At Salon, this story about the Kinsey Institute's recent exhibition of erotic art from their archive. A nice interview with the curator, some interesting insight into Kinsey and sex in the US, and a few selections from their collection of erotic art. The Institute seems to have a lot of great stuff; makes me wish I were working on something related, because there's an archive worth digging around in.
Almost daily kosmonautentraum posts something fabulous. Today it was the digitized Late Medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Biblioteca Palatina in Heidelberg. Holy wow. They haven't cataloged the entire collection yet but it seems they're on their way.
This image is from #217v Buch III.F, "Von den wuormen," which "saget von den wurmen vnd von ir natture..."
Everything seems to be printable at a decent resolution. Some crazy modern scriptorium.
Susan R. Boettcher wrote this excellent Letter from Germany for H-German, discussing Jewish practice outside of the larger urban communities in Germany.
Following up on this earlier post, I found this report at the Guardian, their Jonathan Jones reports on the scandal around Gunilla Sköld Feiler and Dror Feiler's work Snow White and the Madness of Truth.
It's in very poor taste, if you like, but is there a tasteful way to talk about terrorism? About people disintegrating into bits of flesh? Which is what, to me, that chunky pool suggests. ... Death threats have been made against the artists. Only one of them, Dror Feiler, is prepared to speak in public, but you get the feeling he can take care of himself. Before leaving Israel, he was a paratrooper for three years in his country's army. "My family lives in Israel - why should I like suicide bombers? The fact that we try to explain terrorism doesn't mean that we forgive. It feels ridiculous to have to say it, but we condemn suicidal bombings."
The museum, and with it the Swedish government, has supported the artists, on the grounds that Sweden's constitution protects freedom of speech. The Israeli government has condemned the work and Sweden more broadly. Israel's ambassador to Sweden Mazel (who defaced the artwork) says that the work is evidence of the increasing anti-Semitism in the country.
And now, Salon reports, the Wiesenthal Center has organized an email campaign against the installation and the museum, which has received about 14,000 emails. But these people (at least it seems safe to assume the majority of them) haven't experienced the work in situ. The Guardian's story is important because Jones examines the work and thinks about its consituent parts. One problem with installations is that you have to be there to get it; another problem is that, if you are there, you have to pay attention to all those parts. Jones points out that the music playing in the piece, Beethoven's Cantata 199, is vital to the piece's overall meaning:
The words...ought to have alerted Mazel to the ambiguity, to say the least, of this work of art towards the woman he thinks it praises. The cantata begins:"My heart swims in blood/ because the brood of my sins/ in God's holy eyes/ makes me into a monster."
...
[The piece] may fail to make you think as much as the artists would like, but they have the last laugh on critics who sneer at the work's "banality" without looking up the self-lacerating language of Cantata 199, so crucial to the experience in the cold garden.
One of the artists is, apparently, an activist for Palestinian rights; he suspects that the ambassador's attack was planned, not spontaneous, as a reaction against his anti-Israeli politics. But even if we consider where the artists' larger sympathies lie, I cannot read this work as a glorification of suicide bombing. It seems to me (again, without being there) more about the wasting of yet another life in the endless cycle of killing that shapes both Palestinian and Israeli daily experience.
From the Guardian, a report on the SPD's attempts to reform Germany's universities: "We want to change the structure of the German university in order to establish first-class universities and research centres" that can "compete with international top-league schools like Harvard and Stanford," said the SPD's draft. The idea delivered by education minister Bulmahn is to identify 4-6 elite universities (I still haven't located the determining factors for this), which will then receive an additional 250 Million Euros above normal federal funding over five years; the competition would be repeated at the end of that period.
The major problem with this plan, and the reason it's getting flak from the Greens (and in fact from SPD members too) is that it doesn't solve the problem of lack of funds in the great majority of Germany's universities. Last Friday, Humboldt students staged a nude protest to keep the public's attention on their strike for funding. I like the image at the SZ of the woman with "Bildung im Arsch" painted on her back, a big arrow pointing to...well, duh.
Update: About the 250 million: "Millionen" in a specific numerical sense means billion, right? "Milliarden" means million. Anyway, I don't know that they have the money, whether it be millions or billions.
Also: news from the Economist about the UK's similar uni funding woes, a comparison of things on both sides of the channel, and a mention of this program in Bremen, started by Uni-Bremen and Rice U., which is essentially a small private college. Something similar in Berlin, the European College of Liberal Arts. Both of these programs charge tuition (€15,000 and €5,000 a year, respectively--the latter seems to include room and board) and can be selective about their students, something implied, if not stated, by the SPD Elite proposal. The cost, also, means smaller classes, which is a foreign concept in Germany's overfilled university system. There's just this small problem of charging for higher education...
