Dirk Bell
SCHINKEL PAVILLON
Oberwallstrasse 1,
September 19–November 1
Dirk Bell, Revelation Big Sun, 2009, sixty-four neon tubes, aluminum, steel, white paint, suitcase, circuit board, 31 1/2 x 31 1/2'.
The Schinkel Pavillion is a large octagonal room, built in 1969 in the former East Berlin in a mixture of ornate classicism and Bauhaus-style modernism. In the past few years, it has hosted a series of exhibitions of contemporary sculpture. Its grandeur and specificity––high windows, wrought-iron railings and marble floors––make it a difficult space for art to inhabit: Art is always competing (at a disadvantage) with the dominance of the architecture.
Dirk Bell brings to the occasion both an instinct for the dramatic gesture and a necessary passivity. He is primarily known as a painter who references the dissolute genre of late-nineteenth-century Symbolism to blend it with the Pop symbolism of late-twentieth-century graphic illustration. Here, however, he defers to the overaestheticized pretensions of the interior with neutral industrial materials. In the pavilion itself, a geometric structure of white neon tubes has been installed below the original ceiling: a large square comprising thirty-two triangles with two tubes extending from each side so it resembles a star that fits flush within the room’s octagon. The tubes are connected to a computer that turns them on and off, although the changes are so gradual, and follow a system so impossible to discern, that you might not notice. The general concentration of light remains more or less constant. This bright overhead complexity recalls Liam Gillick’s Plexiglas ceilings––which provide a privileged space for discussion and reflection––but Bell’s irregular sequencing of light brings to the strictness of formalistic abstraction an anarchistic quality. It might be a parody of early Conceptual sculpture, recalling Sol LeWitt’s injunction to pursue an “irrational” train of thought “absolutely and logically.”
Bell has erected steel bars spanning the width of the adjoining room, which spell out, in sequence, FREE. Contradicting this, the bars hinder passage through the room, just as the lowered ceiling of neon seems as though it were about to trap you in its buzzing web.
— Mark Prince
Thea Djordjadze
SPRÜTH MAGERS BERLIN
Oranienburger Str. 18
September 22–November 7
Thea Djordjadze, Explain away, ე.ი., 2009, wood, hardboard, carpet, paint, clay, fabric, 12' x 16' 6" x 30'. Installation view.
Thea Djordjadze’s Explain Away, ე.ი., 2009, the largest work in this solo exhibition, is austerely theatrical. It connects a few sparse elements of sculpture, painting, and architecture to form a rudimentary space that is governed by a concentrated pictorial logic. The stagelike setting articulates a formal language that is unique to Djordjadze but is connected to modernism through dense, formally reduced sculptural arrangements.
Djordjadze uses three dividing walls that reach up to the ceiling to construct a space within the work; the structure encompasses the installation like a transparent frame, defining the inside and the outside and establishing sight lines and paths for the viewer. These framing elements consist of thin strips of wood that have been painted black and are arranged in open rectilinear fields of varying sizes: They look like an extensive, spatial line drawing. Here, Djordjadze references the Eameses’ Case Study House #8 (1945–49), though her version is so abstract that the crisp lines unfold with poetic force. The artist literally creates a frame for the gaze, introducing rhythm to the space and allowing the other works to be read within a modernist living-space setting.
The arrangements within the installation are akin to a basic formula for living spaces: a table, pictures, possibly a dresser, all reduced to simple gestures, a simplification that promotes ambiguity. For instance, the table is so large and flat that it functions as a horizontal pictorial element within the entire space. It also serves as the plinth that carries the simple arrangement of two sculptures made by hand from unfired clay, one of which is placed on an antique folded carpet. On the adjacent wall hangs a stylized frame, which also appears as a shelf with uneven edges. Its surface has been painted densely and hastily in green; it seems to be a painting yet also a model of a painting. All in all, Djordjadze weaves minimal arrangements into a subtle, whole texture––a stage on which things retreat into the pictorial.
Translated from German by Jane Brodie
— Jens Asthoff
Alicja Kwade
JOHANN KÖNIG
Dessauerstr. 6-7
September 15–November 7
Alicja Kwade, Der Tag ohne Gestern (Dimension 1–11) (The Day Without Yesterday [Dimension 1–11]), 2009, steel, black varnish, speakers, mixer, microphones, neon tubes, dimensions variable. Installation view.
Three works summon a powerful sense of the uncanny in Alicja Kwade’s latest exhibition, “Border Cases of Fundamental Theories.” The Polish-born, Berlin-based artist’s pair of installations and video share a Minimalist appearance, and together they evoke disquieting impressions.
