Creative alternatives: experimental art and cultural politics in Berlin, 1971-1999

Creative Alternatives reveals a largely forgotten world of experimental art practices staged in public and private spaces in divided Berlin that contested state and corporate control over urban space and presented alternative ways of interacting with urban space. The work focuses on artists on both sides of the Berlin Wall presenting action, performance, and installation art in galleries, cafes, alternative art spaces, and on city streets. It also examines these artists’ interactions and unlikely entanglements with top-down cultural political initiatives through three regimes: state socialist East Germany, liberal democratic West Germany, and unified Germany with Berlin as capital. Action artists’ years of experimentation in divided Berlin made them uniquely equipped to forge an aesthetic opposition months before the Peaceful Revolution in East Germany in fall 1989 and to become leaders of the resistance to the city’s neoliberal shift in the 1990s.