“berlin modern” at Potsdamer Platz: the foundation stone has been laid

2024-02-09 18:42:33

Sometime in the 2000s, the Altes Museum on Berlin’s Museum Island featured a neon sign by the Italian artist Maurizio Nannucci with the subtle sentence “ALL ART HAS BEEN CONTEMPORARY”. In Berlin, however, this was less seen as an ironic reference to the transience of modern art. Rather, it seemed to express a demand circulating in the urban discourse that there was an urgent need for a representative location for modern art. The New National Gallery? Too small. The Hamburg train station? Not really. Comparisons with other metropolises were quickly at hand. Of course – the MoMA in New York, the Tate Modern in London.

At the laying of the foundation stone of the project, which was initially launched as a “Museum of Modernity”, on this rainy Friday in February at the Kulturforum on Potsdamer Platz, we should once again be reminded of the genesis of the house, which is scheduled to open as “Berlin Modern” in 2027 at the earliest. That sounds – really now? – modern, art-oriented.

Changes included

The change in name is accompanied by the architectural adaptation of the original plans by the prominent Swiss master builder Herzog & de Meuron to ecological standards. What was immediately given the somewhat disrespectful nickname of a barn was, when it was advertised in 2016, generously designed to be flooded with light, especially with regard to energy requirements. It would not have necessarily been necessary for a Green Minister of State for Culture to associate the keyword sustainability with large construction projects back then. In his welcoming statement on Friday, Jacques Herzog said that building is above all an experimental process, so changes are somehow organic.

So get to work. Just over a year ago, almost ten million euros were injected into the budget for replanning. Instead of the originally planned 359 million euros for the ambitious house, it was said in April 2023 that the total costs would now be around 450 million euros (the presumed increases in construction costs have already been taken into account).

So they cheerfully proceeded to lay the foundation stone; Claudia Roth’s predecessor Monika Grütters had already claimed a similar procedure as a ceremonial gesture in her pretty spade look. Claudia Roth tried to set the mood on Friday. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining – at least on their faces. In fact, it was an economical, homely ceremony in the front part of the largely empty Neue Nationalgalerie, in which a film installation by the American artist Lucy Raven alluded thematically to the Berlin construction project. With her film “Ready Mix” about the unimaginably large gravel and concrete factory in Bellevue, Idaho, she also pointed to the hubris of gigantic modern construction.

The model of the winning design by the Basel architectural firm Herzog and de Meuron for the Museum of the 20th Century at the Kulturforum. dpa central image

But at the Kulturforum Berlin everything should be green and beautiful, as Klaus Biesenbach, the director of the Neue Nationalgalerie, expressed with the polyglot enthusiasm of a world-experienced impresario. The usual vocabulary of inspiration, provocation and aesthetics was joined by terms such as photovoltaics, cooling and resource flows. Hermann Parzinger, President of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), who was only able to send a video message for family reasons, spoke of ecological and social sustainability. With “berlin modern” they want to complete the cultural forum and move the Tiergarten over to the buildings of the museum and library ensemble.

In her short welcoming speech, Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth highlighted the current political climate. She explicitly welcomed Democrats, as if it was particularly important to ward off a threatening outside world with this most inclusive form of address. Klaus Biesenbach followed suit by explicitly speaking of a house of the democratic center, despite the fact that artists often claim an outsider position, or at least an observer’s perspective from the margins.

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“berlin modern”: More space for 5,000 works

Biesenbach was asked by RBB presenter Maria Ossowski why “berlin modern” was absolutely necessary. Because of the space, was the answer. In the current exhibition “Zerreißprobe” 170 works are being shown in the Neue Nationalgalerie, which is just three percent of the total depot volume of around 5,000 works. Biesenbach left out the fact that it is not primarily about a reassessment of artistic modernity, but rather about a container for the existing Pietzsch, Marx and Marzona collections.

Then we moved on to the ceremony of laying the foundation stone with the filling of a so-called time capsule, while outside at the construction pit the sounds of an artistic drum performance by Deantoni Parks rang out in “industrial sound”. Klaus Biesenbach, clearly a child of the 1980s, jokingly mentioned the band’s name Einstreiche Neuhäusern. “Berlin modern” will of course be about the modernity of the past 20th century.