Saturday, 9 April 2011

Look Good in Ruins (or: Twenty-five Tangents about Bowie in "Berlin")






















kein Hakenkreuz entdecken
























Being an artist in postwar West Germany meant being part of a "lost generation." This was on account of a major aesthetic disruption -- first, from having been removed from the modernist continuum by Hitler and his cultural commissars, only to be plunged back into it after an extended absence. The past buried twice over. The result was a sense of alienation, of feeling culturally adrift, hopelessly provincial. What to paint in the West Germany of the 1950s? A number of artists opted for Abstract Expressionism, since that was the favored international style of the day. But somehow -- what, with all its heroic and romantic and subjective underpinnings -- it didn't feel right. And adopting some mode of art brut-styled shabbiness or art informel neo-primitivism was problematic for a whole different set of reasons. It all seemed dismally inadequate and second-hand. So to be an artist in postwar West Germany meant having to find your own way, devising new methods and means of reconnecting with the surrounding culture -- a new iconography for articulating the times.

But if you were in East Germany, you didn't face this sort of quandary, because the state had already made the choice for you. That choice being the mandated style of Socialist Realism -- long favored by the Soviets, and not much different from the official art of the Third Reich. Interestingly enough, a number of prominent postwar West German artists were defectors from the former East Germany. This was the case with the artists Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter, who -- having learned their painterly chops under the state-mandated, institutionalized style of Socialist Realism -- met in the early 1960s and began trading ideas. Between the two of them and a third artist by the name of Konrad Lueg, they soon cooked up a platform for their own mode of production -- one based in the visual language of advertising, which they christened "Capitalist Realism." The way they saw it, it all amounted to one form of propaganda or another in the end.



It was probably just as well that Bowie had gotten into rock'n'roll, because there was no point in being a painter man in the 1970s. As the mandarin aesthetic discourse of the day had it, the medium of painting was dead; deemed outmoded, obsolete, mired in formalism and tradition, elitist and undemocratic in its institutional and technical orientation. The act of picking up a paintbrush, as critic Matthew Collings would later put it, was the equivalent of worshipping Satan. (Or, to put it another way: What guitar solos were to punk, painting was to the art community in the 1970s.) In the prior decade of the 1960s, art practices had splintered off into a diffuse set of multimedia practices; with the boundaries of what constituted "worthy" subject matter being thrown wide open, thus ushering in the age of art spelt with a lower-case a.

Of all the artistic movements of the 1960s, the international Fluxus movement most epitomized this jettisoning of big-A art. And in NYC during the 1970s, Fluxus's most prominent German representative Joseph Beuys was regarded as one of the most significant European artists of the postwar era. Artworld types crammed auditoriums to hear him talk. At the René Block Gallery in 1974, he performed his famous piece "I Like America and America Likes Me," which involved him being locked in a room with a coyote for three days. As was typical with Beuys's work, interpretations of the performance varied; but many saw it as involving themes about American history -- about manifest destiny, the materialistic nature of American culture, as well as the country's ongoing military involvement in Southeast Asia.



But something about the chronology is a little off, here, in terms of Bowie's interest in Germany is concerned. As far as the avant-garde was concerned, Expressionism was out of vogue by the time of the Weimar Republic. Weimar was, instead, the age of Die Neue Sachlichkeit -- the "New Sobriety," or (depending on which translation you opt for) the "New Objectivity." It was that period after WWI in which Germany was in turmoil, and a younger generation of artists had come along and rebelled, declaring that Expressionism -- with all its interiority and subjectivity and romanticizing of the artist's creative vision and ego -- was too bloated and self-important, too wrongly out of tune with the times. Art and literature and film, it was decided, should instead cast its gaze outward; outward to society, and critically reflect all of that society's aspects -- especially its excesses, its injustices and hypocrisies, its innumerable desperations.

Yes, Weimar...cabaret and homosexuality and transvestites and jazz and decadence, extreme economic disparities, death and crime and riots in the streets. All of that, up until the point when a new regime came to power and put things in order. And therein (perhaps) lies part of the iconic romantic appeal of Weimar -- the orgiastic, blinkered indulgences of a dark chapter in history. And then a page in the history book turns and an even darker and more troubling chapter begins.

Being a creative sort and a young gay male, Christopher Isherwood had -- along with confrere W.H. Auden -- relocated to Berlin to get in on the action, mainly looking to expatriate himself to a climate where his own sexuality might meet with fewer social reprisals. But as a writer, he was also attuned to the culture, and fell in step with the New Objectivity. "I am a camera," he famously wrote, "With its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. ... Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."


Jörg Immendorff, Hört auf zu malen! (Give Up Painting!), 1966


In the context of postmodernity -- with its linchpin criteria of pluralism, hybridity, circumscription, semiotic slippage, and distanciated irony -- there is nothing inherently problematic about blue-eyed soul.



