Einträge von Rory Maclean

What makes an artist? What forces and inklings drive a young man or woman to make their own journey, and where does it begin? In imaginary childhood games? In chance encounters? At the sensitive core of the human heart?



To answer these and other questions, I have met more than one hundred working German artists over the last eight years. I have traced how childhood obsessions and a spark of inspiration develop in the imagination. I've walked beside a platinum rock star and a struggling caricaturist, followed the process of best-selling novelists, tracked the life stories of top film makers, sculptors and painters, shared coffee with the godfather of techno. I've seen how political rebellion, English punk, Pershing missiles, Joseph Beuys, even Elvis Presley has awoken the creative spirit. I've learnt that art is a weapon, that art can heal, and that art deals with the mysteries that lie in the spaces between the words. I've tried to understand how these individuals have succeeded, where they have stumbled and fallen, and how they've survived.

Most of the interviews took place in Berlin, Europe's capital of reinvention. This city's identity has always been based not on stability but on change. Over the centuries Berlin recreated itself from a mean and artless outpost to Hohenzollern garrison town, Hitler's capital of war and then the flash point of the nuclear age. The divided city emerged from the Cold War as a virtual blank canvas. After 1989 thousands of German and foreign artists aspired to create a new artistic life here, a kind of 'artsy communism: a creative utopia of collaboration and acceptance infused with a pioneering spirit', according to the writer, critic and cultural journalist Kimberly Bradley. In its crumbling tenements and vast, peanut-priced studios, they embarked on an experiment in the power of the imagination.

That phenomenal time – and the speed of Berlin's subsequent embrace of gentrification – has made the city an ideal place in which to observe the forces and sensibilities that make and sustain (or undermine) an artist.

Now – in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut – I have selected the finest interviews for Wunderkind: Portraits of 50 Contemporary German Artists, bringing together the stories of some of the remarkable men and women who during those years chose to follow their passion, to break rules and make new ones, to reinvent themselves like the city itself. In this new ebook the musicians Campino and Shantel, actors Clemens Schick and Sibel Kekilli, painters Jorinde Voigt and Michael Müller, film maker Uli Gaulke, author Thomas Brussig and many others reveal their passions and doubts, their working methods and their secret struggles. Above all they show us that the task of the artist truly is uncompromisingly simple; to discover what has not yet been done, and to do it.

I hope that you'll have a chance to read Wunderkind, and share with me the stories of these individuals for whom creative work is the very point of being alive. It's now available from all ebook distributors including Amazon UK, Amazon US and Amazon Germany as well as the iBookstore. 

    I stand in Alexanderplatz, busy with tattooed tourists and old Berliners basking in the sunshine, holding iPhones and lapdogs, flashing neon wristbands or enjoying afternoon Kaffee und Kuchen. I walk away from them, at once back and forth in time, spiralling out from the square and into the city.  



    I pass the Marienkirche where Nietzsche – as well as Goethe, Voltaire, Chekhov, Kafka, Döblin, Nabokov and Günter Grass – paused during their time in the city.  I walk by the site of the phoenix-like Berliner Schloss, rising from its own ruins as well as those of Erichs Lampenladen, East German Party Secretary Erich Honecker's doomed 'lightbulb shop'­-cum­-asbestos­-filled people's palace.  I walk across the Lustgarten where Goebbels and Hitler fooled unnumbered supporters into believing that they alone could save Germany from Bolshevist anarchy.

    Beyond the Brandenburg Gate, I lose myself in the memorial to the Jews murdered in the Second World War, one of humanity's most moving public expressions of the past and a testament to the German capacity for deep, empathetic feeling. Peter Eisenman's vast, undulating labyrinth of concrete plinths rises and falls away into the darkness of Gertrud-­Kolmar­-Straße. I stumble on between its hard­edged, disorientating stelae, spooked by dusky sounds and shadows, moved by the echo of children’s voices and footsteps.

    Finally – on this afternoon walk through the ages -- I stop at the point where as a teenager I'd first looked over the Berlin Wall, from what was then the end of the West.  When I first saw the heinous divide, it shook me to my core. At the heart of civilised Europe were watchtowers, barbed wire and border guards instructed to shoot fellow citizens who wanted to live under a different political system.  I'd known the history, of course. I understood what had happened. But I couldn't conceive how it had happened. The individuals whose actions had divided Germany and Europe – the wartime planners, the Soviet commissars, the Stasi agents – weren't monsters. They were ordinary men and women. How had they have grown blind to their human experience, clouding it with dogma, worshipping a distant tyrant? I longed to understand their motivation, how they came to act as they did, yet at the same time I was repulsed by their crimes and needed to feel their victims' suffering.

