After a long argument: Bernar Venet opens the “Berliner Kunsthalle” – culture

On Friday evening shortly after half past seven, a slim, elderly gentleman walked up to a forklift in Hangar 3 of the former Berlin-Tempelhof airport. He was wearing a sporty, slightly cropped jacket, and he tugged at the bottom edge, as if shivering at what was to come. It was the French artist Bernar Venet. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat. His white-haired head moved out of the cabin first to the left, then to the right. From behind it looked a bit like a pensioner who wants to maneuver his Opel Meriva into the garage. Except that there wasn’t a garage in front, but a row of semicircles made of carefully rusted steel, very large, arranged in a U-shape one behind the other, that is, with the opening at the top. Then the vehicle made a courageous leap forward. A steel beam laid across the fork of the forklift touched the first U on both sides. This tipped backwards and fell onto the next. Domino effect, huge noise.

Should mobile phone videos appear on the Internet: If the picture suddenly turns away, the person or people filming had forgotten to take the plugs available at the entrance and had to spontaneously cover their ears. As the din faded away, the bystanders erupted in delighted applause. The white-haired gentleman happily hopped off the box and gave another white-haired man a “fist bump” – again very courageously. Despite the masks, it was clear that it was the curator Walter Smerling. Smerling didn’t fall over. Applause again. And with that, the new “Kunsthalle Berlin” was opened.

In the general tinnitus left behind by this event, do the dissonances that already existed in the run-up fade away? The project for an art gallery of its own has a long, conflict-ridden prehistory in Berlin. First there was a “Berliner Kunsthalle” that was set up as a branch of the Munich House of Art during the Nazi era. For most of its short existence, it resided exactly where the America House was later built, which in turn now houses “C/O Berlin”, a private art gallery with regularly excellent exhibitions, which, however, focus on international photographic art, albeit At the moment, with Harald Hauswald, only one old and grand master from Berlin is being shown – but one from the east of the city, and here, in the so-called City West, that still somehow counts as foreign.

From 1977, just a few meters away, opposite the Memorial Church, there was a “Berlin State Art Gallery”. It essentially came about on the initiative of the painter Dieter Ruckhaberle, who was also its director. What made local artist colleagues happy was repeatedly criticized by art critics: the “patting” of a “local scene”, as the FAZ once called it. It can be said neutrally that the program of this “Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin” as a whole was strongly committed to left-wing realism. The titles of the exhibitions read engagingly, and many of them one would have liked to see again today, but of the many figuratively working contemporaries who were exhibited there, the GDR painter Willi Sitte is almost the most well-known today. In 1994 the art gallery, like a number of other Berlin cultural institutions, was liquidated for reasons of austerity due to reunification.

In Berlin’s art scene, the specific network of the initiator of the new art gallery was perceived as problematic

In the years after the fall of the Wall in Berlin, art preferred to seek its places and paths in the ruins of Mitte anyway. Again there were interesting debates about how much the focus of an art gallery here should be on the Berlin scene. At some point, the “Kunst-Werke” became more international, especially North American – and for this they received no less severe criticism than the “Tacheles”, which, almost directly next to it, tended to cultivate a scene of artists that was even so local that they with their Art (mostly bulky welded iron sculptures) soon no longer played a role on the other side of Oranienburger Straße.

The concept of an “art gallery” then reappeared at the end of the noughties in the gutted ruins of the Palace of the Republic, shortly before its final demolition. Organized by Berlin artists themselves, this short-lived art gallery was perhaps the best Berlin had ever had. In retrospect, the balance between locality and internationality, discursiveness and market success seems almost unbelievable. And unbelievably little, at least by Berlin standards, was complained about back then. Another “Temporary Art Hall” on the Schlossplatz was, despite the ambitious program, a little more controversial – as a glossed over construction site preparation for the castle replica and because it came less from the scene itself. But after that the name was free again, so to speak.

Open detailed view

At first, only a few noticed that there was already talk of a new “Kunsthalle Berlin” when a colorful exhibition called “Diversity United” was shown in the former airport of Tempelhof. Because the excitement and the rolling of the eyes were too great at first this Title. And about the fact that Vladimir Putin of all people was offered the patronage. Also about the fact that no exhibition fee is paid to those involved. Or about how proudly the initiator of the whole thing posed in front of a monumental painting by Anselm Kiefer, who certainly does not depend on exhibition fees – together with the Federal President, the entrepreneur Lars Windhorst, who was once sponsored by Helmut Kohl as a child prodigy, and Armin Laschet. For the younger ones: That was the prime minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and then actually the candidate for chancellor of the Union. After that, the public perception still has Gerhard Schröder and the scorpion retouched into the picture. In short, the perception was that an armada of veterans from the old Federal Republic had invaded what was left of Berlin’s cultural awakening, but was no longer used.

Because the initiator of the whole thing was Walter Smerling, founding director of a foundation for art and culture Bonn eV, which, among other things, runs the Küppersmühle Museum in Duisburg, which he also heads. The hangars and halls in the former Tempelhof Airport, on the other hand, are now so dilapidated that more and more Berlin stakeholders are shying away from the associated conditions and costs. Smerling, on the other hand, is famous for its good contacts with major sponsors. Thanks to his network, he is considered someone who can handle such things, and if they don’t have to pay anything, Berlin’s cultural policy is happy. Substantial sections of Berlin’s art scene were less fortunate. Here, Walter Smerling’s specific interconnectedness was perceived as rather problematic and the question was raised as to whether it might not be playing a little fuzzy.

The art gallery shows the life’s work of Bernar Venet, an honorable Frenchman who created huge steel sculptures

The targeted amalgamation of major artists, major sponsors, major collectors and art wholesalers obviously has less of an impact on people who are artistically active themselves, but who have had to draw ever smaller circles in the two-year pandemic. In the last few days, members of the Berlin art scene have been calling for a boycott of the “Kunsthalle Berlin”: “Instead of being seen as an initiative that is in the interests of Berlin’s art community in a broader sense,” this new “Kunsthalle” must described as a “cynical, neoliberal vehicle essentially designed to enhance the status and personal wealth of those involved.” On such occasions, of course, the increasingly irreconcilable division of the art world into a market-based camp and a camp oriented more towards culturalist questions and public pots also becomes apparent. The question also circulated there as to which “old, white man” Smerling would roll out the carpet here first: Lüpertz? Baselitz? The liqueur watercolors by Udo Lindenberg?

In the end, however, the announced protest didn’t materialize, and a retrospective on the life’s work of Bernar Venet, a very honorable Frenchman, is now being shown at Tempelhof Airport. who is not responsible for all the quarrels about a Berlin art gallery and hopefully has hardly noticed anything about it. It’s been a while since he last left his mark on the city. That was when Jacques Chirac gave Berlin a large steel curve from Venet for the 750th anniversary celebrations, which has adorned the median of the expressway in front of the Urania ever since.

After that, as you can see, Venet continued to work actively until today. But his exhibition, even its purely sonically strong to the Collapsing new buildings reminiscent forklift performance, nevertheless conveyed the feeling of attending an event in the anniversary year 1987 – not least because the majority of those present would have belonged to the audience at the time. However, at that time there were other big things made of steel in the hangars of Tempelhof, namely airplanes. And after everything that was tried here afterwards, one has to state that this was perhaps the happiest use for the place.

This in turn leads to a topic that some people don’t want to hear about anymore, but it’s no use: The new BER airport outside the city may not be of much use for air traffic. But Berlin artists who were responsible for the obligatory art on the building say that it still works best as an art gallery.