Berlin Part I

We arrived in Berlin on Friday, April 6 from New York. It was my first time in the German capital. I had been to Germany in the early 1990s when Bonn was the capital of West Germany. Then, I visited Cologne the city that at that time was the epicenter of German contemporary art.  That visit also included time in Frankfurt a great city for art museums.  But I always wanted to go to Berlin.  It was the city for artists  some 10 years ago or so as reunification allowed for new possibilities for cheap studios and flats. 

That moment has come and gone and Berlin has settled now for more or less what it will be in the near future.  It is a city with much to admire in terms of its public transportation,  museums,  infrastructure and a very pleasant and friendly citizenry. It also helps that English really is almost on a par with German here.  We Americans are fortunate that the rest of the world bothered to learn a second language and for most it has been English.

Talking to some of the locals, however, there is a begrudging need to acknowledge its recent past.  Specifically how to deal with what happened between 1933-1945.   And then from 1946-1989,  and then from 1991 until now. For these reasons it  may be the most interesting city in the world.  It was here that so much of what has happened of consequence in the recent history of the world was shaped. Our own empire post -1945 is due in large part to the catastrophic  follies that emanated from Berlin.

Besides the extraordinary  ancient art collections,  (and some fabulous contemporary art museums),  the Berlin story that is most vivid is in the one that centers around the Nazi regime.  I have never been to a Holocaust museum in any city before.  I  still don’t think I have been inside one.  But I did visit Daniel Liebskind’s  Jewish Museum (2001)  and there you experience not just a  re-presentation of Jewish history but  you finally begin to see why  these events unfolded the way they did and you feel the powerful sense of loss  in his novel use of voids and emptiness. 

The narrative of history is told through a museum that is extremely interactive (in a good way) but whose ultimate power lies in Liebskind’s design—a meandering  journey into the heart of darkness.  The most moving part of the exhibit for me was a short 5 minute interview with an American Jewish lawyer now in his 80s who was involved in the Nuremburg Trials.  He breaks down in tears recalling his profound disappointment 60 years ago at the clamoring of Germans  already wanting to move on. It is powerful stuff.  He concluded that they just did not care.  In West Germany there was much foot-dragging around the issue of de-Nazificiation while in the East, much rhetorical fury was aimed at the Nazi past, but all was forgiven if one toed the Communist line quick enough.

The second space dedicated to the telling of this history is in the remarkable Topography  of Terrors Museum (2010).  The museum is sited on the grounds of the SS building where so much of the death was conceived. The stunning building by German architect Peter Zumthor  is an updated Miesan pavilion caged in by a steel curtain—this is not a national gallery of art after all but a national gallery of shame.  This museum was the museum that you could picture artists such as Martha Rosler,  Barbara Kruger and  Hans Peter Feldman among others making.  There was little sentimentality, only lots of photos and text that told its story very clearly.  

The final part of the trio of  death was Peter Eisenman’s spectacular memorial to the “Murdered Jews of Europe” (2005).  It is in every way as powerful as Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial.  If I could continue the comparisons to artists,  whereas Lin’s work is a Serra,  Eisenman’s work is Andre, Judd and Nauman.  Minimal and Post-Minimalism have become the de facto style for these kinds of memorials (see Oklahoma City).   From Judd he got the plain rectangular slabs, from Andre there regularization into a grid and the  fact that you can touch them and step on them (though you are not supposed to but little kids and wannabee fashion models where poised atop).  But  what makes this work especially powerful is the parts he borrows from Nauman—that  sense of moving through a space that now becomes fraught with dislocation, anxiety and disorientation.  If you only do one thing in Berlin, I suggest Eisenman’s memorial. 

The other “political” museum was one dedicated to the DDR  or the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). This museum is what a  Pop Art  aesthetic  would  bring to an examination of the DDR.  It reminded me  of the space in New York’s South Street Seaport which houses the Bodies exhibition.  This was the DDR for tourists and it was a lot of fun.  Actual cars including the crappy Tarant  were on display as well as a 3-D recreation of a typical East German apartment.  On display were everything from the anabolic steroid pills given to East German athletes,  East German blue jeans,  interrogation rooms and cells,  lots of pictures of nude East Germans vacationing (nudity being one of the unofficial protests against the shackling conformity of the Honecher regime).    One object that did catch my eye was Eric Honecher’s beautiful hotline to the Politburo phone (see foto).    After an hour in the DDR museum you come away with the universal understanding that East Germany was one big shithole.  And that’s before you learn of how this supposedly earth-loving regime (they passed their version of the EPA ) polluted and spoiled everything in its path by the early 80s.

