck Minister Fuller prêt-a-porter, solar powered, and if you were lucky it was equipped with a melody to sound the alarm. It was shock resistant and perhaps even featured a world map (!). Even the names were sexy: G-shock sounded like an overheated G-spot; Texas Instruments, like a handsome nerdy scientist; Citizen bore an air of timeless cosmopolitanism, and Seiko was the least sexy of the lot, but also unknowingly my very first Japanese word – which translates into either “exquisite,” “minute,” or “success.” Knowing that now makes the phrase “I like your Seiko” a very nice one indeed.

Three thirty-three. The digital watch era also marked the time when we began to speak outside of the rounded 10s or more exact 5s, the squareness of a half past, quarter past, quarter til. Four twelve: time began to sound like a hotel room. Digital time made us sound anal to be sure, brutally truthful, seemingly less subjective, at times, conveying the feeling of being right (and at worst besserwisserisch).

I happened upon a Tiffany ad in an old issue of The New Yorker featuring their line of digital watches from 1975 called the Concord. The watches had been arranged on the page in a Boogie-Woogie Mondrian grid against an all red background. A Bermuda triangle of speed, London, Paris, New York, the Concord, the digital Concord, let it comeback, please.

END

Failed Fashionista No. 2 (Recession Wear: Perks of the Nudes)

2010-02-04T11:02:00.000-08:00

Wasting Away – or rather, Waist, go away! – in Repression Era Wear
By April Lamm

So there’s wasted and there’s waisted, and I cannot get enough of the high-waisted looks from those shops of others’ “waste.” I’m shopping primarily secondhand these days and what could be less wasteful and more ecologically sound than hoarding what would only fill the landfill. Shopping for high-waisted pants, you see, represents the ultimate optimism and the ultimate do-gooding. What fashion signaled the end of the Great Depression? The high-waisted roaring 40s. What’s more, you don’t have to do credit crunches to fit into them. That is, your core bank account – the piggy bank – supports your addiction to these $3.99 Goodwill goodies.

Ok, so truth be told, the idea of wearing recycled pants gives me the heebeegeebees. And though it’s never been a street name that’s sounded anything less than mangy, my pant collection is pure high street, Mulackstrasse. It’s what I pair up with them that’s yesterday’s goods. Recently, I found three “new” tops in my new favorite shops, used, yes, vintage, no. Silk-imitation polyester tops, wash and go – at the risk of sounding like a shampoo commercial, we’re talking about more time for travel and leisure. RTW, no ifs, ands, or buts, and if someone backs into you and your cocktail, you can always convert the goodwill shirt into a holy holed Balmain by cutting the stain out. These tops deviate from the normal button-up with flattering pleats at the collar bones and blousy arms cinched at the wrist. No removal of the shoulder pads necessary, though I’m still unsure of the comeback of the Pad. All three are in hues of nude, and though it’s tempting to say that nude is the new black, it’s not. Black is the new black, red is the new black, and nude is just an interesting side dish I’ll never tire of, like mashed sweet potatoes. Furthermore, this rosy nude evokes the era of taupe. I don’t mean to digress into a diatribe on color in the midst of my push for recession-wear, but… remember that color? It’s not one of your 64 crayons, but connotes rather the tone of a lady who means business, Rosie the Riveter business. Roll-up-your-sleeves business, yes, but just let them blush to think that you’re nude while you’re doing it.

END

Failed Fashionista No. 1 (Immortal Spandex)

2010-02-04T10:58:00.000-08:00

Immortal Spandex

Spandex is immortal. I know it. I speak from a place of wisdom, from the Planet of the Unitarded. (For earthlings unfamiliar with this futuristic state of mind, think of the tortuous medieval costume once known as a pee-prohibitor.)

With that image in mind, let us argue the contrary to prove the point: if spandex were mortal, it would be found in mounds of those musty depositories of the faded unwanted, the garment industry’s graveyard, the Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc. But contrary to what you might conjecture, spandex is conspicuously missing from any of these second-hand shops on Earth. Of late, in order to cope with the discrepancies between my addiction to more and the crisis of less, I began to do what I did so often in the 80s: thrift. Hence, after much field research, I have come to the conclusion that every lycra-legged lady out there is hogging their old spandex. Give ‘em up, I say, I want some hand-me-down spandex! Vintage spandex, what could be better?

I jest, of course.

Sure, it’s chemical, artificial, made mostly of polyurethane, which sounds like something you do to your floors to make them shiny. Polyurethane used to be used as an anesthetic, numbing any feelings you might have. It clads the hard-bodied bottoms of superheroes galore, sure, but on the other hand, it also sounds highly flammable.

Let’s face it. Shopping for pants is a form of mental torture. On top, one remains relatively uniform. Tit size remains a constant where as the bottom is an elastic that expands with the increasingly lost resistance to every cookie that crosses your path. Our nether regions are non-heroic.

Historically, the original era of spandex culminated with the original era of disco, that is, the era when we used to dance … a lot. In the 1970s, Patricia Fields claims to have invented the modern day legging as we know and love it today. And while it might have been Jane Fonda who transformed the verb “workout” into a noun in 1982, contrary to my memory, Fonda was not wearing the shiny spandex I was seeking, but rather a dull striped cottony variation thereof. The disco roller rink muse Olivia Newton John wasn’t wearing it either in Xanadu in 1980, but she did wear it in her bad girl gear in the culminating scene of Grease back in 1978. In her black shiny spandex, she morphed from a conservative Pink Lady into a slinky one dipped in ink. That’s how she got her guy.

There’s just something irresistible about a material that is simultaneously historic and of the hereafter. And it is one of the few items where you can reliably order a generic subjective S-M-L-XL. Spandex is, or so I learned, a material that stretches 500 times its “relaxed state.” No stress. It’s not snake proof, though. But on the other hand, it’s a good retainer of heat.

My own personally hogged spandex collection was once reserved for the annual dance recital. In my jazz flats, leggings and matching spandex silver sequined bandeau, I performed on a stage for a crowd of 50 mothers, and came as close as I’ll ever come to becoming Madonna. Earth, Wind, and Fire and … spandex, immortal spandex: since the discovery of sugar, no better material had ever been found.

A Confederacy of Delirium: Dubai Düsseldorf

2010-01-19T07:05:00.000-08:00

Life in Dubai Düsseldorf: a Confederacy of Delirium

(a version of this was published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 237)

It would seem that not even cities can remain single these days without someone trying to partner them up. Cities need twins as much as political parties need coalitions. Neither an example of town twinning nor sister cities, the proposed “Confederation of Dubai Düsseldorf” is as practical a proposal as the partnering planets. As of the autumn of 2009, a few artifacts from the actual imagineered merger of two cities, like two private corporations, have been pinned to the walls of the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf. This Confederation “DD” has been assigned its own flag, currency, and national costume. Art has all but been eliminated with the exception of two paintings and a sculpture, or rather an “it,” that is, a decaying “Entity” which bears a strange resemblance to a dried up orange under a glass vitrine. The architectural model of the twin art museums rises above the Rhine mirroring the form of its cooler underground double, an elaborate vault buried (quite literally) in the sands of Dubai. But the ultimate symbol for this ill-fated phantom marriage of two disparate cities is manifest by the now-traditional way of giving a city a recognizable face: that is, by building a recognizable building. It has been proposed that each of the former “Twin Towers” of New York, relics of vertical civilization history, be reconstructed, one in each town, as the “Friendship Towers.” A short Blade Runner-esque film poses the demise of the destruction of Tower East, that is, the one in Dubai.

The idea of Dubai Düsseldorf is part fiction, part real. Indeed, it stems from the very real kinship that began between Düsseldorf’s medical establishment and the Sheikhdom’s family’s medical needs and later culminated, apparently, in 2007 when Dubai's Transportation Authority, Matter Al Tayer, proclaimed: "I love Düsseldorf. It's my favorite city!” As he was referring to the bike lanes and pedestrian zones, he might have said the same of Amsterdam or Muenster.

It sounds strange coming from one of the few citizens of what urban critic Mike Davis once referred to as “Milton Friedman’s Beach Club: free enterprise, no taxes, no trade unions, no elections,” hence, no protest, no dissention. Dubai is the land of “supreme lifestyle” and superlatives in general: the soon-to-be tallest skyscraper, the largest replica of the world map in sand, the longest fully automated (i.e., driverless) metro, the most expensive horse race, the most most [sic] expensive hotels, and, at an estimated 1%, the tiniest “local” population. Dubai, that is, is a city of working nomads. Home to most is elsewhere.

I spent three hours on a grey Sunday afternoon soaking up the charms of Dubai’s phantom partner Düsseldorf, in search of what the locals (that is, citizens) love most. A mini-marathon had replaced the conspicuous consumption of the Kö – but the shops were closed anyway, so I was forced to one of life’s more anachronistic pleasures, what the French refer to as léche-vitrine, or “window licking.” When I asked people on the street what I should see, the unanimous reply was surprisingly “The Rhine!” And so I made my way to the river and what I found was a series of shoreside restaurants, each with its own variation of under 10 euro platters, schnitzel and French fries. Meandering through the streets of the old city, I encountered the most dire example of public art I have ever seen. It was called “Auseinandersetzung,” that very German word for which an English equivalent is lacking. Depicted were two life-sized derelict men, one fat, the other thin, cast in bronze. They wore the desolate faces of the Burghers of Calais. Their gaze lacked intensity: perhaps their intelligently intense argument, their “Auseinandersetzung” had reached the point of looping, of missing the point altogether.

My parting glance of Düsseldorf involved three grumpy (I guessed) octogenarians yelling at each other on one of the more intimate of the famed shopping streets. Two against one: the pair of older ladies were barking at a lonely one who was feeding the pigeons in front of Zara. “You can’t do that!” “I know, I know, but the bread was already in the street and they would have eaten it anyway.” “But you cannot do that!” “I know, but I’m doing it anyway!” “But you cannot do that!” They continued this loop until distance rendered them mute. If this protest in defense of pigeon feeding is any indication of what one can and (likewise) should not do in the spirit of a “supreme lifestyle,” then by all means.

April Elizabeth Lamm

“Dubai Düsseldorf,” 28 August – 8 November 2009, at the Kunstverein Düsseldorf, with Ayzit Bostan, Antje Majewski, Markus Miessen, Eva Munz, Ralf Pflugfelder, Z.A.K., and Ingo Niermann with Peter Maximowitsch and Stephan Trüby

Blurring America

2009-05-13T05:33:00.000-07:00

I went to the Guggenheim the other day. I stood in front of a still life depicting a salt & pepper shaker huddled together with a shiny chrome napkin dispenser, creamer, and a bottle of ketchup and cried.

It must have been an instance of nostalgia. Or perhaps what the Germans call “home pain,” Heimweh. As always, I turn to writing when overcome by a feeling that remains muddled in my mind. Writing helps me tickle out the inarticulable, which is usually a one-liner: I left the Guggenheim feeling “nostalgic.”

Art critics dare not use nostalgia as a point of departure. It even seems to have become a bit of a dirty word these days as many artists are accused of making nothing new under the sun. Instead their work is “nostalgic,” hence, lacking in originality, often harking back to the 60s and 70s, on the one hand, or the 20s and 30s, on the other. Indeed, in the critic’s vernacular, “nostalgic” is almost on par with “decorative”; that is, the anti-thesis of “critical” or “conceptual.”

So why did this “nostalgia” leave me with a feeling that these artworks were surprisingly good? Yet another simple feeling, this “good,” but it was the complex emotions stirred up by this good that made me go home to ferret out the reason I might have unwillingly become a fan of the much-maligned Photorealists.

In the 1970s in America, High Art was far from Photorealism. Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal, you name it, that was High. Photorealism was low. It was so low, it wasn’t even Camp. But photorealism leaned towards an appropriation of the aesthetic adopted by Harley Davidson drivers or people in Chevy pick-ups, tits and ass and sunsets galore spray-gunned or airbrushed in glittery gloss along the side of the Slushy Shack. “Neon in daylight,” said Frank O’Hara.

And that’s just it. The photorealists borrowed from a “real” aesthetic but their subject matter was poetic, and perhaps even politically real. When Robert Bechtle depicts a family eating soft ice cream at an outdoor roadside hamburger and frankfurter joint, you see a lot more than just that. In Foster’s Freeze, Escalon (1975), the mother sits somewhat distanced from her children, as if buying them ice cream buys her the time to look through the booklet she’s just bought explaining the historical site just visited. The ice cream is the kids’ compensation, in turn, for having suffered through the historical site. It’s the father (or the stepfather, or the boyfriend – with the rampant rate of divorce-on-demand in the 70s) who takes the snapshot. His aviator sunglasses have been left behind on the table. He’s caught them by surprise. No pleads for a smile, look this way, “Say cheese,” no: instead he’s captured the moment, this in-between moment of a summer holiday road trip, before the map gets pulled out again, and “Mom, how much longer do we have to drive?”

We slurped blue-ice with abandon. We didn’t have to nibble at dainty pink, green or lilac macarons from Ladurée. We gorged on black-and-white cookies by the bundle, ripping them apart to eat the creamy stuff in the middle first and had competitions as to who could stuff the most Ritz crackers in their mouth and still sing, “Mary had a little lamb.” The world was … fun. These are the remembered emotions unearthed by a picture of a woman and two children eating ice cream.

And as for that diner shot? The diner was the democratic eatery, par excellence. It catered to the late-night shift, the to-go crowd, truck drivers and men in blue overalls. I was neither, but I was a part of the hedonist late-night Manhattan transfers, that is, a disco dancer, and the diner provided a hangout spot to recap and refuel. Our “last drink” at 4 a.m. was a water and a cup of borsch before hitting the sack. I miss that. I really do.

Inspector Clouseau Attends an Auction, November 2008

2009-03-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

What a Contemporary Art Auction Is Depends on What Your Definition of ‘Is’ Is
by April Lamm
(a version of this was published on 20 November 2009 in the German edition of VANITY FAIR)

It begins before the herd is seated, and the un-herded few leave before it is over. It is not the opera nor the ballet but a staged battlefield where artworks are stock: up, down, out. There is no intermission, the pace is relentless, a “piece” sells for millions or is “passed” on in a minute. None have qualms about coming late or leaving early: leaving after the piece you wanted is bid out of your range. I’m bored, honey, let’s go.

