Cultivating my garden today

Dear Polly (a.k.a. maternal Grandma Evelyn),

As Eyafällajökull continues to erupt on Iceland, her plume of ashes - however threatening - is apparently not overhanging, at least not here and not now. Flights between Stockholm and the United States seem to be arriving and departing on schedule. Peace is.

I am writing from my home in the neutral territory to which I return, year after year. The cherry tree blossoming in our garden, overlooking a delta of the Baltic Sea, is a witness to that place. Petals fall.

As a young student of the 1960s at Berkeley, the vibrant epicenter of student revolt, I adopted history as a major. What was I thinking? Was I out of touch with the times? Was I not really there? During my two-term introduction to historical methodology, I chose to dig into the Age of the Enlightenment. In that vein, I took a course in the winter of 1968 in modern French history that introduced me to Voltaire’s perspectives on optimism (Candide), which he concluded by advocating that “we must cultivate our garden”.

If claims to be truly contemporary are a current fetish in the modern museum of modern art world, then I believe that my own life incarnates that fetish.

I promise to write to you again soon about where I'm coming from...

yours,

Dig where you are

Dig where you are. Neues Museum, Berlin, in background.
For 10 euro I could purchase a time slot to visit the Neues Museum.
Bullet holes pock the window frames of Neues Museum, Berlin, both inside and out. The new staircase of the new Neues Museum in Berlin is a monumental reconstruction (in terrazo) of the old one which collapsed in the bombing during WWWII.


Since I did not have an appointment (with Bonos) last Sunday when I was in the area, I continued along the shores of the Spree to another architectural relic: the Neues Museum, designed in 1855 by Friedrich Stüler (who also designed the Swedish National Museum). Unlike Speer's bunker, Neues was not built to withstand explosives, and thus was ravaged not only by bombs but by seventy years of subsequent exposure to the elements. It has been closed since the beginning of the war and only recently (2009) reopened to the public. Ironically, the Eastern German government had just appropriated funds to restore the museum in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell. Thus it took several more years to reappropriate funds, and in 1997 David Chipperfield, an English architect, was commissioned to do the reconsruction.

Chipperfield was confronted by Goliath, a nearly impossible task fraught with supervision by authorities and storm fronts propogated by cultural and political stakeholders, as well as by the general public. He continued his task of sifting through layer after layer of material, reviving old techniques and developing new, to integrate and reconstruct from what he discovered in the process. (Strange how an essay appeared just this morning in a Swedish daily (DN) on the Neues.)

In rebuilding places to house art - Bonos or Neues - Berlin epitomizes the layer upon layer that connect history (cities where bombs have been dropped) with the facades of contemporary art and architecture. If a city reflects the time and space of life, then I might well choose postwar Berlin to reflect the kaleidoscope of my own...

tbc

I was here today

Berlin 2010

Albert Speer’s bunker

I collect art that I don’t understand
- Christian Bonos


Visitors exit the bunker slowly,
so slowly. One man’s voice still echoes
in the architecture
of fear –It is
the Remembrance, before the remodeling.
Then someone pounds his fist
like a hammer
against the wall and cries out
“Humpty Dumpty… “ had a great fall.
By the time Bonos arrives, visitors are
knocking away – with mallets, chisels and crowbars –
at the blue concrete.
They are so intent
upon deconstruction that their palms are calloused
their skin is cracking.
.
When they are gone, Bonos sits looking out. He imagines
the collection – sculptures, installations and performances –
His collection – that will occupy this space.
Meanwhile, buried somewhere in the rubble, Mr. Speer
is still breathing out, repentant,
through a sophisticated ventilation system –
His doing.
The temperature in the “Banana Bunker” is ideal
for storing fruits and vegetables, and constant
for sexexperimento, techno and fetish parties.
He once told Playboy magazine: “If I didn’t see it,
then it was because I didn’t want to see it.”

Bonos looks out
from his penthouse and garden atop the bunker,
where visitors enter, by appointment only,
today and every Saturday afternoon,
to view the works that he finds
so difficult to understand
in the beginning.


From Nazi Bunker to Artistic Haven

I tried to peek inside the window of this art haven. Though it was dark inside, I saw more there than I care to share here.

Christian Bonos says he did not purchase Albert Speer's six-storey ground-level bunker for protection, but to house his collection of contemporary art. While most war bunkers in Berlin were built underground, the marshlands along the banks (sic) of the River Spree necessitated protection above ground too, and this particular bunker is one of the few that was not demolished after the war. I hear that Olafur Eliasson's wrecking ball now hangs, however, from the gutted interior of the bunker - like the sphere atop the famous TV tower at Alexander Plaza emitting invisible signals throughout the city, or a rotating disco ball that explodes technicolor light shards onto the concrete surfaces of the interior. A man on the street pointed up to Bonos penthouse on the roof and mentioned that Bonos holds open house by private appointment only (Sundays).