Apr 20th, 2008
Toil and rubble
I’m standing in the middle of a weed-strewn wasteland, looking for the sculpture park that’s part of the Berlin Biennial. In the distance, some overdressed people are stumbling around a patch of ground that was once the “death strip” beside the Berlin Wall. Music wafts from a mound of rubble. Someone is peering intently at a birch tree. It has a label - this must be the art.
Dotted about the place, various other works resemble abandoned billboards, bus shelters and shanty dwellings. A series of holes decorate one patch of earth, as if excavated with a giant ice-cream scoop. This miserable patch of churned, fallow ground in the centre of Berlin has been squabbled over by developers ever since unification; it is a place with a haunted past and a contested present.
Among the broken lumps of masonry and rubbish is a shed in which a film by Lars Laumann tells the story of a Swedish woman who fell in love with the Berlin Wall and now believes they are husband and wife. In the dark, my jaw dropped. The story, I realised, is not a spoof. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer really is Mrs Berlin Wall, and lives with her now retired husband, in the form of various small barbed-wire-topped models of himself, in a village in northern Sweden. She says the day the wall came down was an absolute disaster, but she loves her wall just the same. As well as her beloved husband and numerous cats, she also keeps various scale-models of guillotines for company. What turns her on is parallel lines, rectangular shapes, forms that divide (such as walls), and others that connect (such as bridges). Don’t ask about the guillotines. She says she’s an object-sexualist, and believes that objects have souls, feelings, desires and thoughts they share with her telepathically. Which isn’t all that different from the art critic who also believes that man-made objects can talk and hold secrets they can share. Admitting you’re an art lover might say more about you than you think.
Tags: big, festival, shanty