History Redux

I visited a notable contemporary art institute in Berlin today called the Kunst-Werke to see an exhibition entitled History Will Repeat Itself: Strategies of Re-enactment in Contemporary Art. According to the exhibition's curators Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn contemporary artists have started to employ such 'strategies' in order to engage with past social events that are either overrepresented or underrepresented. Pierre Hugyhe, for example, focuses on the real-life events that were subsequently dramatized in Sidney Lumet's 1975 film "Dog Day Afternoon," whereas Jeremy Deller re-stages the famously brutal suppression of a Yorkshire miner's strike in 1984. In the case of Hugyhe's subject matter, the story of a young homosexual bank robber named John Wojtowicz who became a media celebrity in 1972 and overshadowed Richard Nixon's re-election campaign for a short while, the historical record is rich and the characters well-known, if only because they were immortalized in Lumet's film. Even before the film, however, John Wojtowicz and his accomplices/acquaintances were being interviewed on TV talk shows and in the press. Hugyhe 's installation includes news articles from the time period, reviews from the movie, excerpts from TV interviews and a contemporary re-creation of the event with Wojtowicz himself (who, after Lumet's movie came out, said that it was only 30% accurate). As a whole the piece is a meditation on the way in which historical events are filtered through the mass media and the entertainment industry, establishing a common perception of an event that may or may not be historically accurate.

Deller's subject, on the other hand, is not common knowledge and is in fact an historical event that most people, particularly the British government, would like to forget. I confess that I know very little about the 1984 Yorkshire miner's strike, known as "The Battle of Orgreave" (which is also the name of Deller's work), but one learns realizes quickly from the re-enactment that it must have been an extremely radicalizing struggle, given that Margaret Thatcher thought it necessary to send in thousands of police officers to put it down. Unlike Hugyhe's recreation, Deller's focuses on a traumatic event that received either no or only negative media coverage and has primarily been passed down through working class unions, history books and political activists.

Despite the differences in their subject matter, however, both Hugyhe and Delller seem to be interested in linking these historical events to today's reality. This is, I might add, a concern for all the artists in the show. The curators claim that, unlike popular historical re-enactments that stage events from the remote past or generalize from a particular period (think of Renaissance Fairs or Colonial Williamsburg), artistic re-enactments "do not simply affirm what has happened in the past, but question the present by taking recourse to historical events that have left their traces in collective memory." This may be true, but it also seems problematic to me for a number of reasons. One, it seems elitist to say that 'artistic' re-enactments are always critical and 'popular' re-enactments are not, as if the former are somehow inherently subversive or politically valuable. I highly doubt this is the case. Second, I am extremely skeptical when it comes to arguments that rely upon the idea of a 'collective memory'. What does this mean? Hugyhe's piece in the show is all about how our 'collective memory' of a historical event is always mediated by representations of that event, blurring (but not destroying) fact from fiction. Deller's piece is all about how some historical events are effectively erased from the larger 'collective memory' but live on in the memory of a particular social group--more about this later. It seems to me highly unlikely that a recourse to historical events ipso facto equals an effective questioning of the present by way of our 'collective memory'. What is not sufficiently acknowledged in this claim of the curators is that all these works are incredibly context-dependent. Without understanding exactly how these works engage with historical events and how the events themselves relate to the broader historical context in which they occurred, any critical relevance is diminished and the work comes dangerously close to fetishizing history (which, I would argue, is precisely what the curators' want to distance these works from by contrasting them to 'popular' historical re-enactment).

Back to Deller's piece, or rather, Mike Figgis's documentary about Deller's piece, since it was actually the latter that was on display. What I found most interesting was how in re-staging this single battle in a wider class struggle that took place more than 20 years ago, Deller tapped into an a simmering anger amongst the working class in Yorkshire that lives on to this day. Many of the men who played the miners in the re-enactment were these same miners or else knew these miners. When Figgis interviews these men, most have intimate knowledge of what happened, either because they were there or because they had friends or family members who were. Some even compare the social situation of 1984 to the one existing in 2001 (when the re-enactment took place). More amazing still is that, even though the re-enactment was choreographed and rehearsed to ensure safety, tempers flared and clear distinctions were made between those playing the miners and those playing the police officers. While one could argue that this is simply a reflection of cultural influence (nobody likes cops) or a brilliant confirmation of certain theories of performance (we become what we enact), I would say that it instead show the continuation of social instability and the potency of class struggle. This was an imagined class struggle, granted, but enabled these miners and workers to recapture an important episode in the history of that struggle and bringing that relevance home to their own situation. Whether Deller's piece accomplishes this as well I don't know (but I rather doubt it).

