Goodyn Green is a photographer who has recently self-published her first photobook, The Catalog, a collection of female nudes featuring queer women whose poses reference gay men's magazines. Here she is in Kreuzberg's The Fab Lab, where her photos are currently on display. A short interview follows, along with some of her work, which is probably NSFW (depending on where you work, that is).
A little bit of research into Berlin's music history, and Mark Reeder's name will probably appear. Since moving to Berlin from Manchester in 1978, he has worked as Germany's rep for Factory Records, toured with New Order, managed Malaria!, organized the first secret punk rock show in East Berlin, was certified 'subversive' by the Stasi, and produced the last record ever produced in East Germany (which was also the only record ever made by an Englishman in the DDR). And that was just before the wall came down. Since then, he was the one to discover Paul van Dyk in 1990, and sign him to his record label MFS, which was also responsible for coining the term 'trance music.' On top of that, he was also in his own band Die Unbekannten (later Shark Vegas), which has since developed its own cult status. I sat down with Mark, and after a few hours talking, hadn't even gotten past 1990. So get your Sunday coffee and prepare for a long but fascinating account of 80s underground music culture in Berlin, both East and West.
Last week I went out to the Neue Nationalgalerie to see Taryn Simon's exhibition "A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII". (The first hurray goes out to a woman under 40 being granted a solo exhibition at one of Berlin's most prestigious museums!) Her work presented here basically evolves from the phenomenon of India's "living dead", meaning people who are still alive, but declared dead when their family (or someone else) wants or has to inherit their properties. Based on this idea, Simon investigated family genealogies around the world and recorded their stories, focussing on subjects like feuding Brazil families, victims of the genocide in Srebrenica, and the Kumari girl-goddesses of Nepal.
What is on show in Mies van der Rohe's famous glass pavilion are a number of huge anthracite-coloured displays, each of which contains three glass plates framed in dark, almost-metallic wood. They showcase from left to right: the portrait photographs of all blood relatives of the specific person the exhibit focusses on, a list of names and a text written by Simon, and finally a loosely arranged selection of "footnote pictures", associated with the story. Simon's aesthetic draws from several sources, reminding me of Aby Warburg's renowned Mnemosyne Atlas in its associative manner, of cultural history museums in its quasi-scientific approach, and of the display style of luxury fashion houses in its high-quality material and contrastive lightning. (Interestingly, before Simon decided to focus on her artistic career, she was photographing ads for Chloé. A fact that seems to have been thoughtfully edited out of Simon's curriculum vitae. Thanks to Kirsten Herrmann for the hint!) And of course it's a great approach on Mies van der Rohe's architecture.
But all this various references left me puzzled about what to do with her work: it is kind of scholarly, emphasizing the "artist as researcher" who fills an archive, a wildly popular topic these days, visualized in the bulk of works looking like mind maps and atlases; it also addresses the subject of the portrait - the questionable term "bloodline" is mentioned several times in the accompanying texts, raising the issue whether people can inherit not only physiognomic characteristics but also fateful experiences - be they tragic, brutal or mythic - whether these too can be registered in the faces of one's blood-related family members and thus, be evident in their photographs. Which, of course, evokes the positivist attempts of the late 19th century, when photographers like Francis Galton used "composite portraits" or Alphonse Bertillon "portraits parlés" to identify certain maladies inscribed in the shape of noses, ears, and necklines.
Simon's photographic style provokes this connotation - everyone is pictured in front of a beige wall (not sure if this was done in post-production, it might at the very least be edited to ensure the exact same coloring in every photograph. It is indeed a pictorial style she has used before, e.g. in her work "Contraband" from 2009, currently on display at KW's "Seeing is believing" exhibition), seated on a stool in a slight half profile (the neckline!), looking into the camera without the least trace of a smile (no matter what culture), positioned in the lower half of the picture, placing the face in the almost exact center of the frame. Some are visibly dressed up to have their picture taken, some aren't. Of course, one is tempted to draw comparisons, between the family members (discovering the one feature that seems to travel through the generations) and between cultures, countries, histories (and even species!).
