The David Bowie exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum has arrived at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin and is an even greater sensation than the original version of it in London. The SCHIRN MAG set out on a pilgrimage into the brain of the ultimate pop star.
It was only a question of time before the exhibition, which--almost at the same time as the GLAM! show at the SCHIRN--with its around 311,000 visitors was the most successful in the history of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, would also come to the German capital, the city that between 1976 and 1978 served as a temporary home to David Bowie and Iggy Pop.
David Bowie--the exhibition--is above all an exciting lesson in cultural marketing: as an international traveling exhibition, in Germany it is being supervised by a Munich-based advertising agency that has global brands in its portfolio. And now, instead of the British superstar, who has not given a concert for eight years, his collection is representing him on its travels throughout the world--a refreshing variation on Kraftwerk's robot clones.
And as is normally the case in the event segment, here, too, a hype machine was fired up in the run-up to the exhibition--in London alone there were 67,000 advanced ticket sales, and in Berlin the run on the tickets was also initiated 2 months in advance. While it is possible to buy tickets at the box office, due to possible waiting periods visitors are advised to secure fifteen-minute admission time slots. The Martin-Gropius-Bau is open every day for the duration of the exhibition, and it has extended its opening hours by one hour.
Unlike the bombastic stage show in the tall halls of the V&A, the show itself, which is on the second floor of the Gropius-Bau because of the Ai Weiwei retrospective taking place at the same time, starts off as a small showcase exhibition through whose narrow, dark galleries and alleyways visitors walk as if tracing the windings of the musician's brain. A particularly nice idea: the numerous closed doors whose spy holes provide insight into the young David Jones becoming Bowie--to then depict the steps in the development and the metamorphoses of the musician "from station to station" in ever more spectacular ways.
Curators Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh have assembled 300 exhibits from Bowie's personal archive, which comprises 75,000 objects, and integrated them into a striking multimedia course: original costumes, things written down on paper, instruments, videos, records, and other relics from a 50-year period of restless creativity. The meticulous collection--which ranges all the way to the magic wand from the children's film Labyrinth (1986)--is equal in every way to Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, in which the artist preserved everyday correspondence and other paraphernalia in 611 cardboard boxes until his death.
Another novelty compared with the London original: the Berlin room, which documents the period Bowie spent in the city with all kinds of curiosities--the key to the apartment in Hauptstrasse 155 (What does the landlord have to say about that?), a bench from the legendary Dschungel club, or the musician's correspondence with Marlene Dietrich. Bowie's own paintings from this phase are placed in a dialogue with a loan from the Brücke Museum, Erich Hecke's Roquairol from 1917, which in turn served as a model for the Heroes record cover. The conspicuously low-key music exhibition--the audio guide provides the right song to the respective exhibit--ends with a space devoted to the various influences Bowie exercised, not lastly on fashion, over the last five decades, and then nonchalantly releases visitors into the adjacent museum shop.
The artist, who allegedly has not seen the show itself or commented on it publicly, unfortunately did not attend the opening, despite the crowd of celebrities in attendance, such as Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Blixa Bargeld, or Heike Makatsch.