How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment 9781350194045, 9781350194076, 9781350194052

Citation preview

How to Make the Body

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Visual Cultures and German Contexts Series Editors Deborah Ascher Barnstone (University of Technology Sydney, Australia) Thomas O. Haakenson (California College of the Arts, USA) Visual Cultures and German Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in Germany, Switzerland and Austria, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities outside of these geographic, historical, and political borders. The series invites scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms and time periods. It engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches. It seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in traditional disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Of particular interest are provocative perspectives on archival materials, original scholarship on emerging and established creative visual fields, investigations into time-based forms of aesthetic expression, and new readings of history through the lens of visual culture. The series offers a much-needed venue for expanding how we engage with the field of Visual Culture in general. Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding research studies are welcome, by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical and methodological perspectives. Advisory Board Donna West Brett, University of Sydney, Australia Charlotte Klonk, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany Nina Lübbren, Anglia Ruskin University, UK Maria Makela, California College of the Arts, USA Patrizia C. McBride, Cornell University, USA Rick McCormick, University of Minnesota, USA Elizabeth Otto, University at Buffalo SUNY, USA Kathryn Starkey, Stanford University, USA Annette F. Timm, University of Calgary, Canada James A. van Dyke, University of Missouri, USA Titles in the Series Art and Resistance in Germany, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Elizabeth Otto Bauhaus Bodies: Gender, Sexuality, and Body Culture in Modernism’s Legendary Art School, edited by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rössler Berlin Contemporary: Architecture and Politics after 1990, by Julia Walker Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, by Vanessa Rocco Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930: (No) Home Away from Home, by Erin Eckhold Sassin Material Modernity: Innovations in Art, Design, and Architecture in the Weimar Republic, edited by Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Maria Makela How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment, edited by Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson

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How to Make the Body Difference, Identity, and Embodiment Edited by Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Jennifer L. Creech, Thomas O. Haakenson, and Contributors, 2022 Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Maria Rajka Cover image: Hito Steyerl, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013, HD video, single screen in architectural environment, 15 minutes, 52 seconds, Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl, Image courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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978-1-3501-9404-5 978-1-3501-9405-2 978-1-3501-9406-9

Series: Visual Cultures and German Contexts Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Notes on Contributors Introduction: How to Make the Body Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson Arousal, the Bible, and Bruegel’s Codpieces: The Male Body in Early Modern Visual Culture Alison G. Stewart 2 The Construction of the Aryan Body in German Visual Advertising, 1908–33 David Ciarlo 3 Group Zero: Transforming Trauma into Transcendence Jill Holaday 4 RAF Corpse Art: The Resistant and Recuperative Body: Aesthetics of Diffusion and the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF)/Red Army Faction Ilka Rasch 5 Penis-bodied Specimens in the Exhibit Körperwelten (Body Worlds) Sebastian Heiduschke 6 For the Porn Connoisseur: Cinema Joy Jennifer L. Creech 7 Orientalized Bodies at Work: Cultural Zaniness in Berlin’s Sayonara Tokyo Revue Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick 8 Ai Weiwei’s Body in Berlin Thomas O. Haakenson 9 Afrolocken: Natural Hair in German Literature and Media Jamele Watkins 10 Poppthority: The Politics of Dr. Bitch Ray’s Bodily Interventions Faye Stewart 11 Becoming Invisible/Against Visibility: Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File Lucy Ashton

vi ix x

1

1

Index

11 37 61

83 103 119 139 159 175 195

219 239

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Illustrations Plates 1

Recruiting poster from 1936, “The German Student: Fighting for Führer and Volk in the Ranks of the NSD Student Union,” designed by Ludwig Hohlwein.

2

Advertising poster for Herkules Beer from the Hasenbräu brewery, Augsburg 1925/26, designed by Ludwig Hohlwein.

3

Advertising insert for “Kaloderma Shaving Soap—everywhere,” F. Wolff & Sons, Karlsruhe, 1920, designed by Ludwig Hohlwein.

4

Advertising poster for Café Odeon and Billiard Academy, Munich, 1908, designed by Ludwig Hohwein.

5

Advertising poster for schnapps, produced by the First Tyrolean Fruit-Press National Distillery S. Schindler, Innsbruck, between 1909 and 1914.

6

Regarding Terror: The Dead (1998).

7

Split-screen film still from “She Calls the Shots,” part of the short film collection, The Female Voyeur, dir. Petra Joy (2011).

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Split-screen film still from “She Calls the Shots,” part of the short film collection, The Female Voyeur, dir. Petra Joy (2011).

9

Film still from “Cruising,” part of the short film collection, Female Fantasies, dir. Petra Joy (2006).

10 Film still from “Cruising,” part of the short film collection, Female Fantasies, dir. Petra Joy (2006). 11 Senmaru’s zaniness startles Yoko (left), Heidi (center), and Nancy (right) (2017). 12 Ai Weiwei and an unnamed female refugee in a scene from Human Flow (2017). 13 Ai Weiwei getting a haircut in a refugee camp in Human Flow (2017). 14 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013), displaying a 1951 United States Air Force (USAF) resolution test chart, signaling the relationship between surveillance, technology, and war. 15 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). The screen behind Steyerl becomes a part of her face, demonstrating how one can sink into their surroundings using camouflage and remain unidentifiable to image-capture technologies. vi

Illustrations

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16 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). These semi-translucent figures throw off the cloak of representation. 17 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). The fighting figures demonstrate that resolution continues to be a threat to invisibility.

Figures 1.1 Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio, Jupiter and Antiope, from the series, Loves of the Gods, engraving, 1527.

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1.2 Sebald Beham, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, engraving, 1526.

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1.3 Sebald Beham, Amnon and Tamar, c. 1531–50.

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1.4 Sebald Beham, Death and the Lascivious Couple, engraving, 1529.

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1.5 Pieter Bruegel, The Wedding Dance, oil on panel, c. 1566.

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1.6 Pieter Bruegel, The Wedding Dance, photograph, 1930, with overpainting.

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2.1 Film still from the youth rally scene in Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (1935).

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2.2 “Witte’s Shoe-Protector Baff (made of curved steel with counter-tips). Unbreakable. Secure. Comfortable.” Louis Witte Metalwarenfabrik, GmbH, Barmen, 1916.

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2.3 Advertisement for gardening supplies and seeds, Christian Mohrenweisser, Altenweddingen, 1902.

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2.4 Advertisement for metalware by L. Auerbach & Co., Fürth, 1912.

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2.5 Advertisement for gardening supplies and seeds, Christian Mohrenweisser, Altenweddingen, 1910.

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2.6 Promotional poster for the First National Socialist Reich Youth Day, 1932, designed by Ludwig Hohlwein. Also circulated widely as a postcard.

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3.1 Film still of Piene creating a smoke painting from 0 × 0 = Kunst.

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3.2 Film still of Günther Uecker hammering nails from 0 × 0 = Kunst.

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3.3 Film still from a 1961 demonstration in conjunction with the Alfred Schmela exhibition, created for public television in West Germany, from the Zero Foundation.

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3.4 Footage of Günther Uecker painting a white circle on the street film still from a 1961 demonstration in conjunction with the Alfred Schmela exhibition, created for public television in West Germany, from the Zero Foundation.

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Illustrations

4.1 Protests in support of imprisoned RAF members in Frankfurt (1977).

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4.2 Andreas Baader “Gefaßt” (1972).

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4.3 Regarding Terror: Timeline of Death (2005).

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4.4 Regarding Terror: Entrance to Die Toten (1998).

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7.1 Takeo Ischi, the Japanese yodeler (2017).

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7.2 Anime icons Nobita (played by Naoto the yo-yoer) and Doraemon (2017).

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7.3 Senmaru practicing one of his precarious Edo-Daikagura balancing acts (2017).

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9.1 Krauselocke cofounder, Esther Donkor interview by Jana Parageis (2017).

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9.2 Curl Chart as originally theorized by stylist Andre Walker (2019).

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9.3 Esther Donkor, YouTube Video, “Afrohaarpflege als Selbstliebe-Ritual” (2017).

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10.1 Dr. Reyhan Şahin’s academic persona, presented in a flyer from a 2018 lecture on the German #MeTwo controversy about racism and ethnocentrism, delivered at Emory University, Atlanta, GA.

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10.2 Lady Bitch Ray as a rapper and performer, in the 2012 video, “Die Aufklärung” (“The Enlightenment”), in which she wears a self-designed “Penis Pilates” costume.

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10.3 In the 2012 video, “Die Aufklärung,” rapper Lady Bitch Ray is often filmed from a low angle.

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10.4 In the 2018 video, “Cleopatra,” Şahin/LBR is dressed like the legendary Egyptian queen and gets bathed, fanned, and fed by two scantily clad women.

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10.5 In the 2018 video, “Bitchanel,” Şahin/LBR rides a camel across an urban landscape.

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10.6 Atop a BMW in the 2018 video, “Bitchanel,” Şahin/LBR points to her crotch and the long braid hanging between her legs.

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11.1 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). Steyerl covers her key facial features, obscuring her identity.

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11.2 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). These figures perform how being a pixel can be visualized.

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11.3 Still from How Not to Be Seen (2013). This figure points back at a camera that is suspended above the desert floor.

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11.4 A figure makes a pointing gesture at a surveillance camera at the Fukushima-Dai-ichi nuclear Power Plant in 2011.

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Acknowledgements We editors would like to dedicate this volume to the late bell hooks, who made her brilliance accessible to us and taught us that feminism is for every body. There are a great number of other people who have made the publication of How to Make the Body possible, too. Both of us earned our graduate degrees at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in the mid 2000s – times of great promise, excitement, and hope. Faculty in what has since been renamed the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic & Dutch (GNSD) – as well as professors in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and several other programs – were invaluable in shaping our worldviews and in sharpening our critical thinking skills during those not-so-manyyears-ago. From the Department of GNSD, we want to acknowledge Leslie Morris, Arlene Teraoka, Ruth-Ellen Joeres, Richard (“Rick”) McCormick, Patrizia McBride (now at Cornell), Jack Zipes, James A. Parente, Charlotte Melin, Ray Wakefiled, Monika Zagar, and the late Jochen Schulte-Sasse. Beyond German, the guidance of other faculty colleagues proved instrumental as well: Keya Ganguly (Tom’s kick-ass advisor!), Cesare Casarino, John Archer, Timothy Brennan, Tom Pepper, Catherine Liu (now at UC Irvine), Liz Kotz (now at UC Riverside), Sally Gregory-Kohlstedt, Jennifer Alexander, Shaden M. Tageldin, Robert (“Robin”) Brown, Harvey Sarles, Richard Leppert, the late Gary Thomas, and the late Fernando Arenas (a beautiful soul, gone way too soon). These faculty colleagues and mentors, many of whom we gladly now call friends as well, were instrumental in shaping our thinking about identity, difference, and embodiment. There are many others who have helped shape our individual and collaborative thinking about these concepts as well. Sincere apologies to those faculty, colleagues, and friends we have somehow managed to forget. Know that you are still with us, and still influence, in the flesh and beyond the flesh as well.

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Notes on Contributors Lucy Ashton is an art writer and curator currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Master’s of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts and a Bachelor’s of Arts in History of Art and Visual Culture from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is interested in art practices post-1980. She writes on art as a response to critical issues, new media, as well as critical and queer theory and curatorial practice. Her latest research project looks especially at the overlaps of surveillance and visual culture, focusing on the potentialities of invisibility. David Ciarlo is Associate Professor in Modern History at the University of Colorado Boulder. Ciarlo specializes in the social and cultural history of modern Germany, the history of European imperialism and racism, and the history of visual culture and mass culture in modern Europe. His first book, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Harvard University Press, 2011), uses visual archives to trace the interconnected histories of commercial culture and colonial culture in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Advertising Empire won both an American Historical Association Book Prize (the George Louis Beer Prize) and the German Studies Association’s Book Prize. Jennifer L. Creech is Instructor of German at Oregon State University. She is the author of Mothers, Comrades and Outcasts in East German Women’s Films (2016) and co-editor of Spectacle: German Visual Culture, Vol. 2 (2015). Her research and teaching interests include late 20th-century German literature, film and culture; cinema studies; Marxist and feminist theories. She is the author of Mothers, Comrades & Outcasts in East German Women’s Films (Indiana University Press, 2016), the co-editor of Spectacle: German Visual Culture, vol. 2 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), and and has published on East German and post-unification cinema in Seminar and Women in German Yearbook. She is currently working on a collaborative book and documentary film project that explores the story of former Namibian refugees in East Germany, and is a member of the Digital Feminist Collective. Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick is a Mellon-CES (Council for European Studies) Fellow and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His dissertation project uncovers representations of Asians throughout German film history, since 1910. His article “The World(s) of Anna Suh: Race, Migration, and Ornamentalism in Bis zum Ende aller Tage (1961)” appeared in East Asian-German Cinema: The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the Present (ed. Joanne Miyang Cho, Routledge 2021). Zach also runs the Instagram account “Asian German Updates,” where he has garnered a following by x

Notes on Contributors

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posting about Asian German media, history, people, news, and community events throughout the German-speaking world. Thomas O. Haakeson is Associate Professor in Humanities & Sciences at California College of the Arts, USA. He is the author of Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada, and co-editor of Spectacle: German Visual Culture, Vol. 2 (2015) with Jennifer L. Creech. He has co-edited several other anthologies as well, including Jürgen Habermas and the European Economic Crisis: Cosmopolitanism Reconsidered with Gaspare M. Genna and Ian W. Wilson; Representations of German Identity with Deborah Ascher Barnstone; Becoming TransGerman: Cultural Identity Beyond Geography with Tirza True Latimer, Carole Hager, and Deborah Barton. He also has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism as well as Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. Sebastian Heiduschke is Associate Professor of German in the School of Language, Culture, and Society at Oregon State University (OSU). He is the author of East German Cinema: DEFA and Film History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and the co-editor (with Sean Allan) of Re-imagining DEFA. East German Cinema in its National and Transnational Context (Berghahn, 2015). His essays about German film and language pedagogy have appeared in journals and edited volumes. At OSU he has developed the curriculum of the very first online major in German in North America (perhaps even world-wide). Heiduschke’s research interests include (East) German cinema, animation, fan studies, online learning, language pedagogy. Jill Holaday is currently a Teaching Fellow at Cornell College. She received her Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Iowa. Her main focuses were Modern and Contemporary art, and her minor specialties were in East Asian Art and 19th Century French Art. Her dissertation focuses on the German group called Zero, a group of artists working in the 1950s and 1960s with utopian intentions. Previously, she obtained her Masters in Art in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her thesis was about the art of Francesc Torres, a Spanish artist who works in various media, including video, photography, installation and drawing. She enthusiastically investigates art both from a European and a global perspective. Ilka Rash is Associate Professor in the Department of MLL and the Film Studies Program at Furman University. Her areas of interest include aesthetics of terrorism/politically motivated violence (media coverage, film & literature), visual archives and collective memory, melodrama, German & American film history, fascist cinema and culture, film and literary theory. Rasch received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and wrote her dissertation on The Return of the Red Army Faction (RAF): German Tales of Terror. She has studied at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf (HFF) in Berlin/ Potsdam and works as a script consultant in her spare time. She has extensive study abroad experiences and has helped to organize and direct 9 study abroad programs located in Berlin (her favorite city), Cuxhaven and Kiel, Germany.

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Alison G. Stewart is Professor of Art History Emerita, the University of Nebraska— Lincoln, where she taught courses including Northern Renaissance art and a history of prints. Her research has addressed secular images (large woodcuts, small engravings), changing taste and Pieter Bruegel, and the life and art of Sebald Beham, including his move to Frankfurt am Main. Author of Unequal Lovers and Sebald Beham and the Origin of Peasant Festival Imagery. Co-editor of Saints, Sinners, and Sisters; Crossroads. Frankfurt am Main as a Market for Northern Art 1500-1750 (Imhof Verlag, 2019); and Indecent Bodies in Renaissance Culture (forthcoming). Recent work includes an essay in the Festschrift for Jeffrey Chipps Smith exploring newly found documents on Beham (Brepols, 2018) and a book in progress, Dürer’s Privilege and Beham’s Horse. Book Illustration as Prints in Frankfurt am Main (title in progress). These publications and others are available as pdfs on digitalcommons.unl.edu. Faye Stewart (she/her/hers; sie/ihr) is Associate Professor of German Studies and cross-appointed faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. Her teaching and research interests include gender and sexuality, citizenship and belonging, East German visual culture, equity and inclusivity, and queer transnational cinema. As a member of the Grenzenlos Deutsch collective, Faye co-authored its open-access beginning German curriculum (http://grenzenlosdeutsch.com/). She is the author of German Feminist Queer Crime Fiction: Politics, Justice and Desire (2014, McFarland). She has also co-edited Gender and Sexuality in East German Film: Intimacy and Alienation (2018, Camden House) and Framing Islam: Faith, Fascination, and Fear in Twenty-First-Century German Culture (2017, Colloquia Germanica 47.1–2). Jamele Watkins is Assistant Professor in German Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her current research interests include Black German Studies, East Germany, gender, performance, popular culture, and Black internationalism. Her articles include “Silence as an Interlocutor in the Diaspora” on Olumide Popoola’s novella This is not about sadness; “Performing Oppression and Empowerment in real life: Deutschland” on youth theater performance and “Rearticulating Black Feminist Thought in Heimat, bittersüße Heimat” on everyday racism. Her book project, “Roses for Angela,” examines East German adoration of Angela Davis.

Introduction How to Make the Body Jennifer L. Creech and Thomas O. Haakenson

“What Is the Matter with these Germans?”1 How to Make the Body: Difference, Identity, and Embodiment is a conceptual project, one that focuses on emerging and established theories of corporeality, difference, and embodiment in historical and contemporary German contexts. It is a timely intervention. Mass and social media are full of debates over and images of human rights violations and the so-called refugee crisis, examples of misogyny and sex-based inequality, horrific acts of racism and anti-Semitism, and numerous instances of abuse based on sexual or gender identity. How to Make the Body offers up responses to many of these topics by focusing on the body itself. The collected essays situate “the body” as an iterative concept, dependent on national identity, linguistic community, as well as cultural or social history for its status as a vehicle of authenticity, normality, and belonging. The essays assembled in How to Make the Body focus not on chronological views but rather discursive nexuses, locating particular ideas of “the body” in various historical and contemporary German contexts. In these scholarly analyses, “the body” is constantly in process, constantly made, and thereby serves both as a source of identity as well as a site of difference and resistance. In rethinking both contemporary as well as historical notions of the German body and what it means to make a body “German,” the collected essays in this volume return directly and indirectly to the idea of German identity—articulated even prior to the idea of a German nation-state—broadly associated with “Germanness,” or the idea of belonging to a common culture.2 But these essays do not seek to escape the vexed nature of a distinctly “German identity”—vexed, in great part, due to the association of 1

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Konrad H. Jarausch and Harald Wenzel, “Introduction,” in Konrad H. Jarausch, Harald Wenzel, and Karin Goihl, (eds.), Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 1. For a succinct overview of the idea of “Germanness” in relation to national culture, and relevant theoretical and historical texts supporting the concept, see Liesbeth Minnaard, “National identity: The discursive production of Germanness and Dutchness,” New Germans, New Dutch: Literary Interventions (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008), 15–50.

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German identity with some of the most horrific atrocities of the twentieth century. Rather, the essays collected in the present volume open up new and productive ways to rethinking this vexed German identity. The assembled contributions suggest new ways to challenge claims such as Thomas Mann’s own reflections on Germany’s twentiethcentury atrocities in his famous lecture of 1945, “German and the Germans”: “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned evil through the devil’s cunning.”3 Following up on Mann’s provocative claim, Konrad H. Jarausch and Harald Wenzel note in their “Introduction” to Different Germans, Many Germanies: “If this assessment is correct, the intellectual challenge of dealing with the German case consists of exploring the deep entanglements of its positive and negative aspects with each other . . . Moreover, the recognition of such a plurality creates space of appreciating the enormous diversity of regional, religious, class, and gender identities within German itself.”4 Taking claims such as Mann’s and Jarausch and Wenzel’s to heart, the following texts suggest that the “space of appreciating the enormous diversity” of German identity is the space of the body itself. The essays collected in How to Make the Body employ some of now-canonical materialist as well as theoretical approaches to “the body,” many of which are associated with work done in feminist theory over the last several decades. Key to understanding the aims of the volume and the goals of individual contributors, however, is the ways in which these (often feminist) interventions by the likes of luminaries such as Judith Butler, Lorraine Daston, and Jack Halberstam, among others, have set the stage—indeed, demanded—radically detailed investigations and tightly argued case studies involving contemporary forms of difference, identity, and embodiment. There is a complex German specificity to some of the contemporary and historical theories referenced directly and indirectly in the present volume, as evident in some of the philosophical lines of thought that inform, for example, Butler’s engagements with Enlightenment ideas about matter and the body vis-à-vis Immanuel Kant and G. F. W. Hegel. The contributors to How to Make the Body emphasize, however, the ways in which these theoretical innovations, regardless of their (proto-)German or even (supposedly) German origins, have given a renewed focus to “the body” and thereby have opened up specific and unique fissures within German contexts for further examination. Notable among these developments are the increasing demands for representation—and here academia is not an exception—for different types of bodies: female bodies, racially diverse bodies, refugee bodies, queer bodies, and others. Far from a political or policy manifesto, the essays collected here are a contribution to the action-oriented genealogy with public and political implications. In other words, these essays are articulations that call for the recognition of many types of bodies in and beyond German contexts, historical, in the contemporary moment, and in the future as well. Most of the essays in the volume approach the body through the lens of twentiethor twenty-first-century culture, responding in part to the noticeable absences in the field of German Studies outlined by Jarausch, Wenzel, and Karin Goihl in Different Germans, Many Germanies: New Transatlantic Perspectives. As Jarausch and Wenzel 3 4

Thomas Mann as quoted in Jarausch and Wenzel, “Introduction,” 17. Ibid.

Introduction

3

make clear in their introduction to that volume, North American—and perhaps, more specifically, American—scholars often oversimplify German identity using at times an implicitly historically and solipsistically comparative framework for discussion. “Difference,” these narratives suggest, is celebrated in the United States and countries that take their lead from the North American monolith, whereas Germany history— and specifically the history of the twentieth century, with its two world wars and the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust—show that that country, if not somehow also “Germans” themselves, are predisposed to violence, to a lust for homogeneity, and to an uncontrollable compulsion to eliminate difference. In response to this deeply entrenched methodological bias, scholars of gender, sexuality, race, and postcolonial studies, among others, have opened up important new ways to understand identity in terms not only of the self but also of what it means, more broadly, to be “German”: the process of “othering” is to a considerable degree a projection of one’s own preoccupations upon a foreign subject, much like the invention of “Orientalism” by the West to describe the inscrutable East. The starting point for Americans to evaluate their familiar yet different German cousins must therefore be an examination of how internal American interests have conditioned perceptions of events in Germany. Another precondition for overcoming historical stereotyping is a closer scrutiny of recent developments . . .5

Among the challenges Jarausch and Wenzel see in engaging substantively with these processes of “othering” is the ways in which traditional information gaps—notably associated with mass-media forms, such as television, films, and newspapers—tend to invoke stereotypes to support continued, reductive, homogenize perceptions of what it means to be “German.”6 Cautioning against an uncritical embrace of technologies such as the internet, realtime media, and other forms of “electronic connectivity”—the differential use and (mis)trust of social media among Americans and Germans notwithstanding—Jarausch and Wenzel point to a number of ways in which the opportunity to resituate the German body anew is possible. Scholars in the present volume, How to Make the Body, have embraced the opportunity, exploring a range of historical and new media forms that allow the sharing of information, often, if not primarily, in visual forms, in the hopes of both revealing as well as challenging what it means to be “other.”

What Is “The Body”? The body is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. It is private, public, political, and personal. It is the physical manifestation of individual presence in the world and also the point of interface with others and the external world. The body is key to how we understand identity. The body is also visible, even when it, when the 5 6

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 8.

