Max Pitegoff / Calla Henkel
NEW THEATER, 2012–2013

Art as the byproduct of certain kinds of relationships, certain kinds of communities.
Times is an artist project that was founded in 2011 in Berlin by Calla Henkel, Lindsay Lawson and Max Pitegoff. A bar, a nighttime exhibition and a performance space, Times functions as a club for a mostly young, mostly expatriate art scene. In Bern, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff have reworked the furniture of their bar for a new theater space to open in 2013. Also on exhibit, a set of photographs that provide allegorical evidence of events and discussions said to have taken place in Berlin. The fluorescent lights, indicating that the performance is set to begin, comes– of course– from New York. Soon a year old, Times will close its door while the show in Bern will still be running.

Gela Patashuri & Sergei Tcherepnin
TCCA, 2012

Three years ago Gela Patashuri and Sergei Tcherepnin found a machine that controls air pressure on the Eliava flea market in Tbilisi, Georgia. This marks the starting point of the TCCA Organ, a sculptural, musical and social collaborative project. In the summer 2012 they built the instrument near the village of Shindisi, on a stretch of land bought by Swiss curator Daniel Baumann – a land where the Tbilisi Center For Contemporary Art will be created. For which Patashuri has drafted a architectural sketch. The organ was put to its inaugural use with a performance by Sergei Tcherepnin and Gela Patashuri, and included Tobias Madison, Emanuel Rossetti, Mélanie Mermod and a group of Georgian artists which Patashuri refers to as the ‘New Generation’. The main sounds were produced after a score by Patashuri and Tcherepnin emanating from the center of the organ. The other participants joined by responding from the surrounding field. As a next step the recordings of this performance will be emitted at the Kunsthalle Bern from audio transmitters which are connected to cardboard and amplified by metal tubes brought from Georgia. Gela Patashuri hung additional bells made of metal pieces found in a scrap metal yard in Bern. This combination of both the sound of the bells and the recordings of the TCCA Organ completes the piece.

Jean-Michel Wicker
hc r 1, 2012

Context Content Data Form. Jean-Michel Wicker’s posters take as their point of departure the first issue of Homocore, a 1988 San Francisco gay anarcho punk zine. This visual material is organized, reorganized and disorganized, reframed and defaced, scribbled on and pieced together with images and texts culled from the artist’s immediate Berlin surroundings. In Europe, 1988 is considered to have been a second Summer of Love, which saw the rise of rave culture. Yet, rather than weave these sub-cultural references into a coherent story, Jean-Michel Wicker’s formal and structural games which alter and open up these images, create a rift in the communitarian narratives we expected these images to convey.

APN Research あぷん, 2012

The “APN” are an ensemble of 55 pictures, published weekly between 1953 and 1954 in the most influent photo-news magazine of the time in Japan, the Asahi Gurafu. While the whole magazine showed documentary pictures with thorough reportage and creative layout, as Life magazine did, the APN pictures used experimental techniques and display, but had as sole obligation to represent in the picture the letters A, P, N. These APN pictures were used as the title of a specific double page of the magazine called “Asahi Picture News”. Parts of the collaborators of the APN project were young emerging artists participating in cross media collectives as the Jikken Kōbō (Shōzō Kitadai, Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, Tetsūro Komai) or the Graphic Shūdan (Hamao Hamada). But at the same time, participated to APN preeminent figures of Prewar avant-garde Japanese movements as Sōfū Teshigehara, Sabūro Hasegawa and Yoshishige Saitō. The APN project, not only appears today as a rare concretisation in the Prewar Avant-garde agenda of merging art into mass media, it also render visible a puzzling number of connections and references, from Russian Constructivsm (Saito), Surrealism (Ohtsuji and Takiguchi), Bauhaus (Yamaguchi), to 1950s Tokyo experimental collective groups and 1960s Japanese “intermedia” fluxus scene, to name few identifiable trends.
Grounded on a intense collaboration with most of the few Japanese researchers specialized on the subject, The APN Research あぷん gathers first time all the APN pictures together. The publication made for the exhibition, is devised as a tool for future research, and aims to hightlight Japanese important impact as much in term of experimentation itself as in terms of quality of research that is often largely ignored.
APN Research あぷん is curated by Paris-based independent curator Mélanie Mermod, with the scientific collaboration of Kin’ichi Obinata, independent Japanese archivist.

