A Wall of Our Own by Paul M. Farber

Author:Paul M. Farber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 3.6 Shinkichi Tajiri, The Berlin Wall, 1981. (Shinkichi Tajiri Estate)

That same year, 1981, his installation of a pair of identical castings of his Friendship Knot sculpture underscored his American identity as a balance between distant connection and chosen exile. One version of Tajiri’s knot was included in the exhibition Amerikanische Künstler in Berlin at the Amerika Haus in West Berlin, the institution in Schöneberg established in 1945 to promote cultural exchange between Berliners and Americans and the site of the Vietnam protests in the 1960s. The show was held semiregularly with a rotating cast of artists and was sponsored by the Initiative Berlin-USA e.V., and its director wrote in the 1986 catalog that Tajiri was among the eight artists selected “from among the nearly one hundred who currently work in Berlin. … They all allow us to experience the effects this city had on them.”47 Tajiri’s knot stood outside the building, and a photograph of its installation in the catalog depicts a wooded scene outside, akin to the notion of the knot in the jungle. Here, a sculpture made by a self-exiled American, outside the West Berlin Amerika Haus, reaffirms a location of creative exchange and critical distance, against the long shadows of war and its reconciliations.

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