Art, Art and MORE ART!

So everywhere we went in Berlin was covered in graffiti and street art. Whole buildings – abandoned and otherwise – had murals down the sides, and there were tags in the strangest places. Even on the back of a sign five meters high in the middle of the river! Some was clever, some political satire, some obnoxious, some pretty and some plain strange, but all so interesting! Berlin has CHARACTER.

   

Across the river close to our hostel was the East Side Art Gallery. This is a part of the Berlin Wall covered in paintings by artists from around the world.

    

Running for 1.3kms there are over 100 painted sections. It had recently been renovated so the colours were bright and free from the tagging that the rest of Berlin’s human height walls have been subject to. The bottom middle picture above is of one section that didn’t get renovated and shows the faded colours and the plaster falling off.

We also went to Hamburger Bahnhof an awesome modern art gallery that was a huge surprise and went on forever!

I’ve always been a fan of Andy Warhol (especially the flowers below) but had never been that into his Chairman Mao works. TOTALLY CHANGED MY MIND! This was HUGE. And with all the carefree painterly colours under the screen print I have been converted.
 

And there was a whole heap of Anselm Kiefer works – another surprise! I did a study on Kiefer in high school and he influenced my 6th form and 7th form works. His paintings are so tactile and yet despairing. His work is based on the horror of WWII and the Holocaust.

 

This was in the main hall. The back circle is made from mud from the River Avon and was shipped over for the artist (Richard Long) to paint on the wall. It took all my strength not to touch it – I really can’t help myself sometimes. (I couldn’t help myself from touching the stone circle on the ground and got told off by a guard anyway.) Circles are awesome. Especially circles made up of linear objects!

 

There were lots of little rooms off the corridors with videos and interactive exhibits. I loved this one by Ger van Elk of someone shaving a cactus. And the one on the left was a new exhibition by Cory Arcangel about new media and our interactions. This was a montage of youtube videos turned to make ‘Canon in D.’ You could also play guitar hero, watch Jimi Hendrix play Star Spangled banner, and get your daily internet cat fix.

I was looking out one of the fire doors as I was leaving and noticed a guy across the concrete spray painting on what looked like yet another section of the Berlin Wall. There had been pieces of it all over the city, very distinct in style. He was just hanging out bare-chested doing his thang.


Anyway, it was an extremely cool gallery – highly recommended, and even the exit signs were trés chic! I missed one wing of it without noticing so will definitely have to return to Berlin for more of the art scene. Who wants to go with me?! x

A True English Experience: Ale and Morris Dancing

I got back from Berlin late Friday night, woke up Saturday morning and was accosted while half asleep in the kitchen by darling Reggie who had arrived from Madrid while I was away to celebrate her birthday! I threw on clothes and was suddenly at St Pancras train station with a ginger ale and McDonalds breakfast (first I’ve had in LIGHTYEARS) on our way to Rochester of all places, to watch a day of Morris dancing and folk music, of all things!


Look at the little English town! Ye olde English, with flags and many many pubs.

    

Lots of silly hats, one of which I got to try!

   

Above from left – Susi’s ale face (waaay too bitter); one of the marquees with the kegs and interesting names, and a street stall selling ye olde pewter tankards!

   

Look! The building’s on a lean, that isn’t my photography skills. And an actual town cryer! I didn’t understand a word he was saying, but one of the English guys who was with us translated it roughly as saying God Bless Kate Middleton and he’d had too much to drink. In cockney rhyming slang or something similarly unintelligible but fun to listen to.

 

And a casual castle. Next to a cool cathedral. But what a crazy cap!

We had wild boar for lunch, and I got to the point where I enjoyed the taste of ale, (warm and flat…) and then a curry for dinner – as English as it comes with our NZ/Aussie/German/French/English-for-good-luck contingent!
x

Ich bin ein Berliner

Actually, I’m not a donut, but I have never seen so many Dunkin’ Donut franchises in all my life!

Thanks to the royal wedding, Easter and Mayday all coinciding this year, I got 11 days off for the price of 3. After a weekend in Swindon I hopped on a plane to Berlin for 5 days to seethe city everyone raves about and catch up with two friends from NZ – Oli (living in Dresden) and Xander (studying in Sweden). Both were old hats of the city and were great tour guides to have. Oli booked us into a hostel in Kreuzberg, close to the Spree, the East Side Gallery and lots of cool little cafes and bars.

    

As everyone knows, the city was split in half for years - East and West. There was a huge amount of history on display everywhere we went - from the 18th Century through to WWII and the reunification. I’m having a brain malfunction right now because Glee is on in the background so I apologise if I mess up any of my facts! There were great Linden trees everywhere which made the city seem very green, and this with the Col-War style buildings, what remained of the old Prussian architecture, the grand museums, churches and Hamburg University, and the constant graffitti and street art, made for a unique city.

Above is a picture of the media tower that the East Berlin government built – almost as a beacon over the city to show West Berlin what they could do, as much as for the state media. And of course, Marx and Engels on the left. I tried to get up on his knee but wasn’t tall enough to get up.

   

The middle building above is the Pergamom Museum (more on that in a later post) where you can see shell damage from WWII in the columns. There were extensive renovations going on at many of the sites we visited, and damage from the war 65 years on was still evident.

 

Brandenburg Gate in the rain, keeping the tourists away!

   

Pictured above is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. This is a Holocaust memorial with a name that is fairly self-explanatory. I really liked the memorial itself, and it felt very calm and peaceful. I gather this is not what it is meant to convey but there was a cool stillness that made me feel very tranquil - possibly because the rain had stopped and there were laughing children running in between the concrete pillars playing tag and hide-and-seek. Even so, the memorial definitely left an impression on me.

 

And just round the corner was a carpark with an unobtrusive sign indicating that this was the site of Hitler’s bunker. It had long been filled in and no building can be built there so it cannot become a place for Nazism to rise again.

 

The Reichstag was closed! Well, not really, but there was a new policy that meant we had to apply online to go in, at least 3 days in advance. So, I got to take lots of photos of the outside (check out more on the Picasa album,) and ponder the history and how on earth Cristo managed to wrap it up like a present.

 

Since I took SO MANY PHOTOS. So I will do a few posts on Potsdam, Museum Island and the art – oh the art! and you can view more photos here!