When the wall fell, there was no particular reason to think that artists would gravitate here. After the Nazis decimated the city’s vibrant artistic and intellectual life, Berlin languished, a sleepy backwater of the visual arts scene, for the 45 years of German division. And even a bland luxury hotel suite on Friedrichstrasse, one of the city’s main drags, has done double duty for a night, as the stage set for a video artist critiquing the global financial system with an allegory about Atlantis. Or it may have been dug in order to mail “clean” Berlin dirt to atolls poisoned by atomic testing in the Bikini Islands. A hole in the sidewalk might be just a hole in the sidewalk. You might need to buy a beer at the right time at Späti International, a Neukölln convenience store whose owner, Dogan Karaoglan, lets his neighbors use the storage room for performance art. If you keep an eye out and know what to look for, you’ll see it. This second city is the city of contemporary working artists. Then it rained, and the other city went back into hiding. For a few hours, Rosenthaler Platz became a canvas, with car, bus, and bike “brushes” spreading color across the pavement. Once in a while, it bubbles to the surface-like the Sunday afternoon last year when, in a highly coordinated (and highly illegal) action, bicyclists poured gallons of brightly colored water-soluble paint on the streets of a busy intersection. But just beyond the surface, around certain corners and behind particular doors, there’s another, more playful, occasionally more disturbing city, a place constantly in motion, ephemeral and easy to miss. Once you’ve gotten into the right frame of mind. Then she says what I had just been thinking, what you can’t help thinking once you’ve wandered around long enough in the semi-darkness, inhaled enough stale air, mold, and dust. Fitzgerald pauses to contemplate the shelf. Toward the back of the bar, there’s a shelf stacked with tools, paint buckets, and a frying pan. Fitzgerald, who moved from Austin, Texas, two-and-a-half years ago, when she was 25, has short dark hair and wears green eye shadow and a shirt with a giant sequin butterfly. The exhibition ends in the basement of the ramshackle bar across the street, where a damp, stuffy, and very mildewed cellar houses the remains of a bowling alley. On the way back down, we find Fitzgerald’s paintings on a landing: two watercolor-and-gouache depictions of a wolf-girl escaping pursuers down a Berlin street. Now and then exhibit-goers holding beers pass on the stairway-a welcome sign of life. A disco ball glitters in the attic, illuminating a dangerous, gaping hole in the floor. Someone’s former sitting room looks pitch black, with strobe lights creating a geometric 3-D light sculpture. Next to a broken window and a small stove, a mannequin’s head is impaled on a pipe. The exhibition is upstairs, on floor after floor of abandoned dwellings filled with cobwebs. One is an assistant professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Berlin art university. On the first floor, we discover the lone lit apartment, where the show’s curators live. “I think this is it,” says Christa, who, after studying fine art in Baltimore and Krakow, has spent the last couple of years in Berlin seeking out art shows like this one. We emerge into a ghostly courtyard, where a bike wheel hung with plastic bags might be a sign that we’re in the right place-or might not. In the dark, we walk cautiously through an elegant, tiled hall. We finally find the building, which is enormous. “It’s in the building where they live, which is totally empty, except for their apartment. “Some friends of mine are putting it on,” she said. When she invited me to the show here tonight, I was eager to check it out. One of them is Ali Fitzgerald, an American I’d met a couple of days earlier at a café. Recently, droves of artists started moving in. A working-class West Berlin neighborhood, it’s made up of run-down turn-of-the-20th-century apartment houses, 1970s social housing experiments, and the city’s highest concentration of immigrants. Neukölln is rough, by Berlin’s remarkably safe standards. My friend Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo and I are looking for an abandoned apartment complex in Neukölln.
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