Off the beaten track, down a few stops from where the last of the tourists leave the train, Berlin is still quite a good place to be. The neighbourhood that greets us as we leave the U-Bahn tunnel may not be as monumental as the Unter den Linden, but it makes up for it in human interest, and simpathy. This is a place where it would be affordable to rent a place, and quite possible to have a good life.
We got here following instructions found on the internet, we are on a quest to find one of those legendary English language bookshops that scatter the earth wherever some expat felt like opening one and succeded. Think of the parisian Shakespeare and Co as a reference, but not as yet so well known nor so grandly situated.
On paper, or better, off the screen, this other place would seem to have all the right credentials though. A cultural establishment surely, but mostly an alternative one with more than a tinge of anarchy and very idealistic, boasting a range of activities that include the free loan of books and also film evenings, and the capacity to serve drinks and nuts. Now, you must be NUTS to actually drink or eat there.
From the outside the shop looks OK, promising. A rough kind of bench would accomodate the accidental reader, when the weather is fine, and the window is picturesque and enticing. It’s the smell that hits you as you cross the door that suddenly spoils the dream. Quite horrific. All the shelves, the books, the furniture, the walls, everything is greasy, dusty when not mouldy, in short dirty, including the owner who greets us with a pleasant enough demeanour and an unforgettable smile made of gaps and rotten teeth. Call us petit bourgeois if you want, I will not disagree, but the atmosphere is more oppressive than free. As we cautiously visit the place I find it hard to like it. The books are a vague mix of esoteric deep, strange and trivial, quite absurd as a whole. A copy of Isabella Beeton's Victorian Housekeeping rules next to some culinary tosh from the sixties for example. You may find something good, if you dug hard enough through the grime. The place is a sorry junk yard of paper and leftist gadgetry, unconvincing and unsincere, literary pretentious in a way, utterly self-indulgent.
Downstairs – where the air really is completely unbreathable– a huge section dedicated to pulpy science fiction fills the shelves, around a filthy table where the empty wine glasses of past evenings are scattered, and half full bowls of left over nuts are refilled from huge bags in what looks like a hopeless rotation of germs and grease. Our host looks like a fallen angel, rather a Hell’s Angel who got thrown off the bike by some of life’s vicious turns and took refuge in this self made dump, never to venture out again. Now and again the same dynamics would bring visitors around, we even witnessed young women seek some advise from this unlikely source (maybe very knowledgeable, depending on what one were looking for) and also enter the joint lured by the easy and fast free access to the internet. He looked like a spider in his net when he spoke to them: hairy, sticky and devious.
Sure, it is bourgeois to get mad at a place like this, but why should ideals of freedom entail a complete disdain of hygiene, this utter surrender of personal dignity? Let’s have a revolution, by all means, but please let’s keep washing our feet.
For obvious reasons I will not mention the name of the place. Rest assured that your very own nose will warn you if you find it.
As chance would have it, back in Amsterdam, I ventured in a bookshop that seemed in many respects the exact opposite of the Berlin dump, and still felt very ill at ease. This other place was, well, too clean! So, might it be so that the appreciation of books, not unlike some fine bottles of wine, benefits from the thinnest layer of fine white dust?
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berlin. Show all posts
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Me, Brizzi, At Pigozzi And The Paparazzi
Kristiane F is pulling at my sleeve. In the otherwise perfectly friendly city of Berlin, at the back of Zoologischer Garten Station, she is one of the few exceptions. A man openly urinates across the gated fence of the local courthouse, two overweight policemen chat with each other - unconcerned or unnoticing - further down the street and a group of homeless people quietly wait at the door of a shelter. The doors to the Helmut Newton Foundation (HFN), or Photography Museum, are right between these two as yet unrelated moments of street life, in a way that would have possibly caught the eye of a talent like Weegee, if not necessarily of the German master himself.
A huge text on the facade reads: Pigozzi and the Paparazzi. A smaller list of names under it: Salomon, Weegee, Galella, Angeli,Secchiaroli, Quinn. Check check check check check check... but who the hell is Pigozzi? Eager to find out, I cross the treshold between Berlin and some other place inside. “YOU ARE LEAVING THE REALITY SECTOR” could have made perfect sense on this treshhold from the street to a red carpeted, white walled, well lit-out grand space, under the watchful eyes of at least three prussian gards - wide bellied guys in white shirt black tie kits - and a prussian lady wearing a black tailleur, black rimmed spectacles, black hair tight chiffon, and excruciatingly high heels, horse whip at hand, friendly smile. Now a few of these details could have been imaginary, evoked by prenotions or expectations, as I am distracted by a raw of huge black and white prints towering on the monumental staircase in front of me. They seem fashion photographs from the seventies, but with an almost gravitational Newtonian twist: the beautiful models are statuary, tall and on heels, sternly looking in front of them, crisply sharp, stark naked.
