Baum im Herbst – Artist/curator Ian White’s latest blog from Berlin

Benjamin A. Huseby and Lars Laumann, You Can't Pretend To Be Somebody Else - You Already Are (2009), still

I’ve never been inclined to give myself up entirely to the trappings of The Season (that special time of year when the art industry brings its business back from a month in the country), preferring to vainly cling onto the possibility of a private sex life like a fragment shored against the ruin of all the official functions.

But obligation, in and of itself, doesn’t feel quite so much like the opposite of life when you’re abroad. So here we are again, and when Paul Pfeiffer’s The Saints opens on Friday [9th October] I will have found myself having gone to three openings at the Hamburger Bahnhof in the course of a month. I will be happy to see this show for which I wrote a catalogue text, but the institutional-ceremonial standard here can really take it out of one.

DIE KUNST IST SUPER! Is it? I don’t know… but that’s the title for the display of the various re-hung collections housed by the Hamburger Bahnhof. Come… You arrive on your own through the fearsome blue glare of the permanent Dan Flavin installation in the courtyard and are immediately inside the main hall of this former train station. It’s vast. The crowd, which is large, well-heeled and, I’d say, established, cannot fill it. You feel a bit feverish. You don’t see anyone you know but it’s OK, you can access the rest of the collections galleries via this hall. Or you could apart from the fact that across every doorway that ubiquitous defence that protects art from people – the tensabarrier – is drawn and guarded by uniformed security.

You spot a lonely microphone amidst the straggle. You really are actually penned in and there is nothing to do. Cultural cattle in the museum as an haute couture Easy jet boarding gate. You work it out: it is for The Speeches. Your role in the ritual is as The (invited) Public, which you’re helped to perform by this temporary restriction of movement – it will be removed, but not until three sartorially interchangeable Men In Suits have spoken, their voices amplified through a PA system that is more audible the further away you stand from them and it. There is applause and one of them receives some cheers. Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) is displayed like a trophy. Thank you. You are free to go.

One week later. Hardly believing I let my friend B persuade me to come. Same place, different wing, another prize: the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young German Art. Tensabarriers and Speeches but €50,000 for Omer Fast who won it (and is currently showing at the South London Gallery) is nothing to be sniffed at and I knew enough now to sit outside with B as The Public did their bit before we all became people again and got drunk on the terrace because it was such a good shortlist of artists; Fast, Keren Cytter, Annette Kelm and Danh Vo. And because the show took the pain away from having to wait in the queue caused because no-one had been allowed in earlier. Kelm’s photographs are genuinely compelling, Cytter’s fragmented narratives split also between rooms and out onto a stairwell. And just personally I find Danh Vo’s articulation of his practice so exactly aware that it’s an inspiration.

Movement was much less restricted at the Independent Publishing Fair organised by Motto in Kreuzberg across a number of shops between two courtyards next to where the neat, queer sliver of a gallery Silberkuppe now is, after beginning upstairs at Basso. It ran until midnight with some late summer magic and it was such the antidote to this other place – such ambient pleasure – that it even made a certain kind of sense when the outdoor DJ played The Beatles and we sipped some white wine Scholars until Motherland performed in the gallery.

Their fine set was accompanied by a display of covers for every album they will ever make, with artwork designed by a role-call of ‘local’ talent; Eli Sudbrack, Amy Sillman and Gregg Bordowitz, the Bruce High Quality Foundation (who by the way have just opened an art school in Manhattan) and Anne de Vries amongst others like Julian Goethe who also appears in those photos of Annette Kelm on the other side of town and whose awesome, psychedelically geometrical matt black forms march like aliens down the semi-circular ramp that dominates Scorpio’s Garden, the new group show in the Temporary Kunsthalle.

No-one here seems to like this place, an awful blue box on a lawn across from the Dom. Entrance is free but it’s pathetic that they force you to put your bag into the cloakroom and charge you €1. They should be embarrassed. But nonetheless I liked this show mainly because I didn’t actually mind anything in it, felt relaxed that the white floor was already dirty and because of Goethe’s sculptures, Shahryar Nashat’s dirty boy/shiny brass minimalism and a video by Alexandra Hopf where still images of fake walls, theatre sets and artworks emerge from each other in such a way to evoke that special, strange excitement at not entirely understanding the thing we’re gripped by.

And that, ultimately for me this month, was a video I saw just the other day on a studio visit with Benjamin A. Huseby. You Can’t Pretend To Be Somebody Else – You Already Are is made together with Lars Laumann for the current Momentum in Moss, Norway. It is shot in Ibiza with a cast of three men in drag portraying Nico through her ages and towards her death from a heart attack while cycling on the island.

There is no whiff of crass about it. It is an utterly affecting work economically shot and compiled with delicacy, more brilliant because of the strange integrity of its obvious reconstructions and pseudo-symbolic choreography, casually but definitely danced. So rich in light and colour it is as carefully drenched in crystalline melancholy, hope and desire as it is firm in its grip on a very fine line between ludicrous joy, juvenile longing and intelligent, accomplished expression. Which frankly, right now, I feel like I need, the generous ticket I’d like to be on, a tonic.


Ian White is an artist and Adjunct Film Curator for the Whitechapel Gallery, London, as well as working on independent projects. He is the Facilitator of the LUX Associate Artists Programme and a writer. He curated ‘Tense Present’, a guided tour of artists’ film and video in the Luxonline collection.

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