ARTISTS TALKING

# 56 [18 April 2007]

Straight away we were ready to go on the Fat Tire Berlin Bike tour.  Already it was raining but we were not deterred.  First we had breakfast at the top of the Galleria department store with its great view looking out at Alexanderplatz, then we joined the three other cyclists with Tom the guide, and off we went.  Just to trap us the skies cleared as we set off and so I didn't put on waterproof trousers or top.  Big mistake.  Once we were far enough away from the Fernsehturm the huge television tower where Fat Tire's office is, that it was too far to go back, it started pouring.  Undaunted we pressed on and occasionally the rain even stopped for a few minutes.  The rain did not put a damper on the joy of cycling around Berlin even if one might wince at the word, but a lunch break for Bratwurst and hot drinks came just in time to thaw out my hands and feet.  With us on the tour was an artist from South Carolina and her doctor husband.  As they turned up to go bicycling, they introduced themselves as "Joseph and Mary, we've left the Kid at home".  After the tour they invited us for afternoon tea at their hotel so that they could introduce me to a Berlin artist whose sister, lives in South Carolina.  They were such very warm and friendly people.  She is small, sweet, fair curly-haired, blue eyed, with a lilting Southern voice and an open nature.  Her paintings use her experiences such as when she worked in the Philippines with the street prostitutes.  Their friend turned out to be French but has lived as an artist in Berlin for more than twenty years.  It was such a pleasure, by unlikely chance, to meet up with these artists and lanky humorous Joseph.  We did have a short rest and a bite to eat before going out in the evening, my friend's first day in Berlin, a full one.  In fact we cut it so fine we took a taxi so that we wouldn't be late.  That is extravagant but the performance written and acted by Lindsay Annis was certainly worth it.  It was spectacular.  My Ulysses taken from and adapted James Joyce's Ulysses.  It was sharp and funny, the performance ribboned through with personal references about finding a flat in Berlin through an ad, and then another, and also references to the production.  The sound effects exactly, austerely, creatively imaginative.  As was the sparse choreography.  It was as I remembered off Broadway used to be before it got into being boring clichéd Fringe.  Now here in Berlin I felt the same intense excitement.  And you know what?  She's got a studio at the Milchhof.  That is so great.  The elation of the performance buoyed us up and we went to Gorky Park at one thirty in the morning for bowls of Borsht.  No problem.  Welcome to friendly-to-artists Berlin.

# 55 [14 April 2007]

A friend from London arrives today.  She's coming by overnight train and will arrive at 8:30 am.  My plan is to take her on a bicycle tour of Berlin too, but this time with a regular city tour that Tom guides so that she gets orientated.  What is the weather going to do?  After I had sent her the directions how to get from the Hauptbahnhof station by the S-bahn to Alexanderplatz she texted me that her guide book said that she would be arriving at Ostbahnhof, which threw me, and I had to stop and laboriously text her, (I'm crap at texting), that she definitely was not etc. until finally the penny dropped-she had a very old guide book.  My goodness why didn't she look at her ticket?  Guide Book perils are something to add to the list of travelling warnings. Soon I'm either going to be fit or dead.  Especially since I felt I had to do some housekeeping today, (steps back in amazement), and cleaned the floor in the anteroom which will be the guest bedroom for her. Even Tom from the office was amazed when he passed by. Now it looks quite cosy but how comfortable that inflatable bed really is, I'm not sure.

# 54 [12 April 2007]

As soon as we got our bikes from the Fat Tire Bike Company it began to rain.  After some dithering and then putting on both rain trousers and those clear plastic tops that all Americans seem to carry, off Sarah and I sped in a light drizzle, Tom leading the way.  Our first destination was to go further into the Eastern Zone to Friedrichshain where a mile of the Wall still remains, known as the East Gallery.  After that we cycled up Karl Marx Allee.  Sarah is a speeder while I hang back a little and look around, even sometimes taking photographs   So she set the pace with Tom asking him questions and I kept up but liked cycling at not quite such a ferocious pace.  We got back to Alexanderplatz just as the light was failing, much exhilarated.

# 53 [12 April 2007]

Funnily enough I woke with a sore throat.  It may be all the people smoking in the restaurant.  Berliners sure do smoke a lot.  The last gasp before it becomes illegal.  Manfred came to change my light bulb with his tall ladder and a cool white bulb.  I had mentioned that the one he had put in before was a yellow tungsten one and as a colourist it was driving me mental.  I was still in my navy terrycloth dressing gown and slippers, wet hair wrapped in a red towel, so I felt a bit like either a slut or a housewife.  Never mind my unprofessional appearance, the light is a great improvement.

