On a boring armchair day during a cruise in the caribbean last december, an announcement through the speaker system made us check batteries on our phones and empty the memory cards of all vacation photos. We had 15 min until the lecture on “how the art market works” was going to start.

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A couple of days ago I had lunch across the street from good old Tachels, the former squat that became famous in the 90s. After a rather traumatic experience I had organizing an exhibition there back in 2001, I did not follow the development of the situation there during the last couple of years.

Waiting for my food and a not having anything to read with me a picked up one of the Tacheles Programs (I never see them anywhere else. Is it possible that they only manage to distribute it in their direct neighborhood?). The first sentence that caught my attention translates “scrap and bankruptcy aren’t art”. In a short text on the front page Tacheles e.V. distances itself from the scrap in their backyard. They claim that Fundus, the investor who bought the building a long time ago, tries to damage the reputation of Tacheles and teams up with small-time criminals to do so. According to Tacheles e.V. “Drug dealers and worse” use the territory for “deployment”.

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[display_podcast] Re-education, a small art festival at Hebbel am Ufer on January 19, dealt with the large scale re-education project that the United States imposed quite successfully on post war Germany (more successfully anyway than recent attempts in Irak. Unfortunately I missed much of the program, but I saw two things I liked quite a bit.

One was the lecture/performance “Manifest Destiny” by Pablo Helguera, which consisted of a power point presentation mixing four stories around the idea that the US should expand their territory, which was popular in 19th century. The presentation was half caricature half serious and it worked quite well. I only found out later, when I googled Pablo Helguera, that he was also the author of a book I recently had a look at when I was standing around, waiting for a film screening to start at new gallery show about the art world. The book is called “Manual of Contemporary Art Style” and is a very helpful beginners guide to the art world not only for practitioners. It’s of course a bit childish, but nevertheless very entertaining and mostly quite well observed.

The other was a concert hardly dressed cross dressers punk combo. I could not even find the name of the band anywhere, because as it turned out it was only the starting act. The main act sucked. If anybody knows the name of the band, please leave a comment.

For the group show “New York, New York, New York – So nice we named it thrice” at Flux Factory in Queens artists had been invited to contribute works that were to be placed on a map of new york that is scaled to fit the exhibition space. When entering the space one could think that the installation was the work of one artist. Despite quite different approaches and aesthetic choices of each artists involved (who did not know what their “neighbors” would come up with) the individual works grow together in a way one rarely sees in group shows. This is of course due to the tight placement and because the map provides a formal frame. The result is quite inspiring and seems to be an appropriate way of dealing with a city.
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On the train between Amsterdam and Berlin a man in his forties was sitting across the table from me. He was drawing faces on a sheet of paper using a ball pen. I couldn’t tell, if he was portraying someone sitting near us or even myself. His drawings were naive, one could say childish. I watched the scene while reading in “Notes From The Furure Of Art” (a highly inspiring collection of texts by Jerzy Ludwinski, a Polish art critic, curator and theorist who I only learned about through the book that the editor, Magdalena Ziolkowska, had given me a couple of days earlier). The book contained drafts, mostly also done with a ball pen of how Ludwinski thought art was expanding. The combination of the two very different kinds of of ball pen drawings gave me a sublime joy.

A long time ago I used to experiment quite a bit with the absentminded drawings of the kind that people do while on the phone or when killing time. Usually this type of drawing is more or less abstract, maybe with figurative elements, but generally avoiding obvious references to the world outside of the drawing. However, I never thought about how strange it is when a grownup man draws figuratively outside of any professional context and without artistic ambition. Abstract drawing is clearly more acceptable in this context.

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