It’s a quick and quixotic theatre of inconspicuous consumption. It’s conceptual and concrete: the artworks are abstracted but real and the people who acquire them are real but abstracted, that is they are not real people but “the lady here,” “the gentleman there,” “you sir at the back,” “yes, madam, I see you here on the aisle.” They hold paddles with numbers but all that one can see from the back – from where I sit – are the backs of well-coiffed heads. P.T. Barnum raised high in the chancel, the auctioneer, sways dramatically right to left and left to right like an amateur singer in an off-off-Broadway musical. The ring-leader of the spectacle gestures mostly to the first few rows of heads, the bigwigs. Some are seen, while others are represented by the pew dressed in black gripping old-fashioned landlines. And they have names: “Alex can I have one more? It’s Alex now against the lady’s bid. Alex, Charles is against you and the lady now. The lady is out. Charles are you still in? Can you go one more? Now it’s not yours Alex, no, fair warning, I can sell it at…. Sold to Alex on the phone. Alex may I have your number? Paddle number 0010, thank you sir.”

It’s a battle between invisible parties who communicate via secret agents bidding on their behalf. They hide behind aliases: Alex and Charles or Daryl and Warren. To further complicate matters, Alex is not always Alex 0010, but Alex 434, 1757, or 658. Alex is legion. There’s the rush of the beginning, the boredom of the middle, the blurriness of the end. Was that good, bad, medium rare? After so many artworks – 64 lots at Sotheby’s and 75 lots at Christie’s in an hour and a half – and so many escalating sums, you feel as if you have entered a search term and gotten lost in the links. Did that just sell for 9 million or 900,000?

It is the week of contemporary auctions in New York and everyone is on tenterhooks. This week defines the moment whether or not the art world is a submarine or a sinking wreck (while the rest of the world, or those who owned houses, are breathing “underwater”). “Many like to put their money in banks; I like to put it on my walls,” said rock-star art collector Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame, who is putting yet another of his Basquiats up on auction. It is because of this penchant, this trust in art as an investment that the art world lived out its own parallel market, largely through the wild sums reached on auction. I remember at one point asking myself whether or not 200 million was a lot to spend on an art collection (witness George Michael and partner Kenny Goss) if a single piece of art could potentially cost you 72 million? That was 2007, when what they call the bubble was big.

It remains a mystery to me why people buy art on auction when they can get it for much cheaper through a gallery or dealer. Why people sell, sure, that’s easy to understand. But buying? It makes no sense. It only makes sense to buy works on auction when they are works that are no longer available in a gallery, works that are rare or difficult to acquire. When they are what no one dares to call them: bargains.

For many auction-goers this week, Sotheby’s or Christie’s is Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Sotheby’s is Bacon, Basquiat, Hirst, Koons, Lichtenstein, Murakami, Prince, Richter, Stella, Warhol, Wesselman. Christie’s is Wesselman, Warhol, Stella, Richter, Prince, Murakami, Lichtenstein, Koons, Hirst, Basquiat, Bacon. The same but different. Why do the same artist names always come up on auction? This was the question that had long-plagued me. Was it only a matter of money making more money? When a Richard Prince Nurse, one of a series of 19 paintings that once sold in a gallery for $80,000 each, sells on auction for 8 million some 12 years later, what you have is a gain of , absurdly, 10,000%. Prince has just had a major retrospective at the Guggenheim, but there are 19 Nurses out there painted in 2003-2005, and recently I had seen drawings elsewhere. The artist is still alive and kicking and he might decide to take up a fancy for making yet another Nurse. Wouldn’t you just go to Barbara Gladstone to find out if she might find a collector who was willing to sell at a large profit but not quite so large as what one might get or might not get at auction? The matter is not easy as Prince is not Gladstone anymore, but Gagosian, you see. And a Richter is not a Polke, god knows why. Bidlo or Sturtevant is not Warhol, but Warhol is nearly cut from the list of all tomorrow’s parties. Sherry Levine is not Carl Andre, or at least not yet.

“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” Bill Clinton once said of his affair with Monika Lewinsky. "There is nothing going on between us." His reference to the present tense “is” made his statement true. I had always wondered why some of those same always-on-auction artists are represented by Larry Gagosian. Could one say, Larry Gagosian is Sotheby’s? And if so, is Larry Gagosian Christie’s too? Can Larry be more than Larry? Larry is Sotheby’s and Christie’s and, well, Larry too? Years ago, it was well-known that Larry on the auction floor is not really Larry but S.I. Newhouse. But now even Larry is legion. Larry might be Si, Charles, Ron, David, Aby, Francois, Steve, or Dave.

Which brings me to a new matter of the Importance of Being Lisa: she is not just any Lisa but a new acquisition in the ranks of Sotheby’s employees. Lisa Denison was chief curator of the Guggenheim for many years and destined to replace the director Thomas Krens, until she surprised them all by jumping ship and taking course with Sotheby’s. That is, when you are at Sotheby’s, Lisa is a warm gun, which might help or hinder her client. She is a Brand Name.
* * *

What’s in a name? A name is a name is a name, but that name is not always the name, if you know what I mean. The Pink Panther is a diamond and not Inspector Clouseau. This is clear; do not tell me what I already know, you say? But what becomes confusing is that a Rothko is not always a Rothko.

If you successfully bid on a “Rothko” you are only guaranteed “Rothko” for a limited time of 5 years. At 72 million divided by 5, that’s 14, 4 million a year, a mere 1,2 million per month for the belief in a Rothko. Should you discover that your “Rothko” is a fake after 5 years of having it above your sofa, you might have to re-define what the meaning of “is” is. What a million “is” is also a matter up for discussion, but that’s not an issue for a Marxist with Groucho leanings.

I had asked several people and no one could come up with an answer. It was a case of the missing MacGuffin, the necklace, the diamond, the mysterious papers, the brief case, which we always see but never know what is. Why do people buy at auctions when the guarantee is only a guarantee for the next 5 years? It depends on how you define “guarantee.” The auctions were full of MacGuffins, the plot being driven by the demand for more alone.

It was a case for Inspector Clouseau and his chaotic comic reasoning. Clouseau was at the auctions, that is, the comedian Steve Martin, whose connubial relations made him one degree closer to me than years before (after having married a colleague of mine last year). He was either in disguise, perhaps as one of the many European men in pin-striped suits and flamboyant scarves to frame their natural-looking wavy manes. Perhaps he was the lady with the purple fade to blue hair. “So very last-season Prada,” I heard someone say in snobby mockery of her hue. “Rothko could have done that,” said another. My question was “Is this Steve Martin in one of his many Chief Inspector disguises? “Comme des Garçon once dressed me as a hunchback,” a fine Southern lady collector confessed to me at a dinner after the auctions, “and when Rauschenberg saw how foolish I looked he said, ‘Just go to the bathroom and turn it inside out and I’ll sign it’.” Now that is a true collectible, a piece perfect for the auctions – according to the old-fashioned meaning of “is.”
* * *

“Look at it as a funnel. What you’re hearing is the very bottom of a funnel.”
“Like Pollock the painter?”
“Yes, he is… he is Pollock the funnel arranger guy.”

This is a description of a drummer getting his socks off about the playback of a drum-riff. He’s talking with his manager and a radio “personality” Crabby Cabbie. The drummer, at the height of his powers, is described as being Pollock. Jackson, that is, the piss painter, the angry man of the Cedar Tavern, the guy who painted on the floor.

Lars Ulrich is not a drummer. He is Pollock.

Inspector Clouseau reasons: if Ulrich is Pollock, and Pollock is selling his Basquiat, what this art market “is” now is not easy to define. A hedge fund manager described it to me like this: Call the $8M for a Prince painting in ’08 a spike and chart the long-term trend---remember this result is coming off a major retrospective and eight years of cheap borrowing. Will anybody have money after this crash is over? And then what are the 19 Nurses worth? Markets are very efficient over the long haul. My guess is that it will be like living in Apt 2-A – nice address but not much of a view, plus all the street noise.
END

Overnight at the Guggenheim as the World Turns

2009-03-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

Sanitarium

(a version of this was published in the German edition of VANITY FAIR on 20 November 2009)

My friend Natalie is chock-full of nuggets of esoteric knowledge. As we were standing in front of a vitrine of vintage Channel jewelry pieces at Bergdorf Goodman’s the other day, she said, “People who are attracted to circles are usually facing an onslaught of madness.” It gave me pause, for I was about to spend the next night, election night, in the middle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s magnificent monument to circular form, on a circular bed, that, furthermore, would be rotating slowly, round and round all night long.

Though it is imperceptible, we are always revolving, spinning, going round in circles, or at least, we are told that we are doing this without our knowing it, that our world is round, that we make one rotation around the sun every 24 hours (which is not to forget that the moon rotates around us) that is, we spend our life in going in circles, so to speak, whether we like it or not. What would it do to the powers of our mind to add a further revolution to our already rotating bodies? Was this the question circulating in the head of the artist Carsten Höller when he made the piece?

Over the years, I had become familiar with Höller’s genre—in 2001, I skinny dipped in his Giant Psycho Tank, a sultan-sized salt-water bath in the middle of the Kunstwerk Berlin, and I bathed in the color field created with the help of his Kiruna Psycholabor Instruments, a Lichtecke, at Galerie Esther Schipper; I’d donned his Upside-down Goggles, which turn the world upside down, and if you wear them for 7 days straight, right-side up. But never had I slept in his bed, no, which was occupied for many years by an artist extraordinaire, Rosemarie Trockel, who, in collaboration with Höller, once created a pig pen for the spectacle of watching human beings attending the documenta, back in 1997. Höller is an artist, you see, who doesn’t dawdle in the Laboratory of Doubt as we all do, passively curious but doing nothing about it. He makes things. He makes instruments, or artworks, if you will, that are designed to provoke a state of uncertainty in the viewer, to engender a feeling of helplessness as a cure for what Höller calls the "disease of certainty."

Getting an invitation to sleep in Höller’s bed was no easy certainty, mind you. He has a wife with whom he lives in Sweden, and a homemade aviary with a large collection of exotic birds to care for, and he is building a second home in Africa. The dates that I would be available to sleep in his bed – in the Guggenheim Museum, no less – were in direct conflict with some “Double Club” he had organized with Miuccia Prada in London. The conjunction of our planets, it would seem, or even the alignment of our bodies in the same hemisphere, was not a matter to be left to the stars. So when he sent me an sms saying “The 4th is now available” I jumped on the chance, forgetting for a nano-second, that the 4th of November was not just any night, but the night that would inaugurate a new era: when American could finally begin to be what she should have long been.

So I packed my bags in Berlin and my boyfriend, for good measure, and began to pout and fret that we would be stuck in an inverted ziggurat, a tomb of recent art history, free to explore the exhibition “theanyspacewhatever” sure, but not free to explore the Revolution and Evolution of my homeland just outside the revolving door. Would there be access to the Internet, a television, a radio? I began to regret that I had wished so hard to spend a night in Höller’s bed. Be careful what you wish for, or so the saying goes.

We checked in at 6:30 p.m. on the dot, via the service entry (how gauche!) at the end of a long ramp. The “concierge” would be our guide and constant companion for the evening, our butler armed with knowledge of this loose group of artists, and an earpiece, a coil that looked as if he was either a member of the secret service, or hard-of-hearing. It was a sign, a portent of things to come, yes, even our Guide was the bearer of yet more circles, a spiraling coil dangling from his ear! But first, we were asked for our I.D. and pasted with the kind of stickers one gets at conferences where they serve coffee in Styrofoam cups. We were then asked to sign a form basically stating that if we stole anything we’d be fully responsible, but if anything was stolen from us, well, tough luck. So we signed over our rights to the ownership of our property (as one-way Obama socialists in our Brave New World), and began the long labyrinthine journey through the hidden bowels of the museum, towards our room, some 8 stories above us. Occasionally Brendan would speak into his shirtsleeve to an unseen Big Brother, “Yes, I have them,” “No, I don’t think so…” Not only were we being assisted, we were being monitored from an unknown party in an unknown room somewhere beyond.

Exiting the elevator, “Ramps six to one,” the artist Liam Gillick’s sign informed us from above. “It’s better not to know,” Douglas Gordon’s wall text told us from below. There was our room, a square bed on a round platform in a truncated pie-shaped nook overlooking a cavernous spiral rotunda. (It was exciting to see that our new era would be ushered in on black satin sheets, another personal first.) Breakfast would be served at 7:30, and check-out was at 8:30 latest. “You may view the exhibition at your leisure,” or so we were told. “I want to see the exhibition whilst sitting in a wheelchair,” I politely requested our guide, who found my wish odd, and perhaps not politically correct, but nonetheless, he complied, speaking into his shirt sleeve to some unknown servant from afar, “We need a wheelchair.”

And then we made our Houdini escape, back out onto the streets to experience “theanythingObamaspace,” or so we prayed for an early victory, re-check-in being permitted until midnight. 9 p.m. Obama had it in the bag, but not Ohio, not Virginia, not North Carolina, and California polls had yet to close. Election elation delayed… ‘til 11 o’clock sharp, an hour before Cinderella’s wheelchair would turn into a pumpkin, we could at last rest easy; it was official, Obama would be our 44th President of the not red, not blue, but “purple” (said Oprah) United States of America.

Back at Starship Enterprise, our butler kept his distance while we quickly changed into our pjs; slippers and robes were provided, compliments of the “hotel.” The wheelchair never arrived and the exhibition looked empty – and I don’t just mean emptied of people – so we began to shuffle our way downwards past a nook filled with beanbags where we could have seen the film Pyscho slowed down to 24 hours, but didn’t; shuffling past a series of Swiss cheese cardboard walls by Jorge Pardo, featuring works on paper from all of the artists in the show (a mini-exhibition within the exhibition), yawning, jetlagged, ho-hum, but it wasn’t until we were amidst the sound installation of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (the same artist who had recently put bunk beds for refugees in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern), that we truly began to live out the fantasy of being alone, luxuriously alone in a gargantuan temple. It was glorious. We closed our eyes and let our selves be surrounded by the romantic turbulence of sturm (without the drang), wind, rain, and thunder of this tropical Promenade, without getting the least bit wet or bitten by mosquitoes.

