Not Just a Business Trip:
American Artists in Berlin
and their Relationship to Europe
John Miller, from the series "Middle of the Day", 2004,
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss
Ever
since the sixties, prominent American artists have often been guests of
the DAAD program in Berlin. Yet what once helped the prestige of a city
divided by the Wall has today become a point of departure for cultural
divergence: many of the artists invited feel more at home in Berlin and
Europe in general than in the USA. Their criticism of the patriotism at
home grows in tandem with their experiences abroad. Harald Fricke
spoke with the artists Jimmie Durham, John Miller, and David Krippendorff
about identity in the era of globalization.
The barracks look empty; there are no more American flags hanging from the
apartment buildings. Even the McDonald's Drive-In is abandoned. To the
left and right of Clayallee in Zehlendorf, you really notice that the
American allies have pulled out of Berlin following German Reunification.
One position will still be occupied in 2005, however:
Jimmie Durham has been working in a studio on Käuzchensteig for several
years already, right between the sculptor
Bernhard Heiliger's foundation and the
Brücke Museum, with its treasures by
Ernst Ludwig Kirchner,
Max Pechstein, and
Emil Nolde.
Jimmie Durham, Belegstück I-IV
Sammlung Deutsche Bank, edition griffelkunst
©Jimmie Durham
An American in Berlin
lingering on in a historical location - an ambassador for the peaceful
time dawning between East and West following the end of the Cold War?
Durham has a hard time with the idea. The 64 year-old artist doesn't see
himself as a representative of American culture in the least. When he came
to Berlin in 1998 as a guest of the
German Academic Exchange Program (DAAD), he'd already long broken ties
with his country of origin: born 1940 in Washington, Arkansas, Durham was
at first a poet, performer, and object maker before he became a political
activist in New York and one of the leading figures of the
American Indian civil rights movement throughout the seventies. Himself of
Cherokee origin, he was pushing for more rights on the reservations,
urging the government again and again to make reparations.
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It was only in 1985 that Durham began dedicating himself
exclusively to art; he left the US, moved to Mexico and later Europe,
where he lived in Marseille before resettling in Berlin. His biography
alone prevents him from seeing himself as a bona fide American artist in a
position to contribute something to the cultural exchange between Germany
and the US - a relationship that may indeed have been crucial during the
time of the Wall, when international artists were invited to Berlin to
secure the city a connection to the Western world.
David Krippendorff: Mistake #2
©
David Krippendorff
A 1958 exhibition of
works by Jackson
Pollock at the
Hochschule der Künste gave the starting shot, and in 1963, a
three-year "Artists in Residence Program" was called into life by the
Ford Foundation, out of which the artists' program of the DAAD was born.
Since that time, in addition to guests from all over the world, a large
number of prominent American artists have stopped over in Berlin:
John Cage,
Edward Kienholz,
Lawrence Weiner,
Dorothy Iannone, and
Nam June Paik, as well as
Nan Goldin,
Andrea Zittel, and
Sharon Lockhart.
John Miller, from the series "Middle of the Day", 2004,
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss
Some of them have
stayed on in the city well beyond their DAAD residency. Kienholz, for
instance, remained here until his death in 1994 and was honored with a
large retrospective in 1997 at
Martin Gropius Bau. On the other hand,
John Miller came to Berlin in 1991 and was so taken by the changes in the
Eastern part of the city that he's since spent every summer in a studio at
Kunstwerke with his wife
Aura Rosenberg and daughter Carmen. Miller knows, of course, that his
presence was supposed to help strengthen the city's cultural life, but
"ironically, many more artists are now flocking to Berlin at a time when
the city is more economically depressed." At the same time, it's not the
city's local peculiarities that Miller refers to in his photographs and
conceptual works - he's far too involved in the everyday forms people live
with and use worldwide in the era of globalization.
John Miller, from the series "Middle of the Day", 2004,
Courtesy Galerie Barbara Weiss
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