In any case, I found Deller's piece to ask the most interesting questions, particularly in connection to another work on display, the re-staging of the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks in 1920. There was only a few pictures of this event in the exhibition, but according to the text panel a huge, choreographed re-enactment was staged to celebrate the third anniversary of the actual event. Whereas in 1917 the Winter Palace was taken by very few people, the 1920 re-enactment was a major spectacle with over 800 participants. In Lunacharsky's view, the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Education) and one of the principals theorists behind the Proletkult movement, the audience attending the event were to also be the principal actors, thereby destroying any difference between the spectators and the participants (every avant-gardist's dream). By living 'first hand' this pinnacle event in Soviet history, so Lunacharsky claimed, the people would gain the necessary consciousness to become true 'proletariats'. The ridiculousness of this kind of engineered class consciousness 'from above' is obvious and, unfortunately, is taken as the example of the very idea of class consciousness. What would be interesting, nevertheless, would be to compare this early example of historical re-enactment for explicit political purposes to the 'artistic' re-enactments being produced for supposed implicit political purposes today.

"Dada is German Bolshevism"

So claims Richard Hülsenbeck in a 1920 article.

Berlin Dada-The Meaning of a Slogan

(George Grosz and John Heartfield at the 1920 International Dada Fair in Berlin.)

"Die Kunst ist Tot [Art is dead]."

According to a recent essay by the art historian Brigid Doherty this statement does not constitute a total refutation of art so much as diagnose the state of art in the modern world. She writes: “’Art is not alive,’ the placard might be saying, with the implied ethical position that human beings ought not to treat works of art as if they were persons when they do not treat other human beings that way” (91). The reasoning behind Doherty’s reading is clear: the Berlin Dadaists’ attack upon art dovetailed with a wider ranging attack upon the cultural values that held art to be something alive, something worth defending, something to be sustained. For the Dadaists such high minded notions no longer made any sense and belonged to a culture whose values and institutions were to be eradicated in favor of a new culture, whose values would be different. This represents, more or less, the standard, 'progressive' understanding of Dada as an artistic movement which struggled to deflate the pretensions of bourgeois culture by attacking its most sacred object, art.

There is an interesting historical dimension to Doherty's reading. In the same year in which this photograph was taken, Grosz and Heartfield published an article called "Der Kunstlump [The Art Scab]" that chastised the expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka for putting art above human lives. During the Kapp Putsch in March of that year, when right wing extremists led by Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz tried to take control of Germany with support from members of the army and were met by an armed working class uprising, a painting by Rubens that hung in a art gallery in Dresden was damaged by a stray bullet. Kokoschka, who was a professor of the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden at the time, wrote an article urging all political parties to respect the art institutions and move their street battles to outlying districts. Kokoschka: "I urgently request all those who intend to use firearms in order to promote their political theories, whether of the radical left, the radical right or the radical center, to be kind enough henceforth to hold their combat exercises away from the Gemäldegalerie [art gallery] of the Zwinger--on the shooting ranges of the heath, for example, where works of human culture will not be in danger. On Monday, the 15th of March, a masterwork of Rubens was damaged by a bullet. [...] Certainly the German people will later find more joy and meaning in these preserved pictures than in the collected views of the politicized Germans of today."

Grosz and Heartfield rightly condemn the derisive rhetoric of Kokoschka's article in their response, but all to easily succumb to an ultra-leftist iconoclasm. "Today the cleaning of a gun by a Red soldier is of greater significance than the entire entire metaphysical output of all the painters," they write. In addition to equating Kokoschka's argument to a typical expression of the bourgeoisie--"The bourgeoisie places a culture and its art higher than the life of the working class"--Grosz and Heartfield reduce art to a bourgeois concept in total opposition to the proletariat. They write: "The concepts of art and artist are an invention of the bourgeoisie and their position in the state can only be on the side of those who rule, i.e. the bourgeois caste."

