Ich werde ein Berliner

A guest column by Dolores Overgaard

If you haven’t discovered this by now, you will soon find out that going to exhibitions occupies a central place in an urban nomad’s heart. This is because, to the Club Mate intelligentsia, no single quality is more desirable than the ability to create. Asked to describe themselves and their activities, an elite German person will use the word “creative” more often than a Tibetan monk chanting a particularly cherished mantra. Yet despite their constant efforts to be seen as a spiritual persecuted minority, it soon becomes apparent that owing a moleskin or making a mix tape are enough to be considered to be creative activities. This is partly because vintage tops or neon leggings drastically increase a wearer’s creative output, and partly because elite German people have a worryingly lax take on what is considered “creative”, and believe a strict adherence to semantics to be an evil bourgeois plot. It is therefore no exaggeration to state that these zeitgeisters spend 99% of their time engaged in creative projects, a “project” being an even more ambiguous term than “creative” itself. Given the term’s flexible nature, it will come as no surprise to discover that watching other people being creative is also labelled as “creative”, like a möbius image perpetuating ad-infinitum outside the confines of mainstream.

Creative people watching other people being creative is, of course, an unnecessarily long way of saying “going to exhibitions”, as when galleries use “non-verbal expression” instead of “painting”. Attending exhibitions, particularly if you beat everyone else to it, will mark you out as a visionary urban commentator straddling the bleeding edge of now. But you have to attend the right sort of exhibition. A visit to such a mainstream place as the Pergamon is not going to get you admiring glances at Club der Visionaere unless it was done in an ironic manner as part of one of your “projects” or it was host to a temporary exhibition on the bread baskets of an obscure Javanese tribe oppressed by a former European colonial power.

So what should you be looking for? What constitutes the perfect exhibition? Below is a list of keywords to keep in mind when scouting for creative arcadia. It will hopefully help you reach the 100% creative target whilst using 1% of your intellect. Any exhibition worth seeing should at least include two of them, and if you manage to combine them all then congratulations, you’ve got creative bingo! Although refrain from saying this aloud.

• Abandoned: As a rule of thumb, museums should be avoided in favour of art installations (preferably guerilla ones) or pop up galleries. Not only are museums full of tourists and other philistines, but they are also buildings that were designed specifically for the purpose of displaying and housing art collections. Instead you should look out for abandoned warehouses / power stations / horse hospitals / brothels / horse brothels, because nothing reflects the capricious transient nature of urban topography more than projecting an 8mm film onto the walls of a former syphilis hotbed.
• Ephemeral: Modern art installations always seem to be described as ephemeral, “ephemeral” in this case being a synonym for “little effort”. Plus there seems to be a widely held belief that being constantly reminded of our fleeting presence on this earth will make you sound like a fearless existentialist instead of stating the blinding obvious. In other words “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, LOOK AT MY COLLAGES, THEY’RE SO DEEP, BECAUSE WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE”. This is known as a circular argument, although you’re advised not to bring this up, most elite Germans wouldn’t recognise logic if it approached them as a contiguous, coherent sequence of events. It is also not recommended to dwell on your own mortality in a similar logical vein, or you might be wondering why you’re not, say, in the Bahamas indulging in debauched acts of hedonism instead of standing in an exhibition that just couldn’t be ephemeral enough for your liking.
• Interdisciplinary: You have probably been to an exhibition that consisted, perhaps, of some illustrations hanging on one wall, a film projected on the other, some random graffiti on the third, some distressed textiles hanging on the fourth, and top it all off, a random tree trunk sculpture holding court in the middle. You might also have, erroneously, asked yourself “Gee, I wonder where the curator is?”. And yes, to the untrained eye, “interdisciplinary” will often equal “we didn’t bother curating it”. You’d be wrong! Art is not only ephemeral but also fluid. It refuses to be labelled, hence the many “untitled” pieces that populate galleries. Nomenclature is for the narrow-minded and not for the ambiguous multi-faceted Renaissance Person you should aspire to become. Every self-respecting artist should be interested in at least three disciplines. Although note that “showing interest” doesn’t necessarily equate to “being good at”.
• Playful: Because the average urban flaneur seems to reach puberty round their mid-thirties, it should come as no surprise that they regard art as play. Consequently, many creative events often include terms such as “playground” or “sandbox” in their names. Elite Germans love these creative ball pits, as they consider themselves carefree spirits that have not lost their child’s sense of wonder, which in their minds puts them on par with Chagall. By surrounding themselves with such creative pursuits as DJing, silent film projections and light installations they can achieve optimal creativity, maximised by the consumption of cheap ironic beer and other less legal substances. Just like children.
• Subversive: All art should be subversive, even if it often only subverts good taste and logic. A much favoured subversion technique is placing two seemingly incongruous objects together to create a new meaning (see also interdisciplinary), like a piano next to a basil plant, or a Moomin next to a cheese grater. What these unholy alliances are subverting is anybody’s guess. It frankly doesn’t matter, as long as it hasn’t been tried before. Though like asbestos inhalers, it soon becomes clear why nobody has taken this daring step before.

It should also be noted that subverting culturally accepted models of femininity is a particular popular fecund and never ending source of material amongst female artists. In this department, unexpected facial hair is apparently a timeless classic. Recent examples include the omnipresence of crudely added handlebar moustaches to photos, although you can always go for the perennially popular monobrow as sported by a certain Mexican artist in her self-portraits, even though she never had one in real life and by all photographic accounts was not precisely oblivious to her physical appearance.

• Pushing boundaries: This is closely related to subversion. You should aim to have your boundaries pushed and your perceptions altered at least 30 times a week, without chemical aid. An exhibition should always question previously held cultural assumptions, even if they’re perfectly sound ones, like not finding moustachioed women attractive. The viewer is also encouraged to question things, as long as it is not “why am I here?”, which is a tad too subversive.
• Urban desolation: Finally, no exhibition is complete without a healthy dose of unfiltered raw urban grit. This gives the whole enterprise depth and clearly signals that the exhibition is by and for middle class people. The more it closely resembles a drug den the better. A drug den with an unusual high number of MacBooks. Ideally you shouldn’t be able to find the door, and be forced to wander up and down the street cursing under your breath pretending not to look lost, until you start getting curious looks from locals whilst a little voice in your head keeps haunting you with a simple yet recurring “WHY?”. Don’t fret, this is an essential part of the experience. By the time you find the entrance you will have turned into a tortured soul torn between the siren calls of logic and your apparent duty to contain gentrification by wandering around abandoned warehouses with rolled up cigarettes. This state will enable you to view yet another set of over-exposed/over-saturated/over-rated photos of graffitied walls/doors/kebab stands/kebabs without that pesky common sense getting in the way. Should you run out of beer or just simply wake up from this self-inflicted lobotomy and start screeching like a deranged hyena, just claim that you’re reenacting Edvard Munch’s The Scream in a contemporary dystopian setting as part of one your “projects” about urban alienation.