Hmmmm
So – we (easy)jetted over to Berlin on Friday morning to Berlin from Liverpool – with several of our Liverpool chums – with a sense of expectation and anticipation. . . the last Berlin Biennial (loved or hated) was a great art experience. . . quite a lot to live up to . . . Arriving several hours later at KW in Berlin quickly established that this was going to be an entirely different kind of experience.
Words like post-communist, nostalgic, laboured rumbled around . . . there was certainly a deliberate rejection of experience and an insistence on attention. The lack of a shared perspective on European History was apparent – in fact the making, writing, telling of history was a subject and a recurrent theme. The contemporary visual turning over of a formalism associated with an art rooted in the ideological Twentieth century for a new generation of artists left you searching for what the new message could be – because, while this show insisted that its viewers did some thinking – it resisted telling you anything.
