birthday overflow!

WARNING: this is an ART RANT POST!

beer mountain

I just can't help myself. Now that I'M feeling better (still hacking on an every 5 minute basis, but feeling much better, I know you'll ALL be so glad to know), I am actually in the mood for some quality reflection time.

So today is Friday (that was more for my own benefit - time is confusingly non-existent here. I have heard that this is a luxurious and wonderful thing, but I get that lost confusion that something is amiss - makes me think of that expression cats get when you put a piece of sticky tape on the back of their head. They know something is somewhere ... but they don't know what, how, why, or exactly where. Ah the loss of time.

now this is intriguing to me, coz unlike lucy, i love it when the days lose their specificity. i'm all for the organic process of time where days gain their weight in significance from the activities that occur on them, not by the arbitrary dictates of a machine that designates when my down-time is and when i should feel overburdened with angst looking down the long road of a 5 day week that i cannot escape until a day we call 'friday' coughs up the tick tock tick of 5pm on the windup cogs of a steel and plastic contraption.

sorry lu, i just hijacked your reflection for a philosophically tinged vent. dick.

Anyway. As we say every post, spring spring SPRING is coming! We were greeted with deliciously fragrant and mild air today, with smatterings of sunshine and chirping birds. Kent's birthday is flowing into an unspoken long weekend of birthday jot. I mean joy. Birthday joy. Anyway. Today was spent drifting to and fro from cafes, galleries, shops, oh wait, more cafes and then our desks for some quality cutting, pasting, drawing and writing. Oh hello heaven, so nice to meet you!

Ok, not so much of a desk, but more of a shelf from the cupboard on some garden furniture.
So easy to store!

We started at barn, a cafe in the gallery precinct of Mitte - exceptional coffee and quiche to die for. The only place we have seen in the country that stocks Keepcups - yeah, go team! There seems to be a high quota of Aussie and New Zealand staff here, obviously the origin of the awesome coffee.

have you noticed the two most commonly visited venues for coffees are run by aussies?
tis truly the only reliable way to score caffeinated fixes that adhere to the quality to which we are accustomed.
(Noooo, we're not precious at all!)

The lovely Leo showed us pictures the other day of an art opening she went to in Mitte, that sounded so spectacular we were sad to have missed it, but luckily for us, we stumbled on it today - the aftermath of what was clearly the biggest beer drinking session of the season.

Kent is dubious - is it really free beer?

This work (which Kent will no doubt give all the details, so I am not going to bother getting out of bed to find the artist name, which I have obviously forgotten) consisted of a gigantic pyramid of beer boxes, each filled with beer, to which the audience (at their own peril) were invited to clamber up and help themselves. A quote from Leo 'Oh my goodness, it was so crazy, it was the biggest pile of hipsters I have ever seen!' - and for us, the biggest pile of discarded bottles, cigarette stubs and assorted chip wrappers in a rather silent hall. But oh my. What a surprisingly un-disgusting and peaceful exhibition. We both spent a considerable amount of time lounging on the boxes that were still in tact, quietly contemplative over a warm beer (which was actually quite good - I KNOW, I hate beer!). Kent nearly killed himself (or at least his feet) by jumping off the pyramid into a pile of beer bottles, in a rather deafening clinking and smashing way (I can see both of our mothers clutching their chests and squawking 'Oh Kent you didn't!').

No dad, we didn't visit the tip, this is art!


oh my god, this show was awesome.
just. awesome.
and not because there was 72,000 free beers. which there was, btw, 72,000 ! !
the artist, cyprien gaillard, made a massive monolithic structure, in the style of the egyptians, or maybe the incas/mayans.


long story short - it's about our scrambling desire to consume the monuments of our history. about mass tourism descending on architectural forms, devouring them visually, and quite literally, with their destructive wearing down of their surfaces, the chipping away of souvenir extraction and the resultant litter and mess left behind. the bottles are all imported from turkey and hint at the pillage of grecian and roman ruins and their transportation into european museums. the viewer can get a sense of this through not only looking at, walking around and walking on the massive sculpture (and really, it was on such a scale that it truly eclipsed and dominated your presence in the room), but also partake in the the active consumption of the work, becoming complicit in its destruction. but, paradoxically, engaged in its actualisation and in its accomplishment.

brilliant.

