Marching "queer pipers" out of town

[imomus]

Artists in exile is an article in The Guardian that caught my attention, for obvious reasons. Journalist Charlotte Higgins talked to British artists (mostly classical musicians) who've left Britain and settled permanently on the continent, amongst them Rebecca Saunders, a composer now based in Berlin, Richard Ayres, a composer now in Holland, pianist Nicolas Hodges, now in Stuttgart, and Tacita Dean, an artist (who's also made music) now in Berlin.



Here's a core cluster of quotes:

"I can't bear that an artist has to constantly justify writing a piece," says Saunders. "I just cannot bear the language used to talk about art in Britain." For her, this is about the prevailing discourse – the language used in the media, the place (or non-place) the arts have in Britian's political life. In Germany, arts coverage has a seriousness many feel is rare in the UK. "I didn't want to stick around convincing people the arts were a good thing," Ayres says. "I wanted to live in a place where there was more money and approval for what I do – why fight when there are other countries?" Hodges agrees: "I have every respect for artists who stay at home and fight the fight, but I feel lucky that I have something more secure." Dean says: "In England everything was a struggle. The struggle has gone out of my life."

Naturally, I agree. The mothership in the UK is always commerce; if what you're doing isn't vindicated by sales, you end up having to trot out an endless apologia poetica, to justify "modern conceptual art" or "experimental music" or whatever it is you do. Or else you self-censor, and veer more and more into purely commercial work. Sure, you could struggle to challenge and change Britain, even as it struggles to challenge and to change you. But life is short; you'd rather just get on with doing the best work you can in the limited time you have on the planet. For me, and for many others, a place like Berlin allows that.

Switching Britain for Berlin is a brief transit through space that brings about a significant change in the environment -- financial, mental, physical -- in which art is made. But the city contains strong reminders that transit through time can also change the conditions in which artists work. No other place I've lived in has reminded me so constantly of what a huge difference political and cultural shifts make. I was cycling on Sunday between the Café MOKBA and the Kino International on the Karl-Marx-Allee; that part of the city (where I spent my first couple of Berlin years) is totally 1950s, and totally Soviet in feel. You can tell that the "international" in the Kino International's name is a reference to socialist internationalism, with Moscow the centre of its imperium. Later the same day, I cycled past the Foreign Office on Kurstrasse, which is a vast, neo-classical Nazi-era building (it was built as the Reichsbank).



If you want to know the sort of compromises artists -- and especially classical musicians -- had to make during the Nazi years, have a listen to this interesting documentary BBC Radio 4 broadcast this week. Five and the Fascists looks at the subsequent careers of five European conductors -- Toscanini, Klemperer, Furtwangler, Erich Kleiber and Bruno Walter -- pictured meeting in Berlin during yet another cultural era, at the height of the super-liberal, super-creative Weimar Republic in 1929.



These musicians' future was fraught with dangers, and faustian temptations. There's a chilling moment in this YouTube clip of Nazi television which uses music as a metaphor for society. The dapper, smiling, yet sarcastic and menacing announcer makes clear that the Nazi regime has no room for dissidents, people he calls "queer pipers":

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"Let's return to music. I'm very happy that everything is so harmonious today. Granted, there are still quite a few sour notes and people playing out of tune ["queer pipers"]. And maybe even some that would like to march to a different drum -- to the Center beat. Take these so-called foreign exchange musicians. We don't beat around the bush with them, do we? They're sent to concert camps for their further education, and there they're taught to sing for their supper. And there they stay until they've learned to change their tune and play along."

While it's somewhat surprising that concentration camps would be so freely and proudly alluded to in the middle of popular entertainment broadcasts, this menacing message would have come as no surprise to artists of a subversive or cosmopolitan stripe trying to work in Berlin in 1937; most of the "queer pipers" had left four years earlier, in 1933.

Charlotte Higgins' piece concludes that, if artists aren't to continue leaving the UK in a sort of cultural brain drain, "a great deal needs to change in Britain". That's true, but if Berlin shows one thing, it's that societies can change with breathtaking rapidity. From Weimar to Nazi to communist to capitalist to post-capitalist, Berlin keeps changing, and with each change the artists either exit or enter en masse. At the moment we're entering, we're here, and we're happy. But, given Berlin's track record, it's not impossible that in a decade or two everything could be different.

