Art against the Wall
I was sad last Saturday to miss a one-day conference at the Courtauld which considered the relationship between a piece of art and the wall on which it hangs. It had caught my eye because it relates into the main figure in my PhD research. But, I can’t really complain as I missed the conference because I was in Berlin, a wonderful, eclectic city which is now firmly in my top 5.
I did keep thinking about the topic of the conference, though, especially at two highlight points in my trip. The first was the East Side Gallery, which has preserved a stretch of the Berlin wall and invited a whole host of artists to graffiti a section of this. The result is a stimulating outdoor gallery, with contributions ranging from the riotously colourful to monochrome simplicity, and overtly political to abstract or eminently personal. It succeeds in preserving the wall as an irreplaceable historic landmark, but links Berlin’s troubled past to it’s vibrant present. It’s impossible not to photograph almost every section, or to resist posing with some of them …
My second ‘wall’ experience was in the Pergamon Museum, gazing in awe at the Babylonian mosaics that form part of the 'Processional Way' and 'Ishtar Gate.' I had wanted to see these since learning about them in the British Museum’s Babylon: Myth and Reality exhibition back in 2008-9, but was not prepared for their sheer awesomeness (in the true sense of the word). My friend confessed to me after our visit, that when I had said we must visit the ‘Babylonian tiles’ she had imagined a few bathroom-sized tiles in a glass case and had thought this was typical of me in museums (see the explanation of the name of this blog). This made me realize how inadequate anything I could say would be to give these pieces justice. So here I give you 'Berlin against the wall' in pictures, unable to do justice to it in mere words.