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How to Make the Body

bodies, are unseen. Here it becomes clear that the body is never completely static; it is always changing, transforming, becoming. In scholarly terms, the body has been a subject of interest since recorded time—and no doubt before recorded time, as well. It is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. It is private, public, political, and personal. It is the physical manifestation of our presence in the world and also the point of interface between us and others, us and the objective world. The body is key to how we understand identity. The body is also visible, even when it, when the bodies, are unseen. The body has been a subject of interest across the humanities since recorded time. In theological and philosophical circles, the question of the split between mind and/or soul and body is a central concern. In art history, the status of the body has shifted from an idealized subject of painting and sculpture to a site of explorations of bodily identity through categories of gender, race, sexuality, ability, and ethnicity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In architecture, “geometry, or measuring the world,” is inextricably tied to human form, a lengthy discourse beginning with the Roman architect Vitruvius and extending through the present explores the importance of the body to architectural design and to space. Similar theoretical strands exist in theater, opera, and performance art. In contemporary theater and performance art, the body has even become the medium through which artists portray their ideas. For several decades now, feminist studies has helped radicalize scholarly approaches to the body. In this particular historical moment, the materiality of the body has become a focus of much political and cultural concern. Black bodies, female bodies, trans bodies, differently abled bodies, Muslim and Jewish bodies, and white bodies: these bodies walk through the world and accumulate different experiences according to their legibility and assigned cultural meanings. While scholarship on the body—and, specifically, its fraught expression in relation to material forms, difference, and identity—has proliferated, key authors and canonical texts still inform the field. Notable in this respect is the work of scholars such as Judith Butler, Jack Halberstam, and Lorraine Daston. These avant-garde thinkers, as well as many others whose work cannot be examined in detail in these brief introductory pages, explore the ways in which the body itself is never a given. These forwardthinking scholars have examined the materiality of the body with respect to the gender/ sex system, transgender identity, and scientific and epistemological forms. As a point of departure for the methodological and theoretical insights informing this volume’s collection, insights that have their origins in the work of the above scholars and others like them, we begin by drawing the reader’s attention to a recent study of the body. This particular study will help us to reconsider the centrality of the body and its variable meanings for the many humanistic sciences mentioned above. In Trans*, Jack Halberstam theorizes a way of thinking about the body that radically resists historical legacies of categorization and classification by emphasizing what he calls “a politics of transitivity.”7 Speaking primarily about trans* bodies but drawing on feminist, critical race, and disability studies, Halberstam argues: 7

Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018), xiii.

Introduction

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the term “trans*” puts pressure on all modes of gendered embodiment and refuses to choose between the identitarian and the contingent forms of trans identity . . . [T]he asterisk modifies the meaning of transitivity by refusing to situate transition in relation to destination, a final form, a specific shape, or an established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk holds off the certainty of diagnosis; it keeps at bay any sense of knowing in advance . . . [T]rans* can be a name for expansive forms of difference, haptic relations to knowing, uncertain modes of being, and the disaggregation of identity politics predicated upon the separating out of many kinds of experience that actually blend together, intersect, and mix.8

Beginning his study with a genealogy of modern productions of expertise and knowledge production, Halberstam reminds us of the simultaneity of colonial exploration and the sudden global explosion of “collection, classification, and analysis,” not just of flora and fauna, but also of the different human “races.”9 With industrialization, expertise anchored in systems of knowledge furthered its rational, scientific project: time-management experts determined how to efficiently extract labor from bodies and machines, criminal anthropologists measured heads and hands to determine criminal and violent body types, ideas of racial identity were deployed under the logic of “civilized” governance, and doctors and medical researchers created new languages for gender, sexuality, and desire.10 The “scientific” distinctions used to classify human bodies and behaviors, having emerged from and contributing to ongoing racial and colonialist projects, fueled ideas of “normal” and “abnormal” bodies and continue to fuel our “current investments in the naming of all specificities of bodily form, gender permutations, and desire.”11 Clearly, as the example of Halberstam’s Trans* demonstrates, the theoretical and methodological foundations of any investigation of “the body” in the twenty-first century must take into account the way this body is an iterative product. Thus, “the body” in the essays collected in How to Make the Body is informed variously by Western philosophical (Butler), scientific (Daston), or heteronormative colonial (Halberstam) discourses, but that very same “body” is never reducible to these discourses—and often also simultaneously resists efforts at such a reduction.

Chapter Overview The theoretical and methodological insights of scholars such as Butler, Halberstam, Daston and others offer up foundational ways to rethink the idea of “the body” and its various forms of expression, This “body” allows for an expanded field in which it is increasingly situated not in terms of its given parameters but rather in terms of

8 9 10 11

Ibid., xiii, 4–5. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 6–7.

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“embodiment.” These theories of embodiment, explored in their various manifestations by the authors assembled in How to Make the Body, have made traditional, conservative concepts of “the body” and its relation to supposedly stable notions of identity and difference increasingly untenable. What makes the collected essays in the present volume especially exciting are the ways in which the respective authors situate various objects and approaches to the body, and embodiment, in German contexts. The book addresses various representations and readings of the body in German culture from the Early Modern period to the present. It does not focus on specific periods over others, but seeks to offer readings of “the body” in various cultural forms at various times. It seeks a methodologically diverse orientation. The essays provide interdisciplinary, intersectional approaches to understanding the body as an everchanging amalgamation of internal and external influences and experiences, a supposedly objective “thing” with a continuously evolving genealogy of meaning, as well as a haptic relation to knowing and being. Contributors engage with the convergences of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, ability, trauma, and spectacle on individual and mass bodies, examining contemporary historical and scientific exhibits on the body, the body as both object and subject of artistic interventions into public discourse, and bodily attributes and performances as simultaneously colonizing and emancipatory. The essays provide new approaches in disability studies, Black German studies, feminist studies, postmodern theory, art history, and porn studies, addressing how the body is mediated through visual culture forms, as well as how these forms hide, disrupt, challenge, or subvert a supposedly ideal body, a political body, and bodies with or without certain, specific organs. The volume is part of the series Visual Cultures and German Contexts and, similar to earlier volumes in that series, is multimedia and multidisciplinary. How to Make the Body provides a much needed effort to bring to bear visual cultural analysis across a range of media and textual practices in service of situating the body anew in the context of German visual culture. It seeks to address the important and fluid role that media forms play in the reproduction and resistance to norms of “the body” in the German context, defined as an iterative concept, dependent in various contexts on national identity, linguistic community, as well as imagined cultural or social history. Contributions address the cult of the body in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries manifest in the Wandervogel, nudist colonies, and sports associations; new approaches to dance, theatre, and opera; the body as a subject of painting and sculpture, or the body in space and architecture. Authors also examine new attitudes towards the body that emerge over time because of scientific inventions and medical science or ways body image has altered over time in art, film, and advertising. Finally, essays in this volume address how the body is mediated through visual culture forms, as well as how these forms hid, disrupted, challenged, or subverted an ideal body, a political body, or a body without organs. The chapters in How to Make the Body are clustered together in ways that seek to reveal their similar critical foci, such as race and racism, gender and misogyny, sexual liberation and heteronormativity. The clusters and couplings offer supporting—but also often contradictory—readings of how “the body” in German visual culture, in historical and contemporary terms. The editors have sought to amplify, rather than

Introduction

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remove, the productive tensions created by these clusters and couplings. The essays thereby reveal through their singular analyses as well as in conversations with other essays in the volume the extent to which the body has been a site of contestation, reinscription, and refusal: a site, in short, of the production of “difference” as well as challenges to that very construction. The volume begins with Alison G. Stewart’s rethinking of sexuality and the body in Early Modern German culture. In “Arousal, the Bible, and Bruegel’s Codpieces: The Male Body in Early Modern Visual Culture,” Stewart examines an exhibition about the seven deadly sins at Kloster Dalheim, the only German museum dedicated to the culture of European cloisters, and prominently illustrates what it calls a “dildo” made of glass. Stewart answers the question of whether the lady abbess used the glass object as a drinking vessel, as a joke, or as a dildo for the satisfaction of her lust. In doing so, the article also makes clear the ways in which sexuality served as a key tool for constituting individual, collective, and religious bodies in early modern visual culture. In the collection’s next essay, the body in question is an historically more recent one, a male body subject to both trauma and treatment. Focused on a male body in crisis, David Ciarlo examines depictions of different bodies in his essay, “The Construction of the Aryan Body in German Visual Advertising, 1908–1933.” Ciarlo argues that the commercially produced visuality of the Kaiserreich served to forge the viewer into a mass, by presenting a stereotype of difference against which differences among the white viewers faded—literally as well as historically—from the visual field and into insignificance. The aims of National Socialist propaganda, he shows, were diametrically opposite; they aimed to forge all the enemies of the race into one undifferentiated mass: a stereotype of the Aryan presented against the differences of Nazism’s myriad “enemies” from each other, which thereby faded in significance. Designers, merely by mass-reproducing a visual stereotype, could construct commonality not among Germans, but among non-Germans. What is certain is that a stereotyped, unified vision of “whiteness” and “white bodies” emerged first in the commercial realm—and, moreover, long after a vision of blackness had already formed. Ciarlo concludes provocatively that the racial body in advertising was an effect, rather than a catalyst, of making the white, supposedly Aryan body. Turning from racialized bodies to resistant bodies, Jill Holaday showcases artistic recalcitrance and revisioning in her essay, “Group Zero: Transforming Trauma to Transcendence.” Holaday contextualizes artwork and demonstrations of the artist collective Gruppe Zero (“Group Zero”), which was active in the late 1950s and early 1960s, at a time when memories of wartime air raids were still vivid. She considers how memories presented in and through the work of Group Zero artists triggered the public’s wartime memories. Rather than provoking terror, Group Zero attempted to co-opt the corporeal intensity of these feelings to create for the viewing public a utopian existence. The body for Group Zero, Holaday argues, could become a vehicle for rethinking the past as well as imagining a different future. Continuing the volume’s investigation into the ways in which artists engage with identity, difference, and embodiment, Ilka Rasch, in her chapter titled, “RAF Corpse Art: The Resistant and Recuperative Body: Aesthetics of Ddiffusion and the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF)/Red Army Faction,” focuses on politically conflicted bodies

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and how these bodies are taken up and circulated in mass media—and then reframed for reconsideration by postwar German artists. Rasch suggests that, dead or alive, the iconic bodies of Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Holger Meins— all members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction, also known as RAF)—are layered with conflicting, symbolic meanings. These bodies and their representations provoke a wide range of readings and strong emotional responses while serving different functions within public discourses. Rasch illustrates the complexity of these highly charged bodies in her essay, introducing the idea of a recurring Bilderschleife (image loop) in order to explain why the representation of these particular German bodies stir such controversy. Bridging the supposed distinction between art and science, Sebastian Heiduschke goes inside “plastinated” bodies in his essay, “Penis-Bodied Specimens in the Exhibit Körperwelten (Body Worlds).” Heiduschke reads Gunther von Hagens’s Körperwelten as an exhibit that privileges the penis-bodied person by focusing on crucial aspects of the “penis-bodied” specimens found in Körperwelten. Studying the significance of the penis-bodied specimen in Körperwelten allows Heiduschke to think about the penis as an object of visual pleasure and power, as distinct from the body itself, and without falling back onto a gender dichotomy. Jennifer L. Creech transitions the volume from penis to pleasure in her essay, “For the Porn Connoisseur: Cinema Joy.” In this feminist reading of cinematic pornography, Creech investigates the feminist pornographic gaze in two short-film collections by German director, Petra Joy: Female Fantasies (2006) and The Female Voyeur (2011). Drawing on contemporary feminist theories of pornography and on interviews with the director, this essay situates Joy’s self-described “porn from the female perspective” within the larger history of feminist debates on pornography and provides close readings of Joy’s work as representative of contemporary sex-positive feminist porn. In actively resisting cis-heteronormative tropes typically associated with the pornographic gaze and in privileging female desire through scenarios considered taboo in mainstream pornography—cunnilingus, male bisexuality, and women wearing strap-ons—Creech offers a reading of Joy’s two films that showcases the female body and female desire for the feminist connoisseur. Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick takes bodies from the dark room of pornographic film production to the front seats of theatrical displays. In “Orientalized Bodies at Work: Cultural Zaniness in Berlin’s Sayonara Tokyo Revue,” Fitzpatrick examines Sayonara Tokyo, a variety review of German, American, and Japanese women traveling to Tokyo for an adventure. Once they arrive “in Japan,” these travelers encounter numerous circus-like Japanese performers, such as an anime-cosplaying yo-yoer and a lederhosenclad yodeler. Fitzpatrick combines Sianne Ngai’s notion of “the zany” with concepts of postmodernism and Orientalism to consider how the aesthetics of the body, movement, and production contribute to Sayonara Tokyo’s dubious handling of Japanese culture and audience responses to it. Here, Fitzpatrick shows, the body of the so-called other, becomes a caricature of an authentic body, albeit a caricature that still may offer up opportunities for racial, gender, and sexual subterfuge. Contrasting Fitzpatrick’s contemporary interventions into Orientalist stereotyping in Germany, Thomas O. Haakenson, in his chapter, “Ai Weiwei’s Body in Berlin,”

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examines something of the inverse, a seemingly authentic and mutually beneficial Sino-Germanic exchange. Specifically, Haakenson focuses on Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei’s three-year artist residency in Berlin and shows that, in departing the capital city, Ai leaves behind an impressive but vexing body of work focusing on refugees. Among Ai Weiwei’s most controversial pieces is a photographic representation of his own body, an image Haakenson suggests is synecdoche for the artist’s practice of substituting himself for the nameless, faceless other bodies—the refugee bodies—that the artist purports to represent. The focus of Haakenson’s essay is thus not Orientalist stereotypes by Germans but rather an artist’s problematic conflation of his body and his artwork, a conflation that reduces and equates the thousands of bodies of the socalled global refugee crisis to the artist’s own body, aesthetically and literally. The last three chapters of How to Make the Body address contemporary, racialized bodies in German contexts as well, but take their points of departure time-based and social-media formats. In “Afrolocken: Natural Hair in German Literature and Media,” Jamele Watkins analyzes the ways in which hair matters—metaphorically and literally— for Afrodeutsche (Black Germans). As Watkins demonstrates, hair is a significant marker of race for Afrodeutsche regardless of gender. The complexity of hair for Black Germans often signifies a negative trait that they need to change, but also a trait that at other times represents an opportunity for self-love, empowerment, community, and acceptance. Watkins focuses on the development of Black German hair vlogs (video blogs) to reveal alternative sites for the creation of a self-loving Black German body. Faye Stewart engages in the contemporary racialized body in German contexts as well, but in her essay, “Poppthority: The Politics of Dr. Bitch Ray’s Bodily Interventions,” Stewart focuses on one body with many names: Dr. Bitch Ray, Dr. Reyhan Şahin, and Lady Bitch Ray (LBR). Stewart examines Dr. Bitch Ray’s academic, activist, and artist identities by studying intersections between the rapper (LBR) and the sociolinguistics scholar (Şahin), explaining the ways in which this singular body gives rise to the hiphop “doctor” and performer known as Dr. Bitch Ray. As Stewart deftly demonstrates, Dr. Bitch Ray’s work collapses distinctions between respectability and vulgarity by sexualizing and racializing the lyrical subject of the “doctor,” endowing this unique performance artist with a special brand of cultural agency. Key to Dr. Bitch Ray’s success, Stewart shows, is the ways in which the artist mobilizes her own sexualized and racialized body to explore how femininity, multiethnicity, and intellectualism trouble accepted narratives about German-Turkish women. Finally, Lucy Ashton addresses the artistic strategies for disrupting seemingly omnipotent regimes of (racialized) surveillance in the volume’s last chapter, “Becoming Invisible/Against Visibility: Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File.” Steyerl’s tactics, Ashton argues, offer opportunities for subverting modes of digital profiling through aesthetic subterfuge—protesting against demands that the contemporary body always be visible and making, in essence, the body “invisible” to modes of quotidian surveillance. A general overview of the essays collected in How to Make the Body show the many ways theories of the body generated in the last decades enable insightful, important rethinkings of German difference, identity, and embodiment n German contexts. But, importantly and productively, the assembled essays might also be read with and again

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each other to show continued points of resistance, irreducible differences, and aporias in thinking about the body that should remain open and active, always forcing questions about how the “other” is constructed. Alison G. Stewart’s essays on Early Modern dildos and the female body, for example, might be contrasted with Sebastian Hieiduschke’s more contemporary focus on the penis in the Körperwelten displays or Creech’s examinations of female-centered pornography to show “just how far” we have come, and just how far we have yet, to go. Similarly, David Ciarlo’s early-twentiethcentury examination of advertising and construction of racialized bodies in-andthrough advertising contrasts with Jamele Watkins’s investigation into private viewings and social media formats in the modern-day subversion of media forms in service of more authentic bodies. And Waktins’s findings, focusing more on individual and private viewership, might themselves be contrasted in productive ways to the possibilities of very public displays and disruptions embodied in Dr. Bitch Ray, as examined in detail in Faye Stewart’s entry in the volume. How to Make the Body refuses to smooth over contrasting readings, gaping disjunctures, open wounds. The volume consciously keeps these disjunctions on the surface. Much like “the body” itself, How to Make the Body is open and porous, hairy and fatty, smelly and slippery, allowing for identity to always be in process and embodying difference as a way of life, something to be embraced rather than removed, eliminated, or hidden. Recognizing the problematic construction of otherness, in comparative terms, that Jarausch and Wenzel outline and detailed above, the essays in How to Make the Body respond with readings of German identity, in all its complexity, by focusing on the constructedness, the “making of ” the German body in various media forms, in various ways, and at various times. The essays collected in How to Make the Body reject the implicit narrative Jarausch and Wenzel outline—a narrative in which difference is often understood in almost static, historical terms—and put forward new ways of understanding “the body” in decidedly German contexts. The essays, taken together, serve as a model for rethinking difference in relation to the (German) body in ways, approaches that focus simultaneously on “identity” as well as “embodiment.” It may be an understatement to suggest that the essays collected in How to Make the Body themselves represent—or perhaps, better yet, embody—innovative and thoughtful ways of how to think through, with, and beyond the German body without ever relegating the body in question either out of sight or out of mind.

1

Arousal, the Bible, and Bruegel’s Codpieces The Male Body in Early Modern Visual Culture1 Alison G. Stewart

The recent headline in Die Welt, “Der Dildo der Äbtissin und die Wutbürger,” linked a religious woman from the Medieval past with sex in a strikingly bold manner. The unlikely linking of abbess with a sex toy becomes more understandable with the subtitle of the article, “Die sieben Todsünden,” for the article addresses an exhibition on the seven deadly sins and prominently illustrates what it calls a “dildo” made of glass.2 Dating from the sixteenth century, the glass phallus was found by archaeologists next to the living area for the abbess of the Convent at Herford in North Rhine-Westphalia, which was dedicated to women from the high nobility. The article asks, did the lady abbess use the glass object as a drinking vessel, as a joke, or as a dildo for the satisfaction of her lust, one of the seven deadly sins? What are we to make of this glass object that mirrors the shape of the male genitals? And could the object have been used in the sixteenth century, the period under consideration in this essay, in the ways suggested above? Do other similar objects exist from the time? These questions are not easily answered because they have been seemingly irrelevant to the study of art history and higher culture, are very private, and uncomfortable ones for many historians. In addition, the literature in art history for Northern Europe has only gradually turned its attention over the past decades to the body in general and to women’s bodies.3 Men’s bodies have gained interest even more 1

2

3

An earlier form of this essay was presented at the German Studies Association Conference, 2015, Washington, DC. Generous funding for that presentation was made possible by the Hixson-Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts and the Woods Travel Fund of the School of Art, Art History and Design at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Available at: http://www.welt.de/geschichte/article141612373/Der-Dildo-der-Aebtissin-und-dieWutbuerger.html (accessed June 23, 2015). Some examples of literature addressing the body, especially for the Italian Renaissance, include (in chronological order): Kathleen Adler and Marcia R. Pointon, The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture since the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Jonathan Sawday, Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Andrea Carlino, John Tedeschi, and Anne Tedeschi, Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago of Press, 2004). Recent publications on men and their bodies include: Sara F. Matthews-Grieco,

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slowly. Admittedly, the discipline of art history during the two centuries separating its beginnings, with Johann Winckelmann (1717–68), and Michel Foucault (1926–84) with his History of Sexuality, has been what Jonathan Weinberg has called “a closeted profession in which the erotic is hidden or displaced.” Weinberg cites Foucault’s work, which he states begins with “an attack on academics who think that raising the issue of sex is necessarily transgressive.”4 Although this subject has recently been addressed considerably more than in the past, there has been a reluctance to address issues relating to sex, the body, and sexual activities until recently, as Weinberg has pointed out, because there is a shyness, what Carolyn Bynum has called a “discomfort,” an “unease,” while “others are made nervous by potency.”5 Modern historians are not alone. This essay explores varied responses to the male body, including the phallus and its sixteenth-century covering, the codpiece, that existed over the past half millennium in the visual arts during which time discomfort coexisted with more neutral or positive representations of the human form. The essay will show that images indicate no monolithic attitude toward the body, clothed or not, in the centuries emerging from the Middle Ages, thereby agreeing with Bynum that a “cacophony of discourses” existed for many aspects of life, including responses to the body.6 Bynum’s linking of more general Medieval attitudes to those of our modern world rings true for the body as well. The visual works explored indicate no linear attitude toward the body. Attitudes toward the body have waxed and waned and like fashion, what was in last year may be out the next. In Early Modern Northern Europe, the nude body appears not to have been represented as often as in Italy, nor has the direct representation of the body’s most intimate areas been included in the visual arts in the North as early or as often as in Italy. In addition, the number of extant images showing the male body explicitly has been vastly reduced because of a variety of factors over the centuries.7 Changing taste, both cultural and personal, has vastly reduced the numbers of such images and altered them to conform to newer taste and approaches. Yet, enough visual art has survived to indicate that such sexual images did exist, how varied attitudes were among people living in earlier centuries, and how similar our attitudes are to theirs. The two case studies presented here are centered in the early to mid-sixteenth century in Northern Europe, where attention was paid to the male body, specifically the male member and its clothing. The first case looks at German prints showing the aroused male within biblical contexts. The second case involves a Netherlandish painting where the codpiece, the most brazen part of male dress, was altered because it

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Cuckoldry, Impotence and Adultery in Europe (15th–17th Century) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014); and Patricia Simons, The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Additional references in Bynum and Foucault, n. 4 and 5. Jonathan Weinberg, “Things are queer,” Art Journal, 55, 4 (1996): 13, cites Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978), 6–7. Carolyn Bynum, “Why all the fuss about the body? A medievalist’s perspective on the body,” Critical Inquiry, 22, 1 (1995): 6. Bynum, “Why all the fuss?,” 7. Reasons for loss or alteration of images over time include changing taste due to what can be called cultural differences, to wars, and to iconoclasm in the sixteenth century.

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drew attention to the male sex. Over time, the codpieces were eliminated to conform to changing taste. Historic attitudes toward the male body and the male sex are revealed through what men wore and how they are shown in artistic representations. Male clothing and changing fashion became lightning rods for what was important in their societies. In the Early Modern period of the sixteenth century, male fashion changed less often than in recent times, but it did change. Tights and padded codpieces, and broad-shouldered doublets, worn by Kings Henry VIII and Francis I, emphasized the large man with wide shoulders and large groin. Within a century, the leggings topped by the padded capsule known as the “codpiece” were replaced by blousy short trousers, and then by long pants. The case studies here demonstrate, through artistic representations, the Renaissance interest in exploration, in particular of the male body, and its various states and appearance including through clothing. In discussing changing taste for representations of the male body, it becomes clear that the male body and how it was shown, clothed or unclothed, articulated varying attitudes, repressed or not, that both coexisted and changed over time. Although the Victorian age has often been seen as the age of repression, this essay points to earlier periods in Early Modern Europe, ones less close in time to us today, that were sometimes—but not always—shy about showing the human form in its natural state. The visual works explored here date to the sixteenth century, earlier than the seventeenth century when Michel Foucault argued that repression actually began.8 Whether viewed synchronically or diachronically, taste and response to the body in works of art were not always the same. Sometimes reactions were strong enough to include outrage because of the directness of the representations of the body.9 The loud responses are the ones that have come down to us most clearly and underscore the body as a contested site.

Arousal in German Print In 1535, Nuremberg’s town council referred in a letter addressed to the Augsburg council to “a most shameful and sinful little book, containing many obscene pictures of unconventional lovemaking” (“ain gannz schenndtlich und lesterlich püechlein, darynnen vyl unzüchtiger gmeel von unordentlicher lieb”). The council wrote that the booklet was “in the possession of ” Hans Guldenmund, one of the town’s publishers of single-leaf woodcuts, broadsheets, and pamphlets, and that Guldenmund had been sent nine copies or examples of the booklet by the Augsburg woodblock cutter Hans

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Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, pt. 1, “We ‘other Victorians,’ ” 3–13, and ch. 1, 17ff., for the seventeenth century. On viewer response and the power of images, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1989), including ch.  12, “Arousal by image.”

