About sticker art, "Magistrale" & "Kunstherbst" art events, gentrification through art, meeting Margot Honecker, Mumbleboy, celebrity dj Ari Versluis, Chantal & Salomé.
 

October 4th, Saturday -Tulip Open Ateliers

etty Stuermer, a fellow artist from Berlin also desperately caught up in Club art, was so nice as to involve us in an atelier presentation for the Berlin "Kunstherbst" in October. 
"Kunstherbst" is a label the city of Berlin puts on worthy cultural events that are happening anyway, like the "Art Forum" fair.

This year it featured an "Open Ateliers" event. This official umbrella, taking weeks of paperwork, brought us only 4 new visitors, but somehow this time many friends turned up so it was quite okay. Chantal even brought the famous painter Salomé, turns out he's also made a portrait of her, as has photographer Marcel Steger. (Chantal is starting to become as prominent a drag queen muse as Barbette was in the Paris 20's for the likes of Man Ray and Cocteau. Maybe we should organize a group show with all portraits: "Chantal, B-mused"). Salomé liked the club stuff, he and his colleagues were also showing their art in clubs in theearly Westberlin days, he told us.

The lounge featured a small "Apotheke-Mitte" presentation with installation by Timm Ringewaldt  ("Friendly Fire" -a small electrical heater chassis with monitor showing explosion loops inside), Astrid Kuever's knitted paintings (protruding dick shapes instead of slits this time -there's artistic development for you), and Cecile Coiffard's "V24U" sand paintings (the usual Bali and Penemunde sand, but on maps of Baghdad for artistic renewal). A new, bigger, improved "Apotheke" catalogue, with many pictures, partly in color, by Hilmar Stehr @ OKAROLA was also presented. Also a CD-ROM slide show by Tulip on the mac. 

For the Tulip part we enlarged the installation we did some weeks ago for the "Magistrale" and built a big fantasy space in the back hall with lots of huge paintings & moving projections. Also we had these new wall dividers ("Sliding Wall") that we're making. When lighted they project their glued-on shapes onto their surroundings in a very pleasing way indeed! A bit like being inside one of Moholy Nagy's light modulators, to make an immodest comparison. 

Betty presented the Club art interviews she made for her radio program "Everybody Magazine" for Berlin's "pirate radio" station  Twen FM, and presented a gathering of "weed dealers", fresh from the "Kunst oder Koenig" event (at Berlins Maria Club last week): cardboard figures sporting Warhol flower-like little cannabis leave paintings on chains around their neck, hip hop style. 
 

September 26, 27 & 28 -Art Essenz @Sony Center

resented art for 3 days in a row in two little booths (one for Tulip, one for Apotheke) at the "Art Essenz Nr.5" art fair @ the Sony Center Berlin, Potsdamer Platz, right under the Fuji umbrella. 

A rather un-commercial experience, especially for the "Apotheke" booth, but worthwhile alone for the disturbed double takes of the passers-by when glancing at the "Friendly Fire" or the "Anti Gay Shirt"! You just don't get such strong reactions in the blandness of the arty farty realm. 
The Tulip booth we had set up like a psychedelic market stall, with wallpaper all over the place, and exotic packaging, attracting all sorts of bright people. 

The Sony Center square isn't just visited by elderly tourists, but is a hangout for kids with expensive laptops as well, and international professional folk going to conferences and the like. 
Also spotted quite a few party people and queers. Maybe there's a web design office, fashionable hairdresser or solarium nearby (or rather some AA center, call boy bar or drug dealer penthouse). 

The idea for the Apotheke booth was to also get the involved artists to make museum shop articles to accompany the planned tour of the exhibition. My favourite new Apo shop product is the "Friendly Fire" screen saver by Timm Ringewaldt (aesthetic slow motion explosions). We had products by new artist too, like band aid printed with camouflage patterns by Philipp Messner. 
There was interest by some guys from the Aids Hilfe in Hannover, especially in the giant walk-in medicine package by newcommunity. They might get us some space over there.
 

September 10th, Wednesday

njoyed the first Berlin Mumbleboy v.j. gig. 
The venue looked a bit surreal at first: a small, suburban looking wooden bicycle shed with a unproportionally big neon sign on top saying "Ausland".. Hidden somewhere behind it we found a bright stairway into the underground: to a renovated cellar culture club. It wasn't as full as expected. They let us in free because Paulus wore his mumblefanshirt! The show was nice and messy, not the flat, streamlined flash look i had expected, but rather rough and layered; with personal tourist pics, like of Amsterdam, and scribbling mixed in.
I recognized some illustration works that now were animations. Kinya explained that the hardest part is making the vector drawing, having it move some way or another is much less work. Just the same it was fun to unexpectedly see the "Mumphothek" work Kinya did as a print for the "Apotheke-Mitte" exhibition popping up in the mix! 
 

September 6th, Saturday

ur "Club Art Lounge" package was part of a new "one night culture festival" called "Magistrale", at Potsdamer Strasse. Being organized by sensor.k gallery that recently organized a very well received "staged photo events" exhibition "Deutsche Eiche" by Marcel Steger, we thought it would be a classy event.. 

The Potsdamer Strasse has grand 1880's apartments and nicely ugly 70s buildings, turkish groceries, penny markets, trannie hookers & addicts. The
original strategy against decline is to aim for some mild gentrification through art. Now a writer like Tom Wolfe insist art can only exist and truly "blossom" when the economy does. (And the only successful art is from leading, imperialist nations -right on!) Guess he never visited Berlin, here this thought is turned around: the hope of investors being that economic growth and a better image will develop around artistic endeavor. Most of Berlin's 10.000 desperate artists can be counted on to gratefully (and charitably) go to work, making positive publicity for the neighborhood..

