Blossoms and Rainy days

 

Our last view of the blossoms on this amazing orange building near our place -

before all the petals were blown away!

So, Spring has officially farted in our face and run away. It is most upsetting. On Tuesday we took an ambitious adventure to Potsdamer Platz to the (Kent to insert gallery name here because I have already forgotton, yes I am ashamed - neue national galerie, for twentieth century art, a thank you) gallery, which was most exciting for a number of reasons. 

 

Potsdamer Platz Station - eeeeerie!

Jimmy, we are sorry to have previously slandered Berlin Architecture. 

There are some interesting, or, at least non-commy buildings after all. 

we really stumbled upon an interesting part of town, in terms of architecture.

Or maybe it was just due to the fact that we saw some post 89 skyscrapey, capitally goodness.  

 check it out - the middle building is made of brick!

imagine constructing something that big, brick by brick, with hundreds of brickies, winfield blue cigarettes dangling from mouths, 

little bits of string strung out to keep their levels straight.

epic.

The weather was absolutely nasty, in the sense that the wind blew tears out of your eyes and the rain whipped previously blow-dried hair into a rather becoming clump of crap. yeah, it blew my petty little strands of goose down into a frizzy affair not seen since the 1983 new wave era. It was a sad beginning. The gallery itself was intriguing, to say the least. Most of the space is underground, and you enter through a massive glass room, with a giant hanging work in it, and some rather perplexing fenced off areas. It was a bit weird, and felt like an empty car sales hall. 

it was fantastic.

Some amazing splicing work done by Kent

see! look at that thing. marvellous.

mies van der rohe conjured up this puppy  

(do you google everything  as you write, or do you just know?! - google is for amateurs baby - Wikipedia it is then! ARGH! ! ! ) 

and it was a masterpiece.

crisp, clean, spacious and the sort of thing that you'd expect on the grounds of an evil villain's lair from a bond movie.

if i had my choice of abodes, i'd definitely be doing it evil lair style. 

With bikini babes? And martinis? You can't do it without those. And a swivel chair. the kind that swivels on its own.

 

Downstairs, after collecting our tickets, we ventured into the ever exciting experience of watching the cloak room attendant's face once she realised our coats didn't have loops sewn into the collar. I am even in the habit of very pointedly turning the collar outward, in a keen display of its lacking, but no, they just have to have their bit: very rough fingering of the collar, turn the coat over, look in every seam, realise there is no loop to be found, and before huffing off to the furthest away 'naughty' coat rack, shooting you a very sour look. It is really really hard not to laugh. 

museum cloak-room attendants are universally miserable.

i dunno from whence they fetch up this wretched souls, but surely it is a dire and abysmal hell hole.

i imagine that if, as a joke, you were to give them a flower, as way of thanks, they would spit on it.

then they'd spit on you.

that's how sour they are. 

Gee Kent - I wouldn't go so far as spitting per say. I would envision them giving you a cold gaze, while crumpling up the flower, then stamping on it with an orthopedic shoe, jaws clenched, their spectacles' neck-cord trembling. 

That's their style.

The work inside. Well. This was just something. So, quite a pleasing smattering of 20st century painting. The first room was most offensive, filled with some ugly crap by I don't know who.  

it was frank stella and it was ok. No, you can NOT speak-shit your way out of this Kent. It was ugly ugly ugly! 

it was ugly, but ugly doesn't necessarily preclude it from being good. 

Did I say it was not good? I believe I said ugly crap.

which is fortunate for much of the second half of last century. 

there's some hideously ugly crap that's actually genius. 

This is true. But not of Mr Stella's exhibition.

 The most noticable part was that they hadn't finished installing, the wall transfers were still sticky taped to the wall covered in paper - best 8 euro I ever spent. 

Wall transfers almost ready to go!

We soon realised that there were some paintings that the gallery didn't own, but clearly wish they did. Throughout the collection, of some pretty stellar work I might add, there was black and white photographs to scale of works that didn't belong to the gallery. This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever seen. Ever. 

seriously!?!

what.

the.

fuck.

why print a black and white copy of a colour painting and stick it on a board and plant it between two perfectly excellent actual colour paintings? expressionist paintings for crying out loud. imagine it, expressionist, the very idea being to elicit emotional expressiveness through form and colour. 

idiots. 

