Monday 13 November, 2006

Süddeutsche Zeitung 13.11.2006

Jan Brandt has written an impressive portrait of artist Jörg Immendorff, who is afflicted with ALS, and his doctor Thomas Meyer. Meyer is one of few ALS specialists and himself a poet. Brandt describes how Immendorff, who can no longer use his hands, paints today: "A plastic tube protrudes from his throat for the artificial respirator to which he is attached when he lies in his bed at night and in the afternoon. But now he is in his studio, a high-ceilinged, brightly-lit room on the second floor of a former factory not far from the Dusseldorf train station. His wheelchair is like a mobile command chair, from which Immendorff directs his seven assistants, giving them instructions on how the sketches which they designed together on a computer should be transferred to the canvas. Fourteen hands carry out his will. But because they also have wills of their own, the artist uses words to keep them under control." See our feature "The art of the ape" on Jörg Immendorff's most recent exhibition in Berlin.


Der Tagesspiegel 13.11.2006

Christine Lemke-Matwey learns in an interview with Christian Thielemann how good his Munich Philharmoniker is (an "instrument of absolute precision") and what nonsense it is "that in the greediness currently being negotiated, the opera Unter den Linden is being treated as a kind of national sanctum: otherwise, Germany wants to have nothing to do with Prussia. We like to be proud of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz but if you contemplate out loud the unification of Berlin, Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania into a new federal Prussian state, you'll hear loud cries of protest. It's only with the opera Unter den Linden that our Prussian legacy is suddenly so important. And I'm personally very much in favour of Prussia. But would it not be a courageous and important signal for West Berlin, which is becoming more and more marginal, to elevate the Deutsche Oper, the largest house around, to the status of a federal opera?"


Frankfurter Rundschau 13.11.2006

Frankfurt now has an international film festival. For Daniel Kothenschulte, it has the potential to offer an alternative to the "dominance of the cultural industry," which in his opinion would be a blessing, given the increasing number of glamour events. "Of course there were cultural oases in the shadow of glamour, which has taken on enormous proportions. You feel the need to kidnap them, as Wim Wenders, in a brief appearance in the Blumenberg film 'Thousand Eyes,' once stole a tape from the video store. When caught, he was asked: why are you doing that? His answer was music to our ears: 'There are some films that you simply have to get out of there.'"


Die Welt 13.11.2006

Author Rolf Schneider (more) recalls Wolf Biermann's expatriation from the DDR and the ensuing protest by artists and intellectuals, who gathered around Stephan Hermlin. "I walked into the living room in which a number of visitors were already sitting: Gerhard and Christa Wolf, Sarah Kirsch, Volker Braun, Günter Kunert (with his wife Marianne), Heiner Müller as well as Stefan Heym, and then a woman who I didn't know. She didn't say a word for the entire morning; later, Hermlin told me it was Katja, the wife of the West Berlin publisher Klaus Wagenbach, who himself was not allowed to enter the DDR because he printed both Hermlin and Biermann. Heym had drafted a text in which he protested the expatriation of Biermann in two sentences and demanded a retraction of the measures taken. Hermlin hat also written a text with the same message but in more detail. We agreed on Hermlin's version, to Heym's annoyance. Volker Braun said that Hermlin's Marx quote was not in fact from Das Kapital but from the 18th Brumaire. Hermlin looked it up. Braun was right; unbelievable, we had disgraced ourselves." (see features by Wolf Biermann here and here)


Die Tageszeitung 13.11.2006

Is artist Neo Rauch's work losing its edge? Ulf Erdmann Ziegler seems to think it is, in his review of the current retrospective in Wolfsburg's Kunstmuseum: "While five years ago it was still clear what the paintings were directed against, now they seem to have lost their resistance. All that shimmers through these works is a vague resentment against modernity." And that looks like this: "It is both today and mid-18th century, both day and night and war and play. Sometimes Rauch's large formats fly off in the direction of fantasia, at other times they are a collage of clichees. Figures fly like in Chagall's works, landscapes glow in Apocalyptic tones like in Franz Radziwill, the sky burns like in the paintings of Georg Grosz. Impersonal socialist heroes change into Old Germans, mothers mutate into Trümmerfrauen."


Saturday 11 November, 2006

Süddeutsche Zeitung 11.11.2006

Holger Liebs, by contrast, is thoroughly delighted at the – as the artist announces – last big Neo Rauch exhibition until 2010 at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg. The artist is clearly not dogmatic in his style, Liebs writes: "Rauch has matured, and nothing embarrasses him any more, as he's admitted (see our feature "Neo Rauch: Nothing can embarrass me anymore"). Bearded painting princes wear lab smocks and Converse running shoes. Abstraction and figurative painting engage in wild swordplay, and tailcoats and top hats appear alongside heroic landscapes. Some trees even look like they were painted by Bob Ross. It's not the least quality of these paintings that despite all that, you still have to take them seriously. Once more, Rauch manages to work through art history and come up with original paintings."


Neue Zürcher Zeitung 11.11.2006

Mona Naggar observes that the more important Islam becomes in Arabic countries, the less evident it is in Arabic literature. The only exception is Algeria. "Since the middle of the 1990s, various works by the likes of Rachid Boudjedra, Waciny Larej, Tahar Wattar, Salim Bachi and Assia Djebar have sought to explain the radical phenomena that took place in Algerian society at the end of the 1980s and the excess in violence that broke out following the cancellation of the parliamentary elections in 1991. The reason for this is to be found in a particularity of Algerian literature - its intense engagement with recent history. The French cultural background and the proximity to the French language make it easier for Algerians to deal with topics such as religion, sexuality and politics."