It was approaching midnight and Brother Brendan’s eyes were bleary, no doubt he was weary of accompanying our slow steps. José, we were informed, would take over from here, and we would be relegated to our own little hotel nook, but no further. And “By the way, if you want to use the bathroom, you’ll have to wave to José who will be watching you from the lower level.”

“I will believe in miracles,” Douglas Gordon punctuated our step. “I want my wheelchair!” I protested like a child. Brendan relented, at long last, accompanying us to the lower floor where we could catch a last-minute sit-down glance at the liar-par-excellence Pinocchio lying face down in the fountain, Mauricio Cattelan’s cruel joke… “Are we evil” was the question without a question mark writ large on the ground floor. “Truth” was writ small around the corner. It was time for bed, the revolving one, our first restful sleep in “Bamelot.”

Under a starry firmament, Angela Bulloch’s twinkling ceiling was the last thing I saw before feeling the reeling and slow twirl of the promised change. For the next 7 hours, we’d become sleeping twirling dervishes, the pathological effects of which could only be divined in the morning.

– April Elizabeth Lamm

Obama Hugs the Headlines in Berlin

2008-07-28T08:52:00.000-07:00

HIGHLIGHTS

There are a million journalists who are not famous. Some are half-famous. And very few famous, if not worldwide famous. (…) This week, the branch got a new mega-star. It is (one would like to say at long last, finally, it’s about time it’s) a woman. Judith Bonesky is her name. But before we can dedicate ourselves to her fame, let us step back to an indelible impression from German postwar history: it is the 7th of July 1985, 6:26 pm. Boris Becker is 17 years old and “has matchball” [proper tennis parlance, anyone?] in the Wimbledon Finals. He stretches upwards, serves, and hits his target. An Ace. The scene is repeated endlessly on television. Looking back on his life, this former wonder-child sits with a glass of beer in front of the TV and says: “This win was my own personal moon landing.”

What, you might ask, does this have to do with Judith Bonesky? Some of you might even ask, Who in the world is this Judith Bonesky? Judith Bonesky is the Bild * reporter who was in the fitness studio with Barack Obama in Berlin, whose front page story one wishes one could cite word-for-word (but one cannot), so here is the finale: “Barack Obama put his hand on my shoulder and I grab him around the waist – wow, he doesn’t even sweat! I think: What a man!” This story (or reportage, if one can call it that) is for Ms (Frau) or Miss (Fraulein) Bonesky the matchpoint, her journalistic moon-landing. The one that decides from one second to the next if one will win or lose. The report, like Becker’s ball, could have gone into outer space, but no. The reporter met her match, not only as a woman, but also as a journalist, that is, stylistically and morally.

Even if we shouldn’t compare them so bluntly (or clownishly), the reporter Bonesky is now almost as famous as the intern Lewinski. And we, her colleagues, who have been coming to the office obediently as worker bees, far from every flight to the moon or moon landing, we must contritely recognize the fact that the goddess of fortune doesn’t reward the industrious, but rather the daring. Not the colleagues in culture section, who bravely sit through one premiere after the next. Not the colleagues in the politics section, who meet up with the Head of the CDU, SPD, or Green Party for an interview, but rather the boulevard amazons who go with HIM to the fitness studio, and as he lays his arm on her, and she doesn’t shy away from all of what she reports (boldly going where no woman before her has gone). WHAT A WOMAN! Wow.

*The Bildzeitung has a readership of some 12 million, comparable to the The Sun, with a readership of nearly 8 million.

(This column, "Das Streiflicht," is published daily in the Sueddeutsche Zeitung. My translation is rough and needs lessons in tennis-tongue. Help, anyone?)

Fin de Siècle Contretemps

2008-05-02T07:08:00.000-07:00

The character Erik Schmidt has been given the voice of Hugo von Hofmannstahl, who, writing at the turn of the 19th into the 20th, had made himself a ventriloquist of the 17th century. Hofmannstahl’s Letter [of Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon] (1603/1902) is hereby plundered to forge a dialogue within a 21st-century crisis of fast-talking abstractions.

by April Elizabeth Lamm

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: It would seem, my dear, that a certain symmetry with the Divisionists will inevitably be awakened. Was that your intention?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Elizabeth, darling, a peculiarity, a vice, a disease of my mind, if you like…

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: And though the manner is very similar, the content will no doubt provoke the kind of ambiguous anxiety that will render your public numb. I would strongly encourage you to take prodigious care in your titles….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: If you are to understand that an abyss equally unbridgeable separates me from the works lying seemingly ahead of me as from those behind me: the latter having become so strange to me that I hesitate to call them my property.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: I see. You have fallen into one of your fretting moods. You should like to deny your history, make a clean slate of it? We’ve toiled over this before, not to say that anyone was paying attention.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh, you can be so wicked with me.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Indeed!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I know not whether to admire more the urgency of your benevolence or the unbelievable sharpness of your memory, when you recall the various little projects I entertained during those days of rare enthusiasm we shared together.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hugo, you are testing my patience. Surely you cannot deny that there will be critics who shall proclaim that you are suffering from another bout of hysteria! You must make a statement addressing the rhyme and reason as to your having chosen the Holy Land.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Of course the critics will resort to their usual domain of rhetorical tricks: One can no longer say that the subject matter has been organized, per se, for the form penetrates it, dissolves it, creating at once both dream and reality, an interplay of eternal forces, something as marvellous as music or algebra. This was my most treasured plan. But what is man that he should make plans!

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: (bitterly) Have you been frequenting Khalil Bey’s again? I thought you had relinquished his company.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh I have, it is only the Courbet that I cannot resist.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: The pudenda, yes. It captivates and stirs …

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Much more than that! It is bloated with my blood. The memory alone dances before me like a weary gnat against a sombre wall.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Do you think Khalil will bequeath it to the d’Orsay?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Ah, I know not. He makes no mention of it. The mysteries of faith have been condensed there. This prophecy of morphing a train station into a salon d’hiver is most harrying to the soul.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Horrible place! It’s the one museum I ever dared deny my mother.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: the Luxembourg? Foresaken?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Quite simply. We were at the Louvre and I refused to cross the river. She demurred, of course, her inhibitions as stalwart as my inalienable will. She mentioned it again when Trudy dropped in for tea yesterday. Such an original girl, and yet, she says so little.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Yes, one might call it a “recession” from the murmuring stream one is so accustomed to hear flowing from her thirsting lips.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: (aside) Is she still dry?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Dry, my dear, is a term that crumbles out of my mouth like mouldy fungi. Why do you insist upon the necessity of always being so truthful?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: A rose is a rose is a rose, nosce te ipsum, etc.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: A rose? You endeavour to get a rise out of me?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Oh, I am well aware of how wary you are of being pigeonholed. You’re just like those, how were they called… before they were called the Impressionists, oh, you know! I know you do!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Hah! Indeed. The name has evaded you like a strange spiritual torment: “The Anonymous Society of Artist Painters, Sculptors, Printmakers, etc.”

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: I love that “et cetera”… or were you being cheeky?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I feel myself growing pale.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: With good reason! Anonymous, independent, intransigent, I suggest that you concentrate on your titles. The title you have given to the show is immense. It works in the exact manner of that “et cetera.”

(Editor’s Note: Here Elizabeth is referring to the title chosen for the exhibition: “Working the Landscape”)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh, but these attacks of anguish spread like corroding rust!

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hush, hush. You flounder. You know, recently she asked me if I wanted to join her on a trip to Palestine. Why there, I queried, and she was unable to say, other than her wish to visit the Dead Sea, which I found strange. We’re Jews, yes, but Jerusalem was not the first thing she mentioned, no, but rather the curative properties of the beach.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Who is she? Gertrude? My Gerty! What? She cannot quit me in my hour of most need…

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: “She” is my mother, of course. You nincompoop.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I feel like someone locked in a garden surrounded by eyeless statues.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: What’s this here on your table?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh, that’s just one of Moreau’s studies. Put it down.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: They are so conspicuously abstract.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: But it is difficult to surmise if they are un-finished, you know. The sheer number of them within his oeuvre makes it clear that he painted in this manner at least as early as the 1860s.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You don’t say.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: But even the distinct image of an absent object, in fact, can acquire the mysterious function of being filled to the brim with this silent but …

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hugo! Really…

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Don’t interrupt…

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Yes, do go on… you shall bring me to tears! (laughs)

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: What was I saying?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: … this mysterious function of the brim…

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Yes, yes, and the sudden rising flood of divine sensation.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Careful, my dear, not to get too attached to those sensations. You must detach yourself.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: The critics, I know.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Worse! The collectors!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Even in familiar and humdrum conversation all the opinions which are generally expressed with ease and sleep-walking assurance have become so doubtful that I have had to cease altogether in taking part in such talk. It has filled me with an inexplicable anger, which I can only conceal with great effort.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: But you can very well predict, no? Auto-da-fé, the fatwas, the underlying sentiment of paranoia well on the path to paralysis.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: You cannot mean…

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Yesterday’s confabulation, I most certainly do. The Déjà New. That was it! Perhaps we should have taken less claret.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: (deep in thought) Once, through a magnifying glass I saw a piece of skin on my little finger look like a field full of holes and furrows, and so it is how I now perceive human beings and their actions.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You should rather blindfold yourself than….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: No, I no longer succeeded in comprehending them with the simplifying eye of habit.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: It’s a thorny issue. You don’t want to put yourself in the position of having to kidnap yourself! Do tell me, what’s this one called?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: This? It’s called Man in Tree.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Rather like the body snatchers. Do you know recently I saw a Degas that reminded me of your….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: How utterly ridiculous.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: No, really, in its lebensraum and not the wohnzimmer… those jockeys. You think I jest?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Rather you have placed cobwebs in front of me in which my thoughts may dart!

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hugo. Incorrigibly colourful. All pink and pale blue. What will they say as to the palette?

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: You cannot imagine that they will hurry down that path, surely?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Just as much so as they will to the Promised Land!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I dread the perilousness of the imagination….

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: But you cannot presume that making a trip to Judea as a German Jew….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I am not Ashkenazi, but a pseudo-Sephardi if you must insist.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Oh stop being so Austrian! In any case, your abstract notion of borders will be made a topic of, no doubt, as one cannot travel to the land of milk and honey without having made a choice….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I beg to differ. I was there thrice, thank you, but it was only this last time that suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, something entirely unnamed, even barely nameable which, at such moments, reveals itself to me, filling me like a vessel, any casual object of my daily surroundings with an overflowing flood of higher life.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You are overflowing again… Restrain yourself.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh, Elizabeth, I cannot expect you to understand me without examples, and I must plead for your indulgence in this absurdity.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: What absurdity can you possibly mean? I do understand….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: No, I am quite sure you do not. I mean to say that a pitcher, a harrow abandoned in a field, a dog in the sun, a neglected cemetery, a cripple, a peasant’s hut – these faces in the field! All these can become the vessel of revelation.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You are covering yourself in evaporation powder. Like an ébauche, an unfinished work, surely you must express it somehow…

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: But why seek again for words which I have foresworn!

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hugo, if you carry on further like this I shall have no choice but to dress you up in lavender and banish you to the poetry room!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I have troubled you excessively…

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: But try, in stereoscope, please.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: I feel compelled by a mysterious power to reflect in a manner which, the moment I attempt to express it in words, strikes me as supremely foolish.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You are well aware that Manet wanted his “copy” after Delacroix to be the opposite of a sycophantic imitation. He wanted to ensure that his own work could never be mistaken for one by Delacroix.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Syco, sicko, psycho, Elizabeth, you torture me again, the critics…. Like a splinter round which everything festers, throbs, boils. It is then that I feel as though I myself were about to ferment, to effervesce, to foam and to sparkle.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Hugo… oh never mind. Foaming, yes, that seems to be the case.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking in a medium more immediate, more liquid, more glowing than words. It, too, forms whirlpools, but of a sort that do not seem to lead, as the whirlpools of language, into the abyss, but into myself and into the deepest womb of peace.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: You sound quite settled on the matter, and I must say I do adore your Man in Tree. But I warn you that you must give heed to the titles. They shall resort to labeling it a dementia, a disease of the eye.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Bereft of feeling?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Yes, you must make clear that you have made frank use of the materials without attempting to disguise its process.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: What do you mean? I leave myself to the boundless superiority of the mind that you have summoned before us.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: There is a story, you know, going round about Monet and the Louvre. You have heard this already, no doubt….

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: No, please, I beseech you, do not tease me.

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: There is a rumour that Monet once obtained a license to copy in the Louvre, not to copy the paintings, mind you, but so that he could take his canvas and easel up to the balcony to “copy” the view of Paris!

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: … and that I have captured here the dreamy timeless aura of the Orient, you mean to say?

Elizabeth Grey Boone-Broodthaers: Déjà New. As we were saying yesterday.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Oh, Lizzy, my dear friend, you have unlocked this condition which is wont, as a rule, to remain locked up in me. Would that I had the power to compress this into an essay…. Would you, could you, I mean, only if you have the time and inclination….

http://www.carliergebauer.com/en/artists/erik-schmidt/working-the-landscape/press-information.html

I am a text machine

2008-01-25T01:09:00.000-08:00

“Kunstmaschinen, Machinenkunst” / “Art Machines, Machine Art”

I am a text machine, [command: producing] machine text.

I am given a frame, no color allowed. I have been given a recommendation of more or less 4500 signs, as if I were restricted in my metaphors. Signs? Yes, signs. In German, we count signs (including space), in English, we count words. The word count being, in this case, some 1006 words, which would explain why we like our words smaller in English as bigger ones do not necessarily pay the rent.

Handwritten, the article poses the problem of counting signs including space. I resort to old new habits: the computer is the magic machine.

Pop-up window like a light bulb in my head, I resort to plug-and-chug: an old mathematical trick learned in the 5th grade, which would help me input the things I have seen into the translation machine, input the visuals of this show “Machine Art, Art Machines,” downloading my memory into yours. In the browser’s departure lounge, we find Jean Tinguely and his Mèta-Matics, a number of them, in fact, portable painting machines made in 1959 (figure 5), a fitting companion though not a part of, the great critiquing machine of Guy Debord and the Situationist International. As the geistige kin to Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio’s Industrial Painting (1958), which was produced and sold by the meter (which has no relation to texts produced and sold by the word or sign, mind you), we find Angela Bulloch’s Blue Horizon (1990), a wall-painting which is produced with the metric pressure exerted by one’s derrière. Steven Pippin’s one-track-mind machine, Carbon Copier (Anyway) (2007), produces narcissistic copies of itself, a Xerox machine making self-portraits of its twin, two machines squished together, face-maker to face-maker (this is a when-in-doubt-play-with-your-bellybutton machine); whilst Jon Kessler’s man-made Desert (2005) is not exactly what it seems. You think it’s just found footage of a desert played on a messy stack of TVs until you realize that the odd contraption on top is actually a handmade device which simulates a virtual desert. Say that again: can something be handmade and virtual at the same time? Yes.

