[2025041201-biennale]
I ran across some notes I took (uncharacteristically) when I visited Berlin during its inaugural Berlin Biennale in 1998. It was cold and snowy, a great time to be sheltered inside warm, ruinous spaces full of crazy art. I went to two of the venues, and most of these notes are from the second, in the Scheunenviertel on Oranienburger Straße. The venues were scattered around central Mitte.
Amazing things at the Berlin Biennale
-
"Ventilator" – fan swinging from a high cupola, under power.
-
50 jillion pictures around the city of the same two orange motor scooters.
-
"Tunnel", a room with film running of a tunnel being gone through.
-
"Solar System with TV" – A solar system model with one of the planets consisting of a TV and a little man in a chair watching, earth/moon style.
-
Slide system, with plans for a whole Hochhaus.
-
Clips from CNN doctored so the heads just sit there, blinking and not saying anything.
-
"Purposeless Structures", at the exit of one of the galleries – i.e., the outside landscape! Sort of like Columbus claiming America.
-
Room with mysterious screams coming from somewhere, and various red herrings as to its source.
-
Two multi-room, very busy environments, one a "parody" of a bedroom, maybe, the other of a house dominated by TV.
-
A jillion pointless and annoying things happening on single or multiple video screens.
-
A weird room that smelled of hay, because it had a false floor under which was … HAY. Also holes looking down, a video monitor, etc.
-
A series of human landscapes with no humans (photos).
-
Many strange sculptures and models with noise and movement, most forcing you to move around a lot to take them in.
-
A giant peep-hole through the masonry wall.
-
A very weird shoe collection: thong high-heels, high-heels without heels, shoes consisting of nothing but high heels, about 10 pair of men's pointy boots with no covering from the instep on, called "Cabriolets", etc., etc.
AND MUCH MUCH MORE!!
Commentary from the vantage point of my Seattle Stammlokal in 2025
First, I wish in some cases I had been a little more verbose, but I was fitting all this on the back of a legal pad sheet whose obverse bears a hand-drawn calendar plotting my Berlin visit. I was there briefly to interview a subject for my book Under Construction: Nine East German Lives, McFarland, 2004.
![[Note]](file:/usr/local/Oxygen_XML_Editor_27/frameworks/docbook/css/img/note.png) |
Note |
|---|---|
|
I uploaded a PDF of this book, which is out of print, to Z-Library/Anna's Archive for anyone who would like to read it, FOR FREE. Google Books is selling e-copies for $19.99, which means either that nobody has ever bought one, or I am being robbed, because the rights have long since reverted to me. Do not buy one of those. Instead, you can download it from the author:
 |
The thing that strikes me most today is the archaic fixation with [analog] video, and the near absence of the Internet. December 1998 was the exact moment when the Internet was about to explode (just two years before it imploded) and become the one thing that media artists, media theorists, media businesses, and everybody else would be talking about in the approaching century.
The things that I remember best (without help from this crib) are the wordless CNN anchors, the wildly swinging and quite massive and loud fan, that hay room with its dimensional violations, and the fake bedroom, which one had to scrunch through very carefully to avoid knocking off things attached to the wall, like pictures and knick-knacks. Those last two were dreamlike or nightmarish, spaces that felt intimate and alien at once, and inspired a vague dread. Or guilt. What were you hiding in all that straw? Covering up with excessive decoration?
The "Purposeless Structures" piece is obviously an art-theoretical gag, and it found in me its perfect audience. I had laughed out loud upon reading it again.
Finally, after a few more decades of Internet, with the emergence of pornography as its principle motor (at least until social media and the triumph of ad-focused surveillance capitalism), the parody of foot fetishism appears to have been goofily prophetic.