Reality Bites: Making Avant-Garde Art in Post-Wall Germany

by Diedrich Diederichsen, Beate Kemfert, Gertrud Koch

The Berlin Wall fell almost 20 years ago, and since then a generation of artists has come of age in reunified Germany. Reality Bites investigates the effect of that historical context, identifying the new kinds of work that have grown out of it, full of strategies and materials borrowed from and referring back to one kind of recent German reality or another, aesthetic exploration of experience in which the themes of reality and history take on increased meaning. This representative selection of about 70 pieces created since 1989 includes work from Franz Ackermann, Kutlug Ataman, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Sabine Hornig, Christian Jankowski, Andre Korpys, Markus Loffler, Via Lewandowsky, rude_architecture, Gregor Schneider, Collier Schorr, Wolfgang Tillmans. Among those less known to U.S. audiences are Cosima von Bonin, born in Kenya, who plays curator, critic, DJ and producer in the course of her sometimes risque work; Rudolf Herz, whose Lenin on tour put busts of the great leader on the back of a flatbed and took them on the road; and Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, whose "Places of Remembrance," in Berlin's Bavarian Quarter and "Bus Stop," Holocaust Memorial project build the city's history into its streetscape.

300 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2007

About the author

Diedrich Diederichse is a German author, music journalist and cultural critic. He is one of Germany′s most renowned intellectual writers at the crossroads of the arts, politics, and pop culture.

Diedrich Diederichsen was born and grew up in Hamburg where he worked as a music journalist and editor of the German Sounds magazine in the heyday of punk and new wave from 1979 to 1983. Until the 1990s he was then the editor-in-chief of the influential subculture magazine Spex in Cologne. Diederichsen worked as visiting professor in Frankfurt am Main, Stuttgart, Pasadena, Offenbach am Main, Gießen, Weimar, Bremen, Vienna, St. Louis, Cologne, Los Angeles and Gainesville. After teaching at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart for several years, he became Professor for Theory, Practice and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2006.

Diedrich Diederichsen is a prolific writer whose articles and texts are printed in a variety of periodicals and publications. Newspapers and magazines with contributions by Diedrich Diederichsen include Texte zur Kunst, Die Zeit, die tageszeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Theater heute, Artscribe, Artforum, and Frieze.

With his thinking and his attitude Diedrich Diederichsen reflects a multitude of influences. His writing shows traces of Post-structuralism, Marxism, Cultural studies, New Journalism, Beat literature, Psychoanalysis, and Situationism. A main topic of his writing is the tension between subjectivity, identity politics, and culture industry in Post-Fordist society. In his writings he frequently refers to personal experiences and the links between zeitgeist, biography, and history.