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Schwarzenberger.10 Today not one copy of the booklet exists. Landau and Parshall raise the question of whether the Guldenmund-Schwarzenberg booklet may have been a Northern European version of Marcantonio Raimondi’s now infamous I Modi engravings made after drawings by Giulio Romano. The prints show couples engaged in various positions of the sex act and are known today from fragments of engraved copies by the Italian Agostino Veneziano.11 The association of Guldenmund with this case is striking. Active by 1513, Guldenmund worked as a printer and publisher at Nuremberg throughout his life until his death there in 1560.12 It is altogether possible that Guldenmund had initially become familiar with Marcantonio’s I Modi prints through his family connections in Italy with both publishing and trade, coming into contact either with originals or the numerous printed copies of the series. Although Guldenmund is little known outside specialized circles today, he worked in Nuremberg with painters who are better known including Albrecht Dürer, Georg Pencz, and Sebald Beham.13 Guldenmund’s shameful, sinful book showing obscene pictures of unconventional lovemaking will serve as a point of departure for a discussion of Sebald Beham (1500–50), who lived in Nuremberg and Frankfurt and published sexual imagery that pushed the limits of what was deemed acceptable to the authorities. The kind of sexual imagery Beham made was part of a larger group of works that has over time been censored, discarded, destroyed, hidden, not illustrated, and not discussed. As Weinberg stated, art history since its beginnings has been a discipline where the erotic has been “hidden or displaced.” This case is no different. Like Guldenmund, Beham worked in Nuremberg, beginning in the 1510s when he may have been trained in Dürer’s workshop or under his influence. Beham ran into trouble with the council several times, as had Guldenmund and Hieronymus Andreae, the highly talented wood block cutter Dürer favored. Beham’s now well-known “godless painter” hearing of 1525 resulted in his banishment from Nuremberg for most of that year, along with his brother Barthel and with Pencz.14 Beham made a small number of prints, discussed below, that relate both to the larger

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13 14

David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 223 and 225. On the Guldenmund booklet, see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 225–6, and Theodor Hampe, “Der Augsburger Formschneider Hans Schwarzenberger und seine Modelbücher aus den Jahren 1534 und 1535,” Mitteilungen aus dem Germanischen Nationalmuseum, 1909, 59–60 and 84–5. Translation comes from Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 225. “Unordentlicher lieb” can also be translated as unnatural, unusual, or unchaste love; Grimm’s Wörterbuch, vol. 24, col. 1218, definition I, at: http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/?sigle=DWB&mode =Vernetzung&lemid=GU09222, (accessed September 19, 2019). Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 225f. For illustrations of I Modi fragments in the British Museum, see Freedberg, The Power of Images, 364, fig. 168, and Bette Talvacchia, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), ch. 2. Guldenmund’s family included merchants, printers, and artisans in Nuremberg, and one branch of the family worked in the book-printing industry back into the 1470s in Italy. See Ursula Timann, Untersuchungen zu Nürnberger Holzschnitt und Briefmalerei in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Hans Guldenmund und Niclas Meldeman (Münster: Lit, 1993), esp. 79–88. Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 223. See Die gottlosen Maler von Nürnberg. Konvention und Subversion in der Druckgrafik der BehamBrüder, Jürgen Müller and Thomas Schauerte (eds.), exh. cat. (Nuremberg: Edition Imorde/AlbrechtDürer-Haus, Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, 2011), 33–48.

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context of the I Modi prints and to the Guldenmund-Schwarzenberg booklet. That context, mostly lost, emphasized openly sexual images of the body that appear to have departed from earlier imagery. Traditionally, works were suggestive or symbolic in reference to sex and the body. For example, Cranach’s Unequal or Ill-Matched Couple shows a young woman touching an old man’s purse, or bag, placed in front of his genital area and that stands for it.15 Here the connection between the body and costume, namely the purse, is underscored through placement. Beham’s prints with a sexual emphasis include a handful of prints with subjects from the Hebrew Bible that date over the course of his lifetime, from 1526 in Nuremberg through the 1540s in Frankfurt. This small number of existing prints represents the tip of a larger group of works, now lost. Whether that group was ant- or iceberg-sized, their diminished numbers undoubtedly result from changing social and religious norms, including attitudes and taste. Rather than being understood as examples of outrageous, outsider art for their time, Beham’s sexual imagery appears to have been more mainstream than has been acknowledged to date. Laurinda Dixon’s work supports such an understanding. She has argued for Hieronymus Bosch that twentiethcentury’s attitudes toward “nudity and sexuality” account for art history’s “expung[ing] . . . allusions to sex and the appearance of genitalia . . . today,” thereby altering the historical record of the sixteenth century.16 Similarly, for Italy and the circle of Raphael, James Grantham Turner has argued that eroticism and the sexual imagination were not the exception, side show, or comic relief. Rather, such imagery, to use his words, “drove the graphic invention of antique-inspired artists in the sphere of Raphael” even before I Modi dating c. 1524.17 Such erotic imagery where the male body became showcased became a focus of the exhibition Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, which traveled from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2008 to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. That show included Marcantonio’s engraving made before 1525, that depicts a woman holding a dildo, perhaps of glass, in what exists today as a unique impression in Stockholm. That so few sexual prints exist today indicates that they were censored, hidden, or discarded due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.18

15

16 17

18

Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers: A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art (New York: Abaris, 1977), especially 80–3. Laurinda Dixon, Bosch (New York: Abrams, 2003), 230. James Grantham Turner, “Invention and sexuality in the Raphael Workshop: Before the Modi,” Art History, 36, 1 (2013): 73. See also his more recent, Eros Visible: Art, Sexuality and Antiquity in Renaissance Italy (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale, 2017). Linda Wolk-Simon, “ ‘Rapture to the greedy eyes’: Profane love in the Renaissance,” in Andrea Bayer (ed.), Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), 42–58. Wolk-Simon discusses glass dildos known as “parsnips of Murano,” which Marcantonio Raimondi showed in the engraving, Woman with a Dildo; illustrated in Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 298, fig. 313. She accounts for the small numbers of such images due to “dozens of puritanical purges.” Fragments of seventeenth-century glass dildos from England have been excavated recently during a building expansion of the National Gallery, London; Wolk-Simon, “Rapture,” 57 n. 88. For nuns using glass dildos, see Pietro Aretino, Dialogues, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Marsilio, 1971), 21–43, where the glass is called “glass fruits made in Murano.” See also Patricia Simons, “The cultural history of ‘Seigneur Dildoe,’ ” in Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy. Practice, Performance, Perversion, Punishment (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 77–91.

16

How to Make the Body

Turner’s essay in the Art and Love exhibition catalogue discusses various Italian contributions to what he calls “this remarkable ‘sex-positive’ moment in the High Renaissance.”19 Especially noteworthy are Correggio’s Venus, Satyr, and Cupid painting on canvas from c. 1524 and Gian Giacomo Caraglio’s engraving of 1527 copying Correggio’s painting, from his Loves of the Gods series.20 Turner calls both the I Modi series by Marcantonio and Caraglio’s Loves of the Gods, “laboratories of mainstream taste rather than pornographic sideshows,” an understanding that may well be applicable to the North and the prints discussed here (Figure 1.1).21 Although these Italian images emphasize the gods and subjects from antiquity, Beham’s images of libidinous males appear within the context of the Bible, specifically the Old Testament. These prints include Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, the Feast of Herod, Amnon and Tamar, and one engraving that can be seen to fit loosely within this biblical grouping, Death and the Lascivious Couple. The Feast of Herod (Pauli 832), the only woodcut in the group, dates c. 1530–5, during the early years after Beham left Nuremberg and settled in Frankfurt am Main.22 The biblical story is placed in the background. At upper left, Herod and his wife Herodias sit beneath the arched portico of a domed building in the scene known as the banquet of Herod.23 Salome, Herodias’s daughter, approaches the steps, at right, with the head of John the Baptist on a platter that will soon be offered to Herodias. The beheading of John has just taken place at upper center, an act instigated by Herodias. In the foreground elegantly attired couples dance and play cards. Death, located left of center, holds an hourglass and a woman’s elegant scarf as a man dressed in fool’s costume plays a viol. A boating party with nude swimmers fills the center of a landscape at upper right. An aroused man stands in the water and reaches or lunges toward one of the women nearby. His erection can be seen when the print is viewed closely in the early, rare impression in the British Museum; it is missing in most impressions, or prints pulled from the wood block.24 As Miriam Kirch has pointed out, it is the ocular attraction of

19 20

21

22

23

24

James Grantham Turner, “Profane love: The challenge of sexuality,” in Bayer (ed.), Art and Love, 178. For Correggio’s Venus and Cupid with a Satyr, oil on canvas, c. 1524–5, in the Louvre, see Bayer (ed.), Art and Love, 183 fig. 81. Turner, “Profane love,” 183. Whether the Italian idea of “variety” (varietà) that Turner discusses also became an ideal north of the Alps is a question that I can only raise here. Similarly, the “arousal model” that Turner discusses and that he argues “in effect weakened the distinction between the supposedly ‘dishonorable’ engraving [by Caraglio] and the prestigious painting” [by Correggio] might be considered for the German counterparts by Beham. Pauli numbers in this essay refer to the still excellent catalogue of Beham prints, Gustav Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham. Ein kritisches Verzeichnis seiner Kupferstiche, Radierungen und Holzschnitte (1901, 1911 Nachträge, 1927 Ergänzungen) (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1974). Another impression of the Feast of Herod print can be found in the Popular Imagery Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Box 16, no. 20 (hand-colored; censored) and no. 21. The story of Salome (Mark VI: 21–8) is centered around John the Baptist, the last in the line of Jewish prophets and the link between the Old and New Testaments. The Feast of Herod, printed from two wood blocks, is medium-sized at 15 x 21 in (390 x 535 mm). See the British Museum’s website for the early impression. Later impressions, hand-colored, can be found in Berlin’s print collection and in the Albrecht Dürer-Haus, Nuremberg. Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, 832, lists no impressions of the print. “Copies” in art history indicates a deliberate reproduction of another work of art. Beham’s Feast of Herod woodcut, published at Nuremberg by Albrecht Glockendon, bears an imperial privilege at upper left in the first state in the British Museum.

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Figure 1.1 Giovanni Jacopo Caraglio, Jupiter and Antiope, from the series, Loves of the Gods, no. 6, engraving, state II, 1527, 8.3 × 5.3 in (21.1 × 13.5 cm), plate, inv. no. 6749. Courtesy of SzépművészetiMúzeum/Museum of Fine Arts, 2021.

the bathing women that interests this man and that places perspective on the main subject that is placed in the background.25 Herod’s lust for Salome is mirrored, therefore, in the body of the male swimmer. Most of Beham’s prints showing aroused biblical men are small engravings and they begin with his Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife from a few years earlier (Figure 1.2; Pauli 14). Signed with Beham’s Nuremberg monogram at right, HSP, and dated 1526, the print is small enough to hold in the palm of one hand and measures 2 in (5.2 cm) in diameter. The print shows an aggressive woman, known in the literature as Potiphar’s wife, who

25

Miriam Hall Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night’: An erotic engraving by Sebald Beham in context” (MA thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1998), 83–4, who aptly states: “It is within the viewer and within the real world that the message has value.” The excited man underscores the role of attraction and lust for the biblical subject represented.

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How to Make the Body

Figure 1.2 Sebald Beham, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, engraving, 1526, 2 × 2 in (5.2 × 5.2 cm), sheet, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, inv. no. 1155, PURL http:// kk.haum-bs.de/?id=h-s-beham-ab3-0013.

within a bedroom setting is shown partially dressed and attempts to stop a fleeing man. With pillow at right and curtain above, she propels herself over the bed; the inscription at top, “Ioseph,” identifies the man who leaves this woman; her undraped breasts and pudenda underscore her desire for him. Joseph’s very noticeably aroused state underscores his body’s reaction to her even as he flees the scene. An impression of the print in Vienna emphasizes his arousal through the addition of pale pink wash to the tip of his erect member.26 Nearly twenty years later, Beham returned to the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, but this time he shows both individuals without clothing, nude in Renaissance fashion.27 Potiphar’s wife, known as Zuleika in the Islamic tradition and Saphira in medieval Europe, holds on to Potiphar’s cloak as she did in the earlier engraving. But here Joseph flees quickly and without second thoughts.28 Here Potiphar’s body does not betray him, as in the earlier engraving. The Latin inscription in the tablet below underscores his intention to leave, “Joseph, the faithful servant and subduer of lust.”29 The biblical source, Genesis 39: 7–20, tells the story of Potiphar, the captain of the pharaoh’s guard, who bought Joseph and made him steward of his household. When Potiphar’s wife insisted that Joseph lie with her, he fled, leaving his cloak behind in her hands, a detail Beham included in each of these prints. To her husband she accused Joseph of trying to rape her and used his cloak as evidence. Joseph was then imprisoned. Beham again emphasizes her lustful intentions in this later engraving through her nakedness, her pained facial expression indicating lust, and by her parted legs and revealed vulva.30 The bedroom setting is again emphasized as is Joseph’s athletic body

26 27 28 29 30

For the impression with added color, see state II, Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, 14, Albertina, Vienna. On Potiphar’s wife, see the British Museum’s website on Beham’s print. Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night,’ ” ch. 3, esp. 88. British Museum, registration number 1867,0413.680 for Beham’s engraving of 1544. On the lustful look, see fn. 28.

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shown fleeing in profile. The tall rectangular format of this engraving from 1544 offers the scene as an unfolding narrative event to the viewer. By comparison, in the earlier print, the small size and round shape suggest viewing up close, even voyeuristically, through a window or keyhole into a private scene, the round form recalls stained glass roundels that filled windows of the time. The scene is excerpted from the story and becomes more iconic than narrative.31 Yet, in both engravings, Joseph’s body and his genitalia are displayed for the viewer’s perusal and delectation. Both of Beham’s prints depart from contemporary representations of the subject of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife where the figures are shown clothed.32 Beham’s approach appears to be an anomaly among Northern prints of the time for Joseph’s nudity, but it was copied several times including by Dutch engraver, Allaert Claesz (active 1520–55), possibly active in Utrecht, who altered Beham’s round composition into a lozenge shape, reversing the composition placing Joseph at right. Claesz. added a scroll at top and flourishes along the sides. Potiphar’s wife is still emphasized although her clothing covers, rather than reveals, her genital area. Joseph flees less forcefully, and he is no longer aroused. He thereby leaves without the response shown in Beham’s print. Claesz.’s work, believed to date between 1526 and 1534 and known in only a few impressions, constitutes a very early copy of Beham’s composition, one made within only a few years of its making.33 The copy suggests wide distribution of Beham’s small print to the Netherlands and an audience interested in the subject, but with toned down sexuality and less exposure of the male sex.34 The gender of the aggressor is now male in Beham’s Amnon and Tamar (Figure 1.3; Pauli 16), a small- to medium-sized engraving measuring 5.6 in (7.4 cm) in height. It is signed at bottom with the HSB monogram Beham used between 1531 and 1550 after his move to Frankfurt. The inscription directly above the monogram derives from 2 Samuel 13: 6–13, and refers to the rape by David’s eldest son Amnon of his half-sister Tamar. The subject is unusual for the time; Beham makes clear the outcome of Tamar’s attempt to fend off Amnon through his powerful body, his superior position over Tamar, and his erect member shown in profile. Beham focuses on Amnon’s naked violence and he neither subtly hints at what will transpire (as in a Medieval Bible Moralisée from c. 1240) nor includes a fuller bedroom setting (as painted by the Flemish

31

32

33

34

Her facial expression, which looks like discomfort, appears to indicate lust. Aretino similarly compares the expression of a copulating man with one on the Laocöon; Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night,’” 54. For contemporary representations showing the figures clothed, see printed examples dating 1512 to 1546 by Lucas van Leyden, Marcantonio Raimondi, Heinrich Aldegrever, and Georg Pencz. Although they all feature bed, curtain, pillows, and the grabbing-the-cloak gesture, only Pencz’s engraving, signed and dated “PG 1546” at lower right, shows Potiphar’s wife partially undressed, with bodice unlaced. See the British Museum’s website for these prints. F. W. H. Hollstein, Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, c. 1450–1700, vol. 4 (Amsterdam: Hertzberger, 1949), 106, no. 19 (not illustrated); and the British Museum’s database under Allaert Claesz, with bibliography. Brooks Rich, curator at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, is working on Monogrammist AC, who has been identified in the past with Claesz, but Rich has shown a more complex situation. See his, “The burin, the blade, and the paper’s edge: Early sixteenth-century engraved scabbard designs by Monogrammist AC,” in Debra Cashion, Henry Luttikhuizen, and Ashley West (eds.), The Primacy of the Image in Northern European Art, 1400–1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver (Boston, MA, and Leiden: Brill, 2017), 347–61. Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, 14, cites three copies of Beham’s composition of 1526, all in reverse.

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How to Make the Body

Figure 1.3 Sebald Beham, Amnon and Tamar, c. 1531–50, 1.3 × 2.8 in (3.5 × 7.2 cm), Kunsthalle Bremen—Der Kunstverein in Bremen, Department of Prints and Drawings, inv. no. 12139. Photo: Karen Blindow.

Jan van Dornicke around 1520, and as engraved by Heinrich Aldegrever in 1540), nor does he include a well-appointed room turned upside down from a distance (as in the print designed by Maerten van Heemskerck and engraved by Philips Galle in 1559).35 Beham’s limited setting includes bed and curtain, as in Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. Beham’s print offers a close-up view focused on the two protagonists. His two large figures dominate the print. Beham showcases his ability to render two nude bodies convincingly, especially Amnon’s muscles and prominent member, both appropriate to the subject and very much meant to be seen. The general style is not Beham’s, despite the inclusion of his monogram, and appears to be that of another artist, perhaps an Italian whose style Beham followed. Beham was undoubtedly familiar with Italian models through copies made as engraved and woodcut prints on paper, works that were more affordable than paintings and that traveled easily between Italy and the North; at the time, as many impressions were printed to meet the expected demand for them. Italian works that could have inspired Beham’s Amnon print include Giulio Romano’s Jupiter Seducing Olympia fresco painted c. 1528, in the Palazzo del Tè in Mantua, and Caraglio’s Jupiter and Antiope engraving (Figure 1.1). Although these images feature gods, related images featuring human men could have also provided visual fodder for Beham’s print. The inscription on the bed canopy at upper left in Beham’s print has been altered, according to Pauli whose catalogue remains the standard work for the artist’s prints. 35

For the images of Amnon and Tamar, see Artstor. Dornicke’s painting is in the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.

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The Bremen impression, excellent in quality, with the upper corners replaced reads, “Amnon evil thoughts” (“A. MAN.BÖS.GEDANCKEN”). However, the original bears a slightly, but significantly altered text: “Look without evil thoughts” (“SCHAU . AN . BÖS GEDANCKEN”) that advises the viewer against thinking, let alone acting on evil thoughts.36 The Dutch engraver Claesz. copied the print in reverse and added drapery to cover Amnon and Tamar’s nakedness, as he had in his copy of Beham’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. The Latin inscription at the bottom of Beham’s Amnon and Tamar print, “HAEC SPECTANS NIL TVRPE COGITA,” repeats the German inscription’s warning to “Look without evil thoughts,”37 here underscoring Ammon’s excitement and the rape to come. The most interesting and at the same time most disturbing print in this group of Old Testament-related prints showing an aroused male body is Beham’s Death and the Lascivious Couple dated 1529 (Figure 1.4; Pauli 153), an engraving Beham signed and dated at upper left. A young woman with long flowing hair looks directly into the eyes of her young male companion and she bears the same pained expression indicating lust seen in the later Joseph and Potiphar composition. Beham humorously plays with the location of the hands in this composition. The woman places one hand on either her companion’s shoulder at right or on his head, and with the other hand grasps his penis. The man, in turn, touches her genitals and places his other hand, at right, on the head of a boy who plays with a sack of coins. A partially skinned figure of Death, behind the boy, encourages the couple who does not seem to see him.38 Death touches the young man’s hair or shoulder and one of his hips, nudging him toward his female mate. Death’s reaction to the couple is clear, even if not immediately noticed—his erect member is visible directly above the child’s head. Death embodies lust, one of the seven deadly sins, and his arousal points to the idea that the sexually transmitted disease of syphilis was known to kill at the time Beham made his print.39 Beham appears to have updated traditional sin iconography with the fairly new idea of contagion, thereby making the male body the center of both lust and disease. At the same time, Beham underscores the erotic tension of the scene by making touch ambiguous, who touches the man—she or Death—and where exactly—on the shoulder or head. The male body is touched from top and bottom, intimately yet ambiguously, as if Beham wished here

36

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39

Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, 16, lists the Bremen impression with the altered inscription and replaced upper corners, and two impressions with the original inscription. For an excellent impression, with the lower-left corner repaired, see the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, Ec.N-1651. Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night,’ ” 84–5, discusses the inscriptions on the Amnon print and cites Adolf Rosenberg, Sebald und Barthel Beham. Zwei Maler der Deutschen Renaissance (Leipzig, 1875), 67, that the print wounded moral feelings. Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night,’ ” 84, discusses the print and Death’s erection caused by his viewing the couple’s foreplay. For the connection between syphilis and sex in the sixteenth century, beginning 1502 with a printing in Venice, see Birgit Ulrike Münch, “Das Männerbad, der Jabacher Altar und die große Angst vor den frantzosen. Albrecht Dürers vielschichtige Klagen über die Syphilis,” in Birgit Ulrike Münch, Andreas Tacke, and Markwart Herzog (eds.), Die Klage des Künstlers (Petersberg: Imhof, 2015), 24–44, esp. 35; and Claudia Stein, Negotiating the French Pox in Early Modern Germany (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009). See also Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger Kenneth French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

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How to Make the Body

Figure 1.4 Sebald Beham, Death and the Lascivious Couple, engraving, 1529, 3.2 × 4.9 in (8.2 × 4.9 cm), sheet, Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, inv. no. 1309, PURL http://kk.haum-bs.de/?id=h-s-beham-ab3-0155.

to expand on Hans Baldung’s contemporary and earlier representations of Death and the Maiden.40 As in the Ammon and Tamar, Beham added an inscription to Death and the Lascivious Couple, at left, on a placard placed on its side. It reads: “HO [for Horace]: MORS VLTIMA LINEA RERVM” or “Death is the line that marks the end of all.” This passage, well known by 1529, ended a letter that the ancient Roman lyric satirist, 40

On Baldung’s Death and the Maiden paintings and prints, see Bodo Brinkmann, Hexenlust und Sündenfall: die seltsamen Phantasien des Hans Baldung Grien/Witches’ Lust and the Fall of Man: The Strange Fantasies of Hans Baldung Grien, exh. cat., Städel Museum (Petersberg: Imhof, 2007). Hans Baldung Grien: heilig/unheilig, ed. Holger Jacob-Friesen, exh. cat., Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (Berlin and Munich: Deuscher Kunstverlag, 2019).

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Horace, addressed in his Epistles to “good Quinctius” (Book 1, Epistle 16, line 7). The line underscores the memento-mori associations of the print and underscores the transitory nature of time, that death comes to us all. At the same time, the inscription may have offered a moralizing gloss warning against the deadly and sinful nature of sex and lust. Beham underscores the ancient reference through the man’s contrapposto stance, his weight shifted toward his female companion, and through his straight facial profile, both characteristics of ancient Greek and Roman art. Beham may have added this inscription for reasons best understood within the larger historical context. Other engravers of the time supplied similar inscriptions after Marcantonio Raimondi engraved his sixteen prints of the I Modi series in 1524 based on designs by Giulio Romano, with copies after the lost originals seen on the British Museum’s website. According to the contemporary Italian author and satirist Pietro Aretino, Marcantonio was imprisoned, the engravings were immediately “suppressed, and the plates destroyed by agents of the outraged Pope [Clement VII].”41 But some prints were disseminated and copied several times including, perhaps, nearly a decade later at Nuremberg by Guldenmund.42 The I Modi must have included at least fourteen engravings with multiple copulating couples, ordinary people, not gods or goddesses, who according to Andrea Bayer, were “engaged in a fulsome variety of sexual acrobatics” where the naked male body takes the lead.43 The series has been called “Scandalous, instantly famous, and swiftly censored” by the Pope and his irate minions in Rome . . .”44 Objections to these prints rested, in part, in their everyday nature, that they were, according to Bayer, “patently quotidian (and therefore, in the eyes of sixteenth-century guardians of public morality and decorum, objectionable).”45 Objections to these prints also resided in the contemporary attitude of church and clergy that sex for ordinary people was undesirable in itself unless it was intended for procreation, not pleasure. When the Loves of the Gods series was issued in 1527, the protagonists became the gods whose activities filled classical myths, Roman poetry by Ovid, and Renaissance imagery. Many scholars believe the inclusion of the gods was intended to prevent criticism of the kind I Modi received, with the humanistic gloss—both inscription and naked male and female bodies—justifying the eroticism of the mythological narrative. Beham’s Death and the Lascivious Couple of 1529 offers what has been called a similar “patina of decorum” that allowed its eroticism to be understood within a humanist narrative supplied through the inscription.46 When was it acceptable to show the sex act and sex body parts without a religious or mythological gloss? And what were the cultural influences that brought about Beham’s imagery? These questions can be addressed by looking at other prints by Beham and his contemporaries. By including the inscription in Death and the Lascivious

41 42 43 44 45 46

Bayer (ed.), Art and Love, 54. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 201. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 205. Ibid., 205, 206 n. 2.

