Third Workshop #2
June 5, 2007
The second session of our Berlin workshop took place at the big table in Hadley and Maxwell’s studio where we had spent the day talking about interpersonal media. We cleared away the papers and set places for eleven, setting out the tea candles we’d bought that morning from the Turkish store on Mariannenplatz. Dinner was a Thai yellow curry with vegetables and rice that had been a staple of previous workshops. Hadley made a big salad and the fridge was packed with German beer and Italian proseco. 
Prior commitments took Antonia Hirsch and Michel de Broin away, but in their stead came Vanessa Ohlraun, liaison for artists at the Canadian consulate in Berlin. Vanessa had signed on as a member of the workshop but other obligations kept her from attending the day time sessions. To my delight, Vanessa enjoys sparkling wines, which she said are an uncommon provision at dinners in Berlin.
I recall welcoming everyone with a toast, though it is unclear whether that actually happened. Let’s say it did. The toast was a way to formally convene the table without beckoning the sobriety and obligations of a seminar or study group. I hoped that we would continue our discussion together, but now let the subject of interpersonal media blossom differently, in this libertine hot house of food and drink and conviviality. A toast was a handy way to suggest it.
Hard to say if it worked. Certainly I felt different. In part because I had heard so much during the day, I now felt familiar with a group who had been strangers to me before. It was easy to reply and joke and exercise the full amplitude of my subjective responses without worrying that the terms of our exchange might be violated by my indiscretions. Indeed, the table was generally lively, even as we maintained a single conversation with most of the group (Hadley and Christian had a tête-à-tête). And, as a pleasant surprise, we discussed the assigned reading.
Christiané dismissed Harry Kessler as a self-important fabricator who managed to see the whole sweep of German history through the narrow lens of his own attendance at dinner parties and midnight assignations that may or may not have really played the central roles Kessler enjoyed crediting them with. I asked if she thought his Berlin diaries (published in English as Berlin In Lights) were factually incorrect, or just self-aggrandizing. Christiané seemed to think it was the latter (and I recall Ralf agreeing), that Kessler, whose arts patronage she applauded, had a big ego but was not a liar. As such, I still regard Kessler’s account as a useful window onto the real social dynamics of power. Including, I guess, the power to write and circulate one’s own record of events. (A power I am enjoying even now.)
Turning to another of our assigned texts, James Lord’s Picasso and Dora, Michael expressed distaste for Lord’s sycophantic adoration of Picasso, who he felt suffered from the detestable accolade “genius.” I pointed out that Lord was not just a celebrity chaser, but truly admired what he knew of Picasso and his work. His desire to meet this towering figure — burdened or not by questionable categories, such as “genius” — made sense to me. I confessed that the same desire had overwhelmed me, when I was 20, and led to my following (some would say “stalking”) and meeting Jonathan Richman, the pop musician. As with Lord and Picasso, it was not fame that drew me, but a powerful attraction to be near the body that produced such transforming works of art as “Roadrunner,” “Hospital,” “I’m Nature’s Mosquito,” and “Modern World.” There was something magnetic about the body of the artist, the source of the work, and I asked if Michael perhaps felt the same way about the major figures he admired, for example Michel Foucault. Wouldn’t he have wanted to meet Foucault?
He insisted he would not have wanted to meet Foucault, and denied there was any link between the work and the body of the artist (or writer). Maxwell further clouded the waters by saying that the person he would love to be near was Paris Hilton, because her existence was so unlikely and so abstract.
To witness the actual body would, he felt, be a transforming experience, offering him a kind of proximity to pure meaning, or maybe to abstraction, that seemed impossible. She — her meanings — exist so robustly, yet so far apart from the realm of the physical, that to be near her body would blow Maxwell’s mind.
I felt this detracted from the clarity of my discussion with Michael, but the group was so much more interested in Paris Hilton than in Jonathan Richman or Michel Foucault that, for a spell, we explored Maxwell’s perverse desire. He was broadly, willfully, misunderstood, I felt, by those who preferred thinking of him as a celebrity-chaser or a letch, and the subtlety of his argument was lost. Trying to wrest attention away from the sexy narrative of Maxwell and Paris, I boldly accused Michael of lying, and suggested that he would have been very excited to meet Michel Foucault. Again, he denied it. Ralf, agreeing with Michael, pointed out that the work (particularly the written ideas of a philosopher) exists apart from the body of the author, and that there’s no reason to conflate the two. I find this an especially interesting position in regard to Foucault, who, in life plunged his body so aggressively into the dark, mute space of anonymous sex, as if to fill any gaps that might have opened between thinking and brute physical presence.
The discussion of Paris Hilton, Michel Foucault, and Jonathan Richman evolved into a consideration of the social dynamics of power. To what does one draw near, when one draws near to the body of an admired figure? Is it simply a fascination with power, or is there some other communication that is possible only through physical proximity? Does nearness cloud or clarify whatever has been communicated through books, works, or the objects that first intrigued us? I was reminded of power’s nocturnal operations, how the real decisions and exchanges of power happen at 3 AM. As in Kessler’s world (or the world as he saw it) there is a lot of pomp and circumstance all day and all evening long, and then whomever remains standing, whomever goes to the after party, the cabaret, the pre-dawn club, the aimless drunken stroll at the very end of the night, is given access to real power. We discussed this possibility, but I don’t recall reaching any consensus or conclusions.
I am very curious to learn what Hadley and Christian discussed, for their conversation was just as lively and continuous as ours; we all enjoyed the delicious chocolate dessert sticks Christian brought. Others brought provisions, bread and cheese during the day, a bottle of this, a bottle of that, and when the dinner adjourned we agreed that the next night’s would be a barbecue out on the lawn featuring some remarkable sausages Ralf and Christiané would bring with them. In the meanwhile, I asked everyone who planned to attend the second daytime session to bring along an object or printed piece — some kind of material media — that was especially interesting or important to them. My report on that session will come in the next day or two.
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