The German Friends of the London School of Economics (LSE) invite members of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog to a visit to the exhibition of “Gerhard Richter. Hidden Gems. Works from Rhenish Private Collections” at the Museum Kuntspalast in Düsseldorf on Sunday, 15 September 2025 at 2:15pm. The major autumn exhibition at Museum Kunstpalast brings together more than 130 artworks from all of Gerhard Richter’s works. Many of the exhibits are hidden treasures from private collections that have rarely – if ever – been shown in public before. As part of the most comprehensive Gerhard Richter exhibition in Germany for over ten years, these works provide an insight into the entire spectrum of his art – from his beginnings in the early 1960s to more recent times. Thr tour will take place in English.
We will meet at the Foyer of the Museum Kunstpalast, Ehrenhof 4-5, 40479 Düsseldorf at 2:15pm ahead of the tour to allow time for cloakroom and distribution of entrance tickets, so that we can start the tour on time.
Please register by Thursday, 12 September, by completing the online registration form: https://www.vereinonline.org/LSEAlumni/?veranstaltung=104198 We encourage you to sign-up early, as we allocate places on a first-come, first-served basis.
The guided tour is free of charge for members of the German Friends of LSE while the participation fee for non-members, including those of the Carl Kruse `Arts Blog, is €10. Please pay either by Paypal or provide a SEPA direct debit mandate.
Please reach out if you have any questions and I look forward to seeing you at the event.
Without consulting a reputable source that might satisfactorily define what ‘Landscape Cinema’ might be, I am left to define it myself. Alone, in suburbia, the low drone of midweek traffic humming through my windowpanes, I am to consider what I mean when I designate a film to fall into the category of landscape cinema.
It is always better to give examples when defining a concept, but I will give a brief explanation as to what I mean by the term landscape cinema. In my eyes, landscape cinema is cinema that employs the landscape not as a path on which its characters tread, but as a character in its own right. In the films I will discuss, the landscape sleeps and wakes and breathes and dreams and argues and laughs along with its human protagonists; it demands as much attention from its viewers as the actors that walk amongst it. Landscape cinema can manifest in narrative pacing, whereby the events in a film seem to mirror that which is occurring in the natural landscape; on the other hand, it can occur as an inevitable result of a film whose focus IS the natural landscape and its effects on the people that live within it.
Of what I have seen of it, I love landscape cinema. Perhaps it is partly to do with my penchant for slower-paced films, but to me it seems that filmmakers who take the landscape and use it to reinforce the story being told on screen create works that have a great thickness and richness to them; these are films that remind us we are but flesh walking atop a merciless earth.
There are a wealth of movies that fall into this category, most of which I have not seen – many are obscure titles that are difficult to find and watch, and many are documentaries. I will focus my efforts instead on the films I have seen and which I deem suitable for the categorisation I have proposed.
A very long time ago, my mother had a subscription to ‘LOVEFILM’, which was the precursor to ‘Amazon Prime Video’. She’d get DVDs delivered through our door and we’d watch them together, often on a Friday with a bowl of buttered pasta on our laps. I remember a film I must have seen when I was about 14 years old called Le Grand Bleu (The Big Blue, Luc Besson, 1988), a film that chronicles the devastating and glorious power of water Jacques Mayol (played by Jean-Marc Barr), its protagonist, is an accomplished free diver drawn to the deep, the deep blue, the wide blue, the blue that stretches out as far as the eye can see. Whatever might happen on land, and much does indeed happen, Jacques finds solace in the quiet beneath the waves. For much of the film, director Besson places his viewers under the water. It is difficult to think of any other times we are subjected to this kind of imagery, save for in nature documentaries. In Jacques’ waking life, he finds himself falling into strange hallucinations, and his dives become increasingly extreme throughout the course of the film culminating in his ‘final dive’. Facilitated by Éric Serra’s surreal, dreamy soundtrack, Le Grand Bleu is a hallmark of landscape cinema that stares nature in the eyes and beckons it to fill the screen with its impulsive, changeable character.
