tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-57788702010-01-28T16:53:35.407+01:00Our world, seen by one of usAlexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.comBlogger50125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-47138673269855235052010-01-28T16:44:00.002+01:002010-01-28T16:53:35.431+01:00

At this year's DLD, the thing that struck me most was the work of artist Aaron Koblin. His data animations were all over the place. What is beautiful of them is the way they use globalized capitalist activity to create collective artworks. Capitalism itself becomes the artist here, with its planes starting or the date sent out by the performance of Radiohead. His "Ten Thousand Cent" piece is

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-54044145641983108082009-12-23T22:34:00.002+01:002009-12-23T22:49:00.444+01:00

What an amazing building. What an amazing non-building. The New Acropolis Museum in Athens is everything that makes architecture so strong and so weak today. It is a building that is not really a building, for its core, its essence is the Parthenon temple on the mountain top, visible from every floor in the museum. What is more, with the third floor of the museum having exactly the shape of the

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-61807078726618949742009-09-18T23:23:00.002+02:002009-09-18T23:40:58.191+02:00

Scientists say that Africa and Europe used to be one continent. Probably they are right. Every day, ships start from Southern Spain, carrying one day visitors to Moroccan Tanger. Yesterday, one of them took me, too. The landing of thousands of European tourists from Spain is creating in Tanger multi-level post-urban experience. The place I have been to was obviously a simulation—of a lot of

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-16681084339081286242009-09-06T18:59:00.002+02:002009-09-06T19:09:00.838+02:00

Urban space in central Berlin is all about creating historical references where there were none. Rebuilding the Stadtschloss is a sign for the frantic search for an idea of the historical. It seems to be this spatial evocation of history that Allora and Calzadilla had in mind for their piece in the Temporäre Kunsthalle. Positioned at the future entrance of the Schloss, they artificially reduce

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-26099418575627471162009-05-26T07:01:00.004+02:002009-05-26T08:13:08.647+02:00

When visiting a city, we are used to reading it through the eyes of its arts, its exhibitions and artists. In Shanghai, this is quite easy, and a rather difficult thing at the same time. On the one hand, the city has understood the tourist demand for a "gallery quarter", where nice-looking young locals sell something that can be hung to a Western wall and explained as the result of a certain city

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-5365037566666157192009-05-21T13:18:00.004+02:002009-05-21T14:08:33.585+02:00

One of the first impressions in the hyperbusy streets of Shanghai is the omnipresence of brands. However, it is not enough just to claim that Shanghai is a city thriving on the economics of branding. It would even be insufficient to show that the city is branding itself strategically, although of course this is what is happening, and will be happening to a much greater extent next year, with the

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-32489819704817534362009-05-04T06:51:00.004+02:002009-05-04T07:24:27.311+02:00

You enter a room and watch comboys at a campfire. Beautiful, and seen in so so many movies good and bad. There is also a woman in front of a house, on another screen. And an outside view on an apparently deserted Western town. Then the Cowboys start talking.This is a bit of what you see in Julian Rosefeldts video "American Night" that I encountered yesterday during Berlin Gallery Weekend at Arndt

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-87419283531896224462009-04-11T16:40:00.006+02:002009-04-12T00:51:31.944+02:00

Is this place beautiful or ugly? Is it weird to live here, nice, or just "okay"? Interestingly, no one seems to ask these questions in "Cliff Hotel", Baabe, island Rügen. None of the up to 530 people sleeping here per night. (By the way, Rügen is Eastern Germany—just to be precise. Or rather, to be utterly unprecise? For what does that "Eastern" mean today, if anything? Is that information still,

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-83241531652591114592009-04-06T21:58:00.005+02:002009-04-06T22:44:10.701+02:00

What a place. One square, you turn around and are captured by the full intensity and scariness of Berlin's architectural desires and dreams. All the ideas of national grandesse, of wanna-be Paris. The Unter den Linden 1 Bertelsmann house, reevoking the idea of the grand boulevard, a boulevard that never was. And this thin plastic wall, sponsered by an energy company, reminiscing the Schinkel

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-53755111624816289282009-03-29T21:10:00.003+02:002009-03-30T11:13:32.076+02:00

Been to Berlin Zoo today. I must admit I am a great fan of zoos. Whenever visiting a new city, I try to find out whether there is one, and here I am, staring with fascination at all the poor ones, amit bored children and parents trying madly to remember what they have heard about just this weird Lama thing some years ago. After all, this is a place to spread knowledge, they seem to think. Apart

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-57875556694422337832009-03-12T16:02:00.002+01:002009-03-12T16:12:29.501+01:00

German musician Peter Fox ist offering an impressive tribute to Berlin with his "Schwarz zu Blau", giving voice to the areas that really make this city unique; areas like the Kottbuser Tor. Here, the city shows its ugly, torn, honest face: drugs, gang fights, architectural monsters of an incredibly fascinating intensity. The drug scene is apparently becoming an ever more pressing social problem.