"The avant-garde was defeated by the changing conditions in which it had to operate. Huyssen contends that the avant-garde was either killed off by the repressive political regimes or dissolved in cultural environments like the United States where its dialectic could find no purchase. In dozens of accounts the latter is described as a process of cynically selling out, or being forced out in what financial journalism would call a hostile takeover, some voluntary or involuntary collusion with art markets and hegemonic systems of representation that belies the avant-garde's revolutionary pretensions. [. . .] The economic equation can of course also be used retroactively to discredit the avant-garde all the way back to its point of inception: now the avant-garde was never anything more than a way to generate new commodities or develop a more striking sales pitch. This critique is usually attached to analyses of the so-called culture industry. In the west this death-as-devaluation is also a by-product of the perception that the revolutionary movements with which the avant-garde has historically been linked tend inevitably to end not in utopias but in totalitarianism."
- Paul Mann, The Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde



Joseph Beuys wasn't the only German artist to be a hot ticket item in New York at the time. In fact, interest in German art -- of both the current and early twentieth-century variety -- was in vogue in the late 1970s, resulting in what some would soon refer to as a "German Invasion." First came the arrival of high-rolling German art dealers setting up stateside satellite outposts in the city's main gallery district. Then followed a gradual invasion proper, with critics and collectors taking an advanced interest in the works of contemporary German artists. Starting with Beuys, and then followed Sigmar Polke and Georg Baselitz and Blinky Palermo and Jörg Immendorff and A.R. Penck and Anselm Kiefer and eventually Gerhard Richter, and there were plenty of others where they came from. Sure, painting was still a dubious pursuit and, yes, most of these guys were painters. But due to some twist in historico-criterial rationale, the Germans were issued a pass. Maybe it was because, in sorting through the societal rubble of postwar German culture, this generation of artists was engaging the medium in exceptional ways, turning its conventional visual syntax against itself with the driest sense of irony. Whatever the case, this newfound interest in contemporary German artists would remain a staple of the NYC uptown art boom of the 1980s.


Albert Speer's German Chancellery. Berlin, 1945


Ruination would arrive much earlier than Speer or Hitler had anticipated. Along with a number of cities throughout Germany, Berlin would be obliterated by the Allied powers aerial bombing campaigns between the years of 1942 and 1945.

Economically crippled and purged of any- and everyone who had been associated with the Third Reich, the German film industry lumbered into the postwar reconstruction era with limited means and resources. What followed were a series of middling-budget dramas set in the streets and among devastation of the country's cities. The result was a short-lived form of cinematic neorealist genre/not-genre that would later come to be known as Trümmerfilme ("rubble films"). This variety of film, reputedly, would prove unpopular with German audiences, who preferred movies that could offer them an escape from their daily lives.


Anselm Kiefer, Martin Heidegger, 1976.


At this point, I imagine there's a really profound and pertinent quote by Heidegger that I could insert here. Something connected to cultural memory and nostalgia and the role of myth in a socio-historical context. Something that might add a little more rigorously academic and metaphysical weight to this scattered and meandering spiel.

But honestly, I really don't feel like going out of my way to search for one. Because while David Bowie might not have actually been a fascist, Martin Heidegger was. So fuck him.



True, there was the popularity of "Autobahn," which brought the music of Kraftwerk to many people's attention. Bowie had been impressed and used Kraftwerk's music to open each show on his Station to Station tour. And there was the motorik rhythm of the Düsseldorf outfit Neu!, which can be heard echoing throughout Bowie's so-called "Berlin Trilogy." Brian Eno was quite smitten with it too, going so far in 1976 as to seek out Neu's Michael Rother (by this point working in the trio Harmonia) for the sake of recording together.

The motorik rhythm: mechanical pulse and vibration. The cycling of the engine, the oscillations of wiper blades, the road and the tires providing a baseline drone from underneath. The experience of traveling along motorways; that arterial network linking city to town, traversing borders and scattered terrains. Life in transition, the landscape always in passing. Speed -- deliberate, enabled by technology -- as the essence of twentieth-century modernity, its tautology and telos.


Left: Wim Wenders, Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976. Right: Gerhard Richter, Platterspieler, 1987.


For Wim Wenders, early rock'n'roll tunes made for the ideal travel music. This is what often serves as a diegetic trope throughout the director's "road movie" trilogy of the mid 1970s, particularly in the trilogy's finale Kings of the Road (Im Lauf der Zeit, 1976) It's the soundtrack of choice for the film's two protagonists -- film-house projector repairman Bruno and suicidal drifter Robert -- as they travel the open roads between dead-end towns along the country's eastern border along the Zonenrandgebiet.

At one point in Kings of the Road, Bruno and Robert are poking around in a shabby, empty small-town theater. Having finished his repairs on the projector, Bruno gathers a few short strands of film he finds on the floor of the projection booth and whimsically splices them into a loop. The duo ease back into a pair of theater seats and wryly admire Bruno's improvised handiwork -- a short montage of sex and catastrophe repeated ad infinitum, the gratuitous staples of cheap entertainment filling the void of a culture in flux. As the character Robert mutters at another point in the film, "The Americans have colonized our subconscious."