A few months back, The Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square screened a few films by Andrei Tarkovsky, one of which was his last feature, completed just before his death: The Sacrifice (1986) a Pagan-Christian parable about a man (Alexander, played by Erland Josephson) who attempts to bargain with ‘God’ to stop the impending nuclear holocaust. The Sacrifice is a lonely film, shot in a place that seems as though it could already be a cemetery of post-nuclear fallout. It was filmed on the southeast coast of Gotland, Sweden, in a peninsula called Närsholmen, a savanna-like nature reserve of grass and stone and sea. A person walking through this landscape could be seen from miles around, and this is key to the film. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to shelter save for the house where our Alexander lives with his family, and the house down the winding road where Maria, the family’s pagan maid, lives.
Desperate hope rings as a central theme for the film, and yet the landscape itself speak of hopelessness, of isolation and separation from the mainland, from the people, from time itself. This is a land without time, without dates or days or weeks or years. The Sacrifice speaks also of the strangeness with which we perceive nature and the landscape; when I am out and about in the forest, beside the sea, in fields, by ponds, I become acutely unaware of the implications of pollution, of warfare, of the ongoing decline of the natural world as a result of climate change. I am here, in the trees where the birds chirp, and all is well. Isn’t it? In the world of The Sacrifice, we are left wondering what exactly would change, or has changed, in the event of nuclear disaster. Would the lives of these people, far from everything, change? Would the landscape change, or would it simply breathe differently; where before, it breathed the clear salty air of the sea, would it heave and splutter beneath the surface, invisibly clogged with nuclear waste that would manifest in deformities of its flora and fauna?
Where the landscape of The Sacrifice stands as an onlooker as its character slowly fall into despair, in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), we witness a different landscape, one of a much more insidious nature. Here, the malevolence of the landscape is pinnacle to the tale itself, a tale of private school girls disappearing at a picnic in rural Australia. The ‘hanging rock’ of the title is situated in rural Victoria, and is a towering volcanic formation – called a ‘mamelon’ – which is created by a particularly stiff variety of lava which solidifies as it travels. The result is the rugged, maze-like structure that the young girls are drawn to explore during the picnic. There is something in these rocks, something inexplicably terrible but which remains unnamed and unseen throughout the film, save for a few strange lights, colours, and memories told from the eyes of the girls who survived the experience. The otherworldliness of this film, and of its depiction of the Australian landscape, was facilitated by the brilliant cinematographic techniques of Weir and DOP Russell Boyd, who were inspired by British photographer David Hamilton to drape fabric over their lenses to create the dreamlike visuals in the film. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir dwells on the rock itself, on its grandeur, its coldness, how it pierces the sky, how it takes the girls in and hides them from view.
Nature is often perceived as the ideal, as the ultimate in purity; current trends in diet and fitness are geared towards eating closer to the ‘earth’, or how our ‘ancestors’ used to eat and move. We forget that many of our ancestors were pillaging colonialists, and often even warmongering rapists, and that the majority of fruits and vegetables that we eat today have been manufactured over hundreds of years to make them edible to us, where before they might have been too fibrous or even downright poisonous.
Nature is not always our friend – nature is cruel, nature is merciless, nature lacks consciousness, morality, kindness. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, Weir shows us the brutality of the landscape, its inhospitability, and, ultimately, our complete lack of understanding of it. With all our advancements in technology, industry, and all the rest, we are still powerless in the wild. Weir’s rock is a fearsome antagonist, and Picnic at Hanging Rock is a wondrous example of landscape cinema.
And then, there are the instances where the landscape watches. It stands and watches from behind bushes and rocks and trees to see what we will do next. It is silent, but it is not benevolent. Here, I speak on Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022) and L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). To speak of them in parallel, and to witness them as such, we might see, from the perspective of landscape cinema as a concept, some innate similarities between these two films. In these films, we see two separate rugged isles pushing humans to the brink, both emotionally and physically. Nature watches from the sidelines of L’Avventura as its protagonists, Claudia (Monica Vitti) and Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) search desperately for a trace of their lost companion. It is as though the land had eyes, for it stares at these lost people through cracks in rocks, from behind bushes, from the coastline. The sea batters the shore of the island of Lisca Bianca, where much of the film was shot, and the body of the missing woman is never recovered. What are we meant to feel? The emotions of these people are as unreadable as the landscape itself; beautiful yet unfriendly, cold yet at times joyous.
