Reminded me of something...
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Right on schedule (that is, about 5 years after America) hipster-hating is coming to Germany (g, h/t JCW). But before we assail them, let's celebrate the magic they can work when their obsessions meet with a solid work ethic. I recently dropped by a party held in Generation 13 (g), a combination of cafe, 'museum of pop culture', and shop in Berlin-Mitte.
The museum sprawls through the entire basement of a large building. Everywhere you look, pop culture ephemera from the 1970s and 1980s is displayed with a mixture of Teutonic organization and loving care. I wandered, spellbound. Memories from my misspent youth drifted to the surface: idle afternoons watching Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999, and the Six Million Dollar Man; my Kiss album collection; the first primitive pong video game; and so much more of the crap that we filled our lives with in the 1970s.
I learned much from this museum as well. For instance, that there were once action figures of the Ramones, Johnny Rotten(!), and John Lennon(!!). That the movie Battlestar Galactica was once released on Super-8 film in German. And that the original Donkey Kong video arcade game, of which there's one in the shop, is as difficult as it is addictive. Here are a few cellphone photos to give you an idea of what's on display.
No trip to Kassel would be complete without a visit to the Museum für Sepulkralkultur (g), a museum devoted to death and burial. There are coffins from around the globe (including simple boxes for Orthodox Jews and gaily-decorated Ghanaian models), hell money and hell cigarettes, Totentanz sculptures, hearses, monuments, embalming kits, memorial portraits, 'death crowns' for children and young unmarried people, monuments, death masks, and art inspired by death, funerals, rebirth, and reincarnation. Outside, there are innovative grave markers designed by contemporary artists. Of course, there are also programs for kids.
There are also the obligatory information-drenched placards describing the origin and nature of European funeral practices. From these you learn that the practice of burying people in individual, marked graves only became uniform in Europe in the last 200 years -- before that, most poorer citizens were dumped in mass graves. You also learn that modern German cemeteries are facing a space crisis -- they're not running out of it, they often have too much of it, since almost 50% of Germans now choose to be cremated, and those numbers keep growing.
While there, I stocked up on a few back issues of Friedhof und Denkmal: Zeitschrift für Sepulkralkultur (Cemetery and Monument: Journal of Sepulchral Culture). In the 2-2011 issue of this handsome magazine, there is a discussion of the model rules for grave design in Catholic cemeteries that were recently promulgated by the Archbishopric of Cologne:
Basically, the new regulations contain only required dimensions for the grave, as well as bans on some materials that are inappropriate for cemeteries. Completely covered graves are forbidden: the grave-plate can only cover up to one-third of the grave.... [Individual church cemeteries can still] add regulations that servce to express shared religious beliefs. An example is a ban on polished stone, since this prevents natural change in the stone, which itself is an expression of the transitoriness of human life in this world. A ban on snow-white marble and showy (überschwänglich) golden inscriptions serve to prevent excessive ostentation in the religious sense.
The back of the book contains reviews of recent burial-related books, including a 400-page work by Regina Deckers on 'The Testa Velata in Baroque Sculpture' (g) an entire monograph (written at the University of Düsseldorf!) on the motif of figures with veiled heads or faces in funerary sculpture.
Now for some of the odd and delightful things in the museum, hover for info.
Instead of giving you a panorama of Kassel to start this post, here's an old 'watch for pickpockets' poster from Kassel's disused former main train station. Wait, that's unfair. Here's a picture of Kassel looking its best:
By day, Kassel's not much to look at. There's a somewhat grand central square, the Friedrichplatz, lined by a giant 18th-century classical pile on one side (the Friedericianum, on the left in the photo above) and a row of shops on the other. Just south of that, there is a massive Baroque park, the Karlsaue, divided into a huge central field ringed by artificial meadows in the English style. Outside the city center, things quickly get very grim indeed: Kassel was flattened during World War II, and the monotonous 4- and 5-story housing oblongs thrown up in haste in the 1950s quickly numb the eye.
