Kirsty Bell

Undercurrents

Humane, thought provoking, and moving, this hybrid literary portrait of a place makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities, and our histories. The Undercurrents is a dazzling work of biography, memoir, and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the center of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. The view from this house offers a ringside seat onto the city’s theater of action. The building has stood on the banks of the canal since 1869, its feet in the West but looking East, right into the heart of a metropolis in the making, on a terrain inscribed indelibly with trauma. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell—a British-American art critic, adrift in her mid-forties—becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxembourg, and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives.

A Story of Berlin

The Undercurrents

The artist's house is a prism through which to view not only the artistic practice of its inhabitant, but also to apprehend broader developments in sculpture and contemporary art in relation to domestic architecture and interior space. Based on a series of interviews and site visits with living artists about the role of their home in relation to their work, Kirsty Bell looks at the house as receptacle, vehicle, model, theater, or dream space. In-depth analyses of these contemporary examples--including Jorge Pardo, Miroslaw Balka, Danh Vo, Gregor Schneider, Frances Stark, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pawel Althamer, Mark Leckey, Monika Sosnowska, Gabriel Orozco, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Andrea Zittel--are contextualized by key artists of the twentieth century such as Kurt Schwitters, Alice Neel, Edward Krasinski, Carlo Mollino, and Louise Bourgeois. A two-way flow from the domestic arena to the exhibition space becomes apparent, in which the everyday has a significant role to play in the merging of such developments as installation art, relational aesthetics, expanded collage, and performance art.

From Workplace to Artwork

The Artist's House

Gavin Delahunty

Charline von Heyl

Kunsthalle Nürnberg Staff

Tate Gallery Liverpool Staff

Now or Else

Charline Von Heyl

Dark Incandescence

Elizabeth Peyton

Kim Conaty

David M. Crane

Darby English

Jenny Goldstein

Edward Hopper's New York

Martin Arnold

Founder of sixpackfilm, a platform for Austrian film and video, Viennese artist Martin Arnold (born 1959) has defined himself as an independent filmmaker since 1987. This publication demonstrates Arnold's animated short films that distort and manipulate classic characters from Walt Disney films.

Gross Anatomies

Kirsty Bell

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