Carly Berwick

Reunification pessimists

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In most of Western Europe and the United States, the fall has been hailed as evidence of the advance of democracy, a kind of natural and positive political entropy, and a milestone in human rights. But when I traveled throughout Germany in early 2006, I met with several young radicals who felt that reunification was a step backwards. (I wrote about marching against fascists in Dresden alongside these members of the radical left--so radical it seemed they'd come full circle and become neocons--in Slate.) 

These anti-reunification pessimists--they call themselves anti-Deutsch or anti-German--see a whole Germany as ideologically dangerous, a rapprochement with the country's fascist past. I found the politics of the anti-Deutsch fascinating but difficult to translate to Americans. Making sense of their arguments depends on understanding the gravity, to young, philosophically minded Germans, of the connection between nationalism and anti-Semitism. Here's what I wrote back in 2006:

The anti-Deutsch see German nationalism as founded on anti-Semitism. They see anti-Americanism today as the outgrowth of pervasive anti-Semitism, where Israel and America’s support for Israel is vilified. The anti-Deutsch, in short, are the most pro-American Europeans outside of the army bases.

The anti-Deutsch began to coalesce as a group and a way of thinking in the early 1990s. Initially, they were leftists and communists who thought reunification would be a disaster for Germany. For some of them, the East German experiment was not necessarily dead. For most others, a reunited Germany was a dangerous Germany. They thought the country was better off fractured.

If anyone's interested in reading more about them, the entire report is here: Download Antideutschfinal. 

The global state of housewifery

I profiled Iraq-born, US-based artist Hayv Kahraman in this month's ARTnews. I found her just plain gorgeous paintings at last year's Volta art fair; it's actually difficult to encounter something new at an art fair, where dealers usually bring the same steady sellers they've shown several times already, which is why the smaller fairs make for better exploring. Anyway, Kahraman is the Mediterranean Amy Cutler, painting dark, abstracted storybook fantasies of beautiful women in deceptively dire straits. Funny thing is, lately these women have been American in inspiration. She told me that the image of the subservient housewife was strikingly strong here, especially in contrast to the stereotype of docile wives shuttered up across the Middle East. 

September issues: taming the curator; fantasy cities

ARTnews focuses on curators this September, those often-reclusive, hyper-educated, multi-lingual, sleek beasts whose job it is to define taste. I profiled Yasmil Raymond, the mild-mannered and self-assured new curator for Dia, who has championed good artists such as Tino Sehgal and Tomas Saraceno.

Also on the purely ethereal side of esthetics is the BLDGBLOG book by Dwell editor Geoff Manaugh. Based on his blog of the same name, the book puts on paper descriptions and images of neo-psychedelic real-world structures, most of them seemingly out of a Bond film: underground tunnel cities, satellite roadways. I reviewed the book for Next American City.

Dangerous and venal, all in the same week

My sleepy city of Jersey City, a kayak ride away from Manhattan, has been in the news more than usual recently, first for violence, then for corruption. Neither is new to Jersey City or New Jersey, though the national news seems particularly gleeful to find both here, again, on our streets. I noted the media's--particularly the New York Times'--perverse insistence on identifying our neighborhood as gritty, for the Next American City.

Slum justice

Slum studies is a burgeoning field for critics of neo-liberalism, budget travelers, and poverty tourists alike. There was Mike Davis' trenchant Planet of Slums, in 2006, which I reviewed for Next American City, published around the same time as Shadow Cities: A Billion New Squatters, a New Urban World. Both books emerged after the breakout success of Fernando Meirelles' 2003 movie City of God, about the Rio favela. Then came last year's Slumdog Millionaire, which came close to being the globalization era's Oliver Twist but ended up a cloying, overwrought love story-slash-would-be-gangster pic dressed up as window into slum life in order to offer the frisson of a little poverty porn.

The latest slum studies consideration is more optimistic than all of the above, however (except perhaps City of God, which in the end celebrated slum justice as equally, if not more, effective as police/state justice). Jeb Brugmann's new book Welcome to the Urban Revolution points out that with all the people living in slums (most people now live in cities, and most of those in slums), the systems of informal governance that evolve there represent opportunities rather than extra-juridical problems. I reviewed that book for Next American City's summer issue. The book offers the dull sheen of a scholar's prose, but it also contains the most unforgettable portrait of life in a slum yet. Dharavi, a squatters' village in Mumbai, contains thousands of industrious tradesmen selling raw hides, among other things, to the global market: the dense village of millions is slated for demolition and replacement by high rises under a slum clearance plan. 

