BERLIN

Berlin is by far one of the best cities I've visited. The overwelming essence of culture is mind blowing. Every street corner was packed with history and stories that in my opinion are far better than any art gallery I've been to. There seems to be mass freedom to all artists, if they want to "paint the town red" they will do it and do a fucking good job, a lot of these artists are non commissioned and purely doing their work to strongly express something or maybe even just purely to go crazy on a huge paint/spray paint piece across a huge wall just for the hell of it! Either way their free spirits and they're having a bloody good time!

Whilst in Berlin I visited a few art galleries. The first one being the Hamburger Bahnhof which was strange, as most art galleries are, but I didnt enjoy it much at all apart from the very few pieces that I felt I could relate to. The work that I came across in this gallery is typically the work that puts me off art and the only inspiration I feel from it is to make my work better. A lot of it was modern but nothing that made me overcome with thought. The first art piece you came to was a holding pin full of live reindeer and above them little birds in cages which drew us all to the conclusion that this is why the gallery stank of shit. The idea was based around a ritual that a certain tribe took part in where they would enlighten their spirits through the consumption of fliagaric mushrooms and for some reason they decided to drink the urine of animals such as birds and reindeers and rats etc that had been eating the fliagaric mushrooms. I thought the concept was quite fun but I can never help but think what is the point.
I did feel excited though to come across a few famous pieces by Andy Warhol such as the Elvis Presley print:

Tacheles
Tacheles was originally a department store in Berlin but later became used by the Nazi's as a prison. After the second world war it was damaged and abandoned. Now a group of squatters live there and create fantastic art pieces. Living there now for them is soon coming to an end as the police are trying the force them out but they're fighting back and building up barricades to stop them from coming in. Here are a few examples of the work produced within the Tacheles society:

The collage above inspired me the most from the Tacheles site and I have began to create my own collages using images taken from Berlin and creating pictures of the friends that I went to Berlin with.

I am pleased with these images but I am going to re-do them with smaller images because then I feel that more detail will show through. The next step I am taking with these images is to work out how to animate them so that the faces move because I want to make a Techno music video. The relevance is that Berlin is where techno originates. This will be brilliant once it is complete.