Here in Berlin we like parties. Where you have just one party, we tend to have two. And so, at Berlin art shows, there's a tradition to have one party for the
vernissage (opening) and another for the
finissage (closing). I was asked to DJ last night at a
finissage party for
Robin Hood, an art show held on the 16th floor of a commercial building near Potsdamer Platz. For the show, French artist
Christine Rebet shot videos of Robin Hood as a woman, falling through space against a darkened background. Asked why she cast Robin as a woman, Rebet replies: 'In the first descriptions of Robin Hood, we hear of a game during the May Day festival where Robin and his followers choose figures and play their roles contrary to their usual place in society... The character of Maid Marian is dressed as Robin or mistaken for Robin. There are no barriers of gender relations.'
Since the theme is spring carnival and gender masque, I play Wicker Man folk, splicing medieval estampies with ethnographic field recordings. Robin Hood is a theme I warm to. In fact my mother, an obsessive genealogist, recently told me that her researches show we are related to the merry man of Sherwood Forest; her maiden name is Hood. Anyway, the party's great, there's a harpsichord concert and the Schaubuhne dancers show up, confirming that this is indeed the hippest gig in town (their presence awards any party an instant 5 star rating).
Christine Rebet is a woman working in art. My mother is a woman who writes books about Hebridean local history. Nobody has so far put them in special women-only group shows about 'women in art' or articles about 'women who also manage to be historians' or documentaries about 'women mothers'. Yet this is exactly what art gallery
Kunst-Werke has done. The top floor of the Berlin Biennale at Kunst-Werke, which I revisited on Friday, is devoted to a display of album covers by the Berlin
Chicks With Dicks clique:
Chicks on Speed, Angie Reed, Peaches, Kevin Blechdom... The
Chicks With Dicks are not merely expat women who happen to be music artists currently living in Berlin. If that were the case, Berlin music artists like
Anne Laplantine would be here with them. No, the
Chicks With Dicks are women musicians (and non-musicians: most of the Chicks on Speed music is programmed by men) who put gender at the very centre of what they do. Hello, we're the
Chicks on Speed and
we don't play guitars! Hello, I'm
Kevin Blechdom and my album is called 'Bitches in Britches'! Hello, I'm
Angie Reed and here's a photo of me dressed up as a secretary with two males in suits kneeling in front of me kissing my rings. Hello, I'm
Peaches and I wear a beard and do the most incredibly ironic-phallic cock rock live show you've ever seen, it's a scream! Some people don't like my crotch, but fuck 'em!
Whereas Christine Rebet's Robin Hood becomes a woman, these artists are becoming men. There's a similarly carnivalesque cross-dressing element to what they do, but of course in Rock the carnival lasts all year, and crotch-tight motley is a kind of uniform. The Dicky Chicks are playing all sorts of double games. They're well-connected networkers with business nous who want their commerce to pass for art. They've got an old skool feminist 'sisters are doing it for themselves' angle, but if you point out that (unlike the absent
Anne Laplantine) they're getting male programmers to do most of it for them, well, that's because they're really curators and not artisans. They can't play and they're proud of it!
Punk rock!
There's a certain amount of cake eating (out) and having going on, of gender capitulation disguised as gender revolution. The clique's motto could be 'Our clits are dicks'. Behaviour we'd normally associate with ageing right wing phallorock satyrs like Aerosmith can get trotted out in a
Peaches show as some kind of political statement about empowerment. Marketing we'd normally be able to tune out as commercial noise has to be paid attention to when it comes from the Chicks with Dicks because their marketing is art. They went to art school! They've read about Situationism!
Punk rock! Wanna get your art shown in a Berlin gallery? Well, you'll have to wait until the Chicks on Speed have finished the
vernissage for their new single, dahling. First things first, old chum! And don't you know there's a bylaw stating that every Berlin art show must have at least one Dick Chick in it?
Women being men is what I call 'Police Woman Feminism'. In the 70s, aware that TV formats like police drama were looking weary and, in the light of identity politics, increasingly reactionary, the networks commissioned police dramas 'with a twist'. Instead of a male detective lead, you cast
Angie Dickinson as 'Police Woman'. The same reactionary Law and Order morality came through, but the hand on the gun had a woman's touch. Half way to feminism, right? Well, not really. Allowing women to embody patriarchal values is not a big threat to patriarchy.
So why, in 2004, is Kunst-Werke doing a 'Women in Rock' section in the Biennale? Why is it buying into this idea that Chicks, above all, need Dicks and beards (albeit oh-so-ironic ones)? In visual art it's now totally accepted that the leading artists of a country like the UK can be and are women, and that their themes can be as wide as the world and needn't focus on gender, on how much they want to be men, or on the 'remarkable' fact that they've achieved anything at all considering they were born female. Why then, when the art world turns its attention to music, does it applaud categories and themes it would be embarrassed to apply to its own artists? Do the Anne Laplantines of this world, with their computers and their hurdy gurdies, have to don ironic cod-pieces before they can get into Kunst-Werke? Do they have to get out of art and into roleplay before the art world pays attention?
Once you get past the Usual Suspects and the Suspect Curation, there's some great stuff in this corner of the Biennale. That's because some of the world's most interesting artists just happen to be women, and a few of them have slipped into the show despite the curator. On the DVDs playing in the middle of the Kunst-Werke loft there are interviews with
Sachiko M, who I mention often in this blog as someone who astonishes me with her radical freshness, and
Kaffe Matthews. Neither of them is making art about gender.
Sachiko M says that women often have more interesting ideas and listen better, so they make better 'listening music'. 'Sometimes I'm just sitting on the stage listening to the sounds being made,' she says. In her interview,
Kaffe Matthews seems somewhat bemused by the inevitable 'woman in rock' question:
'For me, it's not important that I'm a woman. I'm a musician, not a woman musician. But I went to some women-only nights and asked the musicians there if they'd have been performing if men were playing there alongside them, and to my surprise most of them said no. If women don't have the confidence to perform in a mixed environment, then perhaps we do still need some protected places where women should be considered as a special case'.
You know, maybe Kaffe is right. Underneath the huge strap-on she's forcing us to fellate, Peaches is probably just a shy, insecure girl from Canada. Let's open our mouths and make a shelter for her dick.
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