Roman Ondak: “Measuring the Universe”
Summer is museum alarm time. When tired city tourists and moderately motivated school classes push their way through exhibition rooms, the alarm sounds so often because someone is getting too close to a work of art that one is surprised when it doesn’t beep for five minutes. There is no beeping in Hall 21 of the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. And this despite the fact that visitors get so close to the work of art that they touch it with their whole body. However, contact with work “Measuring the Universe” by Roman Ondak is not only desired, it is an essential part of this performance. Measurements are taken here by anyone who wants to. Whether it’s a baby just a few months old, a teenager with platform shoes or the senior in khaki shorts. A museum attendant asks which direction you prefer – south, north, east, west – then takes you to the relevant wall and measures the size with a ruler. Finally, the black line is provided with the first name and date – you are already part of the work of art. Just like Carla Zoe, the baby, Stella, Valeria, Louis and Konrad. Like Livia, Proud and Taddeo. From a distance, their names look like filigree calligraphy on the gleaming white museum wall, thinning out towards the top and bottom, while at a height of between 1.60 and 1.80 meters they have already merged into a dense, black stream. The date, along with one’s own height, which is smaller in the evening than in the morning, is a snapshot of one’s own existence that blends in with the crowd.
It’s amazing what this small, supposedly banal instruction from Ondak triggers. Wardens, who otherwise only grumpily insist on distance rules, suddenly beam while taking measurements. Strangers smile at each other, sentences are exchanged. Enjoy the moment while documenting it. The performance of the Slovak artist is already 15 years old. When it was first shown at an art fair in China, the audience is said to have freaked out with joy at being able to draw on a work. Today, after numerous lockdowns and in the midst of the pandemic, it is above all the cheerful, lively community experience that this performance offers that makes it so impressive. Laura Weissmuller
Tod Browning’s 1932 “Freaks”.
Tod Browning’s “Freaks”
Many viewers left the hall during the first test screening, they said, they didn’t go, they ran of which: “Freaks” was the film, 1932, a production of the glamorous MGM. “Freaks” is different, life in a small traveling circus – director Tod Browning, who brought the studio a huge success with the first “Dracula”, had worked in a circus himself. “Freaks” was a total failure, it only became an underground cult in the sixties (DVD on Pidax). Circus back then was a show of abnormalities, and abnormalities were morally suspect. Tod Browning filmed with Siamese twins, a bearded woman, limbless. The cynical trapeze artist Cleopatra pretends to the small Hans Liebe, of course she’s only after his money. A robust tenderness characterizes the film, what makes you shudder is your own curiosity. Fritz Goettler
Jung Woo in “A Model Family”.
(Photo: Netflix)
Netflix series “A Model Family”
Well, hysteria in “Squid Game” dimensions is not to be expected in this Netflix series. But “A Model Family” is nonetheless another testament to the excellence of South Korean film and series making. The ten-part thriller story tells of a middle-aged university lecturer in an existential crisis: career is stagnating, money is tight, the daughter is in puberty, the son has heart disease and the wife wants a divorce. At the lowest point he sees a car on the side of the road on a country road with little traffic. The interior is covered in blood, the corpse of a man behind the wheel – and in the back seat is a huge bag of cash. The bills are also covered in blood, but they could give him a fresh start… Director Kim Jin-woo is a big admirer of “Fargo”, he probably also studied Hitchcock and Highsmith. “A Model Family” is an old-school thriller in the best sense of the word. David Steinitz
Danger Mouse & Black Thought: “Cheat Codes”.
(Photo: BMG)
Danger Mouse & Black Thought: “Cheat Codes”
With “Strangers” the whole thing then arrives briefly in the present. Pumping bass, bubbling pulse, great clattering drums. And the rather fantastic, very loosely now line “It’s kind of strange how the change in climate ain’t because of climate change” – strange that the changes in climate have nothing to do with climate change. Zeitgeist diagnosis featuring word game, the two major trouble spots in the world in one line – something like the supreme discipline of Black Thought.
The rapper’s main job is the frontman of the formation The Roots, now he has recorded an album with producer Danger Mouse. Finally, one must say. It was planned more than 15 years ago. Then the miserable everyday life – what else – intervened. Danger Mouse, real name Brian Joseph Burton, became the project along with singer CeeLo Green Gnarls Barkleyproduced albums of Black Keysby Beck and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Black Thought, aka Tariq Trotter, has been producing films and releasing a couple of (pretty listenable) solo albums with his “Streams of Thought” series. He has also been part of Jimmy Fallon’s studio band with the Roots for many years. What you do.
So now the subsequent summit meeting. If you want to gauge how good the two were and are for themselves, watch the ten-minute one Freestyle, which Black Thought delivered to radio station Hot 97 a few years ago – he is still considered at least the silver standard in the scene. Or you can get Danger Mouse’s “The Gray Album” semi-legally, an enormously famous mash-up work, a sound collage, in other words, made from the sampled and then very cleverly chopped up instrumentals from the “White Album” of the beatles and the isolated raps from Jay-Z’s “Black Album”. Hard to get unfortunately. Rights holder EMI is keeping it under wraps, although the two surviving Beatles love the project.
On “Cheat Codes”, the joint album, the grandeur of the old masters dominates. Very confident retro atmosphere, high density of soul samples, multidimensional, full of violins, grandiosely relaxed rap flow. Absolutely nothing requires one of these exhausting superlatives. But really everything is just very, very good. Jacob Biazza
A boy plants a tree.
(Photo: imago images/Panthermedia)
Seedlings are the new bouquets
At the opening of the Leipzig Bach Festival in June, director Michael Maul not only spoke enthusiastically about the program, he also confidently declared that the bouquet of flowers would be abolished. Instead, certificates for artists would henceforth be printed on seed paper, simply “put it in the ground and a beautiful bouquet of flowers will grow”. It was more of a symbolic thing for a festival that had sold tickets to more than 50 countries, with long-distance travel to and from India and Colombia. It is also a symbolic gesture when the athletes at the European Championships in Munich now receive seedlings instead of beautiful bouquets. The intermediate potted oxeye for all medal winners is then used in the Olympic Park, is bee and butterfly friendly and also flowered locally in 1972. So now it blooms again if it can’t be trampled. Oxeye, be alert! Cornelius Pollmer