    In time that longing – that need to comprehend the discrepancy between the morality of a man and of men -- made me a writer, here in Berlin.  I came to realise that it is only by experiencing the world from another person's point of view that I could – and we can -- begin to understand that person or society.  I wanted to feel what it was like to be alive during Thirty Years War or the Nazi years, or under Communism, and for me that is most powerfully achieved through the written word, through stories, by evoking empathy.

    Why did – and why does -- it matter?  Because at the heart of my decision to become a writer -- and my fascination with Berlin -- there is a moral question.  How would I have behaved under the Nazis or Communists?  Would I have stood up for the victims, or allied myself with the majority and gone with the flow?  It is a question that we all need to ask ourselves.

    Over the last seven years – at the same time as writing my book Berlin: Imagine a City – I have had the privilege of penning this weekly Berlin blog for the Goethe Institut London.  In 380 posts – and almost 300,000 words – I have explored all that thrills, delights, haunts and infuriates me in this city from Bowie to Berghain, gentrification to Genau, Wowi to Weihnachtsmarkt kitsch, Trabants to a proposed Tempelhof aviation museum.  I launched a National Hug-a-German Day (no one paid any attention) as well as outlined the advantages taking a lover to improve ones German (a much more successful campaign).  I also had the privilege of interviewing 81 remarkable German artists from Campino, Shantel and Manuel Göttsching to Thomas Brussig, Clemens Schick, Sibel Kekilli, Jorinde Voigt and Ben Klock.

    Over the coming months the Goethe Institut will be launching its all-new, all-singing, all-dancing Länderportal website.  Final details are being refined but come the autumn I hope to contribute to it, and so continue to bring you news and stories from this remarkable city.  

    Until then do keep wandering its streets, on your desktop or tablet if not on foot.  For Berlin is a living city, despite all its ghosts. It is fresh and green because of its woods and lakes but especially because it is always reinventing itself.  'Berlin ist eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein,' wrote author Karl Scheffler over a century ago. 'It is a place doomed to forever become, never to be.'  That constant reinvention has meant that its identity is not based on stability but on change, making it such a dynamic, imaginative, unpredictable, living place … this Berlin, Berlin.

    David Bowie's son is the filmmaker Duncan Jones.  Paul McCartney's daughter is fashion designer Stella McCartney.  Author Kingsley Amis fathered author Martin Amis (and graphic designer Philip Amis).  Liza Minelli is the daughter of film actress and singer Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.  Singer-songwriter Wolff Biermann's stepdaughter is Nina Hagen.  And Henner Kuckuck's daughter is the Berlin fashion designer Nanna Kuckuck.



    The creative spirit transforms the world, flowing forth from the mouths and pens of poets, painters and songwriters. A gift of talent is bestowed on an artist and he or she labours in its service. The fruit of their toil is then offered to us all, and it in turn can awaken our individual gift or dream.  But how does a gift of talent pass from parent to child?  Is it a matter of nature or nurture, or does an individual's talent have nothing to do with inherited genes at all?

     These questions were on my mind when I met sculptor-cum-furniture maker Henner Kuckuck, this month's featured 'Meet the Germans' artist.  Kuckuck was born in Berlin in 1940.  His father was a Bundesbahn engineer – a practical man -- but his mother was a woman with strong artistic sensibilities.  She exposed the young Kuckuck to the avant-garde world of modern art. As a result at the age of 16 he travelled to Paris and – at a single exhibition – discovered the works of both the French figurative sculptor Aristide Maillol and Russian constructivist sculptor Antoine Pevsner.
    'In that moment at that one museum I decided to become a sculptor myself,' he told me when we met in his studio in Berlin. 'In a way my work has always explored that space between figurative and abstract.'

    With his mother's encouragment, Kuckuck plotted his individual course, which ventured from the figurative to the abstract, minimalism and kinetic.  His design for a public art work for the German School in Brussels won an international competition and – as a result -- he embarked on a dozen more large scale public space sculptures, at Berlin's Freie Universität, Bad Helmstedt’s Theatre Park and across Germany.  Working mostly in metal, all the works had bold and clean, modernist lines.

