higher beings forced me to type the below
it´s true, it´s on placeboKatz since 1:27 PM
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The Oracle of Wifi inside the jukebox at the placeboKatz Lounge
You know, when I woke up this morning I had a realization about myself. I was always Blondie. People always called me Blondie, ever since I was a little kid. What I realized is that at some point I became Dirty Harry. I couldn't be Blondie anymore, so I became Dirty Harry
Deborah Ann “Debbie” Harry
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Back from the tease art fair, the vivid counterpart to the Art Cologne. Again the tease took place in the Rhein Triadem, an administrative building from the thirties, right opposite to it´s bigger complement on the bank of the Rhine. One could easily spend a couple of days inside the 5000 squaremeters filled with young art. Smoking artists and barking dogs, the tease came with a gentle touch of Berlin. No wonder, many participating galleries and projects are wellknown from the Berliner Kunstsalon. Surprisingly much paintings and drawings, often in small formats ("Art-to-go" as rebel:art puts it). Video and media art was nearby not present, beside Directors Lounge that screened highlights from the 5th Berlin International Directors Lounge next to beflowered, an online project by André Werner and Daniel Schubert. Walden, even so Berlin based, presented several artists from Cologne, namely Ralf Schreiber with his autonomous objects like solar powered singing branches. Julia Murakami expanded her installation “1000 Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi trying to capture a snapshot of a rising son in the fortune cookie industry” (also at the booth of A&O/Directors Lounge) everyday, placing them on flower pots or offering the little cut-outs fortune cookie gondolas fixed on silver balloons to fly through the fair. Two of them escaped right after the closing of the tease into the night sky over the Rhine. Maybe they will pop into the next Berliner Kunstsalon in September, the Berlin counterpart to the tease, also curated by Edmund Piper, and next stop for many members of this caravan of art that hit Cologne for four days.
The DL Lounge seen from behind the screen
Entrance area of the tease
acclaimed queen of the art blog scene, the princess of poisonous pulchritude fooling around in front of the beflowered installation by André Werner and Daniel Schubert
collectors everywhere
spontaneous blooming in the booth of Directors Lounge during the simultaneous presentation of beflowered at the Museum of modern art Schwerin and the tease art fair
Two times André, André Werner and André Chi Sin Yueng, both video artists, beflowered.
Julia Murakami, teaching one of her tiny Japanese Paparazzi Photographers how to fly in a fortune cookie gondola fixed on a balloon
Henrik Jacob at Walden Kunstausstellungen
Ralph Bageritz at Walden Kunstausstellungen
The singing branches by Ralf Schreiber at Walden Kunstausstellungen
confident into the future, Ute Haarkötter of Walden Kunstausstellungen, in front of a work by Werner Kernebeck
Stephan Ehrenhofer at dr.julius ap
charming paper work on wire grid (detail) by Ingrid Cerny at dr. julius ap
charming paper work on wire grid by Ingrid Cerny at dr. julius ap
Julia Murakami´s “1000 Japanese Guerilla Paparazzi trying to capture a snapshot of a rising son in the fortune cookie industry” (detail)
A warholesque balloon with a Japanese Paparazzi Photographers in a fortune cookie gondola silently floating through the DL Lounge
Christoph Kopac´s Kleine Meerjungfrau (little mermaid) at Anette Lau
closing time at the tease
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Helen Levitt, caught fleeting moments of surpassing lyricism, mystery and quiet drama on the streets of her native New York. A kind of imagemaking, that, as a NYT reviewer once wrote, “combine[s] intuition and intellect to forge sophisticated, lyrical compositions from commonplace events. Ms. Levitt captured instances of a cinematic and delightfully guileless form of street choreography that held at its heart, as William Butler Yeats put it, “the ceremony of innocence.” The late 1930s and early ’40s, when Ms. Levitt created an astonishing body of work, was a time when many noted photographers took their camera to the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people treated their streets as their living rooms.
"There were plenty of kids playing on the street. The streets were crowded with all kinds of things going on, not just children. Everything was going on in the street in the summertime. They didn't have air-conditioning. Everybody was out on the stoops, sitting outside, on chairs."
