A couple of nights ago at Galerie Konrad Fischer (in the high pitch of Gallery Weekend Berlin) a man in his thirties, short hair, button shirt, blue jeans, screamed at the top of his lungs while a stylish lesbian played tambourine alongside, screeching in a regular rhythm. Clothes came off at one point as they moved from gallery to gallery in the building. The woman’s shirt became unbuttoned, the man’s pants descended round his ankles, his green American Apparel undies shifted down around his thighs, he shat into his hand (not pausing in his screams) and smeared it onto his forehead. The German gallerists said nothing. But of course, called the police.
As for the shitsmearing American Apparel model, exceptions exist as with anything, but transgressive performance art is more often than not bad, boring, and shudder inducing. But not the shudder of shock and horror that the artist may be shooting for, but a shudder of pity and embarrassment. This was true here, but to call the police about a lame stunt made the gallerists look like harried shopkeepers trying to keep there customers from seeing anything unpleasant, rather than the hip patrons of the arts they play themselves off to be. I don’t know which, but one of the dealers (if not all) called the cops to be sure. And how many came, around 10 cars and a gaggle on bikes. It just would of been more honest if one of the dealers just grabbed the offenders and bounced them out.

One man, one woman, one tambourine, one turd, ten cop cars: Germany!
A new slogan for the Paterland. No offense really to Germany, my countrymen often act foolish as well.

Polizei: Were they artists?
Gallerist: I’m not sure. I don’t think so. Maybe.

The performance artists, or what have you, were arrested.

The Berlin Gallery Weekend is everything the Berlin Biennial is not. An amorphous, inclusive poetic drove the Biennial, which was concentrated on younger and unknown artists, and in the end, perhaps came off as institutional, and maybe just a little bureaucratic. The Gallery Weekend is about the market, famous artists, and of course is as unbureacratic as the Germans are able to be, which, truth be known, is still a stiff.

Everything is a bit disconnected, or maybe I just felt lost there. Berlin I haven’t figured out yet how to navigate. I never end up where I intend, a .66L bottle of Becks gripped in my hand as I get turned around and waste time on taxis and tubes, and then people smear shit onto their foreheads.

Here for interviews, artists have either blown me off (Aida Ruilova) or thrown me out of their studios for perceived transgressions (Carsten Nicolai when Nicolai’s gallerist dropped a photographer I was working with off at his studio and she started taking pictures without his express permission). Some people have been very gentle and generous, Thomas Wulffen, Jaro Straub, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Vladko Vladov, Aaron Moulton, John Kleckner, Mariano Pichler, Susanne Schuricht, and others to be sure, but the cold shoulder acquaintances, self-important gestures, and market pressures came to bare bitter fruit for me.

On Sunday, I went saw nearly every gallery in Berlin.

Shrug.

Maybe the hype was directed at the collectors, and hardly a pfennig spent on impressing (with actual ideas and well-developed artistic visions) foreign art critics of low-to-middling reputation, not very surprising. This is not to say that many gallerists weren’t entirely pleasant to me (though some were patently stupid, such as the vapid assistant at Galerie Mehdi Chouakri that when I asked why Matthieu Mercier included antique baseball masks alongside his finish-fetish formal sculptures, simply answered “Why not?”). And that a few of the non-profit and collector’s shows weren’t without quality, many were. But overall a conservative turn by harried shopkeepers.

Besides a distaste for Beck’s and Mercier, I’ll take away from Berlin an admiration for a handful of artists (and shows) at a handful of spaces (Mona Hatoum at Max Heitzler, Tomas Schmit at Barbara Wein, "The New World" at Artnews Projects, Edith Dekyndt at PROGRAM), but overall a sense that Berlin is caught in two contrasting modes, between it’s history as an alternative art community and its fledgling market.

In the end the Biennial and the Gallery Weekend make nice contrasts to one another, both amorphous but for different purposes. As much as I thought the Biennial shapeless, it chose thoughtful work for seemingly non-commercial reasons. It chose them as one vision of what a biennial and, in particular, this biennial should be.

The Gallery Weekend offers a rather different vision. Though quality has not been wholly dispensed with, it merely becomes a measure of an index, an index whose main purpose is not innovation, artistic process, history, or even humanity, an index whose main measure is money. It’s okay, art and artists adapt and survive, but one can’t help but hear about the halcyon days of Berlin in the 90s (or New York in the 70s) and not wince that they’ve passed. Though I kvetch regularly about money, the market can have a little bounce and energy that the academies and alternatives often do not. A conversation, tension, war, between the two I think is healthy. Usually one dominates the other, or in rather sophisticated societies with an absence of market fund art through the government and universities, which often creates academic art, intellectually well-built but often without energy or ambiguity.

The city is in weid place art-wise, but its still a beautiful city and it attracts more and more artists everyday. If anything its the artists that really amke a community of cultural producers interesting. Why are they coming to Berlin?

It’s damn cheap and beautiful and overall, a very easy place to live. I’m ready to jump the sinking American ship myself and dog paddle over to Berlin for an apartment in Mitte for 500 euros. Not that it ain’t sinking in its own way too, just perhaps at a pace I can deal with.