Found at Salon:
Beer spill shorts out Iron Maiden concert.
Ok: yesterday I learned through Ostblog that Harald Metzkes is celebrating his 75th birthday. Metzkes is one of my favorite artists, not just because he and Elrid Metzkes were incredibly kind to me during a visit and interview.
Harald Metzkes' work from the '50s and early '60s is powerful and beautiful and the "Berliner Schule" group as a whole is extremely intriguing, despite the fact that they are being somewhat romanticized now, post-Wende (see Kunst in der DDR). I know I should expand this to discuss some of Metzkes', Schroeder's, or Böttcher's work but instead I want to continue with today's thought:
Along with the news of Metzkes' birthday Web.de posted this interesting image:
How, after all my digging around in Berlin and my dwelling on the GDR in the Fifties, did I miss this? It's the cellar of the old Akademie der Künste building on Pariser Platz which Metzkes and a number of other later-to-be famous GDR artists covered with murals. I'm thrilled to hear about it, it's basically a discovery to me. Apparently everyone else already knew about it.
Freitag reports that Gabi Dolff-Bonekämper, an independent conservator, intervened when the Hotel Adlon planned to destroy the paintings in the process of expanding its underground levels. It seems the Fundus hotel group has put up the money to save the murals, which in itself is a good thing.
The slightly icky thing is what it intends to do with them. Any guesses? That's right, incorporate them into the hoity-toity hotel's restaurants. Not the formal dining area, though; Harald Metzkes' Die Tafelrunde beim Wilderer will be reinstalled in a brand new, casual space in which one can get "Take-Away-Coffees, Sandwiches und leichten Gerichten in vielen Variationen..." I guess that increases my chances of getting in to see it.
But what will be the name of this new cafe?
I am not kidding.
Mrs. Tilton at A Fistful of Euros has written a great post on the proposed end to conscription in Germany. Best of all, she called Renate Schmidt "Minister for Puppies and Sad-Eyed Children (or something like that)." Hi-larious.
But really: the end of Wehrdienst and, with it, Zivildienst, could spell a real problem for social services in Germany. Mrs. T. points out that the country's dependence on the cheap labor in the Kindergarten and Pflegeheim sector provided by Zivis has kept military conscription in place, not as you (I) might have expected, the other way around. Huh.
I bet it will also pose a problem by eliminating that year or so of time "off" before kids go into Ausbildungsplätze--themselves few and far between anymore. The Süddeutsche reports that in 2003 there were 231.000 high school graduates and 83.500 open Lehrstellen for them to fill. I assume that some of this slack is taken up each year, or at least delayed, by people doing their Zivi or Bundi stint.
On Friday, the Israeli ambassador to Sweden was expelled from the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm for throwing a spotlight at an installation by Dror Feiler and Gunilla Sköld Feiler. The installation includes a photograph of Hanadi Jaradat, the Palestinian lawyer who became a suicide bomber in October. Here's the BBC's story.
Here's the installation:
So: what are the limits of freedom of expression? No small question.
Today the BBC ran an overview of European and Israeli newspapers; this discussion highlights the questions within the European left concerning anti-Semitism: what it is, how it manifests itself.
[I'm letting this percolate for the moment.]
I stumbled across this post from Deutsche Welle from April of last year and found it too excellent: A German linguist recommended that Germans stop using English words as a means of "peaceful protest" against the Bush administration's war against Iraq. German has incorporated lots of English terms: t-shirt, ticket, etc.; the alternatives suggested were mostly French words equally ingrained in German speech. I wonder if anyone followed this recommendation...could we group it under the same category as the mercifully brief "let's purge US English of French phrases" fad?
[I've filed this under "blunders," but I don't know that I really consider it a mistake--just hard to pitch to a broad audience as an important contribution to international politics. ]
Today I've seen raindrops of all shapes and sizes: fat splattery, thin and sharp, sideways, fast-moving mist...you name it. And the forecast looks bad for the next few days.
The water just pours unrelenting from the sky. Honestly. When I went out this morning it looked like the creek was on its way to flooding; if it continues like this I'm sure it will (but the photo is from November 2001, and I doubt it'll be that bad).
Salon reports today that a big-screen rendition of Annie Proulx's short story "Bareback Mountain" is in the process of being cast. Provided the movie sticks to the original story, there will be a "normal" (though illicit) romantic relationship between the two male leads.
