ARTISTS TALKING

# 16 [14 February 2007]

Keeping up my newly renewed socialising, I met up with two other friends of a friend, this time writers from New York.  They were rather surprised that they had to enter my studio crouching down through the dungeon-like basement so as not to hit their heads on the pipes and emerging covered in plaster dust, but were sportingly witty about it.  If I now tell you that one of these New Yorkers is certified blind, you will realise how urbane that is. They took me out for a great German lunch, food piled up and marvellously fast and amusing New York chat.  Having been an artist hermit for a month, more or less, in the studio, it made me elated to be with them and gave me so much energy to do my work.  Maybe it is because of the groundwork put in, but now I feel on solid ground with what I'm doing.  And it does somehow come out of all that I've been experiencing here. The one thing that was a bit of a shock was when I went to Boesner's today, the big art shop, they said it would be at least a month before I could have the stretched canvases of the large size I want.  That has to be got around somehow.

# 15 [9 February 2007]

Talking of flea markets, I went back to see if the perfect white bowl was still there, and it was, but before putting down my thirty euros, I wandered around the market and there in the centre, a woman, bundled up in a big brown coat, scarf round her head against the biting wind, eating a sandwich, had all sorts of bowls, including a plain white bowl of the same sort of size.  Asking her how much it was, I asked her several times because she kept saying eine, I thought to the woman next to me rummaging through the stuff.  Finally she held up her thumb, "eine" to me.  One euro, I couldn't believe it but quickly gave her a euro for the bowl, which she even wrapped up.  Not perfect like the other one, not original thirties plain roundness, but perfectly good.  The way using perfect as a modifier shows its' imperfection.  In fact I like its' utility plainness.  Tableware instead of china, but fine.  On the stall I also spied a blue and yellow fluted glass bowl that had been hand-painted by someone, and pressing my luck I tentatively asked about the price.  That she breezily said I could have for half a euro.  Having gone there with the intention of buying one bowl for thirty euros, I came away with two bowls for one euro fifty.  Not the perfect one but great.   How satisfactory.  Going back, I passed the writer D.B.C. Pierre and we said Hi.  Well he looked bemused, (as he's familiar to me from television and his books), but friendly.  In my elated mood I then spent another euro on some daffodil stalks and went home whistling I'd like to say, as it would convey my mood, unfortunately I have never been able to whistle, but you know what I mean.

# 14 [6 February 2007]

An art shop, a flea market, both within five minutes walk, a Kaiser food supermarket next door, the tram at the corner, two different U-Bahn underground stations within ten minutes walk or one tram ride, and cafes and restaurants galore, this Milchhof is definitely a des res.  The front door lock is a problem though.  During the night there was a big crashing sound.  It might have been the wind that was so fierce that it picked up chairs and a wooden bar counter in the side yard smashing them down into a heap.  Then again it could have been someone trying to get in, or out, because the next day the front door could not be opened.  I was standing there facing up to this just as my friend of a friend in London; Tom was arriving on his bicycle.  At that moment, as it seems to happen here, a solution appeared in the large masterful German form of the sculptor Mark.  Just back from his month away, about to form a band in his ground floor studio he quickly took charge.  I was to use the basement entrance, where Marcus, another sculptor, had a studio, down with the central heating plant.  So that solved, we went to a café and talked about being in Berlin in English.

# 13 [6 February 2007]

Jules Olitski American Colour Field Painter died last night, Sunday 04 February 2007. Those paintings were beautiful and influential. I first saw reproductions of them in Time magazine when it was news that Olitski was making stained paintings with the edges, (the edges!), being the focal point. That was his breakthrough and later on his all-over sprays of colour. Today artists are still remaking and recreating his breakthroughs, although not with his originality.

# 12 [2 February 2007]

Days pass quickly with so many choices of things to accomplish and things to explore.  Some times there is so much to do in the studio that I don't get out at all, yet other times I'm out so much at museums and looking around, that I can't get done what I'd planned.  The advantage of a computer is that you give it a task and it does it full-stop, (or crashes), but humans, and I like to think, especially artists, go off on tangents because so many possibilities lie at each stage.  That way madness lies, one might say, but using some sort of discipline, interesting possibilities creep in.  Working steadily on a drawing, I found myself dancing around the studio.  It must be the weather, so bright and mild now that is making me less hermit-like and ready to make some contacts.  Having emailed an artist who lives in Berlin, friend of a friend in London, and arranged to meet for a coffee tomorrow afternoon, I'm looking forward to an insider's viewpoint. 