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How to Make the Body

Couple and in Amnon and Tamar, Beham may have attempted to avoid conflict with the authorities, as did the publisher of the Loves of the Gods series, Baviera, in 1525. As the issuer of his prints, Beham did what was necessary to get his sexual engravings emphasizing the male aroused body to his public, including through the addition of a moralizing gloss. Beham had enough trouble with the authorities in the years following 1525 when he still lived in Nuremberg where he had come before the town council and been banished for three-quarters of that year for questioning both the town council’s authority and core religious beliefs. He was dubbed by contemporaries a “godless painter.”47 Beham’s early Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife dated 1526 is contemporary with the Italian backlash to I Modi. Beham made his Death and the Lascivious Couple print of 1529 more socially acceptable (soon after Beham fled Nuremberg in 1528) through the addition of a quotation from an ancient source, thereby adding a humanist gloss. At least a dozen impressions have survived of this engraving,48 both good impressions and a late one from the visibly worn copper plate; plates become thinner and print lighter after repeated inking and printings between rollers under great pressure.49 Beham made Death and the Lascivious Couple acceptable through the humanist quotation and through its reference to Old Testament representations of Adam and Eve. Beham expanded and eroticized compositions of the first couple, in particular the engraving by his brother Barthel from 1525–7, a copper plate Sebald inherited after Barthel died in 1540. Sebald’s engraving, dated 1543 (Pauli 7), copies Barthel’s print in full and employs a life-size skeleton that is firmly planted at the center between the two figures, like a tree, specifically the tree of knowledge. A snake runs through the skeleton’s body and bites the apple both figures hold. As in Sebald’s Death and the Lascivious Couple, both man and woman are culpable with the life-size figure of Death both present and egging them on. Sebald’s Eve covers her “shame” with one hand, while the ordinary man in the Lascivious Couple does that for her through touch. Eve’s somewhat pained facial expression indicating lust here repeats with less intensity that of her Lascivious counterpart. In both prints, the consequences of the Fall and sex unfold in Christian terms: original sin and death, with the biblically based snake and apple replaced in the Lascivious Couple by an eroticized skeleton and bag of coins. The print secularizes and modernizes Adam and Eve and emphasizes Death as a living, human, male presence, with skin and phallus. The coins in the sack at lower right may point to the idea that capital and sex are equally corruptible and form a deadly combination. In addition to such biblical inspiration in visual form, Beham appears to have been inspired for Death’s erect member by Italian engravings with mythological subjects that were available by 1520 in the North. Such prints include Marco Dente’s engraving of a Nymph and Satyr dating from c. 1516 after a design by Raphael, and by copies of it

47 48 49

See Die gottlosen Maler von Nürnberg. Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, p. 162. An engraving plate can produce hundreds of good impressions, but the soft copper becomes thinner with repeated passes between the rollers of the intaglio press.

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in Northern Europe such as an engraving by the Master of the Snail (Northern?) from c. 1520–5.50 These models offer humans with animal features, especially satyrs, who secretly observe a bathing or sleeping woman. Master IB with the Bird’s Priapus and Lotis engraving features Priapus, whose pointed ears can be seen at center, his erect member extending out from and beneath his draped clothing, peeking under the drape placed across Lotis’s lap; a donkey brays loudly at upper left.51 These two engravings by unnamed masters catered to both the fashion for Italian art and what has been called the “niche market for explicitly erotic pictures that flourished throughout Europe.”52 That market may have first appeared in Italy, but it soon continued in Germany north of the Alps.

Similar Interests in the Male Body Other aspects of early sixteenth-century culture beyond Italian prints and humanist texts underscored the interest in Beham’s sexualized Old Testament prints. Interest in the body and its workings can be seen in other visual works that have been little studied in art history. Leonardo’s drawing of a copulating man and woman, from c. 1493, indicates he explored sexual union from procreative and anatomical perspectives.53 And Italian majolica plates and pitchers used the male organ as a central design element. In Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy, Sara Matthews-Grieco includes images of phalli and testes that decorate plates and pitchers. A plate from 1536 shows a man’s face and neck in profile, with ear and hair covered with dozens of phalli. A pitcher from the mid sixteenth century includes a winged phallus hung with a bell and bird’s feet, rabbit’s ears and tail.54 This winged, walking phallus is similar to ancient Roman tintinnabula which, adorned with bells, amount to phallic wind chimes. The Romans also decorated jewelry and whistles made of metal and stone with phallic imagery visible most everywhere in their culture.55 The male body’s most intimate part served as a good luck charm, one that appears to have been revived in the sixteenth century.

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52 53

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For an illustration of the Master of the Snail’s engraving, and Marco Dente da Ravenna’s, see Sara F. Matthews-Grieco (ed.), Erotic Cultures of Renaissance Italy (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 30, figs. 1.2c and 1.2a, 29. She identifies this master as possibly Northern (as “Northern?”) and states that little is known about him. An impression of the engraving by Master IB with the Bird is found in the print room of the Louvre, Paris, and is labeled Bartsch, vol. 13, p. 247, no. 6. Matthews-Grieco, Erotic Cultures, 29. For Leonardo’s text and illustration, and discussion of images taken of male and female genitals during coitus, see, Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, Ida Sabelis, and Eduard Mooyaart, “Magnetic resonance imaging of male and female genitals during coitus and female sexual arousal,” BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal), 319 (1999), available at: https://doi.org/10.1136/ bmj.319.7225.1596 (accessed February 1, 2021). For the maiolica plate and pitcher, see Matthews-Grieco, Erotic Cultures, color pls. 4 and 14. For majolica jars and tintinnabulum, see Catherine Hess, “Pleasure, shame and healing: Erotic imagery on maiolica drug jars,” Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy, 13–25. Simons, “ ‘Seigneur Dildoe,’ ” 79. The Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Trier, exhibits a variety of phallic metal objects in its permanent collection that include earrings and necklace pendants.

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More popular aspects of culture offer potentially rich avenues of study that point to broader social networks and understandings of the body and male anatomy, which go well beyond the images discussed here. Badges including ones with winged and crowned phalli with legs, tails, and bells appear to draw on ideas going back to the Romans and the tintinnabula. The round bells allude to ones used in falconry, or birding, and also served as references to testicles in Italian.56 Similarly, the word “cock” (“Vogel” and “Schwanz”) functioned in sixteenth-century German for “bird,” “tail,” and the male member, as it does today in both German and English. Badges worn on the body, including a walking phallus pushing a wheelbarrow full of phalli from Zeeland in the fifteenth century, and three walking phalli crowned with a vulva, found in Bruges, indicate that the phallus was not taboo in the century before Beham’s prints appeared in northern Europe.57 Other phallic precursors of Beham’s prints in the North include German glass drinking vessels in the shape of the male genitalia that could either stand upright or lie down on a flat surface.58 Such glass phalli are not normally displayed in museums. Rather, they are kept in their storage areas, including ones at Trier and Munich.59 These glass vessels could hold fluids that, when drunk, could mimic oral sex.60 Although how the glass phalli were used is unknown, they are fragile enough to suggest that their use

56

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58 59

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Allen J. Grieco, “From roosters to cocks: Italian Renaissance fowl and sexuality,” in Matthews-Grieco, Erotic Cultures, 97, 99. For illustrations of walking phalli and vulvae, see Simons, Sex of Men, fig. 7, and 10–12. See also at: http://www.kunera.nl/default.aspx (accessed September 19, 2019) and Hartmut Kühne, Carina Brumme, and Helena Koenigsmarková, Jungfrauen, Engel, Phallustiere. Die Sammlung mittelalterlicher französischer Pilgerzeichen des Kunstgewerbemuseums in Prag und des Nationalmuseums Prag (Berlin: Lukas Verlag and Kunstgewerbemuseum Prag, 2012). Willy Piron’s presentation, “The function of late medieval sexual badges. Apotropaic, farcical, moral or . . .?,” Renaissance Society of America Conference, New York, 2014, offered a review of different theories on the badges and concludes that their meaning remains speculative. See also Willy Piron, “Der Ertrag aus 30 Jahren niederländischer Pilgerzeichenforschung,” in Klaus Herbers and Hartmut Kühne (ed.), Pilgerzeichen—‘Pilgerstraßen’ (Tübingen: Günter Narr, 2013), 187–94, and essays in that volume. See also Michael Lewis, Saints and Their Badges: Saints’ Lives and Medieval Pilgrims Badges (Cogeshall: Greenlight Publishing, 2014). Simons, Sex of Men, 215, fig. 44. Drinking vessels in the shape of a phallus are found in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Trier, and in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, in storage. I am grateful to the curators Dr. Peter Seewaldt and Dr. Monika Schwommers, for showing me examples of these fragile glass drinking vessels. See Sabine Faust, Peter Seewaldt, and Monika Weidner, Erotische Kunstwerke im Rheinischen Landesmuseum Trier, Funde und Ausgrabungen im Bezirk Trier, vol. 39 (Trier: Landesmuseum, 2007), 54–7, nos. 30–5, for earrings, pendants, drinking glasses, and more, and for Roman representations of sex scenes, phalli, including enormous ones, flying phalli with wings and bells known as tintinnabula, and the fica or female external sex organs. These visual works often took the form of oil lamps and pendants. The authors state they served to ward off the “evil eye” (böse Blick) and had apotropaic functions. Included also are the lying and standing glass drinking vessels in the shape of phalli that served as jokes (Scherze) and/or were used in bordellos. Oil lamps show couples involved in sexual intercourse, clay phalli of unusually large size, and numerous metal pendants (earrings, necklaces, door-jamb decorations) support the view stated in the Altes Museum in Berlin’s side-room exhibit, titled the “Garten der Lüste,” that “eroticism and sexuality were present in all areas of ancient life” in the form of the phallus. However, even before the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans, related images—of lovers—were made into terracotta forms, as seen in an example from Babylon dating to 1,000–2,000 bce . Simons, Sex of Men, 215f.

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as sex toys should be excluded.61 During the sixteenth century, the shape and variety of drinking vessels increased to include animals such as owls and deer, pointing to the possibility that the phallic vessels may have been similarly part of this expanding vocabulary of vessels and were used for drinking games and rituals. What their purpose was and whether they might have been used by the abbess at Kloster Dalheim discussed at the beginning of this essay must await further study. Was Northern European art and culture so totally different from that of ancient Greece and Rome and the Italian Renaissance that such phallic imagery was totally absent from it? The ordinary works just seen, such as the badges of lead tin alloy and glass drinking vessels, point to a local tradition of sexual imagery that complemented the southern tradition revived during the sixteenth century. The badges with phalli and vulvae are beginning to be studied with greater seriousness.62 Also worthy of study are the increasingly imaginative drinking vessels made from glass and other materials during the sixteenth century, objects that are often thin and fragile, and most of which were probably shattered or discarded in cisterns and cesspits, making them lost to posterity.63 Although the apotropaic function is possible for these drinking vessels, the joke or Scherz possibilities need also to be explored in connection with carnival plays (Fastnachtspiele) and other contemporary literature, including ancient Greek and Roman sources that when revived furthered the idea that laughter was apotropaic, that it had the power to avert bad luck and the evil eye. Fertility, reproduction, warding off evil, ensuring luck, these are all possible associations for these visual works emphasizing the male member.64 In fact, the male member had a much broader cultural significance and inclusion in the visual arts of the past than has been broadly recognized. Mels van Driel, a urologist and sexologist at the Groningen University Medical Centre, discussed the male organ and various aspects of it throughout time in his book, Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis. Van Driel points to Leonardo da Vinci’s correction of the medieval idea that accumulated air produces an erection. After working with hanged criminals, Leonardo concluded that it was the accumulation of blood that produced one. Still, the mystery of procreation remained unexplained for Leonardo who believed seminal fluid came straight from the brain, drawing on ideas going back to Hippocrates and Aristotle.65 The discussion of the male member and how it functioned since antiquity has continued in Patricia Simons’ recent book The Sex of Men in Premodern Europe: A Cultural History. She argues that the best model for early modern masculine anatomy was “projection,” which she applies to male arousal, centuries before Freud took over 61 62

63

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On dildoes, nuns, and Aretino’s verses, see Simons, “ ‘Seigneur Dildoe,’ ” 79–80. See Kunera database at: http://www.kunera.nl/kunerapage.aspx?From=Default (accessed September 19, 2019). The Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich, recently displayed such varied sixteenth-century drinking vessels. On ancient sources and laughter, including for sexual acrobatics, see the publications of John R. Clarke, above, especially his Looking at Lovemaking: Construction of Sexuality in Roman Art, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998), and Looking at Laughter: Humor, Power, and Transgression in Roman Visual Culture, 100 B.C.–A.D. 250 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). On laughter and sexuality, see the goddess Baubo in Clarke’s writings. Mels van Driel, Manhood: The Rise and Fall of the Penis (London: Reaktion, 2011), 40, 13.

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the phallic concept for the twentieth century. Simons calls the sixteenth century in Italy the neglected realm of “semenotics.”66 She casts a broad network of sources of the kind proposed above for what she calls “social iconography” that includes cultural works both elite and popular, from both the Latinate and vernacular areas, which include “ribald word play and creatures on secular badges.” She sees in these works elements that have been adapted, revived, or continued from antiquity and what she calls a “mutual feedback loop and reinforcement between imagery and its context,”67 that continues native traditions that existed alongside revivals from the ancient past. Together they created an interesting and varied visual context for such works, an approach that mirrors mine here. Laurinda Dixon has similarly argued for the inclusion of everyday objects like the pilgrimage badges in the study of Northern Renaissance art. For her “These items of inexpensive ornament, worn pinned to hats and cloaks for all to see, suggest that Bosch’s audience was less puritanical than we are today when confronted with candid visual representations of sexual subjects.”68 To return to Beham’s Old Testament prints that show male arousal, they should be understood within the broader context of contemporary culture that includes both the everyday (badges, language, and writings of the time), along with humanist ideas and Italian prints centered in the male body. The prints discussed above share an emphasis on the male sex that was part of the broader trend of Renaissance exploration of life and the world.

Bruegel’s Codpieces Male clothing from the Renaissance in Northern Europe offers a similar emphasis on the male body in visual representations, but here clothing and the codpiece are the focus. Visual images and aspects of them have often been changed to adapt to the changing taste of individuals or to new times. Such changes include obliterating details deemed too sexual, as was the case with some engravings, which resulted in reworking copper plates to make them usable again. Paintings also came under scrutiny for the fashion shown as taste and morals changed over the centuries. Pieter Bruegel’s Wedding Dance painting (Figure 1.5) dated 1566, in the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA), originally sported tights topped by large codpieces worn by the three male figures (two dancers, one piper) at the bottom of the painting. The painting displays a large number of men and women dancing and celebrating out of doors, emphasizing two couples in the

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Simons, Sex of Men, 2 and 100. The use of long, thin objects (e.g., pipes), sack, and eggs for men and round forms (bottles, nest, hole, slit) for women goes back to the late Middle Ages in Germany, as seen especially in carnival plays. See Henry Kratz, “Über den Wortschatz der Erotik im Spätmittlehochdeutschen und Frühhochdeutschen,” 2 vols (unpublished PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1949), vol. 1, 60–95. Simons, Sex of Men, 2–3. Dixon, Bosch, 230. Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, 225. On the definition of pornography and pornographic art, see Kirch, “Looking into ‘Night,’ ” 5–8, where she states in relation to her study that: “Renaissance erotic art is work with openly sexual subject matter, classical as well as religious.” Today, pornography is defined according to community standards.

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Figure 1.5 Pieter Bruegel, The Wedding Dance, oil on panel, c. 1566, 47 × 62 in (119.4 × 157.5 cm), Detroit Institute of Arts, access. no. 30.374. Photo: author.

foreground. At some point in time, and it is unclear exactly when, the codpieces were eliminated through overpainting.69 When the painting was purchased in 1930 by the DIA’s director, DIA, William Valentiner, the overpainting was intact and showed flatfronted tights in place of the large codpieces (Figure 1.6). Red, white, and blue codpieces are displayed on male dancers and a bagpiper at the bottom of the painting. The red codpiece, which is very prominent, looks unstable enough to fall off or become unlaced, perhaps enticing the viewer to imagine doing so. The white codpiece appears to be stuffed, and the blue phallic codpiece shown in profile at right is topped by a coin purse laced to the top. It appears to offer a convenient place for the bagpiper’s tips. Fashion comes and goes, both for men and for women, a truism applicable back through at least the Renaissance. The hairless Metrosexual male recently brought coiffed hair and neck scarves into vogue, characteristics traditionally the purview of American women. Recently, calling attention to one’s appearance was deemed the purview of women whether through coiffing, shaving, and plucking, or sartorial attention to scarves, open shirts and open pants. Calling attention to the body in the sixteenth century was similarly seen by some as unseemly for men for just that reason, 69

On codpieces, see Jennifer Spinks, “Codpieces and potbellies in the Songes drolatiques: Satirizing masculine self-control in Early Modern France and Germany,” in Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline van Gent (eds.), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period. Regulating Selves and Others (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), n. 4.

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Figure 1.6 Pieter Bruegel, The Wedding Dance, photograph, 1930, with overpainting. Photo: Courtesy of the State Archives of North Carolina.

because attention to the body was viewed as the realm of women and subjected the male body to the gaze of both men and women, thereby turning them into sexual quarry.70 After Bruegel’s Wedding Dance painting was cleaned and restored in 1942 by the American restorer William Suhr, it became clear that the codpieces had been overpainted to eliminate them altogether.71 Such “intentional alterations” have been the focus of research by Maryan Ainsworth and offer a larger context for the changes to Bruegel’s painting.72 Ainsworth used the term to indicate changes made to artwork through human intervention, rather than changes made over time such as the darkening of varnish. 73 She studied religious images in fifteenth-century Netherlandish painting and also the addition of haloes, calling their inclusion in paintings

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Lyndal Roper, “Blood and codpieces: Masculinity in the early modern German town,” Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 117–18. For before and after cleaning-restoration photographs of Bruegel’s painting, see Alison G. Stewart, “The William Suhr Papers at the Getty Research Institute,” Bulletin of the Visual Resource Association, 35, 3 (2008): 23–43, available at: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/artfacpub/14/ (accessed September 1, 2019). Maryan W. Ainsworth, “Intentional alterations of early Netherlandish paintings,” Metropolitan Museum Journal, 40 (2005): 51–65. Some of the information I present here appeared in my article, “The William Suhr Papers,” cited in the previous note. Ainsworth, “Intentional alterations,” 51.

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from the period “a relatively rare occurrence.”74 Such alterations resulted in a lay religious figure becoming a saint through the addition of a halo, sometime in the nineteenth century.75 Ainsworth indicated that alterations to paintings were made during various centuries as a result of changing social forces, and that such changes “often necessitate[d] a reconsideration of the painting’s history which sometimes, in turn, reveals facts about the function and importance of the work in its own time.” Ainsworth stated that it is often difficult to date intentional alterations made to a painting to a specific century.76 The difficulty of establishing when such alterations was made is also the case for Bruegel’s Wedding Dance painting. One of the owners of Bruegel’s painting found the codpieces objectionable and had the codpieces painted out, but who that owner was and when the overpainting took place is unclear. Was it someone from the Victorian period, part of Foucault’s “repressive hypothesis” for the nineteenth century, or even earlier?77 A seventeenth-century copy of Bruegel’s painting in Berlin suggests the possibility that the size of the original codpieces may have already become a problem for the owner, who had the codpieces made smaller. Similar changes to clothing in other visual works point to the possibility that the overpainting in Bruegel’s Wedding Dance could have taken place in the seventeenth century as a result of aesthetic preference.78 In 1633, the devout Catholic Maximilian I (1573–1651), Bavarian Duke and Elector, ordered several changes made to Lucas Cranach’s Christ and the Woman Taken into Adultery, c. 1522, which he received as a gift.79 According to technical analysis, the hands of Christ and the woman were originally placed together. Maximilian requested that his court painter separate the hands and make substantive changes to the painting, including adding panels to the left and top and adding an additional figure at left.80 Maximilian also requested that the text below Dürer’s Four Apostles or Four Holy Men be sawn off. He also ordered the nakedness of Cranach’s Lucretia to be overpainted with a kind of antique chiton, which was removed in a restoration of 1919. The contours of Lucretia’s new clothes are apparently still visible in good light when viewed in person.81

74 75 76 77 78

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Ibid. Ibid., 52. See ibid., 51–4. Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 15–35. See an exhibition and CD titled, Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries, an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 2010, available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/whats-on/ exhibitions/close-examination-fakes-mistakes-and-discoveries (July 11, 2017), especially for the overpainting of drops of Mary’s milk, lingering on her breast and Christ’s genitals in a fifteenthcentury painting by Robert Campin. See also Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Cranach’s painting was a gift to Maximilian I from the Bamberg Domprobst Johann Christoph Neustetter, genannt Stürmer. See Martin Schawe, Cranach in Bayern, exh. cat., Alte Pinakothek (Munich, 2011), 21, and n. 25, for additional information including Maximilian’s correspondence concerning the transportation of the painting, today in the Bavarian State Painting Collections. Schawe, Cranach in Bayern, 24, fig. 5; and Peter Prange and Raimund Wünsche, Das Feigenblatt, exh. cat., Glyptothek (Munich, 2000), 106–7, for chaste changes to paintings. Schawe, Cranach in Bayern, 25.

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In these examples, Duke Maximilian altered the first painting to expand it compositionally in keeping with the broadening compositional approaches of his time. Similarly, the text that contextualized Dürer’s painting for the early Reformation period appears to have also lost its relevance for Maximilian. The alterations to Cranach’s Lucretia indicates that the nudity of the sixteenth century possibly made for a Lutheran patron was deemed inappropriate a century later by the Catholic dukes. The alterations show that changing taste and religious affiliation may also have contributed to these intentional alterations. Returning to Bruegel’s painting, what Ainsworth calls the “aesthetic intentions of the artist” were revealed after the removal of the obliterated codpieces in his Wedding Dance painting.82 That overpainting is similar to the addition of fig leaves added later to cover the naked male genitals of ancient Greek and Roman statues. Such fig leaves were made of stone and sometimes copper attached by chains, which discolored the marble below. These altered statues, made chaste through fig leaves, became the object of close scrutiny and satire around 1900 in picture postcards where added cover-ups included knee-length pants. An exhibition in 2000 explored the use of fig leaves on ancient statues and added green ones as replacements for leaves previously removed.83 Bruegel’s figures sport very large codpieces, a fashion that was controversial in Bruegel’s time for some contemporaries because of their emphasis and display of the male organ. Art historical studies have often understood Bruegel’s codpieces as revealing the dancers’ physical excitement, thus their lewdness.84 Yet, codpieces were real articles of clothing in Bruegel’s time and later. Visual art and literature confirm that the codpiece was worn in northern Europe across class lines, from peasants to King Henry VIII in England and to Emperor Charles V in Habsburg Spain. At the same time, criticism and satires of such fashionable male clothing, including baggy, extravagant breeches, frilly male clothing, and codpieces, gave cause for the codpiece to be viewed as morally degenerate within the context of the Pants Devil, the Hosenteufel.85 The author of one tract with that name was the moralist Andreas Musculus (1514– 81), a preacher and very conservative Lutheran and professor of theology since 1542 at Frankfurt an der Oder. Musculus was a member of the older generation when it came to male dress.86 He condemned the codpiece not just because it paraded the phallus but because it could incite lust, what Roper called a “form of nudity that displayed the penis to lascivious eyes which would only too easily be incited to lust.” Thus men wearing

82 83 84

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Ainsworth, “Intentional alterations,” 51. Prange and Wünsche, Das Feigenblatt, esp. 8–9 and 126. A recent example linking Bruegel’s painting and the codpiece, to immoral activity, could earlier be seen on the museum’s website at: https://www.dia.org/art/collection/object/wedding-dance-35573 (accessed September 15, 2019). See Johann Strauss Elsterberg, Wider den Kleider Pluder Pauß vnd Krauß Teuffel (Görlitz: Georg Hoffmann/Georg Deffner, 1581). On Musculus, see Deutsche Biographie at: http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz67494.html (accessed February 15, 2019).