Comments

britain prick britain

[(Anonymous)]

the island is changing fast like berlin before they let mr hitler do his bitter catholic veggie cull...its gonna get worser on this black wet island of paranoia and repression. for.unless you are super successful like duglas or ferdinand who say how fabulous it is here in there beautiful home terror town easy when they have houses in new york and all over and spent 5 minutes here but i think in a decade or two it will be like mister hitlers berlin all over again except it will be the west with the us and the uk and isreal leading the cull and spread the death and the poison

Re: britain prick britain

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do see worrying signs in the emergence of "weakest link Britian" (http://imomus.livejournal.com/476558.html) -- a slicker, more pop-culture-savvy version of the "queer piper" theme.

[(Anonymous)]

And yet how do you account for the fact that London, far more than Berlin, remains the art capital of Europe, and that far more of the continent's better known artists reside there rather than in Berlin or elsewhere?

I certainly agree that there's a hostile Daily Mail element that perhaps doesn't exist in Germany, but that kind of friction may in the end be no bad thing. When people write the history of post-Cold War art, I'm pretty sure London will figure more prominently than Berlin.

for sale

[(Anonymous)]

one brown dog
three previous owners
house trained
likes long walks away from capitals
cant read or understand finance
hopes one day to meet a nice bitch
pre warm war
pretty unkown outside kyle park
hates friction
your for 3

[(Anonymous)]

Oh heavens yes. What would post-Cold War art be without Damien Hirst and Banksy?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I have a different take; the art world I know is very much a Berlin / Vienna / New York world. That may just be my personal experience, though; Tokyo also looms big on my art map, despite being pretty insignificant as an art centre.

I think I want to ask, not just where successful artists live, but where starting artists live, and are able to do their work (without having to take exhausting day jobs). I'd want to ask Javier Peres why he has galleries in LA and Berlin but not London. I'd want to ask why London doesn't have a significant biennial, and why so much of its art world revolves around just one collector, Charles Saatchi -- to the extent that a fire in the Momart warehouse Saatchi used could wipe out significant chunks of the legacy of Britain's most celebrated contribution to recent contemporary art, the YBAs of the "sensation generation". I'd also want to ask Tacita Dean about why she opted out of the "sensation generation".

[(Anonymous)]

Of course it's good not to be distracted by all things Mail-like -but if there would be that element here in Berlin / Germany, would myself (an artist that's spent various amounts of time here but about to return to London / UK), Momus, or Tacita Dean know about it, and if so be able to read it and read between the lines of it ourselves?

[(Anonymous)]

Is “the struggle has gone out of my life” a good thing though? Another interviewee says "The best places to live are usually the worst places to work". I know people who left Berlin due to a "small town unemployed" feel, hanging around with people who don’t really do much, who lack the investment and structure to take ideas further.

Despite the opportunities, Berlin has yet to make a world-class noise. I get the impression that things are a bit TOO suppine there. Maybe it needs a streak of ANTI-anti-capitalism to tighten the debate.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You're mistaking the struggle to defend uncommercial work on a daily basis -- or to knuckle down and become more commercial because it's a "hard reality of life" -- with the struggle to create beautiful, significant, meaningful or challenging work.

[(Anonymous)]

I dunno, I'm not going to rep for London, but I find something depressing about the Berlin scene. All those white middle class Americans and Britons studiously not engaging with the locals or bothering to learn their language, leading their deracinated lives within the confines of an anodyne globalised hipster ghetto and imagining they've "escaped". They've escaped high rents and that's it. Otherwise their lifestyles are the same as if they'd never moved from whichever part of the hipster diaspora they came from. There are other European cities I find more interesting right now. Brussels, for one. Or Lisbon. Or Budapest.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Rootless cosmopolitans, eh?

