Rube and Mandy go to Berlin. Spring. 2016.

Berlin notes, asides, and contributions to the Of Blood and Beauty collective SeeingRoom

Category: Uncategorized

Rube and Mandy find some culture. And then walk all over it.

balloon friend

Friday, May 20: Hamburger Bahnhof. Museum für Gegenwart:  Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto (13 high production films in one space, all starring Cate Blanchett [still trying to think what that does for/to the project], all presenting manifesto montages, from Marx to the situationists), some key pieces from Warhol (Hammer and Sickle!), Beuys (including the giant tallow sculptures), and an amazing, extensive Carl Andre show (for those of you who spent time with de Duve, an important figure in his writing).  Below, Mandy/Kathleen walks on the art. Nervously, dare I say Rube-ishly, in spite of the wall texts exhortation to “walk naturally.”  With her, faculty member Julia Zay, always ready to walk all over the art:

IMG_3084

Later that night, Rube, Mandy, and Julia went to see Konono No 1 at the Hebbel am Ufer theater.  Konono No 1 is a Congolese band that works at the juncture of many genres, sometimes known as ‘electro-traditional’.

Saturday: Off the Bauhaus Archiv to witness a workshop for children and adults, walking the length of the Tiergarten, then to the Berlin Ensemble for Nina Hagen’s Brecht concert.

 

Rube and Mandy take in a show: Maxim Gorki (re- and un-) does Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

v.l. Mareike Beykirch (Barbara, Hedwig), Taner Sahintürk (Ali), Sema Poyraz (Paula), TamerArslan (Fuad)

v.l. Mareike Beykirch (Barbara, Hedwig), Taner Sahintürk (Ali), Sema Poyraz (Paula), TamerArslan (Fuad)

http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/maxim-gorki-theater-berlin-angst-essen-seele-auf-a-974049.html

Sunday night.  Starring our friend Daniel Kahn, the romantic-tragic Fassbinder film becomes a rom-com-trag-com in the hands of the Maxim Gorki Theater troupe.  Staged and lit like a musical, making good-strange use of the rotating stage, slapstick as social commentary, the glitz and humor worked somehow to amplify Fassbinder’s story of the love between an immigrant from Morocco and a German Putzfrau 20 years his senior, and the remarkable atmosphere of gossip, everyday life, and racism in which it either lives or dies.

Rube and Mandy turn to mechanical reproduction: films in preparation for the possible upcoming visit to the Museum für Film und Fernsehen

Leni Riefenstahl was the central propagandist for the Nazis, and one could productively think through her work as the attempt to make politics aesthetic (Benjamin).  Here, you can watch her disturbing Triumph of the Will:

Here, you can see Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, as a kind of counterpoint…

 

Sherman Alexie, Hey, Look, the Abyss!

http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/04/15/23961716/hey-look-the-abyss

Galerie: c/o Berlin. K U L T U R bingo.

c/o Berlin (which has moved and is no longer in Mitte; Hardenbergstraße 22, 10623 Berlin) is a contemporary exhibition space dedicated to photography.  Out of the four photographers being exhibited right now, we focused on the central two, both born in the 1940s and still working today: American photographer Stephen Shore and East German photographer Ulrich Wüst.

The Shore-show is a retrospective, which means we moved through is work chronologically (although since Shore moved between New York and pan-US projects, the show had a spatial element and made me think in particular a lot about how we might document our time here in Berlin and after, above and beyond the standard food-and-culture memoir), starting with his move at age 18 into Warhol’s Factory, through a conceptual period (grids!) in the 70s, into larger format, rich scenes of suburban and urban Americana, and finishing (somewhat disappointingly but I’d love it if someone argued me out of that thought) into the digital, streaming world of Instagram.

The Wüst collection is otherwise-organized: categorically, spatially and seasonally, with Stadtbilder (Cityscapes), Spätsommer (Late Summer), and Randlegen (Peripheries).

Screen Shot 2016-04-05 at 10.28.09 AM

Rube and Mandy arrive.

They are amazed. Rube by the noise and bustle, Mandy by Rube’s easy amazement.

proof of life selfie: Rube and Mandy on the streets of Prenzlauer Berg

proof of life selfie: Rube and Mandy on the streets of Prenzlauer Berg

hier-ist-berlin.westdeutschland