Alles Klar

In 1984 Berlin was surrounded by the Iron Curtain. I drove from West Germany through East Germany to West Berlin many times along what was called the corridor, a narrow concrete autobahn with a 50 mph speed limit policed by East Germany. I didn’t look particularly legitimate – my vehicle was an old British ambulance with a large homemade roof rack with what appeared to be a bunch of scrap metal tied to it. In fact it was my sculpture. Inside the ambulance were the tools of the trade, oxy-acetilyn tanks through power saws. And in the forefront of my mind was to get through the corridor without incident.

I remember the intimidating border crossing from East Germany back into the West – West Berlin. It was built to withstand a tank attack. I was never hiding anyone but as I reached the border there were always moments of trepidation as to what the border guards would make of my appearance. There were several East German restaurants along the corridor and I would always stop at one – it was an exotic experience – the opportunity to observe a slice of life behind the Iron Curtain. But did I know that while I was enjoying the scene inside someone was not concealing themselves in the ambulance outside? On one occasion, as I left one of the restaurants, I bought mushrooms from an girl selling them on the exit ramp back onto the corridor – I bought the whole basket and that night Chicken made a memorable risotto with them.

Chicken’s name defies his persona. He is an alpha male. It’s as though he had chosen his name to exacerbate a contradiction to his true nature. He would spit on the sidewalk while talking with a museum director and throw a beer bottle into a dumpster across the street. He marched a cohort of us to the front of the line to see a Butthole Surfers gig without tickets and gained entrance – for all of us. If he thought you could make good work he was incredibly loyal to you. He draws all the time and wants you to look and laugh at the imbecility of what he has drawn - it was usually cogent, political, funny and oftentimes gross. He also knew how to cook a brilliant risotto with a mass of mushrooms from East Germany. Ultimately I made three shows at the gallery endart where he was a founding member and I thank him and the rest of the collective for the opportunity.

In 1987 I had a studio in Berlin for six months courtesy of Kunstlerhaus Bethanian. I scouted around and found Golitzer Park. In those days the park was a hinterland, a no-go place after dark – but nothing bad ever happened to me. I remember going to a bar bordering the park early one morning on my way home and watching two old people enjoying a fuck in the corner – and no-one blinking. I supposed it was normal and acted disinterested – though of course I was not. He was skinny and she was big and she was sitting on top facing him and they were both going at it. I ordered a tequila with my beer – I don’t remember the climax.

Golitzer Park had an old fence running through it from north to south, parallel with the Iron Curtain a few streets away. To cross the park from east to west you had to breach the fence or walk around the park adding an extra mile to your journey – there were several well-worn paths leading to holes that had been cut through the fence and I eventually settled upon one such hole as the site for Alles Klar. Golitzer Park was a wasteland at that time - I don’t think it would have been practical to traverse it with a baby stroller – the place was strewn with rubble and garbage and expanses of mud. You didn’t cross the park because you wanted to – only if you had to. And for many people it was expedient to do so – to get home, to get to the shops or to get to work.

Looking back on the surviving documentation of the piece now, it looks like a drawing superimposed on a bleak cityscape. It was while I was jack hammering into the concrete slab that was underneath the general detritus of the park that I was hit on the head by a boomerang. It was an inexplicable occurance. It floored me and I sat for a while after that contemplating the nature of fences and the nature of boomerangs and realizing that boomerangs could cross fences and walls back and forth until they found a victim – and then both would fall to the ground. Alles Klar.

I cut a 30 foot wide gap in the fence and replaced it with my own fence constructed from the roof beams of a nearby abandoned building. I counter-balanced the imposing beams with a single tortuously heavy length of railway line so that the most fragile touch would open up passage through the fence to the other side.

I and a few friends, high at the time, decided to drive the ambulance around the Wall – I mean right next to the Wall. We started in Kreuzberg where we lived and worked and within a mile we were face to face with an American military vehicle coming the other way. There was no place to pass, it was like being on a narrow country road with a massive wall on one side. One of us would have to drive off the road over rough ground and let the other pass. It was obvious which vehicle was best suited to that purpose. We sat it out for about ten minutes. Nobody got out of the vehicles, we just sat there and strangely I remember the song we listened to It’s a rainy Day (Sunshine Girl) by Faust.

The reality is that on the other side of the wall, less than a meter away, the consequences would have been severely different - there was a hundred yards of minefield embroidered with razor wire. As we sat awaiting the outcome of this confrontation my companions laughed – all of them native Berliners – two of them escapees from East Berlin. Their political standpoint was one of derision for East Berliners for not rebelling against the fascism under which they suffered. West Berliners were ‘free’ and to prove it on one occasion they climbed the observation towers in the West to throw ‘good German sausages’ over the Wall - better sausages than you can dream of in the East - to taunt the guards on the other side. It was childish, but like many childish actions it contained a truth.

I look at the body of work that endart produced during those times in that location, drawings, paintings, music, performance and it still speaks to me. I finally understood that although I was facing down an American military vehicle with its turret gun aimed squarely at my windscreen I was not actually on the front line. Five feet away from me behind the wall were the terrible consequences of transgression. In front of me was a considered, albeit powerful, approach to transgression and we were a bunch of stoned young people rocking out to an iconic krautrock song from the seventies. The Americans declined to engage, moved around, and went on their way.

I made Alles Klar and left Berlin. The piece probably survived for a few months before becoming indistinguishable from all the other detritus immersed in the park. Four years later the Wall came down. I was not there for that, but I wish I had been. It was maybe fifteen years later that I visited Berlin again and went to Gorlitzer Park and watched the baby strollers traversing its smooth terrain.