Today i went to the Hamburger Bahnhof. I felt nauseous. Horst Ademeit's obsessive documentation about how society is pushing him to the limits and damaging the body (personal and societal) through secret radiation, Corey Archangel lost in the ecstasy of technological communcations and then the flip side of limits of land/nature art and then mental fluxus limits through video and identity construction. I was left gasping for air.
I seriously felt giddy. My body felt like it was falling apart. Tho the based in Berlin parts was actually very nice, and i felt like i could breathe again.
after some food at Hauptbahnhof (more insanity), we took off for the Neue National Galerie for the Moderne Zeiten period. I always hated Expressionismus. Maybe because of its urge for primitivism and "real", made me think of heterosoc and male hysteria ugh! but recently i've been really obsessed by the garishg colours of Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff and even the Brücke and Blaue Reiter. what the fuck is going on? who cares. I'm into it, and that s what matters. and what's more i can get enough of the fucking stuff. I blame, seeing the Merlin Carpenter expressionism painting from 1990, then getting curious about all the neo expressionism of rainer Fetting etc, loving all the faggy playfulness and roleplay and irony in general. This made me turn back to Kirchner etc in general. Indeed when i was in Hamburg Kunsthalle recently for the Warburg exh, i had a total Damascus road experience over Self Portrait with Model by Kirchner.
I mean, how fucking garish and horrible is that?! Yet just like Dix, i became infactuated with how ugly it was, and how they got away with it at the time (well, that comment goes more for Dix, and his society people portraits). I started to see Dix painting the queer underground bars of Eldorado, yeah! no more hetero anxiety, i'm resolving my Against Nature/ expressionism conflict once and for all!
So back to Der Radionist... I was very attracted as to how this painting is paralleling how i feel with regards to my relationship to the Internet.
I spend so much time in circulation of images and writing and meditating on and about my time on the internet, in real time. In the painting, a paraplegic unable to witness his beloved opera, can new revel avoid his loss thanks to the new found technology of the radio. Holding his liberetto, he can feel as if he is there. I also felt that way when i was reading the information plakate today in HB, and thinking of how different my experience would be if i didn't project my imagination of how the piece would end and how i had codified it in my mind beforehand, what if instead, i had simply sat down without any information and allowed it to wash over me, in real time instead.
Maybe that's why i felt so giddy in the place. I also wonder about what a friend once said about how the internet plays a role in nostalgia.
Anyways, i watching der Radionist, i felt like i was at the centre of hallucinogenic society, a bit like what Dan Graham calls the just past. Experiencing something in real time and also meditating over it, so that you are actually concetrating on something that has just passed. How much time do we spend in the present? How much time are we really connecting to an event/ experience? I felt totally connected to this painting, even tho it is over 70 years old, and the moment has definitely passed!
I then moved swiftly on to Charlie Chaplin and the Modern times clip, which i suspect i had subconsciously influenced my decision to revisit the NNG. I needed some comfort in seeing someone else being literally swallowed up by modernity. I could then feel a part! Der Radionist taps into that feeling of our essential loneliness in the world and questions of how we mediate and interact in our environments. How we want to feel a part of something, whilst being simultaneuosly comfortably numb in our bedroom. Why social networking has exploded onto our lives, manipulating our fear of being left out and giving a space in the privatised sphere of neo liberal society. Mutual drowning and floating in information. Crushed by the wheels of industry.
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