    But I was especially interested in Kuckuck's move to New York, at the age of 42.  His first New York show – put together on his bed in a tiny Manhattan apartment – attracted good reviews and an invitation to be a visiting artist at Rutgers University.  This led to commissions for him to create large-scale kinetic works that moved with the wind in New York and Philadelphia.  In a group show one of Kuckuck’s two-dimensional works hung between pieces by Julio González and Alberto Giacometti.
    'It was a wonderful time, a wild time,' he recalled.

    In the 1990s he was visited by his then-21-year-old daughter, now the respected fashion designer Nanna Kuckuck.  In New York father and daughter collaborated to design an original handbag that came to be sold as a work of art in the finest stores.  After her departure, Kuckuck turned his hand to his other passion -- furniture design.  Over the next five years he produced a startling collection of bespoke winged armchairs, imaginative flat-pack seats and vinyl sofas that were both sculptural and functional.  With partner and then wife Sharon Holmes, Kuckuck's remarkable creations twice won the prestigious ID Design Award as well as both the Felissimo and Seattle Design Resource prizes. He was one of the first designers to elevate recycled material in to the world of high design.  In 1996 a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation recognised his artistic achievments. His award winning Spine Chair is part of the permanent collection of the London Design Museum.

    In 2001 Kuckuck returned to Berlin, completing – as he told me -- the 'geographic circle of his life' and propelling him on a new artistic journey, which has brought his work back to its figurative foundation.
    'As I grew older I began to look at art which had never touched me before, for example medieval painting and Renaissance sculpture,' he said. 'I became fascinated by how those artists handled robes and the hanging folds of clothing.  I was inspired by the emotion that they conveyed in the folds and sweep of material.  In a way, I found myself returning to the figurative.'

    Curiously, Nana Kuckuck's own creations have a similar rich and emotional quality.  How much had her artistic temperament been shaped by her father -- or indeed had his work been influenced by her temperament -- during those few weeks together in New York in the 1990s?

    'This year I'll turn 75,' said Henner Kuckuck. 'At my age I see how life can describe a circle.  One begins at a certain point, makes a decades-long journey, and then returns to the starting point…if one is lucky.'  He went on, 'Every artist wants recognition for their life’s work. But more important – much more important – is to follow one's individual artistic evolution.  In my life I have been lucky enough to be able to do that, and to come full circle.'

    Come summer, most urban dwellers head for the hills: the vineyards of the Loire, the beaches of the Med, the villages of Andalusia.  Londoners and Parisians vanish from Oxford Street and Montmartre.  Travel supplements are packed with seductive snaps of terracotta Tuscan villas and fields of yellow sunflowers.  But in July and August I like to stay closer to home, celebrating summer in the city.



    Berlin is a vibrant, green city with 'a strange, rough magic' (to quote Alexandra Richie), rich in museums and galleries, peppered with parks and spectacular playgrounds, crisscrossed by waterways, surrounded by lakes and rivers.  My nearest U-Bahn station -- a two minute walk from the front door -- is five stops away from baroque Schloss Charlottenburg with its sprawling French gardens and — in the opposite direction — less than a dozen stops from Krumme Lanke, a quiet, curving lake surrounded by sandy beaches and tall pine trees and reminiscent of Scotland.  In fact Krumme Lanke – like adjoining Schlachtensee – is one of my favourite spots for an urban holiday.  Around the lakes wind broad, earthen footpaths from which bathers step down to favourite coves. Across the surface bob the heads of a dozen swimmers framed by the brilliant green of the trees.  Families row inflatable dinghies to the opposite shore.  Ducks paddle among the bathers.  The surrounding woodland make it easy to forget that the Brandenburg Gate was a mere 25 minute underground ride away.

    Berlin also supports a wealth of summer outdoor festivals, and my top pick this year is the Fort Gorgast Festival. Its organisers promise a languorous summer weekend of camping, culture, music and art.  Festivities kick off on Thursday 23 July with a fantastic array of creative, artistic and cultural events. Every day there will be workshops ranging from photography and writing to massage and drawing, as well as morning yoga sessions, film screenings and author readings.  Come nightfall, the music stage will come to life with live acts and guest DJs who will spin everything from folk to funk and from dub to disco.

