Anne Imhof “Faust” & A Hell of My Own

July 12, 2017August 12, 2017 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

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My arrival to this year’s Venice Biennale was a curious one. If I didn’t have a crowd of people depicting me as their face of Hell, I wouldn’t have been able to appreciate all the allusions to Dante’s Inferno everywhere I went.

I saw Anne Imhof last September at the Hamburger Bahnhof observing her performers with a CEO stance, her feet slightly spread apart in line with the width of her shoulders. As I observed her stance, I became aware of my own crossed my feet prone to causing tilting stumbles. No one seemed to recognize her. Then a half year later, I saw her again winning the Golden Lion and she looked as though years had passed. The hard work and fatigue could be seen on her face.

The choreographed tableaus of “Angst” had changed to ones of hate shown through warring movements against oneself and others. Shadows moved like a herd created by the audience chasing the performers from above and then circling them as they stood looking down through a pane of glass. Small cotton ball bonfire flames burned in a corner, hands traveled down beneath the shorts and inched its way near the groin, a foggy imprint of breath made its way across the floor like one-legged footsteps. Fists appeared, first one, then two, then three – all lined up signifying a moment of unity within the struggle/ resistance.

Walking up to the German Pavillon, I thought is this a cliché, looks just like a building from the Third Reich. Ideology now looked like a cliché. The architecture had the body of classic Prussian style slightly gray in tone but the insides of a concentration camp examining room – Germany’s own pool of inferno blood being washed away by an overflowing pool of water. Imhof carried the burden of German history well on her shoulders and was even introducing non-Germans to “Faust.”

Before the performers arrived, I made a round of the space and found a little bee on the ground. While normally afraid of bees, I bent down and examined it and wondered are you chance or are you art. The bee was gone by the time I came back.

The accessories were laid out grouped in threes and fours, all meticulously placed along the walls, on tables or near corners. There on a Tuesday, around 2 weeks after the fact, the stars of the group were not present. Out of the group of 20 dancers, only 6 were performing the day I was there. Disappointed, the bodies I saw were a little less majestic, conveyed a little less power but even without the stars, I could see Imhof’s piece had come to Venice to kill.

Eating Well in Frankfurt

June 18, 2017June 24, 2017 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

As my friend saw me off on the train back to Berlin, she wistfully said, ” I hope your train ride is like Before Sunrise.” To which I replied, “You haven’t seen the people who sit next to me on trains.” Instead, my Deutsche Bahn train got delayed almost until sunrise and so I got a 9 EUR refund.

I had spent part of the weekend in Frankfurt asking her to help me deconstruct a music video in which a wolf was following a lady in a blue dress. Then I threw in an extra variable of Phrygian mythology into the mix in which a man becomes like a woman or dresses like a woman. Listening to myself, I realized this is really hard to explain. I had the feeling I must be the wolf scared off by the sound of music and then left on the road as the car drives off. And if one wolf wasn’t enough, I saw another one looking straight into my eyes, telling me sweetie pie, you’re the wolf honey bun. The second she-wolf was this pseudo-cinematic poster for Ed Aktins’ Corpsing exhibition at MMK.

When we walked into the exhibition, my friend noticed the artist was born in 1982 and said, “He was born in 1982 and already in a museum. Johanna, we’re losers.” I replied, “He’s ‘one of the greatest artists of our generation.’ ” I told her it might be difficult in the beginning to understand but after about 20 minutes, it will start making sense. Every 5 minutes, I checked in to see how bored she was, “Are you okay?” She said, “This guy is the king of depression but I like the song.” Song went something like this,” I didn’t know… I didn’t know how deep I had gone…” The avatar sang this as he sank deeper and deeper into acts of depression while his body started to decompose until finally a sinkhole (that was unknowingly present the whole time) opens up during an earthquake and swallows him and his world whole. The next day while we were driving through the city, I heard my friend humming a tune and realized it was the depressed avatar song.

Her son was now 3-years-old, so after I bought him some coloring wall stickers and a coloring poster I asked her, “Does your son like to color?” “I’ve never seen him coloring.” “Oh, what does he like?” “He wants to be Darth Vader.” So when my wonderful coloring gifts were revealed, all three of us (Friend, Dad, and Me) made an effort to get him to start coloring. He made like three rough up and down motions with a green marker outside the coloring lines and then started yelling, “Badminton, badminton!” However, I didn’t want to stop coloring but felt I had too. Then, the dad got out the badminton rackets, but the boy kept missing the birdie. My friend then turned to me and said “See, can’t color or play badminton.” “So much energy…” “This is nothing.” Then, the son started yelling, “Darth Vader, Darth Vader!” So the dad got his black cape, mask and lightsaber, fastened the cape, handed him the mask and the lightsaber, and then he presented himself to me as Darth Vader.

