Cranky in Berlin

I am well aware that I haven't been blogging as much as I was in Barcelona, and yet when I ask myself why that is, I can't really come up with an answer that feels completely satisfactory... to me. But this question, and an attempt to answer it, might well serve as a framework (or at least a beginning) for this post.

The simplest thing to say, I guess, is that I'm not really feeling tremendously inspired in Berlin... neither to blog nor in any other way. There's nothing particularly bad about being here... but I'm certainly not feeling ON FIRE the way I was (at least once in a while) in Barcelona. All of which is a bit hard - and makes me a bit melancholy - to admit. But I do need to remind myself from time to time that we've only been here a little over 7 weeks, and that's really not a lot of time in a new country / culture, with a kid and a new school and apartment and all that.

In trying to uncover the reasons, I think it makes a lot of sense to begin with one factor that might actually have a fair bit of influence on other factors... and that is the fact that I am trying to learn German. The reason I am conjecturing that it might have implications for other factors is that learning a new language takes a lot of time. Including my class, my commute to class, and my study time, German chews up about 20 hours a week, which definitely takes a bite out of the 40 hours, give or take, that I have every week during Kodiak's school hours.

As mentioned earlier this puts me in much the same boat Christina found herself in while in Spain. In Spain I had time to soak up culture, look for a workshop, and get involved in clay sculpture, while Christina was busy learning Spanish. We've traded places.

Why would I bother to learn German, you ask? Especially considering that one can get by pretty well in Berlin without speaking it, and also that we'll almost certainly be returning to Taos next summer? Well, I don't have a completely compelling answer to that either, other than to say that I've always loved German and have always wanted to learn it. I guess that when I put it that way, it does sound reasonably compelling... but still, the usefulness of it in my life is questionable. Understanding the lyrics of Laibach and Rammstein will be nice, but...

That being said, my German class, of which I have now completed the first month, has been an unexpected pleasure. It's a fun group of people and a great teacher, I find that I really enjoy learning the language (although it is a hard one), and the class schedule gives my life a bit of structure.

For this last month of school, I've generally been spending the 2 or 3 free hours that I have after class soaking up the city in one way or another. Usually it's a museum or a gallery, or a bicycle or motorcycle ride through some interesting neighborhood such as Prenzlauer Berg or Neukölln or Bergmannkiez. I've climbed the Siegessäule and we've gone up the Fernsehturm as a family too. All of this has been fun... I really feel that long-inactive parts of my brain are getting a workout as I consciously try to learn this new city and it's language.... but...

There's only so long you can be a tourist.

And I get antsy... sometimes even crabby, if I can't work in one way or another.

I think it was easy to be a tourist in the first few months of Barcelona because Barcelona is SO different from anywhere else I've ever lived, and because being in Europe was so new. But even there, after a few months, I was getting antsy. It was around that time that we really stepped up the search for a workshop, a search which eventually turned out to be a big dead end. But all along it was relatively easy to do small art projects in our Raval apartment (no one seemed to care about a little noise and dust). This, and Jorge's figurative clay sculpture class, saved me.

Germany, on the other hand, doesn't really feel that different from other places I've lived, and being in Europe isn't that new anymore either. Plus, the time without a studio, and therefor without doing any real meaty work, is now almost a year. Also, there are explicit clauses in our lease prohibiting any work in the apartment, and Germans are so damn uptight that I wouldn't put it past one of my neighbors to report me to the property management if they heard a jigsaw (more on the Germans later). So yeah, we are really really ready for a studio. But this is turning out to be almost as difficult here as it was in Spain.

The mythical Berlin of cheap and easy artist space is 5-10 years gone, as far as I can tell. On the plus side, there are actually websites and networks dedicated to the rental market for art studio space  (which is a huge step up from Barcelona), but it's all expensive, far away, and competitive to get into (not to mention the near-universal fear of noise and dust, which feels like a prejudice against sculptors... everyone wants to rent their space to a fucking graphic designer). We have our eyes on 2 spaces, but neither one of them is actually very good, and we are vying against other interested parties for both of these distant and expensive spaces. Apparently we aren't the only artists who heard that Berlin is cool and moved here looking for a studio. 

If something doesn't click soon I will just start sculpting clay in the apartment, lease provisions be damned.

Also I would just like to point out that, although they say Berlin is one of the great world capitals of art, I'm not really feeling it (yet?). There are good resources for "classical" painting and sculpture up through the 19th century, but I still haven't stumbled upon much contemporary stuff. Barcelona's modest little MEAM has a better collection of contemporary figurative work than anything I've seen here yet. Maybe I'm spending too much time in Zehlendorf, maybe too much time studying German, or maybe its just that it's only been 7 weeks. Just today I visited two recommended galleries in Friedrichshain... one was empty (between shows??) and the other was closed forever. I continue looking.