# 11 [1 February 2007]

A great bright dry day, I rolled up my sleeves and got stuck in drawing.  That's the way I like to work, before breakfast, before getting dressed, before getting up in a way, so that the night's thoughts are still with me.  Because of the deadline for the cleaner, I did stop and shower just before ten, but it breaks the rhythm.  Coming back, the mood is more stepped back.  Looking critically at what I've done makes me rip up a couple of sheets and wreck another by overcorrecting.  At least I finally have the feeling that I might be starting to work properly.  Outside influences are a funny thing because it is only afterwards that one sees what they are.  Working all day like that was great, but I popped a toffee in my mouth about five pm and you guessed it.  With the very first chew I lost a filling. Aaaargh.  What a nuisance.  What do I do now?  My first instinct is to do nothing and carry on until I get back to London even though that is ten weeks away.  I'll have to see how bad it gets.  It may be slightly throbbing already or is that my hypochondria?   After that I went out and bought some more pencils at the art shop.  Since I haven't spoken to anyone for so long that I found I'd lost my voice and just a tiny croak came out.  Well I'm going to the dogs I must say.  Getting on the M1 tram to go to the organic shop, blow me down but a car ran into the tram and we all had to get out and walk.  As far as could be discerned, no one was much hurt but the front of the car was smashed in and would have to be towed away.  That is so weird because the roads are very quiet with never much traffic on them and the trams run on fixed rails. Bicycles, cars, people; everything has to give way.  They are implacable and have to be obeyed.  Evidently being run over by a tram killed Gaudi the genius architect.  Not paying attention, I guess, like the driver tonight.  Boiled potatoes, cheese, a banana for supper for me, nothing chewy

# 10 [31 January 2007]

  Being alone like this brings me to thoughts of solitary life.  Spare me please the apparition of Sister Wendy Beckett, nun artist looming.  I'm back to nodding my head up and down looking out the window at the distortions in the glass.  Actually it is absorbing, as a metaphor at how one looks at a culture from the outside.  Patterns appear but are they really there?

Returning to the Hamburger Hof Museum, I enjoyed eating the sweets from the Felix Gonzalez-Torres installations, (until I got a stomach ache), but even more agreeable was being able to carry away the ‘Please take one' sheets of paper as they will be great for messing about drawings.  In the Joseph Beuys galleries, the huge blocks of fat, old machinery, felted violin and other autobiographical objects in glass cases sit dumbly without the strutting egoist himself saying how important they are.  Warhol undoubtedly was just as big an egoist, ( as probably every artist is, what moi? saying ‘Look at me, look at me'.  Outsider mental patients excluded.), but his "Oh I don't know.  Gee whiz." stance is much more agreeable and contemporarily relevant.  A Damian Hirst glass case of shelved pharmaceuticals is in the collection.  Titled ‘Void', I at first thought they must be sleeping capsules, but looking closer I saw there were a lot of haemmaroid suppositories, and the capsules must be laxatives.  So the work isn't shit but it produces...  Funny.

# 9 [31 January 2007]

Descending again into the dark of ‘The Art of Projection' made me aware of how there is this split or war between projected works using light, and art using matter.  With the light works we are paradoxically forced and funnelled into blackness, separated from the world by insulating curtains and corridors.  Like wraiths in an underworld one then stumbles, until the eyes become accustomed, against other spectators until one then goes on to the next projection.  Actually this work in its way, is looked at like paintings or sculpture, in the way that we are accustomed to look at art, unlike cinema which we also watch in the dark, we look for as long or as briefly as we want, and then walk on.  The difference is that without a beginning or an end that one would wait for as in cinema, and especially because there are no seats or not more than a token cushion or a wall to lean against, one moves on having witnessed a fragment only.  Of course a fragment does carry the integrity of the whole but it is a little like cutting out one of Cezanne's apples, there is not the satisfaction of an entity.  That is part of the medium's withholding, (sadism I want to say), and its unique expression.  Some works are too long like Douglas Gordon's Twenty-four Hour Pyscho', or Matthew Barney's ‘Crewmaster' series, but mostly there is unstructured ambiguity or repetition, without narrative.  Marcel Broodthaler's ‘One Second of Eternity', a perfect if extreme example with, as I now discover, simply his signature initials O. M. flashing.   Certainly this art of projection does reflect a lot that our collective lives have morphed into, being bound to our laptops day and night.  In the museum shop I buy a Robert Crumb postcard of a trailer trashy lout at a computer: ‘How did I ever live without this thing'.