But wait, there's more! Every five years, Kassel is taken over by Documenta, one of the largest contemporary-art shows in the world. The working-class locals generally tolerate the quinquennial onslaught of bestubbled men in black turtlenecks and women in flowing raiment, since they spend lots of money and put Kassel on the map. The art is all over town, so to speak, with exhibitions in the Friedericanum (the main venue) the grounds of a disused central train station, a natural history museum, the classical Orangerie, a special modern hall called the Documenta-Halle, and all over the grounds of the sprawling Karlsaue. The atmosphere is of a sedate, bildungsbürgerlich outdoor festival. Inevitably, the Occupy folks have come to Kassel and set up a tent city just outside the main venue.
The international art scene, we are told, is now split between two camps. First, the major galleries, museums and auction houses, who extract profits from those at the top of the winner-take-all contemporary-art pyramid. Then there are curators of the international bienniales, who often critique the unholy commercialism of the mainstream market by inviting outsiders, non-artists, scientists, and activists to display at the major international exhibitions. The works they commission and display often have a social agenda and cannot easily be commodified.
Carolyn Christov-Bagarkiev, curator of this year's thirteenth Documenta (or dOCUMENTA (13), in the official spelling) stands proudly in the second camp -- her welcoming remarks even promise a 'non-logocentric' exhibition, whatever that might be. This has its good and not-so-good sides. On the positive side, she has invited a spectacularly international cast of participants, with entries from all continents. Anyone coming to Kassel looking for room after room of 'big names' will go away disappointed. She has also invited several scientists to explain their work, including Anton Zeilinger, the Austrian physicist who has invented deceptively simple experiments to illuminate seeming paradoxes of quantum mechanics such as quantum teleportation.
The downsides of CCB's approach are also evident. It's always a bad sign when curators have to resort to fluff-words such as 'foreground', 'practice', 'intervention' or 'technique' to describe what the artist is doing, and there's a lot of charlatanry on display. Thai artist -- I hesitate to use the word -- Pratchaya Phinthong displays two dead tsetse flies in a glass box. Ryan Gardner has hogged the entire sprawling ground floor of the Friedericianum for an installation that features hidden fans which create a breeze. Yup, that's all there is to “I need some meaning I can memorise (The Invisible Pull)” -- two giant, empty rooms with a mild breeze running through them. I couldn't be bothered to find out what this was supposed to teach us, although perhaps it's a commentary on Germans' paranoid terror of moving indoor air. American Susan Hiller features a jukebox playing songs she likes, which 'foregrounds' the exquisite taste and social awareness of her iPod shuffle list. Lara Favaretto has stacked a couple of giant piles of junk in the open area behind the former main train station, an embarassingly unoriginal foray. Goldberg and Faivovich, a hirsute pair of twentysomethings who look like (and may be) heirs of wealthy Argentine families, have filmed themselves crawling over the El Chaco meteorite. They originally wanted to transport this giant rock from Argentina to Kassel, but were very rightly stopped by the authorities and -- the irony! -- indigenous tribes from the area.
Just as uninspired, though perhaps more edifying, are the didactic exhibits by social activists. One room in the natural-history museum, the Ottoneum, is given over to Maria Tereza Alves' massive model volcano, part of a documentation of the struggle of a group of indigenous people to prevent the sale of their land to an international conglomerate. If this were a high-school science fair, this earnest diorama would certainly snap up first prize. Turning to the social studies fair, we have an outdoor exhibit by Robin Kahn on the oppression of certain Western Saharan tribes by Morocco. The display is pasted onto hastily-erected wooden boards in what is supposed to remind you of a refugee camp, and there is a tent in which you may nosh in solidarity on Western Saharan food, if you wish. The explanatory placards, consisting of simple collages, were bettered by many of the impromptu exhibits in the Occupy Kassel tent city in the Friedrichplatz. And then there was the nice Thai lady showing movies about the animal shelter she runs in Thailand, and soliciting contributions for 'DOGumenta' outside her outdoor '"'installation'"'. Then there were the hairy young things from the art collective AND AND AND, whose intervention consisted of the strategy of selling 'anti-capitalist' organic tea from a hastily-nailed-together wooden stand. Or maybe they were giving it away, so as to interrogate the logocentric matrix of late capita-blah blah blah. Anyone who sees revolutionary potential in organic tea obviously hasn't been to a corporate boardroom lately.
