Achtung Berlin

I am walking on a street called Sophienstrasse in Berlin as crows hover above the expressionistic trees. It is like finding oneself in a Daniel Richter painting with its post-apocalypse party atmosphere and its gothic underpinnings (well, except for the absence of white gorillas on wheelchairs, or vomiting harlequins, or war-freak horses).

A gaggle of galleries near Sophienstrasse is where I am headed. My editor sent me to cover the travel fair at Berlin Messe, and since I had a couple of hours of free time I decided to go see some Richter paintings at Berlin’s Contemporary Fine Arts (CFA) gallery rather than go to the KaDeWe mall or somewhere else. So, here I am on a street all swelled up with the void. Cold as hell. With crows and dying trees. Life is beautiful.

On view at the CFA are the works of Georg Baselitz, a neo-expressionist who specializes in painting his subjects upside down. It is the artist’s way of making the viewers appreciate the painting in its totality, and not just to recognize the subject that is presented. For the artist, the act of recognition is a cage. By simply stepping out of that cage, we the viewers can take on a whole new different visual experience. And what an experience it is — what with his violent brushstrokes and dramatic postures of his figures. In his manifesto titled Painters’ Equipment, Baselitz says, “There is nothing I can say about my pictures. I paint, which is far from easy, and that’s all I can do.”

Baselitz’s “Last Bridge Ghost’s Supper” features paintings of boots and headshots (including a portrait of Edward Munch). Looking at a couple of paintings at the CFA, one gets the impression that the whole world has turned upside down and it is only Baselitz who remains upright.

I step outside for a smoke. Through the window of another apartment unit I can see what seems to be cosmic graffiti in yellow and black. Ah, unmistakably Basquiat yellow and Basquiat black. The unit turns out to be Galerie Davide Di Maggio where the current show features the legendary American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, his paintings as well as stills from the film Downtown 81.

It would take a whole book (and a Julian Schnabel movie with David Bowie, Gary Oldman and Dennis Hopper in the cast) to approximate what Basquiat’s contribution is to the world of art. The artist’s crudely drawn cartoon-like figures, his handwritten disconnected phases, and his physical graffiti are the ciphers of urban life. (When asked why he drew men crudely, Basquiat’s reply was: “Men are crude.”)

Writer Ben Okri once proclaimed, “(Basquiat’s art) is an art outside the village gate… His art is what Picasso proclaimed art should be, an instrument of war… War against the civilizing influences that mute the plangent, beautiful, howling song of the oracles into ‘manageable’ choirs… War against human stupidity and limitation.” Okri also said, “Basquiat exploded like a meteor, and died in the ashes of American fame.” The artist died at age 28 from a heroin overdose. So very rock ‘n’ roll. Like Jimi Hendrix (and Charlie Parker) before him.

To me, Basquiat’s paintings communicate first before they are understood. His primitive symbols and stick-man figures impart something innocent, ineffable and invaluable that all the clinically realistic academic art bull could never impart. No need for scholarly tomes to validate the man’s vision. The proof is in the looking. Didn’t Basquiat once say, “I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to know what art is…”?

After buying books on Richter and a Jonathan Meese shirt (artists are such rock stars in Germany), and getting a Basquiat postcard, I step out of the gallery, walk toward the piazza and notice a pile of leaves and rocks.

Must be God’s own installation.

Standing By The Wall

I ride in a van with the others on an abbreviated tour of Berlin.

We pass by Kurfürstendamm (known largely as “Ku’damm”), which boasts shops, hotels, art galleries, restaurants and theaters. We spot the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächniskirche, or the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Its west tower (turned into a husk by Allied bombs during World War II) is one of Berlin’s most enduring and eye-catching landmarks. Adjacent to the church is the octagonal hall of worship, which has midnight-blue windows. Our tour guide informs us that together they seem to form a “lipstick and makeup compact-case” combo. Someone needs to retouch.

We take a few photos of the Berlin Victory Column, where Bono hams it up in U2’s Stay (Faraway, So Close) video. We walked near the Brandenburg Gate, which, according to our guide was a symbol of division during the Cold War but is now an emblem of reunification. On top of the tor is Johann Gottfried Schadow’s “Quadriga,” a sculpture of the winged goddess of victory piloting a horse-drawn chariot. I read before that the sculpture was “kidnapped” by Napoleon, kept in Paris, and was returned to Berlin in the 1800s.

