# Pals


tomas schmit 
Barbara Wien 
Gelbe Musik 
Otto Schwanz 
Knud Pedersen 
Graf Haufen 
Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art 
Anna Castberg 
Robert Rehfeldt 
Baader Meinhof 
John Cage 
Eric Andersen 
Francien van Everdingen 
Pharao Islands 
Goodiepal & 


Unpredictability belongs to my friendship with Goodiepal. He calls from a train that he took from Copenhagen, Hamburg, London, or - most likely - Belgrade where he and his musician collective now smuggle refugees over the EU border. He doesn't have a phone or any other device that can be traced, so he borrows a cell phone from a random person sitting next to him in the train. He will arrive in Rotterdam, he tells me, in one hour. 

To date, I always managed to pick him up at the station. One time, his harem pants were torn, and he was juggling three suitcases, one of them small and made of wood. As always, he was wearing his fake-Muslim skullcap, a gesture reminding me of the Berlin Dadaists who adopted English names to piss off German society and its anti-British sentiments after World Word I. During a previous visit, Goodiepal's attire made a group of Dutch-Moroccan kids shout that he was an Orthodox Jew. 

The last time I had visited him in Copenhagen, I simply went to the National Gallery on a Sunday noon, knowing that he would give his weekly public lecture there. In his past, Goodiepal had been an electronic musician and tutor at a conservatory where he taught students to compose music _for_ artificial and alien intelligences. After the conservatory found that (and him) suspicious and fired him, he renounced studio composition, teamed up with a cabin bike constructor, built a custom bike with which he traveled through Europe and generated the electricity he needed for his concerts with its pedals. Later, he completely renounced electronics, learned mechanical watchmaking and built two mechanical, singing birds.

The National Gallery eventually bought one of his birds and two of his cabin bikes and put them in its permanent exhibition. It is a public museum, with free entrance, so Goodiepal decided to utilize it as a radically public space. He uses the museum installation and a storage room to stow away his personal belongings. Music, books and artworks he likes and buys from his friends - which include many friends of mine in Rotterdam - thus end up in the museum collection. On that particular Sunday, he had invited the cabin bike constructor for a joint lecture. At the end, he took everyone to the museum installation, unlocked the two cabin bikes and had people race with them over the National Gallery's ground floor, and its security guards in panic.

It was my second time in that museum. I had first visited it in the late 1990s when I still lived in Berlin. In a local newspaper, I had read that René Block had given his art collection to Copenhagen. In the 1960s and 1970s, Block ran a small gallery that showed the Berlin artists of the "capitalist realist" school, decades before that name was picked up and repurposed by Mark Fisher. He also hosted numerous Fluxus performances. In the early 1980s, his wife Ursula Block took over the space and turned it into the world's first record store for artists' records. Many of those were made by Fluxus artists, as Fluxus objects. While Goodiepal, who is younger than me, grew up in Amsterdam's Staalplaat record shop in the 1990s, I grew up in Ursula Block's _Gelbe Musik_ in the 1980s. 

Back then, West-Berlin was an enclave that was artificially kept alive with West German tax money; although it was formally not a part of West Germany, and we West-Berliners didn't have West German passports. The only profitable business in that enclave was real estate, a highly criminal business that brought down two city governments with deep corruption affairs, first the social democrats, later the conservatives. The one I still remember from my teenage years at _Gelbe Musik_ began with a shoot-out between two pimp gangs in an underground parking garage only a few blocks away from the gallery. The boss of the one pimp gang that got arrested went by the name Otto Schwanz ("Schwanz" also means "cock" or "dick" in German). He was a member of the Christian Democratic Party and, as it turned out, had bribed a number of local politicians for real estate development projects. After the fall of the wall, it came out that he also was an East German Stasi agent who worked for _Commercial Coordination_, the department that imported Western luxury goods for top-ranking communist party officials. 