Once actually up and about I felt I needed some fresh air so decided to walk about taking photographs.  Starting out in brilliant sunshine, soon it turned into driving rain, then sleet, snow and all of a sudden back to sunshine again.  Talk about changeable, but I got some good shots even if some were in the pouring rain, like the one of a girl walking by the gigantic Di Suvero sculpture carrying a plaster nude figure.  At one point I found another tiny Heimat shop and bought some cute postcards, one with silly little photos saying in German the admonition: ‘Avoid mentioning domestic difficulties-we all have them.  Suitable topics are children, dogs, and travel-Many thanks!' now whom am I going to send that to?

Meeting up with Sarah Kent in the evening again, we went to Tom's studio so that she could see his work and then went out to dinner at the November restaurant near Kathe Köllwitz Platz, and afterwards walked up to Kakao the fabulous hot chocolate place and bar.  One dark bitter 100% hot chocolate like that has probably got the serotonin content of three orgasms.  We're going cycling tomorrow.

# 52 [11 April 2007]

Finally, I think I'm making some progress on the paintings, but it all takes so much time that it is hard to fit everything in.  Sarah Kent the art critic is in Berlin writing about UK artists who have moved here to work.  Mona Hatoum is one and Susan Hiller, Tacita Dean are others.  Sarah came to my studio here to look at what I'm doing and then we went to dinner.  What a pleasure to be able to talk freely and be understood.  Apart from a few like the quicksilver landscape architect and the jazz singer who has lived in London for a time, the isolation here is the language.  It is as if one lives behind a sheet of glass prevented from being a real part.  Not that they aren't nice - Berliners are so very friendly and well mannered that I am astonished how very obliging and caring everyone is.  Everyone smiles and says ‘Hallo' and ‘Chuss' as we pass in the halls.  Any time I need to find out or get something done they are so helpful, but it is the chats and free conversations, to really get to know them, that can't happen without my speaking German, that I miss.  Sarah and I went to a wonderful laid-back place on Oderberger Strasse, which we both said reminded us of London in the late seventies.  A lot of Berlin is like that as if brimming with nostalgia.  All bare wood and hand decorated loos, no hassle, sweet people and what is more, delicious food.  A girl at the next table was doing her studies, writing in a book.

# 51 [10 April 2007]

For dinner I met up with Tom and another artist who also works as a bicycle tour guide.  Jonathan is German but has just come back from two years in Argentina.  His grandparents settled there and his parents had gone back to live in Argentina when the Second World War broke out.  He was quick to say that his family were against the war and didn't want to have any part in it, although we hadn't asked, but this war business still raises its head even if unspoken.  An extremely volatile, cheerful fellow, he certainly had the sun darkened skin and look of a gaucho, keeping us entertained by his anecdotes of his life in Argentina.  We were eating at the so popular Monsieur Vuong's where the queues are so long and the place is so packed for the two Vietnamese specialities that they offer each day, that getting part of a table seems like a victory.  The mango and coconut smoothie was divine.

Afterwards we went to the Art Pub, which has been open by the English artist Paul Woods.  Everyone that works there is an artist, a Siberian one behind the bar, and the walls are changing exhibitions of his own and others works.  Musical groups play there on some nights, poetry readings, or artist discussions other nights.  He first came to Berlin in 2000 when everything was wide open and he squatted like they all did in the empty abandoned buildings.  He was part of a squat of artists that included some from the Milchhof.  Tall, thin and with one of those scraggy beards, he talked a mile a minute about all his projects and possibilities, even outtalking Jonathan.  He had first started opening galleries in empty shops, building up a group of artists around him, but then he got a backer and opened this Art Pub in November and did a bustling business.  However, unlike running a gallery where he freely operated it, as he liked, Paul said that being a pub brought all sorts of nasty elements circling round.  Criminals demanding protection money, drug dealers wanting to be included, Neo-Nazis turning up, all the underworld elements made him a target.  After many all-out fights and punchings he called the police.  Now all of a sudden no one comes.  It's true we were the only ones there that night.  His telephone and Internet has been cut off and the pub no longer pays its way.  Irrepressible though, in spite of these woes he went on to talk of the artist projects he wants to set up and the performances he is going to give along with artist workshops on how to make money.  Did you hear that last bit?  A real alternative systems breaker.  Hats off to his indomitable spirit even if smashing keyboards, as part of musical performance isn't as cutting edge as it once was.

# 50 [9 April 2007]

For two days now I haven't been able to get an Internet signal outside the journalists' office to send any emails, which is frustrating.  Finally I copied all my stuff onto a CD and was preparing to do the trek to the Internet shop at Rosa-Luxemburg Platz.  It was a drag as it was well after nine in the evening.   I don't like the one nearer here as he charges double and I always lose my work because he charges before use and then inevitably the computer shuts down before I am ready to click Send.  I went upstairs just to check once more, and this time there was the elegant girl who works for Le Monde in Paris, beautiful with long ash brown hair and pale face, but she always looks tired as she has to work long and hard for them covering the political stories.  So we tapped away until midnight.