I am contemplating on how the Gate had been present during historic moments when I overhear a tourist getting euphoric upon spotting a Starbucks. Must be following a different itinerary.

We ride the bus toward the Berlin Wall; only there’s no more Berlin Wall to speak of. In some parts of the city there are still constructs of historic bricks I suppose. But near the infamous Checkpoint Charlie there are only billboards of the Wall commemorating the Wall. A number of the bricks, I’ve been told by a German photographer with a build like a wrestler’s, have been used to pave the roads. No time to drive over to the East Side Gallery, the stretch of wall (the longest, best-preserved and most interesting stretch) turned into a gallery by artists from around the world after the fall of communism. I spot a book at a souvenir shop chronicling Keith Haring’s graffiti work on the Wall.

I try to look for a book chronicling the fixations of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed on Berlin, but can’t find one. What a great read that would be. Think of the facts, the fictions, the flirtations.

Bowie recorded at Hansa Studios in the German capital with producer Brian Eno and King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. One of the studios was a converted dancehall where Gestapo officers partied during social events.

Iggy’s pose on the cover of “The Idiot” was inspired by Erich Heckel’s “Roquairol” painting, which the Stooge saw at the Brücke Museum of Expressionist Art.

Bowie has a “Berlin Trilogy” of albums composed of the bleak yet beautiful “Low,” the epic “Heroes” and the underrated “Lodger” (even if the third platter was recorded in Switzerland, and “Heroes” was the only one recorded entirely in Berlin). Bowie also had a brief affair with a transsexual cabaret star in Berlin.

Lou put out an album titled “Berlin.” A Rolling Stone writer heralded it as “the ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ of the Seventies.” He was wrong. “Berlin” is something else entirely. Something cold, detached and a bit depraved. With songs about “Caroline,” “Jim” and people who are “speeding and lonely, and who make love by proxy.”

Bowie co-produced Lou’s “Transformer” album with Spiders from Mars guitarist Mick Ronson. Bowie sang backup on Lou’s lilting Satellite of Love. Pom-pom-pom.

Andy Warhol “produced” the debut record of Lou’s former band, the Velvet Underground. He also created the iconic banana album cover. 

Iggy was assisted by Bowie on the excellent Pop solo outing “Lust for Life,” even co-writing a couple of tracks.

Eno (onetime Roxy Music member who also produced U2’s “Achtung Baby,” which was recorded in Berlin as well) has a system called Oblique Strategies, which involves 100 cards, each carrying a random musical instruction that is to be obeyed during recording.

Bowie wrote the title track of “Heroes,” a fable about two lovers standing by the Berlin Wall, inspired by a painting titled “Liebespaar Zwischen Gartenmauern” by Otto Mueller. Curiously, the singer’s manager had a tryst with a backup singer near the Wall.

Iggy appears in the segment titled “Somewhere in California” in the Jim Jarmusch movie Coffee and Cigarettes, together with another outsider who should’ve had a Berlin album: Tom Waits.

Lou got Bob Ezrin to produce “Berlin.” Ezrin (who went on to produce Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”) tagged Lou’s album as a “film for the ears.”

The man who used to call himself Ziggy Stardust once said in an interview that he likes Berlin, its friction and isolation. “I can’t write in a peaceful atmosphere at all. I’ve nothing to bounce off. I need the terror.” Four tracks on “Low” are Bowie’s electronic collaborations with Eno, who was inspired by Die Brücke (“The Bridge”) expressionist art school. He said in an interview that Die Brücke artists “all have a mood of melancholy about them or nostalgia, as if they were painting something that was just disappearing.”   

We leave Berlin for an afternoon flight to Stockholm, Sweden. The night before I found myself in a bar in downtown Berlin, eating pig knuckles (they’re actually good) and drinking beer by the liter. And after that it was back to the hotel to watch a home TV shopping channel fea-turing presenters in bondage costumes selling all sorts of paraphernalia. Our van, headed for the airport, passes through a cityscape of nostalgia and melancholia, with metal gray skies seemingly painted by Baselitz, and with a street hum coming as if from the oscillator banks of Brian Eno.

I take the camera out. Take a picture of something. A tableau of things that are just disappearing.

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Photos taken with the Sony Alpha 100 camera. Special thanks to Kata Digno of Sony Philippines and the Department of Tourism (DOT). For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja_ys@yahoo.com.