Scrapbook. part 2

I get paid to look at art.
Well, not exactly to look at it. Rather to watch it. To watch over it.
Because, you know, the art needs to be protected from its visitors. They threaten it.

#1
Mind your step, please!
Ooh, you stepped on the art. Haha.
-The art? Oh ... Sorry.

But mind you, in that same exhibition, there was also some art to step on!

Sometimes though, it rather feels as if I was some kind of caretaker for the visitors themselves.

#2
Excuse me, where is the exhibition?
Right here. You are already in the middle of it.
Oh. Aha? Thank you.

And sometimes I simply don't know what went wrong.

#3
Sagen Sie, sind das alles echte Filme hier?

The woman asking me this was at that moment visiting an exhibition devoted to art films.
Mhhmh.

In fact, I'm not really sure who or what I am protecting.
It's probably my own sanity. Or is it insanity?

In lieu of a cake: lying in the bathtub with Bill Hicks, increasingly pruny.

How does the saying go about history and farce? History, history, beware of your farciness? I have been listening to Bill Hicks' ARIZONA BAY album, his tales about surviving Bush and the Fundamentalists in the White House. About dinosaurs as God's way to test their faith – God, the old prankster, burying bones all over to be dug up and sow doubt in the belief of the non-believers of evolution. About how the Democrats won, finally, after having aimed at the Republican elephant for so many years. The elephant that sold the weapons to Iraq and as soon as the cheque cleared went on to test the quality of its products. Only Hicks is talking about the early nineties. Clinton is president, pre-Bush II and pre-Iraq II. Now, another Democrat is sitting in the White House, and it looks as if the elephant might win over Congress in November – again. Meanwhile, the Fundamentalists are tea-partying and that freak parralel universe in which Sarah Palin might run for president is actually our own.
What would Bill Hicks say if he were alive today? Bloody murder? Or would he put his head under water – if we gonna get all pruny, then at least evenly?
In face of it all Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are going to RALLY TO RESTORE SANITY AND/OR FEAR next weekend in Washington. In face of Germany's own autumn of discontent – the Leitkultur-debate is making its reappearance (aka how to keep the 'German' in German angst) – Christine Lemke-Matwey called out to Germany's own Dichter/Denker to get their heads out of the bathwater sand, and say something. If Christoph Schlingensief were alive today, as she suggests already nostalgically, he surely would have to say something – and clear the air, hopefully.
Living abroad in 2008, I was pondering upon that German angst myself and wrote about Schlingensief's WIEN-AKTION (BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH), his 2000 Austrian take on this season's debate:

// Is this real? Is it real theater? Real art? Or indeed real life? For those who witnessed Schlingensief's work BITTE LIEBT ÖSTERREICH commissioned for the Wiener Festwochen festival in Austria, it was in fact difficult to decide upon the nature of the spectacle: the work featured a large container installed on a square next to the opera house in Vienna. In line with the concept of the Big Brother TV program, twelve participants, who were announced by Schlingensief as seeking for asylum, moved into the container for one week, being under video surveillance on a 24 hours basis. The public could follow the life of the container inhabitants on television and the Internet and were asked to vote for the candidates, whereby those two receiving the most votes would not only definitely have to leave the container, but also putatively have to leave the country, having lost the competition of seeking for refugee. Whereas this account frames the work as a rather straightforward piece of performance art, the introduction of elements such as a banner stating 'Ausländer Raus' ('Foreigners Out'), a slogan used by neo-nationalist parties in Germany, and flags alluding to the right-wing populist Austrian party FPÖ rooted the work within the current political discussion, pointing to its potential as being an actual political campaign.
Hence, interpretations of Schlingensief's work indeed ranged from it being a critique of policies towards asylum seekers and the populist strategies used for their implementation to being a meta-critique on the increasing event character of all politics and the crucial role of the media apparatus. Criticism towards the WIEN-AKTION ran on the very same axis: Schlingensief's re-enactment of the spectacle of politics through yet another spectacle turns artistic practice into an act of populist event management, which dismisses art's potential to say something meaningful about reality by turning it into a piece of virtual reality itself.
Yet, within the framework of this exhibition [MARTYRS. CLOWNS. BIOGRAPHICAL EXORCISMS] the term virtual reality seems the least appropriate to describe the nature of Schlingensief's artistic project, which is marked by his ever-lasting possession by the demon called Germany. His works then appear as performances of political introspection which insist on a place for his own biography within, against, towards and in spite of the reality of German history – PLEASE LOVE AUSTRIA is after all a call for subjective engagement. The audience in Vienna reacted to the initial display of the 'Foreigners Out'-banner with applause – Art, life and true romance are never virtual. //

