Shrinking art
Art is dead, long live science! No, wait, scratch that, art is dead, long live urbanism!
The particular nature of the 'art is dead' message you're getting depends very much on the city you're in, and on where the art galleries mounting their currently-trendy interdisciplinary shows are turning for their funding. 'Art is dead, long live science' is a current London meme, and it's been encouraged by funding from The Wellcome Foundation. On October 17th BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature was a 45 minute programme by Kodwo Eshun about Sci-Art, the hot new thing in the British art world: a series of collaborations between artists and scientists. There was an ex-Pogue, Jem Finer, talking about his work with physicists. There was Lewis Wolpert playing the obligatory fuddy duddy cynic, telling us that no artist had ever helped a scientist in any way. And there was a man from the Wellcome Foundation saying quite transparently that when you're giving wads of GlaxoSmithKline cash away, artists tend to flock around, eager to fit their pet ideas into whatever program you're proposing.
That attitude wouldn't go down so well in Berlin, where things are a bit less capitalist. Here, cultural activities are much more likely to get funding from the government than the pharmaceutical industry. The play I'm working on just now, for instance, is 100% government-funded, as are the fees of the students participating, even those from outside Germany. This government funding may explain why a lot of the art I've seen in Berlin in the past year has looked rather like a government report on urban issues. The show I saw at Kunst-Werke yesterday, Shrinking Cities, was just the latest in a long line of shows about cities. I trace them back to the fantastically influential Cities on the Move show curated in the late 90s by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. Cities on the Move was about 'the Asian city as a force of disruption and an intense concentration of energy'. It was a sexy and optimistic show about the future, and certainly fired me up about living in high density Asian spaces.
Rem Koolhaas, who had big input into Cities on the Move, staged his own urbanism show this year at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, Content, a big survey of his architectural projects, but also of his research into shopping and attitudes all over the world. The show came at the moment of Rem's greatest disillusionment with America (he was closing his US offices and concentrating on China) and has an almost anti-American (certainly anti-Bush) theme -- ironically, the success of the Seattle Public Library project and the probable cancellation of the China TV building in Beijing has since swung Koolhaas back to a much more America-centric position.
Then there was this year's Berlin Biennale, which gave over a lot of the rooms at the Martin Gropius Bau to urbanism and psychogeography, including my favourite piece, a photographic study of allotment gardens and woodland walks by Ingrid Book and Karina Heden. Last year we had the excellent Territories show at Kunst-Werke, a show about 'the production of space' in Israel, especially in terms of segregation and security.
What these shows try -- and in some cases succeed in doing -- is to balance an empirical, objective look at real issues in the world (journalism, sociology, fact-gathering) with an artistic freshness of presentation, and a concern for the lived experience and cultural meaning of the changes described. This is a German tradition going back to the post-expressionist 'new objectivity' of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, and it's an important counter-balance to German idealism and head-in-the-clouds romanticism (currently exemplified in art by the brilliant Kai Althoff).
Shrinking Cities is the latest interdisciplinary urbanism show. It's the result of three years of research by artists, architects, filmmakers, graphic artists, journalists, and cultural and social scientists. It's been financed by the Federal Cultural Foundation in co-operation with the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the magazine archplus. It's all very serious and worthy and interesting. It's also, because of its subject, a rather depressing show, a show about decay and decline.
At Kunst-Werke, itself a post-industrial warehouse space, we get a floor which is basically a book about urban decay pasted up on the wall, with lots of timelines, demographic charts, facts and figures about four shrinking post-industrial urban areas: Detroit (USA), Halle/Leipzig (Germany), Ivanovo (Russia) and Liverpool/Manchester (Britain). On the upper three floors we get more quirky insights: a video about an eccentric tall black homosexual in Detroit who rode around on an amazingly colourful, trash-encrusted bicycle, a reconstruction of a Liverpool cultural projects office, interviews with 12 year old boys on derelict brownfield sites, clips from movies set in post-industrial wastelands, headphones with pop records like Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' and St Etienne's 'Finisterre' playing on them. (For more about the show, see the excellent Worldchanging blog about it.)
I'm enough of a post-Marxist Calvinist to appreciate shows like this, but sometimes they get you a bit nostalgic for the days when art galleries were full of that silly, personal, playful, pointless thing called art. It's not that art isn't still being made in Germany, it's just that you have to fly to London or Chicago to see the latest work by John Bock or Kai Althoff. And using all that kerosene just isn't good for the environment.
