How to Look Serious in Front of Young Art
The Stroke art fair’s premise was straightforward enough: take the parts of contemporary art that white-cube galleries are usually too precious to acknowledge—street work, graffiti, photography born from the internet rather than the studio—and give them a space big enough to be taken seriously. The Postbahnhof at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof had the right bones for it: industrial, enormous, indifferent to prestige.
I went with David and Anna, having smuggled a beer past security through methods I’m not prepared to detail here for legal reasons. Stood in front of several works with a finger at my lip doing the universal gesture of deep engagement, which in this case was also genuinely true, which surprised me a little. The crowd had that Berlin quality of actual attention rather than performed attention—people looking because they wanted to, not because anyone was watching them look.
Danny Doom was working on-site, attacking plain fabric with spraycans and markers in the mode where destruction and decoration are the same gesture. The clothes he was ruining were becoming something else in real time, and a small crowd had formed to watch it happen, which is the best thing a crowd can do.
Artconnect Berlin had cleared wall space for live painting—work that existed only in that moment and that room, which forces a different quality of attention than something framed and catalogued. Gofresh brought out Social Network Photography, a book about the selfshot impulse, about the amateur image-maker using the early internet as a gallery before anyone had proper language for what that meant. In 2011 it still felt like documentation of something in progress rather than archaeology.
Caro Clash appeared on various surfaces throughout the space—she’d become one of those Berlin presences who seemed to exist at the intersection of every interesting thing happening in that city that year, and I was not immune to her appeal, which I’ll simply leave there.
Street art, graffiti, photography, strange three-dimensional objects I couldn’t quite categorize. Beer at one end, sushi of uncertain provenance at the other. The kind of afternoon that exists specifically in the register of Berlin in October—cool enough to want to be outside, interesting enough to stay in.