West-Berlin's center of power and corruption was the charity organization for (West-Berlin's) National Gallery, a club that served as a speak-easy for politicians and real-estate people. One of the collateral damages of West-Berlin's second-rate politics was the National Gallery's contemporary art collection which was stuck in 1950s abstract expressionist painting, in the version of second-rate German painters. The more recent contemporary art was in the collections of the local real estate oligarchs. So a public-private joint-venture was created, the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, whose inventory came from those private collections but whose building and curators (some of them advisors of the local oligarchs) were paid by the public. 

The Blocks refused to join and gave their collection to Denmark. So I, and my partner in that time, had to go to Copenhagen to see it. But we couldn't find it: not at the National Gallery, not at the Statens Museum for Kunst, not at the modern and contemporary art museum Arken outside the city. My travel guide for Copenhagen was a tiny, typewritten and self-published book "Der Kampf gegen die Bürgermusik" ("The Fight Against Bourgeois Music"), written and originally published in Danish by Knud Pedersen and translated into German by Ludwig Gosewitz, a West-Berlin-based artist who had been affiliated to Fluxus in the 1960s. It was a cult book for me and a friend of mine, Graf Haufen, who had been - among others - a cassette label publisher, "dilettante" performance artist, DIY noise musician, Mail Artist, splatter and exploitation movie expert and owner of a video rental store that brought all these genres and interests together. 

Haufen was also the person through whom I got introduced into Mail Art and Neoism in the second half of the 1980s. At that time and years before the fall of the wall, he had extensive contacts with East-Berlin's underground mail artists. He regularly smuggled small publications across the border, from West-Berlin to East-Berlin and vice versa. Best known in that scene was Robert Rehfeldt had who succeeded to work and survive as a professional artist in East Germany although his work defied socialist realism. After the fall of the wall, in 1991, he was honored with a retrospective exhibition in the center of East-Berlin. When I went there, a hippie musician sat on the floor and played acoustic guitar. It was Rehfeldt himself. I was in my early twenties, had a lot of respect and didn't easily strike up a conversation. He asked me whether I had been in the army, because I was so stiff. (As a West-Berliner, I hadn't, since our part of the city was officially under American, British and French Allied authority until 1990. When I was retroactively drafted in 1993, the Felix Krull strategy - of pretending to eagerly want to go to the army while lacking the physical capability - spared me from serving. Next to me was a Turkish-German Berliner who just had managed to dodge the Turkish draft and now faced German military service. He falsely claimed that his girlfriend was pregnant, and was sent home, too. The ones who wanted and ultimately got drafted, were muscular fascist hooligans. This was a period of post-unification Eastern Germany, including Berlin, that only now is getting its proper historian attention as the "baseball bat years".)

Rehfeldt told me how he had first traveled to the West in 1977. He had been invited to the 6th Documenta in Kassel, and obtained a special permit and visa by the East German authorities, because he had worked as a courtroom sketch artist in the past and could pull some strings in the ministry of justice. All trains between East and West Berlin and all West-Berlin train stations were operated by the East German Reichsbahn railways in that time. Until 1989, the Reichsbahn trains from Berlin to Hanover were commonly called "interzone" trains, referring to Germany's post-war Allied occupation zones, not to William S. Burroughs. Rehfeldt told me how traveling from East Berlin via West Berlin through East Germany made him paranoid. He suspected all fellow travelers in his compartment to be Stasi spies. In Hanover, he changed trains to Kassel. The longer he sat in that train, the emptier it became. Shortly before Kassel, he was the only person left in the whole wagon. When stepped out of the train, he suddenly faced machine guns. He got pushed on the ground, searched - but released as soon as the special command unit found his East German passport. 

1977 marked the culmination of the Baader Meinhof terrorism scare in West Germany. In spring and early summer of that year, the Federal Prosecutor General and the CEO of a major bank were assassinated by the extreme left, actually Leninist group. Later, they killed the president of the trade organization. This was followed by the death of group leaders Baader, Meinhof and Ensslin in prison. "Wanted" posters of the group members hung everywhere, in post offices, schools, on billboards in the streets. I was eight years old. On the yard of my elementary school, we didn't play cops and robbers, but Baader-Meinhof against the West German Federal Police. At the end of the game, all the terrorists would get shot by the police. In the train to Kassel, someone had wrongly identified Robert Rehfeldt as one of the people on the Wanted poster. The train had been discreetly cleared, and a special command unit ordered to Kassel's Central Station.

