Was ist schön?

What is beautiful?

I’ve been waiting for some time to share photos of our new apartment until my roommate could fix the place up a bit—to make it schöner. We live in an old factory warehouse (left) that has been divided into apartments. Many of the tenants do their own renovations. For instance, with the help of some friends, my roommate knocked down a wall and a half to open up the space, hung the lights, painted, and put down carpet. She’s done a number on what used to be the questionable WC down the hall. (On the walls you can't see is art associated with her daughter.) Unfortunately, I think I will move out before she gets to the kitchen; she’s planning on putting up a backsplash of various pottary and glass shards that should look really awesome when it’s done.

ààà

Below-left is the kitchen/ bathroom/ playroom, with the (in)famous bathtub in the middle.* My roommate sleeps and works on the other side of the half wall. On the right is my room, which is quite large and has a door (with only one handle...long story). You can see that a lot of light comes in through the big windows. Our rooms look over the back "yard" (parking and a picnic table but no grass) and the recycling/composting bins behind the Umwelt Zentrum (Environment Center). I can also see the the auditorium of the music high school, which looks kind of like a large folded white napkin; if there's a performance, the neon lights in the "folds" glow pink, blue, purple, and green (bottom).

One of the things I noticed when I first moved in with my roommate is that the apartment is full of things found or otherwise collected: natural things such as rocks, shells, and minerals; also pieces she's picked up at local Flohmarkt (flea market), like two marionettes from India. Some of her paintings hang my room. It occurred to me that when one is surrounded by beautiful things, then it is easier to have beautiful thoughts, as it were.

Not everything about this apartment is supposed to be “beautiful,” however. There’s an edgier, in-your-face aesthetic about the art in the stairway, for instance. Only one of the paintings is actually lewd; and after almost four months, even the grimacing clown is no longer shocking (perhaps to the dismay of its artist?).

In fact, not just the building but the neighborhood is full of characters. The "clay" figure on the left stands on top of a hotel building. The soldier on the right was spraypainted on the crumbling entranceway to the Herzogin Garten, destroyed during the 1945 bombing and since then an overgrown lot with various unfulfilled development plans. 

There is also classical beauty to be found. On the left is the old Yenidzi cigarette factory, built in 1907-1909 to look like a mosque--an architectural advertisement for the Ottoman tobacco they imported from Yenidzi (now Genisea, Greece). After standing empty for many years, it was renovated in 1996 into a commercial office building. Under the dome there is a restaurant ("Dresden's highest Biergarten") and space used for a children's storytime. On the right is the Dresdner Volkshaus, a non-commercial office building with a spa and fancy Asian restaurant on the first floor. Just to the right of this frame is a construction site, where they are enlarging the building by one-third with apartments. Unlike the genteel, settled area we moved from, this is an up-and-coming neighborhood. I can understand why my roommate wants to be a part of that; I've often said that my other other dream career would be investment real estate: purchasing/selling abandoned or under-used buildings to revivify urban spaces.

The original impetus of this post was the reminder at the “Was ist schön?” exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum that not all art is made to be beautiful. The collages, dioramas, performance art, and short films my roommate makes, for instance, are sometimes beautiful but mostly challenging. They force the viewer to ask questions: what kind of relationship do those people have? what is going on here? what does that symbol mean? I’ll leave you with a bit of 2D body art of my own:

*--There are two reasons the bathtub is in the middle of the "kitchen." First, this means the water pipes don't have to go far to join those from the kitchen sink. Second, we can lay in the bathtub and watch a movie projected on the far wall. Can you say that about your bathtub? There are a couple of screen we can pull down from the ceiling if we want privacy.