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such clothing attracted attention as sexual quarries with both men and women looking at them and evaluating their “attractions.”87 At the same time, the Hosenteufel text exhibited a bit of what Roper calls “linguistic exhibitionism, exuberantly paralleling the clothing it purports to condemn—occasionally, to the point of titillation,” stating that the young men who wear such fine codpieces bear “the sweetest honey inside” and have an “excess of masculinity.”88 Roper explains, “Thick and padded, assuming outlandish shapes and colours—one is described as boasting a trinity of flies—the codpiece was outrageous. Its hyperbolic exaggeration punctured phallic authority. Where decorum required the phallus to be decently hidden, the codpiece riotously displayed the penis as a massive joke.”89 Despite Musculus’s rantings such Pluderhosen, long and short, continued to be worn until the end of the sixteenth century. Roper identifies the codpiece as the article of clothing that “provoked [the] most explicit discussion of the male body” because it “paraded the phallus.”90 However, Ulinka Rublack illustrates a fashionable Lutheran couple on an epitaph from the late sixteenth century where he sports knee-length breeches made of vertical strips with blousy, rich material below, and lavish codpiece on top.91 Such moralizing appraisal offered both criticism of and fascination with the contemporary codpiece. In both covering and drawing attention to the male genitals, the codpiece constituted a contradiction in itself and a satirical, sometimes humorous element to sixteenth-century male dress for the body. Viewers of Bruegel’s painting could have understood the peasants dancing and piping, decked out with ample codpieces, as dressed in fashion of the time—ridiculous or not depending on the viewer—with fascination, even humor, possibly in the manner of ideas from the ancient world where the phallus was an important cultural object. With apotropaic and other meanings.92 Literary parallels to Bruegel’s large codpieces can be seen in the exaggerations found in François Rabelais’s text and in illustrations inspired by it, in particular of Pantagruel with its contemporary parody of the codpiece.93 For Rabelais, codpieces functioned as emblems of masculinity and pockets for edibles, including for fruit and specifically oranges.94 For Bruegel, codpieces similarly served as coin purse for the piper’s tips. The

87 88 89 90 91

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Roper, “Blood and codpieces,” 117, 119. Ibid., 119. Ibid., 118. ibid., 117. Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 110–12. Ancient Greek and Roman ideas, which may have continued into the Middle Ages and Renaissance or been revived in the latter, equated a large penis with the barbaric, the “other,” and as something to laugh at. Similar ideas continue today for men outside the Caucasian mainstream. For publications by John R. Clarke, see above. Jeffery Persels discusses the codpiece in detail in “Humanisms’ codpiece,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 1 (1997): 79–99. On storing an orange in a codpiece and for a pretty tuft of red silk tied to a codpiece, see François Rabelais, Five Books of the Lives, Heroic Deeds and Sayings of Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel, trans. by Sir Thomas Urquhart of Cromarty and Peter Anthony Motteux, available at: https://ebooks. adelaide.edu.au/r/rabelais/francois/r11g/complete.html#book, 11 (accessed July 11, 2016).

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purse, with draw-string top, may have been intentionally shown laced to the piper’s codpiece for safekeeping and for thrill seekers who could imagine placing coins near such an intimate part of the body, reminding the viewer of Cranach’s linkage of money sack with male anatomy. A codpiece with rounded form, similar to the one worn by Bruegel’s piper, but much larger, illustrates a printed Rabelais from 1565. It offers a satirical understanding of over-sized codpieces that delights in, while criticizing, immoderate masculinity and perhaps the sin of lust. These codpieces are huge and creatively shaped, with pins piercing the surface.95 By contrast, Bruegel’s codpieces appear normal in size. When exactly was the overpainting added to Bruegel’s Wedding Dance that indicates a change in taste toward the codpiece? Conservation assists here. Bruegel’s Wedding Celebration painting in Vienna indicates that the bagpiper’s large codpiece, which is overpainted today, was part of the painting’s original conception. Shown in profile as in the Wedding Dance, the Vienna bagpiper sported an even larger codpiece whose outline is still visible in some reproductions. Conservators established that the overpainting was old and that those paint layers had mingled with the layers of the original paint. A precise date for the overpainting, however, has been estimated to before the nineteenth century, perhaps in the seventeenth century.96 This particular example shows how difficult it can be to establish precise dates for such artistic alterations as a result of changing taste. The two case studies discussed in this essay for Bruegel’s painting and the German Old Testament prints indicate that clothing both covered up and drew attention to the male body and that, clothed and unclothed, the male body was a site of contested and mutable meaning in the beginning centuries of Early Modern Europe. Under the impetus of Charles II of England (1630–85), who linked masculinity with modesty, the codpiece was replaced by trousers and the three-piece suit, which has become the norm.97 The examples discussed here have shown that varied responses to the body in the late Middle Ages, discussed by Bynum, continued into the sixteenth century, even before Foucault’s “repression” had purportedly begun in the seventeenth century. The overlapping and conflicting responses to the male body, as seen through the examples of arousal and the codpiece, indicate that tastes change over time, but that some things do not change, namely that individual and group response to the male body and its clothing can vary.

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Attributed to François Desprez, Elderly Hybrid Male, from Les Songes drolatiques de Pantagruel (Paris: Richard Breton, 1565), fol. 34c, in Spinks, fig. 4.4; illustrations there also show other oversized codpieces. Email from January 6, 2008, from Elke Oberthaler, Head of Paintings Conservation, and Monika Strolz, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, who state that at that time of writing, a precise date for the overpainting could not be determined. The recent Bruegel exhibition catalogue points to a date for the alteration to before the nineteenth century, probably the seventeenth century. Elke Oberthaler, Sabine Pénot, Manfred Sellink, and Ron Spronk, with Alice Hoppe-Harnoncourt, Bruegel: The Master, exh. cat., Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (London: Thames & Hudson, 2018), p. 262, and fig. 4 a–c with details of the codpiece. David Kuchta, The Three-Piece Suit and Modern Masculinity: England, 1550–1850, Studies on the History of Society and Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002).

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The flat-fronted tights, seen in Bruegel’s reworked painting, neutralized the original’s insistent masculinity and offer a fascinating counterpoint to Beham’s small erotically charged prints. These sixteenth-century artworks, seen within the context of diverse aspects of contemporary Northern culture, act as a productive point of departure for a study of contested meaning and the male body in Early Modern Europe, whose private parts attracted viewers and sometimes required moralizing gloss to justify their representation. The body had been revealed in the sixteenth century, but it was not always found acceptable.

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The Construction of the Aryan Body in German Visual Advertising, 1908–33 David Ciarlo

If one were to try to picture an “Aryan”—that is, to call to mind a vision of that notional category of the “Germanic racial type” which became so pivotal to the ideology and rhetoric of the National Socialists—then one would probably summon up something akin to the figure on this propaganda poster from shortly after the Nazi seizure of power (Plate 1). In it a blond-haired white young man, with square jaw and chiseled facial features, posing manfully. Indeed, some might bring to mind this exact image, for this 1936 poster for the National Socialist Student Union (“Fighting for Führer and Volk”) seems to crop up frequently as an illustration in histories of Nazi Germany. This is not surprising, as the poster succinctly distills a range of National Socialist ideological obsessions, incorporating them bodily into a single figure. The image fuses an idealized vision of “youth” to one of “masculinity” for instance. It balances a sense of optimism—conveyed by a half-smile and purposeful gaze—with a sense of fierce determination. The Nazi flag is held purposefully, even aggressively, in a fist. (One can imagine it as a spear, ready to be hurled.) There is no glint of humanity in the eyes to temper the focused gaze of the figure—for we cannot see the eyes, as he is squinting into a bright light (presumably the bright future of National Socialism). The poster illustrates an ideal body, namely youthful and fit. The design also clearly illustrates the supposed facial features of the “Germanic race”—namely, blond hair, high forehead, sharp straight nose, and square jaw. Both the bodily and facial features, moreover, are underscored by the uniform of the militarized nation: the shiny black belt and buckle draws attention to the figure’s trim waist; the short necktie emphasizes the broad athletic shoulders; and the figure’s sun-browned face is accented by the brown shirt. Finally, the figure is not only posed but obviously posing: the composition seems to imply that the figure is aware of the gaze of the viewer (or at least, aware of the longer view of history). One might even read into this exaggerated posing a depiction of the student’s own consciousness of his status as an object. He is not only a “typical” student and “typical” follower of the Führer, but also an archetype of the “German race.”1 Indeed, to return to the eyes, it is the inability to see the figure’s eyes that 1

National Socialist visual propaganda, particularly once the party had the financial resources to commission professional designers in the 1930s, became more conscious of presenting its figures as ideal-types. See Birgit Witamwas, Geklebte NS-Propaganda. Verführung und Manipulation durch das

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facilitates interpreting the figure as a racial type. The hidden eyes abstract the figure by precluding any glimpse of individuality. (The eyes, after all, are windows to the soul.) With this array of artistic techniques and tricks, then, this poster conveys the sense that the figure is not simply a German—but the ideal German. The design, moreover, accomplishes all of this with tremendous economy: it is astonishing that so much can be conveyed in a simple five-color chromolithograph. As a dense yet efficient distillation of Nazi ideologies, I have often used this very image in my teaching. It should go without saying that this (or any) representation of an “Aryan” is, like the notional racial category to which it supposedly refers, a wholly fictitious construct. Scholars like Leon Poiakov and George Mosse have long ago shown us that the notional category of the “Aryan” and myth of Aryan origins was a confused muddle of late nineteenth-century pseudoscientific racial discourse and early twentieth-century political hyperbole.2 Perhaps not surprisingly, the supposed physical attributes of “the Aryan” that one gleans from the muddied descriptions found in racial tracts are a confused jumble of jargon, unmoored intellectual rumination, and crass bigotry, all of which is infused with rhetorical flights of fancy.3 So, from the first, we need to approach images of “Aryans” or of “the Germanic type” with a great deal of skepticism. 4 Indeed, the very possibility of demarcating a notional Aryan—of being able to draw a figure that actually reflects such an intellectual jumble—should not be presupposed.

2

3

Plakat (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), esp. 130–51; Gerhard Paul, Aufstand der Bilder. Die NSPropaganda vor 1933 (Bonn: JHW Dietz, 1990), 217–22; and most recently, Gerhard Paul, “Visualizierung des ‘Volkskörpers,’ ” in Das visuelle Zeitalter. Punkt und Pixel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 259–62. Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (London: Sussex University Press, 1974); and George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1978). For instance, Joseph Widney, an American doctor and historian at the turn of the century, mused about the proto-Aryan’s appearance: We may judge him to have been in stature of medium height, yet varying from this toward tallness rather than toward undersize; full-chested; long-limbed, yet symmetrical of build; a free stepper; a clear striker whether with the hand or the sword; in build rather spare; of active habit; a lover of outdoor life, of the field, of the chase; a man already feeling that he was the superior of the races about him, feeling already the stir of the masterful spirit within him; features well-marked and clean-cut; nose finely chiseled but rather prominent; chin well developed; mouth large yet not gross; teeth regular, showing ample jaw space; eyes blue or gray, rather than dark, and set well under brows that project in a strong developed supraorbital ridge; a forehead high rather than broad, yet swelling out above and behind the temples; dome of the head well arched; head long rather than thick through, the dolichocephalous rather than the brachicephalous type, broad above rather than at the base; hair fine, light in color, reddish or brown rather than black, straight or slightly wavy; complexion tanned by the winds of his life afield, yet back of the tan the ruddy skin of the blond: in all things the opposite of the Mongol upon the east or the Negroid upon the south. . .

4

Joseph P. Widney, Race Life of the Aryan Peoples, vol. 1(London: Funk & Wagnals, 1907), 26–7. While some descriptive words and phrases from Widney’s fanciful free association might well be read into Plate 2.1, they could just as equally be read into figures drawn with very, very different stylistic details. Note especially the importance of oppositional construction (“in all things the opposite of ”) which emerges in the visual realm, as we will see in this essay. See Richard Gray, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2004), esp. the conclusion, “Envisioning the invisible.”

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On the other hand, the opportunities available in a full color poster are vast. While the palette of chromolithography is usually based on four or five primary colors, a skilled designer using overprinting and other techniques has virtually limitless creative scope to fashion an ‘ideal’ category. The same cannot be said of any indexical medium such as photography, where the process of capturing reflected light off of an actual object (despite many opportunities for manipulation) both imposes limits and produces unintended and/or undesired signs.5 While the photograph’s supposed scientific objectivity made it the favored tool of race scientists in the nineteenth century,6 and while the immediacy and seeming-authenticity of film made it a favored medium of propaganda in the Third Reich,7 these each offered a narrower field for representation, which was also less-controllable. For instance, one might reflect on the close-ups of faces of the youths from the youth rally scene in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film, Triumph of the Will, where the aim of the 10-minute scene was not only to show a determined, militarized youth devoted to their Führer, but also to showcase ideological archetypes of the “German race.” Over the course of the youth rally, Riefenstahl cuts back and forth between shots of Adolf Hitler’s ostentatious oratory on the one hand, and close-ups of a dozen different blond-haired youths on the other, all listening with rapt eagerness. The fact that the chosen youths all look very similar, with blond hair and similar noses, and are all filmed in a similar manner— namely, a close-up shot from below, with each youth squinting identically into the sun—underscores how they are presented as racial types.8 Nonetheless, given the indexicality of film, the idiosyncratic and the individualistic— indeed, the human—unerringly creeps back into the picture, despite the intentions of the artist-filmmaker. While we can look at a photographed youth as a “type” (as Riefenstahl clearly wants us to9), we also cannot help but see their individuality—either by noticing physical idiosyncrasies that make them unique, or by glimpsing the expressions on their faces, and thereby try to guess their personality or inner thoughts. Is the youth in Figure 2.1 just squinting into the sun to see the Führer? Or is he also a

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9

I am using the term “indexical” rather simplistically here, as per popularizations of Charles Pierce’s classic nomenclature (icon, index, symbol), where photography’s “indexical” character is its ability to stand for something by virtue of an existential connection to that thing—that is, contiguous with the object it represents. Theorists have questioned the usefulness of this term for photography: see James Elkins (ed.), Photography Theory, The Art Seminar (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), 26f, 130–55. Cf. Gray, About Face, esp. 355–60; James Ryan, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (London: Reaktion, 1997); and Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson (eds.), Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. Andrew Evans’ essay, “Capturing Race,” 226–56. David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema 1933–1945 (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1983). Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (1935; Synapse Films Edition, 2006) DVD. The Youth Rally begins at 44:00, with shots of individual blond-haired youths at 45:10, 46:10, 46:21, 48:49. 51:33, 51:43, 51:53, and 52:00. Welch, Propaganda, esp. 111–34 and 152–3. See also Gerhard Paul, Das visuelle Zeitalter. Punkt und Pixel (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 256ff. Riefenstahl’s 1938 film Olympiade focuses even more on the “typification” of the German, by morphing images of supposedly prototypical Aryans from antiquity into current German athletes in the opening montage, for instance. Welch, Propaganda, 112–21; Paul, Das visuelle Zeitalter, 259–63.

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Figure 2.1 Film still from the youth rally scene in Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph des Willens (1935), 48:16.

bit perplexed—as suggested by his furrowed brow? Is his smile from the previous second now fading? Does the sweat stain under his arm betray the physical discomfort of standing for hours in the hot sun? Does the mole on his cheek or his crooked front tooth count as imperfections in his racial pedigree? Regardless of what we see or imagine we see, the indexicality of photography and film encourages us to peer closely for exactly these signs of humanity and of individuality—which, in turn, only pulls us away from viewing them as an archetype of race or an embodiment of ideology. Chromolithography, in short, gives a far freer hand to racial construction than photography, in part because it is far more controllable. If the chromolithograph poster offered an opportune medium in which to literally design the body of the Aryan, that brings us to the role of the designer. That the National Socialist Student Union poster (Plate 1) could coherently tie together all of these ideological notions—youth, masculinity, strength, determination, militarized nationalism, a bright future—at the very same time that it also forcefully imprints a racial archetype was no accident. This poster was crafted by an absolute master of the graphic arts, Ludwig Hohlwein, the most accomplished German poster designer in the 1930s. In fact, at the time this poster was printed, Hohlwein might well have been the single most well-known graphic designer in the world, with his commissions

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extending beyond Germany’s borders to North America and even Japan.10 Hohlwein is recognized as the undisputed master of the style known as the German Modern, and his work still appears prominently in design manuals today.11 In the Weimar Republic, he commanded the highest rates, and his talents were highly sought after.12 In 1929, for instance, he crafted a striking (and ominous) recruiting poster for the right-wing paramilitary organization Stahlhelm, where a helmeted figure, set against the blackwhite-red flag of the old Kaiserreich, blends into a hardened abstraction of steel: the anonymous paramilitary volunteer himself becomes weaponlike, his body almost transmuting into an artillery shell.13 Ludwig Hohlwein also turned out a number of campaign posters for the National Socialists in the early 1930s, after their initial electoral breakthrough.14 Hohlwein ultimately joined the Nazi party in 1933, and crafted over forty posters for ministries and National Socialist organizations over the next ten years.15 There were other designers who committed to Nazism earlier and more thoroughly, such as the rather mediocre designer Hans Schweitzer, who officially joined the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP) in 1926 (although he was active in extreme-right circles even before), became friendly with Goebbels and worked under the pseudonym, “Mjölnir.”16 Yet, Hohlwein’s exceptional artistic skill elevated his work then (and now) into something more than sketchy political propaganda; it is Hohlwein’s designs (rather than those of Schweitzer, the more committed Nazi) that most clearly illustrate the ideological and racial constructions of the National Socialists in the 1930s.

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12 13

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Volker Duvigneau and Norbert Götz (eds.), Ludwig Hohlwein 1874–1949 (Munich: Klinkhardt & Bierman, 1996). Another good survey of Hohlwein’s work is Christian Schneegass (ed.), Ludwig Hohlwein. Plakate der Jahre 1906–1940 aus der Graphischen Sammlung Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (Stuttgart: Staatsgalerie, 1985). See Steven Heller and Louise Fili, German Modern: Graphic Design from Wilhelm to Weimar (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 1998); Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000); Peter Heller and Louise Fili, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 2006), 167ff. Ragna Jäckle, Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949) (Munich: tuduv, 1994), 107ff. This recruiting poster from 1929 was so arresting that it was repurposed as an election poster for the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (the German National People’s Party, DNVP, closely associated with the Stahlhelm) in 1933, with various labels attached. Duvigneau and Götz, Ludwig Hohlwein, 203 no. 228. For instance, see the “Arbeit-Brot: Drum Liste 1” poster from the elections of 1932, featuring the head of a Storm Trooper (SA-Mann) in profile, accentuating his angular nose, but with eyes hidden by the shadow of the SA cap, in a manner very similar to the “Und Du?” poster for the Stahlhelm. Witamwas, NS-Propaganda, 236, and on Hohlwein more broadly, 131–51. Duvigneau and Götz, Ludwig Hohlwein, 261 no. 325. Mjölnir is the name for Thor’s hammer in Norse mythology. An outstanding essay on Schweitzer is Paul Gerhard, “ ‘Prolet-Arier’. ‘Mjölnir’, Body Politics und die Bilderwelt der ‘Generation des Unbedingten,’ ” in Gerhard Paul, BilderMACHT: Studien zur “Visual History” des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2013), 45–100. Gerhard’s argument about Schweitzer’s significance to the National Socialist visual world is indisputable (as is the influence of his “proletariat-Aryan” images on ideologues like Goebbels), yet Schweitzer’s designs are rougher and more pedestrian, and (I would argue) simply less talented than those of Hohlwein. The core features of the “Aryan” used by both designers are similar, even though Schweitzer’s work tends to look angrier, and Hohlwein’s more idealized. For Schweitzer, see also Witamwas, NS-Propaganda, 46–7, 57–75, and Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 158–9.

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Or do they? A starting point for this essay is that, while visual images are often used by scholars to represent, stand in for, or otherwise “illustrate” ideological constructions, imagery has its own distinct historical trajectories. Visual history should not—indeed, cannot—be considered to be derivative of, or even necessarily coterminous with, the history of ideology. While the visual and the ideological do intersect in specific moments—as we see in this moment of 1933, where Hohlwein’s designs interest with the racial obsessions of the National Socialists—these intersections occur at discrete points along the historical evolution of each thread. Indeed, the visual thread of the chromolithograph construction of the “Aryan” follows a very different path from the well-studied intellectual arc of racial theory.17 This essay, then, will trace some basic design features of Holwein’s (and others’) “Aryans” backwards, first to commercial advertisements of the 1920s, and then further back to the commercial advertisements of the 1910s. Rather astonishingly, as we will see, the key features of the Aryan or “Germanic type” that manifested out of the late advertising of the Kaiserreich did not arise out of growing familiarity with or legitimacy of racial theory. Rather, the “Germanic type” first manifested in the commercial world oppositionally—more specifically, as a visual counterpart to another more popular figure in commercial culture: the African. The racially defined Germanic-Aryan, then, can be first glimpsed in German advertising as a foil to popular images of racialized Blacks. Overall, the advertising of the Kaiserreich, with its images of racialized Blacks and idealized whites, provided an enormous pool of imagery for the political propaganda and ideological fashionings of the Weimar and National Socialist eras. It should be clarified here that this essay does not really grapple with the power structures associated with this racial imagery—namely, racism, colonialism, or genocide—and that many of the images I analyze here are not only implicated in those power structures of racism and murder, but deeply offensive in their own right. Unpacking offensive imagery and analyzing it on the visual plane, however, is an absolutely crucial stage in understanding why imagery looks the way it does. Ludwig Hohlwein was neither a devoted propagandist nor (as far as we know) interested in race science. He was, first and foremost, a designer of advertising. The overwhelming majority of his corpus of work over four decades was commercial; only a small slice of it was politically or governmentally sponsored. Intriguingly, it is in his advertising posters of the mid-1920s that we can see outlines of the same sort of white figure that would later emerge in his work for the Nazis. An advertising poster for Hercules Beer, drafted for a brewer based in Kassel, for instance, (Plate 2) was crafted around 1925, almost a decade before his work for the Nazis. (at a time when the only recently reconstituted National Socialist Party was small, and remained both politically marginal and ideologically fragmented.) Yet, we can see many of the main elements of that later Aryan of the later Nazi regime here. The lighting draws the viewer’s eye first

17

The literature on race theory is vast; in addition to Mosse, Toward the Final Solution and Gray, About Face, accessible overviews include Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981) and Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: Norton, 2010). For Germany, see also Peter Weingart, Jürgen Kroll, and Kurt Bayertz, Rasse, Blut und Gene: Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992).

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to the muscular biceps, but then to the powerful raised forearm, which ultimately leads the eye to the barely restrained power of the clenched fist. The powerful neck is straight; the jaw is square—and delineated as square, even in shadow, by the tiniest hint of an angular outline just above the neck. The “Nordic” nose becomes a particularly prominent feature, emerging out of the shadowed face. Indeed, Hohlwein’s use of (simulated) lighting serves to highlight the nose rather dramatically: it becomes a vertical pillar in the midst of the ominously darkened face. In this regard, the Herkules ad from the mid-1920s clearly prefigures Hohlwein’s 1929 design for the Stahlhelm.18 Yet, Hohlwein’s earlier beer advertisement is, if anything, more aggressive than what he intended for the violent right-wing, anti-Semitic paramilitary. Like his later political posters, the eyes in his Herkules advertisement remain hidden; and together with the particular emphasis on bodily features, the hidden eyes work to downplay the individual-ness of the figure. The designer is steering the viewer to see the figure more as a body, and hence, as a type—namely, the embodiment of the type that possesses strength, determination, and power. The strong, determined, powerful type, who drinks Herkules beer. The cumulative effect of the highlighted muscles, clenched fist, angular nose, and hidden eyes is striking. This is by design: visual advertising took as its mandate the need to seize the attention of the passerby, and stop them in their tracks.19 Stark depictions of power were one means to capture attention. It was not the obvious aggression in the poster, however, but rather its bodily features that Hohlwein returned to, again and again, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In doing so, his work clearly helped to crystalize visions of the Nordic type—or Aryan—and circulate these visions to a broad audience. Indeed, posters like the one for Herkules beer (Plate 2) propagated imagery “Nordic” bodily features to audiences far wider than the race-science publications ever could. Hans Günter’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, for instance, was first published in 1922—three years prior to Hohlwein’s beer poster. Günter’s book was copiously illustrated with photographs (many borrowed from other sources), and replete with photographic tricks to highlight facial features and exaggerate differences among the different racial “types.” Many of the photographs of “Nordic” types, for instance, are of younger men, in angled profile, with lights from above shining down on their foreheads and noses; while photos of “Dinaric” types are often of elderly men in flat profile with flatter light, where the effects of aging (correlating with larger ear and nose size) can be (mis-)represented as racial characteristics. However, despite such manipulations, Günter’s many photographic representations of Nordic features seem less distinct— and altogether less dramatic—than the “Nordic” posters of Hohlwein’s oeuvre from the same era. Günther’s book would ultimately go through dozens of editions, with Günther claiming in 1933 that his book brought racial ethnology from a veritably

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Using a simulated light effect to highlight the nose (in an otherwise darkened face) is one of the core elements of the Stalhelm poster of 1929; see Duvigneau and Götz, Ludwig Hohlwein, 203 no. 228. Christiane Lamberty, Reklame in Deutschland 1890–1914 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2000), 247– 63; David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), 131–2, 206.