When we were still in Barcelona, but considering a move to Berlin, several people weighed in with the opinion: "Berlin is cool, but winter sucks and its full of Germans." I shrugged it off, thinking "winter is winter, we have winter in Taos too... and the Germans can't be all that bad." Well I don't know about winter yet, but Germans do take a bit of getting used to. 

I remember despairing of the lack of eye contact in Barcelona and being excited to come to Germany, but the German alternative is not exactly what I had in mind. Germans stare. And they don't smile. Like, never. On the street, on the metro, they will just stare at you with a facial expression somewhere between dead and mildly scornful, as if to say (with their eyes) "who the fuck are you? And why are you here?" 

Another thing they love to do is honk at each other. The worst example I've seen recently involved a driver that pulled to the curb to pick up her young son, who was doing his darned best to get into the car quickly. The cars behind her were inconvenienced for less than a second before they started honking. Seriously, it was immediate... I'm not exaggerating. That would simply not happen in Spain, or Taos, or most places I can think of.

Not long ago we were in Denmark (which is quite awesome, as far as I can tell), and we saw lots of Danish people who appeared happy (some of them even smiling at us!), proving that it is not actually a requirement to be dour and unfriendly when living in northern Europe. 

Anyway, I digress.

As I write this... I can certainly sense a lot of frustration in my tone and content. This business with the search for an art studio is showing itself to be more difficult and complicated than I'd ever imagined. And the question is not just one of finding an actual space within which to work (even though that is proving to be a colossal task)... it reverberates on other levels too. If we are able to find a studio and I give in to my natural inclinations to work on a larger scale, then what to do with that work when it's finished? Show it in a gallery? Store it? But where? Ship it back to the States? If I work smaller (which I probably should), then similar questions arise... also pointing in the direction of trying to have a show, or ship stuff home. I have practically no experience with the "gallery world,' and so I'm not even sure if arranging a show would be possible. The "context" within which I'm typically used to working is that of a festival, with a fixed show date, but the festival thing is not really happening here. So then, the option that remains is to work simply for the point (the joy?) of working... and figure out what to do with it later. This is what I should do. This is what I did in Barcelona, and I was quite happy doing it. But again... a studio. It doesn't seem so much to ask... a room in which to set up some tools and do some work, in which noise and dust are allowed... does it? It all makes our giant workshop in the mesa, with plenty of storage, look pretty lovely. 

When I get frustrated, I must remember that the very worst thing we could do would be to reach the end of our time here and feel that perhaps we could have tried harder. So... get to work trying to get to work.

OK, phew. Now that my rant is over, I can talk about some of the fun stuff. 

First off, Berlin is a lovely place to motorcycle. It reminds me of the San Francisco of my teens... which is to say San Francisco in the 1990's. Even though it's technically illegal here, you can split lanes - the cops don't care. In fact a few weeks ago I rode slowly past a group of cops who were standing on the sidewalk watching me go by, only to arrive at the end of the block and realize I'd been driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Apparently they didn't care about that either. Also reminiscent of San Francisco, you can park pretty much anywhere you want. Sidewalks, courtyards, between cars... it doesn't really matter (as long as its not in a bicycle lane!). That has been fun. 

In addition to climbing the Siegessäule one day after class...

we also went up the Fernsehturm, which is a structure that I have a strange fondness for. 

Note Kodiak's reflection and mine in the window....

Here's a night portrait. I think my fondness for this tower comes from several sources... 1) its a building which is really more like a machine, 2) for this reason it is quite out of place in the city, 3) it's history as something built by the East, right next to the wall as a kind of provocation to the west, is funny to me, and 4) it's one of the only things I actually clearly remember from the day I strolled around East Berlin in 1987 or so (before the fall of the Wall).

I mentioned that Berlin has good resources for classical painting and sculpture. Here are a few that have caught my eye. This is the famous "Amazon zu Pferde," or Amazon on a horse, by August Kiss that adorns the Alte Museum on Museum Insel. The action and intensity is an even match, in my opinion, to some of the stuff I saw in Venice a few months ago by Damien Hirst. 

Another one I like is this, by Eduard Müller. Also lots of crazy dynamism and conflict in this one.

Kodiak and I visited the Natural History Museum where we saw the Holotype (or very best specimen, against which all others are judged) of Archaeopteryx. Pictures of this exact fossil are in pretty much every dinosaur book, and it was fun to see it in person.

And, as mentioned, we went to Denmark. That was actually last weekend, when Kodiak had a few days off school. 

We took the ferry across a small part of the Baltic,

We saw the "Little Mermaid" sculpture,

We experienced that famous "Danish Design," (haha, sort of an idiosyncratic example, to say the least... I wonder if anyone can guess what that is?)

We went to the Viking Museum in Roskilde (which was super awesome... a highlight!) Look at that smiling Danish guy!

And we posed charmingly in front of a good looking Danish bridge!

OK, until next time... Hopefully I'll have some art to show one of these days.
Cheers