# 49 [9 April 2007]

After getting the edges right in the orange painting, I decided to try and look up the galleries that are listed in the surrounding area, but it isn't as easy as looking up the address and hey presto there it is.  Berlin has the most difficult street numbering system of anywhere I've been to with the exception of Seoul.  In Berlin the numbers start at one and continue consecutively like that all the way down one side until the other end and then they go back up sequential until that end so one and say six hundred and thirty face each other.  The rub is that you have to know how long the street is and which way to start off.  With wide streets it is a real pain because one can't easily check what the numbers are doing across the way.  So geared to insider knowledge, interesting as always.  One gallery listed on Oderberger Strasse, after walking up and down a bit, turned out to be a person's name on an apartment block.  No answer on the phone or the doorbell.  Well, maybe another day.  Then walking down, a long way trying to find 176 Schönhauser Allee, I passed all sorts of intriguing shops: a tatooist whose premises were lined with richly coloured silk hangings and gave the impression of an Eastern cult; a plumber's where a girl had on nothing but a towel and was being photographed in the bath in the window; a shop that was for used clothing and objects but with everything set out so exquisitely that it made me wonder if they were new things designed to look second-hand, but it was closed so I couldn't check; a building with classical column that was so massive it looked unbelievable, and turned out to be a school; a massage and sauna establishment down a courtyard; a vivid red brick Roman Catholic African church that was so angular and odd that it made me wonder if parts of it had been bombed away and they just joined the standing parts with the dome; a ‘Natur' shop that had bolts of cloth with most peculiar old fashioned lumpy clothes hanging that had been handmade there with no attention to to-days or yesterdays fashions so that wearing them I suppose one would look ‘natur; but no 176.  Except that this plastered over with graffiti and fly bills boarded up wall, what is that?  Look it has number 176.  Going up the stairs that were covered in graffiti, one came into a conclave of abandoned buildings around a little park.  There is a tiny workers cafe in the corner that is open for lunches mid week and the rest is closed but is a biergarten in the summer.  So where is the gallery.  Asking the man who was clearing up rubble he said ‘ya, ya,' and waved to the back where there was one of those red and white stripy keep out tapes strung over the derelict public toilets, and yes a small sign with a red arrow on it.  Past some construction work and a pile of rubble one then voilà, came out into one of those fabulous renovations of what had been a brewery, and now is the úber chic Akira Ikeda gallery with a massive red steel Mark Di Suvero sculpture outside.  Wow.  But they don't make it easy for anybody.

# 48 [8 April 2007]

Going down to the basement to try and find a light bulb, I again was in the fantastic atmosphere of dark, burrowing, creepy, sort of dungeon-like basement filled with vivid light cells where Marcus Wittmers and his assistants are working at all hours on his large ironic fibreglass polychromatic sculptures.  Superman is crouched in a corner looking ashen faced up at the sky, and outside an even larger Superman is crashing to the ground splitting his head open.  Marcus is great.  Because he works such late hours down there, he has always rescued me when my key or the front door lock jammed.

No bulb was to be found but one of the sculptors said she had a halogen spotlight that I could have, so we went up to the ground floor to get it.  Wiebke Wachmann's large studio, every bit, was completely painted with multilayered, dazzling white, and one wall had banks of white fluorescent tubes like gym bars.  The effect was of a literal fog of white, palpable whiteness filling the room.  It is like a James Turrell but she has installations within this and makes photographic sculptures from it.  Behind all those heavy steel doors at the Milchhof there are many surprises.   Lisabetta, a painter on the first floor, has got a commission to do one hundred and thirty pictures all to strict specification of the same size, 120 x 140 cm. and technique, for an Anthroposophist Hospital that requires the Rudolph Steiner technique. This uses very thin water-based layers of the primary colours red, yellow, blue, on top of each other, making orange, green, and purple paintings.  The differences in colour come about by the sequence of the applications.  There are to be two paintings of the same all-over colour, in each of the sixty-five rooms, one on either side of the television, facing the bed.  To me this sounds like a surrealistic fable, but I can see that it might be quite soothing.

# 47 [7 April 2007]

Putting my head down, I just solidly caught up on the painting waiting to be done and got the colour relationships in place.  Gulping down a late lunch of a plate of mozzarella salad, and a chunk of chocolate, I rushed off to revisit the Gemăldegalerie Museum and spent a long absorbing time looking at the Vermeers, the Titian Venus, Velasquez's Picture of a Woman, Cranach's Adam and Eve, and Dührer's Two Sisters that have been recently reunited.  An illuminating satisfying three hours, being filled by wonder.