Yesterday my friend and I went to see the Avant Garde exhibition at the Kunstbibliothek. I have seen posters around the city all summer, and I am very interested in the topic, so am happy we finally made and kept plans to see the show.

The whole Kulturforum at Potsdamer Platz is architecturally quite fantastic. The Mies Van de Rohe Neues National Galerie – an art gallery in which the art without visual isolation between inside and outside, and the Hans Scharoun-designed Staats Bibliothek and Philharmonie. My friend said the Philharmonie reminds him of a ship with all of its‘ porthole-like elements and the boat-shaped angled of the building. I mentioned how this cultural complex was built up in the West after the wall went up, since all of Berlin’s cultural institutions were annexed by the wall for the GDR. The West had to build new museums, galleries, etc. which is why the Kulturforum exists, but also why the architecture is so daring – since it was made as an expression of Western „freedom“ of choice – interpreted as freedom of aesthetic expression. What remains after reunification is a city within which several of the institutional functions are doubled.

Anyways, we met at the Kunstbibliothek and went in to see the show. Given the centennial of World War One – 1914 – several of the museums and cultural institutions around Berlin have coordinated exhibits around this event. The Avant Garde exhibition is a part of this larger initiative. I was completely surprised, however, by the exhibit. I had expected much more of the usual suspects – Dada collages, Futurist paintings, some Expressionist paintings, some Surrealism, some strange musical experimentation. But there was in fact very little of this on display.

The lower gallery contained a series of collected publications by various small-presses. The publication Der Sturm was featured quite significantly, as it seems like the publisher was bringing together all of the avant-garde artistic experimentation across Europe. Der Sturm included the French-Viennese Dada, the German der Blaue Reiter, and Italian Futurists. Der Sturm was published here in Berlin, and so the library has a good collection of their publications.

Also very charming was a series of portraits of the contributors to Der Sturm, including Kokoschka, Kandinsky, and many others. These were printed as postcards, and used both as promotional materials and clearly for correspondence. The parallels between small experimental publishing today and its originators 100 years ago is really remarkable. I think many people are still doing this very work.

Another small press was called Der Rote Hahn, which I believe was a more politicized collection – considering that anything Rote is most likely connected to the Communist movement.

In the centre of the gallery one of the pillars had some loudspeakers mounted within which played a sound track featuring recitals of some of the texts, including the very famous Futurist nonsense poem Zang Tumb Tumb.

At this point my friend and I talked a bit about the intersection between Avant Garde artistic practice and revolutionary politics. The Futurists were very much in favour of war, destruction, and embraced new technology as a means to destroy everything old and to make way for the future. They were politically allied with Fascism and supporters of war. This surprises some people (like my mother) who believe that all departures from Conservatism – both political and aesthetic – must agree. I think it is impossible for aesthetic experimentation to coincide with any political movement. But the history of the intersection of artistic avant-garde movements and political revolutionary movements is really interesting.

Anyhow, the upper gallery contained a beautiful collection of framed advertisements that were designed in the period. These were visually amazing, and stylistically bold, but I have never considered this type of work to be at all connected to the Avant Garde. I would love to know who curated this exhibit and what motivated the decision to show period advertising in a show titled Avant Garde. Considering the various Avant Garde movements‘ anti-commercial motivation, pairing their work with the purely commercial and functional forms of advertisements is unexpected, to say the least. All-in-all, though, this was a very cultural afternoon, and we finished it off with beer in the Tiergarten. Tschuss!