Berlin was the quietest big-city I have ever been to.  The only aberrant street noise coming on exactly two different occasions as Arabs celebrating weddings honked their horns through the city streets.  It was drizzling for most of the 5 days and that grey drizzle seemed to fit the mood of the populace.

Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series at OCMA

Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 at the age of 71, at precisely the same time the art world was in the thrall of Identity Art and suspicious of high modernist art in general.  Nearly two decades later, Orange County Museum of Art curator Sarah C. Bancroft is presenting  an exhibition which aims to qualify his Ocean Park series as one of the "crowning achievements of postwar painting."  The 80 works on view--paintings on canvas, works on paper, and prints-make a stunning affirmative case for Diebenkorn's achievement.  It also makes a convincing case that Diebenkorn is one of the greatest painters this country has ever produced.

Starting in 1967, Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series occupied him for 25 years and about 140 paintings. It is fascinating to see the series develop from work to work, from year to year.  The paintings on view are mostly from museum  and private collections.  Diebenkorn was the epitome of the painter's painter.  In the Bay Area he was part of a coterie of artists which formed the Bay Area Figurative school.  But by the time he moved to Santa Monica in 1966, he would embark on the most important phase of his career.  No one was making this kind of nuanced abstraction in the 1960s and Diebenkorn was pretty much alone.

At that time, the Greenberg circle which had years earlier recoiled at Diebenkorn's figurative apostasy (recounted in Caroline Jones Bay Area Figurative Art) was on the modernist march of stain painting, while the Minimalists had no use for Diebenkorn's illusionism and arch stance.  Diebenkorn never had the support of the high academic art establishment either--his name is mentioned one time (no reproductions) in Art After 1900 the recent Krauss, Buchloh, Foster, and Bois survey book.  Diebenkorn did find favor with important mainstream critics like Robert Hughes and Michael Kimmelman.  His biography is one of a prolific painter committed to a rigorous studio practice with little drama and art world intrigue.  

After he abandoned abstract expressionism in 1955, Diebenkorn spent the last 40 years of his life in an essentially conservative artistic project but one that produced a higher great to bad painting ratio than perhaps any other painter in the post-war period.  The exhibition takes the viewer on a journey of how color, gesture, line, and space can be manipulated in such diverse ways from painting to painting to evoke a completely different aesthetic response.  The paintings from the series are all related like a family, but so different in how they act on the viewer.  Some have a decidedly Mediterranean/Southern California feel while others are more austere and restricted in palette.  The variation from canvas to canvas in terms of hue and value is what gives each painting their content. Diebenkorn's facture varies also and his famed pentimenti of faded lines, erasures, and scrapings reveal Diebenkorn's unmatched touch.

The inclusion of works on paper and prints usually superfluous to paintings in these types of shows warrant close inspection.  They are as good as the paintings, including some amazing prints produced for Gemini G.E.L. and Crown Point Press.  The installation itself  sets an example  for museum exhibitions of this kind; one painting per wall.  The viewer never feels overwhelmed but instead leaves wanting to see more and more of them.  One quibble with the catalogue is that we never have a good discussion of how he painted the Ocean Park series. Did he use tape? What kinds of mediums and pigments did he use? How many did he reject? How long did he generally work on each one?  What was the measure of success for Diebenkorn?  

How then for us to measure Diebenkorn's success?  He wasn't an innovator in the sense that Pollock or Newman were in creating new possibilities for abstraction.  But what he did was forge his own original style and maintain a level of quality unmatched year after year in  the careers of so many artists.  This sustained briilliance then is his achievement.  Ocean Park is its summation but it spanned his AbEx work, and his decade long foray into representation. In this way, Diebenkorn's work is a challenge to contemporary painters who faced with dwindling plastic possibilties for innovation can hang their hats on making the best possible work irregardless of the deterministic impetus that Diebenkorn rejected and somehow transcended.  

There is a telling anecdote I learned about at the opening of the exhibition.  One of the Ocean Parks on view is from Eli Broad's collection and I was told that since Broad bought the painting in 1976, it had gone directly from the gallery where it was purchased and right into Broad's bedroom and has hung and stayed there and never moved from there until this exhibition.  That is nearly 40 years with the same painting for a man who could look at whatever he wanted.  It proves that Diebenkorn's Ocean Parks are endlessly fascinating and that this quiet painter may not have been making much art news all those years, so much as making art history.

Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series Orange County Museum of Art thru May 27, 2012.  Travels to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas and The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C,

Next Thursday I will finally get a chance to view Doug Wheeler's Infinity Room at David Zwirner in Chelsea up now thru February 25. The wait is apparently long so be prepared, but the reviews are off the charts.