But enough of the silliness. They can't all be zingers, in the words of Primus, and there was much fascinating stuff on display. The Cypriot-German team of Haris Epaminonda and Daniel Gustav Cramer took over three stories of a dilapidated former train command center to create a hypnotic installation composed of bare rooms with enigmatic pictures and symbols, books containing star measurements or simple diagrams, oddly evocative unsent letters, and framed, faded photographs clippings of everything from Neanderthal busts to Russian waterfalls. The top floor of the building, a creaky loft, has been subtly claimed for art by the placement of black spheres. The installation worked by suggestion and intimation, and left the visitor with an oddly abstract sense of melancholy:
Julie Mehretu displayed four massive canvases whose background consisted of a thick mass of overlapping CAD line drawings with different perspective points, overlaid by a complex system of handmade marks and color fields. Looking upon these canvases brought on vertigo, and the contrast between the clinical precision of the computerized drafting and the hand-drawn marks was eerie and evocative. Thomas Bayrle's dissected vehicle engines and stand-alone windshield wipers evoked the hypnotic potential latent in the calm repetition of machines. Also on display were some of his short films, one of which shows anonymous crowds of miniature human figures wandering on the reflective leaves of a rotating rubber plant:
His massive 'Airplane' from 1983, a drawing of a plane made of recursive drawings of ever-smaller planes, evoked the almost hermetic obsessiveness of Hanna Darboven.
A roomful of intricately abstract paintings and textiles by Aboriginal artists from Australia mesmerized everyone who entered it, including yours truly.
The crowning achievements of this Documenta were, in my view, two multimedia installations. One, housed in a room of the Documenta-Halle, is 'In Search of Vanished Blood' by Pakistani-Indian artist Nalini Malani:
She has suspended five large transparent plastic cylinders from the ceiling painted with silhouettes reminiscent of traditional shadow plays. As they rotate, film is projected both beside and through them, creating a coruscating, mind-breaking riot of silhouette, shape, and sound. Interweaved are images of women veiled, undressed, and in ritual costume. It's difficult to tell which juxtapositions are planned and which are randomly-generated, which makes them all the more fascinating. At one point, for instance, the image of a woman putting on a dress is shown repeatedly, accompanied by the sound of glass breaking. Of course, neither description nor videos can do it justice, you simply have to immerse yourself in the maelstrom.*
The second is called 'The Refusal of Time' and was masterminded by William Kentridge, the South African artist whose career shows a combination of superb draftsmanship, an unerring sense of symbolism, and a streak of unabashed showmanship.
'The Refusal of Time' is a 25-minute meditation on time and space, projected on six separate non-synchronized screens and accompanied by a soundtrack that is by turns boisterously African, raucously Dixieland, grindingly industrial, and spaciously contemplative. And not just by turns -- sometimes completely different stuff gets stacked on top of itself, just as it does in life. Kentridge takes a broad palette of time-related symbolism -- metronomes, space signals, mindless task-repetition, the life cycle of a family, the slow progress toward extinction -- and subjects them to an spectacularly fertile and inventive series of cross-linked variations that is comical, frightening, and moving. Unlike almost every other installation, everyone who entered the Kentridge room stayed, mesmerized, until the end of the show, and there was often spontaneous applause. As someone once said of John Ashbery, Kentridge truly lives in a Versailles of the imagination.