In L’Avventura, the landscape blends with its characters to make something inexplicably poignant. In Pálmason’s Godland, we see something else; the presence of the landscape within a character: Ragnar (played masterfully by Ingvar Sigurðsson) the leader of the Icelandic group guiding a Danish priest (played by the brilliant Elliott Crosset Hove) to the southeast coast of Iceland so he can build a church and spread the word of God. Ragnar is the rugged barrenness of the icescape, and the fairytale beauty of waterfalls plunging down from flower-covered precipices, and the quiescence of water lapping before a half-built wooden church. As in L’Avventura, Ragnar watches with a silent, all-knowing eye. He can read the skies and the water like they were words written in a book, and he is as humble as the horses he rides. But our protagonist – Lucas, the Danish priest – is a most wondrous contrast to the weather-worn Ragnar. In him is modernity, is the rejection of the ways of the land, is technology and callousness and colonialism, all in the name of God. In Godland, the landscape is fractured, and the calm existence of a people is disrupted by the oncoming tide of foreign religion, domination, and greed.
Ah, I could speak for hours on this. I have a list beside me with all the other films I was going to talk about, but perhaps we should leave this here for now. I can’t say for certain why I was drawn to speak on this, but perhaps it is something to do with the low drone of traffic outside my windowpanes, and the rumble of trains beneath my feet, and the sky, obscured by the rooves of the houses on the other side of the street. Perhaps it is that, despite all of their violence and coldness and mercilessness, I long to be in the landscapes that I see on my screen, away from the blinding noise of the city.
I was speaking with a friend of mine a few days ago about innovations in art, or the lack thereof. He was of the opinion that nothing new was being made, that we, as a collective, were stagnating in our incessant recycling of the old, and in our opulent media wealth. At our fingertips, we have it all, from the birth of recorded music in Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautographic capturing of Au Clair de la Lune to the newest Taylor Swift album, The Tortured Poet’s Department. Type, and you will get. That is how it is now. We are used to it.
I did not disagree with my friend. I feel it too, sometimes. When I am writing a film, when I am playing music, when I am writing my articles…am I simply recycling what came before? Am I, as we all seem to be, caught in the web of ceaseless creation, forever destined to be one step behind. It’s that feeling when you watch a film and you wished that you’d made it, or when you listen to a song that you wished you’d written. It’s the feeling of a seeming inability to see the world in a way that has not been done before, and it appears insurmountable.
It is boring, too, sometimes. There is so much that it is hard to look at, hard to see a thing amidst the digital trees. A smog of screens clouds my own creation and makes me leave projects hanging half complete.
However – I did not agree with my friend either.
I have been frequenting many music venues lately. Small places, with small dancefloors and dimmed lights. The music, here, is small too. Names I’ve never heard, people I’ve never seen. And some of it, sure, is as I mentioned; a desperate harkening to the bygone days of 60s rock, a tepid hippy revolution a la 70s with all its tassles and flowing paisley dresses, or a retelling of the pop idols of the late 2000s. But some of it is new, brilliantly new, wonderfully new – voices I’ve never heard before, melodies that stick around in my mind when I return home to my house beside other houses. Bishopskin, The Wheel 2!, Drive Your Plow – these are bands that have found the means to somehow squeeze themselves into the holes that remain in our musical landscape, and there they are building deep foundations that, they hope, will endure in the years to come.
But, sometimes, when I watch some of these bands writhing about on the stage, shouting about politics and love, throwing themselves off the stage into the audience, it is as though, at times, I can already see their end. Because it’s true, what Noel Galagher says. Streaming has killed music, particularly rock music. It pays artists a pittance of what they would have been paid before through record sales. In other ways, it enables smaller bands to be discoverable more easily, through such platforms as Spotify, giving them a reach that would have been neigh impossible before the advent of streaming. But nonetheless; we are out here, us artists, working tirelessly for ‘nish’. And that is enough for many artists to eventually break and throw in the towel.