Programming error G82236. Not enough space to continue processing your document.

The brief attempt at producing a machine text subjectively has here met with a mechanistic rebellion against my wishes to produce a product, to feed the text machine that produces a text. The computer is no longer my instrument, it is now my slave. It shall be relegated to doing the work for me. I will plunder her gully for word-fodder. Online, I connect with a central computer somewhere out there with the help of a mouse. An anagram machine found at a random address gives me x-ways of saying Kunst Maschinen [Art Machines] or Kunst “Machinen” to mingle languages in a mixed up way and to admit to minor flaws of a missing “s.” Not even Word could catch and underline that error for Word is not bilingual, or at least not yet. Should I happen to be in doubt as to my own ability to paraphrase what has already been said, the anagram machine begins, ironically, with “Nickname Hunts”; opposed to this sudden sympathy from the machine at my mercy, I find “Nickname Shunt” much better applied to the sentiment still at hand; however, “Unmeant Chinks” might serve as a rightful reference to the interruption of the imput of this article, or “Ante Munchkin” if I wanted to up the ante in the munchkin amount of material imputed thus far; or rather, I might prefer my munchkins clean and well-dressed, i.e., “Neat Munchkins” for a bit of progressive procrastination; which would not be to deny the rightful distraction of watching “A Munchkins Ten,” Spielberg’s prequel to “A Munchkin Nest,” a much better title than the executive producer preferred, “A Munchkins Net,” which tacitly alluded to a little-used chatroom for short people on the Web; “Oh, ‘Manhunt Sicken,’ I am!” screamed the frustrated screenplay writer who slammed the door behind her in a flurry of fury leaving a wind of mystery behind her; surely she’d meant to say “Unmans Thicken” in reference to the new diet craze which gave great solace to the lonely women in Manhattan with only gay friends, but, “Oh no,” corrected a feminist friend, “What she meant to say was ‘Unmans Kitchen,’ no doubt, especially when you look at all the ‘Camera Hints’ going on around here, yes, unabashedly that Mulveyian Gaze has made its comeback and the prevention of the invention of the ‘Cameras Thin’ is not just another chocaholics conspiracy theory”; the secretary who was taking the minutes of the meeting penned in the margin, witty thing that she was, “Arcane Smith” until the “Chairman Set” a “Charisma Net” whisking her away from her daydream word-smith wizardry.

You have just witnessed an experiment of neo-science using only 16 anagrams of some 6071 possibilities.

The machine is not less creative than the writer behind it. A text based on anagrams is not more objective than a subjective text on “Art Machines, Machine Art.” Think tank: the computer was the first machine in which memory could be purchased and stored, expanded upon by consumption. Memory traveled with floppy discs: a poetic ideal indeed. The databank of an art show now has an additional external memory, here expressed in an impossible file merger of QuickTime hardcopy (patent pending).

To conclude: if the artist can disappear behind the machine, can the writer who has been asked to write about this disappearance disappear too? A double-disappearance? Such a phenomenon has been known to happen quite often in the Southern Hemisphere – when, for instance, a man “is disappeared” in 1970, found in 1980, and then “is disappeared” in 1990 again. The passive tense “is disappeared” became common parlance under the regime of Pinochet, who knew that the best way to terrorize your enemy was to “have him disappeared,” quietly, mysteriously, no bombs, no bloodshed necessary. Unlike the artists who just “disappeared” (active tense) in a boat (Bas Jan Ader) or just took some time-off and “disappeared from New York” (Lee Lozano), or the artists who disappear behind the machine, the writer of this article would be disappeared (active-passive, who knew?) behind an anagram:

A Liberal Math Elm Zip

(April Elizabeth Lamm)

printer error: A machine is not just a machine. A Miele is not a Whirlpool, I beg your pardon.

Dr Speck of Cologne

2008-01-25T01:05:00.000-08:00

file:///Users/aprillamm/Documents/nonfiction/speck.pdf

Leipzig, ca 2004-2005

2008-01-25T01:02:00.000-08:00

There is a term physicists use to describe the reworking of an old theory: the perturbative approach. This was the approach that I had in mind when approaching the city of Leipzig. We came by car from Berlin, a mere 2 hours drive, not knowing what one would find, as the autobahn signs told us, in the city of Bach; something baroque, more than likely damaged and beige, lots of architectural potholes, an uneasy wave of really old and kind of new.

With Zentrum signs in sight, we parked, picnicked in the rain, then asked some other travellers if they might happen to know the way to the famed Leipzig we had come in search of. It seemed as if they might be retro-art savvy, might know where the latest in art factory was to be found, for we Berliners had heard that the art in Leipzig was very retro.

We were on a blind odyssey whose destination was a former mill which some 10 years ago had been converted into atelier spaces and only recently some 5 commercial galleries had set up shop after the way had been paved by an art foundation based in Munich. Our journey took us to the outposts of the ‘real’ Leipzig, of one concrete block of living quarters, or quarters of living, after the next. Round and round we drove from ring to periphery. Weaving in and out of large patches of green parks, with many stops along the way to ask directions, it seemed that Leipzig was a city of Goths, not a gothic city, mind you, and only after the third group of Goths that we stopped did we realise that something strange had this way come. These darkly intellectual pale-faced Goths hadn’t a clue where this shrine of art might be. Though we were both pilgrims to the city, we had different temples in mind. Theirs was a festival of music and graveyard poetry and ours the latest ‘restoration’ art house, not a school (PS1), not a margarine factory (KW), but a cotton mill. We were, in short, in search of those mouldy spaces that Berlin was famous for, and Paris (Palais de Tokyo) and London (former mail sorting ruins) were becoming famous for.

A virtual address, at last, marked the target; painted on a wall, ‘www.spinnerei.de’ announced that we could begin to perturb those carved-in-stone theories made in Berlin, the ones which liked to dismiss Leipzig as merely cheap atelier space for those famed German painters paring their paint-encrusted fingernails. Rumour was amongst the conceptual punks of Berlin that many smart collections of art were being dumbed down by the blind advent known as Leipziger Malerei, that respected Ad Reinhardts across the world were being (dis)placed next to these seemingly thoughtless new kids from the Eastern Bloc.

What we found was exactly the opposite of what we thought we’d find. In the pouring rain, running between one gallery and the next, barring one, no paintings-for-paintings-sake were to be found. Instead, wry commentary on the new German painting phenomenon seemed to be the theme of the artist-run commercial gallery (a ‘produzenten galerie’) called B2. An industrial grey E-class Mercedes (a.k.a. the Baby Benz) was parked and filled to the gills with Kippenberger-like canvases. The artist, Oliver Kosset, later explained to me the meaning of the big plastic banner hanging over the car bearing a Kippenberger saying, ‘Put your eye in your mouth’, in reverse. Kosset said that he liked ‘goofing around the periphery of postwar painting, making bleak references to the recent painting boom’. The car was sadly his own as the installation has been sold to the far-off reaches of Mr Kim’s collection in South Korea at the Arario Gallery, a vortex of contemporary art.

Across the hall, gallerist Andre Kermer is a man who makes a point of not exhibiting painting. Instead, quiet albeit politically charged photographs by Andreas Wünschirs (b. 1967 in East Berlin) were on view, seemingly innocuous beach views depicting the space of master-race health, a körperkultur resort designed in the Third Reich.

Dogenhaus Galerie had a group show up made more of words and sculpture than painting and though the ASPN gallery, which shares the space, featured good abstract paintings by Matthias Reinmuth, they were a far cry from the renown style of Neo Rauch and Rosa Loy. The very-white cubesque new space of Eigen + Art, (whose v.i.p. room bore the transparency of a rich democracy) featured a Baader-Meinhof-Beuys citation installation which time and mind hasn’t yet allowed me to puzzle out what artist Birgit Brenner intended.

Alas, I did find those famed Leipziger paintings, but they lacked the shimmer of other shooting stars such as Tilo Baumgärtel and Matthias Weischer. The Galerie Kleindienst had been morphed into a salon of revisited ‘New Objectivity’, very Rudolf Schlichter, in fact, via the paintings of Christoph Ruckhäberle. The characters in his paintings seem to be as uninterested in each other as I am in them. Unfair to say really, since I perturbedly ran in and ran out, but the gallerist was still courteous enough to point me in the direction of what I had been looking for….

The generator of all the noise, the Federkiel Foundation, the place whose friendly founder Karsten Schmitz I had met because of his generous support of Carsten Nicolai. It was his space that had interested me the most. On view was a show called ‘The Passion of Collecting’ featuring both his own and the Reinking collection, demonstrating the kind of passion which is a kind passion, a division of joy rather than the joy of division. Those intellectual Goths would have been pleased had their pilgrimage made such a detour for the sights rather than the sounds.

Alas, no studio visits, nor time to settle the chicken and the egg question: who came first, Neo Rauch or his partner Rosa Loy? The Krasner-Pollock pyschogeography would never be truly mapped by my perturbative approach, no, because the sentiment of Leipzig is not one of competition, but of collaboration.

Elaine Sturtevant

2008-01-25T00:51:00.000-08:00

AS BRAVE AS A BLIZZARD

No museum in America has yet dared to acquire her works, but in Europe she has been proclaimed one of art history’s unsung heroes. At first glance, her work seems overtly simple, although one senses that it is not so much overt as covert; a copy of a copy –be it an image of a Kodak flower or a sculptural urinal – Elaine Sturtevant pushed postmodern art production a step beyond ‘post-’. While Pop artists were appropriating images from advertising, Sturtevant was appropriating not only Pop, but also other conjecturing ‘stoppages’ of contemplation via the work of Beuys, Fahlstrøm, Gober, Gonzalez-Torres, and Muybridge, before anyone could fathom what mystery she was brewing.

When Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds was broadcast over the radio in the US in October 1938, people believed that its warnings about Martians invading our planet were real, and widespread panic ensued. Such is the flight-path of the imagination of a public who believed for a moment that fiction (fake) had become reality (real). H G Wells wrote the book in 1898; Orson Welles turned it into a radio play in 1938. Frank Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz in 1899; it was made into a movie in 1939. An odd historical parallel: a 40-year span stands between original and copy. What are we to make of this?

A 40-year span has occurred between Sturtevant’s first remake, Warhol Flowers in 1964 and its exhibition in a major museum survey of her work in 2004 (although one must pause to reconsider how to describe what Sturtevant does, for to call it a remake, remix, or a replay would more than likely irk her). Sturtevant makes copies of art works, but she is no copyist. She appropriates, but is not an Appropriationist. She was a renegade female artist, but not a feminist. So what is this artist sine qua non all about?

Is she illustrating Baudrillard’s sense of the simulacrum, or denuding Deleuze’s thinking on difference and repetition? Is she challenging or upholding the aura of the artwork in an age of reproduction? Perhaps a Proustian sense of memory, of ‘seeing again’, lies behind it all. Or perhaps Sturtevant is working against the empiricists, eliminating the possibility of ‘seeing’ altogether. After all, it would seem that the crooked stick of humanity has never quite gone beyond the idea that ‘seeing is believing’.

Sturtevant’s early career is remarkably strange. In 1965, she was given her first solo exhibition at the Gallery Bianchini in New York, playing the role of a prescient dramaturge, setting the stage for future powerstations: Sturtevant/Warhol’s Flowers took its place next to a Sturtevant-/Johns Flag, a Sturtevant/Rauschenberg drawing, a Sturtevant/Stella concentric painting, a Sturtevant/Oldenburg shirt and a Sturtevant/Segal sculpture. One year later at the Galerie J in Paris she redid the show, only this time locking the doors so that one could only peek at the art from the outside. In 1967, she remade Oldenburg’s store just seven blocks away from the original, and in 1974 she re-inacted a series of Beuys performances. But the problem was that she was appreciated by a public who thought she was poking fun at contemporary art: the yellow brick road to fame was paved with the wrong colour bricks. Resigned and disappointed, it wasn’t until 1986 that she would allow her work to be exhibited again, and even this time, she would still be grossly misunderstood as an early hero of Appropriation.

If I see ‘a’ Warhol, what happens when I see a Sturtevant/Warhol? Through the remaking, Sturtevant makes Warhol into a Readymade. But does one ever really ‘see’ a Warhol any more, or has his work become a logo, a label-enabling non-thought? It would seem that ‘seeing’ a Warhol today is less ‘seeing’ than it is a ‘reported sighting’, to borrow John Ashbery’s phrase. I wonder if her appropriation/non-appropriation of Warhol in 1964 functions any differently when she repeats that process in 1965, 1969, 1970, 1990 and 1991. Famously, Andy found Elaine’s idea fabulous, lending her his silkscreens so that she could make copies of works that he himself had planned to have produced and reproduced over and over again by the members of his Factory. When asked years later how he did it, he responded, ‘I don’t remember. Ask Elaine.’

Sturtevant makes her Sturtevantian memory (or memory in motion) the subject of her work and is antsy when anyone places her on the wrong shelf of the categorical imperative/interrogative. When someone called her an Appropriationist, she responded, “I am not an Appropriationist by token of intention and meaning. I do not make copies. I am talking about the power and the autonomy of the original and the force and pervasiveness of art. Perhaps the brawny brains of this ‘doctor of thinkology’ have scared off possible fans and supporters. And if Castelli could understand enough to wheel and deal in Pop, he knew that he could never convince his group of collectors that they should not only buy a Warhol, Johns, or Lichtenstein, but a Sturtevant/Warhol Marilyn, a Sturtevant/ Johns Flag, or a Sturtevant/Lichtenstein Hot Dog (though Castelli himself once acquired a Sturtevant from her Oldenburg store).

