ALBERNHEIT
In all the years that we have known one another, Schoffman and I have shown our work together only once.
In the spring of 1990, Berlin was a city marinating in adolescent exuberance. Art galleries were opening everywhere and in the most unlikely places. Gallerie Kunstbrauerel 17 on Zionskirchplatz, under the ominous shadow of the crumbling evangelical church was one such place. It was run by Claudia Musil, the flamboyant doyenne of the German avant-garde, whose chiseled features and colorful hats became an emblem for Euro-hipness.
She asked David and I to design a collaborative exhibition based loosely on the theme of Habermas’ theory of communicative reason, a fashionably obscure post-modern war-horse. Neither David nor I knew anything about Habermas, (which probably made us uniquely qualified for the endeavor), but a friend of mine, a professor at Heidelberg University explained that it had something to do with language.
Well, to be brief, Schoffman and I bought a small German phrase book, a bunch of stencils and some imported Krylon spray paint. After getting furiously drunk, we went to the gallery and got to work painting long German sentences on the crisp white walls, laughing so hard we were in agony. When we were done, the room looked like the aftermath of a verbal food-fight.
Non sequiturs dripped aimlessly next to declamatory broadsides. Fractured syntax squatted defiantly beside eloquent lyricism. Rhymed couplets were paired with garish profanity. The place was a mish-mash of random gibberish, a disconnected, poorly executed hodgepodge of driveling dreck.
The critics loved it.
Schoffman and I have been pretty successful in Germany ever since, but inevitably, whenever we show, our latest work is always compared unfavorably to that legendary frolic at Kunstbrauerel 17.
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