Don't Call Me a City
On the Works of Franz Ackermann
'Mental Maps' are what Franz Ackermann calls his drawings, psychocartographies
he made of his travels around the world. Ackermann's cities are images of
a globalized landscape in which the conflict between the centre and
periphery is drawing closer. Harald Fricke has visited the
Berlin-based painter.
Franz Ackermann: Nenn mich nicht Stadt, Studioansicht, 2003
©Franz
Ackermann, Courtesy of neugeriemschneider, Berlin, Germany
It took a long time. By now, there are countless chronologies recording
Alexander von Humboldt's expeditions as the economic and industrial
development of the world steadily progressed. But can this 'tour
d'horizon' through time be drawn, as well? Cities with magical names such
as Singapore, Bangkok, or Ulan Bator once seemed so far away - how can we
represent the changes they underwent throughout the urbanization process?
And the South American jungles, the African steppe - can we still conjure
an image of the fascination they once held, now that they've long since
turned into telegenic
survival-show playgrounds for unbridled celebrities on cable TV?
Franz Ackermann, the Berlin painter and draftsman, is one artist who set
off on endless trips around the globe prior to the onslaught of the
adventure trend. Big-city chaos and the boondocks - the cartographic works
he created throughout his travels now hang in international museums and
collections, including that of the Deutsche Bank.
Franz Ackermann: themroc, 2001
©Franz Ackermann, Deutsche Bank Collection
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Ackermann, born in 1963, works in a studio in Lichtenberg
in what looks like the middle of nowhere, situated on property belonging
to the German Railroad on the eastern outskirts of Berlin. A visit to the
studio quickly leads into a conversation about the globalization malaise.
Yet Ackermann is anything but nostalgic, worried that the rapid
dissemination of information, trade, entertainment, and communication has
turned the world far too much into a village. Instead, the contradiction
existing between an omnipresent access to data highways on the one hand
and a growing confrontation with local peculiarities on the other forms
the foundation for Ackermann's work. After all, he himself comes from the
small Bavarian village Neumarkt St. Veit; now a cultural globetrotter,
he's been successfully maneuvering in and around the art establishment for
the past fifteen years, ever since receiving a
DAAD grant for Hong Kong in 1990/91. He exhibited in the German Pavilion
at the Sao Paulo Biennale
in 2002; last year, his paintings could be seen in
Venice and in the blockbuster exhibition
Berlin/Moscow in the form of an installation with steel bars going by the
title Nenn mich nicht Stadt (Don't Call Me a City). Only
last fall, he created a monumental, 46 meter-long mural for an exhibition
in Athens. "After 16 trips,
if I wanted to arrange a date with someone in Bangkok for tomorrow, I
would know my way around there better than I do in Berlin," is how
Ackermann sums it up following ten years on the road. Yet Ackermann's
artistic practice continuously pulls the brakes on his cosmopolitanism.
Franz Ackermann: Birthday, 2003 © Franz Ackermann,
Courtesy of neugeriemschneider, Berlin, Germany
Instead of celebrating the triumph of urbanization or the modern nomadic
existence intrinsic to an 'international lifestyle,' the artist
unflinchingly criticizes the smooth circulation flowing back and forth
between the world's hemispheres. Despite his large-scale painting
productions in the manner of Birthday (2003), the artist returns to
drawing again and again, transforming Peking or Bangkok into monsters
scored by streets and riddled with poorly planned housing settlements
almost entirely lacking in greenery. It wasn't during a cultural exchange
or as the guest of a museum that Ackermann got to know the Asian
metropolises, but rather as a backpack tourist sometime back in the early
nineties, when he developed his concept of Mental Maps,
journal-like drawings that document his dealings with local life as
opposed to actual cities. Thus, in these personal maps, contact is
established to even the remotest of places: at first, no more than a line
on a blank sheet of paper marks the connection between here and there.
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