But after decades of artists trying to create non-object objects, the anti-materialist anticipations of our non-utopian, post-Marxist society are fading fast. And Sturtevant, with increasing fame, is facing an inescapable paradox, namely, that when a Sturtevant/Warhol or a Sturtevant/Duchamp become as famous as the Warhols and Duchamps themselves, then her work too has reached an impasse.

When her works are exhibited in a museum whose collection itself is comprised of several of the works she has pastiched, her work is lost to the conventions of traditional ‘mausoleum’ thought, immured within the archive, the warehouse of aesthetic objects. Indeed, it is surprising that she would relent to exhibiting in a museum. (That said, without her work being “seen” no one would “know” about it.) The theoretical terrorist/artist thus becomes as enigmatic as the Wizard of Oz:

Dorothy, Lion, Scarecrow, Tinman: We want to see the Wizard.
Gateman: The Wizard? But nobody can see the great Oz. Nobody’s ever seen the great Oz. Even I’ve never seen him.
Dorothy: Well then, how do you know there is one? ...
Guard: Orders are, nobody can see the Great Oz, not nobody, not no how...NOT NOBODY, NOT NO HOW.

No one has admission to her sorcery excepting the few who are well-versed in the ideas of Deleuze and Foucault. This ‘black magic woman’ has worked the witchery of exclusivity into her production whether she wanted to or not. Like hearing heavy footsteps on the floor above, one can hear, but never really know what is going on upstairs; until, that is, one knocks on the door.

But the writer reaches a conundrum, having reached an impasse without a permit to this parallel or alternate universe. Where exactly is the land of Oz? And can one describe Sturtevant as its unlikely Wizard? In the movie version, Dorothy calls it, “Not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It's far, far away. Behind the moon, beyond the rain...." As reality would have it, Dorothy arrived in Oz quite by chance, mostly by the whims of a natural disaster, a tornado blasting through her drab farmstead in Kansas. Much like a whirlwind of thought, this tornado embodies the process of how a Sturtevant boggles the mind.

Leafing through the catalogue of the survey dedicated to her work at the Museum der Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, I realised suddenly that it is not so much a catalogue as it is a series of instructions as to how the catalogue should look. Slowly I climbed the stairs to taking refuge in a small room of the MMK, where I found several drawings confirming my wish for more than “fake is more”. The Wizard, once omnipotent, now takes on a sheen of new sympathy. What Sturtevant’s drawing Warhol Flowers Lichtenstein Pointing Finger (1966) depicts is the reality of now. Not only do “We Want You”, but we want you to show us how. Unlike her unmistakably good ‘fakes’, the drawings are a convergence of realities, playfully pointing to the spectator to forge their own ideas about these works of repetition. When Sherrie Levine makes works that are ‘after ’ another image (as her title indicates), the adverb of time either implied being in the wake of something or like a preposition, ‘after’ implied a resemblance, a derivation. When Sturtevant replicates a Warhol, a lateral thought is implied, and the hierarchy of power is eliminated. This is made clear in the drawings where a storyboard is created, whereas in the replica paintings and sculptures, an “either/or” situation is created (either Warhol or Sturtevant), and in that sense, the work is individualised when it appeared to be fighting against individualisation. Possibly, Uncle Sam’s finger is pointing to us so that we might ‘Play it again, Sam’ in our minds, so that we might remember not to forget what this iconoclastic subversion is all about.

The Diaries

2007-12-11T01:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/cgi-bin/mtadmin/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&Template=saatchigallery&search=APRIL%20ELIZABETH%20LAMM

and

search: "April Elizabeth Lamm" at artforum.com

Il Tempo del Postino: Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno's Opera in Manchester

2007-12-03T07:32:00.000-08:00

Il Tempo del Postino
A Group Show
(12-14 July 2007)

It is only those exhibitions that make a difference that really make a difference.

To experience this difference, one needed a ticket to Manchester. Not on an airplane so much as on a luft-schiff, a hybrid machine transporting us into the 4th dimension.

Co-captains Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno had given themselves a mission: how can we curate “time” instead of “space”? After some three years of investigation and in search of a genius loci in which to experiment, the idea landed back on earth at the Opera House in Manchester to become a part of the world’s latest biennale, “The World’s First International Festival of Original and New Work.”

Curator Johannes Cladders believed that the best art exhibition conveys itself through theatrical means, no labels necessary: the art space should function as a stage for the silent theatrical play taking place in the mind of the beholder. Parreno and Obrist have capitalized on this notion, moving art into the theatrical realm, and in doing so have given us a stage in which an exhibition can evolve into new forms, not only encouraging slowness, but demanding it.

As we took our seats, the “opera” began by putting the finger into the wounds (Wunderpunkten) of subjective time, i.e., the fickleness of memory. To the right of the stage and in front of the curtains was a grand piano upon which snow was falling. One could hear the staccato performance of an invisible pianist in search of a tune half-remembered and half-forgotten.

Up front and center was a magnifying glass in the place one would expect to find a microphone (only it was about the size of a single-household residence of a lonely gold fish). Lit up from within, a man appeared behind the looking-glass, the ring-leader, apparently, Parreno’s ventriloquist, who informed us of the recent past and recent future to come.

At last, the “opera” could begin. The curtain lifted. And then it fell. The music swelled, filling the house with the waves of operatic expectation. And then the curtain began its dance, an inanimate object slapstick created by “situationist” Tino Seghal, his actor this time being the curtain itself, the signifier of the beginning and the end of any performance. With the beginning of the “opera” beginning before the beginning, the timing was even further muddled by the ushering in of the ushers. Last-minute guests hoping to board the time-space machine? Walking down the dark aisles with a guiding light in hand, slowly but surely, the gradual crescendo and echo of several auctioneers began, the kind of auction your grandfather would have attended in search of a used John Deere. But the auction wares were not to be seen: the maximal volume of the auctioneering was accompanied a minimalist visual: a large screen which gradually evolved from total darkness to blindingly light, a crescendo indicating a cinematic trope: the enlightened moment when one “sees the light” after being plunged into the darkness of death. Here Doug Aitken had presented us with a pandemonium of prices accompanied a vacuum of visuals.

The cacophony was called to a brutal stop, yielding to a moment of “moving” silence: Tacita Dean’s film of John Cage’s silence, 4’ 33”. Maybe twice, maybe three times, the old man in the film makes a move, crossing his legs the other way, mimicking the minimal motions of the audience. He sits in a dancer’s rehearsal studio with mirrors along one wall. In the mirror’s reflection, a figure counting down the time with their fingers is barely perceptible.

A lovely moment of transit, Dean’s silence was just what we needed after the sound-flood (Stimmeüberschwemmung) of Aitken’s auctioneers. And now the “opera” could begin, in medias res, the aria of Cio-Cio-San (Madam Butterfly) and Lieutenant Pinkerton was divided amongst four geishas and two lieutenants – surround-sound in the aisles and on stage was fragmented and shared, discombobulating, but tear-jerking nonetheless.

Too numerous to describe at length here, similar works of wonder were created by Trisha Donnelly, Douglas Gordon, Olafur Eliasson, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Carsten Höller, and Koo Jeong-A, whose monstrously swaying severed tree was the most minimalist albeit the most potently symbolic of the potential in slowing down the time in an exhibition. Indeed, “Il Tempo del Postino,” (the time of the postman) the title given to this operatic encounter of a 4th kind, was punctuated by a repeating “chorus” – Liam Gillick’s snowed-on piano – and the comic relief of Pierre Huyghe’s 3 acts: the foibles of the offspring of Big Bird wedded to Snuffalufagus and a furry brown bat-monkey midget. Intermission was intermingled with the beginning procession of Matthew Barney’s interpretation of Norman Mailer’s Ancient Evenings: Act II was infused by Barney-esque mythology and the elaborate ritual – involving acrobatics and wrecked cars– required to induce a shaggy-haired bull into copulating with a machine.

Even if the bull refused to cooperate and copulate, who would have thought that an evening at Manchester’s Opera House could trigger a tsunami of thought whose repercussions were yet to be experienced by the rest of the world, frequent travelers on luft-schiff art?

One left the opera house with a kind of perma-grin tickling the mind; that unexpected titillation when one notices that the bearded man buying bananas next to you at the supermarket is wearing bright red stilettos.

April Elizabeth Lamm

(*written for German translation; originally published in Monopol, September 2007)

REVIEW: Simon Starling at neugerriemschneider

2007-11-30T08:08:00.000-08:00

Berlin
Simon Starling
neugerriemschneider
Linienstrasse 155
November 11 – January 13

Within a milieu of quiet conceptualism, of thoughtful works in silent spaces where whispering is par for the norm, Simon Starling’s latest show heralds a booming breakaway. A mind-twisting work titled after its maker, Wilhelm Noack oHG is both film projector and film projection. That is, the film projector itself is a twisted work of art conceived of by Starling and produced by the Noack family firm, and the film is a 4-minute history of its maker and makings. Dark and loud, clangs and bangs of industrial metal-working pierce the room whose bass note remains the mechanic purr of an oversized projector – a spiraling staircase, shiny and new, very possibly a machine rendered after a mental rendezvous with Maholy-Nagy and Jean Tinguely. And though the black-and-white film is nostalgic, it never crosses the border of being maudlin. Here Starling’s continuing fascination with re-building what has already been built appears to be a reflection of a Real beyond the airy ethereal of a virtual production line stretching from Boise to Bombay. And if Fischli and Weiss’s Der Lauf der Dinge [the way things go] is the product of child’s play revived (two boys home alone with matches), then Starling’s latest production is an adult homage to the aesthetic mechanics of the “hard” in a hard-drive technological montage.

REVIEW: Matthew Barney / Joseph Beuys at the Gugg

2007-11-30T08:07:00.001-08:00

Berlin
Matthew Barney / Joseph Beuys
Deutsche Guggenheim
Unter den Linden 13/15
October 28 – January 12

Nancy Spector’s pairing up of Joseph Beuys with Matthew Barney might very well have been a curatorial dash into sudden death. In Germany, the revered shaman artist who created the notion of “social plastic” and boldly proclaimed that “everyone is an artist” is bestowed with an untouchable aura. Whereas the legitimacy of creating a connection between the vitrines and drawings of the couldn’t-be-more-different artists is questionable – and possibly too literal –when Spector posits Barney’s Field Dressing (1989-1990) up against Beuys’s Eurasienstab [Eurasian Staff] (1967/68), a mind-spinning re-evaluation of the odd coupling occurs. While Barney assiduously climbs the walls and intermittently shoves Vaseline into the orifices of his bare body, Beuys engages in layering fat into the corners of the room and placing copper rods into felt-covered poles. By placing the documentation of these performances in rooms where one could watch both of videos at once, the viewer was allowed a space to analyze the motivation behind their shared devotion to rather elaborate (and personal) mythologies. The parallel egress from this world into that of the divine conveyed here reveals an uncanny passage in time – a promisingly unorthodox curatorial decision granting us an exodus from mundane juxtapositions.

REVIEW: Andreas Slominski at MMK, Frankfurt

2007-11-30T08:05:00.001-08:00

Frankfurt
Andreas Slominski
MMK Frankfurt
Domstrasse 10
23 September 2006 – 28 January 2007

Devilishly delightful 500-kilometer taxi rides are a dime a dozen in India. But taking a taxi from Hamburg to Frankfurt? Andreas Slominski did. Then he handed director Udo Kittelmann the bill. Even cheekier: Parked at the entrance, a tire was removed and the meter kept ticking. The menacing metaphor was not lost on anyone; he’d parked at the entrance to a famed Hans Hollein building, which Slominski decorated with a billboard-size set of Christmas lights. A taxi without a wheel is, after all, like the left-behind suitcase at the airport, a ticking bomb, a concentration of panic and anxiety. The evidence of further rigorous mischief inside included a truncated ski-hut (Where are the skis? 2000), a Wheelchair to Surmount the Staircase in Odessa (2000), a soccer ball cautiously patrolled by the guard (Football with Child’s Skull, 2000), and behind a dark wall was the Device to Frighten People Lingering in Parks at Night (2000). It was here, knowing the impish Slominski for his traps, that I warily entered the pitch dark room to inspect a glowing globe and this metal “thing” underneath it which resembled -- in the dark -- a deadly weapon. I nearly wet my pants for fear. But nothing happened. And if such a device were actually put to use in a park, then one would logically see an extra moon. An extra moon? Yes. Scary.

REVIEW: Peter Piller

2007-11-30T07:58:00.000-08:00

Berlin
Peter Piller
Barbara Wien
Linienstrasse 158
26 January – 31 March 2007

For the first time ever, Peter Piller has taken a detour onto the road more taken. And in the context of Piller’s work, which one might describe as that invisible decisive moment of decision-making, this “more taken” road is actually the one less taken. The road not taken by Piller until now was that of showing his own photographs, which he has done here at Barbara Wien and in fine constellations of pure poetry. Those of you who do not know your Robert Frost, at this point – and who do not know Piller’s better-known work– have no idea what I am talking about. You see, Piller is famous for his blick (not far from a “blink”) and not for that moment of “when” to press the button on the camera, but rather that moment when a found photograph becomes one worth exhibiting, when it makes a statement, without ever having made a statement. In the series called Dauerhaftigkeit (2005/2006) taken from the archives of a textile mill in a small town in the Netherlands, one finds that Piller’s chosen photographs are not so much “photographs” as “snapshots,” more than likely shot by the mill workers. Furthermore, not only are they snapshots, but failed snapshots, accidental shots of the ceiling or of a tree’s branches winter bare. The fact that we, as gallery-goers, carefully examine each of these “works” on the walls, making connections where there were none in the mind of the “photographer,” who is not so much a “photographer,” per se, as rather a person with a camera in hand (and then further the distinction that Piller makes, even when he becomes that man with a camera), yes, one finds these forks in the road exposed – man with camera, archive, artist, gallery – and that is exactly what has made all the difference.

REVIEW: RothStauffenberg at Esther Schipper

2007-11-30T07:57:00.001-08:00

RothStauffenberg
Schipper & Krome
Berlin

Flipping through fashion magazines, one finds that timepiece advertisements regularly beg for more than just a moment’s thought, with taglines such as “Elegance is an attitude,” “I am yesterday, today, tomorrow,” and “Time is forever.” Regardless of the philosophical prattle of the text, the watches themselves are invariably set at the pleasurable constant of ten after ten o’clock. Seemingly senseless, 10:10 appears to represent an aesthetic bliss.