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unknown discipline into a required area of study in the classroom.20 Günther’s boast is probably valid for that post-1933 National Socialist era. In the mid-1920s, however, Günther’s grainy photos were < seen by a fraction of people who encountered Hohlwein’s posters.21 Until the massive state-sponsored propaganda effort of “racial education” began in earnest after 1933, and Günther’s book made required reading,22 there can be no question that advertising had a far broader social reach than even the most popular tomes of race science. Revealingly, when the Nazi student newspaper Die Bewegung interviewed Hohlwein in December of 1935, it claimed [falsely] that Hohlwein had “never received commissions from Jews” because they [the Jews] had themselves recognized his work as “too German . . . Compare that found in Günter’s Rassenkunde to what one finds in Hohlwein’s oeuvre.”23 It seems that even the Nazi students of 1935 could recognize that “the Old Master” had long been a purveyor of racial imagery. Although Hohlwein was (as far as we know) uninterested in race science literature, in his commercial oeuvre, one is struck by how much of his work seems to visually reference or play upon racial hierarchy. Indeed, one of his favorite themes, particularly earlier in his career, involved portraying Blacks in service to whites. In Hohlwein’s advertising poster for Kaloderma Shaving Cream from 1920, for instance (Plate 3) we can see, in the white figure, many elements of Hohlwein’s later Aryan. Even though the hair is not blond but rather a glossy black (pomaded in the Weimar fashion), the delineated musculature in the forearm, the strong neck, and, most importantly, the perfectly straight nose, each are clear precursors to the forearms, necks, and noses of the Nazi student of 1933 (Plate 1) or the beer-selling Hercules of 1925 (Plate 2). The racial hierarchy of the Kaloderma shaving scene is “appropriate” given its notional setting, namely “in the colonies”—as shown by the khaki worn by the white figure, the lack of shirt on the Black figure, and the pale yellow background (a hint at African sun). There are a number reasons as to why Hohlwein in 1920 may have chosen a colonial setting for a poster design. First, the official loss of Germany’s colonies in the Versailles Treaty the year before not only rankled, but had itself become a politically charged topic24—and topicality was the currency of advertising. Second, the colonial project in a more generalized sense could offer a politically ambiguous terrain—a sort

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Gray, About Face, 223. After the National Socialists came to power, they held up Günther’s Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes (Munich: J.F. Lehmann, 1922) as an important book, and it thereafter went through at least sixteen editions, with more than 124,000 copies in circulation by 1942. While some advertising posters might have a print run of as few as 2,000–3,000, Hohlwein’s designs usually saw larger runs, and they would be posted in highly visible locations, such as train stations or pedestrian thoroughfares. After the National Socialists seized power, the abridged, popularized version of Günther’s book, Kleine Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes, which was first published in 1929, was made required reading in all German schools in the mid-1930s, and thereby and likely encountered by millions of schoolchildren. Die Bewegung. Zentralorgan des NSD-Studentenbundes 3 Jg (December 12, 1935), 3. Wolfe Schmokel, Dream of Empire: German Colonialism, 1919–1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964); Willecke Sandler, Empire in the Heimat: Colonialism and Public Culture in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).

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of anodyne neutral zone of pan-European effort that romanticized “white” (rather than “German” or “English”) superiority. Locating the tableau in “the colonies,” then, was one means by which to move away from the brutally divisive nationalism of the recent world war. It offered a path to reimagine postwar German identity—especially consumer identity—as part of a pan-European (white) culture.25 A third inspiration for the scene, of course, has to do with the three decades-old trends involving soap advertising (and advertising of soap-like products, such as shaving cream). By picturing soap in “colonial settings,” advertisers could simultaneously invoke two different potent motifs: that of the “civilizing mission” (where soap and cleanliness were linked to the spread of civilization); and that of “washing the moor” (where cleaning-power could be demonstrated by showing the ability to wash off blackness itself).26 The Kaloderma poster, for instance, would immediately bring to mind the by-now decades-old cliché of the European explorer, deep in the jungle, dutifully shaving to maintain “appearances”—namely, the sense of his being “civilized” in contrast to the unwashed natives (and as a pointed demonstration to them). Shaving, we might further read into this freighted tableau, is necessary not just to maintain one’s appearance, but one’s very whiteness itself. (Such a reading is supported by pictorial hints, namely the contrast between the bright white foam of the shaving cream vis-à-vis the dark shadow from the mirror over the lower half of the face of the Black figure.) Kaloderma-brand shaving cream therefore becomes, through a chain of equivalences, the frothy foam of civilization itself—and perhaps even of whiteness itself. A far simpler reason for locating the shave in the imagined “colonies” exists, however, and it is the most relevant to this essay. The tableau is “in” the colonies primarily because that terrain helps to justify depicting a white figure and Black figure in the same field. As I will argue, this juxtaposition of white and Black figures together and against each other was in itself desirable from a design standpoint. Indeed, design can force certain meanings through various tricks and details of depiction, and this is most easily accomplished through contrast. The most basic contrast in the Kaloderma ad (Plate 3) is one of scale. The white figure occupies more of the poster, and more of the viewer’s vision. The Black figure, then, serves to establish the white’s predominance, simply by being there but smaller. Just as important, moreover, are the finer details that

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See most recently Britta Schilling, Postcolonial Germany: Memories of Empire in a Decolonized Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Marcia Klotz, “The Weimar Republic: A postcolonial state in a still-colonial world”, in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (eds.), Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska, 2005); and Florian Krobb and Elaine Martin (eds.), Weimar Colonialism: Discourses and Legacies of Post-Imperialism in Germany after 1918 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014). For soap advertising, see Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, esp. 100–12, 240–5, 259–65. In addition, see “Soft-soaping empire,” in Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Anandi Ramamurthy, Imperial Persuaders: Images of Africa and Asia in British Advertising (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003); and Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). For “washing the moor,” see Jean Michel Massing, “From Greek proverb to soap advert: Washing the Ethiopian,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 58 (1995): 180–201.

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guide the interpretation of the design through contrast. Notice how the supposedly “racial” features of the African boy and the European/German man are set into starker relief when juxtaposed against each other. The consistent angle of the white figure’s forehead and nose, for instance, is emphasized by the contrast with the roundedness of the Black figure’s forehead and the concave skull around the nose area. And vice versa: the short, stubbed nose of the Black face is highlighted by the dramatically sharp white nose. The strong, muscular neck of the white figure is visually underscored by the comparative thinness of the Black neck. Finally, the oddly large head of the smaller Black figure serves as a foil to the more usual head-to-body proportion of the white figure. Each of the racial features that Hohlwein deploys on the white figure, in short, is emphasized and dramatized by juxtaposition to its visual opposite on the Black figure. Most important, though, is the ultimate goal towards which such juxtapositions work: they construct the white figure as “normal,” and they do this by constructing the Black figure as abnormal. For instance, with dress: the Black figure is only partially clothed, and this establishes the status of the white figure as more “civilized.” But notice also how the shirt, belt and buckle define the white’s trim waist (similar to the Nazi student poster, Plate 1), but then the shirtlessness of the overly thin (even emaciated) Black figure magnifies the effect (and thereby posits the white figure as normal). Or again, with posture: the subservience of the Black figure—depicted as crouching with averted gaze—serves to construct the self-possessed confidence of the white. When combined with the difference in scale mentioned above, this confidence, this white authority is made to look natural. (Consider for a moment: would the white figure look every bit as confident—every bit as powerful—if the Black figure were removed entirely from the frame?) Similarly, the design juxtaposes gaze. The averted glance of the Black figure underscores the purposeful focus of the white figure. Indeed, a standard trick of advertising design is of course to use the gaze of the primary figure to direct the viewer’s attention, where a figure looks at what the designer most wants us to see. In this Kaloderma ad, the gaze of the dominant figure is directed into a mirror, and thereby back at himself. If we follow the white figure’s gaze, it reifies that which is important in the composition—namely, the white figure itself. There are a truly massive number of pictorial juxtapositions in this Kaloderma image. They range from skin color, to clothes, to posture, to nose; they span the spectrum from cultural markers to bodily features. This array of contrasts, moreover, mutually reinforce each other. Some of the cultural markers are predicated on the bodily delineations. For instance, the “cultural” superiority of the white—established in the illustration by drawing the Black figure as crouching (and subservient) is enabled by bodily difference: the white man is tall, the Black is short, and only through this disparity can the crouching subservience of the Black figure and the forward-leaning confidence of the white figure be so drawn. The height difference itself also allows for the Black figure’s gaze to be more easily drawn as averted. In other words, the height difference is what allows the taller figure to literally (and therefore figuratively) look down his nose at his inferior. Conversely, some of the bodily differences are, in turn, predicated upon cultural markers. For instance, shirtlessness establishes the Black figure as less “civilized” (given

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the role clothing plays in depictions of colonial relationships.) Just as importantly, however, is that we can only “see” the musculature of the Black figure because of his shirtlessness. This musculature, moreover, plays a crucial role in the design, by circumscribing unwanted paths of viewer interpretation. In the first step, the head of the Black figure is drawn disproportionately large in relation to the body, and this immediately establishes the Black figure’s immaturity. (A larger head in proportion to a smaller body is one of the most readily identifiable characteristics of small children.) Depicting the black figure as immature, of course, helps to visually underscore the white figure’s authority. Set against a childlike Black, the white figure is established as paternal or patriarchal. At the same time, however, depicting the Black as an actual child—a child, moreover, in a position of labor, subservience, and debasement—might well make a viewer feel just a bit awkward. (Is child labor acceptable? Should a child be forced to hold a mirror in this demeaning way?) In the second step, then, such unwanted interpretations are forestalled by redesigning the body. Musculature, with well-defined trapezia and deltoids, is added to the figure; and such defined musculature is not typical of children. In effect, then, the figure is depicted with contradictory bodily markers—childlike oversize head, adult muscular torso—which then work in tandem: the first infantilizes the Black figure, the second shows the Black figure as an adult. Together, these contradictory bodily markers place the figure into an ‘in between’ category, as some sort of man-child. It is a subtle but ingenious solution to what is essentially a design problem: how to visually evoke immaturity—but without drawing an actual child (that might evoke sympathy)—in order to visually magnify the paternal authority of the white figure. To return to the shirtlessness—itself a marker of lower standing—we can now recognize it as necessary in order to be able to draw the figure with defined musculature. This is a complex, multifaceted design with interlocking interpretive tricks. Despite his talents in implementing such tricks, however, such tactics long predated Hohlwein; depicting Black figures as an age-indeterminate manchild, for instance, had become common in German advertising after 1905.27 The elevation of the white figure through carefully designed juxtapositions of scale, of racial features, and of bodily markers was not a unique moment of inspiration in 1920. In fact, Hohlwein’s propensity for displaying Blacks in the service of whites—and of scaling them disproportionately—stretches back to before the First World War, to his early career in the Kaiserreich. A poster for the Café Odeon, for instance, was crafted by Hohlwein in 1908 (Plate 4). In it, a smiling, white blond man, in stylish vest and spats, with sleeves rolled up rakishly, enjoys a cup of coffee during a pause in his billiards game. He is served by a small, unsmiling Black figure in livery. This poster masterfully conveys a great deal of information with a very limited color palette and economy of design: notice, particularly, the white daubs on the shoes to suggest their shine, or white lines on the shirt and socks, to hint at their fine weave reflected in an (unseen) overhead light. As with the Kaloderma poster (of twelve years later), the posture of each figure in this Café Odeon ad of 1908 conveys a great deal of meaning. The white figure is relaxed,

27

Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, esp. 280–6.

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but at the same time, poised and powerful (judging by the width of arms and chest); the Black figure is diminutive, and stands at rigid attention. One difference from the later Kaloderma ad is that there is no visual indication of muscular strength in the Black figure here; instead, the stiff uprightness comes from the perfectly straight uniform—a starched, rigid livery of servitude. Yet the figures for this Odeon poster are again of unequal scale; the white figure towers over the Black, and thereby demonstrated as more significant. The disparity in size is accentuated by a difference in position: the white figure is seated, and thereby literally boosted up into a higher horizontal plane than the Black figure. This uneven positioning—the elevation of the white figure—is further accented by the parallel lines of the pool cue and stripe on the Black servant’s liveried pant leg: the two lines are the same length and parallel, but on different horizontal planes. It is instantly clear that one figure is “elevated” above the other metaphorically, because we see it presented to us visually. Interestingly, more than twenty-five years before Hohlwein crafted election posters for the National Socialists some of the elements of his Aryan figure appear here, though in more muted form. The powerful forearms are here; as is the square jaw and the straight-angled nose. The hidden eyes similarly convey the sense of deindividualization. Furthermore, the contrast of bodies—Black figure versus white figure—is associated with the contrast of facial features: sharp angled nose versus tiny snub nose; strong jaw versus “weak” jaw; high forehead versus rounded forehead; squared-head versus rounded skull. The white figure in this design from 1908 is, in fact, Hohlwein’s Aryan prototype. In this poster from 1908, moreover, it is possible to glimpse a functional aspect to the racial juxtaposition that we have not yet explored. Consider the role of the color contrast itself. Looking intently, one can see that the face of the white figure is constructed by patches of colors and shapes. This is a path-breaking use of overprinting to work around the limited color palette to achieve a sense of “depth.” Darker patches of peach (using overprinting) keep the white face from looking too flat (as it would if it is a simple monochrome—as with Plate 5, to look ahead). This sense of depth adds “realism” by subtly evoking the contours of the human face. However, this could be problematic: if you focus narrowly and stare intently at the white face, the various shades of peach will dissolve into a blotchy patchwork of odd shapes of peach color. The tactic designed to add realism can backfire. If you pull back, however, and look at the white face within a visual frame that includes the Black figure’s face, this peachy patchwork or blotchiness recedes from optical perception, because of the starkness of the optical contrast between it and the deep black. (Different shades of a light color are less noticeable when immediately set against a chromatic opposite.) At the optical level, then, the color contrast of black-white (or more precisely, of black-peach) actually works to efface the patchiness of the method used to convey depth. Phrased much more simply: adding in the Black figure makes the white look more real. This contrast-effect works not just with colors, moreover, but also with shapes— namely, depictions of facial details. In the Café Odeon poster of Plate 4, the sharp nose, strong chin, tall forehead, and “correctly” proportioned head and ears are set into sharper relief from the contrasting “racial” features of the Black figure. For instance, the cranium of the white figure is rather blocky, even square-ish. Yet, when the squarish skull of the white figure is juxtaposed against the elongated and rounded skull (almost

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simian) on the Black figure, the white figure appears less “abnormal” through the contrast. Or, again, the extremely tiny nose on the Black figure helps to normalize the sharp angled nose of the white figure. Indeed, if you focus intently at the nose of the white figure alone (without the Black figure in the frame) you are more likely to immediately spot the oddities of the white figure’s nose-chin proportionality. Or again, the Black figure’s receded chin makes the sharp, almost jutting angularity of the white figure’s chin look more normal. The perfect white teeth of the white figure are similarly highlighted by the lack thereof on the Black figure (where there is instead a hint of red—a tongue, perhaps or lips). Overall, then, the exaggerated contrast of facial features (cranium, nose, chin) causes the white figure’s own blocky constructedness— built out of angular shapes, given the constraints of early print technology—to recede from the viewer’s vision. Racial difference, then, can be seen here as a design tactic that helps to hide the limitations of trying to draw a human with a five-color palette. Race is not just an intellectual or cultural delineation; race can also be a deft artistic move. This advertising poster from 1908 was so widely admired that it found both imitators and plagiarizers. An Austrian designer, for instance, borrowed the basic tableau in a poster for the S. Schindler liquor manufacturer in Innsbruck (Plate 5). The colors are different, however, and more importantly, fewer: for while it is a five-color lithograph, there is no overprinting, and so it looks monochrome and flat. The figure of the Black serving boy is racialized in a more simplistic and abstract way: bright red lips (and a golden earring) almost glow against the jet black monochrome of the figure’s head. Nonetheless, the function of the Black figure’s facial features work similarly to the way they do in Hohlwein’s much more sophisticated poster design. The white face— monochrome and “flat”—appears less monochrome and flat when juxtaposed in the same frame against the inky blackness of the Black face. The red lips of the white figure— which might well look so garish as to appear to be lipstick—seems somehow less bright when juxtaposed against the much larger bright red lips of the Black. In short, the racial otherness of the Black figure again works with stark chromatic contrasts to make the white figure come across as more “real.” In a deliberate visual imitation of Hohlwein, the differences of scale (with the white figure larger) and of position (with the white figure elevated) likewise work to show hierarchy. The discriminating connoisseur of this fine Austrian liquor holds up the crystal class—thereby elevating the product literally above the head of the Black servant. This poster for Schindler liquor was not the only one to imitate Hohlwein: other imitations abound.28 Indeed, some limitations even eschewed the element of racialization, but this then created a very different effect.29 28

29

See Hermann Karl Frenzel, Ludwig Hohlwein (Berlin: Phönix Illustrationsdruck und Verlag, 1926), 61. The Polish designer Franz Laskoff, for instance, copied this basic tableau in his work for Costina’s Coffee (an Italian company) in 1914, where he drew a dark-skinned male figure serving coffee to a seated white female figure. In his reworking, however, Laskoff moves away from hierarchy and racial stereotyping. First, Laskoff ‘s figures are almost equal in scale, occupying roughly equal space on the poster. Second, the darker-colored server is in motion—rather than crouching or standing at attention—which alters the power dynamics within the image. Most importantly, Laskoff did not exaggerate the facial features of the darker figure, instead drawing in individual details such as eyebrows and sideburns that individualize and humanize. Laskoff ’s approach makes for an ad with a very different functionality.

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Not every juxtaposition of Black and white figures had to be drawn with contrasts of scale, of bodily hierarchy, and of racial differentiation that elevated the white figure, of course. Designers could use Black/white contrasts in more benign ways. This was particularly true in the decades before Hohlwein’s fame, when the advertising profession was younger, and approaches to design thereby more diverse. In the 1890s, before advertisers’ depictions had congealed into formulaic stereotypes, both Black and white figures were drawn with greater variety. In an ad by Rasche & Company company for shoe polish in 1899, for instance, a Black figure is set next to a white figure, but caricature is avoided. Both white and Black figures’ faces are drawn with idiosyncrasies that add to their individuality, and so look more like actual people than abstracted typologies.30 Moreover, the figures in the Rasche & Co. shoe polish ad are roughly the same size and in the same plane, so the image is not structured with an obvious power differential. Indeed, in the ad, the Black figure even playfully dabs shoe polish onto the nose of the white figure in a humorous attempt to “shine” her nose. In ad images like this one from 1899 and many earlier ones from the 1890s and 1880s, the larger juxtaposition of Black and white could often be more playful than power-laden. Not every color contrast or juxtaposition of Black and white was structured fundamentally around inequality. Such occasional “parity” in pre-1900 commercial representation would not persist, however. As I have argued elsewhere, German advertising saw a surge of Black figures around 1890; by 1900, images of Blacks serving, offering, carrying, and laboring were everywhere, collectively offering a growing visual fantasy of Black subordination visible across Germany.31 After 1905, these ubiquitous Black figures were increasingly racialized—depicted in ways that standardized the caricature of facial features (such as lips, noses, hair, and head shape) in order to dramatically exaggerate racial difference. Some of the patterns of racialized depictions were imported directly out of American minstrel-show imagery; other elements traced from different origins, such as from Germany’s caricature tradition; still others arose out of efforts to capitalize on sensationalized depictions in the press of “race war” in Southwest Africa after 1904.32 However, there is one factor behind the growing standardization of Black figures as racialized in German advertising that is salient to the standardization of Aryan figures later on: namely, the new dynamic of imitation in mass-reproduction. As we saw with Hohlwein’s Café Odeon poster (Plate 4), when certain designs became widespread, they were increasingly imitated (and even plagiarized) by other advertisers and 30

31

32

The lips of the Black figure in this shoe-polish ad are slightly overemphasized, however; see Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 227. The reasons for this are complex: in the 1890s, German advertisers borrowed imperial imagery from British and American advertisers; around 1900, German advertisers tapped into the topicality of “colonial issues” (with the Boer and Boxer conflicts) with Black figures; Germany’s new status as colonial power encouraged the re-patterning of more venerable (and idiosyncratic) images of exotified blackness to look more like “Germany’s African colonial subjects”; and there were a host of other factors as well. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, esp. chs 3 and 4. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, chs 5 and 6. On the effect of “race war,” see also David Ciarlo, “Picturing genocide in German consumer culture, 1904–1910,” in Michael Perraudin and Jürgen Zimmerer (eds.), German Colonialism and National Identity (New York: Routledge, 2010), 69–89.

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designers (Plate 5). Moreover, originals and imitations were then circulated by new processes of mass reproduction to an unprecedentedly large viewing audience. (We often forget, in our everyday use of the word “stereotype,” that it comes out of printing; it indicates the mass-reproduction of duplicates on paper from a master-cliché block.) When one design became very widely disseminated, this only encouraged even further imitation—for imagery that was broadly recognizable was also broadly legible, and legibility was particularly useful to advertisers and designers seeking to make their visual messages understood to the widest possible audience.33 Overall, then, the stereotypification of the Black figure’s bodily features could emerge from the practices of commercial culture rather than reflecting any specific ideology. Hohlwein’s own work provides an example of this mass reification through imitation. The very first of Ludwig’s Hohlwein designs to win broad acclaim—in the very first year of his design career—was his 1906 poster for the Palast Café, which featured a diminutive Black serving-boy in uniform.34 The figure is racialized, with graphic emphasis upon the lips, an overly rounded skull, and a diminished stature. Hohlwein’s poster for the Palast Café was reproduced in a number of advertising trade publications, most prominently in Hans Moor’s Reklame-Lexicon of 1908. In Moor’s handbook, Hohlwein’s poster was hailed as a “model” for other designers. The design of a Black serving boy in livery with racialized features thereby established Hohlwein’s name and launched his career, and in the next five years, images of Black figures became one of Hohlwein’s favorite themes. His poster for Eppan Burk’s Ueberetscher champagne in 1909, for instance, revisited the Black-boy-in-livery theme—although exaggerating racial delineations even further, by coloring the Black figure’s lips bright red.35 Hohlwein’s fame inspired others. Ultimately, in the imitation- and plagiarismfilled world of advertising, giving Black figures large red lips quickly became nearly universal, as renowned designers like Julius Klinger, Ivo Puhonny and Julius Gipkins, all increasingly turned to identical techniques of racialization when incorporating Black figures into their ad designs. Gipkins’ notorious Sarotti-Mohr (Moor), trademarked in 1918, was in many ways a culmination of the growing uniformity in patterns of racializing Black figures.36 As we saw with Ludwig Hohlwein’s designs above, abstracted, racialized stereotypes of Black figures could help to establish white figures as “normal”—as ordinary— through stark contrast. This is true even where the white figure is caricatured . . . just so long as the Black figure was caricatured to an even greater degree. For instance, a metal-ware manufacturer trademarked an ad for its Baff shoe-protector (registered in 1916, but certainly crafted a year or two earlier) where a Black figure with caricatured

33

34

35

36

David Ciarlo, “Advertising and the optics of colonial power,” in Martin Jay and Sumathi Ramaswamy (eds.), Empires of Vision: A Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 189–208. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 294–7. See also David Ciarlo, “Rasse Konsumieren. Von Der Exotischen Zur Kolonialen Imagination in Der Bildreklame Des Wilhelminischen Kaiserreichs,” in Birthe Kundrus (ed.), Phantasiereiche. Der Deutsche Kolonialismus in Kulturgeschichtlicher Perspektive (New York: Campus, 2003), 135–79. This champagne poster was featured in Das Plakat, 4, 3 (1913): 110; see also Gude Suckale-Redlefsen (ed.), Plakate in München, 1840–1940 (München: Stadtmuseum, 1975), 74 no. 206. Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 9–10, 280–1, 302–3, 319.

