![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.uni-siegen.de\/pop-zeitschrift\/files\/2015\/02\/artcreep.jpeg\" "\\"artcreep\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nI\u2019m not sure when I started thinking of myself as \u00bbthe Art Creep\u00ab. Quite often, when catching sight of myself in a mirror, the phrase pops into my head: \u00bbOh, there goes the Art Creep.\u00ab Or: \u00bbThe Art Creep is looking quite interesting today!\u00ab (as if I were a critic appraising the Art Creep\u2019s visual statement).<\/p>\n
The negative tone is probably due to my internalisation of the voice of one of my exes, who went to art school but later went off artists in a big way. I imagine this ex-lover hate-reading my Tumblr and saying: \u00bbThere goes the Art Creep in his stupid clothes!\u00ab If I call myself the \u00bbArt Creep\u00ab affectionately, it\u2019s because I still feel affection for her, and even for her disaffection with me.<\/p>\n
I prefer the term Art Creep to the term \u00bbhipster\u00ab or \u00bbtrend-setter\u00ab or \u00bbartist\u00ab or whatever. It\u2019s fun to find negative terms for all the things this type is supposed to be good at, like picking up on significant trends early. Like \u00bbart fags\u00ab earthing homophobia by reappropriating a stigmatic term, I can lighten the load of disapproval others feel (and I share, to some extent) for this type of hipper-than-thou fellow \u2013 the one in the mirror \u2013 by inventing new terms of affectionate abuse, like \u00bbKnobhead Bellwether\u00ab.<\/p>\n
\u00bbHey, Knobhead Bellwether, what\u2019s in? What\u2019s coming up? Where\u2019s hot?\u00ab<\/p>\n
When did I first become an Art Creep? Probably when I first began to creep up the iron, poster-pasted stairs leading to Edinburgh\u2019s only serious contemporary art gallery in the late 1970s, the New 57 on Market Street. The posters were important: they showed what else serious art galleries were showing across the country, and in other countries too. Long before the internet with its clickable links, these posters gave exciting and valuable evidence that there was an international network of furtive Art Creeps like myself, creeping up similar staircases in other cities, keen to spend time with interesting, boring, challenging or colourful work made by professional Art Creeps.<\/p>\n
At about the time I\u2019m talking about \u2013 1980 or so \u2013 I began to notice that Art Creeps in the UK were dressing like Germans. Some of them, like New Order\u2019s Bernard Sumner, had even changed their names to make them sound more Germanic (Sumner opted for \u00bbAlbrecht\u00ab, which evokes both Brecht and D\u00fcrer). In retrospect, it\u2019s easy to make a list of reasons for the pseudo-Germanic fashion that swept the land:<\/p>\n
* The clean, electronic lines of Kraftwerk\u2019s music had made American rock sound utterly antiquated.<\/p>\n
* David Bowie\u2019s move from LA to Berlin had conferred considerable subcultural capital on all things Germanic.<\/p>\n
* Films like Cabaret and The Tin Drum had a high profile.<\/p>\n
* The arthouse cinemas were full of the products of German New Wave directors like Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog.<\/p>\n
* The Neue Deutsche Welle (Der Plan, Palais Schaumburg, DAF) was getting played on John Peel\u2019s radio show, and British bands on labels like Mute and Factory were listening intently and copying what they heard.<\/p>\n
* There was a Krautrock influence on fashionable groups like John Lydon\u2019s PiL.<\/p>\n
I was still seven or eight years from my first Berlin visit, but I remember at this time meeting a filmmaker called Gerd Conradt. He\u2019d come to learn English at a language school my father was running. My summer job was to \u00bbmonitor\u00ab these students, which meant taking them to Edinburgh landmarks and giving them the chance to improve their English conversation skills.<\/p>\n
With Gerd, I did more listening than talking. I wanted to know all about Berlin, which seemed to me \u2013 the apprentice Art Creep \u2013 like the place where you could be more arty and more creepy than any other in the world.<\/p>\n
My favourite writers used the German language, of course. I bought Handke\u2019s The Goalie\u2019s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (doubly impressive because of the combination of German-ness and fearfulness: this was the age of jittering nerves) and everything ever written by or about Kafka. Theodor Adorno became my guru.<\/p>\n
It must have been about this time that I saw a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival which impressed me enormously: Yvonne Rainer\u2019s Working Title: Journeys from Berlin\/1971. You don\u2019t need a tiny cinema off an alley to see it; these days you can watch it on UbuWeb.<\/p>\n
Thanks to the diaries this young Art Creep was keeping assiduously at the time, I can give you an account of my impressions just as I wrote them down that day:<\/p>\n
Monday August 18th 1980<\/em><\/p>\n Galleries. Kafka\u2019s Amerika back home. Possessive, clutching destruction of the self. Outside threats are competitors who can be afforded no foothold (especially not the binding, straw to flesh, of dummy self to partner, saviour, killer, woman).<\/em><\/p>\n A film, Working Title: Journeys from Berlin\/1971 \u2013 all human life is contained in it. If only I could have it in writing, yet, no, that was its greatest fault, the words flow incessantly, arrows which were unbearably accurate, unscrupulously demanding: \u2018You are God, you are our victim, you are omniscient, you are stupid,\u2019 they cried as they hissed into our helpless flesh (which is, after all, only that) . . .<\/em><\/p>\n Stonehenge from the air over\/under a girl\u2019s sensitive diary entries \u2013 her distance from the feelingless slabs, her necessary involvement nonetheless. \u203aThere will be no steerage on spaceflights departing from the earth\u2026\u2039 Want an axe to break the ice (\u203aAshes to ashes\u2039) \u2013 here the axe was that of the R.A.F. (\u203aWhat makes you think anyone’s worried about you?\u2039 \u2013 Eno, R.A.F.). Psychoanalysis, surrealism. \u203aMy brain is lying on the floor beside tramlines that go through the wall to the asphalt six feet away . . .\u2039 \u2013 but it was a camera track, not a tramline.<\/em><\/p>\n The shots of street scenes through windows, landscapes from trains. How Kafka would have liked them! The scenery always a slap in the face to the ideals of the captions and words on the soundtracks \u2013 not because it was \u203areal\u2039, but because it so ruthlessly realised a dream.<\/em><\/p>\n The director of Journeys was there, waiting to be addressed by her audience in the bar. I couldn\u2019t bring myself to confront this person who had just widened my appreciation of the possibilities of expression, and my sense of community with anyone at all, vastly. At the door of what I took to be the bar, where everyone but me seemed to be going, an official asked to see a blue card which everyone but me seemed to possess. Such devices of exclusion, even though enigmatic, surprise me less than the simplest inclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n Later, my sense of exclusion would end. I\u2019d visit Berlin (East and West) for the first time on a rock tour with Primal Scream in 1987, and move to the city in 2003. I\u2019d get to know the K\u00fcnstlerhaus Bethanien in Kreuzberg, where many of the Rainer film\u2019s scenes were shot. I\u2019d learn to complain about gentrification and rising prices and upstart curators just like all the other adoptive Berliners who act as if they own the place.<\/p>\n Even now I\u2019ve left it, Berlin is still the place where I \u2013 an absolutely unbearable Art Creep, let me stress \u2013 feel most at home. It\u2019s the world centre, after all, of that utterly artificial, dandyesque, exotic and totally made-up thing: German-ness.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n