Travelling to Basel as a member of Monogatari in the 1990s, Tim Dinter is used to fast-paced Berlin. In Basel, he visits museums.
True, one is not absolutely sure whether it is the illustrator (Tim Dinter) or the visual artist (Kai Pfeiffer) who strolls through Basel, but the accompanying comments speak volumes: ‘Berlin – where the deposits worth seeing accumulate in a time lapse. This paradise of instant archaeology has formed a fossilised crust on my tender skin. I will have to detoxify the blocked pores of my optic nerve. Nothing but radical detoxification can help here,’ is what it says. And the anonymous protagonist – the melancholic flaneur, invented by Pfeiffer and Dinter for the German newspaper FAZ in the early 2000s and made to wander through Berlin – stumbles his way through ‘Basel – Place of Purity’. From the historical market place to the view of the Rhine from the Basel Minster to the Schaulager, a ‘refrigerator for art’, in which artworks like corpses are stored at the right temperature, ‘to ensure that artistic tastes always appear fresh’.
In linguistic terms, this introduction to ‘Operation Läckerli – Comicreportagen aus Basel’ (Operation Läckerli – Comics journalism from Basel) provides the orientation for Tim Dinter’s solo contribution to the volume published in 2004 (which incidentally is the fourth and last publication before the members of the group - Markus Witzel alias Mawil, Tim Dinter, Kathi Käppel, Jens Harder, Ulli Lust and Kai Pfeiffer - go their own way). The city itself does not really interest Dinter, its highlights – FC Basel, Basel beach and the impressions of tourists when walking through the city centre – are left to his drawing companions.
Instead, he devotes his time to the museums that the city offers and compiles these to create the card game known as quartets. Quartets, for those who no longer remember, is a collection of cards that carry several numbers and letters relating to their respective objects and so can be compared. Two or more players play against each other. The player who has the advantage chooses a value on his card which he assumes is the best in the game and asks if another player has this card. If he is right, he gets his opponents’ cards, if somebody else has a card with a higher value, he has to surrender his cards and loses his turn.
Dinter used this model to put together a game of quartets involving museums, for which he considered a dozen buildings: Museum of Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Basel, the Schaulager mentioned earlier, Fondation Beyeler, Basel Historical Museum Barfüsserkirche, Museum of Cultures, Natural History Museum, Museum of Antiquities, Kunsthalle Basel, Jean Tinguely Museum Basel, Vitra Design Museum, Caricature & Cartoon Museum (today, the Cartoonmuseum) Basel, and the Dollhouse Museum (in the sequence in which they appear). Ratings are based on: display area in square metres, number of exhibits, number of visitors per year, year of opening, and a personal rating of architecture, reputation and location on a scale of one to five bananas (why bananas is not explained); one banana is poor, five bananas is the highest score.
Anybody who has been to Basel knows that the city does have several museums to offer. Dinter’s quartets can of course be read as a museum guide, which summarises at a glance whether a visit to a particular museum is worthwhile. The choice of your reference point is up to you: location, visitor numbers, number of exhibits or architecture, even though Dinter’s information is not always sufficiently helpful. For example, in terms of reputation, the Dollshouse Museum and the Cartoonmuseum have exactly the same score (five bananas), but a look at the visitor numbers to help you decide is not very helpful, as in one case it says 15,000, and in the other ‘several’ (it’s best if you find out for yourself which rating applies where).
To offer you a little assistance in playing quartets here, a few more facts are revealed: the museum with the largest display area also has the largest number of exhibits and is already over a hundred years old, but when it comes to architecture and reputation, this card is not the winner. It can be trumped by the card for a museum that is equally old but can perhaps be beaten in almost all categories (other than location).
Incidentally, the museum with the highest visitor numbers falters when it comes to the number of exhibits: in the Cartoonmuseum, for example, the number of exhibits is many times higher. There would of course be much more to analyse, but ultimately this quartet is like any other: each player must discover his own strategy for success. Fortunately, you yourself can decide whether success should be measured according to the number of cards or to which museum visit was the most pleasant.
Monogatari. Operation Läckerli – Comicreportagen aus Basel; Edition Moderne, 160 pages, 18 EUR.
