I don’t know if it’s appropriate or if it defeats the purpose, but I chose a room in the apartment I’m staying in. There’s something about this room which gives me the sense that every object has a life and a voice of it’s own; when I am there I feel shrouded with unnameable spirit. It’s where my host parents have put the weirdest items in their collection: stone gnomes, broken chandeliers, abstract art, candle sticks, a lot of things in threes. There’s a statue of a crow with a piece of plastic stuck to it that will follow your eyes around the room if you let it. They don’t let any light into the room so even when the window is open the sounds from outside seem to justify the goosebumps.
—
I heard the sound of what sounded like someone putting giant dishes away, yelping, rushing sounds, high whistling, and intermittently the caws of a crow. Birds flirting, humming, and from inside of the room a low whirring. I’m bad at describing sounds in the way requested – sorry. And once I opened my eyes I noticed that every time I’ve sat in this room by the window the sky has always been blindingly white.
6.4.16 City Office of Development:
What a long, informative session! I really appreciated seeing all of the models it helped me get a better grasp of the layout and history of Berlin. It really put into effect the idea of Berlin being a city of constant Becoming.
11.4.16 Boros Bunker:
Spinning trees, a popcorn machine, claustrophobia, put a house on it, the most moving piece of artwork was in a hallway, a special room for lights, “site specific pieces”, and the blank stare of the guide when asked if the bunker would be open in case of a tragedy, “it’s meant to play with your lack of knowledge”, and shattered glass that wasn’t glass but was glass but is now steel — that about sums it up.
13.4.16 Street Art Tour:
I couldn’t really focus on the street art while we were walking in a large group of people and trying not to run into each other – however, when the tour ended Kate and I ended up hanging out with Evelyn the tour guide. We looked at the art on fragments of the Berlin wall and talked about the growth of style from the 80’s until now. We also looked at the art outside of squats and talked about how street art helped turn places which were once definitively made for the wealthy into safe and radical leftist spaces.
18.4.16 Jüdisches Museum Berlin:
The best part of that tour is when I walked far enough away from the tour guide to where the microphone was out of ear shot and I got to sit in this room where show tunes were playing and dancing was being shown on this little screen. It was obviously like, communicating the varied aspects of Jewish culture and I thought it was really important to think about the striving for the continuity of a culture and religion.
20.4.16 Berlin Wall Memorial Documentation Center:
I think that the emotional intensity of that excursion really altered the way I was thinking of it in the current moment. I couldn’t really process what was being said to me, when watching the documentary all I could focus on was the narrator’s voice and when walking around all I could think about is how badly I wanted to take off my backpack. When I got home all I could think about was Donald Trump.
This is a Psychic City assignment both Kate G. and I came up with. Kate is working on translation and I’m working on aesthetics and we thought about how to mix the two. I’ve been thinking a lot about the illusion of art and ideology and how the ideological message in artworks can never posit themselves in any sort of “pure” form – this relates directly to attempting to understand the proposed “meaning” behind a work when translating. We’ve discussed that these are two very similar mental processes.
The Degenerate Art Exhibition in 1937 (hope y’all read your German history books) showcased art which had been labeled as deviant, essentially. Our assignment is going to be finding a piece of art by one of the artists whose work was displayed at the exhibition and:
1. Write a poem/prose/a short essay/make a drawing translating your experience of the artwork.
or
2. If you feel that you don’t know how to find any one of these artworks, find a piece of art which you find could be potentially deviant (if you believe in that sort of thing – if you don’t, pretend you do) and then do number one.
A helpful link:
http://www.listal.com/list/degenerate-art
Today at Berlinische Galerie I thought a lot about the illusion of art and how it can grab you and take you into a mental space that had been previously unexplored. In my project I’m talking a lot about the illusion of art being the truth of the artwork while the ideology behind it acts as a catalyst for the cognition of the illusion.
When walking through this gallery there were definitely works which called to us each individually; we were running around the gallery with the hour we had left pulling each other into different rooms and pointing out works hoping that the magic would work on each other like they worked on us individually.
The curation of the gallery led to a forced introspection and a mental quietness which allowed for each artwork to speak loudly on it’s own. A lot of works were left to hang on the walls by themselves as if the curator knew that some of these paintings and photographs had auras which would overpower the charm of other works.
Overall: moving, beautiful, 10/10 experience.
this is the v first 1♥
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The Evergreen State College
Olympia, Washington