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Version 8.10.04

Location, Location, Location

John Miller

The sinister in a primitive sense seems to have its origin in what could be called "quality gardens" (Paradise). Dreadful things seem to have happened in those half-forgotten Edens.

Robert Smithson, "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects"

Clearly, in terms of gentrification and cultural transformation, the New York City's East Village art scene and that of Berlin's Mitte invite comparison. Both have witnessed a curious interplay between so-called esthetic lifestyles, social displacement and the commercial legitimation of formerly marginal districts. Both subsequently saw a romantic, bohemian sensibility overtaken by cool, businesslike acumen. Yet this has played out quite differently in the two cities. What makes the East Village/Mitte pairing vivid to me is that I have taken part in both - although, paradoxically, the term vivid pertains only to the reverberations of something that is over.

Mitte's bohemian phase came to an abrupt end only recently, but it already seems distant. You could say it belongs to the realm of the "just past:" a period that's fallen from fashion, but not yet deemed historical. This forgotten pocket of time may be the most remote realm of all. By virtue of its relative unrecognizability, Walter Benjamin considered the "just past" to be politically overdetermined, a phase temporarily suspended from the political economy's eternal recurrence of "the new." Benjamin's thinking was in turn inspired by the surrealist fascination for outmoded material - especially the merchandise left unwanted in sleepy shop windows.

In contrast to Mitte, the East Village scene has already begun slouching into history. Artforum recently devoted much of its special issue on the 1980s to it and the New Museum has a special show in the works. In the late 1970s, what eventually would become the East Village scene was anticipated by an artists' collective called COLAB (Artists Collaborative Projects). The group came into prominence in the late 70s, just before the Reagan Revolution. Part of its impulse was activist and critical. Part had to do with urban romance. Big American cities were just coming out of a protracted urban blight. The 1960s had witnessed a "white flight" to the suburbs. Cities, in turn, had become repositories for poor people. Almost twenty years later, for artists born and bred in suburbia, the sheer decision to move to New York amounted to a rejection of the mainstream. Abandoned, rundown, forgotten, the city was theirs if only because no one else seemed to want it. Of course, the Upper East Side, Midtown and Wall Street were all there all along, but, below 14th Street, huge swathes of urban space were up for grabs.

When artists moved into So Ho?, they took over empty spaces formerly dedicated to light manufacturing. When So Ho? became too expensive, younger artists, like me, looked for apartments in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. Unlike So Ho?, these districts were populated historically by African-American, Latino and Asian minorities. On one hand, the area had always been a melting pot. On the other, it soon became clear that the burgeoning art scene there would lead to gentrification. This, after all, was the heyday of the Yuppie. To its credit, COLAB tried to bring these contradictions to the fore rather than suppress them. It tried to make artists something more than pawns in an overarching real estate process. For a short while, it succeeded. There was, for example, a brief but intense exchange between uptown and downtown scenes, between rappers and visual artists. Charlie Ahearn's film, "Wild Style," is a testament to that moment. The rappers, M Cs? and graffiti writers it documents are all Old School originals. The film became a hip-hop classic. But "Wild Style" is also a parable of a Bronx graffitist's fateful entry into the world of curators, museums and art collectors. (Lee Quinones played the part.) Almost perversely, otherwise staid 57th Street galleries embraced real-life "graffiti artists" along with many COLAB members. But, for these galleries, graffiti - at least that produced by blacks and Latinos - was merely a fad. After a few short months, most of the graffiti stars found themselves working as bike messengers again.

