About our journeys into the Eastgerman and Berlin subculture, making art, organizing exhibitions, pattern painting, club culture. Now with lots of useless time consuming extras. 
 
 

March 23, Tuesday - Henry Darger

iscovered the "outsider art" of Henry Darger, a kind of proto Pop-art made between the 30's and 60's by a recluse NYC janitor, that was only discovered after his death. He made a huge body of work on paper, unknown to anybody in his lifetime: the adventures of the "Vivian Girls", in fantastic and wonderfully sadistic situations, as part of his, the worlds longest novel. Clearly Darger means his fictional heroines no real harm, and everything does turn out all right in the end, but the poor things do get crucified and strangled a bit too much along the way to be politically correct thank God.

It is the strangest, most complete "private mythology" that i've come across, and so un-calculating compared to "professional" art. I wonder why the american political right is not campaigning that funding for the American Folk Art Museum (that owns much of Darger's work) be stopped, they probably just don't know about it .

Darger used all sorts of modern, "unpainterly" techniques like tracing, projecting and repeating images some thirty years before Pop-art. You can see that a painter like Neo Rauch has seen his art, the colours, the spatial not-making-sense, and tarot card like landscapes are similar.

 

March 21, Sunday - Toilet Art

ave been rewriting the gloryhole page a bit, in the course of which i found some nice toilet links. For instance the London based "Space hijackers", a fun ironic art collective who had a project last year of simultaneous worldwide guerilla toilet art exhibitions at your local Starbucks or McDonald's.

Another, a Persian blogger, offered the very perceptive idea that blogs are just digital toilet graffiti.

 

March 11, Thursday - Blast

"Die Freiheit stirbt an ihre Verteidigung" -Thomas Mann. 

Tramslates more or less as: "freedom dies by defending it". A comment made by Thomas Mann during the McCarthy years.

 

March 7, Saturday - Leipzig

e put up a club-art installation in a Leipzig airport club, called Fly club. As it is a high security area we had a passing audience of all sorts of uniformed people already during the day. Leipzig airport looks like a giant oblong ufo at night, and the train station next to it has a beautiful roof design.  Inside the clubs you could see planes landing right in front of the dance floor through candy-coloured windows. We had made moving digital slides depicting tupolev planes (the eastern-block concorde) that were gliding along the walls. Because of something with the floor i was getting all static, going from shock to shock.

Leipzig has a kind of parisian flair at certain spots and is pretty urbane compared to Dresden, which in the GDR era was called "the valley of ignorance" by some: because of its geography it could not receive any foreign radio or tv (as if that would have you any smarter). Some difference still seems to linger on though; Leipzig has for instance much more clubs, magazines and galleries.

Contrary to Berlin here everybody didn't just double the prices after the monetary union, and therefore Leipzig seems to be mildly booming while staying incredibly cheap. We're toying with the idea of taking the "Apotheke-Mitte" group show to Leipzig and combining it with some club-art projects. (Berlin is suffocated by its own pretense and representativeness, and being representative these days is to be afraid.)

Eastgerman kids have this strange way of calling anything stupid "schwul" (german for "gay"). People had already warned me that its just a kind of ludicrous slang, and indeed it turned out more hilarious than disturbing to hear them mention queer cars, queer electricity, gay flyer, gay disco balls, gay beer bottles, gay mammas, gay papas or their queer girlfriends...

At these parties there's always some boy coming up asking for fatherly advise on how to make their girlfriends try anal sex -on him. (I mostly advise them to take a tranny for a girlfriend, then you have the best of both worlds).

 

Februari 4, Thursday - House of Shame

etting up we today we realised we had promised Chantal a birthday party art installation at her "House of Shame" again, and had to hurry to the Sage club. Apart from repeating her animated portrait projection that's further down the pages, we did a "subliminal" one of Thomas C.Howell (of "Rumblefish" and "Hitchhiker" fame) that started flashing every now and then. 

I usually don´t like erotic imagery for art or deco, but i do have a thing for prim obsolete American 80's teen idols like Barry Gibb or Rob Lowe, don't you? 

 

Februari 26, Thursday - Tattooed semantics

y friends from Holland, fashion dj & artist MC de Waal, Ari & Kris came over for a working visit. Ari, the noted photographer of Exactitudes fame, had a project of photographing the tattooed backs of guys in clubs, his idea is that together it will eventually  form a sentence for a magazine spread. (but i wonder where he'll get the verbs, -custom made?)

He also made a great photo of Chantal, the famous Berlin tranny club queen, together with Kris. They looked real beautiful, Chantal was in a pre-Raphaelite look (and mood) but she really got into it as kris was standing over her, doing all sorts of facial gymnastics. This pic can be another entry for the "Chantal as modern day Barbette" exhibition idea if it turns out good. 

Martin works under the label "Global Citizen", and indeed his art is very mundane. To appreciate it, it helps to have such contemporary interests as body fluid art, sub skin piercing, drag queen electro clash, Leigh Bowery, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Amanda Lear & botex. As "MC fashion dj" he's just released an illectro record "Living Like Warhol". (Like all proper artists, Martin has a Warhol fixation, although in conversation he is often more like Pope Ondine) He is planning a gig with Glamour to Kill in the retro new wave Berlin Rio club, we might cooperate doing stage design. 

 

January 23, Friday - Black-out

n our neighborhood Hollywood is filming scenes of the "Bourne Supremacy", somehow causing a blackout in Berlin-Mitte. The giant set lights are the only thing still on, so i am writing this by the light reflected by Matt Damon onto the building opposite and back into the atelier, every movement of his strong body modulating the shadows of my pen. It is very quiet just now, the silence only broken by the skilled blows Matt uses to escape those nasty secret agents, and by the audience's gasps of disappointment and horror when Matt flashes a smile or two.

The atmosphere gets wonderfully surreal, all sorts of fake and real cops running around helplessly, spectators flooding the set. Then, after a few hours of darkness, a beautiful sight: window by window the light came on again symmetrically along the street.

Maybe it's just a scheme by the german government to create a rich people baby boom (to resque the social security system they need more subjects, and typically they would rather change the people's breeding habits than the system). Wait for the next blackout in Munich.

 

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