The same unnamable mechanism is at work in RothStauffenberg’s most recent installation Schall und Rauch (Noise and Smoke), which in fact incorporates images of watches at this bewitching time. The title is derived from a line in Goethe’s Faust, “Names are but noise and smoke / obscuring heavenly light,” and such is the artists’ take on text itself; instead of issuing a press release, the artists submitted a series of images, forcing the viewer to rely on their eyes (and mind) alone.

With interludes of Mozart and Beethoven, what we see plucks the strings of our emotions without unnecessary schmaltz. In the films Bliss (2002) and Bliss II (2004) emotional swells are created through a sequence of blurred images that wondrously flow together in a three-sectioned split screen. Like a theatrical production, the lights go down after the film to spotlight the world clock Paris/ London/ Turin/ Miami (2003), whose hands are fixed at ten after ten as the second hand ticks away persistently. Fade to black again to spotlight a film still, whose time-code (and title, 01:24:18:11) acts like a call number in a card catalog accessing an archive of images too numerous to be fathomable.* The photograph 00:56:44:04 (2004) depicts several hands grasping onto a man who has fallen down the stairs. It is a moment (a “time-coded emotion,” if you will) evocative of the emotional intensity of a Géricault or Delacroix painting.

Titillating and sensually intellectual, the images that RothStauffenberg use are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow without becoming hackneyed. But in Schall und Rauch, the marvel is at how the artists have created a conflict between the Scylla and Charybdis of image and exegetic text.
– April Elizabeth Lamm

*Capturing a moment in film-time, each “time-code” represents 1/24th of a second of some 300,000 images in any given 120-minute film.

REVIEW: Carsten Nicolai at the Schirn

2007-11-30T07:51:00.000-08:00

Carsten Nicolai
20 January-28 March
Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt
www.schirn.de (www.antireflex.de)

Review by April Lamm

In the winter, thirst acts as my personal barometer. When I get thirsty, I know soon it will snow. Those at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, might be studying this phenomenon in a special room at the end of a long neon-lit hallway, division ‘personal abnormal perception’, subdivision ‘private weather forecasting’, topic ‘winter and the consumption of drink’. Those familiar with the promiscuous collaborations (art, music and science) of Carsten Nicolai will understand immediately what I am getting at.

In Nicolai’s exhibition at the Schirn, older works are put in the context of new in two chambers of reflection -- one light, one dark -- divided by an antechamber mingling the two. The white room called ‘reflex’ makes one feel like a white mouse in a laboratory witnessing the products of a man in deep thought in deep space. While the Wellenwanne, the Telefunken, and Milch works (all 2000) involve the realisation of making sound visible, Reflex (2004) is a cube askew which one can walk into to experience what could be called an ‘acoustic’ James Turrell.

One would think that thought might take place more fluidly in the light, but Nicolai’s exhibition proves otherwise. The darkness of the ‘anti’ chamber reveals mysteries wondrous and inane, less illustrative of the artist’s desire to show the unseen and more illustrative of the wide wild landscape of thought taking shape in the viewer’s mind alone. Void (2002) titles a series of sound traps in the form of sci-fi chrome-plated glass tubes placed on top of the hat racks at mission control. (Ground control to Major Tom.) The questions invoked—‘can sound be stored in a space? What can be perceived when the sealed tubes are opened?’—hark back to the witty seriousness of Duchamp’s Air de Paris (1919) or Robert Barry’s Inert Gas Series (1969). While the Nebelkammer [cloud chamber] (2002) is a machine making visible the invisible cosmic radiation penetrating our lives, the Portrait (2004) is a simple ‘painting’ composed of strips of magnetic tape which have recorded the ‘portrait’ of the sound of a room.

My friend the poet Fred Seidel once said, ‘Everyone talks about the silence of light / But no one talks about the sound’. Nicolai seems to be working on the research team trying to figure out why. . . why we stopped thinking about moonbeams. And though one might be overwhelmed by the nearly religious aesthetic of minimalism, Nicolai is a maverick whose patterns of interference, error, and coincidence might help us reach that planet on which we escape our wish for coherence in a cosmos where the lacework of a snowflake can never be predicted but will (mysteriously) always have the symmetry of six sides.

REVIEW: Nairy Baghramian at Galerie Nagel

2007-11-30T07:44:00.000-08:00

Nairy Baghramian
Galerie Christian Nagel
24 June – 6 August

Once upon a time in a land far from the familiar, on a Mediterranean beach, Rock Hudson disappeared behind a striped cabana to change out of his wet swimming trunks. Was it Monaco? Nice? Cannes? It was there, in any case, that he met Grace Kelly, an heiress and a southern belle. And though he was not the thief that she believed him to be, she longed for his life, the aura around him, longed for the adventure of stealing diamonds. But to catch a cat like Rock required more than just the flourish of a chiffon-covered shoulder and a polished Texas twang.

These were my first thoughts while meandering through Nairy Baghramian’s sculpture Vierte Wand/Zwei Protagonisten (Fourth Wall/Two Protagonists) (all works 2005), whose faded yellow stripes reminded one of canopies and colonnades, of wicker-work under a portico lined with ferns. In theatrical terms, the ‘fourth wall’ is that invisible space the actors look to as if the audience were a wall onto which they projected a faked reality. This was the first scene of a play enacted in our minds, sehnsuchtig for those Technicolor Junes, of beach front views we found difficult to afford without the remorse of guilt.

As reality would have it, Rock was no rock but a Cary (Grant). Nonetheless, along the corridor were trap doors with (if one bent low enough to see) golden teeth, a painful twist on a motif. A place of escape or invitation to the world beyond the looking glass, these Klappen mit Goldenen Zähnen (Traps with Golden Teeth) offered a glimpse into the impossible, and such absurdities have flourished in galleries seemingly for centuries and yet … never quite enough.

Beyond these narrative traps of seeing and not seeing, of hiding and of the flamboyance of being on stage was the peek-a-boo of Teestube (Tea Salon), something of the belle holding up her billowing skirt by a thread while floating through the ball room. This sculpture, or rather this living breathing creature, this eminent beauty in balletic pose, was to be seen through the glance in a mirror, curtseying behind a fan, in the spotlight without ever appearing to want to be. Here the latent poetry of 1950s Cologne was to be found behind a paravent, not seen directly but from the reflected periphery, something one could sense without seeing. What others might see as a shameless flirtation with hypocrisy, seemed to me allusions to affluence leaning less towards a literal critique of the Vanity Fair than to nostalgia for the noble sublimity of convening at tea. Indeed, the capitalist critique inherent in the show’s title ‘Die Geister Mögen das Flanieren’ subtly gestured towards a telethesia of graceful discontent.

up next

2007-11-30T07:24:00.001-08:00

My Dinner with Andre

2007-11-30T04:23:00.000-08:00

I come here often just to ride the elevators.
– Marcel Duchamp on “Anonymous”

Some of them were where some others of them were. Some of them were where no others of them were. One of them was where not any other of them, of that kind of them, had been, and it was a thing that was important to any one to have seen that one, to have heard that one. – Gertrude Stein on “Anonymous”

When I returned from the summer pause, referred to in German-speaking countries as the “summer hole,” I found a note on my desk at the Ministry of Leisure instructing me to have dinner with Andre. Andre? Andre who? Oh yes, Andre Gregory. The theater fellow who is friends with the artists of the Anonymous show, the subject of our most recent investigations.

Over dinner, Andre told me all about the exhibition, the movement, the quake in our wake. In typical Andre over-the-top let’s-go-get-naked-in-the-forest kind of fashion, he told me that the exhibition planned was all about making Relevant art, about creating and instigating a dialogue that would usher in a moment of what he called “Accidental Anarchy,” leaving the Spectator alone with their very own thoughts about the Spectacle to be seen. It was a moment of philosophy made naked, a fearless feat in the face of a world where Googling had become substitute for further-thinking, where the gaze greedy for more information revealed a tendency towards less thought.

But that’s just my morning’s memory of our evening’s conversation, and it’s difficult to rely on my breakfast transcriptions, though I was hired, after all, because of my elephantine memory. What I remember best were the gesticulations he made with his hands as if he wished to give Gestalt to the Geist he was trying to express. I didn’t really follow him at first, and it was difficult to fathom what this “Accidental Anarchy” might entail, or what “Relevant Art” might be. But in my work for the Ministry, it is one of my primary duties to investigate matters that might give cause to an uprising or a disturbance of the status quo in the well-oiled Creatocracy machinery.

The investigation, you see, began many moons ago, after concern had been expressed by my supervisor, Mr Rainbow, after a number of press releases, e-flux-s, and briefs that had come in from a number of agents in the field about an exhibition scheduled to open in the winter of 2006, and, curiously enough, the pictures sent along to accompany the c.v. of the Anonymous curator were the faces very few would recognize from the past, the faces of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Comte de Lautréamont, Martin Heidegger, Leila Khaled, and Hakim Bey, among others. A trickster was amongst us. Was there a real person behind this ever-changing façade or was this truly a movement of a group of artists who wished to play havoc with the marketing mechanisms of the Leisure sector?

It took me quite some time to figure out who these “Anonymouses” might be. The project smelled like a leftover from the leftist-neo-Marxist generation, those engaged in a struggle against the encroachment of neo-liberalists, and though Andre was willing to talk to me about the show, at first he was unwilling to tell me about the artists involved. Based on a few slips he made over schnapps – Merlin or Mirwin, it seemed he slurred – eventually it dawned on me that the authors who once published with Merve might be a good place to begin the search for this potentially volatile faction. Concern had even been expressed that they had instigated the riots of the Parisian banlieue in the summer of 2005 and the Ministry wanted to avoid any repeat scenarios at all costs.

When I was young, one of my greatest ambitions had been to write a book for the Merve Verlag, a prêt-a-porter paperback for intelligence-on-the-run. The Merve Verlag was a distinguished publishing house whose author list comprised part of the sector whose files might have been marked by the stamp of “dangerously smart.” I had my suspicions of such fantastic categorizations confirmed one day when I caught my first glance inside one of the Ministry’s vaults dedicated to the works of “ideas and non-ideas with many words around them,” finding there stacks and stacks of the white books with colorful banners. Many such tomes often ended up being allocated to the dark recesses of the Bureau of Rejected Philosophy, and many never saw the light of day thereafter. The science fiction undertone of their titles titillated my sixth sense:

Hyperculturality
Zeus in New York: Heidegger and the Cybernetic
Voyage to Another Star
Divertimento für Gilles Deleuze
Rhizome
The Seeing Machine
The Aesthetic of Disappearance
The Unreal Monument
The Problem of Artificial Intelligence
In the Future No One Will Be Famous

Whilst peering over them, poring through their pages, making lists of those that I wished to dedicate some time to later, I bumped into their current carekeeper, Mr Auterraum, a lovely species with a six-pack torso and spectacles like Waldo. It was enough to send me into a tizzy every time he came near.

“What are you looking for, Frau Lamm?” he inquired, pushing his tortoise-shell glasses up the sharp slope of his nose. His German accent only added to the complete and utter disarray of my very being.

“Oh, my, Mr Auterraum, I’m very starry that I’ve disturbed you by your vork… I mean I am very sorry to have disturbed you. I just thought I’d have a look at the Ministry’s distinguished collection of endangered books and knowing you to be, well, to be who you are, um, well, maybe you can help me find a vork, work, I mean, that I have been looking for, yes, about … worldwide conspiracies in the music of pop.” (I was working undercover, after all.)

“Pop music, you say? You mean music composed and then played backwards by Manson and such?”

“No, not exactly. More like conspiracies on the dancefloor, Michael Jackson and how the Afghans used his Thriller to coordinate the great coup of Raji Raji….”

“Oh yes, yes, I know exactly what you mean. Let me see here. No, no, the Merve sector is all wrong. You’ll need to head to the Children of the Weathermen sector for the plethora of works on that theme.”

I had just begun to follow him when he turned hot on his heels after receiving a message on his handy, muttering something about “the dust devils, the dust devils,” he needed to tend to the dust devils first. He then vanished down the hall.

ADHT, I could only presume. Rather a bad case of it. Baffled, I returned to the stacks after having settled the mini-debate with myself (internal, subjective, and irrelevant to the story?) as to whether or not I should pee first before returning to the list-making after having dodged that sexy beast Mr Auterraum and his odd theories of dust devils, whatever they were. Speaking with him was like taking a stroll into a black hole and not knowing whether you’d come back again. On tenterhooks that he would return, my fingers moved across the pages impatiently and the need to pee made me all the more anxious when I came across an untranslatable sentence from Heidegger:

Das Bedenklichste in unserer bedenklichen Zeit ist, daß wir noch nicht denken.
[roughly translated: The most thoughtful thing in our thoughtful time is that we don’t think yet.]

Trouble had arrived, but I had the feeling that I was approaching my target as so many of the press releases we had received at the Ministry had spoken of the need for thought. I pulled to a full stop. I closed the book and began looking for further clues to the quandary of naming Anonymous in other books. Sortis Shakespeariani, was the game, and waving my finger magically through the air, I landed upon a title which spoke volumes to my urgent need of an immediate answer: Immediatism. Synchronicity. Perusing its scant pages, I immediately began taking notes:

Fully realizing that any art ‘manifesto’ written today can only stink of the same bitter irony it seeks to oppose, we nevertheless declare without hesitation (without too much thought) the founding of a ‘movement’, IMMEDIATISM. We feel free to do so because we intend to practice Immediatism in secret, in order to avoid any contamination of mediation. Publicly, we’ll continue our work in publishing, radio, printing, music, etc., but privately we will create something else, something to be shared freely but never consumed passively, something which can be discussed openly but never understood by the agents of alienation, something with no commercial potential yet valuable beyond price, something occult yet woven completely into the fabric of our everyday lives.