There is some truth in what Grosz and Heartfield write. Our Western notions of 'art' and the 'artist' are the outcome of the historical bourgeois revolutions and the triumph of capitalism, which destroyed the anonymity of the feudal guild system and freed art, over time, from the restrictions of form and content imposed upon it by the nobility and the church. What Grosz and Heartfield were responding to was the fact that, despite the relative 'freedom' of art during the modern era in terms of form and content, the institutions of exhibition and distribution of art were concentrated in the hands of a small minority of wealthy individuals (or, in the case of Germany, the state). This objective relationship allowed for rapid and wide-ranging artistic experimentation to co-exist with slower and narrower artistic institutionalization. Anyone could be an artist, but only a small few could make a living doing it. Rather than limiting their attack to the objective situation, Grosz and Heartfield extended their assault to the art produced under this situation, 'bourgeois' art (especially expressionism), as well as the artist that produced it. In fact, the 'bourgeois' artist serves as nothing more than a mechanical conduit of the bourgeoisie's values: "The artist does not stand above his milieu and the society of those who approve of him. For his little head does not produce the content of his creation, but processes (as a sausagemaker does meat) the worldview of his public."

The question is: if artists are nothing more than the willing (or unwilling) spokespersons of the bourgeoisie, what does that make George Grosz and John Heartfield? I do not mean simply to accuse them of hypocrisy. This question goes to the heart of Berlin Dada's transformation from a nihilistic 'anti-art' movement to a self-appointed leader of cultural revolution in the service of revolutionary socialism. It is precisely this transition that I aim to put into historical context because I believe, contrary to Doherty, that the 'problem' of Berlin Dada's politics is not ambiguous or summed-up in an ethical mandate to put the welfare of human beings above the well-being of works of art (this is not as radical a principle as Doherty makes it out to be). Rather, the politics of the Berlin Dadaists has everything to do with political and social context of the immediate post-WWI period, particularly the radicalization of artists during and after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918. It was during this period that the Proletkult (short for Proletarian Culture) movement in the recently formed Soviet Union became an international phenomenon. Proletkult stressed the importance of cultural revolution and called for a decisive and total split with any bourgeois cultural traditions or values. Barbara McCloskey, in her book on George Grosz's decades long relationship with the German communist party, writes that the Proletkult movement "suggested a model for reconciling Dada with Communism."

The real problem is that, following certain ideas of Proletkult, the Berlin Dadaists believed their anti-art to have inherent political value with revolutionary potential. These high-spirited claims were resolutely rejected by the German communist party (the Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands, or KPD), which did not officially recognize the Proletkult movement at the time. Many art historians claim that this reflects the conservative and/or authoritarian mentality of the KPD. However, the basis of this rejection, I would argue, has much to do with the ultra left-wing mentality of the Dadaists and their belief that the eradication of bourgeois culture was not only a goal of the socialist revolution but a necessary precondition. (We can easily blame the KPD retroactively for their conservative aesthetic taste, but that is a different question.) Brigid Doherty tackles this rejection head on and argues that the Berlin Dadaists consciously toyed with their purported identity as ultra left-wing 'infantiles' by creating works that reflect or comment upon this identity. Doherty thus shifts the question back to the works themselves and analyzes them in terms of ambiguous or conflicting ideas of artistic identity. This is all well and good, except that it limits the 'problem' of the politics of Berlin Dada to personal identity and subjective experience, placing these limits directly into the works rather than viewing the political value of these works (or lack thereof) in relation to the boarder political context.

It is within this broader political context that we can begin to understand why Grosz and Heartfield simultaneously declare the death of art and champion the birth of Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin's 'neue Maschinenkunst [new machine-art]'.

Rücksicht

Unfortunately the internet has been on the fritz for the last week and a half, thereby making any further posts near impossible. At the moment Kaite and I have strung an Ethernet cable through our neighbor's mail-slot into our own--our neighbor happens to be our landlord's mother. Now the internet works fine, much faster in fact than it has in the past. Hopefully the wireless connection that we relied on in the past will be fixed in the coming days and we will no longer have to use the cable. In the meantime, however, I hope to post more often.