Kent was most upset at this. And still is. 

I just love the fact that they deliberately didn't print them in colour - maybe in case we thought 

they were the real deal? Bwah ha ha ha!

luckily the whole experience of being in van der rohe's building, together with the fine quality of paintings and sculptures they actually did have on show, was so amazing that even this sacrilegious act didn't taint the joy.

just confused it a little. And made it very funny.

 

this room was excellent. 

they hung a whole myriad of portraits from their collection, salon-style in one big room.

but rather than classify them by style, or by artist, or by some curator's determination of merit, they simply ordered them alphabetically by the name of the portrait sitter. This was very cool indeed. Awesome mix, of some of the most creepy portraits, mostly from around the 1930s. It was amazing how contemporary all this work felt, and then remembering that it was created before WWII - bizarre. 

non-heirarchical, even handed and clever way to redirect attention from the perceived genius of the author to the subject of the work itself.

and there was some killer work in amongst it.

As everyone was taking some serious photos, we thought we'd sneak a few in for you. I then got thirsty and had some of my bottled water, to which I got yelled at for by an attendant. I quickly excused my self abashedly and stowed it away in my bag. He then pointed at me and kept scolding in German, which felt was most unfair (which I pointed out) before turning my back on him to have a good gaze at a sculpture. Doosh.

Anyway! Then, there was an even BETTER cloak room attendant, whom we have featured for your pleasure. We walked into the cloakroom as she looked up at us, positively sighing at the effort it was taking her to take our tickets. If my German was better, I would have heartily pointed out our coats, so she could go back to her crossword, but alas. Anyway, the old duck knew her way around and waddled painfully down to the end rack, and then unceremoniously dumped our coats at that end of the counter, muttering a reluctant 'gutentag', before waddling all the way back up to her chair, where we were standing, without our coats, and phwumping into her chair. We both got a serious case of the giggles at the absurdity of it and had to run out before letting out the real whoops of laughter.

I know, I know, this image says nothing. But we want you to know that this woman existed. 

That is her over Kent's shoulder - quite possibly snoozing. 

i really really wanted to ask her, 'pardon me madam, but we have travelled some distance from the southern hemisphere to hand over our increasingly valuable antipodean dollars into the coffers of your fine cultural institutions and have been so taken with your extraordinary level of customer service and general personal civility that we would love to acquire a photograph of your mercifully sourpuss mug.'

but i couldn't figure out the deutsch for it over the shocked giggling fit we got stuck in.

This really was one of the more enjoyable art experiences - due to the unconventional approach to display and curating. The layout resembled a disused office building, and the curating that of a high school art show. But because of that, it seemed to make the work far more silly and fun! (One particular Chirco painting was dated 1917, while the gallery's card stated that it was made in the 30s.) I noticed which paintings were more highly valued due to them having very small barriers the exact width of the painting (because I most definitely couldn't just stand next to the barrier and then touch the work from there).

i'm going with the possibility it was put together by an idiot savant - 

equal parts genius and mind-numbing ineptitude.

The rest of the day was spent getting home as soon as possible for some serious sandwich eating, picture making, office watching and ninja fruiting. It was that kind of day. Good stuff! 

i got a review published!! (He just couldn't hold it in any longer)

remember that pyramid of beer? i was so smitten i wrote a review and the good folk at artinfo.com.au were kind enough to broadcast it on the interwebs. with a lucy photograph too.

huzzah! Yay! Kent is famous! (See below for victorious gestures.)

 

I lie. This is just Kent doing some pre-coffee stretches. Very essential to this way of life. I think I'm starting to atrophy in our little flat (which is definitely getting smaller and smaller), quite frankly. I think we managed to get some coffee in somewhere in the last few days - don't you worry. Today, it was the outing. (It was colder and rainier today, so we employed a full day of moping, grant applications, more picture making, and the very difficult task of the ten minute walk to Gaudy. I had a double sized milchkaffee to make up for the effort.) 

We promise to be more productive tomorrow - I have some very deliberate wandering planned.