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-7340663974328036412009-02-24T18:06:00.004+01:002009-02-25T11:43:19.130+01:00

Hafen City Hamburg is remarkable in many respects. For one, the project is huge. It actually extends the inner city by a staggering 40 percent. It also connects the formerly rather discinct worlds of the financial district and the port. And this point is connected to another unique festure that you become aware of when walking the many streets in there that are finished today: The architecture,

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-61875744071067948202009-01-28T13:02:00.003+01:002009-01-28T13:17:52.606+01:00

Some years ago, Germany staged the most embarrasingly postmodern phenomenon. It was called Ostalgia, meaning the ahistorical play with references to the East's GDR past. In typical postmodern quoting and pastiche production, people went to Ostalgia parties, listened to the ridiculous Eastern German pomp rock and drank Rotkäppchen Sekt. All this underlined with the subtext that somehow, the GDR

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-89940956198392641972009-01-04T20:39:00.002+01:002009-01-04T20:52:09.741+01:00

Yeah yeah, families are having a hard time and all that. Big discussion in Germany, as usual very fundamental: either you have a kid and hence assume that all singles are barbarians. Or you don't, and claim that parents with kids destroy all urban culture. Which then leads to the with-kids starting a general sermon on how hard it all is, how society does nothing for them. Well, quick example that

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-17072796235096332732009-01-01T18:06:00.002+01:002009-01-01T18:14:43.233+01:00

Anish Kapoor in the Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin. Smart, beautiful, original, obviously. Perhaps the greatest bit of this piece is that it makes us rethink notions of objects and spaces. Here, the object becomes space, and the space transforms into something object-ive. You look at his tremendous piece from three sides. You never get the whole of it, and from one side, you look at the inside of

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-53912306119256290312008-11-26T09:01:00.004+01:002008-11-26T09:26:34.650+01:00

It is beautiful in a melancholic way: London is mourning the loss of the "cool Britannia" vibes of the 1990s. And just as the economy goes down and newspapers tear Labour to pieces for getting back to old-style Labour politics, Heathrow's new Terminal Five seems to memorize the crazy self-confidence of the 1990s, the British version of "we can". The airport extension is a design clearly developed

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-71693963922597482352008-11-07T22:24:00.004+01:002008-11-07T22:36:21.707+01:00

Here's something beautiful and smart from the last Berlin Art Forum: Dionisio Gonzalez, confronting in his works favelas with lofty arty architectural designs. Clearly, this is more than common-sense criticism of social inequality. Rather, it seems to be a reflection of the mental situation of your classical bourgois arts friend. Obviously, in his search for unpainted walls and naked concrete,

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-62936463747510744672008-10-17T08:59:00.002+02:002008-10-17T09:18:53.553+02:00

Theorist Anthony Vidler had years ago coined the term "architectural uncanny". His claim was that architecture in modernity is always connected to a certain darkness, an unexplicable fear it produces. On an abstract level, this is what creates the fascination of buildings, or entire urban settings such as cities. The experience of South-East Asian cities such as Bangkok are very much connected to

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-50981422669046793482008-09-05T16:18:00.002+02:002008-09-05T16:28:01.952+02:00

Seen the film "Cloverfield" yesterday. And yes, I liked it, although its viral marketing-inspired "look how authentic you can be when sticking to a handy cam" is getting on one's nerves after a while. But the way the monster can never quite be seen in full made a lot of sense to me. After all, the monster is here more a virtuality than a reality. Of course, after 9-11, all non-human monsters have

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-11936250069815398012008-05-22T18:51:00.005+02:002008-05-27T04:09:35.414+02:00

Once more, David Lynch was the one to see. In "Inland Empire", after myriads of incomprehensible twists of story, life and nightmares, the heroine dies on—Hollywood Boulevard. Lying next to bums and beggars, in the dirt. This is the small death the dreams and expectations of visitors to Hollywood Boulevard also die. There, in the heart of phantasy land, where at the Kodak theatre the Oscars are

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-12128982319538675652008-04-06T09:59:00.003+02:002008-04-06T10:22:29.773+02:00

There is nothing as strange, but also as fascinating, as a grandezza that it not quite there anymore, that exists only virtually. The "Grand Hotel delle Terme" in the Sicilian place Termini Imerese is one of the places to encounter this virtual grandness. The hotel still has the architectural ingredients, the ambitious lobby, the glitzering bar "Zeus" to perform as an age-old place of the utmost

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-37662898062637626222008-02-07T11:11:00.000+01:002008-02-07T11:34:24.486+01:00

I saw a very interesting film last night: "The Brave One" with Jodie Foster. It's about a young New York radio journalist whose fiancé gets brutally mordered in a remote area of (I think) Central Park. Afterward, Jodie brilliantly plays a woman on a revenge tour: She buys a gun, and with the new-felt power fights back the threat of the city: First, she shoots a guy attacking a sales woman in a

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-13496993071676231532008-02-05T16:04:00.001+01:002008-02-07T11:11:22.246+01:00

Of course, Germany did it as well. When it comes to finding new ways of regulating people's behaviour, then suddenly this country can react really quick, avant-garde-style even. So here comes the smoking ban in all pubs in Bavaria.Now, however, something interesting happens. Bar owners set up "clubs". Why? If a pub is a private club, and has the club rule than smoking is allowed, then apparently

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-82283069391113741862008-01-10T11:47:00.001+01:002008-01-12T09:21:52.059+01:00

Discourse among European intellectuals has a favourite enemy: the USA with all their nasty inventions. One of these inventions are gated communities. The European city is usually presented as an alternative model where we all live together happily. Interesting, then, to ask whether in prototype European-city-model places like Berlin Prenzlauer Berg, there could be similar urban developments. This

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5778870.post-76559479399657576342007-11-10T08:58:00.000+01:002007-11-10T09:42:25.301+01:00

In his book "Kingdom Come", British writer JG Ballard brings us to a weird world at the outskirts of London, a place called Brooklands, where consumerism reigns supreme: The whole area is dominated by a gigantic shopping mall, which creates its own microworld: a parallel universe without classical politics, but with own rules of social engagement, own values, and even its own TV channel. (Here's

Alexander Gutzmerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05440114764143405263noreply@blogger.com1