UPDATE:  February 28, 2012:  After waiting in line and then in the gallery anteroom for nearly 2 hours, I finally saw the exhibition on February 16.  I forgot that I had seen one of the previous three iterations of Wheeler's infinity room.  It was in 1983 in Los Angeles, at the inaugural show at MOCA.  I think for whatever reason, the execution of the piece was much more seemless there than at Zwirner.  I could see some dark areas in the upper areas of the so-called Infinity room. 

The Men in Dresses Win Again

In the issue between the medievalists and the modernists concerning contraception, the Obama Administration appears to be capitulating to the medievalists.  On this issue the White House got spooked because a few of its reliable media allies like EJ Dionne, Mark Shields and Chris Matthews got their panties in a wad over a silly issue that comes down to tribalism and sentimentality.  These old-timers are still sentimental about their religion and their identity as Catholics.  Funny who the ones really tied to identity politics are.  

That these U.S. Catholic Bishops have been planning this campaign for months speaks volumes to the fact that the Roman Catholic church hierarchy is committed to joining forces with the right wing here in the United States.  They pay lip service to the social justice teachings of their purported leader while getting all worked up about what they always get worked up about--women's bodies, and gays. They obsess on these two things.  These privileged men who protected child molesters and protect obscene wealth get some kind of perverse pleasure in their assault on women and their rights.  

Obama should not give in to them.  Fight them.  Just like we fight the crazy Muslims, fight the crazy Christians with their hypocrisy.  This is not a theocracy.   The U.S. Catholic Bishops really know how to play the victim card.  They are  a disgrace.  

Mike Kelley Kills Himself

Mike Kelley died of an apparent suicide in his bathtub a few days ago in Southern California. He was perhaps the most influential artist to emerge in the 1980s.   His progeny spread far and wide especially in the 1990s when his brand of the art of the abject was celebrated all over the world.  My own take on Kelley's art was that it bore the same relationship to art-making as snuff films did to the world of cinema.  Except that Kelley's was a world of make believe gross out juvenilia with a patina of filth thrown in along with the punk guise of Darby Crash.  The collectors and curators ate it up.  Why own something slick and austere and beautiful when you can announce your own dark/alt side by owning a gen-yoo-ine Mike Kelley.  Are you a boring haute bourgeois hedge fund investor?  Not anymore, not with with that creepy looking Kelley doll with pus coming out of every orifice in the living room.  The guys at the office will think I'm positively edgy!  

His curios were inspired by many trips to the now defunct AMOK book store the former Los Angeles emporium for the study of the bizarre, ugly and the unsettling.  Kelley's work was a practiced detached engagement with these subjects but he ultimately could not avoid trivializing them.  He tried to make the muck cute; reveling in it while simultaneously dismissing it.  He was always superior to his subjects.

In the meantime, I look forward to seeing the wonderful art of that other Kelly in a few weeks when I will be in Los Angeles.  You know, the 88 year-old guy running around with an oxygen tank but still making achingly beautiful art with his spare language of color and form? The guy that the likes of Kelley in his black leather jacket have been launching spitballs at all his career from the back of the class.  Rest in peace Mike Kelley along with all those demons and all those spitballs.

Tadaaki Kuwayama at Gary Snyder

Tadaaki Kuwayama had his first solo exhibition in New York in his late 20s in 1961 at the famed Green Gallery.   He was an early exponent for a radically new reductive language for painting.   In the past 50 years, he has shown all over the world and last week a  new exhibition of his work opened at Gary Snyder in Chelsea.  The new Snyder gallery space is the perfect setting for Kuwayama’s  beautiful work.

Snyder’s gallery is one of the few in New York that specializes in abstract art, similar to the role Eric Stark played in the 1990s in SoHo and Chelsea.  However,  Snyder has focused more on representing artist’s estates and re-igniting interest in overlooked or forgotten artists.  Tadaaki Kuwayama is an artist who has produced an extraordinary body of work , working quietly in his Chelsea studio while art fashions have come and gone.  He is revered in his native Japan but in America has remained known only among those keenly interested in abstraction. 

That has been changing over the course of the past few years beginning with a   wonderful show of his paintings from the 1970s in 2008 at Gary Snyder.   He is currently part of a show at the Guggenheim in New York focusing on 1960s monochrome painting and will be having major museums shows later this year and next in Japan and South Korea.   

The centerpiece of  this new show is a work comprised of 22 identical 8 x 8 x 2.25” panels of reddish anodized aluminum.   Spanning an entire wall, they are both monumental and light as air.   Behind that wall,  is a new floor piece made up of 8 identical units of anodized titanium.  They strike me as little Olitskis (the sprayed ones)  that somehow dematerialize.  The installation of his work at this show is of the highest order.  
The exhibition runs through February 25. Gary Snyder is located at 529 W. 20th Street, 10th floor 

Sunday Morning, 40th St. and 11th Ave.

Photo by Max Estenger 2012