A Musical Interlude

Yesterday's post had me ruminating of what was evil, what was social tolerance, personal feelings about cultural backgrounds: Nazis, persecution, WWII, HEAVY!!!! This has been just one facet of this trip.

So, not wanting to leave only  one Berlin post about Jews, Nazi's and WWII, let us move to the recent times. A couple of nights ago I was fortunate enough to catch Daniel Barenboim at the Berlin Philharmonie performing 3 Schubert concertos and two (Chopin I think) encores! It was leeker (delicious). the performance was sublime, the acoustics were incredible and it is a beautiful concert hall. What a treat! Also what I found very poignant is how heartfelt the applause was for this amazing pianist and great man.
Read more about him here: http://www.danielbarenboim.com/about/biography.html
He is not only a great performer and musical genius, but a man of peace. He developed the West East Divan Orchestra with young Arab & Israeli musicians being trained by world class musicians. He is taking culture, music and human interaction to a whole new level.

Berlin is all about culture. It seems that any day of the week you can find performances of all kinds all over the city. Also art, museums, galleries, murals. The need/desire to express runs strong and deep in this city.  At twilight, you can peer into any random window and see many rooms filled with books. I find that comforting. Also to see a broad age range at the concert was encouraging, it wasn't just the senior set.

So, onward to Amsterdam and a new post to come from the Netherlands!

Gleis 17

This photo gives you a sense of the memorial, Gleis 17, which means Track 17.

This is the track the Jews were taken from Berlin to be deported to various concentration camps.

The track is in Grünenwald.When you walk downstairs from tracks 1-4 turn left inside the train station, which is part of the S ban or above ground train lines used daily.  It's how I got to this place and took another S ban to get back to the flat in Kreuzberg.  Every panel has a grid and at the top or edge of the platform are: the date, the number of Jews (Juden), then Berlin – name of camp. Earlier in the beginning of this forced mass exit, the numbers are smaller, but then they would swell periodically. The largest number to Auschwitz was 1743. Sometimes there only 33 or even single digits. but they seemed to keep aiming for a quota of 100, I saw 100 a lot. On March 4th there were 1143, and the day before there were 1732. They went to Riga, Lodz, Theresenstadt, and Sachenshausen which is quite close to Berlin city centre.

Seeing these details is very chilling and disconcerting. Grünenwald is a bit out of Berlin, kind of like Westchester, but not as far (more like Forest Hills). If you walk around the block from the train station there are beautiful villas with lovely architecture, lawns and clean well swept sidewalks. This area didn't seem to be bombed, so the buildings pre-date 1945, unlike much of Berlin which was seriously flattened., by US and other allies. Berlin was bombed about 500 times more than London during the Blitz just for a comparison. 

Anyway, back to the story at hand. These people (the whatever # Juden) were marched out of Berlin, made to walk to this station, through the streets and then put on these trains to take them to basically the end of their lives or if not that the lives they had before. The Jewish population was about one third of Berlin. That's a big proportion. I wonder on a busy day, a large group, what the people sitting in their villas thought of these people being marched (let's assume at gunpoint) down the street of their neighbourhood? Did they look out the window? Were they afraid? Smug? Disinterested? 

Looking at this memorial, walking up and down the platform I heard other trains come and go. It reminded me of Steve Reich's 'Different Trains'.  Hearing people chat and laugh over a beer at the nearby biergarten, audibly overlapping the trains passing, it gave a strong audio track to my contemplation of Gleis 17.

I went to Berlin, not to go to see the lurid horrors, the violent cruelty, e.g. Sachenausen near by, is open everyday.  I knew there was dark history, and I wouldn't ignore it, but I wouldn't go on a tour of a camp. I've seen so much footage from age 11 onward. Previous to all this, I was interested as a young child to learn how to speak German. I'm sure my parents were horrified, it was 1971. Or they thought, whose kid is this?  Earlier I had wanted to make a Japanese style doll house....Both my parents had lived unscathed in the US during WWII, but were very aware of who 'the enemy' was, and to have their kid interested in 'the enemies' culture? It wasn't the first or last time I tried their patience. But patient they were. When there was a program on TV (shortly after my interest blossomed) about the Holocaust, my Dad and I watched it, I was fascinated and puzzled as well as horrified. My father, at a rare moment of calm patience, after we watched, explained that was why he wasn't so keen about my learning German, though he himself had studied it in high school. Jump ahead 10 years: It was why on a Eurail pass summer break from college I went to Germany on my whirlwind tour of too many countries at once. To have it (Germany) not be 'this place' that was a country of people aka 'the enemy' who hated people 'like me'. I'm glad I did. It helped me peer over a wall that had built in my mind. The phrase, "If Nazis marched down Broadway, you would be dead, " was not uncommon when and where I was growing up. For some reason, the bigger part of me, went to visit 'this place'. I'm glad I did. Even now I have a friend that I met in Italy, lived in Köln, invited me to come visit her during this trip and it made all the difference. It put a person who I knew and liked on 'this place'.