But there is hope in it. Some of this music is indeed new, indescribable and incomparable to what I’ve heard before. There have been times where I have been so shocked at the skill and innovation of a band that I’ve found myself standing motionless, mouth agape, in awe of what I am seeing, because what I am seeing feels like a birth of something that, one day, will no longer frequent these small dingy venues. It feels like I am dancing in purgatory with performers that will soon find themselves up in the sky, untouchable at last.
Similarly, in film, when we search a little deeper, we find a clamouring, the clunking resonance of thick-bodied old cameras, and the quiet poise of a director with an eye unlike any other. In film, I find the new over and over again
A little while ago, I discovered the work of Hlynur Pálmason, an Icelandic director, whose heart of ice and snow and shingle and waterfalls bewitched me instantly. The first work I saw of his was Nest (2022), a film created over the course of 18 months which follows three siblings as they build a treehouse. The children building the treehouse are Pálmason’s children, and the film is permeated with the endlessly changing landscape of Iceland. The cold, the wind, the whiteness of the sun, then the orange of the sun and the green of the fine grassland. The film is plotless, in a sense, and yet, as we watch the months pass, and the treehouse being built, we feel the passage of time as something so present, so palpable, that it makes us see it in our own lives, in the passing of our days, our weeks, our months, our years. Nest reminds me of long summer days spent whiling away the hours doing nothing, or of winter mornings, wrapped in sheets while the kettle boils and the fire burns away.
Later, I watched Pálmason’s Godland (Volaða land (Icelandic); Vanskabte Land, (Danish – ‘Malformed Land’) (2023), a film whose terrible, stark beauty and impossibly crisp images stayed with me long after its last frame. Godland is imbued with the insidiousness of colonialism without a word being said about it. It is also a film filled with simple pleasure; the pleasure of sun and warmth after days trudging frozen tundras, the pleasure of an accordion bellowing out over the water as people dance, the pleasure of a hot soup swallowed under a wooden roof.
Pálmason is new. His films are new, his eyes are new. Away from the endless mechanical pumping of the Hollywood machine, we find many like Pálmason. Not like him in vision, but like him in sentiment. Making only art that he feels must be made, not the art that is asked of him, not the art that is made only for money.
Mark Jenkin is another director who has caught me in his grip with his eye and his fishing line. I watched Enys Men (Cornish for ‘Stone Island’) (2022) recently, which follows an ecologist as she goes out to check on some strange flowers growing on a cliff on the Cornish coast. Every day, she goes out, checks the temperature of the soil, drops a rock into a well, then returns home and switches on the generator, pens down her findings, and makes tea. In the evening, she reads by candlelight, because she has turned off the generator. This is a slow film, despite its short running time (1h 30m), and all the better for it. Time is not an anxiety, time merely serves as a tool with which to dwell on the rolling waves, the verdant fields, the darkness of the night in rural Cornwall. The protagonist’s house is away from everything, and so she is alone. And despite the implications of her solitude, I found myself yearning for the simplicity of her existence. London is tiring, at times. It is perhaps because I am here that I am often anxious that I can never create something new, something that touches people as the musicians and directors I have mentioned have touched me, something that excites people and makes them see this strange life a little differently, with wider eyes, like those of a child. I live and breathe in the saturation of a city groaning under the weight of millions of dreams and lives, and it is difficult, at times, to see the light, to see the possibilities that shine through the cracks in the grey paving stones of the streets where I live.
After the terrorist attack by Hamas on October 7th in Israel and the Gaza war, life changed for artist Yury Kharchenko.
And now,, the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum is showing works by the artist in a solo exhibition from June 29th to October 20th, 2024.
The Berlin-based artist was born in Moscow in 1986. He came to Germany in the late 1990s as a Jewish refugee. From 2004 to 2008, he studied painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy and then philosophy and literature at the University of Potsdam. The up-and-coming young artist has recently exhibited in well-known institutions, including the Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, the Kunstmuseum Walter, the Kunstmuseum Bochum and the Hamburger Kunsthalle.