In its totality, it's a laborious work, resulting from many hours of researching, traveling, talking, and convincing (several family members did not agree to participate and are thus represented by a blank sheet of paper), photographing, phrasing, mapping, wording, etc. But in the end, it's not an academic work, it does not have to obey academic rules, and so there are no sources mentioned and no cues on how the displayed persons are related (if it's a brother, a nephew, a grandson, etc.). And why am I to trust her? Taryn Simon is an artist and would have had every freedom to completely "fake" this work, all the pictured persons could be hired extras, all the stories could be completely fictional, all the bloodlines invented.
Has all this research then been done to show me that both everything and nothing can be found here? All the portraying to show that nothing can be shown in a photographic portrait? All this expense to show me, the viewer, that nothing can be shown? I already knew that.
Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII
22. September 2011 – 1. Januar 2012
Neue Nationalgalerie
Potsdamer Straße 50
10785 Berlin
Mono.Kultur reprinted their Taryn Simon issue on the occasion of this exhibition. See it here.
/mary
ps, This is the first review of an art show published on StilinBerlin, any comments on the usefulness of this "new addition" to the content is, as always, highly appreciated.
Disclaimer: As a reward for reading all of the following words, you'll find the possibility to win something.
Over the last few years, I've often been asked how much longer I thought it was going to be until printed publications would go extinct. Because naturally I, someone who publishes online (as in: the antipode of offline), would totally oppose everything printed on paper. Like online publishing is on something a kind of religious mission striving for world domination. Though it all sounds terribly 2009, this phenomenon is scarily present in the fight against subscription and ad sales losses most print products face these days. Still, I do not have the saving answer, despite saying out loud that I do love print! I mean, you get to choose the paper, and a format, and a cover (or umpteen covers, as seems to be necessary these days), and there is just no equivalent way to do a correlating double-page spread in a browser. So yes, there are a dozen reasons to still do print products, at least in my Weltanschauung.
I have to admit, I seem to honor only a few of the gazillion available magazines by actually walking to the store and paying money in order to read them - but they do exist and one outstanding exemplar is the Berlin-based mono.kultur, a publication I've eagerly followed since attending the event celebrating their Miranda July issue in Spring 2008 at Scala (which no longer even exists, oh oh Berlin...). So of course I said yes to spending an hour of my more than restricted time (you might remember I'm working on finalizing my thesis) at their office in a lovely Kreuzberg backyard on the occasion of their new issue.
Portrayed here is Kai von Rabenau, the head and motivator of a team of ten writers. Being a photographer and magazine lover himself, he started mono.kultur back in 2005, searching for contributors by, quite classically, putting a flyer at the Pro.qm bookstore. The concept of mono.kultur is simple and has grown out of economic necessity - they never managed to finance the print of their dummy, which included several interviews, so they decided on spreading them over single issues, starting with Carsten Nicolai, Frank Leder, and Nine Inch Nails. This turned out to be a genius idea, making it possible to create a new design for each issue, resulting in fabulous editions on Tilda Swinton, Dries van Noten, Dave Eggers, and many more. (Also note the reprint of their Taryn Simon issue on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Neue Nationalgalerie.)
Their newest issue, "Refine for Now", focussing on Chris Taylor, the bass player of the fabulous Grizzly Bear, has just been released and will be officially presented this Wednesday night at L.U.X. in Kreuzberg. Good thing is: you're all invited! Even better: Kai agreed to present us with five copies of the new issue, so if you want to share some of my print-joy and win one of those five, just leave a comment saying you want one under this post before Thursday, Nov 10, 8pm! (The winners will be announced in the comments - so take a look on Thursday night!)
/mary
ps, in case you can neither make it to the release event tomorrow, nor win one of the issues, you can still follow mono-blog.
