Last summer we met our daughter in Berlin as she had finished a semester at Central St. Martins in London. I carried a sketchbook with me for the trip. After College I spent nearly a year travelling in Europe, and I used a sketchbook daily during that trip. I arrived in Berlin on April 13th 1984.
My 1984 sketchbook focused more on journaling, as I left the city for Hamburg by train I wrote, “Berlin, an oasis of life, laughter, lust and money in the wasteland of communist Germany. The barbed wire electric fences with their guard towers and automatic firing machines are behind us now, like a vicious snake the fence line slices over the countryside.”
We stayed in the Wedding area of Berlin in 2022, an area that I explored in 1984. My sketchbook in ‘84 was filled with written entries and my few sketches of people included these men from walking through Wedding. I also drew some of the punk rockers of Kudamm (Kufürstendamm) the avenue to visit in 1984.
My sketchbooks have followed the trajectory of my teaching. Building on essential ideas to become more visual and focused on imagery as content. The drawing acts as a key like a door in a memory palace that opens up the breadth and depth of the experience.
There is a patina of history and a vibrant graphic overlay of imagery to Berlin that acts like sedimentary layers of content and expression. I was just in Brooklyn and even the birthplace of so much graffiti seemed naked compared to the heavily sprayed streetscapes of Berlin.
In 1984 the art of Papua New Guinea in the Dahlem Museums inspired me, as it must have inspired the Neo-Expressionists dominating the contemporary art galleries. In 2022 I returned to the Pergamonmuseum to revisit the incredible Assyrian relief carvings, as the Pergamonmuseum was in East Berlin in 1984 and many of its exhibits were in disrepair and drab compared to the West. I purchased a monograph from one of the exhibitions and typical to the frozen in time reality of East Berlin, it was printed by letterpress.
Berlin in 1984 lived with the constant scar of a violent and horrific past and an uncertain future. The nihilism of punk seemed to fit the times perfectly. It is an unrecognizable city today from 38 years ago. It is not just the stucco on the buildings that has been renewed, the fabric of the city has found new roots in a diverse mixture of the past and present.
These 2 books travelled on very different journeys, just as Marco Polo in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes Venice as a series of unique destinations, Berlin is recorded in these books by two people. One was collecting, gathering, and seeking in 1984 and in 2022 the other was connecting, engaging and navigating meaning.