In 1979, Knud Pedersen, the author of the "Fight Against Bourgeois Music", briefly dabbled in Mail Art and sent a bottle to Rehfeldt in East Berlin, declaring the bottle as the letter's envelope so that he only had to pay letter-rate postage - a typical Pedersen move. Graf Haufen and I had discovered his little book independently from each other, at the artist's book store Wien's Laden (now Gallery Barbara Wien). It was West-Berlin's other resource of Fluxus and DIY publications aside from Gelbe Musik, and the other, even more significant place where I grew up. The store had been co-founded by tomas schmit, a first-generation Fluxus artist and close friend of Gosewitz. I became friends with tomas in the years before his death (while Goodiepal was close to Gustav Metzger in London in the years before his death). He often stood at the bookstore's counter, making sure that the heroin junkies in the neighborhood were not playing tricks to run away with the cash register. One day a customer, visiting from America, came to buy one of his self-made books. Tomas offered him to sign it, but the customer - thinking that he was dealing with a mad person - recoiled in horror.

I remember that Graf Haufen had called "Fight Against Bourgeois Music" his favorite book of all times. In the 1960s, Pedersen had been part of Copenhagen Fluxus. In a former church turned into an artist-run center, he installed a juke box that played John Cage and other avant-garde music. Likely, this was Haufen's inspiration for taking the juke box equivalent of 1980s working-class culture, the video rental store, and run it in new ways. In the 1970s, Pedersen opened a gallery, in a tiny and dark basement, which would not sell art but only rent it for affordable rates. In the 1990s, he was still running it. So I decided to visit and ask him whether he knew where the Block collection was.

First, however, we talked about the gallery-library itself. He showed me its official postcard: the front side consisted of a full-size black-and-white photograph of a monumental brutalist building, the back side contained the text "Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art" along with the gallery's address. Pedersen explained that, of course, he had never claimed any relatedness between the picture on the front - actually, the building of Danish Federal Reserve Bank - and the address on the back. On top of that, he had legally registered the name "Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art" for his basement gallery. The city did not have a modern art museum of its own at that time. As a result, whether of the picture on the postcard or the name registration, he, the director of the Copenhagen Museum of Modern Art, had been invited to be a curator for, among others, the Venice Biennial. 

When the city of Copenhagen later, in the 1980s, decided to build a museum for modern and contemporary art, it soon found that the name had been taken. The designated museum director came to visit Knud Pedersen in his basement and negotiate a solution. In Pedersen's words, "she looked like Meryl Streep". He melted away and would have handed over the name without a single act of resistance if she had politely asked him. But instead, she had decided to play hardball and sue him. She didn't know that his son was, according to Pedersen (as well as a number of Danish people I later asked), one of the most notorious hack lawyers of Denmark. The museum lost the case. 

In 1996, it opened under the name "Arken" ("The Ark"), with a retrospective of the now-controversial German expressionist painter Emil Nolde. The press apparently lauded the director's courage and unconventionalism, opening a contemporary art museum with Nolde. Shortly after, the director - the same person who had sued Knud Pedersen for fraudulently using the museum name - got exposed as an impostor. She had faked all her references and art history diplomas. Emil Nolde was one of the few artists whose work she was familiar with. Of the two tricksters and con artists who faced off in the basement, the one who had gone through the school of Fluxus had the last laugh.

In the 1960s, Copenhagen was not only a hotbed of Fluxus, but also of Situationism. Asger Jorn lived there, and his brother Jørgen Nash who sawed off the head of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid sculpture. But just as Situationism had split into a French and into a Nordic faction, Fluxus was - as Knud Pedersen explained - divided into an American-dominated, minimalist school influenced by John Cage and La Monte Young and a European-Nordic-Shamanist school influenced by Joseph Beuys. In Copenhagen, these two schools collided. The Fluxus artist Eric Andersen, who had lived and worked in New York, represented minimalism, the Fluxus composer Henning Christiansen, a collaborator of Beuys, Nordic shamanism. 