Newton was one of those unsofferably happy, few, highly successful photographers to have defined their style, and thus becoming rich and famous, by shooting the rich and famous (or less famous but very beautiful) women, often naked and infused in his own particular brand of eroticism – a mix of sadomasochism and other isms that only experts and psychiatrists could correctly put a name to. But let us make no mistake, Newton was neither crazy nor a fool. He consistently got away with things that could easily turn ugly in less proficient hands, and produced images that are provocative, but still glossy and very commercial. He was totally unapologetic, and easy to hate as a character as much as his work is strongly appealing, though possibly for feticistic reasons rather than artistic ones. He probably didn’t care either way.
Undoubtedly many of his images are memorable. Personally I like Elsa Peretti wearing a Playboy bunny costume on a New York rooftop, to name one. But in front of the huge nudes I am divided. What am I looking at? Is it the women? Am I supposed to be oedipically shrunk by these huge godlike venusses, or sexually aroused by their mega, sharp, model-perfect nudity? Is the oversize print to enhance their supernatural beauty or simply the better to be admired from a distance in the architectural space?
Some instinct is wary as I cross the door to the groundfloor exhibition dedicated to Newton’s own work and a few possessions, because it all looks too grand and cultural in its set-up for something that as clever as successfull as it has been, surely isn’t serious art, is it? Even if I had been completely convinced by his work at the deepest level, I would find the display of his personal clothes quite irrelevant and strange. It smells of a somewhat macabre attempt at selfdivinization. Even one of his cars is on show, a ridiculous custom made contraption that he used in LA and in which he was to die, heart struck, in traffic stuck. Surely all this is beside the point in a serious photography collection? Istrionics may be very expedient in life but are potentially absurd in death and tend to fog the issue of one’s real worth and legacy.
High time to find out about Pigozzi, whom I have never heard about, and the paparazzi – but what do they have to do with Weegee and Salomon? – on the upper floor. Not so fast...
Traditonally, at Cannes film festival a miscellanious crowd of lens men (for want of a better name) frenziedly feast on topless unknown starlets laid about along the beach at appointed times and places. Quite surprisingly HN wasn’t above all this but joined in, from a ladder - let it be said - to get his very own angle on the proceedings. Some large rooms are devoted to the resulting shots, an overkill all around in my opinion.
At last the inner core of the show, the revelation of Jean Pigozzi (a fellow Italian, business man, socialite, photomaniac, with a collection of snapshots in the company of assorted glitterati and celebrities, a funny not unlikable southern levantine kind of guy, big face, nice interaction; the series is amusing to look at with the accidental little giggle here and there). Then the hard stories of Ron Galella’s and the other real paparazzi, the fights, the indiscretions, the tireless probing with huge lenses on a stretch of the French riviera - that is little more than a shooting range for sitting golden ducks, and could easily be avoided if celebrities were anything short of very eager to be caught with their pants down in the sun. They need each other, go about their respective business, we suck the results on printed paper.
As HN himself occasionally would shoot celebs out of their pants, although by appointment, explicit consent and probably in five star secluded locations, a connection if flimsy is established. Furthermore some of them knew him personally, met at parties possibly – them shooting, him mingling – and he had developed a fellinian interest in the phenomenon. But what has all this to do with Weegee or Salomon? They had invented serious photojournalism, to the point of art. Weegee shot unknown people producing masterpieces, while paparazzi trash celebrities into pulp, mostly. They are almost opposites.
One truth if anything seems to transpire from their work: much mondane fame is randomly bestowed by chance on occasionally undeserving persons. We would do better not to be so interested in them.
HN wasn’t undeserving, he was very talented. At some point he probably had a choice about what to do with his talent and went for the good times. All you see about him, his very attitude, is both provoking and guiltless.
To put things into perspective, in all fairness to the great city of Berlin, one could hop on the U-bahn and go to the Gemaldegalerie, to name one, where the same entrance fee of eight euros will let you in on a fantastic endless collection of paintings, very serious art indeed.
