A Laborious Romance
Avant-garde dating. Two women meet. One week. A gallery. Berlin. Powerlessness. Frustration. Art. And departure.
Those are the ingredients in the following story. It’s about a date that went well and turned sour.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.
The project
In Berlin Mitte lies a gallery. The gallery is called New Life Shop and is owned by two Danes, Martin Rosengaard and Sixten Kai Nielsen.
In March 2007 the two Danes encouraged on their website (wooloo.org) artists from all countries to participate in a project which they, Martin and Sixten, wanted to realize.
The name of the project: Avant-garde dating.
The idea behind the project was to match artists who wanted a partner to engage with, either professionally, romantically, or both. The only condition for participating in the project was that each artist make a profile on wooloo.org. The profile should state the artist’s gender, age, artistic means of expression, and sexual orientation. Everyone who made a profile would get a partner.
The biggest reward, however, for participating in the avant-garde dating project was to be chosen to come to Berlin and live, sleep, eat, and make art with one’s partner for a week in New Life Shop. The gallery would be open to the public that week.
150 artists from 30 countries made a profile on wooloo.org. Two artists were chosen and invited to come to Berlin. They are Tanya Ury (56) from Germany and Laurel Jay Carpenter (39) from the US.
Laurel
I meet Laurel at a café in Berlin in the morning of the first day that she and Tanya will be living together in New Life Shop. Laurel has arrived in Berlin two days earlier, but she hasn’t met Tanya yet. The deal is that they won’t meet each other until seven o’clock the same evening in the gallery at the opening that Martin and Sixten have organized to officially welcome the two women and kickstart the week.
Laurel works as a teacher of fine art at Alfred University in the village of Alfred 500 kilometers from New York City. During the last five years she has made a number of art performances of which at least six are documented on video. One of them is ’Lick’ from 2004.
In ’Lick’, Laurel lies on her stomach for seven hours without a break, licking every tile in a six meter wide and 40 meter long tile-covered corridor in the college where she was studying at the time of the performance. Laurel made 'Lick’ to express her unconditional belief in the power of art after seeing artworks made by a Buddhist mentor at her college whom she had a crush on.
Laurel is bisexual, single and childless. She hasn’t had many partners in her life. I ask her: What made you make a profile on wooloo.org?
”Personally I’ve always had bad luck with partnership. Even in New York I felt I had never quite met the right person. And then I saw the add for avant garde-dating on the internet, and I thought ok, this is interesting. I liked the idea that the wooloo-guys were reaching towards an international community. So I set up my account, I was really honest in my application, I said, I’ve always been very skilled at art and the business behind it, I’m organized, I’m ambitious, I always had good luck with work. But I was always terrible, terrible, terrible at love. I couldn’t make eye contact, I could never read the signals, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what I said in my application – it’s perfectly meant for me, this combination of work and love.”
The first disagreement
Laurel is a big and emotionally generous woman with long, carrot-colored hair and an optimistic personality that it is difficult not to like. When she speaks, she speaks with conviction. When she laughs, she laughs hard. She is cheerful and loud and very straightforward.
But this morning she is nervous. During the two months preceding the opening she and Tanya have been in frequent contact via email. The purpose: to get to know each
other and to find the best way to approach the week. Along the way they have discovered that they have a lot of things in common. But their correspondance is not without problems. Laurel has reasons to be worried.
Tanya’s mails to Laurel show that Tanya is very nervous about living publicly. She has always felt vulnerable in front of an audience, and it makes her anxious not to know what is expected of her during her stay in Berlin. In an attempt to calm herself she sends Laurel a great number of mails with suggestions to how they can fill time during their stay in New Life Shop.
Laurel acknowledges Tanya’s anxiety but the thought of planning their date in advance fills her with regret. Laurel is used to working site-specifically and wants to wait until they meet and have a chance to see the gallery before they make decisions about how to spend their week.
When Laurel talks about Tanya, she does it in a very diplomatic tone. But the message is clear: Tanya wants her ideas to exist, and one had better comply with her.
The phone conversation
The night before, Laurel had a phone conversation with Tanya that made Laurel so nervous she couldn’t fall asleep. The conversation was about how they should contribute to the opening.
Laurel: ”She seemed set, when I was still trying to figure things out. I was waiting to collaborate, but it still seems like she wants her ideas to exist, and then whatever my ideas are, whatever. You know, do it or not.”
Tanya wants to show a lengthy video of her work at the opening, and insists that the light be turned off in the gallery while the film is on. Laurel disapproves of the idea.
