The war on patina

[imomus]

Yesterday I really fell in love with Berlin again. I saw the Berlin Biennial, an event I thought I'd missed (it's been extended until June 5th). The art was pretty good, but in a sense it was upstaged by the city itself, and by patina. Curators Cattelan, Gioni and Subotnick found all sorts of spaces up and down Mitte's Auguststrasse; a cargo container, a gilded ballroom, several private apartments, some galleries, some post office stables... and a former Jewish School for Girls.



Here the patina was amazing. The art was arranged alongside communist-era didactic displays of notable Jews, peppy 70s and 80s graffiti, peeling paint and uneven plaster work, tiles and a vast range of fake brick, fake wood and floral wallpapers. Oh, and murals featuring Bertolt Brecht.

After seeing the biennial I went flathunting, ending up in Neukoln -- the only area where I could find decor shabby enough to satisfy my craving for patina, which is, finally, character, personality, history, texture. It's a familiar Berlin battle: how can you reach an area before the developers do, and how can you cling to a friendly bit of texture before some anally clean Germans define it as "dirt" and reduce it to a series of utterly bland, clean, neutral surfaces? "Sanierte", they call this in the lingo; re-organized, sanitized. Given Germany's history, the phrase has a sinister ring to it.

Berlin seems riven between the people who want historical monuments like the Volkspalast preserved, patina intact, and those who want them sanitized or razed. In the case of the former socialist "people's palace", the battle has been lost. It strikes me that this is also a battle between people who want expansion and economic development, and people who want characterful decay, decline, and a "slow life" somewhat protected from market forces. In other words, it relates to yesterday's question about demographics and the management of population decline.



In my last days in New York I visited the Parsons design department degree show. There was lots of excellent work, stuff about recycling and community-oriented design (a portable stoop people could sit on, for instance). The worst piece I saw, though, was a Communication Design piece by Hector Diaz called "The Effects of Spatial Design in New York Public High Schools".

"For the past 5 to 10 years," Diaz explained, "there has been a concern for students attending some New York City High Schools due to small graduation classes, low attendance and a lack of educational interest. My thesis conveys how through environmental design, combined with architecture, color and typography, students can unconsciously change the way their education is pursued."

Showing before-and-after pictures of a place very like the Former Jewish Girls' School, Diaz proposed changing a lovely, fusty building predominantly coloured in earth tones into a zingy electric blue-tinted educational freeway service station, complete with coffee franchise-style "motivational" graphics. I found his whole design-for-growth schtick dismal, sad and aesthetically offensive; a war on patina. He'll probably do very well.

Comments

[larameau.livejournal.com]

speaking of biennials, let's hope they don't invite diaz to the next venice biennial - i am horrified at what he could do to the wonderfully shabby, decadent buildings in venice.

venice, the triumph of patina

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. I must say that when I first saw the Whitney Biennial my heart sank a bit. It wasn't the art, it was the building. It just isn't the Arsenale, is it?

[larameau.livejournal.com]

one of the peculiarities of italian contemporary art shows is that they are often a combination of new text and old texture, i.e. innovative contemporary art gets shown in ancient spaces, just like the arsenale, or the grandiose "sala delle cariatidi" in milan's palazzo reale, which was deliberately left unrestored for a long time and used as an exhibition space, or even the ancient cellars and warehouses of medieval towns in central italy.
the only trouble may be that these places and architectures are so redolent in themselves that they distract the viewer's attention from the works, or add extra esthetic value to the works they contain - but personally, i don't see anything wrong with this. art is also an event, and as such it is ephemeral and context-bound.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think the neutrality of the white cube is a Modernist anomaly. Most of the time art has had a context, stuff around it, often very gilded and ornate stuff. Of course, the white cube (seen as a Modernist anomaly) is also a context. The question then is, why should post-Modernist art be seen in a Modernist context (like Breuer's Whitney, for instance)? And when the Whitney has been made over by Renzo Piano (2008, I hear), will pomo art fit better in a pomo space?

[larameau.livejournal.com]

i think the clash of styles (modern vs. postmodern) and the mixture of old and new is postmodern by definition. indeed, the postmodern is closer to the ancient rather than the modern

what do you think, for instance, of this lucio fontana exhibit in central italy:

http://larameau.livejournal.com/808.html

and here are some pictures of the "sala delle cariatidi" i mentioned before:

http://larameau.livejournal.com/1056.html

p.s. i don't know how to insert images directly into the post, sigh!