Influenced by his experiences as a Jew in Germany, he takes up themes in his current paintings that deal with the war in Israel and Gaza, the Ukraine war, the problematic culture of remembrance in Germany, anti-Semitism and the relativization of the Holocaust. For example, he presents an Auschwitz gate with an Israeli and Palestinian flag hanging above it, and a ptyrodactyl flying out of it. What German responsibility does the Holocaust have for the current Middle East situation? Or the founding father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, the T-Rex from the blockbuster “Jurassic Park” by filmmaker Steven Spielberg under an entrance gate whose shape is reminiscent of that of Auschwitz. The lettering, however, reads “Welcome to the Jewish Museum.” He depicts Beavis and Butt-Head, who embody woke culture from the US cartoon series, in front of the Auschwitz Gate. One of the images shows Jean Amery and an inscription on the Auschwitz Gate reads “From the River to the Sea”. Is it a call for a new genocide of the Jews and the annihilation of Israel? It is images like these that Kharchenko uses to demand more ethics from a society that is facing the decline of historical knowledge. In his works he focuses on the present, which contains a past that can never be overcome, and references to reactionary identity politics and post-colonial anti-Semitism meet totalitarianism and the utopia of consumer society. The synagogue paneling by Elieser Sussmann on display in Schwäbisch Hall is one of the most important Judaica in Europe. This alone is one reason why the Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum regularly makes reference to Jewish topics.
Among other things, Yury Kharchenko also makes reference to the museum’s collection, such as the synagogue paneling, the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and vice versa, to the questioning of what terror is today and how or whether one can still live as a Jew in Germany today.
What do the German Holocaust, Hamas and Russian terror have in common and how does an artist experience the current world situation in his pictures?
Friend of the Carl Kruse Blog, Rick Minnich will be celebrating the world premiere of his latest film “The President’s Tailor” as part of the Jewish Film Festival Berlin-Brandenburg. The screening takes place at the Bundesplatz Kino in Berlin on June 19th at 20:30.
Blog followers and friends will gather with Rick at the Mexican restaurant “Alcatraz” beginning at 6pm for complimentary appetizers and drinks. The restaurant is located at Bundesplatz 6, right across the theater.
“The Presidents’ Tailor” is a heartwarming story about the Holocaust survivor and star tailor Martin Greenfield, who dressed six US presidents and hundreds of celebrities. The New York Times wrote an extensive tribute to Martin upon his death in March at age 95. The Jewish Journal also ran a cover story about the film.
An additional screening is planned for June 23rd at 5 p.m. at the Bundesplatz Kino.
There will be a Q&A session with Rick after the film for those interested.
Tickets for the film are 9€ and can be reserved at http://www.bundesplatz-kino.de/ The Carl Kruse Arts Blog has 5 complimentary tickets, preferably earmarked for students and anyone under financial duress, but really available to all on a first come first served basis.
For any questions please write me at info@carlkruse.net
See everyone on June 19 for what should be a wonderful evening.
The Carl Kruse Arts Blog invites all to another exhibition and social gathering in Berlin as part of its Art series with German artist Michael Dyne Mieth.
Join us Thursday, May 23, 2024 from 6:30pm – 9:30pm at Dorotheenstr 83, 10117 Berlin.
Dyne will exhibit a collection of his works spanning his more than three decades as a painter. We will also have on hand staff from Margarethenhof Vineyards who have graciously offered to showcase some of their wines for the event. Jasmin Catering will serve unique Levantine-inspired finger foods. It will be good.
Dyne is a painter, sculptor and multimedia artist living in Berlin, whose art is exhibited internationally and always attracts attention due to his visionary motives. Some of his work includes his massive “G18” in which he revisits and reimagines Picasso’s Guernica, which has forever inscribed itself in art history as an appeal for peace. G18 was exhibited along with Pablo Picasso’s original Guernica at the Imperial Hofburg Museum in Innsbruck during the anti-war exhibition GUERNICA – “Icon of Peace.”
Dyne was also selected by Cisco Systems to envision a work on sustainability for their innovation center openBerlin. He created a sculpture in the shape of a robot called “Recycle” from packaging material that is normally hazardous waste. Sensors in a bodysuit that Dyne wore saved the data of his movement as the work was created and later published as “the data of creativity” allowing viewers to immerse themselves in the artist’s world and understand what he did and how he did it.
We look forward to seeing you on May 23 for what will be a beautiful evening.
