Blackened Blu: 'Artists' Destroy Their Own Art

I See an Art Wall and I Want to Paint It Black

File under WTF WERE THEY THINKING?

Recently, under cover of night, vandals applied paint to the walls of an innocent building in Berlin.  Ironically, they weren’t blasting graffiti bombs all over the dump—they were painting OVER two of the most famous street art wall murals in Berlin.  Then they talked to the media.  Then they sounded like media-groomed art-tards with carefully-prepared sound bites like “We felt it was time for (the artwork) to vanish, along with the fading era in Berlin’s history that they represented” and “The white–well, in this case black–washing also signifies a rebirth: as a wake-up call to the city and its dwellers, a reminder of the necessity to preserve affordable and lively spaces of possibility, instead of producing undead taxidermies of art.”

 

                                    

Who asked you to do it?  The ACTUAL artist (Blu)?  I don’t think so.  You say you were ‘co-creator’ of the murals and yet your ‘credentials’ as a ‘cultural scientist and curator focusing on art in the public domain’ sound like happy horseshit prepared for you by the people who actually paid you to paint over the walls.  While the rest of Berlin is subject to hostile takeover from gentrification investment whores, you just decided to kill the art in a pre-emptive strike against yourselves.  Art suicide?  The problem with your reasoning is that art is a creative process, not a destructive one.  If we need any more proof of your collusion with sneaky developers, just look at the big fence around the property.  Somebody unlocked the gate for you and your crane.  Did the developers provide the crane as well, or is that a standard tool for scrappy street artists?  By working with the developers to blacken Blu’s art, you tar yourself with the same brush.

These particular murals had meaning.  They were not just tags left by random dogs spraying their turf.  These paintings were carefully thought out and executed by an internationally famous street artist from Italy named Blu.  While I am only beginning to understand the significance of the two upside down figures (I only recently learned they were flashing East and West Berlin gang signs), the headless figure of the business man with two gold watches chaining his arms was a work of brilliance.  It became one of the icons of Berlin—right there along with the East Side Gallery section of the Berlin Wall.  Hell, I even have a Hard Rock Café pin in the shape of a guitar with the damn mural on it.

A year ago I was walking by the now-deceased art on a similarly mild winter day.  The simple white wall figures loomed large over some squatters in a field. There were still a few shanties left in Camp Cuvry, the open-air squat beneath the graffiti giants.  I was able to walk in and drink beer with some of the remaining campers.  I did not envy them in their uphill struggle against the developers; nor did I envy them sleeping in a field in the winter.  I shared beer with them for the privilege of talking with them a while before their inevitable ousting.  Their eviction was imminent simply because they were sitting on a view of the river.  Riverfront developer Mediaspree’s policy up until now has been: 1) buy every dilapidated thing along the river (occupied or not), 2) drive out the ones who won’t be bought out.

While I was writing a story on Berlin's Beach Bars a few years ago, a few of the bar managers were packing their shit while they were speaking to me.  Others warned me that within a very short time there would be no places for ordinary people to have a drink with a view of water.  Only high rise condos and office buildings would remain.  High rise condos and office buildings seem perfectly reasonable in cities like Los Angeles or Tokyo, but in Berlin they are about as useful as an asshole on your elbow.

KIEZ STATT PROFITWAHN!

(Neighborhoods Instead of Profit Madness)

The majority of Berliners do not like what is happening to their city.  And this majority is not just a bunch of grungy slackers crying about change; all of them embrace the idea of Berlin as the constantly changing city—a city where anyone with an idea can take over a disused, dilapidated factory and make something of it.  But there are some changes that can only harm a city; changes which benefit a few wealthy investors at the expense of driving out the REAL movers and shakers of Berlin.  Once again, the artists are the unwilling shock troops of gentrification.


They came, they saw, they left their creative mark.  Then the developers conquered.

Kreuzberg Street Art Walkabout

The street art scene in Berlin is one of the best in the world.  And no neighborhood in Berlin packs more street art per square meter than Kreuzberg.  Just take a stroll in the area between Oberbaumbrücke and Schlesiches Tor U bahn station and you will become a believer.  Spray can statements writ large encompass entire sides of buildings.

On a rare clear January day in Berlin I hit the streets of Kreuzberg to add some more street art shots to my growing collection.  Last summer I began a personal project on street art and street artists in Berlin.  In pictures and words I aim to document the vibrant street art scene in Berlin and show the importance of street art as a form of communication, protest and/or city beautification.

As I was fixing my camera’s focus on a particularly colorful wall, I heard the familiar sound of the English language nearby—explaining the very street art I was about to photograph.  I stood my ground as a small group of a dozen tourists flowed past me pointing and snapping pictures.  The last words I heard from the tour guide was ‘and this piece is by ALIAS…’

I waited for the group to soak in the spray can scenery before I proceeded to take my own photos in my own time.  Just around the corner a table loaded with spray cans stood in front of a sleepy café.  A spray can artist popped up from behind the table and bombed the wall with blasts of colorful coffee cups and trees with oranges dripping juice.  I looked around and noted the neighborhood pride:  many cafes, shops, bistros and kebab joints were festooned with urban art and spray painted motifs.