The next day the whole family and I went to brunch at a Japanese/ French cafe. After a few bites of peaceful eating, the son’s head erupts. He starts coughing, then his nose starts running, then tears start streaming down his cheeks and then he vomits. His dad catches the vomit in his hands as I quickly pick up a plate for it to be disposed. The two of them immediately head home but my friend barely even freaks out. “Your son’s head just erupted!” “Happens all the time,” and she goes back to eating. Just the two of us now, I start telling her of this video I posted on Facebook and got a Durex condom advertisement in my newsfeed. But right as I start telling this, my friend calls which I ignore because I specifically told him I would be busy visiting a friend but accidentally took the call so he hears the first half of the story. Astonishing how much I was able to communicate in just under a minute.

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To the Sound of Horns at Crescendo

December 16, 2016June 25, 2017 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

I discovered a song with my name in it while watching Us Dead Talk Love by Ed Atkins. Walking into the room, I was first attracted to the sweet voice of the speaking cadaver and a recurring slightly curved black line, cutting midway through the images like the first stroke of calligraphy writing, the focal point and the leitmotif to a love story. The slash rendered as eyelash took on the dimensions of an objet petit a. Two wide screens were alternating images of the cadaver’s severed head complete with high definition zits (the head kept making me want to leave but I stayed for the voice) and the iconography of romantic and erotic symbolism depicting falling apples and reclining marble statues.

Later, as the rambling narrative mentioned an eyelash and foreskin along with the meandering stream of words evoking fossilized time, the understanding of “I,” the metaphysics of representation, and the human body in biological terms, there it was, the obvious confession by the cadaver “as in, I love you.” As the images flashed binding the eyelash to a dream world and the melody of the voice feeling like love’s own caresses, the instrumental sampling from the musical Todd Sweeney comprised of horns and percussion rose to a climactic crescendo as I was lulled into my own reverie of eyelashes and eyebrows.

Ed Atkins Us Dead Talk Love, 2012

A Love Affair with Myself

December 9, 2016December 10, 2016 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

A Palermo lady upgraded my room to one with a view of Teatro Massimo. Teenage kids party, socialize, dance, drink wine, and make out all around it. I fed a homeless cat a hot dog in front of a cafe on one of its side streets.

Inside the theater, there is a room originally only for nobles called Pompeian Hall or the Echo Room with frescos from Pompeii circling it. If you stand in the center of the room and speak, your voice echoes and everyone can here you. But if you stand anywhere else, your conversations will be drowned out by other conversations, keeping all conversations private.

When this lady found out I would be spending two nights in Messina, she grimaced and said, “Messina is not worth the trouble. Just sleep there.”

I told another Milanese lady I’d be going to Messina and her eyes went wide and asked, “Why?”

Then in a long-winded fashion I tried to explain, “I saw these paintings in the Risorgimento museum in Turin and…” and before I could finish she said, “You’re going because of Garibaldi ?!” and then she laughed for a good 2 minutes.

I blame the tempera paintings of Carlo Bossoli found in the National Museum of the Italian Risorgimento Turin. I saw Messina and decided to go. His little room of paintings showed the Piedmontese conquering and yet also admiring the view.

I blame Filippo Juvarra for being born there and Caravaggio for being on the run. But it wasn’t as ugly as everyone said it would be. Although everything was destroyed in an earthquake, the so-called ugliest city in Sicily still had its charms. I saw the Strait of Messina and its like the width of the Rhine in Cologne. In the distance, you can see the white buildings of Reggio Calabria. I had a Bronte pistachio gelato twice. I saw a boat called “Tourist & Carton” and found my little poseur dog from the Boudin painting I loved so much. He is a little bigger in real life.

boudin9 — *The Beach at Trouville*, 1865. E. Boudin

unnamed-22 — “Tourist & Carton” ship off in the distance and the Boudin dog

So I asked this Palermo lady the places she liked the best in Sicily and she said, “Agrigento in the south. It has 5 Greek temples and Erice with over 100 churches. And the most beautiful in the sunset, the salt dunes in Marsala.”

“Marsala, like the wine?”

“Yes, they also make salt.”

I thought damn, my love story did not take me there.