Ironically - and perhaps predictably, white graffiti artists (notably Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf) did manage to make it within the art market. Their work had more to do with conventional painting and sculpture than it did with reclaiming urban space. As opposed to the social activism of COLAB, the East Village scene took a funky, hedonistic turn - be it decorative (Rodney Allan Greenblatt), neo-surrealist (George Condo), neo-primitive (Rick Prol) or unabashedly self-promotional (Richard Hambleton). This phase celebrated the East Village as a bohemian cliché. Crudely painted rats, hypodermic needles and pit bulls abounded. Stretch limos that disgorged art collectors into the fray abounded as well. Walter Robinson and Carlo Mc Cormick tirelessly promoted this work. Robinson held a perverse affection for it, but he also saw it as a kind of elaborate practical joke on the collecting establishment. Then, Neo-Geo (principally Jeff Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Meyer Vaisman and Haim Steinbach) took over. This ushered in a cooler, conceptualist phase. Pit bulls and needles were out. As the art market mushroomed, the major players had to have double shows: one in So Ho?, one in the East Village. Now, the principal galleries were Nature Morte, International with Monument and Cash (which officially had to change its name to "Cash Newhouse" because collectors couldn't just make out checks to "cash.") Ironically, it was a market savvy, neo-conceptualist ethos that emblematized complete gentrification. Then, in a 1985 issue of the East Village Eye, Mc Cormick declared the scene dead. Almost overnight, art galleries fled like rats deserting a sinking ship - not only because of Mc Cormick's declaration. Rents had gone up. The bigger galleries simply moved to So Ho?. The smaller ones simply closed up shop.

Although I've lived in Mitte - off and on - for over ten years, I can't offer a full account of its art scene. My sense of it is highly impressionistic because most of the time I'm around during the summer, during lulls in the art season. That, plus language and age, buffers me somewhat from the scene itself. Even so, the logic of gentrification is clear and, although the real estate process parallels that of the East Village, it is hardly identical. I first visited Auguststrasse in 1991 with Joan Jonas and Aura Rosenberg. Joan had met some people from Kunst-Werke and wanted to find out more. What struck me about the area was how grey and deserted it was. Everything was covered with bullet holes, leftover from street fighting with the Red Army. Cafes and phone booths were few and far between. Before the war, the area had been a Jewish ghetto and it still felt like a ghetto then. Ironically, its once repressed Jewishness would render it a prime tourist destination.

The Mitte scene started gaining momentum about five years after the East Village petered out. As galleries and institutions began to take root in Mitte, they focused on professionalized, contemporary art - often by figures that the international biennial circuit would later feature. Despite the city's sizable artist population, after the Neue Wilde painters, the work produced in Berlin never coalesced into a cohesive style or tendency. In '91 Berlin had little or no graffiti. In just a few short years it covered the whole city. At first it seemed to me like a heavy-handed and forced imitation of a quintessentially American phenomenon. Then, through repetition, it took on a life of its own. Populist impulses, similar to East Village funk, manifested themselves as street art too, a kind of folk genre that tourist groups come to seek at Tacheles or the East Side Gallery (which is not a gallery at all but a section of the Berlin Wall given over to murals). Unlike the East Village, little of this populist work crossed over into the official art scene. The artists who produced it either had no use for the gallery-museum system or else actively despised it. Some were drop-outs, members of the Autonom community. Consequently, populist and professional practices kept apart in Mitte. The populist work, despite (or perhaps because of) its dated existentialism, flourishes as a kind of unofficial tourist art. It lets visitors to Berlin time-travel back to the 1950s. It is meant to be expressive, but it only conveys the idea of expressiveness. That, too, could account for its popularity; looking at it has a well-rehearsed feel of going through the motions. Not one of these works has ever assumed a distinct identity for me. The tenor of leftover East German public sculpture at Koppenplatz and Monbijou Park is markedly different. Tourists seem to ignore it. It bespeaks (to quote Smithson once more) "a set of forgotten futures": a child riding on his father's back, three Aztec-ish women holding stone bowls … a man standing behind a table replete with a sextant and a "Tarkus"-style armadillo! I have photographed them repeatedly. No doubt the Hoennecker regime commissioned these works cynically, but their residual utopian contents, however propagandistic, still registers sharply against the now prevailing sense of business as usual.

