Up until recently, the bane of my writing existence was the group show. When writing on group shows you are obliged—in avoidance of what David Foster Wallace called “the asshole problem”—to mention every artist in the review. The solo show liberated me from obligation, from inclusiveness, from the curator, from the institution, and to some extent, from myself, to focus solely on the artist and their work and see where the cumulative identity of the artist via the artworks might take me in terms of writing. As you might have noticed, the solo show has been out of fashion for some time; that is, except for the 1% museum retrospectives of Wolfgang Tillmans and the established male cohort et al. Thing is, ever since a bigger than 1% chunk of would-be artists turned coat to become would-be curators (probably because the latter are realists), the group show has become our staple diet. The group show is more communitarian, more pluralist, less careerist than the solo, even though it’s a byway to getting a solo show down the line. (After experiencing Eva Rothchild at the Venice Biennale last month I started to feel for the first time that the “mid-career” reasoning behind the selection of a solo artist for Venice feeds into everything that is bad and poisonous about the catapulting of solo careers over the promise of art, the championing of art.) And yet, even though the solo show is the dream, the group show the compromise, it’s lonely going solo. The whole original Star Wars narrative hangs in the balance between Han Solo being independent but lonely, all the while repeatedly joining the tribe at the moment of most need and being needed, their need, his neediness. I loved him for that; orphaned Batman too with his attachment issues and silly reluctance to join faux family, The Justice League. The wah wah-idealist in me says, It all comes back to subcultures in the end, which art was once part of but, today’s artists—according to crazy and calculating Sean Scully in the infamously entertaining 2019 BBC documentary—embrace the mainstream with a crazy and calculated image on Instagram. I was part of a subculture for 11 years of adolescence-cum-adulthood: skateboarding. Being a skateboarder you end up hating institutions, from banks to police to parents who never got fed up of saying “grow up” from year 10 to 21. What I learnt during some 4000 days of being a skateboarder was, it can be fun and full of purpose being outside the mainstream. Skateboarders speak the same language, on and off the board, just like artists speak the same language, which mainly frustrates the mainstream. I did my very best to annoy and frustrate during those skateboarding days, and less in terms of words (gift of the teenage grunt) and more in terms of personal aesthetics (DIY face piercings with a combo of mullet, skinhead and long fringe holding skateboard and wearing a Napalm Death T-shirt shouting “NAZI PUNKS FUCK OFF”). See, subcultures are neither the resistance nor the rebellion. Subcultures celebrate difference in their retreat from the sameness of the mainstream, but their difference is based on similarity and like-minded ideals. We are tribe. (Here I had written a brilliant critique of the curator, bla bla bla, but why bother, the same way a critique of technology, social media or Trump is pointless.) So: solo shows suck because “it’s all about me”, while group shows feign “it’s good to share”—something I repeatedly mantra to my six-year-old son who hasn’t yet caught on since his hairy head emerged from my wife. Oxymoronically: We are selfish. Which brings me beautifully to Berlin Opticians. Even though I had a nice chat with Marysia Wieckiewicz-Carroll—the Director of Berlin Opticians—yesterday, at the Assembly Hall Dublin amidst her troupe of represented artists, I feel I can write with integrity about what I really feel about Berlin Opticians as an art experiment. First: What is it about Berlin Opticians that makes it so attractive? Against mountains of creased foreheads looming over black lakes stickered Instagram, Berlin Opticians slid off the top shelf last year, all sexy, like it was pre-packaged and still in its cellophane. The name, Berlin Opticians, seemed pretentious, even when its provenance became known—the simple repurposing of a retired opticians on Dublin’s Capel Street which reads today (in red) on Google Maps, “Permanently Closed.” Alas, the questions followed: What is Berlin Opticians? A gallery? Promotional engine? Conceptual conceit? Marketable ploy? Wolf in drag? Berlin Opticians is, for lack of a better definition, a nomadic gallery, whose home is almost exclusively online, except for a few flirtations with physical space to keep the old in with the new—the two physical iterations so far have been at heritage sites. Berlin Opticians exists as a group in physical space and solo through online presentations. Online is business, offline is communitarian; cold vs warm respectively. It’s a brave move; and it took a curator to make the move: MW-C. That’s how it’s been since we came out of recession—artists with one hand in their pocket and the other panhandling to the curator. “Why were they picked?” other artists ask. The 10 artists Berlin Opticians represent, or make up Berlin Opticians, are primarily respected, socially connected and professionally networked artists with a few token new-kids-on-the-block. Unsurprisingly for a commercially driven enterprise, Berlin Opticians is made up chiefly of painters—”there’s a lot of painting” (intimating too much painting) at Assembly Hall one artist tells me. The majority of the ‘blessed 10’ have been around the block a few times, and like most Irish/ Ireland-based artists, have completed the urban and regional artist-run back allies and art centre cul de sacs to the point of toleration—it’s a short circuit. After a year of teasing the physical art scene and saturating the “Instagram scene” (in the causal words of a young photographer), the nomadism of Berlin