    The festival was conceived by Victoria Gosling, founder of the author and publishing consultancy Reader Berlin, and this year is supported by Paul Sullivan who runs the city's most popular creative travel platform Slow Travel Berlin.  
    'I used to go to tonnes of festivals, but I seemed to spend the whole time queuing or watching things happen from the back of a crowd,' said Victoria.  'Gorgast is such a special place with amazing potential. I was so proud of what we achieved last year. There was such a friendly, creative, good-time vibe and an amazing international crowd.  I desperately wanted to do it again, but bigger and better. I was amazingly lucky to find Paul. We have the same ideas about what a festival should involve - participation, meeting people, great food, a selection of wonderful acts and artists that may be new to me, but that I can go home and tell everyone about.'
    Paul added, 'As a long-time fan of art and culture festivals such as Port Eliot in the UK, I have long dreamed of organising a similar event in the peaceful and often scenic surrounds of Berlin. When Victoria approached us and showed us the amazing Fort Gorgast and what she had done there last year, I knew a golden opportunity had arrived.'

    Just an hour from Berlin by car or regional train, yet a world away from the bustle of the city, the festival will take place from 23 to 26 July in magical, moat-encircled Fort Gorgast.  Numbers are limited so book your tickets now.  Then next month, throw your tent up amongst the atmospheric ruins and lush green meadows and enjoy a summer weekend to remember.

    'Dear Mum and Dad,' wrote then-21-year-old Mark Reeder in his first letter home from the divided city in October 1979.  'I have finally arrived safely in West Berlin.  I am quite exhausted, but so excited…'



    In the 1970s and 1980s West Berlin was a dying capitalist outpost, encircled by the Wall and surrounded by a quarter of a million Red Army soldiers.  Isolated from West Germany, and sustained by massive cash subsidies from Bonn and Washington, the island city had become a magnet for draft dodgers, anarchists, artists and independent musicians, and the creative melting pot for a special kind of sub and pop culture.  

    Like many other Mancunians, Reeder had found that 'the only way out of 1970s Manchester misery was through music'.  His fasciation with German electronic music drew him to Berlin, where he found that the city 'was even more f…ed up than Manchester'.  But he loved the place.  'It wasn't pretty but it was damn sexy.'  He threw himself into its underground world, finding a Kreuzberg squat, spending his nights at SO36 and The Jungle, working (sort of) as a record label representative, a roadie, a bouncer, a musician, a manager, a sound engineer and even as an actor in short and feature films.

    B-MOVIE – released two weeks ago in Germany and with a UK premiere scheduled at the Sensoria Festival in Sheffield – tells Reeder's story while documenting the chaotic music scene of 'wild' 1980s West Berlin.  Among its many cameos are Blixa Bargeld, skinny as a rake, and an earnest-looking Nick Cave in his first Berlin flat. Tilda Swinton, Die Toten Hosen, Westbam and Gudrun Gut also make early, artless appearances, in the days before they too were swept to stardom. Reeder's own extensive archive footage is intercut with staged reenactments (featuring Reeder lookalike Marius Weber), extracts from television programmes and scratchy Super 8 footage, much of which has never before seen on screen.  

    This feature-length film – directed and produced by Jörg A. Hoppe, Klaus Maeck and Heiko Lange – is a dynamic, engaging and irresistible jaunt back to a punky, heady and head-banging heyday.  Its soundtrack includes music from Westbam, Joy Division, the Sex Pistols, Ideal, Die Ärzte, Die Toten Hosen, Einstürzende Neubauten, Malaria!, Der Wahre Heino, Notorische Reflexe, Die Tödliche Doris, Anne Clark and Mark Reeder's own bands Shark Vegas and Die Unbekannten.

    According to Blixa Bargeld, in 1980s Berlin 'the sun is shining, the birds are twittering, the world is beautiful, people are good.'  As he recalled for the film, in those days 'West Berlin was a very strange little creative island, but it was also my yardstick for normality.  Everything else was different in West Berlin.  Rents were cheaper than in West Germany.  It was possible to survive on next to no money in West Berlin.  At the same time the whole situation, the atmosphere there, caused many people … to stay in West Berlin.'  

    In the 1980s West Berlin was a town where the days were short and the nights felt endless. To the film's producers, the city was actually like a B-movie, that is 'colourfully cheap and trashy, threatened and thrown together, anxious and ambitious, clubbed and caned, stoned and strung out, drunk, drugged and – just very special.'  

    But it couldn't last, of course.  The Wall fell not long after Reeder – who lives and works in Berlin to this day – took part in the first, small Love Parade (a couple of hundred people strolling along the Kurfürstendamm).  A few months later in November 1989, West Berlin was history.