Escape to Berlin — E\Coleman\Muehlhausen Art + Design

I spent the last week, our Herfstvakantie, in Germany, stopping in Berlin for several days, then a medieval town, and after that a day in Stuttgart. I’ve been wanting to go to Berlin since I was a backpacker hopping around Europe in college. Back then, I ran out of money in Prague, and so hopped a train to Amsterdam instead, where I could catch a plane back to London on the cheap. Berlin was every bit as excellent as I’d hoped for then. It buzzes with creative energy and an irreverent spirit. We visited a gallery/artist space in a repurposed hospital surrounded by squatters living in modified trucks that would’ve been at home in “Mad Max,” and dined at a cafe location on the Spree constructed by local community activists who’d obtained squatters rights and established themselves against growing gentrification. I imagine NYC felt like this sometime in the 1980s, but with more dangerous street crime. In any case, it was an inspirational trip. It’d be an amazing place to live, if only I could make that work.

We went by train, which remains my favorite way to travel, partly because I can spend so much time reading. I finished The Care Collective’s Care Manifesto, and was able to crank through a third of Arthur C. Danto’s After the End of Art . Both works contain interesting ideas, and Danto’s is something I wish I’d read in college when it was relatively new. In any case, it’s a wealth of knowledge for people like me interested in thinking about art at a higher level. Over the last few months, after I’d started on a self-study crash course in philosophy because I felt certain it was the way to better think about art, Danto, a serious philosopher and later art critic, defines the direction of art after Modernism as a philosophy exercise. That gives me some confidence that I’m headed in the right direction. Additionally, I finally found a book by Adrian Piper at the Hamburger Banhof museum bookshop: Escape to Berlin; it inspired this post’s title.

I left out a post the week before leaving, but I’m making good progress on my latest Shadow Bloom too. I was thinking of making a necklace to go with the group but ultimately decided the designs lend themselves better to a classic torque. I also found myself very inspired for some new abstract paintings, and decided to stretch my own canvas for the first time. It was relatively successful, now I just have to paint them since the gesso coats are fully dried.