Of Lovers and Diet Pepsi

December 6, 2016July 25, 2017 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

The range of reactions from the audience to Anne Imhof’s Angst II exhibition as durational opera during Berlin Art Week this year ranged from “Turner Prize” to “You could be one of the performers” [the equivalent of “I could have done this”]. The first reaction I heard came from two German girls standing behind me at the entrance waiting to get into the general public opening night, “Der Nebel! Ich liebe Nebel!” [Fog! I love fog!] I thought, has fog become the new sunset. Throughout the evening I heard comments like “This is lasting forever [when there was still 3 more hours to go],” “Berghain in a museum [Berghain several times],” “Just your average night in Berlin [Americans bragging to out-of-towners],” and “hahaha lets go.” The crowd was also a mixed, broad and diverse sampling of Berliners and visitors. I saw middle-aged and older museum goers, start-up CEOs, tourists, cool kids dressed in black and PR party girl types. This wasn’t an emotional piece but it made me think about it for quite awhile.

The smoke machines filling the main hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof offered a thrilling aspect for me as a lover of smoke/ fog. I spent about three hours walking back and forth taking photos and almost running into one of the main non-beings. The humans in the piece were not performing as humans but as the equivalent of objects. The gestures slowly performed by the non-beings were like tableaux vivants or living pictures with ready-made objects. The living pictures showed the postures and movements the bodies made with a mobile phone or a cigarette or shaving cream but blankly. Without the objects, their gestures were at times highly stylized and mannered, sometimes recognizable and other times not. Often the gestures mimicked exhaustion, death, boredom, fatigue or the audience. And the vacant looks of the non-beings were well-executed by this cast. They did however at times acknowledge each other. Almost immediately, I realized how gendered and almost Quattrocento my own postures and gestures were compared to these non-beings whose gestures were androgynous, desexualized, and highly anti-social.

It’s difficult to be moved by the musical sound of a soda can going “pop” or for shaving cream to be used not for the non-beings, whose bodies no longer had any hair but so that the shaving cream could perform and the razors could have its moment. The roles were interestingly reversed but whether equality was achieved, that is harder to tell.

Although the piece had no narrative and the audience was told this, I still couldn’t help but try to follow a conventional narrative structure, convinced that if I stayed till the end, something might happen. I didn’t make it to the end but it was interesting to know that I kept on thinking it would. Even though the humans were non-beings, the regular humans still followed them around and gave them more importance than the objects because that was also an old habit to break. In fact, most of the drama was actually created by the drones, the falcons, the smoke machine, the shaving cream, the razors, the Coca-Cola/ Diet Pepsi cans and mobile phones. Once the falcons left the stage, it was fairly uneventful.

That non-being had less of a role than a soda can

Echoic Mention

September 8, 2016September 8, 2016 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

“We are standing by a wishing well
Make a wish into the well
That’s all you have to do
And if you hear it echoing
Your wish will soon come true”

Snow White “I’m Wishing”

An English artist revealing the resonant frequencies of architectural structures… how poetically perfect, every work of art is a wish come true.

Thinking of Mules and Looking Like Uma

August 10, 2016December 24, 2016 ~ johannajuni ~ Leave a comment

Juvarra’s ceiling and Maurizio Cattelan *Novecento* (1997) The horse’s name is Tiramisu.

Hiking on an ancient mule path to the Sacra di San Michele, I spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking of this horse named Tiramisu that looked like a mule that I had seen the day before at Castello di Rivoli. He was suspended from what had to be the most beautiful ceiling I had ever seen. Stepping on stones that were like smooth little peaks jabbing into my non-hiking shoes, I kept imagining Tiramisu (aka pick me up) carrying fat monks (the idea of skinny monks is about as ripe as thinking of skinny bankers) to the monastery all day, every day till he died. But then even after death, he would be stuffed and strung up as contemporary art. The sadness I felt for Tiramisu and for my feet were diametrically opposed to the smiling and friendly Italians I passed on the mule path all wishing me “Buongiorno,” “Buonasera” or “Ciao.” I’ve never been greeted by so many Italian smiles. I felt as if walking on the Floating Piers was like being baptized by the Lombard sun, and walking this mule path made me an honorary Piedmontese.

At the end of the mule path, I literally emerged from the bushes (like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill emerging from the grave covered in mud into a diner best seen at 1:58) onto a large paved road filled with people who had not suffered to get there like a mule. Just like Uma, I went straight to the bar cafe and bought a bottle of water and a white popsicle.