To the degree that Berlin's culture demands a form of 'passing,' it is in the problematic tendency among those of us who belong to the international creative class to embody cultural capital in order to conceal our (lack of) access to cash, as a way of avoiding discussing the relationship we have to the city as a result of our economic circumstances. These conditions vary radically among the many freelance artists I know living and working in Berlin, and yet we interact in a space of cultural production that feigns egalitarianism, because—because why, exactly?
These questions have followed the Volksbühne Berlin since the appointment of Chris Dercon, former director of the Tate Modern, as artistic director of the city's “theater of the people.” The theater was occupied in late September in a protest that wasn't (only) against Dercon, exactly, but rather against gentrification and the capital motivations behind art production; it was described by some of the protestors as an art performance. Nevertheless, when Dercon offered the protestors the Green Room of the theater as a place to engage in talks, they refused, and so he called the police to invoke trespassing, ending the seven-day action which had been marked by a blue banner wrapping the theater emblazoned with the phrase “Doch Kunst.” ('Doch' is an incredibly flexible word in German—in this context I would translate the phrase as 'Actual Art')
The controversy seemed to dissipate at the same speed with which the occupation was peacefully cleared out by the police. Dercon's programming for the theater is ambitious, with an eye toward viewing the stage as an inter-disciplinary, inter-dialogic space. In a re-branding of the Volksbühne, the new season pronounces itself, unironically, in a stark red-and-black Helvetica font: revolutionary design for the art set. But, what to make of this? Is Dercon the ur-embodiment of a sinister neoliberal plan? Or are the protesters fools, and do they need to get with, as it were, his program?
Neither is true, naturally, but the polarization of the debate points to the difficulty of carving out a meaningful space of discourse for these important questions: namely, who gets to make art, and how; and what to do about the way art relates to capital (he who has the capital gets to make the art). The Volksbühne's re-branding is seductive, but obscures these questions even as it pretends to confront and address them, not unlike this H&M campaign that advocates 'closing the loop' by recycling clothes at a retailer whose very economic model is predicated on disposable consumption.
Nevertheless, poetry is to be found in the spaces created by the artworks themselves, and three weeks ago a friend who had scored free tickets to the dress rehearsal of the Tino Sehgal / Beckett program at the Volksbühne invited me to join her. Dercon was there, as was Sehgal, since the premiere was scheduled for the evening following. The three Beckett pieces “Not I,” “Footfalls,” and “Eh, Joe” were performed in German. Anne Tismer's rendering of “Nicht Ich” recalled Billie Whitelaw's flawless interpretation, but was imbued with Tismer's own sense of delicate urgency. Morten Grunwald as Joe was a living portrait, a silent embodiment of the canvas of shifting thought: rather than trying compensate for his lack of dialogue by conveying and projecting emotional states (a disastrous way to approach Beckett's theater-of-consciousness, as Liam Neeson, who is otherwise a fine actor, illustrates in this overwrought interpretation), Grunwald let his face shift in subtle concert with the words being spoken to him. This was projected onto a large screen so that we could appreciate these nuances (appropriate enough, since the piece was originally written for television, and had its world premiere in the 1966 Süddeutsche Rundfunk broadcast, which Beckett directed). Watching Grunwald, I had the sense of glimpsing an inner life at work. His performance had the rich intimacy of the best of Warhol's screen tests.
Tomorrow, I'll write about the Sehgal pieces from the evening.
Yours, Kathleen
(Note: the Beckett program, without Sehgal's work, will be reprised on December 21 and 28, 2017.)
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