1990 East Side Gallery BERLIN (DDR)

‘The wall that encloses the wall’ East Side Gallery, Berlin, 1990 Greasy chalk

This time, the « temple » that freely swung into chaos is enclosed in a pink frame.
1987: I paint the collapse of the ancient order on a billboard. The temple falls, carried away by the elements. Free, wild, prophetic vision.
1990: The Wall has fallen. The East Side Gallery transforms the concrete of the division into an open-air art gallery. The whole world celebrates. But I draw the temple again – this time prisoner of a pink frame.
The pink frame: homage or domestication? It honors and it neutralizes. It preserves memory and it softens it. It protects against forgetting and transforms tragedy into decoration. Pink is soft, almost tender – but it is also the color of easy consensus, comfortable aestheticization.
From the concrete wall to the cultural framework: have we really liberated? In 1990, Berlin liberated itself from the physical Wall but perhaps enclosed itself within other walls: memory tourism, patrimonialization, the spectacle of its own history. The temple that was free and dangerous in 1987 is wisely framed, civilized, presentable.
The paradox of all memorization: If we do not frame, everything fades, is forgotten, disappears, If we frame, we freeze, we lose the vital force, the urgency, the danger. The pink frame does both. It sublimates and ridicules. It pays tribute to what once was and transforms it into an harmless memory. He says: « Look how we have conquered » but also « Look how we even domesticate our revolutions. »
Mise en abyme: a frame (pink) surrounds a temple (symbol of order), on a wall (the East Side Gallery), which was itself the Wall. Prison of the prison of the prison !!
The systems that imprison are themselves prisoners. Even freedom, when framed, becomes a new form of imprisonment.
Open question, without a definitive answer: Should we frame memory at the risk of killing it?

The pink frame asks the question. It does not solve it. This ambiguity is a strength. I do not decide and prefer to show the insoluble contradiction of 1990: how to honor without mummifying? How to remember without neutralizing?

The pink frame is both necessary and toxic. That’s all the complexity of the drawing.