Niraj Welikala, a member of both the Oxford and Cambridge alumni societies in Berlin, founded a play-reading and theater group in Berlin last summer and is looking to expand the group to fellow thespians and those who love the theater. The group’s objective is recreational play reading and perhaps one day putting on a production. Details from Nigel below. You can contact Nigel directly at niraj.welikala@gmail.com or fellow co-founder Nigel Luhman at nigel@luhman.de
Cheers,
Carl Kruse
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An Actor Prepares…
Calling actors and theatre enthusiasts!
We are a play reading group (in English), originally formed from members of the Oxford and Cambridge alumni clubs in Berlin and we are looking for new people to join us. We meet every 2 weeks on a weekday evening from 6-8 pm (usually on a Monday) at the Theaterhaus Mitte Berlin (https://www.theaterhaus-berlin.com/).
We aim to select and read a diverse range of plays. Plays we’ve read so far include Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, J. B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’, ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ and we are currently in the middle of ‘The Crucible’. We usually start with a few minutes of warm-up exercises. During the reading, we switch characters to give people a chance to explore different roles and also experiment with different acting and directing techniques.
The play readings are meant to be recreational although we hope to put on a production as well. We have a range of experience in the group (from little or no experience to some with years of acting and directing experience). If you are interested, please send an email to: playreadingberlin@gmail.com, mentioning any previous acting experience (but this is not required) and we will send you more details including our WhatsApp group that we use to organise readings. You are welcome to come to a session and see if it’s for you.
Hope to see you there!
Niraj, Nigel, Kaya and Justin The Berlin Play Reading Group committee
It is dawn, and the city is not awake, because in France, cities sleep when the night rolls through them. Maybe a light shines out from the backroom of a bakery, where a few bakers with sleep in their eyes pound and shape dough beside a firing stone oven so the breads will be baked in time for the morning traffic when it streams in through the bakery doors. Perhaps a waitress is walking dozily beside the flowing grey of the Rhône with the keys to her café jangling between her front two fingers. And somewhere, perhaps, there is a shadowy figure retreating unseen from a wide crack in the pavement, which he has filled with tiny shards of ceramics that glitter like stars as the sun glares up, up and above the towering white of the Cathédrale Saint-Jean-Baptiste. The day has begun, and there is a new artwork by Ememem in the streets of Lyon.
Ememem is an anonymous artist, described by Ian Phillips of The Guardian as ‘France’s answer to Banksy’, and has produced over 350 artworks throughout the streets of Lyon; from potholes to pavements, from gaps beside wide gnarled tree roots to broking paving stones, Ememem’s ‘flacking’ (his name for the mosaic method he uses) shines through the gaps in the cityscape.
Ememem’s work seems, to me, a sort of variation on Kintsugi, the Japanese art of traditional ceramic repair, a way to visualise the mending process of broken ornaments which treats breakages as essential in the history and future of an object, rather than as something to be seamlessly hidden. The imperfections of these objects are highlighted and cherished using Kintsugi, as the cracks in the concrete of Lyon are highlighted and made colourful by Ememem.
The word ‘flacking’, which Ememem uses to describe their technique, is a neologism originating from the French word ‘flaque’, meaning puddle. I think this to be a most poetic way to describe Ememem’s artwork. As puddles of colour, with patterns pooling out from their centres and dribbling into the surrounding splits, just as water would. As natural as rain, Ememem’s works blend into the metropolis.
There are many roadworks occurring in my city at the moment. Holes in the road being filled with steaming concrete. Paving stones being unearthed from their soft cement beds and replaced by other such stones. Small potholes being haphazardly filled in – when they dry up, they make little molehills in the road. And all around these works is commotion. Trucks, huge machinery buzzing and whirring and crackling, men in neon waving this way and that, or bent over, tugging at rocks and earth, or stood observing as a mechanical arm picks up grey detritus before them. It is not that these works are not essential, of course not. But perhaps there are some instances where an Ememem-type figure could perform their quiet work, and calm the noise somewhat; maybe they might venture out from the woodwork in the dead of night, and fill in the deep crevasse that has emerged on the pavement over by that café, fill it with red circles and blue squares and orange crescents and green rectangles, fill it with colour and brightness and precision and beauty. It would be good, I think, if we were to fill in the holes of this city with more colour.