Our presentation scared people off, it was no young audience... Middle aged men running out again to their wives, who invariably didn't dare come in at all, shouting "ach du lieber Gott, Sabine, das ist was fuer junge Leute!" 

There was a razzia at a sleazebar across the street that seemed to host a bouncer convention, that was fun to watch. A bit of a test where the people carrying paintings under their arms that regularly came out of Kiddy Citny's atelier next door. At the end of the night Kiddy even gave us two paintings, he felt so sorry for us i guess!

Ari Versluis had come over from Rotterdam to do a celebrity dj-set ("gaypunkfuckdisco", -his description), and OKAROLA and Strassmann ("heteropunkfuckdisco"?) played laptop live. 



Ari & Ellie had just shown their new "Exactitudes", (photo series on fashion uniformity) in Fort Asperen; giant prints featuring Muslim Warriors (sponsored by HEMA and Cincqetoilesluxe). So we were all frolicking about in our new Cinqetoilesluxe muscle shirts, more than one person remarking the 5 stars followed by a "L" must be code for "schwul". 

The only press that could be found afterwards featured a photo of a wayward female artist tying little pieces of rope to the branches of a backyard tree -a good vignette. Underneath it read ironically: "The Marginale was a great success"... The "Scheinschlag" newspaper had an even more cynical piece(in german) about the inflation of gentrifying events like this. 
 

July 15th, Friday

pending much time digitally creating, or re-creating art for several print projects. Like "Butterfly", an exhibition/event by the Pussy Galore gallery in one of the glass pavilions at the famous Karl Marx Allee in Berlin Friedrichshain. It involved a project by Radio Berlin (the now homeless art gallery by Patrick Zollinger and Jim Avignon): Posters to be sold cheaply to young art enthusiasts. We'd send in some from the "History book"
series, and some of our handmade poster designs from our past lounges - to get that Toulouse Lautrec feeling poster buyers love so much. 
The prints by about 10 international artists (featuring the likes of J. C. Lee (L.A.) and Jim Avignon) looked fine, but all posters were just glued to the windows though, not looking too appealing. 



Then i'm still designing for the "Berlin-Tapete" wallpaper project. The designs are getting along fine..

And, most recently (and most urgently!) for the Querpunkt Art Edition.


It will be their fourth edition, and we thought of making it a fancy sticker set: in one way alluding to our club/street work and youthful male audience eager to leave a mark, in another to our design-like work, like the sliding wall, which is after all a giant sticker work too. 
Stickers by artists could be seen as a new Pop art technique. In the early 60's, people needed time accepting a technique like silkscreen, with its crude associations of industry and commerce, as art. Today the sticker medium, that's usually either infantile or decorative, is introduced into the arty realm.

The introduction going real easy however, even the "Nutsy's" exhibition featured a sticker art edition made by the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin.
And Showroom MaMA in Rotterdam recently had their "Illustrationist" artist group design a plastic pseudo gambling hall decor that was glued onto the many windows of the gallery.
Of course like much in art it is just a fast moving fashion. But there's also a less self conscious scene developing, coming out of graffiti, taking stencil art one step further, people wheat pasting original drawings or life-size cut-out figures as "hand made stickers". Stuff like you can find at: stickit, urbanwallpaper,stickernation , regularproduct. 
 

June

t the end of June we took part in a charity group show for the Haus am Luetzowplatz, in Berlin, a sort of private socialist "Kunsthalle" in need. Usually they rent out office space in their building to help pay expenses, but as the whole of Berlin seems to go bust at the moment they're sitting on, or rather underneath, this huge empty building now. The show is kind of nice, albeit without any concept. It features art by Guenter Gras, Rebecca Horn, Bernd & Anna Blume, Rainer Fetting & Emmet Williams, Claudia Skoda & Abramovic. At the auction people had the hots for the big names only though, like proper little greedy art investors.

Our Apotheke show meanwhile came to and end. A guy from the "Museale 03" museum art festival on the Berlin "Museumsinsel" turned up and offered us a prestigious free booth at this "new very high-class presentation of young art in Berlin", but right after we applied with an expensive presentation they went bust! 

The Exactitudes are in the show too, they had a piece in I-D Magazine that brought a last minute visitor boom. Same I-D issue (June) has a whole demo culture segment that has a lot to do with Apotheke Mitte ideas, like the demo T-shirts we got. Also popular was Mumbleboy (who has yet another presentation in Paris, this time a japanese group show) 

The finissage on a Sunday afternoon attracted a lot of young urban parents. C.W., a feared local art journalist and friend, took a tour of the show, bravely ignoring the smell of full diapers and warm mother's milk that pervaded the rooms. Anti Gay Spray  brought in lots of hip hop kids from the building again, they just love anything in a spray can. Met Cristof Huseman, also a former Radio Berlin artist, again. He organizes Flash cinema events at the moment, featuring Mumbleboy sometimes. 

In the evening there was a "Peace Academy" lecture by painter Manfred Gräf, an old Westberlin painter who had an interesting Op-art phase in the 50s and 60s. Betty Stuermer's Peace Academy doing really well by this time, there was an okay audience. He talked of having been questioned by Henry Kissinger ("Sir Henry") as a 16 year old when he was prisoner of war. It was pretty anti-american with some very old G.D.R. lefties in beige and pale blue polyester shouting support in the audience. 
-Well, it's all in a day's work for a social sculpture like this. 
One woman in the audience actually looked quite like Margot Honecker. She does travel the world you know, to attend any hardcore socialist events, so maybe she slipped in incognito. 

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