Opticians, this collective entity in its plural singular, is the antithesis of what we expect from private or public art institutions in Ireland. Berlin Opticians’ dalliances with physical space are just that, dalliances, teasing out its online presence on Instagram and a dedicated website. Conscious of the image economy, it leans heavily on Instagram and produces online exhibitions wherein tastefully staged photographs tease out a marketable fantasy, or, in business terms, market potential beyond the provincial where the private art market is like 5 people. After only a year, Berlin Opticians roles off the tongue without much thought. As an image it has saturated the art scene with the virtual promise of something more that the physical experience of art, something that has become a fact in the fleeting interactions with art as image on Instagram. The director and artists involved are pretty much saying: This is how we experience art now, online, so get with the image, “grow up”. Of course, this new direction has been provoked by the external reality that art is really on its own. So here I find myself excited by Berlin Opticians’ promise—the virtual teasing and physical flirtations have massaged skeptical shoulders. Although I have experienced these artists solo or in different group contexts, the Berlin Opticians’ experience is more umbilically tied to an entity, a mothership, a welcome invasion of collective art enterprise. Berlin Opticians reminds me of Andrea Fraser’s artist-run for-profit space “Orchard Projects” which, according to Brandon Joseph—“treaded a fine—and perhaps ultimately impossible—line between self-reflexivity and (to use a barbaric neologism) self-complicity, which could veer at times into self-promotion”. (Disclaimer: All Orchard’s apples fell out of friendship.) Or John Kelsey’s and Emily Sunblad’s Reena Spaulings with its collective sensibility and marketable critique that today still treads a similar impossible line with conceptual tightrope walkers like Merlin Carpenter (Truth tell, I’ve always wanted a local Reena Spaulings). Except for its acronym, BO, Berlin Opticians is less punk than those critically self-reflexive and complicit New York iterations of ironical resistance to and compliance with the artworld, a world that recycles market critique to its own promotional and monetary needs. Unlike New York, we have no art market to critique, so Berlin Opticians sits pretty on the rounded edges of the swimming pool in a motel, desert side of Trump’s Mexican wall, with its little piggies sloshing in the blue yonder, waiting, wishing, as shooting stars scratch the celestial chalkboard. That said Berlin Opticians propose an alternative vehicle to the tunnel vision of the art scene which, like meth in Fresno, has become overly dependent on the 5 or so Dublin galleries, and on public funding in particular, which conditions a certain type of art, artist and administration aware of audience strategies and project outcomes that is overly self-serving, self-protective and sociopathic—when the funding boxes are ticked ties are invariably cut. Since Berlin’s arrival there’s been a sexy smoothness to it all, marketability, a collective marketability that has activated the art scene and, in my rare social interactions with artists, garnered acceptance after just two public exhibitions (If you don’t count the spin-off show of selected Berliners at Garter Lane Arts Centre Waterford as I write this). [Timeline infractions ahead if you have been reading this closely.] I write this on the eve of the next physical manifestation in the Assembly House Dublin which, no doubt, will be fending off the curious and, let’s call a spade a hammer, the cynical. There’s a lot of love out there for Berlin, but that means there’s a lot of the insidious other. For me, I’m interested in the t-e-a-s-e-d—out, short-lived physical events than the online solo exhibitions. The exhibitions at Assembly Hall and Merrion Square managed to yank the Dublin art scene away from their mobile screens to come together under one roof on opening night to celebrate this thing that is new and experimental and comes from necessity rather than privileged notion. Like music groups, Berlin’s strengths and desires lie in its collective smoothing over individual ego and ambition. In such a small and competitive art scene that, on the surface at least, hums with good will, such a collective entity has the potential to last and grow, like all upstarts, into—god forbid—something more concrete and established. There’s possibility in its current liquid state. There’s a flattening of the field so one artist bleeds into the other, into Berlin, without recourse to offend, a perennial group show of Stepford Husbands and their assimilated Wives. At Garter Lane Arts Centre it feels more punk (Maybe it’s the white walls); at Assembly Hall it’s more civilized, like history has already been indelibly written—bet artists on the opening night of the latter became more self-aware of what they were wearing! Image is everything. Artists never owned the physical ground on which they exhibited anyway. Never. It was a lease, temporary, virtual, that twist of capitalism. The Instagram scene is a veritable mixed tape of love songs that cannot really offend. As Berlin grows and hopefully takes more risks it will offend, if it hasn’t already, with its branding and smooth business plan. But Berlin is more than a galley or a business plan, it’s a spark that that is enlivening the art scene, and hopefully other artists to take their hands out of their pockets, stop panhandling curators, and encourage a real community that stops being about ME, my art, my career, getting Venice, and contributes to a like-minded subculture that involves groups, not private reading or seething groups, but groups that break into the public sphere and shout and laugh and cry and do something brave and bold that leaves everyone open, vulnerable, wounded, agasp, angry, but still fucking alive.