Dear friends,
I have been to the fifth Berlin Biennale yesterday… I started my walk through the venue at 2 pm and ended the pilgrimage at 9pm. So what can I say… I started the march full with hope and eager to see some new, interesting, not shocking but fun, art! I had no big expectations. I just wanted to let it all come to me and have a great time, seeing new art peaces and meeting friends along the way. I thought it would be a wonderful day… but instead it turned out to be a joke… and a bad joke it was indeed… It was so bad that I thought there would be a man jumping out from behind some corner shouting at us: “candid camera”!
I don’t know where to start… I first got my accreditation in the Kunst Werke and walked through them and it wasn’t all that bad… From the entire Biennale I would only save two videos from the Kunst Werke: one is in the basement, made by Jos De Gruyter & Herald Thys. Even though I would save this peace, I still think their use of amateur video effects go beyond cheapness and that they should have known better then to edit their video like a kid would do… but then again, I have no idea how old they are.
The second video I would save is an installation piece with two video projections made by Ania Molska. Nice rhythm and edit. Has an energetic beat to it even though I couldn’t catch the essence of the concept, but who cares! At least it was appealing to the eye and it gave me something to think about.
And as arrogant as it all my sound, I have to say that the rest nothing special. At point five o’clock I started crying when I arrived to the sculpture garden park thingy… they were just opening it and I guess they made an extra opening there because they were uncertain anybody would visit it on their own… well, my impression was that there were over a hundred people and all were running around the place in desperate search of art… it was as if we had easter again and the easter bunny not only hid the easter eggs so well… he actually didn’t even hide any and the kids started getting more and more frustrated as they couldn’t find anything to play with, anything to eat or confront with. Was the sculpture garden just trying to be modest? If so, I have something to say about it: modesty is the most dangerous form of arrogance!
The Schinkel Pavillion was O.K…. I mean just design, but nice design for that matter. I could see some of those Janette Laverriere mirrors hanging in my bathroom or floor… very nice but not arty. The pavillion changes shows so I will see how the upcoming will be. I am eager to see Ettore Sottsass. I am a fan of his.
Now we come to the Neue National Gallerie… I arrived there with my dear friend Emanuela Nobile Mino just in time for the seven thirty opening and we saw all the pieces and installations… The Neue National Gallerie was suposed to be kind of the special place of the biennale… well… first of all I have to say that due to the monumental beauty and magnitude of the building itself, almost anything inside that space automatically becomes bigger and assumes a ritual kind of quality. Having said that, I tried to mentally extract the art pieces from the “frame” and see them in any other normal space and the result was a bunch of stuff you would forget in a day or two.
You enter and see an ugly glittery thing hanging from the ceiling, blocking your view and path, a thing showing that the artist learned from “sensational” London arty show-off attitudes… so you pass the glitter and face the gutter right behind it, with ugly garments and stuff stuck to yellow panels (“whatever” was what I though out loud)… and it went on and on… We wanted to see the two video installations right behind the presentation and speech booth, but some idiot decided it wise to turn the installations off during the opening speech, to avoid any interfereance with the person trying to talk and the videos… Anyway, if I were the artist in question and somebody turned my installation off at the most important moment of the opening, where most of the important people could get a chance to see my work… I would have gotten really angry.
But as I said… the building is so grand that you just forget the rest and admire the space, wishing it would be totally empty so that you could enjoy it even more. I liked one part of a bigger installation by Nashashibi/Skaer and to be precise, it was just a detail, there were some “chopped off” horse feet made of clay. I really had a strong urge to touch them and play with them, turn them around and take them home with me… silly but true. Unfortunately, shortly after that, I got an anxiety attack from the masses of people crowding the space and that led to a faster energy and concentration draining process.
At 9pm I was tired and full of it up to my guts! I went home and the enthusiastic “ha ha ha” I wanted to hear myself shout out loud just turned into a tired ol’ yawn. What a waste of our time. How dare they make us waste a day of our precious lives. As if we had many to just give away as lollipops! And again, to me, modesty is the most dangerous form of arrogance!
Trying to regenerate myself, I kiss you all.