I was convinced that these statements had certain uncanny parallels to those I had read from the manifesto-in-progress, the “Notes towards the Anonymous Movement,” that slip of paper which Mr Panama covertly handed me in the elevator of the Waldorf. The author was most certainly one and the same. Back at the Ministry, I began my report tenuously and even at variance with the subject at hand, for though I had found the author of the Anonymous Movement at last, I wanted to delay Mr Rainbow’s knowledge of my knowledge, keeping him in the dark for a brief moment in time. I decided it was best that I should play dumb and so I began:

A Night of Work on Useless  Solutions for as yet Non-Existent Situations
A Memo for the Ministry of Leisure
12 April 2006

“An obvious matrix for Immediatism is the party. Thus a good meal could be an Immediatist art project, especially if everyone present cooked as well as ate. … rituals of conviviality like Fourier’s ‘Museum Orgy’ (erotic costumes, poses, and skits), live music and dance—the past can be ransacked for appropriate forms & imagination will supply more.”

And that was that. It was enough to throw him off my track, to get him off of my back at least for a week, so that I might enjoy the sojourn into knowing the unknown. But further investigations led me into a muddle: whether or not this Anonymous Movement was some sort of Chinese Tong or secret society, whether or not they moved in circles of “democratic shamanism” escaped me. I had booked a flight for Juniper Hills, California, to speak with the Town Council about further agreements. It was there that my search for Hakim Bey ended in the gutter. Bey (after a bitter divorce from Sylvie Lowen, a real estate tycoon of Vanuatu island) had been sentenced by the Ministry some 20 years hence and, never having come to trial, had disappeared presumably in the ever-swelling bowels of Guantánamo.

Some weeks later, a rather convoluted constellation of conversations led me on another path completely. It was an ordinary Wednesday in Paris, but as everyone knows, Wednesday night séances at Alejandro Jodorowsky’s were a treat not to be missed. It was there that I discovered another clue that led me to the dark heart of Serbia and Montenegro via Venice. After having tea with Onan the Magnificient (just to get the number of the man I was really after), I met up with Branislav Dimitrijevic in Belgrade who told me all about the work of the Anonymous artist/curator who put together the “International Exhibition of Modern Art (Armory Show)” in 1986, an “anonymous genius” who made a series of copies (shoddy copies made perhaps after reproductions found in books) of those same artworks that had appeared originally in the Armory Show of 1913—Cezanne, Gauguin, Brancusi, Matisse, Kandinsky, Leger, Picabia, etc. Our conversation lasted til the break of dawn, and, unfortunately, the only thing I have penciled in my notebook is the question: “Can an art collection become an ethnographic collection—simulating the status of artifacts?” I thought I was hot on the trail, but no…. This was not the person we were after. Dimitrijevic put me on to a lady in Croatia who put me in touch with an academic named Ana P, who seemed to know all about these Anonymous Movements involving artists like Mangelos and Jo Klek.

Jo Klek, in turn, talked about the antecedents to the antecedents. In 1934 at the MoMA, there was an “Anonymous Art” show and others had taken place in Harlem sometime around the turn of the millennium. But none of these Anonymous authors was the author that I was looking for. The only conclusion that I could come to was that Anonymous had become a brand that takes on non-Anonymous characteristics by necessity. All attempts to reach a final destination were but so many hijacked detours into tomfoolery. Ever elusive, Anonymous would remain Anonymous.

The piles on my desk, the phone calls from Mr Panama requesting more secret meetings in elevators, and the enigmatic memos of Mr Rainbow were beginning to tax my inner yogi. He had sent me a memo outlining the possible dangers of the Eighth Dwarf (“short, black, rubber?”) of whom Andre, of course, had never heard. The surfeit of sources for speculation, however, was yet another cause of worry at the Ministry in dire need of a clear report. After all, we were just one cog among many working towards a greater Creatocracy. The conundrum of Anonymity continued to present confirmation that our task had only just begun.

– April Elizabeth Lamm

Addendum
An excerpt from a taped conversation between Annie Hall and Woody Allen, very similar to the conversation held between April Lamm and the Anonymous curator one hot summer night in the revolving restaurant at the top of the TV tower at Alexander Platz:

Annie Hall: Well, you’re what Granny Hall would call a real Jew.

Woodie Allen: Thank you.

Annie: Well, she hates Jews, she thinks that they just make money, but let me tell you, man, she’s the one, I’m telling you, is she ever.

Woodie: So did you do those photographs in there, or what?

Annie: Yeah, yeah I sort of dabble around.
(I dabble—listen to me, what a jerk?)

Woodie: They’re wonderful, you know. They have they have a quality.
(You are a great-looking girl)

Annie: Well, I would like to take a serious photography course.
(He probably thinks I’m a yo-yo)

Woodie: Photography is interesting cause you know it’s a new art form and an
aesthetic criteria that hasn’t emerged yet.
(I wonder what she looks like naked)

Annie: Aesthetic criteria? You mean whether or not it is a good photo or not.
(I’m not smart enough for him. Hang in there)

Woodie: The medium enters in as a condition of the art form itself.
(I don’t know what I’m saying. She senses I’m shallow)

Annie: To me, it’s all instinctive, I just try to feel it, and not try to think about it so much.
(God I hope he doesn’t turn out to be a schmuck like the others)

Woodie: Still you need a set of aesthetic guidelines to put it in social perspective.
(Christ I sound like FM radio, relax!)

On the Monuments of the Mind of Christoph Keller

2007-11-30T04:13:00.000-08:00

A Trip into the Monuments of the Mind

“The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap.... Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words.”
--Chuang Tzu

He was an oxymoron, keeping going and staying put. Like a motorhome. He was between worlds, a hinge-man.

I encountered him in my travels through time, in the era of difference, slightly before the era of sadistic children, in the winter of the year 2003. Having passed through the low earth orbit space junk, having dodged the some 8000 objects floating 320 to 800 kilometers above the earth, I met a man connecting with these objects, receiving their signals.

Though he once called himself a hydrologist—measuring the circumferent distance of lakes in the mountaintops of Chile—he now called himself an artist, measuring the mental distances between his mind and others from the foot of a small hill in Berlin.

In his name one could see a Denkbild of contradiction. If a pictograph of Christoph Keller existed, it would depict a travelling man—patron saint of travelling, Christoph—no longer travelling per se, but rather sitting in a place of storage, a cellar—Keller—watching television. That is to say, his travels were no longer those of the body, but those of the mind’s eye, no longer his, but those of many others. His suitcase remained unpacked, his travels were selected through the powers of a telecommando, a remote controlling of some 256 possible journeys to places which did not resemble in the least the cellar in which he sat. Like many others living in the dark city, he was most fond of the round tool which enabled him to put his troubled travelled mind to rest: a satellite dish. Not a plate of edibles, but instead an apparatus whose features included “remote sensing” and “high gain antennae.” Connected to his far-away-seeing box, his satellite dish accessed the world of moving pictures. Undenkbilder.

This cellar-dwelling traveller seemed to have a blatant disregard for the well-trodden path, for the perimeters of his chosen profession. Instead of producing objects to be seen and awed over, objects to be eventually stored in the cellars of museums, kunsthalles, galleries and the like, he made objects which were then transformed into representative letters and numbers, and stored in name alone. There were places that held objects with signatures, and places that held the idea of objects with signatures. Patent number P 34 71 262.4 symbolized a paradox-picture machine: neither here nor there, not even truly rundum, because of the resulting rectangle. The machine produced representative contradictions in the laws of the physical moving world. In the pictures the machine produced everything that went fast goes slow, and everything that went slow goes fast. Slow things were blurred. Fast things were sharp.

“Time turns metaphors into things and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.” -- Robert Smithson

Outside of his window looking onto a wall, the only worlds of motion were the reflections of a sun, reflections of an object which he couldn’t see. (“Ich habe versucht, am Grauton der Mauer zu
erkennen, ob Sonne scheint oder Regen ist.”) Patent number P 44 24 571.8, a.k.a. the Helioflex (1997), followed the motions of the sun and channeled them into the shady lower stories of vertical structures, middle-format high-rise apartments and neon-lit bureaus. This mirrored Plexiglas satellite dish, 68 cm in diameter, resisted wind speeds of up to 120 km/hour and featured a “light-dark sensor.” It was a satellite dish with eyes detecting the fluctuations and graduations of light and its absence; a satellite dish that replaced the undenkbilder of the moving pictures with pure light. “Licht das einen wegbläst,” said Keller of his way of tackling the social inequalities of vertical architecture. “Licht für Lebensraum.”

Then there was light, but no motion. His mind had been numbed from the moving pictures channeled-in from the satellite dish. But being the hinge-man that he is, he left his now-well lit cellar and went to a dark one not far from his home on a hilltop. In the cellar of the Charité hospital, he found some 4000 un-archived films. Nearly a century of film-footage documenting some monumental moments in medical history, he found out the answers to questions such as “What happens to a dog when his brain is removed?” or “Can one prevent homosexuality in rats?” “What did amputation look like at the turn of the century?” In Keller’s film Retrograd (1999), he interpolated the historical fragments of knowledge with fragments of interviews of scientists working at the Charité now. Much of the talk was of a certain “objectivity” in the films serving the history of knowledge, and not art.

Going further along this path of celluloid history, the straddle of a giraffe, the waddle of a porcupine, the gallop of a horse, indeed the movement of the entire animal kingdom was the subject of the scientist Konrad Lorenz. Animals “in” art and “as” art. They are animals on the go-go, heading nowhere further than the confines of a loop. It’s as if they were placed on a treadmill, away from the flock, the herd, the bevy of safety in numbers, on behalf of our curiosity. On 40 monitors—the same bilder-boxes for undenkbilder—Keller created a space for his “Encyclopedia Cinematographica” (2001).

“I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past.”
--Robert Smithson

In a travel wagon, one would expect that it might be high time for this mind-traveller to hit the road. But the Expedition Bus was on a meta-journey, its wheels high in the sky of epistemology. To be seen were several ethnological documentaries recording the invisible journeys of the mind of a shaman. In order to combat evil spirits, Shamans journey to the heavens above or to the underground below to wrestle with troubling demons. Ethnologists are the makers, in this case, of non-travelogue travelogues. An acceptable format used in the gathering of knowledge about differing cultures, we believe these films document a certain reality. Oddly, they function on a level somewhat in the way that we believe in a photograph of a piano concert. Separate screenings of the same film were projected onto the driver and passenger sides of the front window. The landscape the passenger saw was slightly off from that of the driver—presenting the idea of a time lapse. No longer films with a beginning, middle and end, the installation marked a passage of time connoting the interval between something said and something understood.

“Repetition, not originality, is the object.”
—Robert Smithson

Return journey. Roundtrip. Retrospective of a transhistorical consciousness. Remote sensing of not so remote worlds read through wireless signals. Reading the world through pictures—hieroglyphs—reading the world through 1s and 0s—computers. Reading the past through history. Some believe that we can read the world through a matter-less substance called Orgones, a libidinal energy to be found in us and all around us in the atmosphere, in every place we see, touch, and don’t see. Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) believed that we could channel this energy for the good of humanity, and even to cure cancer. “What Einstein was seeking in his own way—a single principle, a unified field theory to explain everything—Wilhelm Reich had already found. The libido theory was a weapon against both the death drive theory of his intellectual hero Sigmund Freud and the atomic energy of his second hero Einstein. Healthy sexuality, supported by orgone accumulators, was the bulwark against the assaults of life-threatening radiation.” However, just before his death in jail, he locked his research up –in storage—not to be revealed to the world until the year 2007. Here again we have a cellar of secret knowledge awaiting a release of its secrets.

“Stoop if you are abcde-minded....”
--James Joyce

In the spring and summer of 2003, this specimen of man, known for his fascination for round dishes with mirrors and magical powers, took up the sky as his playground. Though he was a creator, an inventor of many things new, he was also a re-creator who relinquished the idea of making something “new.” He went to the top of a clocktower on the island of Manhattan, and to an area called Long Island City (which was neither island nor city, but a borough also known as Queens). There he reenacted the Cloudbusting Project, carefully following Reich’s set of rules, including:

Rule # 4: ”In cloud engineering, you do not ‘create rain,’ you do not ‘destroy clouds.’ Briefly, you are not playing God. What you do is simply helping nature on its natural course.”

and

Rule # 6: “Do not let workers draw Orgone energy any longer if they become blue or purple in their faces or feel dizzy.”

His experiment seemed to work. His obedience to the rules in creating this large penile contraption made of shiny copper and natural wood which would suck the orgone energy out of the clouds, made it rain, made it pour. He made many an island Manhattanite unhappy, as unhappy as the long-island inhabitants of Queens.

He brought his cloudbusting-object back to Berlin and began working on his experiments once again, this time with the aim of bringing more light to the gloomy November days which fell languorously into the hands of darkness at the early hour of half-four. On the rooftop of the Galerie Schipper & Krome, he aimed his cloudbuster in the direction of the tv-tower of DDR dreams on Alexander Platz. Inside the gallery he placed a large satellite dish in the corner of the room in which the rooftop apparatus was projected live. On a crude wooden pedestal he placed joysticks controlling the cloudbuster’s movements, right and left, up and down. No longer the weather master, Keller put the idea of “helping nature along its natural course” into the hands of others looking into a live-fed film of Berlin’s cloud-blanketed sky.

No longer bound to the confines his cellar, to a museum, to a patent office, or to the windows of a non-travelling bus, Keller’s journey continues into the Himmel—into the sky, into heaven—into the Zukunft, the “to coming” and the “to going” of the beyond. Mingling weird science with conceptual art, one would encourage the young artist to go on, to keep on going on, in his experiments for a non-abcde-minded world.

April Elizabeth Lamm, December 2003

Operation Snowball

2007-11-30T04:06:00.000-08:00

“A Little Snow” had brought Ulrike Kuschel great fame and envy amongst her friends. Although the idea was simple enough to provoke a knee-jerk “I could have done that” in a crowd of “never would have done that” amateur critics, “A Little Snow,” after appearing on the front cover of Artforum, was a succès de scandale. Neither heaps nor the shoddy after-effects of a blizzard that had swept over Berlin, it was thought that Kuschel had faked these spartan winter landscapes with the help of a computer, or the know-how of an environmental architect. It was thought that Kuschel might have manipulated her viewer into believing that they were seeing a harmless bit of snow in a harmless environment, when they were actually seeing a harmless bit of snow in a not-so-harmless environment (the site of a massacre, the last cigarette kiosk before Sachsenhausen), or that Kuschel had manipulated her viewer into believing that this harmless bit of snow was actually chemically infested and quite purposely placed on the ground in seemingly anonymous places, that this snow was actually the evidence of a governmental plot against its own unemployed citizens, or one of the more absurd side-effects of the unpopular employment-creation measure. No one could believe that they were seeing actual snow, the wee bit, part of mother nature’s B-side, in actual places, with no specific rhyme or reason.

