Charango (Photo: Villanueva)

The answer is Peru, Bolivia and Argentina. All three are associated with the origins of a stringed instrument, the charango. It also has a link to Iceland. The World’s Marco Werman speaks with Icelandic singer-songwriter Olof Arnalds who sings and plays airy Icelandic songs on the charango.
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On a day when we’re remembering soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember. That can depend on the nature of historical events, whether we identify with victors or victims, with brave acts or evil ones. In Germany, memory of the past is often painful: two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall. Now, Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events. Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways. Download MP3 (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

• Neues Museum
• Berlin-based Yiddishkeit band ‘Jewdyssee’
• Berlin Wall graffiti

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MARCO WERMAN:  On a day when we remember soldiers and wars, it’s also useful to think about how we remember.  That can depend on the nature of historical events and whether we view them with pride or with shame.  In Germany, memory of the past is often painful.  Two world wars, the Holocaust, the Berlin Wall, now Germans are again thinking about how they remember these events.  Writer Alissa Quart visited a couple of museums in Berlin that memorialize the past in different ways.

ALISSA QUART:  Berlin is a city of odd collisions.  Collisions of architecture, 19th century buildings next to severe modern ones.  Angry graffiti on fancy stores in the former East Berlin.  People collide here too.  I was part of that briefly.  An American Jew sorting through the city, adding the fragments of my own family’s history in Europe into the mix.  Berlin’s buildings offered some clues.  This is the Neues Museum.  Neues means new in German and this museum is new, well pieces of it are.  As I walk up the museum’s giant steps, I can see strips of exploded old bricks incorporated into sturdy new ones.  The museum has been rebuilt using the ruins of the original 19th century museum building.  It was bombed during World War II and then left to decay by the East German government.  It reopened late last year.  The new structure, renovated by British architect David Chipperfield uses bits and pieces of the 1850 one.  There’s weird 19th century iron work, World War II bullet holes, walls and ceilings left chipped and stained.  I had to fight through the crowds to get through.  Olivia Zorn who works at the museum leads me around.  She points out the layers from different periods.

OLIVIA ZORN:  The idea of the conservation of this building was to show all what is preserved.  The top painting, the paintings on the pillars.  After that it was damaged in the Second World War.  And we will show all these details.

QUART: We pass the bust of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti.  It’s the best known exhibit here.  It too is surrounded by fragments of history.  Sitting under a half-conserved kitschy 19th century mural of the Roman God Hercules.  Nefertiti is very beautiful.  The Egyptians want her back now.  I am told I can’t ask about that.  The sound of a large curved horn from the Bronze Age plays next to where the horn itself is displayed.  Nearby ancient bracelets and rings are shown in dirt and sand.  Some critics and curators find the renovation of the Neues Museum annoyingly artsy.  The bullet holes and broken brick, a cliché of World War II trauma, all in clever quotations.  A more direct approach can be seen at the museum at the Wannsee Conference House.  It was at this house in 1942 that Nazi leaders planned the Final Solution, the extermination of Europe’s Jews.  Among them, many in my own family.  The museum is stark and the house unchanged.  Tapes featuring the voice of Adolf Eichmann play in a corner of one room.  I had forgotten that cigarettes and cognac were served during the planning of the Final Solution.  The Neues Museum, of course, is aiming for a more self-conscious vision of German history.  Art historian Benjamin Buchloh thinks the result is remarkable, incorporating fragments like corny 19th century wall paintings.  Those reminders of the past hint at how the history of Germany’s heroic fantasies about itself long preceded Fascism.

BENJAMIN BUCHLOH:  They really give us a sense of the intensity with which Germans in the 19th century desired to remake themselves in the image of the Greco-Roman culture.  That type of imagery that is still left in the museum reminds you of that.  So as you go through the museum, as you look at the collection, you start thinking about the history that necessitated and formed the collections and the museum architecture itself.

QUART: Buchloh is also impressed that the Neues rebels against a typical new museum building.  Many new museums aim to invoke jaw-dropping awe, sometimes at the expense of the art they’re showing.  And the Neues engages you more than those buildings do, says Susan Howe, an American poet who has been writing about the Neues.  That’s because the museum doesn’t try to be a shiny new place that has all the answers.  This museum is purposefully incomplete.

SUSAN HOWE:  This building represents a feeling of no final intentions, or a museum that is open, open to the sky literally.

QUART: I, too, have long believed places and histories are more fractured than they appear.  I think that’s what the museum is saying as well.  In Berlin and in so many other cities, the best thing any new structure can do is disown the past and honor it as well.  The Neues Museum does this by retelling the past in fragments, while still cherishing Nefertiti.  For The World, I’m Alissa Quart, Berlin.

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• www.alissaquart.com
• www.olofarnalds.com
• Roni Horn
• www.eileenmyles.com

I bought into Brand Iceland. I visited the art spots Reykjavik, Stykkiholmur, and Budir. I swam in a hot river and slept in a hotel where the walls were painted lichen-green. When I came back to New York, I was still seeing traces of Iceland everywhere. There was even a new Iceland-themed exhibit by the American artist Roni Horn. It’s going on at the Whitney Museum right now.

Icelandic singer Olof Arnalds played at the opening. Horn’s show starts right in the elevator, with aquatic sound art.

Horn’s show is full of pictures of Iceland: geothermal water, taxidermist birds, faces floating on the surface of hot springs. She’s drawn to the isolation, the communal atmosphere, and above all, the landscape.

Donna De Salvo curated Horn’s show. She sees the draw of Iceland like this:

“You know the extremes, where you have volcanic activity marching right down to the sea, and this collapse in a sense for us at when you live in an urban environment like NY to see this extreme range of terrain is just magical.

Iceland has long attracted other American artists. Call it Artland. Yoko Ono, Richard Serra, and the poet Anne Carson all came here looking for a muse. Same with Eileen Myles. She just wrote The Importance of Being Iceland.

“Iceland is really interesting because it just happened to be to the side in a way so certain things could continue to exist and certain people could have a self-effacing way of looking at their own culture.”

I love that Icelandic self-effacement. There’s that appeal of their music and literature. It’s all about stubborn iconoclasm. An experimental writer like Myles could seem odd in the world of American letters. But in Iceland, odd is perfectly normal.

Eileen Myles: “Icelandic artists are really proud of how many odd strange people who’ve lived in odd strange ways were part of their history American artist wouldn’t go for a folkish approach to who we are and really claim lineage to these oddballs, there’s a kind of funky pride.”

While Iceland was a dreamscape for artists, it was also floating by on a wildly inflated economy of credit. Iceland’s fishing culture had migrated into banking and boutique hotels. Then it all crashed. Now crushed by debt, their currency devalued; do the newly poor Icelanders still see themselves in the portraits American artists make of them? Philosopher Oddny Eir Evarsdottir says in a way they do. Icelanders depend on American artists’ view of their country. Just like American artists depend on Iceland.

“We are living inside it like inside the crisis situation we are like really hoping that inside Iceland’s economy we are heading toward this metaphor of an Iceland as a health and beautiful place where you can go way like an asylum and I really hope we will go there so at this moment, the guest’s eye, the metaphors of others, it’s so helpful.”

These metaphors may not help much in the end. But Iceland will still have its amazing, strange indie music to keep Artland alive. All those heated, water-logged dreams. For The World, this is Alissa Quart.