Yesterday (Thanksgiving) Katie and I went to the Ausländerbehörde (foreigners' authority) where I had an appointment to apply for an Aufenthalterlaubnis (residence permit). My experience with such bureaucratic necessities in Rome was terrible, so I did not expect any difference here in Germany and I was very nervous during the appointment. The woman I dealt with, Frau Krauzka, was nice enough and tolerated my spotty German. She did, however, mumble and spoke aloud to her printer and computer, such that I was never sure whether she was talking to me or the objects on her desk. There was some confusion over my proof of study, but besides that everything went well and I am now living in Germany legally until the end of January. If I do return in the Spring I will have to go through the process all over again as well as pay the fee one more. Katie, on the other hand, still needs to apply for a residence permit, and since she is not a student, must find another means of legitimating her stay here--but it should not be that difficult, the German government gives residence permit to 'artists' if they can prove that they regularly receive compensation for their artistic work.

I hope the next two to three days to lay out the abstract and outline of the project I have been working on here in Berlin. In the most general terms, I will be writing a prospectus toward an investigation of the social and political background of the First International Dada Fair, an exhibition mounted in Berlin in the summer of 1920. Although several art historians and cultural/social historians have written about this event, I do not feel that anyone has provided an in-depth analysis of both the artistic context and the social/political context in which this exhibition took place. Many scholars focus on one aspect and neglect the other; some consider both aspects but in such a way that any relationship between art and society, or art and politics becomes theoretically convoluted and historically unclear. I am particularly interested in how Dadaists working in Berlin attempted to reorient their earlier outright rejection of 'art' and bourgeois culture into a 'revolutionary' commitment to establishing an oppositional, 'proletarian' culture via the model of Proletkult, a movement for cultural revolution that was popular during this period in the recently formed Soviet Union. This connection is well established; in fact, I would argue that much of theory behind the concept of the 'avant-garde' develops out of this connection and the questions it poses. Reviewing the context in which the Berlin Dadaists attempted to align their art with revolutionary politics from a historical materialist perspective rather than from the perspective of 'avant-garde' theory will shed light, I believe, on aspects of this connection that have hitherto remained opaque.

So, I intend to post my abstract, a timeline of Berlin Dada and thoughts regarding those scholars who have tackled the same topic from other viewpoints, utilizing different methodologies. I'll try to keep up.