According to Pedersen, Andersen hated shamanist Fluxus with a passion. When he heard that the Blocks were giving their collection to Copenhagen - to the National Gallery, as it turned out -, he became furious. In his opinion, the Block collection was biased towards Beuys and the shamanists. Putting it into the permanent collection of the National Gallery would, he feared, cement the wrong version of Fluxus in his hometown. 

Knud Pedersen described Andersen to us as follows: a sharply intelligent, perfectly polite person who sometimes visited the gallery for a cultured conversation; but he, Pedersen, wouldn't be surprised if one day, Andersen would come to the basement with a Kalashnikov and shoot everyone dead. 

After the Block donation had been in the Danish news, Andersen gave an interview to a major newspaper. According to Pedersen, he roughly said the following: "René Block ran a gallery in the 1960s where Fluxus artists came and performed. After their performances, he cleaned up the space and picked up the remains. These became his art collection. _Did any of the artists ever sign a paper stating that these objects are in the legal possession of René Block?_"

Upon reading this the next morning, the National Gallery curators withdrew their agreement with the Blocks. The collection is now rumored to be in a barn on the Danish peninsula Jutland. Two decades later, another National Gallery of Denmark curator came to an international expert meeting for the preservation of electronic art in Netherlands and lectured on the difficulties of dealing with Goodiepal and his use of the museum.

When, in Rotterdam, Goodiepal and I got off the tram near my home after his surprise arrival, I noted that he was carrying only two of his three suitcases. He had forgotten his small wooden case on the tram. The doors had already closed. We did our best to run after the tram, but lost it. There were only two more stops to its final destination. While we were running, a car stopped with shrieking tires, the driver opened the door telling Goodiepal "I will do everything for a Muslim brother", and let him in. 

I stayed behind while the two drove after the tram. After ten minutes, they returned, with the recovered suitcase. In the meantime, the conductors had noted the suitcase, remembered the person who left it there, and called the bomb squad. 

On an earlier visit, I had introduced Goodiepal to my friend Francien van Everdingen. We came to her house unannounced, as Goodiepal always does, and talked for about fifteen minutes. Francien is an artist and experimental filmmaker who, years ago, converted to Islam. She is a serious student of the religion. One of her works, which should be in every history of performance art and John Cage's music, was to perform the silent piece _4'33_ sitting in front of the public piano at Amsterdam Central Station wearing a Niqab. The police arrived before she had finished the performance, with the officers nervously looking at her stopwatch and taking her for questioning afterwards.

It was a Sunday afternoon when Goodiepal had arrived, and we needed to find new pants for him when most shops were closed. Biking through Rotterdam's Charlois district, in a street full of artist-run spaces, we spotted a tiny shop that sold second-season sportswear. It was still open, and run by two men who had immigrated from the Dutch Antilles. Seeing Goodiepal walk in, the shop owners asked him where came from, which resulted in the following conversation:

Goodiepal: Faroe Islands.

Shop owner: Pharao Islands? Must be a lot of black people there. But you aren't black.

Goodiepal: We got colonized. 

Me [explaining the geographical location of the Faroe Islands to the shop owners, in Dutch].

Shop owner: In the North? They got colonized, too? But those people don't care because they are rich up there.

**

Disclaimer: everything told here is the truth.

fcr grew up in West-Berlin and lives with a German and NSK passport in Rotterdam. As a writer, he works like a designer: all his work been commissioned. He received his education in post-punk and post-Fluxus DIY cultures as well as in academic humanities to end up working in the middle of both, in Rotterdam's art and design school that (luckily for him) identifies as a school after art and design. In recent years, he has become an intersectional political activist although he still identifies as a reactionary - in his case, against fascism - and thinks that fascism deserves no monopoly on hate. He avoids using his name outside paid work, and enjoys being part of ano- and pseudonymous collectives.

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