Orienteering the field of artists' organisations in Berlin is all you can do. It mostly slips out of its clothes. Another one's opened before you know it, doing it differently, eluding characterisations. Amongst them: artist-run-, off-, project-spaces, austellungraums, produzentengalerien, all taking issue with the specifics of their individual situations and drives. The terrain is vivid and rampant! and unstable and surely broke, yet teetering on it's excitement. And there's little point in attempting to clarify identities; from one artists' group to another, routes are accessed in activity and participation. Berlin's art initiatives feed on an atmosphere of creative freedom, diversity, sociability and agility, with potential abounding on the brain and on the horizon, all the while hovering over unstable futures. Perhaps this instability is where such energy combusts from.
Art spaces create community and operate off this local context, generating opportunity, exchanges and discussion, in time with an international tune. In fact that's it, about Berlin: aerially its art status hardly beacons forth to international prominence, whilst inside, in the undergrowth, it can feel like an internationally comprised warren. And whilst other cities with similarly energetic creative networks stand strong, Berlin's map is divided and unsteady, with artists' organisations kept aside in the future planning. For a city whose reputation is being fabricated on such artistic energy, artist's enterprising often comes in for criticism, with much made of who stands on which side of the commercial line.
It's a most basic point to reason that the rent is cheap, also Berlin is full of gaps, gaps that artist's have long made use of, but now they're closing up fast to privatisation. How shall Berlin's artist-run scene sustain itself, and how shall such energy be directed?
From art institutions through contemporary advertising, Commerce and the State, all appropriate and put to their own use the aesthetics and languages of artists practices, for their own prerogative. Artistic practice, creative production, has always been an available and bountiful goldmine. Our environment is tacked together of this reinvention, this hectic pasting, so that a sense of purity of meaning or reception abounds absurd. Berlin lays this bear. Artists can only negotiate those workings and pursue open operational practices in a freer exchange, in which economic interests aren't kept from them.
Is there a sense of a phantom hawk circling over artists' initiatives? Artists' spaces need to be able to determine their own economic future, from within their individual modes of operation. So that fluidity within the field of the commercial and the non- would entail, become less arbitrary. Several means are being pursued: there are the producer galleries, of which Invaliden1 identifies, there is the model whereby artists' studios are rented out which in turn supports a broader project for exhibitions and other facilities, there are a few projects aided by international funding although this doesn't determine their own future, there's some commercial funding also but this seems to only support short-term projects. And now there are Berlin art fairs trying to re-route the art economy back to the city, and project spaces are afforded an opportunity to join in. I am surprised there are not more of such hybrid spaces that have as an objective, eventual economic self-sufficiency. And by observation, it is the spaces which have secured a certain financial platform (actually a budget!), and also run by older artists, whose programs exist beyond a few years.
There is an ambiguous patch in relation to galleries and artists' organisations, that is magnified when in contact with each other. I'm told that professional Berlin galleries make their living through art fairs, as the city itself doesn't support a market: project spaces in Berlin seem to rouse confusion and conflict when they attempt to participate on this commercial scene: art fairs also include a space for non-commercial projects to enter the arena, albeit remaining in a non-commercial fashion. This proximity opens a space for this commercial aspect of art presentation to face and challenge its own parameters. Being tagged 'non-commercial' or 'non-profit' can become a weird premise. A premise that seems to cut a specific divide between art spaces, and in turn, withhold modes of exchange, possibilities of staging further endeavors, and ultimately their potential sustenance. In fact, where such a divide marks off and suggests polarity, art spaces are often operating between rather more malleable differences. One hardly hears artists proclaiming to be non-commercial themselves. Can't artists' organisations partake in this business of exchange rather than solely a language of exchange? And simultaneously open the venue to challenge professional gallery presentations in Berlin, that often take formal and tame routes by other cities standards.
Invaliden1 sits on a neat and prominent corner, which is rife with artists' activity. They operate as enterprise and porous collective, between drives to sustainability and endeavors of open collaboration and mutual support. The artists are already working with galleries in Spain and Portugal, and are able to function in Berlin around less introspective parameters as some other project spaces. Their approach welcomes, socialises, and negotiates with critical and practical forces in the gallery/artist-run scene.
