5 posts tagged “vienna”
For about the past year I had a copy of William Shirer's Berlin Diary sitting on the shelf, in the reading queue. I was turned on to this book by my friend Sam Gould, whom I once caught with it on a trip, toted along as his casual reading. Later my brother-in-law told me that this book became a popular assigned book in many college European History courses for the generation born in the decade before World War II. And that explains its frequent availability in secondhand bookstores and rummage sales.
Upon my latest return from Vienna, I was feeling the need to process my experience through some reading and so finally cracked the book. I'm now getting into the three hundreds, where Shirer leaves Berlin to cover the Western Front, which the Germans had only days ago pushed westard into Belgium and the Netherlands. On his way to the front he passes through Aachen and later Louvain. He tells of the Germans having deliberately destroyed the University Library there, and of them burning the irreplaceable books. And then, the High Command lying about it, declaring that the British did the deed, in an attempt to fabricate another excuse for Geman aggression.
And then today received in my inbox from a friend this link, to hip hop poet Kevin Coval's blog. He's composed a poem in response to the Israeli Defence Force's closure of a literature festival that was to be held last month in Jerusalem.
The opening epigraph says it all...
Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem
Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich HeineFrom there, he goes into something sad, outraged, and beautiful.
Check out the whole thing here.
Last Sunday I got to deliver a rough but fresh report on my doings in Vienna to a small audience at Madison's Project Lodge. This coming Monday I get to do it again–a little less fresh, but probably a little more coherent–in Chicago at Mess Hall. So come join if you want to know more about what I've been blogging about, mostly, for the past few weeks.
7 PM
Monday, June 15, 2009
Mess Hall
6932 North Glenwood
Chicago
Morse stop on the Red Line
There I'll have the time to give the overview, hit the high points, the deficiencies, and the odd and ends I've not had the time to relate here. For example, saying something about the Kunsthistorisches Museum, or maybe commenting what I saw of the Asian Village weekend-long project, with its performances by artists like Daito Manabe.
Until May 31 I will be working in this space at Neulerchenfelder Strasse 8, first floor, in the 16th District of Vienna. Amos Kennedy will be there with me, and there are some interesting art projects on the second and third floors, too.
My cellphone in Austria is 43.650.9504732.
Upon boarding my outbound flight to Europe I grabbed a copy of the International Herald Tribune from the newspaper cart. One of stories below the fold was about the upcoming European Parliament elections and how they haven’t caught the interest of the regular citizenry in nations across Europe. The report noted the baffling gap between the hotly contested domestic elections and the largely ignored European Parliament elections, in country after country—baffling precisely because the European Parliament is the only elected body with the power to shape European Union rules. These rules trump many laws passed by national parliments and legislatures, including in all-important areas such as agricultural trade policies.
The election in Austria is coming up very soon, the first week of June, I think. And so the campaigns are going strong, but according to the article and to folks I’ve asked in Vienna, not many people are paying attention. At least, not many in comparison to the national elections. The article said that the lack of mainstream attention gives the more extreme elements an advantage, in that those wings of the political spectrum that can muster committed activists and base voting blocs gain an outsize influence.
And so it seems that might be the case in Austria, where the extreme wing includes the FPO, a hard-right nationalist party that gained worldwide notoriety a few years ago after they dressed up a xenophobic platform for mass appeal and some unforeseen electoral success followed. I’ve seen FPO posters along the Gürtel beside those of SPO/Social Democrats and the OVP/Christian Democrats. I must say, even dressed up, by American standards some of their campaign rhetoric stands clearly beyond the pale. I take it as promising that this racist poster was defaced.
Still a little jet-lagged, but getting up in the middle of the Budapest night does give me a chance to blog.
I've been trying to process Monday's event at the Depot. The format was somewhat flawed from the beginning. There were three of us: me as presenter, and then Edelbert Koeb, director of MUMOK, and Peter Pakesch, from the Kunsthaus Graz, as respondents. My dear friend Beatrix Zobl was charged with the thankless task of moderating. I was given only 25 minutes to make a case for a different curatorial treatment of new art from China than has become standard on the Euro-American museum circuit in the last ten years or so. What I chose to focus on was the significance of the '89 social movement centered in Beijing, the role of art in the lead up to it, and how the shadow of that event (the mass demonstration phase of which, of course, ended with the martial crackdown in Tiananmen Square) colors the post-89 period, including in China's world of contemporary art, and how
So the stage was set. But there were positives as the event got underway. For one thing, the audience was big. The room was filled to capacity, SRO. Probably fifty people in a space the size of Mess Hall. And everybody seemed engaged as I went through my thing, which I ended more or less on time.
And then, disaster. Pakesch proved to be a mumbler, and a long-winded one at that. His points were not in anyway germane to anything that I had said only moments before, and were mostly general observations about the 'transition' taking place in China nowadays. Which is precisely the ideological trope Wang Hui demolishes in his critiques of the post-'89 period, and which I strongly echoed in my presentation.
Five minutes into Pakesch's response, a bloc of probably ten people conspicuously walked out.
Koeb wasn't much better. Despite the announced event language, he chose to speak in German, against the protests and irritation of the organizers, and especially to the everlasting chagrin of Beatrix, who tried to right the ship several times but was basically ignored. (I was not so irritated; after all, we were in Vienna.) But it didn't even matter because his comments, as well as I could understand them through translated segments and my own elementary German, were about as relevant as Pakesch's. He basically told stories of how he put the China–Facing Reality show together, and what he had intended to do, and how he had some problems managing the artists. He admitted to deficiencies in the show, but offered almost no analysis on why that happened to be the case, and zero evidence of self-awareness as a Western curator trying to work in a cultural world about which he knows nothing. It never seemed to occur to him that the artists in China, as well as his Chinese co-curator, might be playing him like a song, even though he readily admitted that he could never seem to escape the same circle of the same artists who are already internationally known.
More people left before Koeb finished.
The discussion part was better, partly because the drone of the two respondents finally ended. But it wasn't really their styles that bothered me. It was the fact that they didn't actually respond to what I said. Knowing what I know now–that they are basically cultural functionaries, having been appointed to their positions by the government–I am not really surprised. But at the time, I could only wonder, did these guys even listen? If not, then why did they even bother to take part?
But of course, the main thing was having an opportunity to communicate with an audience outside of the mediation of big institutions, to see the Depot, and re-connecting with Martina Reuter, who works as the Depot's manager, as well as with the great WochenKlausur. All of that was terrific, and, in the end, counts as the real work.
