Schablone Berlin. Tucson: Chax Press, 2005. With Kyle Schlesinger.
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Schablone Berlin is an artists’ book as well as a book of documentation, presenting stencil graffiti from the streets of contemporary Berlin. The book consists of over 100 color photographs showing not only the graffiti, but also its placement within the confines of Germany’s most international metropolis. The introduction examines the semiotic and performative aspects of stencils within the contexts of art history, media, and urban anthropology.
This art and text project by Caroline Koebel and Kyle Schlesinger is a loving drift through the streets of Berlin to examine and to be inspired by its raw, lively, lustful, sometimes esoteric stencil culture. Exquisitely photographed, this work plays in the in-betweens of poetics and politics, the trivial and the insightful, the amusing and the disturbing, the immediate and the aloof. One way or another, this book will seduce you.— Critical Art Ensemble
Contemporary trackers on the trail of an esoteric species, Koebel and Schlesinger have captured a gallery of transitory signs from the surface of Berlin's walls. The very sign of urbanism, these swiftly made images depend on a community of knowing readers to recognize their codes, nod, and signal back across the space of time and geography. The city is the site, scene, of a whole system of traces and communications. The marks show their ephemerality and questionable legality in the very stealth mode of their production. Stencilled, spray painted, rapidly produced, they haunt the walls with their fading imagery, semaphore signals in a common but still-specialized system, introducing their alternative image-speak into the regulated zones of public discourse. A beautiful collection, thoughtfully framed by its introduction.— Johanna Drucker
One of my favorite books I've read this year is Schablone Berlin, which for some odd reason Amazon is storing under the title Berlin Schablone; I hope people continue to seek it out and find it, a fantastic candybox of images and speculation. It's very user friendly and you hardly have to know a thing about Germany or the German language to understand it. Caroline Koebel and Kyle Schlesinger are admirable guides, pointing out a set of signs which we might never even have noticed in the busy citiscape of modern Berlin. Maybe you have to be there and be intimate with the city before you notice its "Schablone," i.e. the stencils that graffiti artists and other activists have plastered over every conceivable public surface, whether it be the curbs beneath the fire hydrants, or the diagonal juts of the fire escapes. You don't even notice them at first, and then, like every other living thing, they become inescapable.
The photographs themselves are lovely: lucid, clear-eyed, deliberately rendered and printed in small, postcard sized images. (Well, large posrcards.) And the variety of stencilling is staggering. Every conceivable artist is invoked, from the gabby, petalled overpainting of Raymond Pettibon to the UFA pristinity of Cocteau: if he (or she) can be reduced to a few lines and shadows, then a stencil can be made and reproduced, within a few seconds, on the streets of any city. Why does Berlin have so many? Our guides have a theory or two to explain it. In turn the stencils force us to look again at the public buildings and structures they decorate or detourn: the sad magentas and river blues of Berlin are themselves totally hallucinatory. You could be nowhere else, Kudos to Tucson's Chax Press for bringing us this strange bewitching treat.—Kevin Killian
Hair Snarl: the Aesthetic Body in the Order of Things
Film essay published in The Brooklyn Rail in March 2004
Read at the Rail
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A traveling program curated by Warsaw-based Lukasz Ronduda of short works from the Archive of Polish Experimental Film, “Polish Women Artists Films of the 1970s and ’80s” was first presented in April 2003 at The Kitchen, and subsequently in October at Hallwalls in Buffalo. The program will screen again in summer 2004 at the Tate Modern. But rather than surveying “Polish Women Artists Films of the ’70s and ’80s” as a whole, I want to look closely at how the films of three of the artist-filmmakers, Zofia Kulik, Ewa Partum, and Teresa Tyszkiewicz, offer particular insight into an international dialogue about the possibilities of the body in art during these two decades. Personally influenced in my own creative practice by such vanguard artists as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Valie Export, Eva Hesse, Adrian Piper, and Carolee Schneemann, it is with great enthusiasm that I come to know the Polish artists whose work in many ways resonates with theirs. The vital output of these women artists from twenty, thirty, or more years ago regarding the investigation into how the body marked by sexual difference produces and deconstructs meaning and language systems comprises art historical turf wars largely responsible for the— in some cases— thriving careers and— in others— tenacity despite obscurity of contemporary artists addressing similar concerns.
“Color the Shadow”
Catalogue essay in Carolee Schneemann: Split Decision.
Buffalo and Toronto: CEPA Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, 2007.
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“Color the Shadow” is third in my series of critical writings about legendary multidisciplinary artist Carolee Schneemann. Having focused previously in an article for Wide Angle on her revolutionary film Fuses, in the new writing I examine the film Viet-Flakes: 1) as a poetic outcry against the Vietnam War, 2) in the context of the artist’s body of work, and 3) as an instrument by which to comprehend mass media and artistic expression in the contemporary context of Iraq.