Exhibitions 2
Metropolis
(Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, till 21 July)
Anselm Kiefer (Nationalgalerie, Berlin, till 20 May)
Prosaic pontificators
Giles Auty
Each time I stay in a European city that is less than congenial, I feel relief to be back in London until I catch sight of some- one reading the Sun . . . `GAZZA AZZA BONK'. Then I want to be back where I have come from as fast as possible.
Berlin, whence I write these words, is far from uncongenial, even in the snow, pro- viding one remains to the west of where the Wall once stood or fairly close thereto. To the west as well as the east of the city of Jeff Koons's 'St John the Baptist, 1988 Berlin itself, of course, lies what was for- merly East Germany. A young Berliner to whom I spoke told me of her longing to live further out of the city, `. . . but that would be impossible, of course, owing to the lack of sanitation and telephones there'. Communism, which could not pro- vide the citizens of Moscow with soap when I was there last in 1989, cared little for the comfort of its faithful. Indeed, absences of soap and proper sanitation may well have seemed trivial concerns compared, within the former domains of Marxism, with a contrasting ubiquity of informers and polit- ical police.
The Martin-Gropius-Bau is a building of some history and distinction which stands at what was formerly one of the more east- erly extremities of West Berlin twixt, as estate agents like to say, the former Gestapo headquarters and the remains of the cellars where they tortured their vic- tims. Clearly the building inhabits a site of symbolic as well as geographical impor- tance. It could also have been once a first landfall in the Free West when coming in from the East. The current exhibition, occupying much of the huge building, is named Metropolis and is the offspring of a liaison between Berlin's Christos Joachi- medes and London's Royal Academy exhi- bitions secretary Norman Rosenthal. Its ostensible theme is the speed, sex and vio- lence available so freely in the cities of the West. But would these last be a magnet or a deterrent to Trabant and Wartburg own- ers from East Germany, cars in which opportunities for speed, let alone sex or violence, might be thought to be rather limited? In a recent edition of the Royal Academy magazine, Mr Rosenthal elabo- rates on his attractive proposition: 'Art today, in contrast to ten years ago when many Italian and German artists were much more interested in going back to the land, is rooted in the idea of the city, in the idea of speed, sex and violence if you like. These are the concerns of artists and they express this with many forms of media.' The commentary informs us further that `the present situation as outlined by Rosenthal suggests that reality is above all produced by man and not by nature.' Philosophers please note.
What, then, is the 'man-made reality' the Western world has on offer for those flee- ing the gruesome rhetoric and grey homo- geneity of the Marxist world at this, the very gateway between the , two? What would a young worker from the East, leav- ing recent memories of a state-run life behind him, glean from a first face-to-face encounter with the envied culture of the West? The first object he would see on entering the Martin-Gropius-Bau exhibi- tion would be a 35-foot-high Disneyesque figure clad in ballet attire and clown's head twitching one hand and foot feebly in some faint parody of natural movement. But might not our dazzled youth reflect here that the probable cost of making this absurd object could have fed his communi- ty for a month? Does the figure's occasion- al spasmodic jerk suggest more strongly the vitality of Western culture or a society of deepening decadence acting out its death throes?
This giant, glossily painted piece of non- sense is the work of one Jonathan Borofsky. Like almost all the work in Metropolis it has nothing to do with the exhibition's attractive-sounding title, nor does it connect obviously with the promised sex, speed and violence, the themes held to obsess international art's fashionable elite. The latter is out in force, nonetheless: Julian Schnabel, Gilbert & George, Georg Baselitz, Ross Bleckner, Jeff Koons, Cady Noland, Edward Ruscha, Cindy Sherman, the Starn twins, Richard Artschwager and some 67 other would-be luminaries of our time. I confess not one of these contributors has ever been the sub- ject of favourable notice in this column. This may not be surprising, however, since one of the exhibition's organising duo, Mr Rosenthal, looks to just three artists who, in his own words, 'above all define the posi- tions and possibilities of art today'. The artists in question? Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. Mr Rosenthal avers further that although 'the English hate Gilbert & George' they too `are incredibly important artists'. Even those of short memories may recall that a mere four years ago Mr Rosenthal was a shortlisted candidate for the esteemed position of director of the Tate Gallery in London. I fear there are few points on which my views coincide with those of Mr Rosenthal on the subject of significant art, nor even on questions of taste. In one of Yasumasa Morimura's huge works, chosen specially for the exhibition, a brace of Sindy dolls masturbate one another at the feet of a crucified Christ. The catalogue claims 'ironic alienation' for this work, the violence being confined, presumably, to the sensibilities of possible onlookers. While many of the other works in the show were less witless or repellent, I found few engag- ing either to eye or spirit. If the exhibition, as claimed, were a true foretaste of what Western art will be in the Nineties, there might be much to be said for a quiet coun- try house in Albania.
Happily the proof that such drastic action may not be necessary was also at hand in Berlin in a huge show devoted to the works of Anselm Kiefer. This is staged at the Nationalgalerie. Kiefer was born at the last war's end and was shown harrowing film of the Holocaust when still a schoolchild. Unsurprisingly, death and inhumanity are two of his regular concerns. Unlike most of the artists of Metropolis he is a true poet; as an archivist of his coun- try's myth and history he puts the colours of dust and death to the service of a redemptive vision. However, the danger for the artist and for us may be that he belabours us not only with vast scale but with an unbalanced understanding of the possibilities of life. Slipping away from his show for a moment, I encountered a series of small paintings by Adolph von Menzel in a nearby room. The spiritual charge of these beautiful and mysterious works is an element lacking almost entirely in Metropolis. Would that our new cultural pontiffs were even aware of such a loss.
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