I don't know if Schlingensief would want to participate in the current debate, too. Or if he would feel that you can only state the obvious for so many times. I don't even know if I want to. The fact that to Seehofer and company the Leitkultur-debate is no farce at all (and that they are not asking to Please love Germany either) leaves me a bit breathless. I think I'm already holding my breath under water with Bill. 'Germany', neat and tidy within its lovely 'borders', home of the 'Germans' and their 'Christian-Jewish tradition', reading Grass or better yet, watching TATORT on Sundays. I have no clue.
I am German, yet nothing but a patchwork, my biography a succession of actual physical and/or cultural displacements, migration, refuge, adaptation, weirdness. My grandmother was born in a country that doesn't exist anymore, my parents were, I was. Germany just turned twenty. Or two-hundred, but then again, I have no idea either way. I'm living in Kreuzberg now, where nobody is from here, everybody came from somewhere, including patched baggage.
The only time I ever got a glimpse at what that concept 'Germany' might mean (that icing apart from the actual cake, the Grundgesetz) was when I lived abroad back then in 2008. And then I only realised it in the way other people looked at me and told me, that yes, I am German, even if in denial. And in the way the Germans at the Goethe-Institute in Amsterdam explained it to my fellow Dutchmen. I listened to Feridun Zaimoglu talking about GERMAN AMOK, I read Christian Kracht's FASERLAND, I found Schlingensief in a dark room at the De Appel gallery. I even enjoyed the familiarity of their geographies, Heimat. But then again, they looked a lot like Kreuzberg.
So I have an idea after all. Last week I asked for political and cultural asylum again nevertheless. Not that I'm headed for greener pastures (see above). Just pastures. If L.A. has fallen into the ocean by then, I'll be heading out to ARIZONA BAY.

A little death behind the eyes.

I admit I did not make it any further than 20 minutes into the pilot the first time around before I decided that yes, I am a bit bored, so why not leave it for another rainy day. I had been rather reluctant to watch the meticulous re-creation of N.Y.'s advertisement industry in the 60s in the first place. Why the past anyway? What I wanted to see was a meticulous depiction of the ad business in N.Y. in 2010. However, as a fellow pop culturaphil reminded me, it's not about the past and even when it is about the past it's actually about the present. And, you can only ignore such a big chunk of pop culture for so long. So, I sat myself down again and finally caught up on MAD MEN.
Yet, even after having watched it all and the series' fourth season finale this past Sunday, I am still not sure what's actually going on, what the series – and the fuss – is about (except for the obvious meticulous part). For it is not about mad men. The pun doesn't work, or rather it ends where it started: on MADison Avenue. These men are not mad, they are complacent. They aren't jumping from the roofs of downtown skyscrapers (as the title sequence suggests) and land in their office chairs. They had already been sitting there, and have continued to do so for the series' past 4 seasons, albeit in different offices - somewhere in between pantyhose campaigns, in between Lucky Strikes, in between drinks, in between marriages, in between secretaries. Yes, there is nothing wrong with that as a plot – or a philosophy (I have written a 'maximum of pleasure, minimum of bullshit' defense for another cable TV ad man, Brian Kinney – forthcoming in CQN # 3). Only why bother if you don't seem to be having any fun, if you couldn't care less?
And Don Draper, leading man, creative hotshot and womanizer (or so he's called), is not having any. Or maybe he is, but you can't really tell as the series' immersion in everything white straight upper middle class 1960ish also applies to its cinematography: it sticks to the kiss&pan-rule, and no taking off of tights during sex.
When Don Draper is not piling up secretaries, wifes, ex-wifes and children like ties (you just buy one after another, more of the same because you like the pattern and one can never have enough accessories for that matter), he is alternating between trying to stay sober enough (or get drunk enough) to come up with one of his hotshot ideas and indulging in introspective swimming. Not that it gets him any further than feeling a bit sorry for himself, a bit alienated from his womanized women, a bit empty. His favorite line in that case: You don't really know who I am! (Yes, he's not Don Draper, and no, he did not kill Don Draper to become him. It's not that bad.)
I have been watching MAD MEN together with the fifth season of DEXTER these past few Mondays: If you want to see a man with truly alienating secrets, try Dexter. Likewise Don, he has also diagnosed himself with being a bit dead behind the eyes. Unlike Don however, he's no longer too complacent about it - as it dawns on him that it doesn't go together well with having some things in your life that you can actually be bothered about.
Watching Don moping around, I find myself reaching that state of mindless cotton wool complacency, too, interrupted only from time to time by pointless rampages towards the screen: Don, come on! Aren't you living in New York in the Sixties? Isn't Andy Warhol sitting in his factory three blocks down the street, re-writing the history of something. Isn't there a revolution underway? Don, come on! Stop impregnating your secretaries and let's go get screen-tested!
But we know how the story ended, I'm only waiting for Don to catch up, too. Don won't have changed the face of anything, his children did. Those children I yelled at him not to have, my parents' generation - I stand corrected (for that part anyway).

// I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
[...]
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
[...]
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.//
(Sharon Olds: I GO BACK TO MAY 1937)

Men, desks, paper dolls.

A little death behind the eyes: Don Draper (MAD MEN), Brian Kinney (QUEER AS FOLK), Dexter Morgan (DEXTER).

Put the babblin back in binary babblin.

THAT'S HOW WEIRD IT WAS. (I)

2010