Left: The verb imperative? East Germany, circa 1960-ish. Right: Gerhard Richter
rolling out the season's Capitalist Realism wares in Düsseldorf, 1966.


Polke and Richter's formulation of "Capitalist Realism" was, as such, a variant of Pop Art -- a reading of the movement's engagement with the dominant culture from a postwar German perspective. As some proponents of postmodernism would later decree, Pop Art marks a pivotal moment in the history of twentieth century art; the moment of dissolution and terminus in which the critical imperatives of the modernist avant-garde -- e.g. the Futurists' demand of taking art into the streets, of aestheticizing everyday life, its adversarial attack on the status quo of the larger society, etc. -- were overtaken and subsumed into the common (re: commodity, consumerist, "everyday") culture. By this rationale, during the 1970s some critics asserted that art and its avant-gardes were now officially dead. An artwork was now little more than another product circulating in a broader political economy, of no greater cultural importance than any other commodity -- be it a car, a kitchen appliance, or a sitcom on TV. Or so the argument had it. But as far as lazy and under-nuanced postmodern declarations go, this obituary more than slightly reeked of a self-gratified bourgeoisie triumphalism.



The album title Low reportedly described the state and mood Bowie was in during its creation. West Germany had seen its share of lows at the time, as well. In some respects, some things in West Germany weren't much different than they were elsewhere during the 1970s. The "economic miracle" of its postwar recovery years had ground to a crawl, bringing a spike in unemployment and labor unrest. Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign from office when it was discovered that one of his top aides was secretly in the employ of the East German Stasi. And in 1977 -- just a couple of weeks after Bowie and company wrapped up their sessions for "Heroes" at Berlin's Hansa Studio by the Wall -- the country was entering the one of most violent and politically tumultuous episodes of its postwar years. It was the "German Autumn" which marked the culmination of the country's long-running conflict with the Baader-Meinhof gang, bringing with it a series of connected events that involved kidnapping, hijacking, murder, and death. While these events were very specific to the decade, they also pointed backwards; begging a number of critical questions about the society's self-imposed cultural amnesia and denial, its unwillingness or inability to acknowledge -- let alone address -- the ghosts of its own history prior to the "year zero" of 1945. There were some things, it seemed, that couldn't simply be bulldozed away with the rubble.



Rapidly going broke, mental and physical health in shambles, life run off the rails. Bowie had reputedly gone to Berlin for a number of reasons -- reasons both personal and creative. To what degree he achieved what he wanted to achieve, made the changes he hoped to make, or how much the city met his expectations or provided him what he sought is anyone's guess. Dicey going, that -- going to a place while viewing it from an earlier half of the century, from a remote and amputated portion of its own history.

What we do know, once the facts are teased out from the blur of myth and marketing copy, is that Bowie didn't spend the entire time of 1977-1978 in the city. Of the three albums that fall under his so-called Berlin Trilogy, only one of them was fully recorded there. But as a critical rubric, the "Berlin years" designate a distinct and transitional phase in the artist's career. There's the much dissected sonic difference that evolved from working by alternate methods of crafting and developing songs, drawing from a set of different influences, from working with specific people at a specific time. Lyrically, the material is in some ways darker, at other turns cryptic and fragmented. It was also, at first, sometimes more personal. It was as if the artist who'd spent the past several years submerging himself in a sequence of invented identities and elaborate theatrics finally had to check in and find out who, if anyone, was still at home.


W. Kasper said...

Tangent 20 made me LOL with a healthy sense of dasein...

But classy stuff - you could get a whole lot of other tangents out of each one. Berlin did loom large in the late 70s.

Greyhoos said...

Yeah, had that Kiefer graphic on hand, figured it might be good for lightening the mood/breaking the tedium.

Phil Knight said...

That David Bowie Nazi salute is so obviously not a Nazi salute. I'm amazed that fiction is still entertained.

Besides, you're supposed to put your finger over your top lip.

Michael said...

You could argue that Bowie anticipated German Neo-Expressionist painting, although its hard to imagine anyone taking seriuosly at the time paintings of Iggy Pop done in the style of Erich Heckel. The sleeve of "Low" is a joke apparently, Bowie in profile.. low profile. His desire for anonymity was so strong when he arrived in Berlin he even grew a moustache, how German is that?

Greyhoos said...

Anticipated? Since these things often go in cycles, it may be more be a case of: if you wear that pair of flared trousers long enough...

Michael said...

Ok, I'm pushing it a bit but Bowie was hardly the man sitting round waiting for his trousers to come back in was he? If something was coming round he could sniff it. No coke pun intended. On the subject of cocaine, Bowie is the worst example for the drugs/creativity argument. He got crap when he stopped.