The masterpieces in Ms. Levitt’s oeuvre are her photographs of children living their zesty, improvised lives. A white girl and a black boy twirl in a dance of their own imagining. Four girls on a sidewalk turning to stare at five floating bubbles become contrapuntal musical notes in a lovely minor key.
In Ms. Levitt’s best-known picture, three properly dressed children prepare to go trick-or-treating on Halloween 1939. Standing on the stoop outside their house, they are in almost metaphorical stages of readiness. The girl on the top step is putting on her mask; a boy near her, his mask in place, takes a graceful step down, while another boy, also masked, lounges on a lower step, coolly surveying the world.
Influenced by her personal contacts with Cartier-Bresson, Evans and James Agee she remained active as a photographer for nearly 70 years.
Helen Levitt, the Grande Dame of street photography, died in her sleep at her home in native New York on Sunday. She was 95.
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Julia Murakami, untitled, 2009, Installation, dimensions variable
Edmund Piper, the man behind two german satellite art fairs (Berliner Kunstsalon/ tease art fair, Cologne) and artist himself opens CIRCUS MINIMUS, a 100 sqm art fair with 43 exhibition booths on a scale of 1:10. Leaving it to the visitors to look at the art market literally at their feet or to catch a glimpse of a state of construction which is usually hidden during exhibitions. Edmund Piper and Walden Kunstausstellungen invite you to meet some of the protagonists of and off Berlin´s art scenery. The lounge of circus minimus takes place in the entrance area of the Kastanienallee 86 with Mike Riemel aka DJ Aussenborder.
André Werner/Daniel Schubert, beflowered, net based project, 2009
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On first sight, his films are very abstract and conceptual. Thorsten Fleisch is working directly with materiality, which can be as analogue and direct as skin impressions or crystals growing on the surface of film surface (16mm), or as digitally generic as a reciprocal math formula that creates 4-dimensional forms, inter-cut with 3 dimensional space and finally shown on the 2-dimensional space of video screen. Material in that sense could also be the electric discharges and their traces on photographic paper. Thus following his workflow, it becomes evident, the author is working with a hybrid combination of analogue and digital image processing. However, and as he tells me, the analogue, or better saying material processes are allowing him to also use chance operations and mistakes (like a light flair on film stock) during the working procedures, whereas with code (or programming) a mistake will just result in a script-error, which has to be eliminated scrupulously instead of being able to be integrated in the creative process.
Just by reviewing the titles of his work, such as “Blutrausch” (blood rush), “Videohaut“ (video skin) “Friendly Fire”, “Kosmos” (cosmos) and “Gestalt” we may realize, on the other hand, that something more is going on with and within the artist’s working process. Without any pathos and drama in his making of, Thorsten Fleisch is lingering (or, shall we say loitering?) on existential and creational themes: light through the literally on film grown minerals are producing a pictorial cosmos, or the blood drawn from his own body is creating a (maybe delirious) rush of images. Trying to put it into a nutshell, one could say, body, creation and space are the themes of his work.
By taking an even closer look, one may also discover that the filmmaker is focusing onto a third yet to mention aspect: It is the sensuality in images that triggers his interest both in his own and in the work of others. One may call it old-school, it sometimes takes as much as a couple of years for its execution, and it may be similar to the meticulously composing and editing of the early Stan Brakhage (classic avant-garde filmmaker who combined all kinds of lens and lens-less effects with camera images to visual compositions), but it is that quality of painstakingly controlling the composing and composition towards pictorial expression that creates the quality of his films. What is new and contemporary in his work, Thorsten Fleisch uses any kind of hybrid techniques, thus challenging the meaning of the “expression of material.”
I prefer old-school and handcraftship to cold calculated superficiality, it makes me read the work on different levels while at the same time enjoying its pure sensations. In fact, Thorsten Fleisch’s work has been screened widely in galleries and on festivals including Directors Lounge.
Thorsten Fleisch will be present and available for Q&A after the screening.
Following the screening, the band … will give play …
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The 5th Berlin International Directors Lounge
5 - 15 February 2009
