Click-through for a photo slideshow of Timm Rautert’s work capturing the Amish and Hutterites, and for a description of his efforts “photographing-those-very-uncomfortable-with-being-photographed”: http://nyr.kr/KSyRFs
oh America the beautiful, America the strange…
Grimes. at Berghain this week.
Europe gave birth to the Slow Movement (it was an Italian, specifically). Australia, the United States, and Japan are taking over where many of the old guard have left off, namely re-working the way we humans view our neighborhoods, our food systems, our approaches to beauty, just to name a few areas being hit by the slow wave of awareness.
Berlin serves as an incubating kettle, where many of these different approaches, boiled in different metropolises and grids around the world, converge. This city breathes new, hot air into the movement in the form of enough media content and feet on the ground to make any snail-paced traveler quite proud. The magazine Hidden Europe, for example, is a British encampment based in the city of re-invented ruins. Working off a register of hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers, editorial staff members, travel writers, and marketing geniuses it gets ‘er done.
The incestuous network of slow-moving, ecological sources of media and engagement in this city is inspiring…so long as it actually remains slow in Praxis.
For now, concerns aside, for something beautifully slow, look no further than Sam Harris and his photos of the everyday - he approaches the capture of an image as a long, spontaneous wait. This series is called “Postcards from Home”. Mmmhmmm, childhood.
the changing hands of European identity had produced one strange composite of people with complexes.
and NOW - a graphic to visualize the process!
Far-away gestures become the name of the game, which is particularly difficult when “creatives” like to use holidays in honor of other people as an excuse to finally do something with that picture frame, pile of foil, that poetry notebook, that expensive tart pan.
SlowTravel folks and I brainstormed some Mother’s Day in Berlin ideas. The result is this lovely piece. Enjoy.
Also - the poem I wrote for my mother.
A Distant Muttertag
A Mother’s Day in Germany – ein Muttertag, as the Germans say – seems more a foreign play, a theatrical arrangement, than a day on which I once made quiche for you, thought about buying you flowers from a road-side stand, and made plans to one day take that trip with you to New Zealand, which is still in the cards, I must admit.
I may be far – far over this wide ocean into a time zone that looks like an American bureaucratic organization (CET) -but my desire to make you a quiche, buy you flowers, and sit around a coffee table, planning what would be a magnificent trip into the kiwi wilderness of the other Zealand would be simply magnificentand a fitting Muttertag, indeed.
You deserve hikes in Lord of the Rings country, lilies and tulips, and the lavender I never sent, even a quiche Lorraine that looks just like the ones at that café we meet at sometimes, half-way over the river, chatting about the state of things in a place called Portland in a time called (PST) on any other day that is not today - a café, a time, an arrangement that I’m sure will come again.
The gestures we do for those we love on holidays sanctioned for their exercise become even heavier on the heart, when we cannot do them.
Instead,
I am wishing you all eggs and buttery crusts, flowers, and travel mirages that this cross-Atlantic hope can muster.
Happy Mother’s Day to a mother I dearly miss.
Q: What do you like about Berlin?
A: The fact it has a completely different atmosphere to any other city in Europe. Living here is a bit like rewinding European time a couple of decades, before Big Business stepped in and made most Western cities feel like one giant homogenous high street. There are historical reasons for this, and the fear that Berlin’s gradual process of gentrification will render it just like “the others” remains. But while in the last week or two, cultural/tourist institutions like the art-commune Tacheles and the city’s only urban camping ground Tentstation were closed to make way for property development, the city has also just announced a one million euro budget to help protect and/or relocate clubs under threat from developers. This ongoing fight and conflict feels very “Berlin”, and is necessary to keep the city unique. I think if they really did close the beloved Mauerpark, for example, there would be a bit of a revolution.
founder of SlowTravelBerlin; slowtravelberlin.com
Media platforms that bring us commoners closer to art or official “aesthetics” are sprouting up around Berlin as of late. Why so many at once?
I reckon it be a response to the dwindling, unmasked hype of the city, that which has preceded its intentionally-creative spaces to the point of desperation since the scene began its rumblings here in the early 2000s.
The crisis of Berlin’s identity in response to the divide between art and citizens or even art and its idea is manifested in the new obsession with criticizing the accessibility of its own scene. It is cool to call Berlin’s art borderline sacrosanct, stuffy, needing repair. The avant-garde cannot survive its own pretension - so have the curators, critics, and creatives of Berlin slowly experienced, prophesized, and preached.
It is no coincidence that for Berlin’s famous Gallery Weekend, few young people I knew actually took the time to gallery hop anymore. What would we see -another non-political, political art piece? Another anarchist art collective from Belarus or Spain showing anti-art in a glossy gallery with pearly, IKEA furnishings?
I do not feel it all-together logical to expect the rugged to stay rugged and ahead of capitalism for long. After a while, it just gets old…like making fun of hipsters for being “weird”, “unique”, “ironic”, when we could just start calling them “young people”. Affording special terms and special movement characteristics to things that cease being all that rare or special is doing everyone a disservice. Berlin cannot forever be a party, artist paradise (the disclaimer here being that I believe in social movements but also in collective, non-selfish consciousness, which Berlin lacks). It is a cultural lie - the idea that the arts are free and gritty for all and that Berlin has failed if this changes - that hinders critical discourse.
The arts are not some fringe trend, anymore. Graffiti is not special in Berlin. It is no more a phenomenon than the tourists who take pictures of cigarette machines. The question is: do we use this information about the limits of the avant-garde and of “the creative city” to make it better? Or do we just continue to bitch, talking to ourselves in our chosen media platforms, like this article in Berlin Art Journal:
http://www.berlinartjournal.com/issue/alexander-forbes-7th-berlin-biennale
Or do we create these alternative platforms for sharing art, making it user-friendly, releasing it from the chains of tech-phobia, and make Berlin just another place where art is created and not where the avant-garde quality of its art creates the place?
One such idea is covered by Slow Travel Berlin, a project I have recently found myself working with: http://www.slowtravelberlin.com/2012/04/26/ikono-fine-art-tv/. Groups like ikono and ArtWiki had better spread the message. The city depends on it.
Korean sculptor Seung Mo Park creates giant ephemeral portraits by cutting layer after layer of wire mesh. Each work begins with a photograph which is superimposed over layers of wire with a projector, then Park slowly snips away areas of mesh.
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inspired by the work of SAUL BASS, ART GOODMAN and DAVE NAGATA.
hitchcock typeface by MATT TERICH. tumblr theme by MATTHEW BUCHANAN.
