- Venue
- New Life Berlin
- Location
- Germany
Nathan Peter’s installation in the New Life Shop has already been and gone, so the following is in the past tense. This may not fit the interactional immediacy of Open Dialogues, but might work as memorial, in a similar fashion to the installation itself.*
Eminent Domain occupied a street-corner room with windows and doors removed. The back wall was covered in bill posters removed from Berlin streets. These were arranged regularly and presented in the form they were found: layered over each other in thick accreted blocks. They had been drilled into, using a hollow bit, to varying depths and at varying intervals, to expose parts of the underlying posters. Reflective material had been added, also drilled through. Sheets hung off in places.
By removing the entrances to the space – leaving only rough pillars at the boundary – a continuity was made between street and gallery. On a functional level, this provided an open locale for the festival events, but also (productively) compromised the aestheticizing effect of the white cube on the imported objects, as the space they occupied hovered between exterior and interior. The remaining bare brick columns and carefully dilapidated surface suggested the folly or designed ruin, one contrived by Warhol teaming up with Kiefer, perhaps.
Breaking the surface of the advertisements, so that no original message could be discerned, turned them from transparent semantic vehicles into a unified object of contemplation, one on the scale and dimensions of landscape. At the same time, however, drilling through the layers suggested an archeological turn, a drilling back through time.
This seemed to be the unresolved awkwardness in Eminent Domain: a synchronic concern for making pure form at odds with the found object’s history. This tension left me wanting to know where the posters had come from (The site of a seminal personal event? Some point of upheaval in Berlin’s history?) and what they had advertised (A concert? A demonstration?).
The Litfaßsäulen are those towers for posting advertisements on. A Berlin invention of the 19th century, they were sanctioned areas, introduced to counteract just the unmitigated posting that provided the material for this exhibition. One sat (and still sits) politely outside the space on Choriner Strasse, a counterpoint of history and form to the scene within.
* Suggestion: print this text out, layer it amongst others from the website, and drill through them, for an archaeology of response…