Such are my thoughts on Documenta. I stopped by a few more museums during the trip, and will post about those in the coming days, as my schedule permits. And below, just for fun, some more images from Documenta (details in hover text):
I've been doing some research at the Max Planck Institute for International Criminal Law in Freiburg for the past couple of days, and good G$d, Freiburg is delightful. Even though it's been gray and intermittently rainy, the residents smile at you spontaneously on the street, and from behind the counter. They chat with strangers on the streetcar, and anxiously offer to help you if you look lost. The natives seem to be extremely happy that they're living in Freiburg, and who can blame them? Now, the city was bombed to smithereens on one night in 1944 (Operation Tigerfish (g)), and there are the unavoidable drab post-war buildings here and there, but much of the city was lovingly reconstructed in the post-war decades. The Old Town is quaint and not afraid to be a bit cheesy. The magnificent Minster, build between the 13th and 15th centuries, was almost completely unscathed, and dominates the city skyline.
But the most important thing Freiburg did was to keep itself green. Tree-lined avenues abound, and the Black Forest sprawls literally to the very edge of the historical old town. You can take a tram ride from the middle of town and be in the middle of a charming section of the Southern Black Forest in 3 minutes. The city is positively overgrown with green space, and is renowned for its devotion to all things ecological. It is clearly one of the bike-friendliest cities around, and the large student population fills it with beautiful young people speaking all of their fun, crazy languages. Why, walking down the Guentertalstrasse, I found a copy of a Peter Handke novel (Die Lehre der St. Victoire) just sitting on top of a utility box! I waited a decent interval, then stuffed it in my bag. It was, after all, about to start raining, so the book had to be rescued.
The old town is criss-crossed with small rivulets which remind you involuntarily of medieval open sewage canals, but are now flowing with nice fresh water. They're called Baechle (brooklets), and they're uncovered. which is actually sort of dangerous, which makes them even more charming. The cuisine is leavened with French and Swiss flair, and the wine and Schnapps are world-class. Of course, it helps that it's extremely prosperous. You can always criticize environmental consciousness and an obsession with green spaces as a frippery of the prosperous bourgeoisie, but it's a much more wholesome frippery than many others I can name.
The Max Planck Institute for Criminal Law is an extremely funky building from the mid-1960s. Built on the edge of a forest, it's apparently supposed to remind you of the shapes and colors of the forest -- the exterior is festooned with tree-shaped forms, and the interior is entirely wood-paneled. It's like your parents' mid-1960s living room, if your parents lived in Big Sur and had a lot of money. I'm here for another day, so any suggestions are welcome...
Here are a few photos, which don't do the place justice, since it's gray and rainy outside, but still:
On Friday, I debated American law professor and death-penalty proponent Robert Blecker in the 'New Auditorium' of Heidelberg University, which was freshly renovated in 2011 to celebrate the 625th birthday of that institution. The room was pretty crowded, and the audience -- almost exclusively students -- asked interesting questions. The Heidelberg Symposium (g) is organized exclusively by a small group of idealistic, hard-working students, and they did a fine job, presenting dozens of interesting speakers (I went to several other presentations myself and was never disappointed) and making guests feel more than welcome. If you want to support this entirely voluntary, student-run, interdisciplinary conference, go here (g). They also welcome Sachspenden (in-kind contributions).
Given all the charming people I was meeting, I did rather a bit more drinking and socializing than I normally do -- in fact, on Friday night, I stayed up until 6 AM, and walked home to the Hotel Tannhäuser.* Many thanks to my readers for the suggestions. Unfortunately, the weather was cool and rainy, so all the Biergärten were closed and no space was left inside, so there was no white asparagus with braised pork knuckles (or whatever they eat in Heidelberg) for me. My drinking companions and I always seemed to end up in the Weinloch ('Winehole'!) in the Untere Straße, which stays open until 3 AM and lives up to its name.
I finally got a chance to see the Prinzhorn Collection of art by patients in a clinic for the mentally ill, collected in the early 20th century by an idealistic psychologist and art historian named Hans Prinzhorn. The classic book he published in 1922, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (g) (Artistry of the Mentally Ill), influenced a generation of modern artists. And I didn't just buy if for the pictures; Prinzhorn's innovation was to treat artworks by mentally ill patients not as curiosities or signs of disease, but rather as serious expressions of the primal human need to understand the world, bring order to sense impressions, decorate one's surroundings, and express states of the soul.
