speak the password primeval at the HAMBURGER BAHNHOF

Hamburger Bahnhof is a very large modern art gallery here in Berlin. Standing firmly in the tradition of what I like to call Berlins "lets make sure everything here is always really giant" theme, the visitor today can follow a passage from the main venue (which is pretty massive itself) to the "Rieckhallen", which is a huge elongated warehouse once used by the eponymous haulage contractors. It's actually a pretty sinister place, and was of course a fantastic venue for the show that pretty much satisfied all my basest urges (and hey, I've got a few) called There is Never a Stop and Never a Finish.

Right near the top of the list was the room just full of creepy creepy Paul McCarthy fun. The show featured a lot of his videotaped performances, often spreading ketchup or saliva all over his naked body, having sex with his bed, or just beating the crap out of himself. In Tubbing he just seems to jams sausages into his mouth and arse. He might have done some other things but it got a little boring after awhile and I had to move on. I was particularly excited to final see 'Santa Chocolate Shop' which I thought seemed about the coolest thing when I was a teenager pouring over the 'Transgressive Art' section in Matthew Colling's This is Modern Art. It seems that I haven't come so far since then because somehow a large, tipped-over cottage with video projections of a red-nosed reindeer humping an elf and a demented Santa shitting chocolate into the mouth of a female helper still did it for me. All in all almost certainly misogynist, fairly funny, dull in parts, but overall strangely hypnotic. Great way to start of the Christmas season anyway. http://mccarthy.smak.be/

BUT THE THING I GOT REALLY EXCITED ABOUT was smack in the middle of the end of a ridiculously long hall which I later found out was an installation by Jason Rhoades called “A Few Free Years”. I didn't know that at the time because I was already too busy playing the REAL 80s and 90s arcade games that faced each other to make a kind of corridor in the gallery. Terminator 2, Tetris, Joust, that car game I can't remember the name of, they were all here with an unlimited amount of credits on them. I have since read that it was meant to be some sort of tribute to Beethoven's 9 Symphony, and I don't really know about that. What I do know is that it was a damn good afternoon in the artwork, and I know I must have been there for awhile because my ears are still ringing with the tinny sounds that made up a fairly large chunk of my childhood spent in front of an atari, a super nintendo, the arcades at Balcatta Rollerdrome and Hillary's Boat Harbour. If only they had Bubble Bobble, it would have been like a time warp in there. Perhaps not the most challenging work I've ever seen, but still.