ostalgia
Posted: October 18, 2011 Filed under: About Leave a comment »
I first went to East Berlin in the late Eighties to script a film about the emergence of underground artists.
As East Germany became seriously bankrupt, shunned artists were dragged out of their ateliers to go exhibit and sell in the West. I saw an amazing collection of allsorts – photographs, collages, silkscreens, sculpture – suddenly produced from the shadows.
Despite the pandora’s boxful of treasure, the film never got funding and many of the artists and their work I’ve since been unable to trace. The culture of the old East, however, left a lasting impression on me, as it still does on the city.
For me, the most interesting aspect was that the artists were multimedia – largely due to the shortages in the East. If there was no film that week, photographers would paint. If there was no paint, artists would make prints. If there was no ink, they would work with plaster, and so on.
Karla Woisnitza is typical of the artists I met at the time. She had a small stipend from the State to be an artist but was rarely allowed to sell or exhibit. And when she ran out of materials, she made collages. She started one day with pencil shavings.
Karla was one of those dragged out from the underworld by a bankrupt Honecker to go and sell work in the West. Rare privilege: she was allowed to travel and to keep a tiny percentage of any sale in foreign currency. For a few brief months before the wall fell, these artists went from the bottom of the DDR’s social heap to the top.
I’m here at the moment, trying to pick up on what happened, twenty years ago.