The project was perverted a generation later, when the chairman of the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic, Carl Schneider, permitted works from the collection to be used by the Nazis to 'prove' that modern art was no different from the 'scribblings of mental degenerates'. Prinzhorn himself was prevented from further developing his own fascination with racial ideology (g) by his early death in 1933. Many of the artists whose works appear in the book were later murdered in Grafeneck (g) as part of the T4 program. Prinzhorn's masterpiece has been translated into English and has consistently remained in print in Germany, with the last edition appearing in 2011. The Prinzhorn collection is now housed in a thoroughly-renovated old lecture hall, and is the perfect size.
I have a few other observations about Heidelberg:
UPDATE: The indefatigable Christian Boulanger asks how the debate was. You'll be able to judge soon enough, since it will be posted on YouTube. Until then, my impressions. My job was to defend the 'European model' of criminal punishment, which could be summed up as (1) avoid prison confinement wherever possible; (2) integrate retributivism (as the basis for the length of the sentence) without going overboard; (3) make sure prison does as good a job as possible resocializing inmates; and (4) keep criminal justice out of the hands of the people and in the hands of politically insulated civil servants. Blecker, for his part, is an 'emotive retributivist' who favors capital punishment for the 'worst of the worst' and supports making prison life gradually more restrictive depending on the level of moral culpability of the offender, meaning those who displayed serious depravity of mind would be subject to punitive segregation. His views are more nuanced than some of the video clips circulating on the Internet may make it seem: he believes the death penalty is used too frequently in the United States, agrees that America has a serious over-incarceration problem, and that too little is done to try to rehabilitate prisoners. His focus is on severe punishments for the 'worst of the worst', but on correspondingly less severe punishments for those whose crimes don't demonstrate utter viciousness.
I was preaching to the choir, since I was defending a system that most of the middle-class to upper-class university students tend to see as natural and normal and humane. (This complacency is aggravated by the 'respectable' German media's disinterest in highlighting the many problems plaguing German criminal justice, with the intermittent exception of Der Spiegel (g)). I don't normally like preaching to the choir, so I tried to leaven my endorsement of European mildness with some criticisms. Nevertheless, the students listened to Blecker's point of view respectfully, and Becker earned applause for his frankly, honestly retributive opinions -- such as that he has little use for the abstract notion of 'human dignity', and that he considers the 'human dignity' of people like Magnus Gäfgen as much less worthy of protection than that of the young boy he callously murdered.
Anyway, that's my two cents. The debate was captured on video by a pretty professional camera team, and I've been promised it will be posted on YouTube in the next few weeks. As soon as it shows up, I'll post it here, and you can draw your own conclusions...
And now for a few random pictures from my photostream:
Tomorrow I trundle off to Heidelberg to take part in the 24th Annual Symposium of the Heidelberger Clubs für Wirthschaft und Kultur, with the theme Mut zur Moral (g). I'll be debating Robert Blecker there on the subject of criminal justice and morality, details (partially in English) here. Tickets are available at this website.
So, this is going to be a semi-lavish, some-expenses-paid weekend in Heidelberg for me. Lucky me! And now I'd like to ask for any tips for places to eat and/or see. I've been to Heidelberg several times already and have seen the main sights (castle, Philosophenweg, churches, the unmissable Frankonia fraternity house), but there's always new stuff to see. Time permitting, I'm planning on visiting the Prinzhorn collection of art by the mentally ill and the Egyptian collection of the University. Perhaps even the German Packaging Museum, which, for sheer thrills per square foot, may well rival the German Bread Museum.
Here are a few questions for my esteemed readers. First, can anyone find the opening hours and times for the Egyptian Collection? I can only find this website, which says the collection was closed until 'March 2011' for a move.
Also, what's the best beer garden in Heidelberg? Best restaurant overall (especially for solid, hearty German food?).
Any tips will be warmly appreciated. And come to the conference, if you're so inclined.
