Hamburger Bahnhof and other delicacies

"The clarity of the well-marked path is sterile. To find the path, to follow it, to examine it, and to clear away the tangled undergrowth: that is sculpture" Giuseppe Penone

Winter is a stranger to me. I have 22 or 23 winters on my shoulders, a couple of them bad enough to remember, but its harshness, and its otherness, to use a word I much dislike, always strikes me as a very odd experience, hollow inside and prickly outside. I was running on the frozen Wilhelmstr. cus I wanted to get to this guided tour at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum on time. I found out yesterday they offer such free tours, on a different topic every Thursday, and the chosen topic for today was minimalism, discussed along with works from the local Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, focusing on their local collection. As I said, I was running but suddenly started freezing all over... so I just got into this Turkish place in order to get a coffee and warm up my fingers, which hurt, half-dead in my pockets from not wearing gloves. The coffee wasn't that cheap, but what I saw there was worth it: a picture of Angela Merkel eating a kebab, with a caption where she was rambling something anti-left. Amazing... I've just checked it up on the internet, and it's Angela's favourite Imbiss (fast food place) apparently... It's called "Motiv" for some reason. So Angela Merkel goes to Motiv once per week to get herself some Turkish delights. I'm definitely becoming a regular too, but being a staunch vegetarian, I guess I'll just go for the other great populist staple, Falafel. There were some other photos hanging on there, like the president of Germany's silliest state, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but who cares about him, we just can't get enough of Angela and her kebabs!

But back to Hamburger Bahnhof. It was my first time there, and I can say it's really worth it. I've always seen the building and its blue neon lights and thought "oh I really must go in there", but never did it. It's a former railway station, completely revamped for art uses together with the adjacent industrial containers containing equally machinal works of art. It took me the pleasurable effort of purchasing a yearly ticket for a good deal of the Berliner museums (20€ with student discount, not that bad if I use it for special events like this one) to get in for the first time. It was truly interesting, and a good opportunity to challenge myself and my concentration with a German language-only event. The guide was a really sweet man who presented himself as an artist and art historian. Considering the amount of his speech I understood (some 90% at least), must say I feel quite successful now, hah! I understood everything and even managed to utter a couple of half-baked insights... Minimal art kind of gets along well with a season like this. It reminded me somehow of D.H. Lawrence, insisting on the topics of cold as a desert of abstraction (I'm quoting from memory, so maybe it wasn't exactly so), and flesh in liberty, the solar desert, the unconquered space of putrefaction. (Here I just made it all up) Not bad for a morning wasted in the wasteland of intellectualism...

There was a specific piece ressembling an igloo - a small, blatantly uncomfortable space intended for living which was meant to play on the topics of sterility, not-meant-for-real-life aspects of art, along with the artist's own experience in hospitals (with the Clinic, if put à la Foucault) after contracting HIV. My most direct association was something I saw once at the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona: a real avantgarde-art-inspired Republican torture room used during the Spanish Civil Wars at the Checas of Barcelona, a bizarre blend of wartime Stalinist exports, bogus (or not) psychology and surrealism. It was a small cell intended to induce its dweller to madness... How come did I think of it, I don't know. But it was maybe all this interesting talk about the distance minimal artists wanted to achieve between traditional art -including the avantgardes- and themselves. Beyond all barriers of representation, way beyond all traditional elements that make art art, between ideology in the broadest sense of the word, and pure immanence. "Non referential art", as the guide said: that is, all possible references not contained in the actual object are false. Minimalism doesn't intend to misguide one about meanings or forms because, as the minimal motto goes "What you see is what you see", literally. My mental jukebox switching back and forth was therefore plain Herstellung of bullshit but that's how the brain works, isn't it? So be it.