Big Pictures

Monday afternoon I stopped by the Deutsche Guggenheim to check out the Jeff Wall exhibition currently showing there. First off, despite the Guggenheim name the gallery space is a glorified lobby for Deutsche Bank, which owns the building and worked out a deal with the Guggenheim. Three large white rooms and a gift shop constitute the Deutsche Guggenheim, a far cry from its other satellites in Bilbao and Venice--though smallish, Peggy's former palazzo on the grand canal at least feels like a museum, not a corporate showroom. A similar situation can be found in Istanbul, where most of the well known, swanker galleries are tied to banks and financial institutions that either provide space in their own buildings or rent space in prominent locations for rotating exhibitions (namely along Iskital Caddesi in Beyoglu). The difference is that these 'art centers' usually show work by Turkish artists and those unknown outside the insider, festival circuit, whereas, so far as I can tell, the Deutsche Guggenheim only shows up and coming art stars or reliable, blue-chip regulars like Lawrence Weiner, James Rosenquist, Helen Frankenthaler, and, surprise, surprise, Jackson Pollock. Group shows are mounted periodically as well--a exhibition pulled from the Deutsche Bank collection went up in 2005--but what makes the space special is that often new works commissioned for the space (I have no idea who owns these commissioned works after they are exhibited but I would imagine Deutsche Bank takes partial if not full possession.) The Jeff Wall exhibit, for example, is composed a couple new commissioned pieces and few older works (approx. 7 in total). I've never paid much attention to Wall's work and only remember a piece that was at Documenta 11 featuring a man sitting in the middle of a basement workroom or shed with lightbulbs covering the ceiling. I've read a little about Wall though, mostly reviews, except for a critical essay by Michael Fried that appeared in Artforum some time ago. Fried is currently finishing a book on contemporary photography that focuses on Wall's work in great detail, or so I've heard. For those who don't know anything about him, Jeff Walll is a Vancouver, B.C. based photographer who shoots real-life scenes and landscapes as well as staged situations. For the last twenty or so years he has displayed his photographs on light panels which enhance the colors of the prints and give them almost a luminescent, cinematic look that a photograph printed on paper cannot. He has also written several essays on his own work and the history of photography, and is well informed when it comes to contemporary theories of photography. What makes Wall's work really stand out, however, is that is photos are big. Many of the pieces in the current show, I would guess, measure at least 5' by 5'. This puts him in the company as Thomas Struth and Andreas Gursky, but I think Wall was working with large images earlier than these other artists were. The size of Wall's photographs entirely alter one's common sense conception of photography and the photographic aesthetic. The technical achievement alone boggles the mind: how does one print these large photographs without losing the sharpness of the image? I looked closely at one image and noticed a horizontal line through the center of it, so I am guessing that a least a few are printed in sections and then combined onto the light panels. So far as I know Wall's images are not digital (one does not notice any pixels), so the skill required to develop these works must be substantial (and expensive). It is not surprising then that Wall's oeuvre is relatively small for a photographer (around 160 words I think), although I've read that this may also be a conscious effort to narrow his output for theoretical effect (a comment on archives, or the role of the photographer vs. the role of a the painter, or some such thing). Being so big one cannot easily take the image in all at once, or rather, one can, but one is immediately inclined to look around the image, move closer to it, along side it even, to look closer at all the aspects captured in the image that are not entirely visible when the image is seen as a whole. This is, of course, how one often looks at a painting and I assume that is exactly the point. The size (or better, the scale) of the photographic images alters the way one views them and shifts the experience such that one views them as if they were painted images (even though the surfaces look nothing like painted surfaces, one can tell this both when looking at the images from far away as well as close up). A quantitative change has a qualitative effect. This formal 'transformation' is buttressed by the fact that Wall often stages his images to look like snapshots or documentary footage. Whereas almost nobody this day in age believes what they see in a painting to be 'real', nearly everyone considers what appears in photographs to be the documentation of a real-life event. Wall plays with these assumptions in visual terms much like theorists such as Roland Barthes did in theoretical texts. Can we trust any image to be 'real'? Does not photography rely upon formal conventions as much as painting? Is the reality of a photography merely the result of a 'reality effect'? Common questions in academic discussions of photography and/or art theory. Rather than try to answer any of these questions directly I would merely like to discuss the image above from the exhibition and hopefully frame the discussion with them, thereby pointing toward answers indirectly.
The photograph is dated 2006, but the location is unknown. We see a vast sky that takes up approx. 2/3 of the image, much like the landscape paintings of German romantic painters such as Caspar David Friedrich. In the foreground is a street and alongside it stand a number of men, racially diverse, dressed in jeans, warm jackets and hats. One man in the group to the right wears a hard-helmet. These men appear to be waiting, waiting for work. Behind the men are the backsides of single story strip-mall buildings (the awning of a Value Village is just visible to the left of the two men in the middle of image). Two trees stand in the foreground as well, a pine to the right and smaller tree with absolutely no foliage in the middle (I would say it was winter). By the look of th sky it appears to be morning, the morning of a cold day, and these men are day laborers waiting for work on an off-road where people do not normally go unless they are looking to hire someone. Now, this is an image, I think, we are all familiar with, if not personally than at least theoretically. It is well known that many people (and not only men) who are either unemployed or undocumented immigrants rely upon day labor in order to survive. This can be a dangerous enterprise and is commonly frowned upon, forcing day laborers to congregate in back streets or alleys as if they were criminals. Day laborers, especially if they are non-white undocumented workers, are often targeted by racist groups like the Minute Men. These anonymous men in this anonymous location represent a social reality that exists worldwide. This image, therefore, depicts a real situation. Is this reality contradicted by the fact that I know that this image is not 'real', but has instead been staged for the camera? No! [Like that Jon?] While the specific situation captured in the photo may be staged, the general situation it represents continues to be real. I think this is the strength of this particular image. Why Wall chose to stage such an image instead of taking a photograph of actual day laborers waiting for work is a different and, I think, much more interesting question. The title of this photograph is simply, Men Waiting, which does not explicitly identify them as day laborers, but I believe we are meant to see them as such. If we were to say that the focus on day laborers is meant as a political comment what would that comment be? Nothing but a confirmation of the obvious: these kinds of people exist. But the fact that Wall uses stand-ins to represent the existence of these people, these 'men', while perhaps a more symbolic reference to the invisibility of such people, nevertheless further insulates the work from any true relation to the lives of those this image represents. The image, in conclusion, represents a true social reality, but lacks any meaningful connection to or interaction with this social reality. It says everything without saying anything at all.