By the mid-90s, "creatives," i.e., artists, architects and designers, steadily began to take over. The long lines at public telephones gave way to legions of pedestrians with "handys" clapped to their ears. Galleries opened in and around Auguststrasse - so many came so fast that the situation felt overdetermined. In terms of prestige, the area imploded. As a result, galleries now give Auguststrasse fairly wide berth, favoring Jannowitzbrucke or Zimmerstrasse instead. Dan Graham's Café Bravo is probably the sculpture that, to me, most singularly embodies the change in Mitte. It not only symbolizes this transformation, but, as a functioning café, has actively propelled it. Before Graham built the cafe, the Kunst-Werke building was mostly uninhabited. At times, Aura Rosenberg and I - plus our daughter Carmen - were the only ones living there. On summer evenings, we would move our kitchen table into the Hof and eat outside. All around, the walls were crumbling and covered with vines, just like an Italian villa. When Graham visited Kunst-Werke, he wisecracked, "Sorry to ruin your urban paradise." Now the café does a good business, drawing a steady stream of customers. Many are unaware that it is an artwork. On weekends, tour buses roll up to Kunst-Werke and empty their passengers into the Hof. Tour guides probably make sure to identify the café to them. Making the café function as a viable business, however, wasn't an entirely smooth process. It went through a few various managements. One even redid the interior design. Graham now mutters about disowning the piece. In any event, I consider it to be one of his strongest pavilions, partly because it has a social use.

Functionality, however, does not guarantee utopia. The developer, as John Sinclair once pointed out, not the architect, is the "architect of society." According to Sinclair, in the postwar period developers have engineered cultural life for profit. The architect mainly makes the developer's plans more palatable. Writing about punk and postwar art in his 1981 essay, "The End of Liberalism," Graham asserts that "fascism didn't die with the cessation of World War II but remains the collective unconsciousness of the present." This impulse is latent in the massification of postwar life, whose visual culture becomes increasingly spectacular. Quoting Laura Mulvey, Graham went on to note that "this new situation for the viewer produced an 'alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of loss, by the terror of potential lack in [his] fantasy.'" Conversely, liberal media "democratically" represent[s] various points of view as a substitute for "direct conflict between the classes and other social forces." Although most of Berlin's "forward-looking" construction projects still remain consistent with the urban planning of the Third Reich, the city's poor economy makes the new buildings look like pipe dreams. For the moment, they sit empty. All the cranes and businessmen rushing around with briefcases come off as a sad charade, but, in the end, the joke may be on us.

I, of course, have not been divorced from the goings-on in Mitte. Not only do I live there, part-time, but, together with Aura Rosenberg, I took part in Klaus Biesenbach's "37 Rooms" project that was timed to coincide with the 1992 documenta IX. The show was a sprawling project with thirty-seven curators that took place in various spaces around Auguststrasse. Early on, many saw the project as an ominous real estate conspiracy - clearly, a paranoid oversimplification, but still an accusation Aura and I could not ignore. As curators, we decided to invite the performance artist Mike Smith to do a puppet show in a Hof behind a working Puppentheater. He got a big turnout. His performance featured a puppet aptly called "Mike" who is asked to take part in a project involving thirty-seven rooms. Artists get to pick their rooms. The puppet "Mike" asks for the disco, but he gets the toilet. Smith performed in English, but everyone seemed to get it. In retrospect, his performance seemed to be not only a critique of real estate, but also a critique of the real estate of the group show where the most prominent artists get the best positions. Yet here, in terms of gentrification, the paradox is as follows: Critical art tends to be more blue chip and blue-chip art has the greatest legitimizing capacity.

Presently, it may be Berlin's dysfunctionality that makes artists want to live there. This, too, is the exact opposite of the hyperfunctionality of New York where the demand to be cutting-edge is insidious and incessant. Such a demand is synonymous with devaluation. What desperately is touted as "new" is fated soon to be old. New York tends to accelerate that process. Right now, in Berlin, these demands are at least less imperious. The city lacks the monolithic character of a real national or financial capital. Instead, it breaks down into quarters that function, more or less, like villages. Mitte is no exception. Although jobs may be scarce, low rents and a housing surplus make it easy to get by. As a result, Berliners have time. Their lifestyle is less regimented. This is exactly what artists need. As Robert Smithson once observed, "For too long the artist has been estranged from his own 'time.' . . . The mental process of the artist which takes place in time is disowned, so that a commodity value can be maintained by a system independent of the artist. Art in this sense is considered 'timeless' or a product of 'no time at all'; this becomes a convenient way to exploit the artist out of his rightful claim to his temporal processes." Smithson was writing about art objects, but he could have just have been writing about the production (or reproduction) of space . . . which always takes place in time.