The particular nature of the 'art is dead' message you're getting depends very much on the city you're in, and on where the art galleries mounting their currently-trendy interdisciplinary shows are turning for their funding. 'Art is dead, long live science' is a current London meme, and it's been encouraged by funding from The Wellcome Foundation. On October 17th BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature was a 45 minute programme by Kodwo Eshun about Sci-Art, the hot new thing in the British art world: a series of collaborations between artists and scientists. There was an ex-Pogue, Jem Finer, talking about his work with physicists. There was Lewis Wolpert playing the obligatory fuddy duddy cynic, telling us that no artist had ever helped a scientist in any way. And there was a man from the Wellcome Foundation saying quite transparently that when you're giving wads of GlaxoSmithKline cash away, artists tend to flock around, eager to fit their pet ideas into whatever program you're proposing.
That attitude wouldn't go down so well in Berlin, where things are a bit less capitalist. Here, cultural activities are much more likely to get funding from the government than the pharmaceutical industry. The play I'm working on just now, for instance, is 100% government-funded, as are the fees of the students participating, even those from outside Germany. This government funding may explain why a lot of the art I've seen in Berlin in the past year has looked rather like a government report on urban issues. The show I saw at Kunst-Werke yesterday, Shrinking Cities, was just the latest in a long line of shows about cities. I trace them back to the fantastically influential Cities on the Move show curated in the late 90s by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Hou Hanru. Cities on the Move was about 'the Asian city as a force of disruption and an intense concentration of energy'. It was a sexy and optimistic show about the future, and certainly fired me up about living in high density Asian spaces.
Rem Koolhaas, who had big input into Cities on the Move, staged his own urbanism show this year at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, Content, a big survey of his architectural projects, but also of his research into shopping and attitudes all over the world. The show came at the moment of Rem's greatest disillusionment with America (he was closing his US offices and concentrating on China) and has an almost anti-American (certainly anti-Bush) theme -- ironically, the success of the Seattle Public Library project and the probable cancellation of the China TV building in Beijing has since swung Koolhaas back to a much more America-centric position.
Then there was this year's Berlin Biennale, which gave over a lot of the rooms at the Martin Gropius Bau to urbanism and psychogeography, including my favourite piece, a photographic study of allotment gardens and woodland walks by Ingrid Book and Karina Heden. Last year we had the excellent Territories show at Kunst-Werke, a show about 'the production of space' in Israel, especially in terms of segregation and security.
What these shows try -- and in some cases succeed in doing -- is to balance an empirical, objective look at real issues in the world (journalism, sociology, fact-gathering) with an artistic freshness of presentation, and a concern for the lived experience and cultural meaning of the changes described. This is a German tradition going back to the post-expressionist 'new objectivity' of Die Neue Sachlichkeit, and it's an important counter-balance to German idealism and head-in-the-clouds romanticism (currently exemplified in art by the brilliant Kai Althoff).
Shrinking Cities is the latest interdisciplinary urbanism show. It's the result of three years of research by artists, architects, filmmakers, graphic artists, journalists, and cultural and social scientists. It's been financed by the Federal Cultural Foundation in co-operation with the Leipzig Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the magazine archplus. It's all very serious and worthy and interesting. It's also, because of its subject, a rather depressing show, a show about decay and decline.
At Kunst-Werke, itself a post-industrial warehouse space, we get a floor which is basically a book about urban decay pasted up on the wall, with lots of timelines, demographic charts, facts and figures about four shrinking post-industrial urban areas: Detroit (USA), Halle/Leipzig (Germany), Ivanovo (Russia) and Liverpool/Manchester (Britain). On the upper three floors we get more quirky insights: a video about an eccentric tall black homosexual in Detroit who rode around on an amazingly colourful, trash-encrusted bicycle, a reconstruction of a Liverpool cultural projects office, interviews with 12 year old boys on derelict brownfield sites, clips from movies set in post-industrial wastelands, headphones with pop records like Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' and St Etienne's 'Finisterre' playing on them. (For more about the show, see the excellent Worldchanging blog about it.)
I'm enough of a post-Marxist Calvinist to appreciate shows like this, but sometimes they get you a bit nostalgic for the days when art galleries were full of that silly, personal, playful, pointless thing called art. It's not that art isn't still being made in Germany, it's just that you have to fly to London or Chicago to see the latest work by John Bock or Kai Althoff. And using all that kerosene just isn't good for the environment.