Kwade’s video captures a few rocks falling slowly through pitch-black space. In reality, the stones are mere pebbles. Yet Kwade has filmed them with a high-speed camera that magnifies the objects to massive proportions on the gallery wall to create the unnerving sense that these simple, harmless stones are meteors plummeting toward an unknown and possibly fatal destination.
The creepy experience of watching the film is accentuated by the audio that emanates from the installation adjacent to the screening space. Here, Kwade has assembled eleven large, shiny black-lacquered curved steel plates that divide the space. In front of each one she has placed a simple black speaker. Visually, the effect is neat and nearly soothing. But each speaker is connected to the fluorescent lightbulbs in the ceiling, amplifying electromagnetic waves against the uniquely shaped structures. As the sounds echo around the room, one feels a physically sickening sense of disordered anxiety and panic, which stands in sharp contrast to the work’s banal, benign materials and cool, elegant look.
Less physical but perhaps even more effective is Kwade’s unassuming outdoor installation. At the gallery’s entrance, the artist parked two silver Nissan Micras next to each other. On first look the cars seem identical, but closer examination reveals that they are actually mirror images, with steering wheels on opposite sides and matching dents in their fenders. Without any overt justification, the sight generates a sense of dread, as well as admiration for Kwade’s pitch-perfect tweaking of reality.
— Ana Finel Honigman
Martin Flemming
GALERIE KOAL
Tucholskystr. 25,
October 25–November 14
View of “Martin Flemming,” 2009.
In Martin Flemming’s solo show, twelve individually titled spherical lamps hang from the ceiling at different heights, forming a tilted ring that recalls the seats of an amusement park’s octopus ride in full swing. Clumps and streaks of sandy sediment create patterns along the interior surfaces of the orbs, each of which is tinted a different hue from Bauhaus master Johannes Itten’s color wheel. The lamps themselves are Bauhaus designs. The residue is salt from the Dead Sea, which the exhibition’s press release links to Israel’s concentration of gradually eroding buildings created by the many war-exiled teachers of the famed German university.
While too many exhibitions’ thematic motifs and allusions feel conveniently adopted for the purposes of yielding meaty and erudite press materials, Flemming’s weighty art-historical references, given the artist’s studies at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, take on a different, more interesting tone: Perhaps his work acknowledges the unavoidable allegiances—and burdens—imposed by any academic lineage. The Modern Lovers lyrics that form the exhibition’s title, “but I still love the old world,” only add to the picture of someone extricating himself from the past with difficulty.
Over and over, Flemming seems interested in pitting the methodical processes of artmaking against the aleatory forces of nature. Hüte dich vor der Schwiegermutter (Beware the Mother-in-Law), 2008, is a tin sculpture, taking the shape of upward-reaching coral, which Flemming created by dropping the metal, heated to a liquid state, into cold water—a process traditionally used during New Year’s Eve in Germany to tell fortunes. Zurück in die Zukunft (Back to the Future), 2008, comprises a slide show depicting found concrete pillars in a forest clearing. Evoking Sol LeWitt’s cubes, Flemming photographically manipulated the beams into various right-angled configurations; the surrounding foliage, in contrast, seems mythic in its constancy. Artists have long paired orderly processes with random, environmental elements, but Flemming’s work is all the better for butting up against the past, with alternating measures of grandiosity, humility, and humor.
— Dawn Chan
Wieland Speck and Shelly Silver
EXILE
Alexandrinenstr 4, HH,
November 4–December 5
Wieland Speck, Berlin Off/On Wall, 1978, still from a black-and-white video, 22 minutes.
One August afternoon in 1978, painter Per Lüke straddled the western end of the Berlin Wall and played a small harp. Filmmaker Wieland Speck (who would go on to make the 1985 queer classic Westler, about a romance between two men living on either side of the wall) documented this potentially life-endangering performance, which captured the curiosity of passersby—as well as the hostile attention of authorities on both sides of the divide. The footage forms the half-hour-long video centerpiece of Speck’s installation Berlin Off/On Wall, 1978, which also includes photos taken by the secret police as well as photocopies of the Stasi files on Speck’s documentation of the action, the documentation itself regarded as a provocation by the East German authorities. Speck’s piece cleverly asserts the blunt material stupidity of the wall—that massive symbolic failure of a few bureaucrats and politicians, blinded by chauvinistic allegiance to their respective ideologies, whose inability to sit down and have a conversation resulted in the needless suffering of millions.
