I always wanted to get to know Christian Ebert better. During our overlapping time at San Francisco Art Institute and later during his six months marriage to Stephanie, which was terminated like an unwanted child in the second trimester, we crossed paths only long enough to get a sense that he was a great guy, but never enough time to get into the weeds. Stephanie lived in Berlin with her husband and children; instead, I reached out to Christian.
He suggested we meet at Hamburger Bahnhof. At first I thought he was making a joke about the Hauptbahnhof. I arrived two hours early and decided to see the show without him, once, so I wouldn't feel rushed or distracted. In the central Historic Hall was a four projection installation of Agnieszka Polska entitled, "The Demon's Brain." The screens shows footage of a devastated forest, dialogue between two people that are dressed to medieval period, a horse rider and a strange, hand-drawn animated owl, which I presumed was the demon. Between the projections were piles of foam core mattresses for visitors to sit on. The film follows "a young messenger tasked with delivering these letters on horseback. Along the way, the boy loses his horse and he gets lost in the forest. There he has an unexpected encounter with a demon, whose monologue fuses Christian theological ideas with today’s developments concerning resource consumption, environmental destruction, data capital, and artificial intelligence." [1] Thematically I really enjoyed the work, but I found that animated parts to be visually hard to swallow. The live film was UHD and cinematic while the animated interludes felt like moving clip art or cartoons. The white horse sequences, rendered in 1990s CGI style, were interesting. The audio was really great. I watched other visitors try to make sense of how to engage this, and most looked like I felt: lost. As a narrative in which there is something “to get,” and, by extension, a necessity “to follow” what is going on, the work may have been better suited for a sit and watch black box setting, rather than multi-channel, meandering format. But that’s another position in contemporary art.
I saw “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions,” as well, but didn’t feel very much from it. Topically, I was very interested in:
“The emphasis on “speaking” or “talking” raises questions as to how meaning is created and conveyed, and for whom. The concept of “meaning” in Western science seems especially human, since most semiotic modes of communication presuppose a human mindset. And yet language is just one mode of expression in the planetary semiosis, and like other meaningful acts, it is rooted in the environment and all those dependent on it.” [2]
Visually, the show was boring maybe because it actually fulfilled the vision of the international artspeak statement. Don’t use ‘semiosis’ on a wall text. We get that you have a PhD. Also due to the disparate styles of the participating artists, in part due to the poor quality of the artworks. Nothing even slowed my meander through the space.
Christian punctually arrived and we took a coffee in the cafe. I shared with him my sense of never really having got to know him; he corroborated the feeling. Christian makes hard line, abstract paintings, most recently with geometric, triangle and parallelograms. The arc of the conversation bowed under the pressures we both felt to produce art but were a loss not only on how to make a financial foundation from it but how to make the next step in our careers. Painting world and the contemporary art world. Identity politics v. 2.0 and the rest. Positions. We talked about the illusion of teaching artist being outside of the gig economy within which most other artists exist, and the difference of New York and Berlin. It was a conversation that seemed to be on repeat with artists I knew, regardless of their level of “success,” i.e. exhibition history, gallery representation, number of sales or relationship with institutions. (Collectively, this could have been the conversation that bridged the emerging career to the mid-career. The illusion, I thought, was that the “emerging” is a gerund–the stage is one of a process, presupposing action and participation. Was mid-career also gerund? Perhaps it was just “exist early” and if you’re still alive later, there’s a chance of afterwards.) We all seemed to feel that there was more than what we had; and we all hoped that if we had more it would be fulfilling financially, artistically, professionally and personally. That is, we wanted our art practice to do everything for us, to be gesamlebenwerk.
I met Katharina during Sound Development City. She introduced herself back then as an urban researcher; six years later she was finishing a PhD in Urban Planning and was quick to admit that she’d tired of academia and her thesis topic, which she refused to share with me. In the last six years, I had gravitated toward her specialty, probably because I’d been stuck in cities and, even when traveling away from New York, I ended up in another city. Her general focus was on immigration, which itself was a curious inclusion within the field of urban planning. Rather than strictly thinking about streets, infrastructure and zoning, the integration of the immigrant, the foreigner whose class and economic status is presupposed, into the urban plan suggested a further–literally transnational–extension of the focus of the biopolitical. That is, no longer were governing bodies concerned exclusively with their sovereign subjects but with the livelihood of those outside their sovereignty.