About a month ago, I took a short bike tour in the Allgäu, starting in Ulm and going down to Rot and der Rot, where I gave a speech. Taking the bike on an IC train turned out to be pretty straightforward, as long as you reserve everything first. The landscape down there, at the border between Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, is idyllic: rolling hills, verdant meadows, cool deciduous forests, and fat, lazy cows and sheep everywhere. Perfect for biking: The hills are just high enough to add some variety to your ride, without being too intimidating.
The entire area is filled with baroque monasteries and churches. I usually find baroque churches a bit tedious: after a while, the hovering angels and ornate columns and rays of light remind me of a Mexican cab-driver's dashboard. So I was a bit surprised to find myself really liking the South German baroque on display. In the really fine churches, such as the spectacular Ottobeuren monastery church, the pleasure comes from the consummate skill on display. The sculptural groups -- in particular, the Baptism of Jesus located above the pulpit -- are minor masterpieces, as are the ceiling frescoes by Januarius Zick. Riotous blasts of juicy Counter-Reformation drama.
But there's also a charming, folk-art aspect to many of the churches. St. Verena, the monastery church at St. Norbert in Rot and der Rot, is a soothing blend of neoclassical columns and baroque ornamentation. It has paired groups of side-altars topped by ingenuous sculpture groups created by F.X .Feichtmayr II in the 1780s:
But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of these churches is the phenomenon of the so-called Catacomb Saints (Katakombenheiligen). Beginning in the 16th century, the catacombs under Rome were re-discovered. Someone had the ingenious idea of locating skeletons buried on or near Christian symbols (cross, monograms, lambs, martyrs' palms) and declaring them to be early Christian martyrs. The skeletons could then be sold to interested buyers, of whom there were many in Germany.
After arriving from Rome, the skeletons would then be draped in the most precious finery the local community could afford, and displayed in ornate glass-enclosed altars. Sometimes the skeletons are propped on pillows, holding martyrs' palms, sometimes they are standing up. The bones are usually held together in fine white gauze. To make them more life-like, the faithful might place wigs on them, or even entire reconstructed model faces. Nevertheless, their clothes are always made with cunningly-placed openings showing a shinbone here or a ribcage there, to make sure the faithful know they are seeing an entire skeleton. A few pictures:
It goes without saying that the attribution of entire life histories to these anonymous remains was almost always spurious. The practice was finally ended in 1860. Tour guides and brochures often gloss over them or ignore them entirely, as if they were faintly embarrassed by the whole charade.
I found them fascinating. The German artist HAP Grieshaber, known for his monumental woodcuts, was born in Rot an der Rot. As a child, he was also drawn to the catacomb saints, as his wife recalls:
He rode to Rot an der Rot. After a half-century he saw the place of his birth again.... There, Helmut Andreas Paul (HAP) had been born to Protestant parents. His first steps led to the monastery church, which was his playroom. Immediately, he found his childhood, and himself, again. Some visitors might have thought him very pious as they saw him on his knees in front of the side altars, to see everything from the perspective of a four-year-old, before his nose these glass cases* with their martyrs' relics, these macabre delights, whose ivory-shimmering bones are draped so richly in pearls, embroidery, sequins, and glimmering semi-precious stones. A skull blooms like a bouquet of roses, some were covered with plaster and painted to a doll-like sheen. Some hands held swords, and some had embroidered shoes over their delicate ankles. Grieshaber recognized everything once again. He remembered how he had felt as a child, and saw everything he had previously kept covered and hidden in his conscious life. And over him arched the round, figure-strewn heaven of the Baroque.
(source: Kirchenführer Pfarrkirche St. Verena, p. 27).
Sorry about the light posting lately. A combination of actual work and fitful pulses of a social life have distracted me from my most important obligation -- blogging.
Anyway, in a few days I plan to set off for a trip to the Allgäu, on a mix of business and pleasure. I'm gonna bring my bike with me to Ulm, then bike down the Danube until around Memmingen. My schedule is pretty flexible.Does anyone have any particular tips for things to see, taste, drink, have stamped, or do in this area? All suggestions are welcome!
Blogging may (continue to) be light, obviously...
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