A huge text on the facade reads: Pigozzi and the Paparazzi. A smaller list of names under it: Salomon, Weegee, Galella, Angeli,Secchiaroli, Quinn. Check check check check check check... but who the hell is Pigozzi? Eager to find out, I cross the treshold between Berlin and some other place inside. “YOU ARE LEAVING THE REALITY SECTOR” could have made perfect sense on this treshhold from the street to a red carpeted, white walled, well lit-out grand space, under the watchful eyes of at least three prussian gards - wide bellied guys in white shirt black tie kits - and a prussian lady wearing a black tailleur, black rimmed spectacles, black hair tight chiffon, and excruciatingly high heels, horse whip at hand, friendly smile. Now a few of these details could have been imaginary, evoked by prenotions or expectations, as I am distracted by a raw of huge black and white prints towering on the monumental staircase in front of me. They seem fashion photographs from the seventies, but with an almost gravitational Newtonian twist: the beautiful models are statuary, tall and on heels, sternly looking in front of them, crisply sharp, stark naked.
Newton was one of those unsofferably happy, few, highly successful photographers to have defined their style, and thus becoming rich and famous, by shooting the rich and famous (or less famous but very beautiful) women, often naked and infused in his own particular brand of eroticism – a mix of sadomasochism and other isms that only experts and psychiatrists could correctly put a name to. But let us make no mistake, Newton was neither crazy nor a fool. He consistently got away with things that could easily turn ugly in less proficient hands, and produced images that are provocative, but still glossy and very commercial. He was totally unapologetic, and easy to hate as a character as much as his work is strongly appealing, though possibly for feticistic reasons rather than artistic ones. He probably didn’t care either way.
Undoubtedly many of his images are memorable. Personally I like Elsa Peretti wearing a Playboy bunny costume on a New York rooftop, to name one. But in front of the huge nudes I am divided. What am I looking at? Is it the women? Am I supposed to be oedipically shrunk by these huge godlike venusses, or sexually aroused by their mega, sharp, model-perfect nudity? Is the oversize print to enhance their supernatural beauty or simply the better to be admired from a distance in the architectural space?
Some instinct is wary as I cross the door to the groundfloor exhibition dedicated to Newton’s own work and a few possessions, because it all looks too grand and cultural in its set-up for something that as clever as successfull as it has been, surely isn’t serious art, is it? Even if I had been completely convinced by his work at the deepest level, I would find the display of his personal clothes quite irrelevant and strange. It smells of a somewhat macabre attempt at selfdivinization. Even one of his cars is on show, a ridiculous custom made contraption that he used in LA and in which he was to die, heart struck, in traffic stuck. Surely all this is beside the point in a serious photography collection? Istrionics may be very expedient in life but are potentially absurd in death and tend to fog the issue of one’s real worth and legacy.
High time to find out about Pigozzi, whom I have never heard about, and the paparazzi – but what do they have to do with Weegee and Salomon? – on the upper floor. Not so fast...
Traditonally, at Cannes film festival a miscellanious crowd of lens men (for want of a better name) frenziedly feast on topless unknown starlets laid about along the beach at appointed times and places. Quite surprisingly HN wasn’t above all this but joined in, from a ladder - let it be said - to get his very own angle on the proceedings. Some large rooms are devoted to the resulting shots, an overkill all around in my opinion.
At last the inner core of the show, the revelation of Jean Pigozzi (a fellow Italian, business man, socialite, photomaniac, with a collection of snapshots in the company of assorted glitterati and celebrities, a funny not unlikable southern levantine kind of guy, big face, nice interaction; the series is amusing to look at with the accidental little giggle here and there). Then the hard stories of Ron Galella’s and the other real paparazzi, the fights, the indiscretions, the tireless probing with huge lenses on a stretch of the French riviera - that is little more than a shooting range for sitting golden ducks, and could easily be avoided if celebrities were anything short of very eager to be caught with their pants down in the sun. They need each other, go about their respective business, we suck the results on printed paper.
As HN himself occasionally would shoot celebs out of their pants, although by appointment, explicit consent and probably in five star secluded locations, a connection if flimsy is established. Furthermore some of them knew him personally, met at parties possibly – them shooting, him mingling – and he had developed a fellinian interest in the phenomenon. But what has all this to do with Weegee or Salomon? They had invented serious photojournalism, to the point of art. Weegee shot unknown people producing masterpieces, while paparazzi trash celebrities into pulp, mostly. They are almost opposites.
One truth if anything seems to transpire from their work: much mondane fame is randomly bestowed by chance on occasionally undeserving persons. We would do better not to be so interested in them.
HN wasn’t undeserving, he was very talented. At some point he probably had a choice about what to do with his talent and went for the good times. All you see about him, his very attitude, is both provoking and guiltless.
To put things into perspective, in all fairness to the great city of Berlin, one could hop on the U-bahn and go to the Gemaldegalerie, to name one, where the same entrance fee of eight euros will let you in on a fantastic endless collection of paintings, very serious art indeed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
