In the working-class neighborhood of Kreuzberg, just a few years from the graffiti-splattered Berlin Wall, four fragments of the city’s old trolley tracks poke through the crumbling dead-end street. While this is literally the end of the line for West Berlin, it is also the starting place for much of its art. Traditionally, Kreuzberg has been the home of those who cannot afford to live elsewhere: factory workers, Turkish immigrants, the elderly. But in the late Seventies, the younger, more radical members of Kreuzberg’s patchwork population fought off developers looking to gentrify the area and proceeded to remodel affordable living spaces from old apartment buildings and factories. Artists moved into Kreuzberg’s abandoned industrial spaces and made them studios; store-front galleries squeezed in among the B-movie theaters and kabob stands.
If the art bred in Kreuzberg is rebellious, it is only in keeping with the traditions of Berlin. Berlin has long been home to emergent art movements, from the social criticism of painters George Grosz and Otto Dix and the anarchy of the Dada movement in the Twenties to the "actions" of Joseph Beuys and The Fluxus group in the late Sixties
"I wouldn’t say today’s art is a continuation of Beuys, exactly, but it is a continuation of the Sixties," comments Rene’ Block, a Berlin curator and former art dealer who brought Beuys to America in 1974. Block believes that spirit of "happenings" and the Fluxus movement comes through in the work of contemporary Kreuzberg artists. "This earlier art had a great deal of influence on the young generation and they are following these ideas with a new spirit."
By basing themselves in Kreuzberg, artists are also participating in another, more recent Berlin tradition. In the late Seventies, Kreuzberg became the home of the New Expressionist painters known as the "New Wild Ones."
"Kreuzberg is still the quarter of Berlin for experimental ideas by a younger generation," says Block
"Politics was a key theme in Berlin art in the Sixties; now the focus has shifted to the politics of art itself. The subsidies given by the German government to all Berlin residents make life here more affordable for young artists, but the location of the city exacts a price: West Berlin is a cultural and physical island cut off from the more commercial art markets of Cologne, Hamburg and Frankfurt. But the artists stay in Berlin for what is labeled "the energy," a creative atmosphere unique to the city.
The most widely recognized of Kreuzberg’s artists are the New Wild Ones. Painters such as Helmut Middendorf, Rainer Fettig, and Salomé received international attention in the late Eighties for an impassioned painting style first championed by another Berlin artist K.H. Hödicke. This New Expressionism was a direct confrontation of the figurative tendency of the time, "a combination of personal experience and invented images," explains critic Wolfgang Max Faust. It was also a critical and commercial success: "Berlinart: 1961 – 1987," a 1987 survey shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, confirmed its status.
But today, talk of the avant-garde in Berlin no longer centers on the New Wild Ones - – ironically, their very success has made them establishment figures in the art world. "The energy could only last for a few years," says Faust, "then there necessarily had to be a transformation to something else."
Now there appear to be several tendencies defining Berlin’s art scene. Chief among them are installations – room-enveloping works designed for the space in which they are displayed – and what Faust refers to as "crossover tendency," a mix of everyday activities and art that plays havoc with conventional ideas of art and galleries. But while it is agreed that Berlin is giving birth to substantial art, there is a widespread reluctance to group these works together and call them a movement of one kind or another. "In the moment you have a name – it’s over," says Dr. Evelyn Weiss, vice-director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the home of one of Germany’s premier collections of modern art.
"The first idea is that we do art in the city, not in the gallery," says Berlin artist Stefan Micheel of the "Aktion" he and his partner HS Winkler have initiated on trolley tracks in three Berlin locations. Using an industrial polisher, the pair has burnished one of the rails to a dull shone, leaving it strangely naked among the other three rusty ones. The altered rail immediately leads the viewer to ask questions: "Who did this? And why"
According to Winkler, that is just the point.
Armed with the most basic tools, the duo focuses on the functional but easily overlooked elements that make up the urban landscape – railways, bridges, city streets – transforming.