# 8 [29 January 2007]

Hours drift away while I read about Berlin and shuffle all the brochures and listings.  Planning to go out means studying the map and then the transportation system map.  This takes a lot of time, but once I actually do get out at least I know where I'm going.  Social guilt means I get up earlier in the mornings, even though I stay up late reading, writing, putting up some paper on the walls. 

The episodic nature of time and experience has been influenced by the email phenomena. I get vast amounts of junk emails. Every day there are between twenty-five and thirty-five emails in the Bulk folder.  I delete them all without looking, but the ones that irritate me are the ones that slip through and I think well maybe that might be from someone I know.  Then immediately delete it because no, it's not.  Today I finally have got going and worked steadily in the studio.    Overcome by email ephemera, I try to draw something that at least is a real mark and not just restlessness.  It is the steely seriousness of the German mind that I'm hitting up against.

24/01/2007

A great day at the Hamburger Hof Museum of 21st Century Art with its' monumental Anselm Keifer installations, huge Richard Long Slate Circle and such a large exhibition of ‘Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection', that I have to go back to see the Felix Gonzales-Torres and Beuys that I missed.  Warhol's ‘Knives', 1981-82 looks terrific as does his ‘Sickle and Hammer'.  Upstairs, coupled with a Marcel Broodthaler exhibition of ‘Le Corbeau et Le Renard', a series by Arnold Dreyblatt, ‘Ephemeral Epygrahica', digital papyrus translations printed in transparent layers over each other, so that they appear and disappear, from concept to execution are remarkable.

# 7 [23 January 2007]

Many of the buildings show the damage from the Battle of Berlin, and there are a lot of empty spaces and unreconstructed buildings just left.  Broken Berlin is still shattered, especially on this eastern side that didn't have the pouring in of American money.  Imbedded into the footpaths are brass tablets as memorials for the Jewish people who had lived in those buildings before Auschwitz.   A very large ruined complex of buildings with a big archway used to be a famous artist's squat but now will become commercial.  At last I got to the New National Gallery.  Built in 1968 it is Mies van der Rohe's last built building - a masterpiece.  O. M. Ungers Cosmos of Architecture is the featured exhibition and includes his own collection of artworks.  A knockout Ellsworth Kelly painting, Black Green 1980, Donald Judd's cadmium red, Half Solid Tube Piece 1990, in that show plus other works in the museum's collection, make me feel very happy. 

When I lived in New Zealand, I had a neighbour with three daughters.  One day, this recent widow intrepidly climbed up onto the roof to try to fix a leaking tile.  She fell off onto her head, and from then on lived in an institution, with the eldest daughter Fiona, bringing up the other two girls.  They used to bemoan that they would never be married now, saying that in New Zealand men only marry girls that are rich.  Not entirely true I'm sure, but true enough everywhere, viz Jane Austen for the reverse.  When the mother came for weekend visits, she looked the same, however it was as if her head was an egg, which unlike Humpty Dumpty's, the shell remained unbroken but the insides were scrambled.  She used to try to find things that weren't there and ask about "her area".

Still not quite habituated to this routine of living out of a studio and a suitcase with hygienic facilities at a distance, I keep forgetting where I've put things.  Today it happened, coming out of my hot shower I realized that the towel was back in the studio across the public, unheated corridor.   That's when I thought of that brave New Zealand widow: In my case, same on the outside, but very stupid inside.  But hey, for a few years when I was a child, we lived on a farm in Canada with the outhouse some distance away and a pump for the well outside the kitchen door.  And that was high snow to get through.