AMONG THOSE PROFESSIONALLY OBLIGED to look at and think about art, summer holidays engender two camps of tourists: those who travel to see it and those who travel to get away from it. In the wake of three weeks spent in Düsseldorf on an unofficial tour of the region’s museums, I can advise those of the latter weary-eyed and wanderlustful group that the Rhineland is not for you.
Great art is so highly concentrated here that it might as well spring the Rhine itself. The countryside situated around the mining valley of the Ruhrgebiet is littered with public institutions housing legendary collections assembled largely after World War II. Take, for example, the Caspar David Friedrich paintings at Museum Folkwang in Essen, or the endless masterpieces of late Gothic retables at the LWL Museum in Münster. A must-see for more contemporary enthusiasts: the breathtaking series of larger-than-life canvases made by Sigmar Polke for the 1986 Venice Biennale, at the Abteiberg Museum in Mönchengladbach (worth a visit for the Pritzker Prize–winning architecture by Hans Hollein alone).
What Germans lack in national pride they make up for with serious cultural heritage, and a week after Chancellor Merkel and Prince William met in town to commemorate the British invention of North-Rhine Westphalia, Düsseldorf Cologne gallery weekend was upon us. The three-day-long slide of openings started in 2009 as an experiment between two rival cultural capitals but in recent years has become one of the largest events unifying the region’s art scenes.
Newcomer Lukas Hirsch opened his gallery last Thursday with a collection of found (and stolen) industrial objects altered and mounted on the wall by artist Lukas Müller. It seemed that everyone I had met in town over the preceding weeks was in attendance––a scene dominated by students, alumni, and professors of the famed Kunstakademie. A few hours and countless Altbiers later, some of us found ourselves back at Peppi Bottrop’s studio, where artists Felix Amerbacher and Camillo Grewe put on a dangerous yet entertaining performance of acrobatics from the rafters. Testosterone filled the air and I was reminded of bros from my boarding school days: frustrated, bored, and full of flesh-and-blood Angst––no longer the teenage kind. After witnessing a long-winded, aggressive, and incoherent argument about the evening’s exhibition, I had to remind myself that here, where the patriarchy prior to Rita McBride’s tenure as director of the Akademie dominated so much of the self-identification of its students, boys will (try to) be Beuys.
Friday night. Cologne openings. A different city across the Rhine offers a different set of customs. In Germany, this means a different brew of beer, and here Kölsch was on the menu. Especially at Daniel Buchholz’s gallery, where the dealer presented Tony Conrad’s Super 8 combat film Beholden to Victory from 1980 in which actors––including David Antin, Tony Oursler, and the late Mike Kelley––were given no script, only restrictions and permissions making it a study in “good behavior.” Replete with archives, notes, edits, and other preparatory matter from the artist’s estate, the show offered a contextual glance into Conrad’s employment of structure to make an antistructural critique. I ran into a relaxed, good-natured Buchholz, who seemed to me more Cologne than Kölsch itself, smoking a cigarette in the garden. “There’s nothing to sell here, but if you have questions, I’d be more than happy to answer them,” he told me near the keg, seeming more a guest in his own gallery.
Later, I joined Jan Kaps to celebrate Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel’s labor-intensive objects in wood, ceramic, and textile with a joint dinner attended by the parties of Markus Lüttgen, DREI, Rob Tufnell, Clages, and others at Cologne staple Haus Töller, where the lightest thing on the menu was, naturally, more Kölsch. Afterward, the consensus was to stroll over to MD Bar for a real drink, but I remembered that Buchholz mentioned heading to a bar with the ever-promising name of Champagne––or so I thought. After some confusion, I found him with artist and Polke protégé Udo Lefin at Shampanja, a gay Kölsch bar––I should have known––where Lefin had just ordered a round for everyone. Or, more precisely, he counted forty-two patrons in the room and ordered forty-two beers––a quirky German punctilio, of which, at this point, I was happy to partake.
Perhaps I partook too much, because the next evening, after what was supposed to be a forty-five-minute nap, I woke up two hours late for the shuttle to the official gallery weekend dinner. I took an eighty-euro cab ride to the Museum Morsbroich in Leverkusen, where the only remaining signs of food were ice cream cones and smatterings of Resteessen. So I went to the bar, in the garden of this baroque Schloß-cum–modern art museum, one of the first in Germany to show contemporary exhibitions after the War, a venue that just a week before had been saved from selling its collection to front costs in the city’s municipal budget––a neoliberal misinterpretation of the institution’s role not uncommon among midsize cities with large deficits that house many of the small, regional museums in the Rhineland. The proposed sale had been deplored by artist Gerhard Richter in an open letter to the mayor of Leverkusen as “alarming” and opposed by local taxpayers and friends of the museum, and a tentative strategy was devised to keep the institution afloat, for now.
The next evening in Düsseldorf, I found myself at Good Forever, a performance project space run by Tobias Hohn, Moritz Krauth, and Stanton Taylor––Kunstakademie students and disciples of Christopher Williams and Peter Doig––who took up the location of Matt Moravec’s previous Off Vendôme space for the summer. I arrived early to the smell of burning weed and incense, and an hour later, David Aird (known better as his stage name Vindicatrix) began to perform and play the best beats I had heard all weekend. Someone handed me a Xanax and a drink, and I felt my mind melt with the music as Aird repeatedly sang, “Let your body become your body” alternatively with lyrics from Beyoncé’s 2006 single “Check on It.”
Just as things were getting sexy, something happened: Performance duo New Noveta, dressed in brown, ruffled dresses––think 1980s austerity prom––pushed through the crowd, fighting over a pair of scissors, which they used to cut sacks full of sand hanging from their groins and bags full of squid ink hanging from the ceiling. Wet and shrieking, they wrestled into the street and an adjacent apartment building where the duel, presumably, continued upstairs. “Is there more, or…?” asked artist Andrew Christopher Green, after the ruckus. “I don’t know,” responded Taylor, answering for all of us in a moment of suspense so potent we hoped it would last forever.
