munich - Katya Tylevich

Munich
An artist in Munich is necessarily
a ‘working’ artist
Maybe the way to speak of Munich is not
through its presence, then, but rather its absences.
And in the generally positive conversations
I have with the artists and designers
who make Munich their base, I repeatedly hear
of two: the absence of undefined space, and
the absence of undefined culture. There’s a slur
sometimes hurled at Munich, by its own residents:
‘Disneyland’. Symbolically, the city’s
cen tre gives the impression that not one brick
is out of place, and not one window lets in a
draft. Outwardly wealthy, clean and well manicured,
even Munich’s dark alleyways seem well
lit; those whispers of subculture that run through
urban corridors seem quieter, here – minding
signs to ‘respect the neighbours’.
It should seem a paradox that today’s Munich
is also an open confrontation with its yesterday;
the city’s organized tours falling into categories
like ‘Beer Halls’, ‘Local Brews’ and ‘Third
Reich’, for example. Munich was the beautiful
backdrop of some of the ugliest moments in the
past century, but it seems to have patched many
of its open questions the same way that it
has its open craters. Take, for instance, The
Haus der Kunst, built under Hitler as a monument
to Nazi art. Today, the building is a noncollecting
contemporary art space, which deals
explicitly with its origins through rotating exhibitions,
some of them taking place in bunkers
below the building. The museum is a physical
question given a seal­tight answer. Using visual
language and architectural definition, Munich
articulates itself eloquently to the degree that
stammering or unfinished sentences seem like
a foreign dialect.
What’s funny is that in the context of an art
magazine, words like abandoned, neglected,
and peripheral become synonymous with inspiring,
arousing, and even (that awful thing)
‘creative’. So often, an artist’s studio visit takes
place on the margins of a city, in the grey area
of meaning, in place of something former or
abandoned, like the shell of an old factory or
warehouse. But in Munich, the periphery we
see is green and suburban, most of our interviews
take place in personal apartments, cafés,
or living rooms turned into workspaces:
between ceilings and floors that have always
housed value.
Another way to understand Munich, in that
case, is to talk to those artists and designers
who have left it – for Berlin, for Brooklyn or
Oakland. What were they looking for that they
couldn’t find in their pretty city? Is it grittiness,
cheaper rent, a different sense of time, a bigger
slice of world? That’s as much as I can
compress from many earfuls of conversations.
Of course, the companion question is: What
do they miss so much that they come back?
Because many do come back, so say the artists
and designers whom we meet in Munich.
To work against time, pressure and the monthly
rent isn’t romantic, by most standards, but
it can certainly be motivating. After all, as one
Munich designer put it: to afford living in this
city, you can’t afford to have a bad day. An artist
in Munich is necessarily a ‘working’ artist.
And so, a common thread that runs through
the conversations here is ‘productivity’. And
maybe that word, however unsexy, can take at
least some credit for the fact that, among other
things, Munich is internationally celebrated for
its industrial and graphic design.
At its worst, Munich’s uncompromising
stance on ‘time is money’ (incidentally, ‘space
is money’, too) narrows the margin between a
‘dry spell’ and having to reconsider one’s artistic
career or location. At its best, Munich is
a more tangible devil on one’s shoulder than
distraction or ‘too much’ choice. We’re told
that, in Munich, if you want subculture, you
have to carve out an underground yourself.
A task made possible due to the coziness of
Munich’s artistic community. People do know
each other in this city of 1.3 million: artists,
photographers, fashion designers, industrial
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Munich
designers, graphic designers, musicians – if
they didn’t go to school together, they at least
drink at the same bars. Sometimes they work
together. And so, within the interviews that follow,
there is unavoidably a built­in game of
three degrees of separation.
‘Do you know Konstantin Grcic?’
‘Have you talked to Mirko Borsche?’
‘Have you met (fashion designer)
Ayzit Bostan?’
‘Have you gone to Schumann’s Bar?’
‘Have you been to Charlie Bar?’
‘Have you been to Rubybar?’
‘Have you checked out Gomma records?’
For all the quotes I collect about Munich being
a buttoned­up city on a tight schedule, the
artists and designers we meet give us generous
amounts of their time, speaking at length
about the neighbourhoods in which they live
and work, showing us around, introducing us
to other artists, designers and gallerists. The
game of ‘who knows whom’ and ‘who does
what’ seems rather satisfying in this corner
of the art world. It may be that Munich feels
less competitive because so many of its artists
and designers know each other socially and
not just professionally. Munich has changed in
the past three years alone, they tell us, with
more spaces opening that try to evade definition:
clubs, restaurants, bars, art studios and
event halls that punctuate the city’s script with
more exclamation marks. To paraphrase the
words of one artist, Munich is in the process of
adding a creative wing to its pretty structure.
It’s still too early to tell what it will look like in
the following years, or who will move in, but
for now, it’s telling just to see who’s hanging
around the construction site.