I am not religious. I am Jewish by culture as I am Christian by culture (coming from my parents). Coming from New York City, my culture weighs more to the Jewish side. Preferably I am a secular humanist with my own personal spiritual beliefs that need not be shared because they are personal and not the point in this post. 

Seeing this memorial, after seeing a bunch of others, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe designed by Peter Eisenman (who lived in my building and whose kids I babysat for), the Jewish Museum (designed by Daniel Libeskind (who designed the Freedom Tower and 9/11 memorial) and the plaques outside of buildings stating people who lived there and were deported. They all ask more questions than they provide answers. Strangely they circle back in some way to where I was from: far away and long after all this went down. I'm glad that they are there and that they do. This 'behaviour', treatment of people we consider 'other' continues to this day. We are all guilty and are all innocent, all victims, all complicit. It is in our natures, just as it is in our natures to be heroic and risk our life for another, sometimes a total stranger, which also happened many times during this dark history. And thankfully is still happening as we speak.

I didn't mean to be preachy or dark. My intention is to report what I see and share it through my eyes and thoughts. On the way to the Jewish History museum I saw this mural which I liked enough to take a snap. I take my leave with this photo:

BTW- Berlin is a terrific place. It has a dark history and almost everything built here is new, but the sensibility and the quality of life is very positive. I have enjoyed my time here. This trip has had an arch of 'all this' (see above), but I look forward to returning, it's nice to be here. Despite all I wrote I'm having a great time. I have met and been re-acquainted with wonderful people. It seems familiar. Perhaps in another space/time continuum it is.

Ganesh: Slipped, Dipped, Fired

When I last left our hero, Ganesh he was fresh from the bisque firing and I was deciding what to do next. Well here he is being dipped in slip, not actually a glaze, but the way the slip reacts with the fire and ash in the kiln does give it a quality of being 'glazed'. (that is the point)

I could only watch (and take pictures) of Ganesha and his bench (rat mobile) got dunked in a large bucket of slip with much more capable hands than mine....

My task after his dip was to go all around the creices and make sure it was smooth so the sip didn't crack which would create a weird surface....it seemed to work....

Voilà! Here he is photographed fresh out of the wood fire kiln, all toasty warmly aglow....He is making passage now to the States. He decided to immigrate to New York. He'll be in good company.

Ganesha making

The time in Pondicherry before the 'road trip' was spent at Golden Bridge Pottery making a Ganesh.

I had made 'them' before, a lot. It had obsessed me.  Then I stopped making them, for a variety of reasons, none of which were very clear to me at the time. I went to the wheel and tableware and stencils.....all good.

But when I went to Japan and met Ray & Deb (who run Golden Bridge) I was advised by Ray (Meeker) and Jeff Shapiro (who is an extraordinary ceramicist as well and ran the Japan trip) to go back to Ganesh and continue the relationship and explore that avenue. 

Initially, I tried throwing different parts of Ganesh on the wheel. It was a manual kick wheel, that we saw heaps of in Japan. Compared to my Lockerbie a motorised kick wheel at home, it was like attempting to play tennis with a baseball. The voice that spoke to me, that dialogued with me would have nothing to do with the idea either. "Madame, you have to make me with your hands, not with parts from a wheel. You must touch the details of who I am." This is a deity that is much beloved in India and actually all over the world. He's the remover of obstacles, the deity invoked when beginning a new endeavour. He is a taskmaster. At least to me.

 

He or the part of 'he' that is 'me' or however you want to explain this consciousness spoke to me and we had a dialogue in his creation. The push/pull of how he should sit, the size of his trunk, the gaze of his eyes or his 'waking up'. Which I found out is a big deal when they make the giant ones for ceremonies. The photo below left is the first attempt, a bit too 'Disney' and it got altered.

This time I made Ganesh's vehicle 'Mooshika' a rat or mouse that he sits on or rides. This time I made an Indian style bench. Mooshika is considered 'the little hoarder' who is hyper and is completely run by his senses. Sound familiar? Ganesh 'riding' this creature is the idea of a deity in control over the senses. I see it as the greater consciousness over the material conscious mind. That's my take as the western white girl who makes these things. Who doesn't know why she does it. At all.

So here's my Ganesh after a wood bisque firing sitting on his rat mobile (vehicle) with a bit of clay supports. I'll post the pix of him being glazed (actually with slip) in the next entry.