The immediate aftermath of the Mauerfall (the toppling of the wall) forms the subject of Shelly Silver’s 1994 documentary Former East/Former West, which consists wholly of interviews with inhabitants of Berlin in the years 1992 and ’93. That denizens hailing from both sides of the divide were already strongly divided about the wall’s collapse reflects a state of ambivalence, a perspective that the ongoing jubilee celebrations in the German capital have carefully avoided.
— Travis Jeppesen
Nan Goldin
C/O BERLIN
Postfuhramt, Oranienburger Straße 35/36
October 10–December 6
Nan Goldin, Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC, 1983, color photograph, 30 x 40".
As a photographer, Nan Goldin has inspired a legion of imitators who tend to confuse certain lifestyle traits with artistic substance, a privileging of content over form with an excuse for taking sloppy photographs. I tend to think of them as the Vice generation, after the magazine that first published many a Goldin copyist under a hipster anti-ethos saturated with attention begging and unwarranted self-destruction. Where one finds a similar mode of annihilative glamour in a Goldin original, it appears more authentic, perhaps accidental. Her subjects, whether laughing or crying, often seem as though their minds are somewhere else, and their eyes are lost in pensive reverie (unlike the random soulless fashion victims hamming it up in, say, a Ryan McGinley). Revisiting The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, 1981, in this exhibition, one is struck by this generational lapse in the twenty or thirty years since most of the photographs comprising the famous slide show were taken. Whatever happened to empathy?
For it is her empathetic identification with her subjects that has always been at the core of Goldin’s work, from the Ballad to the more recent Heartbeat, 2003, a series of couples captured in moments of intimacy. It is this most “uncool” facet of her output that endows it with its lasting appeal, as the four slide shows that constitute this exhibition––each set to a sound track compiled by the artist––attest.
— Travis Jeppesen
Mat Collishaw
HAUNCH OF VENISON
Heidestrasse 46,
September 12–December 19
Mat Collishaw, Insecticide 15, 2009, color photograph on Dibond, 72 x 72". From the series “Insecticide,” 2009.
“Submission” is the name of Mat Collishaw’s first solo exhibition in Berlin, and the work on display assigns Collishaw’s subservience to the altar of art history. Collishaw was never the flashiest of the YBAs, but his most recent work positions him among the more studious—perhaps even the most gifted.
On entering the massive darkened gallery, viewers are confronted by The End of Innocence (all works 2009), a monumental digital work projected onto an enormous screen. The work hijacks the “digital rain” effect popularized by the “Matrix” film trilogy to present fragmented re-creations of Pope Innocent X as interpreted by both Bacon and Velázquez. In the rear gallery, a new series of “Insecticide” photographs, capturing an array of insects at the moment of their deaths, calls to mind both early Netherlandish still lifes and the butterfly paintings of Collishaw’s friend and contemporary Damien Hirst. Upstairs, a mechanized zoetrope, The Garden of Unearthly Delights, sustains Collishaw’s interest in Victorian curiosities while providing, with its child hunters ritualistically attacking their prey, a sort of pagan alternative to Bosch’s famous triptych.
Now that postmodernism is beginning to appear an almost retro stance, it is artists like Collishaw, who interrogates histories through the disparate prisms of technologies recent and refurbished, that demonstrate how to make it new in even newer ways.
— Travis Jeppesen
Ricarda Roggan
THE MARIE-ELISABETH LÜDERS BUILDING
German Bundestag, Schiffbauerdamm,
September 4–January 10
Ricarda Roggan, Garage 8, 2008, color photograph. From the series “Garage,” 2008.
Photographers are often praised for their ability to work with light; with Ricarda Roggan, one might say that it is her talent for isolating darkness that distinguishes so many of her images. The light in her large photographs typically emanates from mysterious, unseen sources—and like the series of interiors she depicts, it is often unremarkable. But the omnipresent force of darkness—whether it hovers threateningly, annihilates the background, or appears in shadowy splotches to sculpt her blunt arrangements of mundane household objects, furniture pieces, and cars—endows her work with its dramatic edge.
Roggan’s artful manipulation of shadow is on full display in her current mini-retrospective. In the “Interieurs” series, 2000, boxed belongings and pieces of furniture wrapped in swaths of transparent plastic are shrouded in the darkness of some ill-defined space—neither clearly indoors nor outdoors, as the gray floor could be concrete or sand, and the typically domestic items are obviously in a state of transit. Perhaps they were removed from the empty “Attika,” a series from 2005, whose arboreal beams of stained wooden columns and supports appear to have sprouted out of dusk itself.