This led to some other gallery hopping, saw a great show by (Kent insert details here please - nicky broekhuysen at pool gallery) which consisted of large scale drawings entirely made from stamps of zeros and ones (you know, like binary code. she made these massive abstract works of accumulated digits, each tending toward pattern and form, but showing hints of disintegration and decay. like systems, with inevitable signs of entropy. systems form, then they collapse. such is life. beautiful).

Totally nicked from the pool website - thanks guys! (Like you had a choice.)

We also popped into another show where we received an extra chilling welcome - one staff member stayed on the phone the whole time, until another staff member stumped out, stared at us and muttered a rather stiff 'guten tag' before giving his coworker a very cold stare. It wasn't until we left that we saw the sign saying that the show would be opened tomorrow. Now that I think of it, I am pretty sure that the staff member on the phone told me this, but seeing as she was on the phone and I don't understand German, I didn't consider that she might have been talking to us. Whoops!

haha - that was funny. interestingly, because we ignored them (by accident, we didn't know what they were saying) and we were clearly engaged in looking at the works, they just backed off and let us be.
and the work was fantastic. three great shows in a row - it was like a miracle. art's about a 20% hit rate in my opinion. for various reasons, and i don't mean it's 80% crap, although you could mount an argument for that, just that you're lucky to find a personal connection to more than fifth of it. like, in the same way that if you met 10 people, chances are you'll only really like 2 of them (OR if we are doing fractions or statistics or whatever, by that deduction you could meet 5 people and only like one? Just saying.). most will be ok, and probably 2 will shit you to tears. art is exactly the same.
the work in this last one (Eelco Brand) was killer. what looked like lightboxes with photos on them, were actually digital flatscreens with amazing animations on them. click on the dude's name in the last sentence to check 'em out. awesome.


Again this is totally illegally stolen from [DAM]Berlin's website - sorry about that. You really should check out the site for the actual animations though - mesmerising! Is is creative genius? Or super advanced computer game software? Are those two things the same? So many questions ...


Aaaaanyway. What else did we do? Oh that's right, a bit of moochy shopping, finally found my perfect 'keeper' ring (to keep my wedding ring on my finger or something), at a cool boutique that specialises in über cool clothes and shop fittings. They had these awesome little kiss rings sitting at the counter, made from ceramic. And huzzah! Found one that fit so perfectly that I made Kent propose all over again, much to the shop keeper's bemusement. (truly, i did the whole, 'lucy james, will you do me the honour, and make me the happiest man... etc etc... but i stayed on my feet, so as not to jinx the original). Feels very old world and medieval with my white gold ring ... mmm ... shiny objects ... drooooooly.

Look at my awesome rings. LOOK!!!

THEN a fantastic lunch at the now truly beloved yamyam (I think this was our fourth visit, and definitely not the last), for some dumpling extravaganza and the broiled beef of the gods (our love is probably due to us trying to stave off scurvy, what with the appearance of edible/affordable red meat at the supermarkets close to nil. No I don't want to buy any more fucking pork products thank you!) This was, of course, followed by a leisurely stroll home via (oh! how did we get here?!) Gaudy, for a cheery afternoon coffee in the sunshine, basking in our 'we don't have any time/place constraints' glow. (Ok I will stop rubbing it in now.)

Broiled beef sounds so gross. But it's not! It is so good! Anyway, that's not broiled beef, that's seaweed.
Which is gross. (killer seedweed. good for what ails ya)

The weekend promises to pass 20 degrees, so we are amping up for 2 days of sunshine (please please please!), picnics and a frenzy of creative activity!

We'll let you all know how we go! Until then, back to some hearty doodling!
xxx

This is to prove the tinyness of the flat - Kent is over there in the study-come-lounge-come-bedroom. I am in the Kitchen. That corner of furniture to the left is the sink, that light part on the right is the window. To the left of Kent is the bed. Mmm - cosy.

ooh - an excuse to show some proof of the said doodling ... check out me blog!