Free Berlin

An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity.

In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city.
These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects.  
 
With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.
 Introduction: Berlin's Provincial Avant-Garde (1) 
Part I: Democratizing Art and Transforming Space in Late Cold War Berlin 
1 "Culture for All" and Experimental Practice in Divided Berlin (17)
2 The Free Scene and the Island City (63)
3 Art, Participation, and Civic Life in 1980s East Berlin (103)
4 1989: A Berlin Counterhistory (141) 
Part II: Art vs. Capital in Post-Wall Berlin
5 Protest Art and Place Marketing in the "New Berlin" (187)
6 Artists in Coalition in the Twenty-First-Century Berlin (227)
Coda: Berlin Social Sculpture (261)
Acknowledgments (265)
Notes (269)
Bibliography (293)
Index (309)“In Free Berlin Smith shows vividly what has made dour Berlin twinkle: the offbeat creatives who dared to live out their eccentricities on its streets and in the drafty walkups—not for money but because this is who they had to be, and Berlin was the best place to be it.”
—Paul Hockenos, author of Berlin Calling: A Story of Anarchy, Music, The Wall, and the Birth of the New Berlin

“Writing across artificial spatial and temporal boundaries, Briana Smith offers an exciting counter-history of art, radical praxis, and daily life in the world’s most consistently-Promethean city. Highly recommended.”
—Timothy Scott Brown, Professor and Chair of History, Northeastern University, author of Sixties EuropeBriana J. Smith is Assistant Director and Lecturer in the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature at Harvard University and teaches for the Harvard Extension School.