  

On the river end of Cuvrystrasse is an abandoned field with three painted behemoths standing guard.  The entire sides of the two buildings behind the field were covered with five-storey tall figures by globally-famous urban artist BLU from Italy.  One of the iconic pieces—a headless businessman adjusting his tie while his hands are bound by twin gold watches and chains—is even featured on a Hard Rock Café Berlin collectors pin (among no doubt hundreds of other pieces of unofficial tourist tat).

 A wide open gap in the wall surrounding the field beckoned me inside.  As I walked further into the field, the random piles of rubbish began morphing into mounds of building materials crudely lashed together into the shape of shacks.  A large teepee stood to my left and I heard voices and laughter near some curling smoke.  Moments later I encountered a couple sitting around a fire amid piles of tastefully arranged skip furniture.  They asked me to join them with a warning not to take photos.  They pointed to a sign with the international symbol of a crudely drawn camera with a big red line through it.  I agreed to their reasonable terms and they invited me to join them by the fire.  After a quick run to the nearby market, I procured portable potables for us to drink around the fire in the field.  They told me the story of their community, their struggles and their commitment to sleeping outdoors in the winter.

We discussed the economic state of Berlin, the closing of almost every beach bar, jam space and artist community along the River Spree.  YAAM, the last of the Mohicans, is apparently on the chopping block as well.  I once interviewed the manager of YAAM for a story on Berlin’s beach bars.  He told me the outlook is grim for anyone who takes an abandoned space and makes a thriving community from it, because the developers are always poised to move in and smash dreams.

So once again gentrification rears its ugly head.  In Camp Cuvry’s case, the police haven’t yet applied the jackboot.  The young Argentinean man I was speaking to plucked the few remaining strings on his old guitar and informed me that a community isn't in danger until the original property owners decide they have the money (investors) to do something with the space.  I hope that they never will.  And on that note, I finished my drink, bade them farewell and wished them the very best of luck.

In the coming months I will update my website and blog with images from my Berlin Street Art documentary.  Please subscribe to this blog and/or check back periodically to follow my progress.

Berlin Sells the Berlin Wall to Developers

On March 1^st Berlin sold a piece of its culture and history to the highest bidder.  And the crowd went wild.  On the streets along the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall and open air gallery, hundreds gathered in protest of the cultural rape.  City honchos and district bosses simply shook their heads and stated that the new owners had the right to destroy the second biggest tourist attraction in Berlin.

How an officially-marked Berlin denkmal (monument) could be sold without public involvement is a scandal of the highest order.  Construction crews removed the first section under cover of night, but by 9am Friday morning, hundreds had gotten wind of the change.  You just can’t hide a giant crane lifting a brightly colored, 12 foot concrete slab in the air.

Police gathered in force:  at first only a few dozen ‘garden variety’ officers formed a human wall and taped protestors off across the street from the Wall.  When push came to shove, a gang of riot police quietly sidled into position and dropped a metal barricade between the construction site and the crowd—but not before the entire group broke through the police tape and wheeled a mock section of the Wall right through the police lines.  The wall segment read ‘Mr. Obama.  Tear Down Wall Street,’ a reference to Ronald Reagan’s famous statement at the original Berlin Wall: ‘Mr.Gorbachev. Tear down this wall.’

In the end, protestors' efforts were not in vain.  Police informed the crowd over bullhorns that the wall destruction would be delayed--for now...

Kunsthaus Tacheles: A Requiem

A Berlin Icon swept under

carpet bombing banks;

gentrifying Gestapo

stuck the jack boot in.

Kunsthaus Tacheles (Art house Tacheles) was on the tourist map and guides once took merry tourists through the hallowed halls of art and piss-reeking stairwells to catch a glimpse of the Real Berlin.  The building survived Nazis, commies and squatters.  Now it is gone.

It has been months since the police pushed the last artists out of the former-art-squat-turned- artist-residence and the last angry shouts of protest fell on the deaf ears of press and passersby.  Tacheles died a slow death, fighting tooth and nail, as most alternative spaces do, until the very banks and investors who let them stay for a song ripped the rug out from under the very people who made the neighborhood as prosperous as it is today.  Looking up and down the restaurant and bar-lined street, there is no question that this is a bustling area.

Unchecked and unregulated, the uber-Capitalist machine runs roughshod over the very people who build communities and make neighborhoods worth living in.  But no, we must let laissez faire markets kick lazy fairy artists out into the street.  Because that’s what we do in the free world. 
I watched police moving the artists out.  I spoke to the artists and the police.  I took some photos as well.  These are just a few of the photos I took in what may later become a long term documentary of the effects of gentrification on city and citizen alike.