Since I have the time, I'll try to write some more about what I have been up to in Berlin. The first two days i spent walking around by myself. It was a good break from spending the whole day everyday with someone like when i was in Prague and Budapest. I had time to explore more on my own. Even though I was mostly determining the pace in prague and budapest too, its still different to have your own solo personal pace. Thinking, watching people. The first day, Thursday, I did alot of walking. I went to the east side gallery, the 1.3 km long stretch of the former wall. There is alot of cool graffitti on it by artists that were commissioned by the city to decorate it and other artists who just took matters into their own hands. took a ton of pictures of it. Then I went to a market area and walked around. And since most city museums are free on thursday i went to a museum. it had mostly 19th century paintings and sculpure. It was nice i guess. Then i went to the mall. yeah that was weird. a mall. but they had h&m there and thats like the cheapest place (even in europe) to buy anything that seems at least alittle fashionable. wow, is this as boring to read as it is to type?
ok well since i just mentioned the art museum i can talk about that for a minute cuz the next day i went to the hamburger banhoff museum for contemporary art. and before that i went to an outdoor sandsculpture exibit. the sandsculpture exibit was so cool. These things were huge and for the project they had to bring in literally tons and tons of sand. It was an international competition. I couldnt believe what they had made just from sand. took many pics of course.
in the museum they had alot of modern art. a few peices from picasso, andy warhol, and other people who are well known in that medium but whose names i dont remember. There was alot of metal sculpture. i liked that. and there was alot of photography which i also like. So the whole time i was there i was really trying to figure out what kind of art i truly like. i mean i guess that andy warhol stuff is important and everything because he was the first to do what he did. and i know i like picasso cuz the colors are cool and it just looks funny and weird, but there is just so much art that i dont understand and i dont get it but i want to. -- Ok well forget about rennaisance art. I gave up on that in Florence. Its ugly and dark and all the faces of people look the same, and frankly i don't really care about Jesus so any art that has to do with him (which is what, like 85% or rennaissance art?) is not interesting to me at all. -- but back to the more modern stuff. A big white canvas with a streak of green on a diagonal through the middle and some polka dots. I mean, it looks ok, but i really want to know why it is hanging on this wall in this gallery that i had to pay to get into cuz its not thursday anymore. I know that this is not the most original complaint of all time. i have heard it before myself from others but what i feel like iäm trying to say is that i want to like it. no, thats not true, i dont have a special need to like it. I just want to know why it is so important to other people. i guess thats similar to the interest that i actually do have in jesus. i want to know why and how it got to be so important to so many people. ok so until someone can really explain it to me im giving up on splotches of paint and simple squiggly lines as art.
large metal sculptures are amazing. cuz they are large and they are metal and they were somehow sculpted into something. so im all about that.
But then we come to photography. So here is something i think i know at least alittle about. took two semesters of it in high school so im not a complete stranger to it. but there is definitely stuff here that i can get into and stuff i really have a hard time getting into. so the harder (dare i even say bad?) stuff first.. pictures of still life buildings. run down shacks, abandoned buildings, warehouses, barns, little houses even. gas stations... stuff like that. ok so good, the composition is good. the right kind of converging lines. but what am i looking at? its just something that was just there. standing still. I kept thinking to myself that these arent bad pictures at all. I just don't know why i am standing right here right now looking at them. I would like to look at them though. but only like if i was there and i took them and i wanted to remember what it was like when i actually saw it i person. Or even if it was a friend or a relative of mine that wanted to show me some neat pictures he or she took when they were in this or that place. and id say the same thing to them as i would to this artist. Hey, thats a pretty neat picture. But the difference is that if its a friend or something then its cool cuz at least then we could talk about what that place was like or why they wanted to take a picture of it and etc. i mean, there's lots of fuckin buildings and barns. there's a million gazillion things in this world and they can all be captured in a photograph. But i need a REASON to look at it! For example, they had some pictures of amazing sunsets over water and mountains and hills and valleys. purple and pink and yellow and blue skies. icy mountain tops, glaciers, wild animals. with that i can really say, wow! look at that! ok here was another exibit that i saw there. each photograph was a very very large print in black and white of a big tree. Upside down. Seriously. Now i know iäm sort of poking fun here and all, but why does it have to be upside down. its a really nice tree anyways. I would be happy to look at it right side up. its not bad for me that its upside down, but i feel like iäm missing the point. and if the point is to make me think more about trees or to think about what it means to me personally to see a tree upside down then it really doesnt mean anything to me at all. so like, what is the artists big accomplishment here? is it the nice picture that he took, or is it the amazingly creative way he decided to hang it?
so besides the pretty landscapes, i really did see some photos that i liked alot. not surprisingly they were ones that had people in them. people posing was ok for me some of the time, but i like the ones that captured some kind of action the most. my favorite was the collection of pictures of a bunch of arabs (turkish maybe? im not sure) who were sitting around smoking from a big pipe in the middle. it must have been hash or some kind of marijuana cuz these guys were STONED out of their minds! it was great! the looks on their faces. their eyes! They looked like most of my friends just with darker skin, wearing jilbabs or kaftans or whatever and turbans, etc. they were laughing and just hanging out blowing smoke out of their mouths. now its not just cuz i like seeing pictures of peope when they are high that i liked these. well, yes im sure it had something to do with it, but really it was because it took me to a different place. somewhere i have never been. something i have never seen. and i know that it is real. it exists or at least existed when this picture was taken.
On sunday i went to the art space called Tachles. Cool name because it is yiddish for purpose. I guess i think thats cool because i like things that reference jewish things and dont have an overtly or even jewish feeling at all. there is nothing jewish about this art space. Tachles is one of the many legal squats in berlin where artists can live and work and make and show art for free. some of it is pretty dirty and smells like piss and beer in the stairwell. they only recently were forced to put windows into the building because someone fell out of one and died. there is a nice cafe on the first floor. They also had alot of metal scuplture there. alot of the paintings they had for sale were very urban. mixing politics and sex and sarasm. alot of colages. i liked almost everything i was looking at. i wasnt really sure why. i just liked it. maybe because i related to it. maybe because i felt like it was current to me. maybe it was too easy though. but maybe too easy is good for me.
Ok so im getting there. this was one of my goals of the trip. to try and refine, better yet to define my tastes in art. especially because ive never taken an art history course or any art course besides photography in high school. But like i said, im coming along. My brother Max refuses to let me or anyone in our family forget about how when i was about 11 or 12 years old i taped a collage of pictures of naked women all over my bedroom wall from old porn magazines (dont ask me how i got them). i liked to look at them. so that's art too, right?
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