Not a German Whip. Klein made the coolest, wildest, most expensive mountain bikes back in the ’90s, eye-bleed paint jobs on oversize aluminium tubing. Utterly desirable and mad collectable today. Total shock to see one turned into a pub banger with front rack and riser bars. Other than that it looks in fairly good condition, thrashed but loved. I almost wanted to stick a note on it offering to buy it.
Lucky last from the Berlinische Galerie, which I’ve only been to once before shortly after I arrived in Berlin and remembering not liking but felt like I ought to cos it was getting hyped, but here I am a lifetime on and nah still don’t like it. Abstract Expressionism though, I do have a soft spot for my eyes and brain getting fucked on these visuals.
Still at the Berlinische Galerie. Obviously I liked this one. Totalled Deutsch hoonage? Easier fix than changing the timing chain. Sometimes I wonder if I’m emotionally swayed by art which is actually superficial at best and kind of white neoliberal corporate in its heart. I dunno. Would I watch 10 minutes of this Benz doing a Nürburgring lap? Duh! Simple pleasures.
Primarily I went there to see this painting. Me and eyebleed colour, eh. And at the end of a couple of hours, it was still my fave painting. The colours are kinda off in my photo though cos I still have no idea how to do colour-balancing.
Seen on Urbanstr. as the first snow started to fall, proper German hoonage of an Audi TT RS Mk2 Coupé in winter camouflage white riding slammed on black RoadForce centerlock rims (or at least pretending to be centerlock). “Guys better show respect / If they see man pullin’ up in a TT”
The trees along the southern perimeter road which I know so well. I haven’t sat under all of them only because I have my favourites.
This storm line slipped to the south-west of Tempelhofer Feld. The next one to the north-east. Threading the sunny needle between downpours all afternoon.
The Flugfeld doing that pretty late-summer bloom of lilac-lavender chicory flowers. I sat under a tree reading Fatimah Asghar’s If They Come For Us.
First time ever being inside the Neue Nationalgalerie, and with Alison Currie who’s blasting through Berlin / Germland / the north-west Asian peninsula (aka Europe) on a dance / art trip.
One of the last artworks we saw, and the last painting I photographed before we schlepped around the gift shop. It’s supposed to be three chicks perving at a naked dude, but I think it’s three trans women showing off what the fourth could have if she just got on hormones and embraced her femme.
Me, trying to remember what I was looking at in the Neue Nationalgalerie, having forgot every artist’s name, but still, “Oh, yeah, that one, that’s one of my faves,” pointing at Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz and Rheinbrücke paintings which I’ve seen heaps of times and still very much faves, or Max Beckmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Wassily Kandinsky … seeing all those artists in context with each other (though minus the ladies, cos … ‘reasons’) and in context geographically and historically is a trip.
Last time I blogged Otto Mueller was when I visited Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig way back in 2016, and when I used to photograph massive amounts of art and edit the fuck out of it all. Which, like everything I get enthusiastic about, became stressy and slightly too intense, whole weeks gone on doing fifty or sixty images per museum, and then a pandemic happened and I’ve been to maybe two or three exhibitions since the start of 2020.
