Due to the cold generating colds all across Berlin, coverage of this week’s events mostly involved talks where it was possible to sit down in one place for a while and exert minimal energy. Clearly this epidemic didn’t hit everyone though, judging by that video of the line to get into the C/O party. We missed it, did you? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

This week we have commentary on two talks by smart and fabulous women, one talk by a man who writes about glamour (in addition to visual culture, politics, and war), one exhibition in an attic that we will never have access to again, and an exhibition about appropriation and interventions. Let’s see how these events fell on our Miss or Diss scale:

 

WEDNESDAY 06.03

 

Amanda Beech, Final Machine @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt

part of the ongoing Speculative Thinking in Art, Literature, and Philosophy lecture series

"Times New Roman"">introduction by Armen Avanessian

 

"Times New Roman"">-5 for only screening four minutes of normal">Final Machine…Yes, I know she had limited time, but four minutes was such a tease! I’m pretty sure most people there wouldn’t have minded watching the whole thing. It is clearly a very complex work and must be seen/experienced in its entirety to really get it.

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"Times New Roman"">+5 for screening all of We Never Close…It feels a bit like a Hollywood trailer (as someone in the audience mentioned) and also the techno soundtrack really makes you feel like getting up and dancing (someone else in the audience also brought this up) and now I want to go to Vegas more than ever!

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"Times New Roman"">+5 for many words of wisdom…“Art is different from the norm but it must struggle to be different; Art is not different from the norm and it must struggle to locate itself in empirical reality; it must try and become part of life…the consequence of these contradictions is that art achieves a new self consciousness, it fully understood the problem that I just described and this problem became the point of a new critique, a new critical purchase of post-conceptual practice…”

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+15 for Amanda Beech being an all-around awesome/inspirational person…She is the dean of Critical Studies at CalArts (in Valencia, CA), she is on the committee for The Political Currency of Art Research Group, she is a practicing artist herself, and she is really well dressed. She’s got it all: smart and fabulous! Also the “are you f-ing kidding me?” look she gave to one of the question askers during the Q&A was priceless. He tried to ask where she sees her role in producing images within this “triad of neo-liberal economics/politics, neo-conservative morality, and neo-humanist ethics…”(blah blah you get the idea…) and that was only the first part of the question…

 

FRIDAY 07.03

 

normal">A room that was never meant to be @ Neue Berliner Räume

photographic works by Jodie Carey in a top secret location

N.B.R.’s Manuel Wischnewski talking about the works

-1 for having to wait out in the cold…Entrance was only permitted in 30 minute shifts so some of us were waiting for a while…I guess now in retrospect it wasn’t so bad, after seeing the video of the queue for C/O’s goodbye party!

+7 for the location…I think since the exhibition has come and gone it’s now safe to reveal the site of the exhibit which happened to be in the attic of the Mitte Postfurhamt in a room that …an appropriate farewell to a truly “Berlin” space.

+5 for the opportune coincidences…The blue that shows up in Carey’s photographs almost exactly matched the traces of blue paint on the brick walls of the room; it was meant to be!

"ＭＳ 明朝";mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";
mso-ansi-language:EN-US;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:AR-SA">In case you did miss this one, don’t despair; Jodie Carey’s work will be on display in April curated by Manuel Wischnewski at Galerie Rolando Anselmi.

 

 

totally unrelated to the exhibition (I’m pretty sure), but what was going on in this room of the Postfuhramt?

 

between appropriation and interventions @ Kunstraum Kreuzberg/ Bethanien

17 artist group show curated by Harald Theiss

 

sorry, my favorite (sound) work in the exhibit isn’t done justice by a photo

-7 for very few works holding my attention for very long…I came into this exhibition wanting to like it, but I wasn’t so excited. To be fair, this might be the fault of my seasonal cold and not the exhibition.

 

SATURDAY  08.03

The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 2 @ ICI Berlin

 

Tom Holert, “Interventionist Investigation. Nongovernmental Politics and Artistic Research”

-7 for not engaging all of the audience…Although he is someone who “needs no introduction in Berlin” it was a struggle for me to make it through to the end of his talk.

 

+3 for people’s alternate methods of entertaining themselves…Not since attending university lectures have I had so much to look at over the shoulders of other people not paying attention. One man in front of me drew a portrait of Holert in his notebook instead of taking notes; he clearly wasn’t satisfied with the drawing he did, so me made another on the next page. One woman in the front row had the nerve to get out her Macbook and examine some diagrams and then make the switch to her ipad to check emails. And of course there were those checking their phones every three minutes or with their eyes closed and mouths open (actually just one of those).

 

Hito Steyerl “Withdrawal From Representation”

this was in the time capsule the US sent out to space to communicate what we looked like (and apparently since it was in America, there was debate whether or not the people should be clothed)

this is what the aliens will receive from us first...our spam

 

-3 for the women in the bathroom line being critical of Steyerl’s talks, saying that she is “fun” but they can’t take her “seriously”…but -5 for me for not standing up for my homegirl; sorry Hito, I promise I will defend you next time.

 

+9 for Steyerl’s enjoyable and refreshing ideas about spam…She essentially brought up similar topics as the spam and porn panel we saw at transmediale, but it was presented it a lighter, more fun way.

 

 

 

 

 

The points this week land on the positive, so although spirits may be low due to the return of winter and feverish chills, it’s obviously not all so bad.