Together @ Berghain

The term „permanent celebration“ could also be used to describe the hustle and bustle in the Lab.Oratory / Panorama Bar / Berghain – complex during long weekends. For the past twenty years or so, the venue has been regarded as perhaps the best, but certainly the most well-known club in the world. In the former district heating plant built in 1954, it is not the ornamentation but the monumental sobriety of the architecture that fuels the excess. Body ideals, however, seem to be quite similar to those of three hundred years earlier. On the Lustgarten portal of Schlüter’s Stadtschloss, fully sculpted, half-naked male figures are carrying the second-floor balcony. With their defined, muscular torsos, these anthropomorphic pilasters look as if they’ve been going to the gym every day for years, much like many of the men on Berghain’s Main Floor today.

With “Together,” Joseph Marr has created a three-dimensional narrative frieze that is site- specific in several ways. First, because it was created in the mythical club Berghain and is permanently exhibited there. And then, because at the time “Together” was created, a few kilometers away the reconstruction of the palace was being undertaken, with all of its political and social implications. The spolia of Prussias pride can now be found in the toilet bar of Berghain. The contrast between the statist reconstruction of the castle, fuelled by conservative forces, and the explicitly lifelike sculptures cast from cola-flavored sugar couldn’t be more stark. But you don’t need to know all this to understand Marr’s work. The ancient imagery of satyr masks, vine tendrils, claws and rams is accessible having become an integral part of Western culture. “Together” has yet another level. The work is made of boiled sugar preserved with synthetic resin and thus contains a psychoactive substance. Sugar, like sex, can make you high and and even lead to addiction. There is another well-known, annoying quality of candy: as temperature rises it gets sticky, just as the bodies in “Together” who seem to melt into each other. For Marr, this sugary clinginess carries a metaphorical significance. “Together” therefore reveals a development within itself. Following its length of nine meters, the work can be read as a narrative, from animalistic sexuality to more sublime forms of togetherness. In the final scenes of the work there is no more sex, but a deep blissfull attachment. “Together”, like Marr’s three-dimensional portraits, interweaves inside and outside, intimate experience and objective representation. The artist neither imposes his own artistry on the viewers (the sculptures are cast without any visible sculptural signature), nor does he make the intimacy of the sitters available to voyeurism. Not everything revealed to him in the conversations with the portrait sitters is made public – in fact, a lot isn’t. „Together“ was created for a place where no one is not allowed to take photos. If you want to see it, you have to go to Berghain.

Joseph Marr has created an installation in a semi-public space, a work about and for the present. In doing so, he succeeds in capturing the fleetingness and intensity of a mythical, but at the same time extremely open place. Looking at his vitrines, one may think about the reception of antiquity, about modern body images, and Schlüter’s Baroque, but one can also simply use “Together” as a place to have a drink while chatting with a chance acquaintance. That’s what makes is unique. „Together“ doesn’t come with a frame or a pedestal. Of all the artworks permanently installed in Berghain, it is perhaps the most incidental. Josephs Marr’s work about the possibilities of human interconnectedness in the early 21st century succeeds in something which the avant-gardes of the 20th century ardently desired: to tear down the barrier between art and life without damaging either.
Boris Pofalla