The male Israeli Lucille Ball

Ikea stores across the world, like McDonalds franchises, provide comforting uniformity of taste. No need to research this yourself: convenient proof came in 2007, with Israeli artist Guy Ben-Ner's video, Stealing Beauty, in which his family of four filmed an entire 18-minute existential-quasi-Marxist sitcom in the Berlin, Tel Aviv, and Elizabeth, NJ stores, without company approval. The only observable differences in shoot locales lie in the language of surprised exclamations from passersby and in the denominations of fluttering price tags.

The video is part of Ben-Ner's mid-career retrospective, at MassMOCA, now through March 31, 2010, as is "Second Nature," a 2008 work about a crow, a fox, and some animal trainers-turned-thespians. I wrote about "Second Nature" for the May issue of ARTnews. I then got a chance to expand on the thoughts it sparked about humor and housewives, as well as universal schooling and informal canons, for the catalog essay for Ben-Ner's upcoming show of six works at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City this summer. Until last year, Ben-Ner's works featured members of his family, usually his children, and were often filmed at home. It was the ultimate in stay-at-home parenting art. He's moving on in casting and locales--kids grow up after all, and even parents mature; his latest work at MassMOCA is a screwball odyssey, with planes, bikes, and automobiles. If you can't get to North Adams or Mexico City, a sampling of his work is available here.

Self-help advice from destitute artists

Andrei Codrescu does roundabout, witty commentaries on NPR about slippery things that I can never actually remember. His new book about the Zen of Dada, the manic art-cult of negation and absurdity, has more sharp hooks, including the tantalizing promise of pithy self-help bromides for down times. His account of the enduring spirit of a gang of art-besotted war refugees in 1916 Zurich is funny, half-crazed, and semi-profound. I reviewed it for the Los Angeles Times.

Picasso the poet

Picasso was a scribbler too. An exhibition at Yale now doesn't overemphasize his word salad poems but does make clear that the life of letters--in the most literal sense, ie, how the physical forms of letters take shape on the page and imagination--was critical to his art. I reviewed the show for Bloomberg.

State of scandal

Florida is where gangsters, deadbeats, and tanorexics go to reinvent themselves, if two new books are to be believed. If you are younger than 35 and still have aspirations of being cast in an orgy scene in a Madonna video, head to Miami Beach, where, says Steven Gaines in "Fool's Paradise," being wanted by the law only enhances your social standing. Over 50, with hopes of one day ruthlessly cutting off all former associates because you are so damn wealthy you can do what you please? Then Palm Beach is for you, according to Laurence Leamer's "Madness Under the Royal Palms." I reviewed both for Bloomberg News.

The New Yorker's George Packer doesn't dispute either Leamer's or Gaines' general findings; his recent article about the collapse of the mostly speculative Florida real estate market renames the Sunshine State, the Ponzi State, which not surprisingly annoyed the editors of one local paper enough that they were moved to mock him as a Yale man who heads south to find a strange land populated by real estate agents with bad teeth.

Art that may be worth something next year; Congo in London

Most art will survive the market downturn/recession/great layoff spree of 09. Because most art was never worth much, monetarily speaking, anyway. Art's relative worthlessness is neither a good nor bad thing, though some people like to praise art that scares off collectors and others assess value by looking at the price tag. 

A small proportion of art gets both groups excited. I wrote about good buys in a bad economy for Art in America this month; it's in print only. The names that experts came up with were: Alexander Calder, Sigmar Polke, Agnes Martin, Robert Ryman, Robert Gober, David Hammons, and Julie Mehretu. (If I had a spare couple million, I too would consider placing it in a nice Hammons rock head).

I also wrote about Carsten Holler's Double Club for Art in America. The idea of this mass performance art piece is a Congo-themed pop-up club in London, where precisely half of the music and food comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and the other half has a British-inflected European flavor. Holler, who is German by way of Belgium (whose King Leopold II enslaved and killed off many of the people of the Congo in the late 19th century) seems mostly unbothered by some of the London critics' assessments of the club as cultural neo-colonialism, with too much fabulousness and too little self-examination. Holler defends himself, saying, if "you hear only bad news, the news becomes worse." In other words, he's trying to rebrand the country as a fun place, though its eastern provinces continue to produce brutal images of an ongoing civil war.