Sweet Wall, 1970
Getty Research
Institute/Allan Kaprow
Estate and Hauser & Wirth
Performance artist Allan Kaprow visited West Berlin in November 1970 on a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) Artists-in-Berlin grant. In cooperation with René Block Galerie, he carried out a performance on Köthener Strasse in Kreuzberg titled Sweet Wall. Known for his “happenings” in which banal activities with minimalist staging became platforms for performance art, Kaprow and a small group of collaborators fashioned a proxy wall in an empty lot near the actual border. They used cinder blocks held together with bread and jam as mortar. Soon after, they toppled their own creation. Sweet Wall was a work that playfully aimed to commandeer the physicality of the Wall, as well as offer an examination through a deliberately rudimentary imitation. In doing so, Kaprow was able to approach the Wall’s symbolic power by scaling it to a workable size for critique. He reflected on his project by stating, “It enclosed nothing, separated no one. It was built in a desolated area close to the real Berlin Wall. The real Wall divided a city against itself… As parody, Sweet Wall was about an idea of a wall. The Berlin Wall was an idea, too.”