Different Stuff: South India Tour Part 3 (final)

The furthest reach of the Tamil Nadu tour was Aiynnar Kovil. There is a temple filled with these horse statures that are about 50-150 years old. There are also figures as well, but not larger than life as are many of the horses. This temple is very small, the grounds are littered with these statues, many in pieces; a head here, legs and lower body there.... It is in the middle of nowhere, according to my urban sensibility and the driver who took me all over.  We had to ask a lot of shepherds and farmers to get directions. It was so worth it!

These statues are made by hand with clay coils in pieces: first the 4 legs and lower body, then then the upper body and lower neck, then the head and neck, the ears and tails are added at the end. All the pieces fit neatly together and can be fired together assembled. My friend Shirley Bhatnagar, (ceramic artist extrordinnaire) has watched them being made and really appreciated the simple elegance of the construction method.

There are also figures, here are a group of ladies. Also a lot of men as kings and some deities. The ladies sitting as a group, as if a hen party, intrigued me the most.

This is the pujari or temple overseer of the place. He had a lovely energy about him, calm and sanguine. He seemed to get a kick out of my enthusiasm about the  horses. His uncles and grandfather was part of the team that made these statues. This small desolate location has had movies shot here and the following day was a big mela (festival) expecting 100+ people. The pujari invited me to stay to be a party of the mela, but large devotional festivals don't really agree with me. It's just not my thing as a western big city dweller. Enthusiastic crowds are to be avoided whether it be for spiritual devotion, sports or shopping.

The area around the temple was desolate, dry farmland spotted with dry rice beds, goats and cows.
I am told after the rainy season it is green and lush. It is also a large quarry area for the granite that supplies many buildings and temples. Even in it's arid emptiness, I found the colours of brown and beige, punctuated with green trees and succulents very beautiful.

So before I left for the north, now reporting to you from Jaipur, I had to finish my own sculpture. At a much smaller scale, I made a Ganesh. Picture and story to come next.

More Stuff (less sublime) in South India: Part 2

This picture, and the ones following were taken outside of a couple of different temples in Tamil Nadu. I think this one and the next few were in Swamimalai and the others were Thanjuvar. Personally I am not particularly interested in Temples, despite my interest in creating deities, but sometimes the life around the temples can be interesting (read, photographic). I hope these pictures are interesting/entertaining to you.

Then the driver found this bronze 'factory' that uses the lost wax method and creates these bronze sculptures, some are hammered as well. It's India 'old school'.

Then as a finale, as promised the Palace Museum in Thanjuvar and their take (if you can call it that) on 'exhibition design'. More like, the lack there of.... To me it was an interesting juxtaposition of sublime and ridiculous. You decide.

Sublime Stuff (in South India): Part 1

While taking an excursion in Tamil Nadu I saw a bunch of stuff.  Small and large Chola Temples, about 1000 years old with incredible details of sculptured deities and their entourage. Yallis for example, are human bodies animal heads, like Ganesh for example. (so you can imagine my interest).

But in the first small temple was a giant Nandi bull and this giant Cat which had a room in it's belly, making it a building that really impressed me too. 

Visiting a temple, one must remove one's footwear. I had forgotten. But in this case, there is a lush green lawn that felt wonderful between my toes. In some of the other temples there were sisal runners that helped, otherwise my tender footed nature was really getting broiled. So I was running from one shady patch to the next. Some of these patches got crowded with other tenderfoots. There were a couple of tour groups that apparently been warned; they were wearing socks.

There was a visit to the palace in Thanjuvar to see the Chola bronzes. The height of the Chola period which started in the 3rd century was during the 10th-11th century when they were creating amazing temples and beautiful bronze sculptures. It was a time when the arts really flourished and a disciplined government was put into practice. Think Italian Renaissance in a few centuries to come. So, back to the bronze sculptures. Ever since I saw my first in Paris at the Guimet museum I have been captivated by their grace and form. The Nataraj (photo below) or the dancing Shiva creating the Universe. You can see that also in the stone sculpture on the temples as well. The palace museum was 'kinda funky' it was an interesting contrast in sublime and ridiculous. Unfortunately, the pix are on my other card....next posting. But here are some examples of the bronzes themselves without showing how they are shown (too much).

So there it is for a bit. I'm back in Pondicherry now for several more days. I am curious to see how the Ganesh I made while here did in the bisque fire. Fingers crossed! If the results are positive I will share them. Meanwhile I'll write next on the less sublime more everyday aspect of the trip. Nothing bad, well not really, just a contrast. The contrast that is India. But before I go here is a view from the terrace where I stayed at the Ideal River View Resort. It truly was Ideal.