Laurel: ”When I think of video at an opening I think a film on a loop that you can pay attention to or not, but she (Tanya) really wants people to concentrate for half an hour, so then I thought that we might lose people, because that’s not going to be expected. So we were just trying to talk that out, and she didn’t seem to really want to... I didn’t feel heard – for whatever reason that is, whether it’s from me projecting or whether she was in an atmosphere where she couldn’t actually hear well.
I do feel a little like I’m giving in, but I think I felt that all along and didn’t mind.”
Laurel and me walk down to the gallery. She is going to hang part of her and Tanya’s 150 pages email correspondance on the wall before the opening. Tanya and me meet and go to a café.
Tanya
Tanya Ury was born in England as the child of German-Jewish parents. Many people were killed during the Second World War, and some managed to escape. Because Tanya’s parents went to England, they survived. But at least four members of her family were murdered in German concentration camps.
Tanya has always felt connected to Germany. Her identity is German, she knows the culture well and speaks the language fluently. But then there is Holocaust. Just the name makes her visibly embittered.
In 1993 she left England for Cologne (Germany) and started to make art about Holocaust and the way Germany today relates to its own history.
In one of her projects – Who’s Boss (from 2004) – she makes the clothing company Hugo Boss the target of her political indignation. The title covers many artworks that in different ways deal with the fact that the founder of the clothing company, Hugo Ferdinand Boss, made money producing SS uniforms for the Nazis during the Second World War.
Tanya deals with Hugo Boss – not only because the clothing company profited economically by having prisoners of war make uniforms for the Nazis. But because the company never compensated the prisoners and their families sufficiently.
Tanya has long, grey hair and a pleasantly soft voice. She is gentle, almost meek - attentive and slightly selfdepricating. This is at least true until she speaks her mind. Physically she seems slightly nervous as if a lack of human intimacy or past pain has settled in her bones and become part of her being. She is bisexual and has had many lovers.
I ask her: Why did you make a profile on wooloo.org?
Tanya: ”As a woman in her early fifties the whole dating-thing completely changes. Sometimes just for fun I look at ads in magazines, and unless it’s a new age magazine the women in the ads are always women under 50. As a woman above 50 you’re not catered for at all. Older men are always looking for younger women. And younger men are not interested in older women, so it’s all a bit problematic. I made a profile at wooloo, and I didn’t in a 100 years expect to be chosen. They said, every applicant gets a partner. That’s all I was looking for, actually. You know, address somebody in Australia, and maybe we could just email and talk, that was it.”
The meeting
The opening in New Life Shop the same evening goes well. Laurel and Tanya meet for the first time, and there is a positive, excited energy between them. The small gallery is half full of people who patiently watch Tanya’s half hour video from start to finish and who politely applaud Tanya and Laurel for the performance they do at nine.
After the opening, Laurel spends the night in New Life Shop. She has decided to sleep in the gallery every night of the week. There is no shower in the gallery, and it’s important for Tanya to have a place where she can freshen up and be alone. Because of this, before coming to Berlin she has booked a room in a hotel close to the gallery. During the week in Berlin, she spends four nights at the hotel and three nights in the gallery.
The planning
On the morning after the opening, Tanya and Laurel meet and go to a café next to the hotel and have breakfast. After breakfast the two women start to discuss which of the ideas exchanged via email they want to realize during the week. This is an excerpt from their discussion:
Laurel: ”I like the idea of doing something new every day, but I also think that we don’t have to make all these decisions at this breakfast. Let’s say we wake up on Tuesday and say: Ah, let’s just read stories to each other all day, or, no, let’s go out and get some feather boas and be art whores.”Tanya: ”I seriously have a feeling that there is an expectation from other people that we’re going to do heavy sex and nudity.”
Laurel: ”Really?”
Tanya: ”I think so.”
Laurel: ”Where did you get the idea that there are these expectations?”
Tanya: ”Probably from within my own head.”
The first performance
The week offers no hard sex, and only a little nudity. Nevertheless, the two women make three big performances that are exciting.
The first performance they call ’List of Lovers’. Both women make a list with the names of the lovers that they have had during the years. Then Laurel gets Tanya’s list, and Tanya gets Laurel’s list, and for one hour they take turns talking for five minutes each about the lover that the other part wants to hear about. Every fifth minute someone cries ’time’, and no matter if the person talking is in the middle of a sentence, she stops and lets the other part begin her story.
Laurel goes "berserk". She is an excellent storyteller. Her life is paved with broken hearts – first and foremost her own.
