Trash gallery closes doors, but don't blame blasphemy charges
By Roy Kammerer
Foto-Shop was bound to clash someday with the officers watching them from the police station just across Invaliden Street. The hole-in-the-wall gallery just has to be suspicious--all the wrong kinds of people are there.
Artists and life's unrepentant have adopted it as a habitat, floating in from nearby joints like the King Kong club or Bergstuebl. Views of politics and life--often the wrong ones--are exchanged; music and smoke of all kinds thickens the air until the early morning hours.
"The unusual thing about the place is it wasn't a club, a bar, not definable," said Mike Riemel, one of Foto-Shop's seven members. "But everybody that came in talked to each other. We see the gallery as an occasion to talk about interesting things."
Riemel calls the gallery a throwback to Berlin's less commercial, more edgy 80s art scene. Trash, not in it for the cash. The tiny 15 quadratmeter space for each of its two floors makes the place extremely cozy and intimate _ a good reason for the name the gallery once had, Mini-Muschi (Mini-Pussy).
Profane, if there is such a thing, isn't unusual for the gallery, as the event that got the place into trouble proved. None of this, however, has much to do with why Foto-Shop is up for sale and will close its doors Feb. 28.
That has to do with World War II.
But Benedikt XVI's loose mouth led to the inevitable run-in with their polizei neighbors who share the intersection that adjoins Veteran Park. During the German pope's return to Bavaria, he managed to piss off muslims across the planet with allusions to their religion's violence.
Benedikt lost it in August, with Berlin's most important art month of October looming.
Foto-Shop was searching for a way to snare the attention of the international crowd pulled in town for Art Forum and other events, not easy when it sometimes seems half of Berlin's downtown residents are artists and the rest think gallery owner is a very cool hobby. Riemel, Jens Keiner and Manuel Bonik attacked the exposure problem by building a pope to put in the gallery's shop window.
Prenzlauer Berg, Mike Riemel
Benedikt's remarks still echoed in their heads.
"It was a mishap. We kind of thought the pope behaves like an elephant in the porcelain shop." Riemel said.
Their pope's head, above the female torso and under his elegant coned miter, was a skull. The empty eye sockets stared through the window at the officers across the street. One finally snapped and filed Berlin's first blasphemy charge in decades.
The blasphemy charges--reportedly the first in Berlin since 1982--were dismissed in late December, not unexpected, in a city which staggers from one extreme to another.
The Weimar Republic's world-famous sex, sekt and cabaret decadence ended when the Nazis marched in, much to the dismay of many Berliners, a little too snobbish and cosmopolitan to fall for an act that was a smash hit in Germany's provinces.
Maybe they sensed the third act coming _ the theatrical goose-stepping fanatics manage to get Berlin bombed to rubble. By the time the city rebuilds, the 60s student rebels began fighting in the streets while shouting "revolution." Around the same time, the city's east got locked away behind a wall by a socialist state.
When the wall fell in 1989 and a whole half of a major European city resurfaced overnight, the youth and not so youth rushed into socialist ruins for a nonstop massive party. All you needed was a long cord to feed electricity to the DJ's inside an abandoned building and the dancing raged over three floors.
But Foto-Shop wasn't worried the blasphemy charges would stick, just a little angry that someone would even try.
"We have this little fucked-up gallery, with the police here trying to be the religion police. It's not their job to think about whether its blasphemy or art," Riemel said.
Next to the pope in the gallery's shop window was a book turned to a page which quoted 15th century Pope Calixtus III--he called for the destruction of Muslims and termed Mohammed "the son of the devil."
The incident, which drew a lot of publicity in Germany, fit right in with the clash of civilizations theme rampant in the media of late. Riemel believes, however, the Pope affair was just business-as-usual at their gallery.
"It's tiny, dirty, fucked up, but the way we touch topics is interesting, so diverse, because we have no curator," Riemel said. "We break taboos, I suppose everybody does, but we really do."
Since the pope affair was the gallery's biggest media splash, it's either fitting or sad that Foto-Shop will close its doors next month, ending five years of existence. The building that houses it--damaged by World War II bombs _ will be torn down.
For Riemel, the gallery is an artwork itself and a symbol of post-Wall Berlin's central district of Mitte. He wants to sell it wholesale in one piece, down to the walls, refrigerator, sound mixer, upstairs bar and stools.
"Foto-Shop isn't simply just a piece of property, but a charismatic complete art work and a piece of the myth of Berlin's Mitte since the wall came down," Foto-Shop's press release states.
Riemel also wants to export the concept of Foto-Shop to other cities. The idea is to get around seven artists to split 200 euros (US$260) rent, keep the piece afloat amid democracy in its purest form (no curator, no boss) and somehow stage an average of 20 exhibitions a year.
"Define the shop, how its been working for five years, then franchise it," Riemel said. "The concept is find a small space and don't commercialize it."
Riemel is no stranger to selling things and through force of personality would probably be the gallery's PR guy, if Foto-Shop had those kind of people.
He was once early new economy after studying economics and moderated events like the Deutsche Sponsoring Kongress. Then he drifted into Berlin's exploding club scene after the Wall fell, helping found Klub Radio, the internet radio that broadcast music from the city's famous venues like WMF, Tresor or Maria am Ostbahnhof to the world. Riemel also put together a bible on fliers, based on a collection of a half-million in both English and German, called "Flyer Soziotop."
He started life as a nice boy from Bavaria, but a year as an exchange student in the United States changed his life. He landed in Hollister, California, a farming town with more in common with the Midwest than the hip coastal towns just a few miles away.
But he was exposed there to America's hothouse media environment. "For a little Bavarian boy, seeing Hustler, gambling halls, watching 50 movies in a row, to me that was radical media use," Riemel said. "When I came back to Bavaria, I was really infected by underground hardcore music."
Foto-Shop will close after staging more than a hundred exhibitions in five years, using unframed pictures. The principle is the unique space inside the former mini-muschi is the perfect frame for the art, or in German, der Raum ist der Raum.
"We have ambition, but we don't deliver finished product. You have to talk with us, then maybe you can get what you want," Riemel said.
Just don't ask him how Foto-Shop chaotic collective succeeded in putting up one show after another with breathtaking regularity.
"It's a joke, the planning is hilarious, funky, edgy, trash, courageous," Riemel said. "It's total 80s."
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