Monday 7 May, 2007

Süddeutsche Zeitung 07.05.2007

In Munich, the Wiesenfeld architectural Werkbundsiedlung, or settlement combining space for the arts, business and living quarters (more on the idea of the Werkbundsiedlung here), planned by Japanese architect Kazunari Sakamoto, is due to be nipped in the bud. The reason: too expensive. Gerhard Matzig (articles by Matzig here) gives a bleak picture of the city's urban planning. "Munich is one big self-satisfied boom town, where you can sell a parking space in any dingy underground car park for tens of thousands of euros. That's why the 'urban renaissance' long considered a boon in other centres has been completely ignored here. Munich prides itself on being a 'single-city', and it will be a long time before families and seniors find a place to live downtown. That's why the Werkbundsiedlung is such an enormous chance for the city. It's inconceivable that the problems involved in an innovative, dynamic concept such as this can't be solved collectively."


Frankfurter Rundschau 07.05.2007

Elke Buhr wasn't put off at all by the strong smell of paint in the Hamburg retrospective of paintings by Daniel Richter, because new works like "E.R." more than compensated for it. "Richter's fast pace has clearly not worked to his disadvantage. Because this gnome is just a fantastic figure. It's both a striking caricature of the hip wireless types who clog the big-city cafes and a reprise of all the lecherous dwarves that have crept, grovelled and sneaked through the history of painting. The composition of the picture is also chock full of tension. With her soft, white features, the woman's figure on the side looks as if she's sprung from an art-nouveau painting. And the hard-contoured street scene in the background ebbs repeatedly into rough layers of colour, into pure painting."


Süddeutsche Zeitung 07.05.2007

Elfriede Jelinek's play "Über Tiere" (on animals) which is premiering at the Vienna Burgtheater is brimming with "raw mourning," raves Christopher Schmidt. "It was an article in the Viennese city newspaper 'Der Falter', that brought Elfriede Jelinek's attention to the call-girl affair. Then using repetition and semantic shifts she amalgamated the telephone protocol which the agency played back to her into a rhythmical text, which is less remarkable for its startling exposure of the male language of objectification, than for its precisely documented interplay of Business Deutsch and baby speak, infantilism and perversion."


Die Tageszeitung 07.05.2007

Under the promising title "Sign of the Times" Gabriele Goettle visits the tattoo artist Berit Uhlhorn. "Once a young man came in who insisted on having the end of his penis tattooed. I suggested a black spiral – I mean I can hardly do a portrait of the Virgin Mary on there. But a spiral, which seems to charge the sex with magical powers, that's elegant, timeless. And as for the pain, if that's what he wants, that's what he has to endure. It all went well. He didn't utter a squeak. It was so sweet though because when I'd finished, he got a hard-on. He looked at his penis lovingly, and his penis looked back at him. I should have put a face on it after all!"


Saturday 5 May, 2007

Frankfurter Rundschau 05.05.2007

Harry Nutt was there when Nobel Prizewinner Orhan Pamuk received an honorary doctorate from the Free University in Berlin (more on Pamuk's German reading tour here). Little was said about politics, a fact that Nutt makes up for in his commentary: "The tension... that threatens to break apart Turkish society is based on the conflict between the growing Islamic reform movement and clandestine authoritarian Kemalism. The clash of white (representatives of authoritarian secularism) and black (Islamic Calvinists in Anatolia) elites can in any case no longer be explained in terms of the simple opposition of Istanbul cosmopolitanism and Anatolian backwardness."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 05.05.2007

For Marc Zitzman, the Parisian Institut du Monde Arabe, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary, is still an absolute washout, financially, organisationally and in terms of exhibition politics. "Its exhibitions focus single-mindedly on the past and seem to follow the guiding principle 'the deader the better'. And although they draw the crowds and have a sound scientific basis, all contemporary references and questioning of the way history is 'constructed' in the Arab states today are resolutely swept under the carpet in favour of conservative-conservational discourse.