But performance number two is the one that leaves the biggest impression. In this performance, Tanya is lying in a sofa in the gallery in a white dress, telling stories for one and a half hours non-stop about the many scars she has on her body. Meanwhile, Laurel is sitting on a chair with a red waterbased pen illustrating Tanya’s stories on her own skin. One of the stories that Tanya is telling is about the tattoo she has on her right thigh. The tattoo shows the number 4711, and above the number: lines like in a barcode.
Tanya’s story
In 1993 Tanya decided that she wanted a tattoo. The tattoo must be a number-tattoo like the one her father’s cousin, her grandmother, and her grandfather’s two sisters got in the German concentration camps before they were murdered.
The number Tanya wanted to have tattooed on her skin was 4711. The number comes from ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’ - an eau-de-Cologne that she remembers from her childhood.
The number 4711 has a history that goes back to the Napoleonic era. When the French occupied Cologne, they changed all of the city’s street names and numbers. The Muehlen company that produced the Kölnisch Wasser perfume received the number 4711, and today the company promotes this perfume with the slogan ’4711 – Die Zahl der Welt’ - The number of the world.
As a child, every year Tanya went with her parents from England to Germany by car to visit her grandparents who lived in Cologne. Tanya often got car sick during this trip, and when she vomited in the car, her mother always cleared up the vomit with ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
Tanya: ”It’s an important number. I mean, there’re numbers that nobody forgets – like 007. I chose the number 4711 because the number represents Cologne where a lot of my family is from, and to me it represents Germany.”
Milena
When Tanya realizes that she wants the tattoo she is living in England. To add a layer of symbolic meaning to her decision she decides to have the tattoo made in Cologne.
Before leaving for Cologne she sets her video to record a documentary film that is running on television while she is away. The film is about Milena Jesenská – a Czech woman who, for two years from 1920, had a romantic relation to Franz Kafka.
Tanya: ”I knew about her because I had read Kafka’s ’Letters to Milena’. I thought, she
must have been a pretty wonderful woman for Kafka to have written all those beautiful love letters to. And then there was this documentary film about her on television, and I thought: Now I will find out what she was like. That’s why I recorded the film.”
Czechoslovakian. She came from Prague. Later in life she became a journalist and a freedom fighter publishing a number of anti-fascist articles in Czech newspapers and magazines.
When the Nazis occupied Prague, Milena helped a lot of people get out of the city. And because of her activities the Nazis sent her to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp for women.
Milena died in the camp in 1944.
Message from the beyond
Tanya gets the tattoo in Cologne on February 6. Two days later she is back in England. The same evening she turns on the television and starts watching the documentary about Milena Jesenská that the video has recorded while she was away.
Five minutes into the film something strange happens. Tanya learns that Milena’s number in Ravensbrück was 4714, and that this number was so close to 4711 that all her friends in the camp called her ’4711 Kölnisch Wasser’.
The thrill
Tanya and Laurel’s first performance – List of Lovers – took place on day three. The moment the performance ended, both women broke into laughter, clapping their hands and embracing each other to express how excited they felt that their first performance together had come out so well.
The previous day Laurel had told Tanya that she believed there was a mother/daughter element in their relationship, and that the wooloo-boys by choosing to match her and Tanya consciously or unconsciously plugged into a connection between them that had existed since the dawn of time. She said: ”Where this women energy comes from I don’t know. I just think that this project offered an opportunity for larger things to take place. And I love that place.”The seven year itch
When performance number two ends – this is on day five - the relationship between the two women is significantly more tense. Tanya is not easy. Her tendency to rigidly insist on the value of planning and her reluctance to act spontaneously make Laurel frustrated and to some degree resigned. In their third and last performance – day seven – Laurel and Tanya illustrate with a needle and a red thread just how unconstructive their collaboration has become.
The setting: a square table covered with tablecloth is placed in the middle of New Life Shop. Laurel and Tanya sit next to each other at the table, without speaking. Laurel sticks the threaded needle up and down through the tablecloth. As her sowing progresses both women are slowly moving around the table. Laurel is sowing a circle, but the circle never becomes full because just as fast as she is sowing, just as fast is Tanya pulling the tread out of the tablecloth. Half way around the table the two women change places so that Tanya is now working the needle and Laurel is undoing Tanya’s work.
If days were years, Tanya and Laurel have on this day reached the seven year itch phase of their relationship. Their date has been enriching – a laborious romance. But now it is over. When they get up from the table they do it without pleasure and with the knowledge that it takes more than a needle and a thread to patch up their relationship.
An hour later, Tanya says goodbye to Laurel and me and goes out for dinner with friends. My bus to Copenhagen is leaving two hours later. Laurel and me go to an Indian restaurant before the departure. This is the last I see of the two sympathetic and very different women.