The Academie der Kunste second part of the Site and Space exhibition is at the Hanseatenweg building that has a Henry Moore Reclining Figure outside. There was a time when no building was complete without a Henry Moore outside it. They're dotted around the world all over the place, but does anyone ever look at them now and say ‘I want to make sculpture just like that?'
This exhibition is really a catchall to show anything they can get hold of, which I don't mind, as there are terrific things in it. Here there was an extremely fascinating mixture of Man Ray photographs, Picasso sculpture, painting and drawings, Marcel Duchamp's reproduction of ‘The Large Glass,' a film of the Alexander Calder ‘Circus', a film of a Samuel Beckett play, Morandi paintings, Klee paintings, Max Ernst early paintings, an exquisite tiny drawing by Malevich as well as paintings, a large sculpture by Louise Bourgeois of what looked like a large bunch of penises bunched together like asparagus, perhaps growing like that, but carved or cast in what looks like a rose marble but could be a polymer. So all of that, did I mention Matisse, Bonnard, and Nauman all in the same breath too?
What stood out, apart from the intense pleasure of looking at a good selection of works each, from all the above, was a shockingly authentic film by Jean Genêt, ‘L'Amour'. It distils poetry out of violence and is compelling to watch, however brutal. A very long way from contemporary camp anonymity. I stood and watched it all the way through, but mostly other people would look transfixed for a few seconds and then seemed to get uneasy and move on quickly once they realized what was going on in this prison with the prison guard and the prisoner who had the sexual power. That plus films by Gordon Matta-Clark and others by Jean Painlevé suggesting the Fourth Dimension, were riveting. What a lot of great works to see.
One film of Gordon Matta-Clark showed him pasting up advertisements and then graffiti ‘From the USSR with Love' on the Western side of the Berlin Wall when it was pristine white, and being questioned by the guards as to what he was doing. This was in 1976 and that means that he must have been the first to do graffiti on the wall, so starting the avalanche that followed. Historically that is important. It was touching to see the West Berliners queuing up to go up a staircase to a platform contraption so that they could look over the wall at the East where perhaps their home had been. They weren't giving even a glance at what Matta-Clark was doing with his art pasting and spraying cleverness. Like Banksy at the Israeli Palestinian wall. Maybe it takes outsiders just to kick things off.
