Oodekkah rundgang

[imomus]

With about 4600 students (and annual costs of about €200 per student, including foreign ones), Berlin's Universität der Künste (known as UdK or "oodekkah" for short) is Europe's biggest art school. This weekend it throws its doors open to visitors, with its annual rundgang (walkabout) taking rubberneckers on an art safari across eight buildings. Magnificent old buildings they are too, equipped with beautiful blockwood floors and mysterious old fuseboxes from 1975. Hisae and I went yesterday to see what the students had been up to.



Here I am with some Laura Ford-like figures. And that's Hisae in a room with a painting installation. In another room there was a video of a naked man masturbating into a glass and drinking it. There was, as usual, tons of crap -- especially the painting and print-making. But there was some very good and very interesting work too.



I liked this tabletop installation about Alpine walking tours, with its seed packet-like tour packages. There was also an audio element -- headphones you could clap on to eavesdrop on a travel agent trying to seduce clients into taking the tours.



The same Germanic restraint was in evidence in the work of this student, who plots the shapes made on walls by posters and papers on a crowded noticeboard, plots the shapes with blocks of pure colour, then labels the blocks with mysterious abbreviations.

I really think I've missed my vocation in life -- twice. First, I should have gone to art school. Second, I think I'd have been happy teaching at one. I just get so excited and delighted walking around these lofty yet lived-in buidlings, with their smell of paint and their cool bohemian feel -- factories of art, finishing schools for Momus girlfriends, and birthplaces of the world's best bands!

More snaps on my Flickr page.

Comments

[alphacomp.livejournal.com]

Ah, but would you have gotten to the Biennial that way?

[akabe.livejournal.com]

nice to see you enjoy the alpine stuff :-)

do you think it's too late to go to school? from where you're at you could most likely much do a phd about what you normaly do. then you could teach.

ps. that Pierrot Lunaire song is too damn infectious , every time i put it on i have to play it ten times or so.

[grrrlishgrin.livejournal.com]

every time i visit an art school (my boy used to teach at one so i hung out waiting for him there a lot) i wish i had gone to art school.

but then deep down i know i would have hated it.

back to school

[geweih.livejournal.com]

...no never, don't drag me back to the art school dance, all those earnest plots for world domination hatched before tea time.

The crap ratio is standard, or at least in my experience. At Chelsea I was part of a small 'conceptual' ghetto, enviously sniffing the liniseed oil in the painting studios.

It was a lovely place to dream for a few years and had a great library but seriously Nick, Akabe is right, a life lived Malcolm Bradbury style could just be a PHD away! > I've heard holland is good - though frankly the idea of being banged up with Relational Aestheticians gives me the heeby-jeebies.

Re: back to school

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My brother is the control experiment here -- with the same first class MA degree in Englit that I got, he went on to a PhD when I opted to make pop records. He's now running the creative writing class at University of East Anglia that Malcolm Bradbury started!

But that's not quite what I had in mind. The corridors have to smell of paint before I get high. Maybe the vocation I've actually missed is glue-sniffing.

Re: back to school

[geweih.livejournal.com]

Well I've missed a few vocations myself but glue-sniffing and art school were certainly not incompatible.

After my MA I ran a gallery for a while, an insalubrious nightclub and via a few detours find myself here, in Berlin, writing but mostly without a map.

Strangely a lot of my friends have been trying to persuade me to get back into academe but the reality, for me at least, never seemed like a good fit.

The glue always smelt good though.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I really like that student's faux-systematic.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I said "Germanic restraint", but Hisae tells me that work was by a Japanese student. I wish I'd written down all the names now...

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'd like to see a post that concentrates on art that employs organizational models, hueristics, diagrams--Lombardi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lombardi), etc.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I know Lombardi's work. It smacks a little of conspiracy theory for my taste. It's quite pretty in a Cy Twomblyesque way. Pierogi (http://www.pierogi2000.com/flatfile/shelleywdrawings06.html), his gallerist while he was still alive, also shows Ward Shelley's work, which is quite similar, though aesthetically rather an eyesore, I feel.

I mix my appreciation for the "didactic aesthetic" (and I'd include James Goggin's "ostentatious quietness" in that) with my appreciation for Swiss Graphics. In other words, I like this stuff best when it's all gridded up in Helvetica! It appeals to my inner Protestant.

[(Anonymous)]

And once again I admire Momus enviable inner peace that enables him to dress the way he does - though the above ensemble is hardly his most striking one :-)

(I say this with the big affection of someone who's much more inhibited.)

FrF

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

The Alpine walks leaflet things, they remind me of school textbooks.



but still, that and the notice board blocks are just 032c style retro-trend anti-design bullshit. I dont like design thats so unsubtle as to just be a backlash against the mainstream. its not even original, it's just retro looking. We've been here already.

art school.

[(Anonymous)]

YES!

UdKr

[(Anonymous)]

This post art to my tired eyes.
Going to art school this september by skin of teeth.
Berlin early august to visit art student girlfriend (any Berlin art world insiderish tips?).
I saw you (Momus) at the De La Warr Pavilion in the shiny Ice-cream book today, looking untrustworthy (strangely? they were filming 'The Antiques Roadshow' there). Sometimes the space more interesting than the art.
Telegrammic/rambling style due to hungover exhaustion.
Thanks for the consistently interesting blog (+ music, audio etc etc).

Neil- impressionable art atudent.

school

[(Anonymous)]

hello M,
you don't have to go to regular art school, just try some postgraduate school, Palais de Tokyo they have one, it is called Pavillon, it is sort of school but not that much, more like residency for artists but you still have some advisers.
also, maybe you can try Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, or Hisk in Belgium or something similar in Berlin.
best,
.

[werdtoyourmoms.livejournal.com]

lol @ finishing schools. truuue.