I like to imagine how Ememem might create one of their artworks. How patiently they must place the little pieces of ceramic, how very meticulously they must plan out the pattern in order to fit it exactly into the strange shape that has been gouged out of the street, or road, or wall. How quickly they must work so as not to be seen by a soul.
Not a lot is known about Ememem, but there have been musings about the reason behind their name; their agent of 15+ years, Guillaume Abou, asserts it may be a reference to the first letters from Lou Reed’s ‘worst’ album – Metal Machine Music (from The Guardian article entitled ‘France’s answer to Banksy: the anonymous street artist filling potholes with colourful mosaics’ – September 2022). Ememem have purportedly said that their name refers to the sound made by their moped when they go out at night to create their pieces (I challenge you not to make that noise in your head). I’m not sure which idea I prefer – Lou Reed or the rumbling of a moped grumbling reluctantly awake at midnight. We know that Ememem is French, though speaks with a bit of an accent (perhaps Italian, suggests Ian Phillips of The Guardian), and that they are untrained, artistically speaking, though their father was a house tiler. Might that make Ememem a street tiler? I’ve always thought it to be a wonderful thing to follow in one’s parent’s footsteps, to learn a craft from them and continue it on for generations. It is a lost thing, I think. These days, we find our own way, and reject the old ways of our parents in favour of paving a path towards the new. Always pushing forwards, quicker, faster. Never taking a moment to admire the path from whence we came, or taking the time to fill in the cracks in that path with our own mosaics. Rather, we move to different streets, different roads, and leave the old to whither in our wake.
It is refreshing to have an artist without a face. Anonymous authorship is not a particularly easy feat in the modern day, and, save for the aforementioned Banksy, I can’t think of any other known artists who have managed to successfully make themselves opaque to the public’s ever prying eyes. We live in a visual age, an age where parasocial relationships have become the norm. We believe that we KNOW our favourite celebrities, or ‘artists’ – we know what they eat, we know the music they like, we know who they’re married to or dating, what clothes they wear, where they live, where they grew up, what school they went to, who their friends are…and, perhaps, we might feel that they know us, in some way, or that they might be our friends, should we meet them in real life. So, to have an artist who rejects all that, who is known only for the patterns they’ve made in the cracks in a city, is quite magnificent. Ememem ‘fixes’ the city, makes it beautiful, and they do not even want us to know their name. This, to me, implies a humility and compassion that I do not think I possess as an artist, nor ever will. ==============
Hello all! The Friends of the London School of Economics invites the Carl Kruse Arts Blog to a unique guided tour of the Wallraff-Richartz museum in Cologne.
A museum that deliberately exhibits a fake Monet? The Wallraff is showing an unusual look behind the scenes at its “In the Museum’s Laboratory” section, where the painting “On the Banks of the Seine Near Port Villez“, which was first identified as a forgery by Wallraf art technicians, is on display. This exciting type of work is what this collection presentation is all about: We will get a clear explanation of what happens behind the doors of the “Department of Art Technology and Restoration”. In addition to the forged Monet, we will learn about painting in the Middle Ages, van Gogh’s painting tricks and methods of restoration. Furthermore, fascinating X-ray images and infrared images of a medieval altarpiece are on display.
We cordially invite you to join us for an exclusive guided tour in English “In the Museum’s Laboratory” at Wallraff-Richartz-Museum on Saturday, 24 February 2024.
We will meet at the Foyer of the Wallraff-Richartz-Museum, Obenmarspforten 40, 50667 Cologne, at 2.15 pm, 15 min ahead of the tour to allow time for cloakroom and distribution of entrance tickets, so that we can start the tour on time.
Please register by Thursday, 22 February, by completing the online registration form. We encourage you to sign-up early, as we allocate places on a first-come, first-served basis.
The participation fee is €10, which we ask you to either pay by Paypal or provide us a SEPA direct debit mandate. (For paid-up members of the German Friends of LSE and for followers of the Carl Kruse Arts Blog this event is free of charge.)
