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| The Visibility of the Urban by Knut Ebeling (Extract from the Catalogue Home:Sweet:City) |
Consider her Model of an Exhibition from 1994:
large, subdivided canvases whose upper section display drawings of the Potsdamer Platz area before it was rebuilt—that no-man’s land which the world’s cult-seeking tourists and bourgeoisie overran after seeing Wim Wender’s film. In the exhibition catalog the following is said, in bold face, about Potsdamer Platz: “A not-yet center as still-always no-man’s land through which the sharp-eyed traffic planners in helicopters drew artistic street patterns.” In 1994 Berlin, the helicopter could still appear as a bearer of artistic intention. In Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, which had appeared shortly before, the helicopter had already become a medium of surveillance: “…the aerial view of the city [is transformed into] a huge police grid….All this airborne surveillance and engridding, endless police data-gathering and centralization of communications, constitutes an invisible ‘Haussmannization’ of Los Angeles.”
The urban-trained look sees from above only Hausmannization and concrete block walls, security fences and video surveillance. Bürkle, however, uses an artistic and art-historically-trained perspective to consider Potsdamer Platz. She comments on the Potsdamer Platz through a Fibonacci sequence, that series of numbers that codified the golden ratio in Western painting. In Bürkle’s case, the golden ratio does not appear as a horizon but as a boundary that separates the upper part, containing the panorama of Potsdamer Platz, from the lower part. The un-built is supplemented and, as it were, grounded by the un-painted: The lower part of the canvas consists of an old rough backdrop (found in a Berlin theater) that suddenly unmasks the new center at Potsdamer Platz as a theater and stage. These are the two basic elements of Bürkle’s work, the city and its theater, the image and its stage, the visual and its frame. For the city is not only a stage on which something new is continually performed; the stage itself is constantly changing, making possible ever new performances in the theater of the big city. These alternating stagings are Bürkle’s theme and her work displays a good eye for the transformations and mutations of the stages, dispositives, and frames of the urban.
Her 1993 painting Yellow City I provides a good example. It shows the gigantic excavation of the former Friedrichsstadt arcades, in whose underground floors yellow diggers prepare the next edifice. Yellow City I is also divided according to a golden ratio, though here Bürkle does not call attention to her own method by spelling out a Fibonacci sequence. In distinguishing the buildings and underground levels at the horizon, Bürkle uses the ratio to separate city surface from its underground. In this way, the horizon does not separate heaven and earth but earth’s surface and its depths. Since the Renaissance, the largest part of the picture surface in Western painting was reserved for earth; in Bürkle’s art, it is reserved for the subterranean. Her gaze digs ostentatiously into the depths, as if part and parcel of the urban excavation and agitation process. From the spearhead of the avantgarde to the drill bit of the Berlin Republic—this is the path covered by Yellow City I.
Knut Ebeling is an art critic and philosopher at the Institute for Aesthetics at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He runs the research project “Archive of the Past: Knowledge Transfer between Archaeology, Philosophy, and Arts.”
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