At last a day at the magnificent Pergamon Museum with its priceless treasures brought back wholesale. Enormous structures in their entirety have been transported and reassembled here. The vastness gives an unmistakeable high. Here is the Pergamon Altar, the Ischtar Gates from Babylon, rooms that literally take one's breath away, as well as the elegant simplicity of single eternal objects imbued with the mystery of their great age.
From this weighty classical antiquity to blatant commercialism with a bump, only stopping for a Berlin sausage on the way, at Deponie. The Daimler Chrysler Contemporary Museum was our goal but difficult to find it certainly was. At Potsdamer Platz there are signs to the Daimler Chrysler Quartier, a gigantic Mall, arcade of shops and offices extending to the sky, but in this bustle no one had heard of its eponymous Contemporary Art Museum. After much searching and enquiring we were directed outside to a doorway. The High-Rise Mall and office skyscraper had been built around the original building, leaving a doorway, on the frontage. A takeaway eating place has put obscuring advertising in front of it. Ringing a bell the door opens and a lift takes one up to the fourth floor to the Contemporary Museum. Talk about discreet, this seemed like obfuscation to the point of sadism. Well next time you'll know, and aren't you supposed to suffer for art? But of course really, it is the materialist imperative, they want the kudos and tax breaks of Contemporary Art but know the value of expensive retail square footage at the forefront. What's new? On display was Contemporary Indian art from a Paper Manufacturer Corporate Collection in New Delhi. Photographs of a eunuch's position in society were fascinating; ethnographically, interesting with the ramifications of being invited as good luck to be present at weddings and celebrations but not truly part of society. A massive figurative polychromatic sculpture of a woman's head almost as a Deity stood out amongst versions of the sort of work being done elsewhere tweaked to reflect India.