The Salon review of this news is really interesting; it's nice to think there might be a mainstream movie in which gay men are just men first and foremost--not campy, not psychotic, not secretly wishing for a straight romance with the Best Friend. In other words, nothing like what we've seen in the past. Certainly it's true that "the recent embrace of all things gay isn't to be laughed at. The more gay characters populate the pop-culture landscape, the less pressure will be faced by their progeny."
Here's my big question: where are the lesbians? Am I missing the critiques of the explosion of gay or "gay-like" culture that address the fact that there simply aren't any lesbians in these roles? Or am I forgetting someone?
Are queer women less appealing to a mainstream audience than queer men? Why?
HeiKu has new lovely Kreuzberg photos up. Go see!
I just came across a review in the Morgenpost on H.N. Semjon's kioskshop, a permanent installation/gallery right across the street from our house in Schröderstraße. The reviewer draws comparisons between Semjon and Warhol; Oldenburg seems more accurate. Apparently at Markus Richter, Semjon also did a Duchamp and exhibited an old GDR-era toilet.
From kioskshop's press release:
Over 1000 "Product Sculptures," are at the center of this walk-in artwork, product packagings with their contents covered in white wax...The painterly white and the estranging effect of the waxed "Product Sculptures," the minimal design of the white fixtures and the brightly lit room create a distance and transcend the well-known store ambiance to another kind of perception and understanding of ones surroundings. The experience is analogous to standing before a painting, the work creates a distance and simultaneously piques a kind of curiosity.
It's all ghostly and very pretty. But because this is a semi-permanent project, with every "product" based on the same scheme (slightly modified by the artist then covered in wax), the effects of estrangement and fascination mentioned above are fairly short-lived. Seen one wax-covered coke bottle, seen 'em all. I don't mean to undermine the overall impression the shop makes, though, because walking past at night it really is striking; the products seem caught out of time. And there's something to be said for serial objects, competetively priced: 3 Euros for a water bottle.
Ostblog declares: es ist vorbei!
Ostalgie has burnt itself out. Can this be true? Those of us in the profession of history (or whatever this is) should take note...
:)
Ionarts comments on the Guardian's review of a retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein's work at the Louisiana. I admit that I'm not a big fan of Lichtenstein, but must agree with ionart's assessment of the heavy-handed and grumpy analysis of the Guardian's reviewer. I find it hard to believe, for example, that there's no irony in Lichtenstein's work, although perhaps that irony dissipates somewhat in a one-artist-show, when it's seen with only itself as a reference.
Then there was this from the Guardian reviewer: "This kind of art—a painting of the back of a painting, a cast of a beer can—has always fascinated Americans. At once naive and sophisticated, it speaks to a culture both materialist and self-conscious." Not sure how to respond to that; wouldn't want to trade with some equally pointy jibe against British artistic habits.
From the Leipziger Volkszeitung, a report on the new building that will house Leipzig's Museum der bildenden Künste. 16 months late and over budget, the museum should open in the coming fall. It is meant to replace the museum's original building, which was destroyed in WWII. The collection has been in provisional housing for half a century, so this is a big deal.
This new building has created some scandal because, as evident in the photo, it's , well, big and square and grey. Not bad on its own, I'd say, but in the context of downtown Leipzig, which is quite charming overall, it probably seems a little out of place. I'm sure the residents are just happy not to be walking past "die Lücke" anymore. Now they can walk by "den Klotz."
Anyway, the best thing about a nice big building (as we know here at UT) is that there will finally be space for the whole collection. No more itty bitty shows with just a few things. Or so I hope. Leipzig has a huge collection of GDR artists and I'd love to be able to visit just to see them hung with dignity.
H-Net has just published Richard Steigmann-Gall's review of Daniel Goldhagen's A Moral Reckoning. It will be interesting to see what public discussion follows this book; I suspect it won't be like last time, although it does sound like Goldhagen's tone and approach haven't changed much:
Claiming to be aware of historical contingency and nuance, Goldhagen feels himself freed to go about the rather heavy-handed task of exposing every antisemitic diatribe he can find. For the ethicalist, what follows in the body of this work is stern stuff, and exceptionally convincing. Goldhagen leaves no stone unturned, overwhelmingly laying to rest any lingering claim among historians that the Catholic Church was anything other than a leading propagator of antisemitism throughout modern European history.
Update/correction: Reckoning isn't new; it was published late in 2002. Oh well. Luckily I have H-Net to bring these things to my attention.
From die Zeit, an excellent little greeting. Watch for a few seconds so it can do its thing.
Happy New Year, hope it proves a lucky and peaceful one.