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Figure 2.2 ‘Witte’s Shoe-Protector Baff (made of curved steel with counter-tips). Unbreakable. Secure. Comfortable.” Louis Witte Metalwarenfabrik, GmbH, Barmen. Warenzeichenblatt, Kaiserliches Patentamt (1916), p. 584, reg. no. 210758. Designed by Louis Oppenheim.

lips pops up out of the globe to repair the shoes at the direction of the white figure (Figure 2.2). The Black figure is so abstracted that we are not even sure if this is supposed to be an “African”—although the ubiquity of Black figures as shoe-shine boys in German commercial visuality (imported from American advertising culture since the 1880s) suggests it. Note, however, that the white figure—a portly Bavarian, drawn in comic fashion by the noted designer Louis Oppenheim—is charmingly cartoonish. Again (as with Hohlwein’s tableaus) we have a contrast in racial markers. Again, there is a hierarchical positioning. Again, there is a bodily contrast in height. And, again, there is an inescapable contrast in scale. However, a closer look at what the contrasting racial markers allow is revealing: the extreme exaggeration of the Black figure’s nose and lips—so distorted as to actually call into question whether the Black figure is even human—sets off Oppenheim’s cartoonish of the white figure, making the cartoon German/European appear more, for lack of a better word, realistic. The nose of the white figure is so pointed as to be Pinocchio-esque, and the body of the white figure is so rotund as to be (if looked at “realistically”) practically spherical. However, set against the Black figure, the cartoonishness seems less cartoonish. Even with the war looming (this was likely created just before the war) the contrast of Black and white was too tempting to pass up: it allowed Oppenheim to have it both ways, by crafting a funny cartoon, but one that still encouraged identification with the white figure (rather than puzzlement or even alienation) by adding a starkly contrasting “other.” What did this all have to do with the figure of the Aryan? As the facial and bodily features of Black figures became more caricatured throughout the broader corpus of

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Figure 2.3 Advertisement for gardening supplies and seeds, Christian Mohrenweisser, Altenweddingen. Warenzeichenblatt, Kaiserliches Patentamt (1902), p. 249, reg. no. 53287.

commercial visuality—almost to the point of abstraction—they would sometimes be paired with white figures. However, white figures in the decades between 1890 and 1914 still tended to be drawn in all sorts of diverse ways, from the campishly cartoonish to the quasi-lifelike. Yet, this diversity with white figures—this lack of stereotypification if you will—when set against stereotyped Black figures, could strike bizarre notes. Take, for instance, this an ad for gardening tools from 1902 (Figure 2.3). The choice of design originates in a play upon the name of the business-owner, Mohrenweisser: the design offers a visual pun on the name, namely a Janus face of a “Moor-White.” The design thus mirrors a Black and white face, more specifically, a Black bellhop (or other occupation requiring a uniform) and a white businessman. This design follows the increasingly pervasive pattern after 1900 of racializing the Black face through gross exaggeration of the figure’s lips.37 In the Mohrenweiser ad of 1902, this facial caricature is mirrored against a white figure that includes far less exaggeration, and the white figure thereby appears through contrast more true 37

Ibid., 213–58.

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to life. This leaves the graphic designer with a bit of a quandary, however: namely, a potential imbalance within the design itself. The oversized lips—which were quickly becoming de rigueur on Black figures after 1900—could well pull our eye towards the left. That would draw attention away from the white figure, thereby effectively marginalizing the white face. The design solution—a temporary fix—was to add a thick black mustache, which is a step towards visually balancing the composition through direct contrast: the full black mustache of the white face takes on an optical parity with the oversized white lips of the Black face. Overall, advertising images from around the fin de siècle that featured a Black figure with oversized (or caricatured) lips as well as a white figure, often included a mustache, often for visual balance. For instance, in an advertisement trademarked by the Auerbach metalware firm in 1912, we can see an array of racial stereotypes representing the five continents (Figure 2.4). Four of the “races” are presented with stereotyped racial markers. They are balanced against each other by pairing their stereotypical codifications. The large lips and rounded head for the African are balanced, diagonally, against the white lips and hook nose for the American Indian. Meanwhile, the slanted

Figure 2.4 Advertisement for metalware by L. Auerbach & Co., Fürth. Warenzeichenblatt, Kaiserliches Patentamt (1912) p. 2809, reg. no. 167477.

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eyes and Manchu mustache for the Asian are balanced diagonally against the wild beard and stubby nose for the Australian aboriginal. There are other elements of design balance as well: the African and Asian face each other in profile in the top third, while the Aboriginal and American Indian face away from each other in angled side views in the bottom third. The African and Aboriginal figures on the left both lack clothing, while the Asian and American Indian on the right both have exotic headwear. Meanwhile, at the center is the white figure—a presentation of the “normal.” This sense of normality is established visually, by placing the figure at the optical center of the composition, and directly facing the viewer (and perhaps making eye contact). This sense of normality is also established by dress: the white figure has neat hair, plaid jacket, and orderly tie. Normalcy is also achieved, however, by a far lower register of physiognomic exaggeration: the white figure (apart from the mustache) possesses no highly exaggerated “racial” features. Surrounded by the exotic—and by the exaggeration of racialized caricature—the white clearly becomes the epitome of normalcy. There remains a potential problem in this design, however: surrounded by caricature and exaggeration, the white figure’s face would look a bit bland, even blank—with the result that the gaze of the viewer would be pulled away towards more sensationalized features on all sides of him, thereby decentering him as the image’s optical focal point (and undermining the effort to keep the white figure metaphorically “central”). Hence, the artist adds a rather overstated handlebar mustache, as a balancing gesture. Indeed, given the symbolic weight of the other markers (oversize lips; dramatic headdress), we might see the mustache now as part of the figure’s Europeanness . . . or even its whiteness. Nonetheless, the mustache remains a cultural marker: it can be shaved off. What would happen when mustaches would no longer be in fashion—as they increasingly were not after 1918? And what might replace the mustache to balance such compositions? We see a revealing development in a new version of the Mohrenweiser logo that emerged before 1910. This is an updated version of the advertisement of the same gardening firm seen in Figure 8. Again, the pun on the firm’s name, Mohrenweisser, provides the basis for the Janus-faced, contrasting figures of Black and white (Figure 2.5). A decade later, though, the Black figure has been redesigned: the Black “bellhop” has been redrawn as an African “native,” with a looped native earring substituting for the uniform collar. Meanwhile, the white businessman of the earlier version (with a high shopkeeper’s collar) has been replaced by a more “venerable” figure—an “ancient German.” This revised design seems to strive for a deeper contrast than just Black versus white; it goes back in time to juxtapose the primitive African against the Ur-German. (Indeed, the tressure flory around the necks of the figures at the bottom even harks back to heraldic devices of the late middle ages.)38 It thereby seeks to capture a contrast in timeless “essence.” The racialization of the Black figure remains: in this new version from 1910, the dramatic exaggeration of

38

The image of the moor in heraldry, which include the quite old coat-of-arms of the city of Coburg, draws from a complicated lineage. See Peter J. Bräunlein,“Von Mohren-Apotheken und MohrenkopfWappen,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, 41, 2 (1991): 219–39; and Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren. Afrikaner in Bewußtsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), 53.

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Figure 2.5 Advertisement for gardening supplies and seeds, Christian Mohrenweisser, Altenweddingen. In Paul Hillman, Die deutsche landwirtschaftliche Pflanzenzucht, Heft 168 (Deutsche Landwirtschafts-Gesellschaft, 1910), 235.

the lips has been retained, and emphasis on the curly hair only heightened. Nonetheless, the oversized white lips of the Black figure again threatens to pull the gaze of the viewer to the left, and marginalize the white figure; so the white figure again has a moustache to balance the composition. However, we see a new trick: the nose of the white figure is drawn quite differently, as a “Germanic” nose that drops steeply at a sharp angle. (The “African” figure, meanwhile, has been deliberately drawn with a shorter, stubbier nose to greater emphasize the contrast.) This effectively pulls the eye toward the right. In this way, then, the gross imbalance of contrasting lips is counterweighted by a dramatic differentiation of contrasting noses. To put it more simply, the white figure now also has a racially stereotyping feature, and design balance has been reestablished. By the late 1920s, however, such Black–white juxtapositions were becoming far less common. Much of this had to do with the Black figure itself falling out of advertisers’ favor. While the changes in advertising during the first decade of the Weimar Republic are complex and wide-ranging, I will just mention here three influences on the gradual decrease of Black figures in German advertising, all of which involve the impact of the First World War and its aftermath. First, the war itself evidences the greatest caesura: from the moment war broke out in August of 1914, Black figures were immediately recognized as less relevant to the new national and nationalistic focus of German advertising. For a nation mobilizing all resources for the war effort—military, civilian, economic, and even commercial resources—it was the figure of the soldier that seemed the most salient. The ordinary soldier (Feldgrau) then quickly became the single most prominent motif in all of German advertising by

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late 1914, and remained so throughout the war, through Germany’s economic and military decline and collapse.39 Second, in the early years of the Weimar Republic, the political fallout from the war and the Versailles Treaty that followed would continue to militate against the use of Black figures. While the loss of Germany’s colonies in 1919 became a politically volatile subject, this did not necessarily hinder advertisers’ use of Black figures: indeed, as we saw with Hohlwein’s Kaloderma advertisement from 1920, it might even have fostered it, at least initially. However, the political propaganda surrounding the supposed “Black Horror on the Rhine” that developed in the early 1920s was another story. Here, protests against French occupation of the Rhineland were reframed as a graphic tale of French colonial troops raping young German women—and, in the visual realm, Black Horror propagandists worked within the pictorial pattern of racialization of Black figures developed in prewar advertising culture, but now applying the racialized abstraction to aggressive, threatening monsters.40 Recent research has described this propaganda as “the product of a fractured society,” primarily serving only to “provide catharsis for an embittered right.”41 Yet, it had an enormous impact in spreading imagery of Blacks as threatening monsters—an unpleasant, pervasive imagery around which Weimar-era advertisers would need to step carefully. This was particularly problematic, given that the fulmination of the right against the cosmopolitan decadence of Weimar often deployed a highly charged racial rhetoric. Black figures became contentious, because they now represented the foreign imports of jazz and American negroes.42 Certainly, Black figures were becoming politicized in a way that they had not been before, and in such a climate, it is not surprising that as the 1920s wore on, despite blips such as the popularity of Josephine Baker, advertisers saw decreasing utility in using Black figures to sell products. Most importantly, however, the growing standardization—even stereotypification—of the white figure after 1914 also contributed to the declining popularity of the Black figure. This began with the war: as mentioned above, the figure of the common soldier rather rapidly became the main motif of all advertising. The sober seriousness of the Feldgrau (soldier), standing watch, helmet on and rifle at the ready, became the most ubiquitous design in German advertising from the end of 1914 through 1916. With the collapse of

39

40 41

42

David Ciarlo, “Die Vermarktung des Krieges: Bildreklame in Deutschland, 1910–1916” in Cornelia Rauh, Arnd Reitemeier, and Dirk Schumann (eds.), Kriegsbeginn in Norddeutschland. Zur Herausbildung einer “Kriegskultur” 1914/15 in transnationaler Perspektive (Bremen: Historischen Kommission für Niedersachsen und Bremen, 2015), 82–105. For other glimpses into wartime advertising, see Dirk Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing. (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 217–18, 416–28; and Jörg Meißner (ed.), Strategien der Werbekunst von 1850–1933 (Berlin: Deutsches Historisches Museum, 2004). Ciarlo, Advertising Empire, 316–18. Peter Collar, The Propaganda War in the Rhineland: Weimar Germany, Race and Occupation after World War I (London: Tauris, 2013), 11 and 259. For instance, the conservative commentator, Adolf Stein (pen name Rumpelstilzchen), bitterly lamented what he called the postwar “niggerization” of Berlin, where Blacks from abroad were becoming common in public cafés and the like. And when Wilhelm Frick, the first National Socialist to hold a ministerial-level post in Germany, became the Minister of the Interior in Thuringia in 1930, one of his first actions was to put into effect the “Ordinance Against Negro Culture”—intended to cleanse Germany of “foreign” influences, such as jazz or the “negro dances.”

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the consumer economy by 1916, however, many graphic designers then moved into the employ of the state to design posters for war loans and other forms of official propaganda. The theme of the ordinary soldier, needless to say, remained the predominant motif. In short, the helmeted soldier was everywhere in graphic design—first in consumer imagery of 1914 and 1915, and then in state-sponsored propaganda in 1916 through 1918.43 The universality of this image—as a representation not only of the soldier but of Germany itself—was hard to give up in peacetime.44 And the Black figure would find little purchase in this new nationalized, militarized, and uniformed and uniformly white motif landscape. Yet the racialized stereotyped Black figure had proven so useful, both commercially and visually. As this essay has sketched, the Black figure had offered a convenient visual tool—a means to flatter the (presumed white) viewer with delineations of power on the one hand, and to cast a “generic” white consumer figure by means of optical contrast on the other. In the highly fractured political landscape of the Weimar Republic, then, a universalizing figure—a figure that would help forge a unified, generic consumer—was desperately needed. It would replace the varied, idiosyncratic, mustached, patchy, comic, or sketched white figures—a variety of figures that had been made to “look” more similar to each other by means of contrast to the Black. This new figure would soon be widely recognizable by means of the repetition in mass culture—the same forces that had forged Black figures into reified patterns of racialized depiction before the war. And, it would be—like the Black figure before it—increasingly delineated, indeed, stereotyped. In this context, Hohlwein’s poster for Herkules Beer in 1928 (Plate 2) can be seen in a new light. The stark chromatic contrast between dark and light of prewar advertising remains: only this contrast is now wholly within a single figure. The “racial” features of the German/Aryan—straight nose, broad forehead, strong forearm—are set into stark relief by the shadows elsewhere on the face and body. In a pictorial shift that parallels the prewar codification of the Black figure’s “features” then, white figures in the 1920s onwards increasingly began to look more similar to each other. At the same time, this typification was underscored by Weimar advertisers’ shift towards an emphasis on “lifestyle” ads; previously dominant motifs that showed power relations—whites elevated by subordinating a Black stereotype, as we saw in Plate 4—began to be replaced by representations speaking to of internalized possibility, namely, conforming oneself to an abstract ideal, as we see in Plate 2.45 What iconography would all of these white figures come to share? It is worth pointing out explicitly that the straight “Nordic” nose, highlighted by a trick of the light, is one of the key hallmarks of Hohlwein’s “Aryan”; it is the white figure’s single most defining feature (Figure 2.6). Sander Gilman’s insight on the cultural construction 43 44

45

Ciarlo, “Vermarktung des Krieges,” esp. 90–100. The persistence of the steel-helmeted soldier in early Weimar-era visual culture—from posters appealing for volunteers by Freikorps units to photographs of revolution and counterrevolutionary forces in the newly photographic mass media—is rather astonishing, given the realities of demobilization and the stunning break with the past seen in so many other Weimar visual art forms, from avant-garde photomontage to expressionist film. I do not have the space to go into this transformation here; see Dirk Reinhardt, Von der Reklame zum Marketing. Geschichte der Wirtschaftswerbung in Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie, 1993), 387–412 and 441–5; and Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany, 1890–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

The Aryan Body in German Visual Advertising

Figure 2.6 Promotional poster for the First National Socialist Reich Youth Day, 1932, designed by Ludwig Hohlwein. Also circulated widely as a postcard. Münchener Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Reklamekunst.

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of what he calls “the racial nose” in the late nineteenth century is an important backdrop to this iconography, of course.46 But, when Gilman goes back to the line drawings in some books of the mid-nineteenth century, I would argue that the pervasive Nordic nose of the Aryan comes straight from the origins of modern German pictorial modes of advertising. As we have seen, the physiognomic construction of the Aryan served a useful purpose in commercial design decades before it became a staple of National Socialist propaganda. Let me end by reflecting: If the overarching strategies of stereotypes of Black and white figures were similar—namely, the mass repetition of a defining feature or features—the goals were surely different. The commercially produced visuality of the Kaiserreich served to forge different (German) viewers into a mass, by presenting a stereotype of difference against which differences among the white viewers faded (in the visual field) into insignificance. The aims of National Socialist propaganda, however, were diametrically opposite; they aimed to forge all the enemies of the race into one undifferentiated mass.47 A stereotype of the Aryan, I might tentatively suggest, presented a stereotypical figure against which the differences of Nazism’s myriad “enemies” faded in significance from each other. Designers like Hohlwein, merely by mass-reproducing a visual stereotype, might seem from one perspective to be proposing or claiming commonality among Germans. From a different angle, however, we might also see these archetypes as actually constructing commonality among nonGermans, through implied visual contrast. Did the very image of the Aryan—designed incrementally in the 1910s, hardened into a stereotype in visual commercial mass culture in the 1920s and then reified in Nazi propaganda after 1930—facilitate the interchangeability of Nazism’s diverse Others? Were Jews, socialists, communists, Slavs, Blacks, asocials, homosexuals, the handicapped, Americans, and other Others more easily “seen” by the public as somehow interlinked, or even interchangeable, because of the contrast to the by now rigidly delineated figure of the Aryan?48 This point must remain speculative. What is certain is that a stereotyped, unified vision of “whiteness” emerged first in the commercial realm—a decade after a stereotyped vision of blackness had already formed in that same realm. Indeed, the “Aryan” vision of commercialized “whiteness” seems to have come into being in advertising, at least partially, originally as a visual foil of blackness. Ultimately, however, the figure of the aryanized white relied upon the same techniques as that of the racialized Black—the repetitive emphasis on a few defining “racial features”—for its power in the visual realm.

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Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). See also Gray, About Face. Witamwas, NS-Propaganda, 46ff, 206–9; Paul, Das visuelle Zeitalter, 262–6. Cf. Paul, Das visuelle Zeitalter, 262–6; Witamwas, NS-Propaganda, 46–57.

3

Group Zero Transforming Trauma into Transcendence Jill Holaday

In the late 1950s, just a little more than a decade after the end of the Second World War, German artists Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Günther Uecker began working and exhibiting together. These artists named themselves “Zero.” They would become the founding core of what would eventually become an international network referred to as ZERO.1 Zero artists experienced trauma for years during the Allied aerial raids, especially during the nights of the last three years of so-called carpet-bombing.2 Piene, Uecker, and Mack were all adolescents during the war, and none of them fully understood what was happening until years later. Most of the information they received was not verbal, but corporeal. Breathing in the smoke, experiencing fire, seeing and smelling the corpses scattered across neighborhoods, hearing the sirens, the roar of aircraft, and understanding light as danger from above. The body itself became a vehicle of comprehension for these artists. As Edmund Husserl asserts, perception is not strictly visual or linguistic, rather the entire body is always perceiving the world around us.3 However, Husserl uses the term “horizon” to describe how we can only experience a certain amount of the world around us based on our position, our focus, and mental state. There are infinite, ever-changing horizons because of our limits in perception, in Husserl’s framing, even when objects stay exactly the same. For Zero artists, creating an infinitude of perceptions visually and corporeally was the way to activate a zone of inexhaustible possibility. They chose to use phenomena eerily

1

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3

For the sake of clarity, I will use “Zero” to refer to the three German artists who were the founders of Gruppe Zero, while “ZERO” will refer to the international network associated with Zero. Rather than using precision bombing, bombing important sites of military power and resources, carpet bombing is bombing the most densely populated civilian area. The goal was to demoralize Germany, with the hopes they would turn against fascism. Piene and Mack studied Nicolai Hartmann, a philosopher of phenomenology who came after Husserl, carrying on his tradition. Hartmann stated: “The tragedy of man is that somebody who is starving and sitting at a richly laden table but does not reach out with his hand, because he cannot see what is right in front of him. For the real world has inexhaustible splendor, the real life is full of meaning and abundance, where we grasp it, it is full of miracles and glory,” in Nicolai Hartmann, Ethik, 4. Aufl. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962), 11.

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connected to wartime experience, especially air raids: fire, smoke, and spotlights. Visitors co-participants were immersed in a multiple-sensory experience, often at night or in darkened rooms. The use of spotlights, music, and direct interaction with kinetic art, drew attention to each person’s body in space. During the aerial raids, the visible body was a moving target for the aircraft above, especially at night when spotlights flooded the streets. Hiding became the only way to survive. Zero chose to create experiences that brought crowds together in dark streets and rooms. The visible body was reclaimed as a source of artistic production and celebration. Zero artists’ focus on the body to comprehend historical trauma is not altogether unique. Scholars from many fields—including Sabine C. Koch and Laura U. Marks— have established how memory can be processed bodily in the arts and how the movement of the body can be healing. Koch and Steve Harvey conducted experiments that revealed: Next to being the container for negative memories, the body is also a reservoir for positive memories. These positive body memories need to be re-accessed in order to experience the body as a resource. DMT (Dance/Movement Therapy) works on disentangling the association of body and trauma and (re-)establishing previously owned, as well as new positive body feelings.4

Also referred to as movement psychotherapy, Dance/Movement Therapy utilizes body movements to access the subconscious and create a physical intervention to work out issues deeply seated and not immediately accessible through verbal communication. Marks asserts that perception can be “subtractive,” a learned response to close oneself up to sensory memory from traumatic events.5 Through movement, Koch and Marks believe that truth that is inaccessible consciously, can be accessed and worked through. As Husserl makes clear, returning to these historical traumas, these forgotten memories, opens up the possibility of further comprehending seemingly incomprehensible past experiences. Zero artists are working against this subtraction, reclaiming sensory experiences of traumatic events by activating emotional triggers left over from the war. As the following essay makes clear, Zero artists create celebratory events and artworks in service of reconfiguring these past events, in expanding the horizon of possibility. Zero artists wanted to break through their historical moment as Walter Benjamin suggests: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. . . . A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus, he

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Sabine C. Koch and Steve Harvey, “Dance/movement therapy with traumatized dissociative patients,” in Sabine C. Koch, Thomas Fuchs, Michela Summa, and Cornelia Müller (eds.), Body Memory, Metaphor and Memory (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2012), 382. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 152.

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establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.6

Zero artists felt stuck in a historical trajectory of German history that was soaked in shame, guilt, violence, and oppression. Like Benjamin, who criticizes historicism for its reduction of history into a progression of events, Zero artists wanted to overcome an understanding of the present, and perceive time as something beyond a sequence of events. In order to free themselves and others from this trajectory, they created interruptions, flashes of light, sonic eruptions in their demonstrations and in their art. This essay contextualizes Zero artists’ experience of the war, its influence on their art, and how their demonstrations and objects were meant to overcome their historic moment and ultimately, re-empower crowds of viewers/participants who were weighed down after years of trauma. In Germany, especially, artists grappled with how to make art after the Holocaust. They were not exposed to contemporary art immediately after the war and had little resources with which to make art. Zero broke artistic conventions, hoping to break with history. This new approach to art in West Germany was embraced by some scholars, such as Willoughby Sharp: The art of light and movement is the only totally new art of our time . . . it is the only art which adequately reflects the new age in which we live, it has a great future. The new age, the electric age, has created an environment that has reconfigured our senses. Seeing is no longer the primary means of knowing. Hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling have now become more important. We need an art of total environment. We need an art that unites us with the real rhythms of our era.7

For some, Zero’s art and activities provided a positive engagement with their own time, an engagement that would otherwise be fraught with despair. After the war, Germans faced harsh physical and psychological consequences, a reality that was further complicated by the dread created by the escalating Cold War. The ecstatic, celebratory nature of Zero’s art, statements, and demonstrations provided a way for Europeans to exhale, a cathartic experience that opened a new zone of freedom. For Germans, this space was especially powerful because public expression of their loss from the aerial raids was out of line with the need for Germans to appear as cooperative and compliant with the Allies’ postwar efforts of de-Nazificaiton and Western integration as possible. All three artists—Otto Piene, Heinz Mack, and Günther Uecker—experienced the aerial raids differently. Of the three, only Piene officially served in the war. In 1943, he and his male classmates were drafted into the Flakhelfer (generally referred to as “Flak”), the anti-aircraft artillery arm of the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force.8 Members of 6 7

8

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 263. Willoughby Sharp, Günther Uecker: 10 Years of a Kineticist’s Work (New York: Kineticism Press, 1966), 317. Luftwaffenhelfer came from an order to draft entire school classes of male students born in 1926 and 1927 into a military corp. They were used to help defend Germany from overhead aircraft.