Stefan Tcherepnin
OOO &&& LLL, 2012

It is said that certain universities, libraries, and museums survived, but to this day we have little contact with them. Earlier this year, Stefan Tcherepnin and Marianne Schroeder re-interpreted Petra, a piece for two pianos composed by Maryanne Amacher which originally premiered in 1991 in Boswil, Switzerland. The piano piece was itself inspired by an eponymous short story by science-fiction by author Greg Bear which describes a post-apocalyptic world where nuns fornicate with stone gargoyles, giving birth to humanoid stone-creatures. A member of the New York based performance group Grand Openings with Ei Arakawa, Jutta Koether, Emily Sundblad and Jay Sanders, Stefan Tcherepnin’s collaborative practice is built from the ground up, making use of the biomass of the cultural ecosystems that host him. His work for Kunsthalle Bern, takes Greg Bear’s story as its starting point and processes the leftovers of a collaborative work by Swiss artists Kaspar Müller, Tobias Madison, Emil Michael Klein and Emanuel Rossetti, bits and pieces of a tent that he soaked in cement before hanging it on a wire. In Greg Bear’s tale the stone creatures shapeshift through walls, hide and climb in a cathedral. Tcherepnin’s hung ‘skins’ delineate the contours of a penetrable installation, a physical and narrative threshold alluding to the tenuousness between an idea and it’s materialization.

Jan Vorisek, Ken Okiishi
sci-fi sounds from the alienated kitchen, 2012

Scifi sounds of the alienated kitchenAFX & SFX (wt)
Trains on a Snake (Nov. 2011) was a performance at Ap News, an artist run cinema that screens films every Monday, down the street there’s another cinema, a multiplex cinema called “Abaton” which shows Hollywood blockbusters.

On the night of the performance the screen at Ap News was hidden. A white rope kept the viewers away from the performance. During 40 minutes Jan Vorisek produced action and sci-fi movie-like sounds, not unlike the ones heard in “Abaton”.

Scifi sounds of the alienated kitchen / AFX & SFX (wt) decodes the mechanism of emotional response production in high-concept movies by 1) separating the sound from the image and 2) reproducing that sound with unexpected materials such as kitchen appliances or other domestic items.

1st page & 2nd page (new theater), 2012

Times was built on love. A deeply sentimental and corny type of love.

2007 marked the first federal surplus in Berlin’s history. I open a Pilsner Urquell and hand it across the bar. Since 2009, rents have increased yearly by 7.9%. “Everyone’s moving to Wedding.”

“I don’t want to live in fucking Wedding.” At night we sit around and talk about how we wish we could have bought apartments three years ago.

A young intern from Johann Koenig slouches on the corner of the bar smoking a cigarette. He adds, “It’s like New York in the 70’s.” “Shut up,” someone responds. The intern looks embarrassed.

Berlin’s debt is somewhere just over 60 billion dollars, but the surplus of the past two years will begin to pay it off. There are around 12,733 Americans living with visas in Berlin. At least a dozen of them are sitting in the bar. I pour glasses of whiskey and exclaim, “at least it’s almost summer.”

Berlin is one of the European cities least effected by the credit crisis, almost entirely due to persistent growth in tourism, with over 20 million auslanders flooding the city each year — “the MDMA is really good” — making it the third most visited city in Europe.

“LA?” I squeeze lime juice into a Moscow Mule and hand it across the bar. “LA is weird, you need a car and it’s fucking expensive.” The new Brandenburg International Airport is set to open June 2012, securing Berlin’s status as the “gateway to Asia” and the new hub of European travel. “Maybe Brussels would be better.”

“I don’t want to make paintings in my bedroom.”

Studios are harder to find but property prices are still 4-6 times lower than London or Paris. “Paris is annoying.” I agree and open an Erdinger Kristall. The prices of Berlin’s real estate market are expected to double in ten years due to the capital gains exemptions on residential property, which expire after ten years.

“Everyone’s leaving Bushwick.” Maybe as a joke, the Koenig intern orders a Manhattan. “Everyone lives in Chinatown.” The unemployment rate in Berlin reached an all time low in 2011. Most of these new jobs are in the service sector, and most of them with unregulated pay. I scoop ice into glasses.

The rent for the bar is €523 a month. Our profit margins fall below the average for a bar of similar size. A Pilsner Urquell costs €2.50 we sell around 35 cases a month. There are 746 hotels in Berlin with 112,400 beds.

“What about Detroit?” I laugh while wiping down the bar with a wet rag. What about Philadelphia?” Everyone laughs. My rent is €250 a month, and the revenue from the bar pays little over half of it. A web developer in Germany makes an average €26.50 hourly, a waitress €5.50. I slice oranges out of love.

The numbers behind European households are regularly printed on the front page. The eurozone is a personal crisis, taking place in interviews by Times reporters in kitchens over olives and dates. “What about Athens?” I unpack a crate of beer into the refrigerator. As artists it is our responsibility. Patti Smith just checked in at the Soho House.

Leaning against the tile, someone pauses from their beer and asks, “is the rent cheap?” “The Acropolis Museum is only €3 for students.” Germany is one of the few countries in the European Union without a minimum wage.

As an artist, I pour Aperol into a spritz glass turning it blood red. Our tab book is full of names. We don’t use debt as a weapon. “Modulor is too fucking expensive.” “So shop at Bauhaus.”
Max Pitegoff / Calla Henkel