Commemorating Nov. 9th

Last Friday night Katie and I visited the Brandenburg Gate to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. It was a cold night in Berlin, with a terrible wind chill factor, so we were bundled up in scarfs and gloves. I told Katie that 18 years ago we would have been approaching the gate from deep within the East and would most likely have met crowds of people mixed with Trabis (East German cars) along the Unter den Linden before we even got close to the gate. Surprisingly few people turned out this year however, at least fewer than I had imagined. Perhaps there was a celebration earlier in the day, but by the time we reached the gate I counted only 20 or so people, many of which were foreign tourists. Nevertheless, the twinges of history kept me rooted to the spot. We first stood on the Eastern side of the gate, where 18 years previously East German border guards had erected makeshift barriers to maintain the 'dead zone' they patrolled along the wall. On the Western side of the wall people had already begun to congregate and some stop atop the wall. At some point a couple of revelers jumped down on the Eastern side, daring the border guards to take some action, which they did not. More and more jumped across and walked under the gate to where the guards were keeping East Germans back. The makeshift barriers soon fell.
To mark the occasion the city of Berlin commissioned a work by a Korean artist to be displayed near the gate, a glowing plastic representation of the former wall, neon colored and covered with Korean writing. I believe the work is exactly the same height as the original wall but it does not stand in the same place. Also unlike the original this latest 'wall' resembles an air mattress, and responds to pressure (from a hand, for instance) much the same. Everyone who was there seemed to enjoy it and many had their pictures taken in front of the structure. I overheard a German mother telling her children all about that night 18 years ago, where she was standing, what happened hour by hour. Perhaps the sculpture helped those kids to envision the situation their mother was explaining better than if nothing were there. I was glad I had watched a Der Spiegel documentary with footage from that night earlier in the day.
Speaking of Der Spiegel, a recent issue focused on what are referred to die Mauerkinder, those children who were born in Berlin on Nov. 9th, 1989. These children turned 18 on Friday, meaning that they are the first adult generation to be living in Berlin with no firsthand experience of a divided Germany. Out of the 80 Mauerkinder, approx. 66 were born of parents living in the East, and the magazine used the stories of their upbringing and life experiences to pose a number of questions about present day feelings about the DDR. According to Der Spiegel many of the prejudices and mentalities that existed in Berlin prior to 1989 continue to exist to this day, even among the generation who never experienced them live in the divided city. What has perpetuated the 'wall in the head' syndrome that so many commentators and cultural theorists have spoken of in the past? Upbringing and parental influence is surely a factor. Ostalgie, however narrow or widely you wish to define this concept, is probably another. Unemployment, continued discrepancies in the standard of living of between those living the former East and those living in the former West, low prospects for students post-graduation, governments that support imperialist wars, and a general disillusionment with neoliberal capitalism are surely part of the rejection of the standard 'triumph of freedom' narratives of post Cold War transition, especially amongst the more educated. It will be interesting to see how this generation, both within and outside of Germany, interprets the fall of 'real existing Socialism' once they start to become politically conscious and begin studying the history of the present day world.
When I returned home on Friday night I started looking through some notes and realized that Nov. 9 was also the day that Philip Scheidemann of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD) announced the abdication of Wilhelm II (without the monarch knowing) and the birth of a German republic in 1918. Scheidemann made this announcement out of a window of the Reichstag to a large crowd waiting outside at 2 p.m. that day. Only two hours later Karl Liebknecht of the Spartacists proclaimed a Free Socialist republic of Germany to an equally large crowd. And thus began two contrasting views of post-WWI Germany that would rock the country for the next six or seven years.

In Response To All Those Who Thought It Would Never Happen

So, after years of outright refusal and recent months of deliberation I have decided to start a blog. As I assume for most others, the decision came down to convenience: it is much simpler to have updates located at a central spot that people can visit than it is to send them out to everyone you know one at a time. The only other solution seemed to be mass emails. My hope is that by starting this blog I will be able to both share by experiences in Berlin with others as well as formalize my thoughts and receive some feedback. I suspect I will often intersperse posts about Berlin with others about the projects I am working on. Perhaps it is silly to be prefacing this blog with so much introspection, but I have no idea how else to begin. Well, what of it...onward!