The success came as no surprise. After all, Ulrike Kuschel, e pluribus unum, was one of a group of ladies who lunch in East Berlin nearby the offices of the Ministry of Leisure. There were several agents at the Ministry who had a nodding acquaintance with her work, but it was I who was given the order to explore in depth the possible dangers to our society of workers and farmers. The fruits of my espionage were summarized by my supervisor Mr Rainbow in a few bullet points. Her photographs indicated (in no particular chronology or order):

* Uncovering seditious interiors via the exposure of prosaic exteriors (conspiracy plots to bring the Superpower under the rule of the unknown Sub-Power)
*Uncanny situations in familiar settings (man with a rake in a garden)
*Subversive celebrations of economic apartheid on the 2nd of May

The dirty work Mr Rainbow had later requested of me was performed quite naturally by my fellow citizens one day as I was watching her take photographs on Walhallastrasse. Eavesdropping on her with my trusty directive laser microphone, I could hardly believe my ears:

Can I see your identity card?
You are photographing every house, I saw you! You simply cannot photograph all of these houses. Who are you photographing for? I’m going to call the police….

My fellow citizen’s attempt to use these naïve interrogative scare-tactics on Kuschel were in vain, for she remained completely unfazed and continued to shoot. The crux of the matter, however, was the Ministy’s desire to understand the hubbub surrounding a series of subjective notations on archival images from German history. Ulrike Kuschel, you see, had been recently denounced by the Party of Professionals for a violation of ordinance no. 2789462, which everyone and his brother knew as shorthand for the “defecting from the law of what you see is not what you see.” The rule was a tried and true one in the sector of art production – and the art apparatchiki were heavy-handed in their enforcement of the regulation meant to encourage labor and craft. Indeed, it was an ordinance meant to eliminate unnecessary time spent on poesy and accidental intention.

But just as it seemed that her suffering could grow no worse – the doctors diagnosed an acute phase of cultural combat fatigue – Kuschel’s troubles were lifted like an iron curtain when a private patroness (known for allocating the bulk of her inheritance into the Trust for Anarchic Meaning) took to collecting her work. But that was after the Wall and before the Invisible Fence. Nonetheless, Kuschel had made no request for transfer, and continued to assiduously amass a body of work undecipherable to the nobs at the Ministry whose fire and fury revolved around perpetuating a past and the flurry of Operation Snowball.

– April Elizabeth Lamm

My Dinner with George

2007-11-30T03:46:00.000-08:00

My Dinner with George

As part of the governmental effort to boost productivity within the cultural sector, the Ministry of Leisure had given me the covert charge of “having dinner.” It was the idea of the minister himself (who cleverly noticed that my nighttime activities were slowly taking precedence over those in the day) that I should write a weekly report recording my dinner conversations, as it were, with pop stars, poets, artists and post-theory philosophers. The idea had come about after one of our daily departmental unwinding sessions in which we had screened Louis Malle’s “My Dinner with Andre” (1981), a film in which two frustrated New Yorker playwrights meet over dinner to discuss the meaning of life.

Serendipitously, my first mission, my first “meaning of life” over dinner, happened to coincide with a dinner for George Michael given by a film producer friend of ours from London in town for the Berlinale. He had said he wanted to invite me particularly so that I could meet George’s beau Kenny, who was opening up a gallery in Texas soon and wanted to know everything about “the art part” in Berlin. George had chosen life. Surely he would have some insight into the meaning of it.

I was no rookie to the job, as some six years ago, the Ministry had hired me as an agent whose sole purpose was to record the blurring boundaries between art and life. They had been having difficulties of late distinguishing between the two, and in order to avoid a rash decision of new hires to take on the recent flood of work, they decided to double-up the shifts of those already in service. You see, the Ministry of Criminality had been consulting the Ministry of Leisure more and more often because of what they called an “incremental discrepancy” of arrests whereupon the defendant proclaimed that the crime committed was in service of art. I knew of just such a case where an artist was arrested on the spot for possessing a strangely manipulated camera along side a map with key spots in Berlin mysteriously circled. He was driving a 70s model Fiat which screeched around the corners no matter how slow he was driving, making him appear the bandit, even if he were on a simple shopping trip. On one Sunday, this artist happened to purchase a toboggan—the kind with the eyes cut out—and for kicks, he was wearing it whilst driving home from the flea market on a dusty corner of Kreuzberg, when suddenly, he careened in the middle of an NPD street protest on Torstrasse and found himself trying to explain this finagled camera and the map on the passenger seat to a squad of machine gun bearing riot control police. Such were the cases causing my minister unnecessary grief.

I was by no means new to the business and blurriness of art. Having given up the intellectual cache of being an art critic, cupidity had led me into trading in the coveted editorial position at one of the world’s most fashionable art magazines for a stable position with a pension at the Ministry, without a whisker of doubt.

I had come from a long line of “diners” and dialogists, after all, so taking up the Minister’s offer seemed quite natural. My mother had trained me well to follow in her feted southern belle footsteps whose hoop skirts had traveled from the Kremlin to the refineries of kumquats in China as part of the Committee to Charm the Worker’s Party, an odd and failed effort of a few blue bloods with a fading interest in Chairman Mao to bridge the boundaries between capitalism in communism through a series of balls. Or at least that is what she told me. There were no pictures documenting these events, and though occasionally I believed it to have been merely part of the Simpson family folklore, there would inevitably appear some gentleman from the past who would pop in for tea and I would overhear them reminiscing about the good old days in Peking. With this history, it seemed only natural that she should become involved with voodoo and black magic while secretly working for the cause of the Black Nationalist Party. Though she was a white girl, she had somehow managed to get away with calling her black friends her “brothahs”and “sistahs” (quite literally actually, since the Simpson family was well-known for having more than a few butterscotch-colored children along the line). I had indeed seen a few newspaper photographs of protests from the Black Nationalist movement where my blue-stockinged mother would appear front stage and off-center next to Panthers and priests on a political mission.

It was no surprise then that while I was penning a quick note to my mother, wanting to brag about my dinner with George the night before (and ask if she hadn’t thrown away my Choose Life t-shirt), multitasking, checking my mail inbetween sentences on Word, while playing “stupid cupid” (as George would say) with Dexter and Jorn on the phone, I discovered my mother’s mail. Subject: Dinner with Amiri Baraka.

Per post electronique from the beaches of Hilton Head, she wrote:
“Dinner last night was more fabulous than I had expected. It turns out that Baraka isn't Muslim at all. What too much bourbon does to the brain, I tell you. Who knew? I guess I knew, but I had forgotten. He's still very passionate and fiery at 70, and he announced that he isn't religious at all; he believes in Good, not God. After a rather intense reading of his poem ‘Somebody Blew Up America’ we went for drinks at Big Bamboo then dinner at Mag’s. I came home very tired but elated. What a treat.”

Baraka? My head was aching from too much of the bubbly pushed on us from the overly eager sommelier of Bocca di Bacco. I had dined with George Michael, pop star and author of the lyric, “guilty feet ain’t got no rhythm” on the same evening that my mother had dined with the author who once wrote “don’t tell me shit about the tradition of slavemasters / & henry james.” Suddenly anything I might say seemed, well, fluffy. Hanging on like a yo-yo between Word and Yahoo, I was stumped. After all, she had just dined with LeRoi Jones, not only the last poet laureate of New Jersey, but also the last poet laureate of New Jersey. The white woman who’d grown up in the Bible Belt south and whose mother Blanche referred to the local Leroys (note: y instead of the royal French i) as those “other” people, my mother had dined with the poet, the Beat poet who made poetry a racy thing, the stuff of riots. LeRoi Jones was the one whose open sesame call out to all the brothers who were prohibited from entering certain honkie’s stores went like, “the magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up.”

My mind was racing to make connections where perhaps none existed. Faint memories of the things George had said, in a rant (obviously suffering from a vile hangover himself) came back to me in flashes, seemingly meaningful because of my quivering state of mind. George was not just a pop star. He was a man living in fear of being murdered. He mentioned something about his phone being tapped by the CIA simply because of a music video he once made in protest of the war in Iraq. We all just sat at the table, indeed, just like the dumbfounded Wallace Shawn listening to the wild stories of Andre Gregory, stories of being naked in the forest with Polish women, of being buried alive, and like Wally, all we could do was say, “Wow. So what happened next?” Though I cannot record it directly, I remembered vaguely something about him saying how the system of Apartheid was a system of labor control, just as the death camps of the Nazis, just like Intel, Nike, Levis... something about how you can go to China and exploit the workers at about a dollar a day who can make jeans just as good as here. Blah, blah, the G7 building alliances with the elite and providing the local police with tear gas and guns. It was all a blur and it seemed that the only words I kept repeating in the taxi home were, “He’s so politically engaged.” I knew then that the Ministry had reason to worry that one of their stars was indeed overstepping the confines of our department. Were they also worried that because George had offered up his songs on his website for free that he was a potentially dangerous, albeit retrograde, commie? George drank Diet Coke. The rest of us drank Louis Jadot.

I remember his mentioning something about a cheap paperback of Nostradamus being in his toilet, sure, but was this really reason to worry? Toilets and prophets and pop stars with power. This was all well and good, but my duty to the Ministry required that I come up with an explication of the blurring of pop and life, distinguishing between the dangers and the doo-dads.

Out for a coffee, I caught sight of the Berliner Zeitung in the hands of a handsome man eating spaghetti on Ackerstrasse. There he was again, front page of the Feuilleton, George entering a limousine. The headline: “Ich war die männliche Kylie” (I was the manly Kylie). Transfixed and wobbly, I kept walking, but my eyes and mind were somewhere between last night’s dinner and “did he say that last night too?” when suddenly, I collision crashed into my friend Florian, whose basket of strawberries went flying under an ice cream truck. Bending to help him in a fit of laughter, “Oh heavens, Flo, what have I done? I’m so hungover, please forgive me.” Behind my sunglasses and baseball cap, under what a friend of mine cleverly calls “celebrity disguise,” I told him that I had just had dinner with George Michael last night and made fluorescent gestures with my hands. “What did you say? Dinner with George Michael... uh-huh. Did you win that? Oh God, I’ve got to run. Listen darling, I once had champagne with Elton John. Ring me and we’ll get together and I will carelessly whisper to you the whole dirty story.”

These gay men and their quick wit. I could barely put two sentences together and here was Flo on the street talking to me and his handy* at the same time, totally nonplussed about the strawberries in the street. My thoughts were somewhere else, still trying to concentrate on what George had said last night ... about having Nostradamus on his toilet seat, I mean next to his toilet seat, and what could that mean? And what was all the fuss about George in a public toilet and didn’t that make the rest of his restaurant-going life really difficult? Never again could he innocently ask the hostess, “Excuse me, but could you show me where the toilets are?” without getting some sort of crass smile as an answer. Wasn’t there some discussion about the extinction of sea turtles too and a twenty year window before the big Flood came to wash us all away? I remembered the day a friend of mine once told me as we were walking through Europe’s largest conglomeration of new parents –Prenzlauer Berg-- that more than one billion trees are used to make disposable diapers every year. Passing by a woman in a batik dress pushing a stroller with shock-absorbing rubber wheels, the song line of George’s kept running through my head: “If my best isn’t good enough, then how can it be good enough for two?”

It dawned upon me that the pop star might indeed be in dire need of a rendezvous with the poet. After all, George was afraid and Baraka fearless. Both had been oppressed, one as a black man, born in 1920, and the other gay, born in 1963, both of whom had cut their slice of the pie with a cookie cutter gone awry. (Such were the ways of hangover speech. Little made sense, and every detail of the remembered dinner seemed an epiphany.) While Corey Hart might have been the “Boy in the Box” who could never surrender, George was the boy in the closet who was oh-so-something else other than Boy George. The dinner-chore duty began to annoy me, if only because I was responsible for writing it all down and was the Minister really going bother reading this anyway? Perhaps if LeRoi had been sitting across the table from George he might have schooled him in the ways of creating a violent revolution and there would be more than enough fodder for my report tangling the cords of cosmopolitan lore. Could the father figure, preacher teacher teach anything to the man who had once written “It is better to have loved and lost / Than to put linoleum in your living room?” George was a swinger. Words like “jitterbug” for him were par for the norm.

I knew that I had to find out more details from my mother’s dinner, and if parallels were to be made, then an insight into being a missionary pop star might be revealed. I rang my mother in the late afternoon, knowing that I would reach her at the very beginning of cocktail hour, the time when sense was still making sense. Feeling inadequately armed with knowledge of LeRoi’s poems, and knowing her to grow impatient with my constant reply, “No, I don’t remember that poem,” I googled “Baraka,” whereupon I found evidence of an unwilling prophet: “Remember, I do not have the healing powers of Oral Roberts.” Denying the prophetic vision of LeRoi’s poem written when George was still a toddler, “Monday in B-Flat,” was a tune still worthy of the pop charts:

I can pray
all day
& God
wont come.

But if I call
911
The Devil
Be here
in a minute!

There I sat. I could not do otherwise. My head was bursting now, and my ice pack melting dangerously over the scriptbed of my new legtop. Googling further, I found out that Baraka, too, had words to the wise-weary in our love-torn world. George, the man who now lived in an “open” relationship with his lover Kenny, had certainly given a thought or two to the vicissitudes of love. It had been reported in the Daily Mail that George had slept with over 500 men in the seven years that he had been together with Kenny. I wondered how open open could be without causing the heart to close.

& Love is an evil word.
Turn it backwards
see, what I mean?
An evol word. & besides
Who understands it?
I certainly wouldn’t like to go out on that kind of limb.

Matters of the heart could be lengthy and backwards and given the pressures of being and existence, I thought it best to put the issue on the backburner. The deadline was approaching for the sobering report about how in 1213, the King of England seriously considered converting to Islam, and that we’d all soon have less to worry about round here as soon as I could place the radical poet next to the pop star (Ich war der männlich Kylie? Was?) at a dinner party, yes, soon someone would hear a song on the music box and they’d “shoot the dog” in office.

April Elizabeth Lamm
* “Handy” is the German word for mobile phone.