Tacita Dean gives the lie to your view that artists here don't become, in some way, more German, or less British: "Since 2004, I've been sharing a studio with [German artist] Thomas Demand, and before that it was [Danish artist] Olafur Eliasson. Eventually, I began to pick up their way of behaving. There's a quality of seriousness about being an artist here that is so un-British. These people invest in their existence as artists rather than apologise for it. They don't doubt that what they are doing is legitimate. If you say you are an artist here, that's a valid thing. In the UK it's laughable – you are a freak or a radical. In 2000, when I left, you had to be at the sensational end of things, hanging out with pop stars. That wasn't me."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Linguistic precision: the term I've translated as "queer piper" could also be "aslant fife player", but it has a very specific definition in German marching music of the baroque period, as this page (http://209.85.135.132/search?q=cache:2-PWwQHov_wJ:www.whitwellessays.com/docs/DOC_625.doc+%22querpfeiffer+means%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=safari) makes clear:

"The most interesting first-hand account of German military music during the Baroque Period is found in a publication (1726) on the subject by Hans von Fleming. He includes a long discussion of the method of performing the standard drum signals and mentions a player called the “Quer-Pfeiffer.” This player, the “good companion of the drummer,” plays a morning song during Reveille and also plays during marching. He carries both a large and small instrument in a wooden case and, according to Fleming, when he played these instruments his performance varied considerably with the printed page. Fleming relates seeing these instruments in a procession in Dresden for the changing of the guard.

"In Dresden I have observed that 12 Querpfieffer and 24 drums, 6 in rank and 6 in front of the Head Guard, in the New Market Place. As soon as the clock struck 12, the eldest regimental drummer gave an orderly cadence to the drummers, which was a signal for them to remove their instruments from their shoulder harnesses before preparing to play. Then he commanded them to play the “Changing of the Guard,” which occurred to their slow beating."

Since the "central drummer" and the "exchange musicians" referred to by the Nazi announcer seem to be references to the Bolsheviks and Jews, the Querpfieffer would be people who played along with them, trying to change the guard -- something the Nazis clearly didn't want to happen.

There's more than a touch of Bush's "you're either with us or against us" in this talk.

[(Anonymous)]

LOL @ googling "querpfeifer+means"

[(Anonymous)]

I understood it as a play of words, referencing the expression "jemandem in die Quere kommen" (to thwart someone). I like your ways of understanding the term, though.

What I don't quite get - although I wouldn't know how to translate the term myself - is why they translated "Devisenmusikant" as "foreign-exchange musician". I can't quite make the connection between Devise (slogan, motto) and "foreign-exchange".

[(Anonymous)]

Liberals have been exaggerating the imminent threat of fascism since 2001. Where are the WMDs?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well -- and you asked for this! -- you'd be a lot more likely to find illicit WMDs in Israel than Iraq.

[kineticfactory.livejournal.com]

The difference is that in the Anglocapitalist mindset, everything is a market, and the value of anything is determined by the market. So the arts in Britain are part of the magisterium of branding/marketing, with successful artists being marketing characters like Damien Hirst, or the 16-year-old he's prosecuting for stealing pencils from his exhibit (http://dev.null.org/blog/item/200909060013_casepurlp).

Not sure how much of that is a recent Thatcherite-Blairite development, and how much of it comes from the pragmatic, empirical strain of anti-intellectualism in English culture. I've heard recent accounts that reframed the great artists of English history as savvy marketing geniuses (i.e., claims that Shakespeare was sort of the Michael Bay/Aaron Spelling of his time, and came up with the one-swordfight-per-10-minutes-of-dialogue formula), though these may be Blatcherite revisionist takes on history.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Really, Damian Hirst couldn't be more evil if he had cartoon bats flying around his head. I repeat my fuck off forever (http://imomus.livejournal.com/400901.html) in his general direction for this.

Nevertheless, I rather like how The Null Device picks up on the Frommian concept of the "marketing personality" to slag both parties off:

"Cartrain is, by all accounts, only 17 years old, and a product of the values of the Thatcherite-Blairite marketing society, a society in which what Erich Fromm called the Marketing Personality has become the norm. Growing up in the Marketing Society, you learn that you are not just yourself but Brand You, a commodity whose value is constantly plotted on an invisible stock exchange, and only losers miss opportunities to promote themselves and maximise their market value. (Of course, Damien Hirst and his fellow veterans of Saatchi and Cool Britannia, are prime exemplars of success in the Marketing Society.)"

