Glamour, Champagne, collapse
While people line up for Pierre Huyghe outside Berghain, choreographer Michael Clark performs in Jim Lambie's exhibition. Notes from a Berlin that is sometimes
not so post-cool after all.
Last week, Berlin once again didn't feel post-cool or over at all. On Thursday evening, for the opening of Pierre Huyghe's exhibition at Halle am Berghain, a queue formed outside that-both in length and in looks-could easily rival any club night at the infamous techno temple. On Friday, just as many people would probably have crowded in front of Konrad Fischer Galerie, had the guest list not already been closed in advance. The chosen few were rewarded with a performance by dancer and choreographer Michael Clark.
For those who know as little about dance as the author of this text: Clark brought punk into ballet in the early 1980s and is considered a major rebel in his field. He has collaborated with artists such as Sarah Lucas, Peter Doig, and Leigh Bowery, and worked with music by Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, The Fall, Jarvis Cocker, and repeatedly David Bowie. I once saw him years ago at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, where his performers danced to music by Scritti Politti-and it was at least as mind-blowing as a night at Berghain, assuming Pierre Huyghe isn't performing there at the same time.
Clark has now come to Berlin to accompany the opening of Jim Lambie's exhibition at Konrad Fischer with a performance-the two have been friends since their student days. Like Clark, Lambie is Scottish, also born in the early 1960s, and-alongside his artistic career-has one foot firmly planted in music and club culture. He became known in the late 1990s for his psychedelic Zobop floor installations made of multicolored vinyl tape. His new work in Berlin consists of reflective silver and white stripes, recalling Warhol's early Factory. Four dancers initially spread themselves across this installation as if at a rehearsal. Clark himself cues the music on a laptop-it's "Save It" by the punk rock band The Cramps. Then he stops the rehearsal, murmurs new instructions to his dancers-and they begin again.
Everyday things and opulent splendor
Gradually, a mood of improvisation and unfinished-ness spreads-something that characterizes the work of both artists just as much as their collision of opposites. Just as Clark allows raw musical anarchy to penetrate the rigid discipline of ballet bodies, Lambie charges discarded objects with opulent splendor and psychotropic energy.
Reused sunglass lenses joined with lead profiles form honeycomb-like jewels that fracture color and light. His Metal Box sculptures, made from stacked fluorescent sheets of metal, have dog-eared corners like peeling posters in the urban landscape. Shirt collars, necklaces, safety pins, a Marlboro Lights pack, bamboo, and colored thread come together in a Psychedelic Soul Stick 68. Potato sacks filled with expanding foam and mounted on a white canvas overturn the old idea of painting as a window-and instead function like portals inward. One work from the series is titled The Other Side of the Sun.
Like Clark's dancers, Lambie's works conjure a dreamlike, ominous, extravagant atmosphere, shimmering between DIY aesthetics and subversive glamour, champagne and collapse, activation and pause: an existentialist "failing better," a celebration of the irreducible beauty of bodies, music, community, and art. Even-and especially-in these shitty times, at least for this moment. Video or photo recordings are not permitted this evening.
So much for "no future"
In the magnificent finale, the performers dance to David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane (1913-1938-197?)", with Mike Garson's still-unbelievable free-jazz piano improvisation. Bowie wrote the song inspired by Evelyn Waugh's "Vile Bodies"-he saw the 1930 story about British decadence and dandyism on the eve of the World War catastrophe as a mirror of American society in the early 1970s. In the song title, the years in parentheses refer to the periods before the First and Second World Wars. The third, unknown date stands for the impending third. So much for no future.
– Sebastian Frenzel