In a classic “urban” tradition, i.e. urbanization in the original form of which Ildefons Cerda conceived, the extension of the urban plan onto the rural can now include the projection of the immigrant, the foreigner, first into the urban fabric, localized into what is traditionally thought of as the “city limits” but also later into the suburb and the rural, ultimately “urbanizing” these areas ethnologically. I doubted that this exact theater of generations was what was feared in the political current of ruralites, who didn’t experience immigration and immigrants in the same way that urbanites did but fear them nonetheless. I expected that a more simplistic fear was at work, especially from a perspective of juxtaposition between where it was that people were coming. Which sociopolitical systems each country had and how immigration was seen to interface with it. i.e. Europeans that opposed immigration often did so on the grounds that the immigrants were believed to “exploit” existing social welfare systems, which suggested these systems were both definite and required exchange by paying into them before taking out of them.
“The American urban experience, of immigrants reviving aging inner-cities, sharply contrasts with that of Europe, where immigrants often cluster in large cities but remain marginalized economically and socially, imposing many costs and becoming seen as a long-term drag on growth and vitality.” [3]
These systems don’t exist in the same manner in the U.S., though some do and where they do, one could hear similar complaints of the exploitation of these systems. While in the U.S. the primary retort to immigrants was that they “stole jobs,” which suggested these Americans believed they had a right to access jobs, first or in perpetuity. What should have been noted was both of these systems–social benefits and jobs–were resources that may have been mitigated in the urban fabric, but not necessarily. While the vast majority of jobs or productivity occurred in cities and was from there leveraged for social benefits, many jobs still existed outside of the city. Increasingly the jobs were becoming virtual. How immigration to cities, which “it is safe to conclude that without a massive inflow of non-Americans, the biggest and most economically-vibrant American cities – New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, Houston – would surely have stagnated or worse,” will resolve in an age of (potential) placelessness was yet to be seen, particularly when the jobs that required a person to be present (the immigrant?) were replaced by systems of automation. [4] Would we see Cyber Flight, a new version of White Flight, when the physical, cultural and economic infrastructure of cities was outpaced by the digital? I wondered how long people would continue to prefer NYC to LA, after a subway ride was no longer necessary, when remote work was the norm or when local taxation didn’t make sense, when the culture we prefered was online rather than in a museum or on the street. Was this happening already?
I met Jana at a fusion Vietnamese restaurant. It was fitting because I recalled that her father was a diplomat in Southeast Asia and had told me in 2012, also during Sound Development City, that the Vietnamese, i.e. Annam, were essentially Chinese fisherman who moved south down the coast. He was referring to the Lê Dynasty, based in Hà Nội. It made an impression on me, and by 2018, with some tiếng việt lịc sử I realized how contentious what he said really wa. Was referring to the Tang and successive dynasties, which conquered the Cham, or to the North which made a Communist state over the south.
Sound Development City was a three-part series of residencies of five days long, each part in a different city: Berlin, London and Zurich. 13 international artists met and explored each city through the framework of sound. At the time, my proposal had been to write a series of critical essays about cities; I had included my essay on the High Line and Ghost Capital as work samples.
The last time I met Jana she was self-identified as working in theater. Like Katharina, she expressed a sense of inferiority to the sound artists of Sound Development City. 2012 slightly predated a trend of institutions taking an interest in sound art; the trend has for the most part subsided, unfortunately, since I personally though it was more interesting in 2018 than before because sound was more widely in the use of sound in cinema (Hans Zimmer’s Blade Runner 2049), which may have been the last reason to see movies in the cinema, since an increasing number of people could afford inexpensive projectors for their home but few had sophisticated sound systems. Jana was writing scripts for television and web series. In 2012 she was just beginning her relationship with a Colombian; today she could appreciate the cultural differences in holidays and familiar relationships between Germans and Colombians. We agreed that the manner in which Latin families stay close was a technology in and of itself.
It was raining, cold and wet. Walking through the district I saw a synagogue with an armed guard, barricaded. It reminded me of the shooting in Pittsburg, the barricade around the Chabad Center for Jewish Discovery on 19th St. In 2010 I picked up a free book there, “Terrorism and Hostage Negotiations.” [5] Coincidences are a matter of time.
[1] "Agnieszka Polska: The Demon’s Brain," Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany, 27 September 2018 to 3 March 2019
https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/agnieszka-polska-the-demons-brain.html
[2] “How to talk with birds, trees, fish, shells, snakes, bulls and lions,” Hamburger Bahnhof: Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany 16 November 2018 to 12 May 2019
https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/hamburger-bahnhof/exhibitions/detail/how-to-talk-with-birds-trees-fish-shells-snakes-bulls-and-lions.html
[3] “Immigrants as urban saviors: When Immigrants Revive a City and When They Don’t - Lessons from the United States,” G. Pascal Zachary, Council of Europe, 2006
https://rm.coe.int/16804925d6
[4] Ibid.
[5] “Terrorism and Hostage Negotiations,” Abraham Miller, Westview Press, 1983.
https://www.amazon.com/Terrorism-Negotiations-Westview-National-International/dp/0891588566