I think that's certainly what Tacita Dean is talking about when she says that in the UK "you had to be at the sensational end of things, hanging out with pop stars".

[(Anonymous)]

But how can you presume that we your fans are to accept you as an artist of the same ilk? This article is about genuine artists - especially the classical musicians. What a fancy you have! We love you only as the ingenious charlatan you've always been.

Victorine.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Thank you, Victorine!

I'll own up to being a charlatan, with the proviso that a charlatan would, of course, claim to be an artist, which means that I may really be an artist pretending to be a charlatan pretending to be an artist. Or a charlatan pretending to be an artist pretending to be a charlatan pretending to...

[(Anonymous)]

It's all fair enough, and i read the article too this morning. No surprise that you posted in relation to it. (Do you read other newspapers? Me, I skim the online Guardian and read the occasional article but these days find the cloying comment and journalism often as predictable, annoying, and flawed as anything else).

But anyway, Tacita Dean certainly benefitted from the UK- study at the Slade and then up for the Turner Prize, and with a number of good profile galleries. I wonder where she'd be if she'd left the UK before any of those things?

[(Anonymous)]

... not to mention the DAAD scholorship!

In fact I wonder if any of the people they focused on left the UK before an opportunity (ie money) presented itself ?

[(Anonymous)]

don't forget Dick Wagner

[imomus.livejournal.com]

How could we, he keeps going BANG CRASH WALLOP!

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

The situation in Madrid has sadly declined in the time I've observed it. In the 80s there was a nascent alternative scene , with art spaces and venues springing up in areas such as malasaña, lavapies, and chueca. Then it all went very wrong. A long came a succession of right wing administrations , many of whose number were either direct descendants of Franco's 'movimiento' or , at the very least, came from the class of well placed bureaucrats of the dictatorship.

Reflecting the wider trend in the construction boom which lasted from the mid 90s until very recently, a sort of parallel construction fever gripped Spain's institutions, best indicated in Madrid by the expansion of the Reina sofia museum ( Jean Nouvell) and the Matadero. This has been referred to as the Guggenheim syndrome: local governments hired big name architects to create iconographic institutions, largely unapproachable to local or new artists, with the ulterior motive of increasing the property value of the surrounding areas. From which the poorest inhabiltants, many of whom artists and musicians, were pushed out as the yuppies moved in. What was needed, yet absent, was institutional support for grass-roots artistic activity - which was (and still is) perceived as a subversive threat by the ruling catholic-ultra Partido Popular.

Echoing your comment that London is a good place to sell rather than create, witness the yearly supermarlet that is ARCO Madrid. Over 200.000 visitors! it has taken on the role of an ersatz network ing space of galleries and spaces, with talks and fora (30E entry), since there is nothing comparable out in the city. Unfortunately, what is represented at ARCO is not real contemporary creation, but what the market has a fetish for at that moment.

The effect of these trends has been the closure of spaces en masse, and exile of many figures. Spanish artists have been visible in the likes of Documenta and biennials such as that of Venice; yet several are entered under their place of residence, not origin (Framis listed under Holland) -almost nobody active, livnig and working in the spanish art scene is represented.

The competition for the limited amount of subsidies, grants, prizes and the chance to exhibit in one of the 'iconic' centres has pretty much emasculated what remains of the scene of the 80s. There are a handful of alternative spaces, but not fully dedicated to art - they have to be part bars or leisure spaces to exist. There does not seem to be one public space or institutuion 100% for 'art' now :-(

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What about La Casa Encendida (http://www.lacasaencendida.es/)? From what I heard last time I was in Madrid, there are rules that banks have to give a certain amount of their profits to cultural institutions, and La Casa Encendida was paid for that way. It had some pretty impressive shows on last time I was there.

[georgesdelatour.livejournal.com]

Musically, the black/white cultural mix of London has created Drum'n'Bass, 2-Step, Grime, Dubstep & Funky. Isn't Berlin still treading water with Minimal Techno?

[(Anonymous)]

Distinct genres only to fetishists. Reminds me of dances from the 60's. "Have they yet matched the hully-gully, the ripe banana, the flapjack, the beltloop?"