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Flak were trained to track and gun down enemy aircraft using spotlights to locate bombers during the night. The spotlights and guns were so large that they usually required two people to control and operate them. With each firing, a dramatic plume of smoke would rise, and flares and bombs fell from enemy aircrafts above. Over time, though, the grueling hours of watching the sky changed from excitement into terror and fatigue for Piene: The blue sky had been a symbol of terror in the aerial war. It had meant flying weather, attacks by low-diving fighter planes, and bombardments. As a gunner at a four-barrel Flak, surrounded by detonations, at night I used to see tracers draw lines, hectically beautiful. But fear came before beauty; seeing was aiming.9

It is not surprising that light, smoke, and fire are the materials Piene worked with as an artist. The use of smoke instead of paint, for instance, evokes directly the smoke that filled entire cities during the aerial raids of the Second World War, scenes with which he was familiar directly. As Marks points out: “images are always both multisensory and embodied. Pure memory does not exist in the body, but it is in the body that memory is activated, calling up sensations associated with the remembered event.”10 Piene’s use of smoke and eventually fire to create art, allowed him to access his corporeal experience of the air raids He created immersive art that incorporated utopian ideals. Piene’s techniques for materializing these memories in his artworks are key for understanding his aims. He used the soot from candle flames to create marks on canvases (Figure 3.1). By putting canvas or paper behind the stencil, he could use the soot to create new compositions.11 These became known as his Rauschbilder, or smoke paintings. His smoke paintings are made dynamic through the movement of the flame. As he wrote in an exhibition catalog in 1960: “The size of unit ‘points’ assumed shifting proportions to their distance, which are in turn dependent on the size of the field (sheet of paper), i.e., the ‘frequency’ varies accordingly, so does the ‘speed’ or intensity of vibration.”12 The vibration and movement he sought to achieve in his raster paintings are transformed through flame into the actual means of creating the art. The movement and speed with which the candle was moved determined the final composition. In one of his earliest untitled smoke paintings from 1959, a horizontal band of soot circles occupy the paper as in his horizontal raster paintings. The effect of the narrow bands of soot on paper has visual affinities with the artworks of better known, celebrated artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. In Cage’s Automobile Tire Print from 1953, for instance, the tire print was intended to be indexical, a

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Piene quoted in “Light Ballet” [“Lichtballet”], in Joanna Ahlberg and Rachel Churner (eds.), Otto Piene: Lichtballett (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2011), 29. Marks, The Skin of the Film, 73. Stephan von Wiese and Susanne Rennert (eds.), Otto Piene Retrospektive: 1952–1966: Raster, Rauch, Feuer, Licht, Sky Art, Inflatables, CAVS, Neue Arbeiten, exh. cat. (Düsseldorf: Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf), 51. Otto Piene: Ölbilder, Rauschzeichnungen, Lichtmodelle, Lichtballet, exh. cat. (Berlin: Galerie Diogenes, 1960), n.p.

Transforming Trauma into Transcendence

Figure 3.1 Film still of Piene creating a smoke painting from 0 × 0 = Kunst.

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challenge to art created directly by the artist. For Piene, however, his use of smoke was beyond indexicality; his intention was that the resulting artwork would inspire phenomenological experience. Unlike paint, smoke is atmospheric; it is breathed. Thousands of Germans suffocated from smoke in shelters during the WWII air raids. Piene’s use of smoke thus employs one of the most permeating elements of these aerial bombardments and transforms it into art. In a sense, through his use of smoke, Piene sought to control violence by making it a creative force. In his Das Licht malts (The Light Paints) from 1961, for example, the raster smoke circles expand out so far that their borders touch the edges of the paper, leaving little white space in the composition. The title, “The Light Paints,” seems ironic for a painting that is mostly black soot, but it is the perfect pull between the light and dark that Piene sought. The light of the flame paints the darkness of its smoke. Similarly, he manipulated the linear and gradational properties of smoke on canvas masterfully in his Untitled painting from 1961. The background is white oil paint on canvas. In The Light Paints, darkness indexes light; the artwork’s deepest blacks are created by the most intense exposure to flame and heat. He employs methods of creating art that confront his own body. A film clip of him at work, for example, shows him holding a board laden with lit candles. A canvas is placed above his head. He lifts up the board with the flames in order to make contact with the canvas, placing the flames above his own head. His act of creation is reminiscent of the destruction caused by incendiary bombs. But rather than make his body invisible to the flames, he used his body to manipulate them. On one occasion, Piene applied too much fixative over a smoke painting and it left a stain. He knew the fixative was flammable, so he set it on fire. The result was a new kind of artwork and a new process, a process that was part destruction, part creation. Eventually, he called such works his “fire paintings.”13 These works were more threedimensional, with parts of the fixative turning into a jelly-like substance. Bubbles formed from the heat of the fire. The borders of the colors seem to flow out toward the viewer. In his fire paintings, the flame had a life of its own. Piene only stopped and started the fire. What happened was the result of a direct interaction between the fire and the support: Images of the sun turned into afterimages of the sun, a fire dance on the retina and a choreography of fire on the canvas. I ignited solvent that otherwise would have dried into an existence of gemütlich [“pleasurable”] contemplation, and pictures grew within seconds on a border line between destruction and survival—the Fire Flowers. To me they were a liberation from the rules of optical exploitation of geometry and a turning towards organic forms which derive from melting and technological process.14

Piene used technology, in the broadest sense of the word, to create paintings which are like “images of the sun turned into afterimages of the sun, a fire dance on the 13 14

Ana Glibota, “Otto Piene or a rainbow in the sky,” Otto Piene (Paris: Delight Edition, 2011), 25. Piene, “Lichtballett,” in Ahlberg and Churner, Otto Piene, 32.

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retina.”15 Rather than directly confronting the viewer with lit chemicals, he presents the artwork as the trace of the interaction between fixative and flame. When talking broadly about his artistic intentions, he stated: “I go to the darkness itself. I pierce it with light, I make it transparent, I take its terror from it, I turn it into a volume of power with the breath of life like my own body, and I take the smoke so that it can fly.”16 In his fire paintings, he pierces darkness with flame, but then extinguishes it, presenting the viewer with something beautiful and non-threatening. Piene’s “light ballets” were perhaps his most important artworks. They were installations of motorized, rotating spheres, with holes slit through their outside membranes. For these works, light was projected from a source inside, for example, an exhibition called Ein Fest für Das Licht (A Celebration of Light), was installed in Piene’s modest studio. Several mechanized objects created multiple simultaneous visual effects. Wires, metal rods, and moving spheres filled the room. The studio was constructed with concrete floors and white brick walls. Spectators were confronted by moving light, the sound and movement of motors, and music that was often minimal and discordant. Each individual had to choose to open his or herself up to these elements and embrace these elements as art. It is impossible to fully reconstruct the significance of Zero’s demonstrations and participations’ experiences, especially in relation to real experiences of the war, but accounts of survivors seem to be the most illuminating. For example, a survivor of the Second World War, Aaron Appelfeld, hid in the woods when he was a boy for five years to stay alive: All that has happened then has been imprinted into the cells of my body. Not into my memory. The cells of the body seem to remember better than memory although it is assigned for that. Even years after the war I did not walk in the middle of the pavement or lane, but always close to the wall, always in a hurry . . . Sometimes the smell of food, dampness in the shoes or a sudden noise suffices to take me right back into the war.17

The corporeal interaction between the surrounding darkness, the moving lights, and the sounds, recall the aerial raids subtly. Piene’s work thus plays with individual and collective experiences in ways that recall theories of corporeal, bodily memory. As Sabine C. Koch notes, for example, “Knowledge is stored in memory not in an amodal way but in a modality-specific sensorimotor format, and any type of recall includes a sensorimotor simulation of the process involved in the original encoding of the experience.”18 Here, as Koch’s ideas help explain, the viewer/participant encountering Piene’s “light ballets” can provide a “sensorimotor simulation” that physically recalls a specific memory of the past. The viewer’s wartime memories may be triggered, but

15 16 17 18

Ibid. Ibid. Thomas Fuchs, “The phenomenology of body memory,” in Koch et al. (eds.), Body Memory, 18. Sabine C. Koch, “Introduction,” in Koch et al. (eds.), Body Memory, 2.

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their internal fearful response to run and hide during the raids is assuaged. The longer, and more frequently the light ballets are experienced by the viewer, the more completely the learned response to hide the body from danger is dissipated. Like Piene, Heinz Mack co-opted elements of wartime experience to create art that was positive, even utopian: He stated: “My ideas fall from the sky like stones and jeopardize my life—I create birds out of them and let them fly again.”19 Mack’s utopian ideals about technology, light, and cultural transformation were eerily connected to the technologies used during the Second World War. In Mack’s book about himself, Mack: Leben und Werk—Life and Work, 1931–2011,20 he juxtaposes a photograph taken during a nighttime raid during the war with a drawing he made in 1960. The drawing is titled Black Radiation, a title that conjures up memories of the two nuclear bombs detonated at the end of the war. Streaks of white are the only identifying feature of the falling bombs. Lines of light were deeply embedded in Mack’s visual memory and found their way into his artwork. Years after Zero disbanded, he reflected: Though it was not spiritual, for that, however, there was all the more real experience I had as a 12-year-old during the war. After the clattering salvos of anti-aircraft shells and the thuds of the air bomb detonations had silenced, we had left our airraid shelter, lit by a single candle, emerging to see the city lit up by the fires and the will o’ the wisp searchlights of the air defense: an inferno! Being accustomed to only living in darkened rooms, this night sky aglow with fire raging to the horizon was my first, deep experience with light. Even in my student days at the academy I did a charcoal drawing out of a purely graphical interest, which—this only came out many years later “by accident”—looks very similar to a photograph of the burning city of Krefeld.21

Here Mack realized that the visual and emotional experience of the war was embedded so deeply in his psyche that he had not even realized its presence in his art. Often his art hangs from the ceiling or erupts from the ground, angular and fragmented. These forms can be understood as a visual articulation of his prolonged experience of unpredictable, terrorizing violence. It was not a singular experience that affected his psyche, rather a prolonged experience of time punctuated with violence. In one such episode, his religious Confirmation ended abruptly as an air raid began. To create his artwork, Mack employed aluminum foil, steel mesh, mirror, plexiglass, and motors to reflect light kinetically. Even in his still objects, light moves across shiny surfaces in different patterns. In Mack’s Licht-Karussel from 1964, he created something like a cyclone composed of aluminum. Long, metal forms activate the spaces between

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Mack quoted in Sarah Gold and Karlyn De Jongh, “A conversation with Heinz Mack: Seeing the light,” Sculpture, 32, 99 (2013): 40. Mack: Leben und Werk—Life and Work, 1931–2011, Heinz Mack and Ute Mack (eds.), trans. by Stephen Barmann, Eva Dewes, Stephen Barmann, Eva Dewes, Michael Scuffil, Michael Wolfson, and Achim Worm (Worm: DuMont Buchverlag, 2011), 54–5. Mack, “Conversation between Otto Piene, Karlyn De Jongh, and Peter Lodermeyer,” in Peter Lodermeyer, Karlyn De Jongh, and Sarah Gold (eds.), Personal Structures: Time, Space, Existence (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2010), 342.

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the ceiling and the floor through motion, light, and verticality. The top of the sculpture is flat. Steel forms, mostly vertical rectangles, many ending with a point like a long silver arrow, are all affixed together with a motorized disk at the base that would rotate the conical shape around. Each metallic surface has at least one, if not several, different patterns pressed into them by hand. Patterned lines run diagonally, vertically, and horizontally in irregular formations. Forms hang in front of each other, sometimes straddling corners and in spaces between other metal forms. Shorter forms are used around the exterior, revealing the longer internal forms with the top the broadest, the bottom the narrowest. Spotlights were placed at various locations, each creating reflections and shadows that fill the room. When the room is darkened, jagged rectangular forms flit over the ceiling, underscoring the foreboding nature of this whimsically titled artwork. What appears to be a dangerous mechanized cyclone is called a carousel, creating a tension between the whimsical and the destructive. Mack maintains a tension between embodied memory of trauma, and creation of a new reality, a new art. It also reflects the viewer’s own image on its reflective surface, his, hers or theirs image distorted as the irregularly shaped aluminum surfaces moved, bringing together awareness of both the artwork and the body of the viewer. The body, which was taught to be invisible during the war, becomes directly visible. The perception of the body is distorted by the different metallic patterns, inviting the viewers to look closely and continuously at their own image. Working in a studio was not grand enough to satisfy Mack’s ambition. He sought the absolute, ultimate space of pure light outside time and place. He travelled to the desert and the Arctic to execute seemingly impossible artworks. As early as 1957, he began planning projects for the Sahara Desert that would exceed in scale any art from earlier periods, with the exception of structures such as the great pyramids. These projects were so large in scale and complexity, they could never be fully realized. His quest for transformation through phenomenological means in a way quite distinct from Piene. “The basic idea to enter a world in which everything is still possible is, of course, a utopian principle . . . Space, filled with immeasurable light, displays a boundless emanation here, all the way to the Fata Morgana itself.”22 Mack’s focus on the phenomenological is very much in line with Husserl’s idea of “horizon” mentioned earlier. There are infinite, ever-changing horizons, even when objects stay exactly the same because of the limits of human perception. Husserl stated: “I can provide for myself constantly new and more or less clear and meaningful perceptions and representations, and images also more or less clear, in which I make intuitable to myself whatever can possibly exist really or supposedly in the steadfast order of space and time.”23 Much like Husserl and his thought experiments, Mack sought in the material manifestations of the ultimate horizon. In Mack’s case, this could be most fully attained in the desert, full of little except unbroken light. Mack the artist sought the ultimate,

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Mack quoted in, “Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland,” Licht, Raum, Farbe, exh. cat. (Bonn: Die Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 2011), 31. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London and New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis, 2002), 53.

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unbroken horizon of the desert and went back to his studio to create art stemming from these experiences. Like fellow Zero artists Piene and Mack, Günther Uecker experienced threat from above in aerial raids. However, also quite evident in Uecker’s work is the impact of his experiences of raids, as well as on the ground from Soviet troops arriving in his town. Uecker described one incident during the war when he acted compulsively, driven by fear. He boarded up the inside of his house, shutting the door on all outsiders. He stated: “Nails represent in my work: on the one hand a defense, like ruffled hair, like a hedgehog curling up into a ball, but on the other hand tenderness.”24 These tactile perceptions can be quite fragile and poetically sustainable in their visual perception. Rather than facing the memory of the repeated traumas overtly, he used nails to shut out memory to protect himself. In his violent artistic process, there was something fragile within himself that the body of the hedgehog protected with its quills (Figure 3.2). Uecker expressed himself through the movement and force of his hands, arms, and body, rather than creating a visual image of specific objects. Uecker’s bodily allusions parallel ideas outlined by scholars of phenomenological experience. For example, Koch asserted that conscious memory can be subtractive, while bodily memory can work to keep trauma hidden “if we consider that perception

Figure 3.2 Film still of Günther Uecker hammering nails from 0 × 0 = Kunst. 24

Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Interview with Günther Uecker,” Günther Uecker: The Early Years, exh. cat. (New York: L & M Arts, 2011), 11.

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is subtractive, we can respect the fact that perception is not an infinite return to the buffet table of lived experiences but a walk through the minefield of embodied memory.” 25 This seems to be the case very much with Uecker. Recalling the years he spent as a Zero member, he described his impetus for pounding thousands of nails into canvases and objects: It was an attempt to affix this sludge, the vomit. To affix the human vomit, the impure, as a place of presence; this is how many things are existentially founded. These quanta of emotion which could not be expressed through speech, because I was not capable of such speech at that point, became very complex material structures which were able to then express this sentiment.26

His conscious memory and his capacity for speech were shut down by the multiple traumas he experienced, but bodily movement, the obsessive nailing, allowed a means of dealing with the pain. Elizabeth A. Behnke describes the type of trauma Uecker experienced succinctly: “If I am experiencing something painful, there is a tendency to try to close myself off, clamping down so the feeling is muted . . . In this way the moment of yielding to the vaguely felt tension brings a kinesthetic consciousness into play and allows me to experience the structure of the inner gesture through which I am living-through what I am undergoing.”27 Indeed, Uecker was literally hammering nails down, closing, affixing . . . But affixing what? His mind had no language to express his trauma, and his bodily response is defensive, clamping down on each nail. Although Uecker does not talk about or directly represent trauma, his body is acting it out. One way Uecker attempted this was to perform the act, to drive nails into a piano in front of a live audience. Uecker hammered the nails by moving his body, especially his hand, and employing the size of his thumb as a rough measurement. The process was witnessed and documented. The Neue Rheinzeitung newspaper, which was widely distributed in the Ruhr region, reported how such works were made: Under Uecker’s quick hands, the opus came into its own. Every three seconds a steel nail whizzed into the piano. From the middle of the piano lid the Maestro nailed entire columns across the sides down to the foot. Bang, bang-bang, bang, bang—and that for a full two hours. A lady art-lover—at least that is how she described herself—suddenly gave a groan: “But take a look at his hands!” Gunther Uecker, who, drenched in sweat, was hammering away ever more intensely, had missed the head of one of his nails. A finger was bleeding.28

Uecker provided a performance for his audience. The sound of each nail piercing the piano, the movement of his body, the hammer always coming so close to a finger, it 25 26

27

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Marks, The Skin of the Film, 152. Uecker quoted in Dominique Lévy and Robert Mnuchin (eds.), Günther Uecker: The Early Years, exh. cat. (New York: L & M Arts, 2011), 9. Elizabeth A. Behnke, “Enduring: A phenomenological investigation,” in Koch et  al., Body Memory, 86. “Nun den, die Brillen sind geputzt,” Neue Rheinzeitung, January 22, 1963 (my translation).

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was truly a concert of sorts. But the performance was not a piano recital; it was a series of acts that destroyed the function of the piano, as well as injuring the artist himself. “Bang, bang, bang,” his loud hammering echoed through space while viewers sat uncomfortably. Uecker may have found the process cathartic, but his audience members were left unsettled and shaken. Unlike Piene and Mack, Uecker’s triggering of violent war memories did little to calm or please his viewers, but was rather meant, perhaps subconsciously, to release himself from his own violent memories. His desire to perform in front of an audience, however, is confounding. The context of his personal experience of the war and the Wirkschaftswunder may prove key to understanding this impulse. Many of Uecker’s artworks suggest a critical reception of the growing materialistic culture of West Germany. Coming from the former East Germany—the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—he was conditioned to hate the materialism of the West. Modern styles of home furnishings were available in stores; the utilitarian function of chairs, so dominant in the mindset of GDR communism, was just one consideration in the West, along with style and price. Uecker’s response to this disjuncture was physical; in addition to the piano, he nailed over other performance works l everyday chairs and stools. Most often, the seat would be nailed, as well as one of the legs of the chair or stool. In this example, it looks as if the nails spread from the seat down to the ground. The nails protrude like tall, slim spikes, a hazard to anyone who dares sit. Uecker rendered the chair’s utilitarian function useless while changing it into an artwork. The result is unsettling. Perhaps it expressed his displeasure with chairs becoming aesthetic objects that could represent wealth and social standing. Uecker also hammered nails into several television sets. After years of West Germans struggling to survive after the war, the Wirtschaftswunder (Economic Miracle), created a new influx of money. Most West Germans enjoyed stable jobs and earned more disposable income. As a result, televisions were in practically every West German home by the 1960s. Not only did Uecker alter, if not ruin, a commodity that West Germans were adding to their homes, he was damaging a device of communication. Much earlier, under the National Socialists earlier in the century, Adolf Hitler had dreamed of using television, but only had access to radio. As a result, the possible use of television by the Germans for propagandistic purposes was a deep concern for the Allies during the occupation. As more homes had television sets, the power of the new medium grew. Initially, the Allies controlled the content of television production, gradually allowing West Germans to own their own television stations. Thus, Uecker’s aggressive attacks on television sets were attacks on mainstream culture. To reinforce this sense of attack, Uecker’s nails were arranged one by one, and then often sprayed white. The process was ritualistic. He imposed his own process on the objectified cult of the consumer world, thereby transforming consumer objects into his own functionless works of art. He provoked people to question the function and value of such objects. Like the piano artworks, he performed his hammering into the televisions in front of an audience. His disruptions during these live performances were meant as a means for his viewers to experience a shock, a shock which could provoke a break from the past. Like Benjamin’s historical materialist, Uecker allows time to stop, even for a short time, to break with the powerful ongoing discourse, in this case the telling of the war

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and the call for consumers to acquire new commodities in postwar Germany. Benjamin wrote: “It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.”29 Uecker’s performances disrupt with violent action, and for a moment the audience is shocked and alarmed. This is the opposite of the comfort being extended to them by materialism and assurance that the horrible years of war and its stark aftermath have ended. If Fascism is tucked nicely in a historical time and place, it continues unchallenged in the present. Uecker breaks through the comforts of the present to reawaken a moment in history, allowing the audience to remember, even if only for a moment. Their sensorial experience of war is triggered, but they are physically safe. Zero demonstrations and larger, collective exhibitions offered a physical, active encounter among art, artists, and viewers. Piene, Mack, and Uecker created excitement and participation on a large scale, unprecedented in the German art world at the time. Such large-scale events were still associated with political rallies. After the years of war and poverty, crowds of viewers and Zero artists joined to create positive, even transformative, experiences. Luisa Passerini suggests that “unspeakable lost or hidden memories may survive through generations in silent bodily gestures and movements. Survival of memory is associated with its public silencing.”30 Indeed, West Germans lived through trauma after trauma, garnering little sympathy because of their collective culpability. At these artistic demonstrations and interactive exhibitions, that which cannot be fully remembered or forgotten was acted out. Any sense of paralysis or silence was met with real action, noise, and enthusiasm—but, importantly, in a positive sense, in service of a new and possibly utopian present for postwar Germans. Zero’s first large-scale outdoor event was part of their “ZERO: Edition, Exposition, Demonstration,” that occurred on July 5, 1961, beginning at 9:00 p.m.31 It took place in front of, and eventually inside of, the Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. This first largescale event also was the occasion of their release of their publication, Dynamo. More than one thousand people joined the crowd.32 Many had prepared for the event by making and wearing black tubes with “Zero” written in white on the tubes. The white text rendered these black tubes part of the artwork; the tubes were embodied with a signifier of the group “Zero.” Like a costume, the tubes could transform the attendees into a new persona, the optimistic, unafraid persona of the Zero artists. Some audience members blew soap bubbles up into the dark sky. The darkness that enveloped the

29 30

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Benjamin, Illuminations, 257. Luisa Passerini, “Memories between silence and oblivion,” in Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone (eds.), Contested Past: The Politics of Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), quoted in Susannah Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin (eds.), Memory Cultures: Memory, Subjectivity and Recognition (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction, 2004), 33. Valerie Hillings, “Countdown to a new beginning: Them ultinational ZERO network, 1950s–60s,” in Katherine Atkins and Jennifer Bantz (eds.), ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2014), 26. This event was captured in a short film. It is important to note that Zero’s first large-scale outdoor demonstration was filmed for and aired on television. It was also reviewed in the local newspaper the next day. Zero used media effectively and over a thousand people were in the crowd for their first demonstration.

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Figure 3.3 Film still from a 1961 demonstration in conjunction with the Alfred Schmela exhibition, created for public television in West Germany, from the Zero Foundation. Also by Winkler.

crowd was pierced with bright, moving spotlights, camera flashes, and other sources of light. One thousand balloons were released into the night sky. A band played music; people danced. During the event, noise was generated for the spectacle. Excerpts from speeches, music from various instruments, pop songs, bells, buzzers, and Morse code signals were all sounded.33 The event was completely immersive (Figure 3.3). During the event, Uecker’s pants were covered with smears of white paint, traces of activity. He did not present himself as a detached artist; he appeared to be more of a blue-collar laborer, much like he appears in his self-portraits. He soaked a street broom in white paint and then painted a zero on the dark street. He then painted inside the zero, in a sense white-washing the street (Figure 3.4). He later recalled: I painted the street in front of the building white to illustrate that there is a white zone which can provide the basis for true artistic expression. I did not belong to the generation of the guilty, but to the generation of the guilt heirs. And accepting this inheritance led to the necessity of establishing other principles in order to express one’s truthfulness to the world, in this case artistically. I painted the street white with a wet paint and people walked through it and dragged it through the downtown. And Beuys was so excited, he kicked over the tub with the white paint and laughed. There are many pictures of that.34

While the mood was exuberant, Uecker’s words reveal an implicit relationship between war and guilt among Germans. He had internalized the crimes of the Nazis

33 34

Horst Richter, “Kunststunde Null,” Kölner Stadtanzeiger, July 11, 1961. Hans Ulrich Obrist, “Interview with Günther Uecker,” in Lévy and Mnuchin(eds.), Günther Uecker, 9.

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Figure 3.4 Footage of Günther Uecker painting a white circle on the street film still from a 1961 demonstration in conjunction with the Alfred Schmela exhibition, created for public television in West Germany, from the Zero Foundation. Also by Winkler.

and struggled to move forward. He believed the war was the fault of his father’s generation and wanted to absolve, effectively to “whiteout,” his own responsibility, marking him as innocent. Most of the crowd members at this event were also grappling with what their own parents had done, were struggling with the fact that their parents’ generation had been complicit in Nazi atrocities. Thus, there is a sense of rebelliousness, even insubordination, in Uecker’s act of painting a public street. Uecker’s action was transgressive, like illegal graffiti, but it was not done in secret; rather, it was done in front of a crowd. It was a performative statement, acting out the rebelliousness under the guise of an artistic intervention. An audience member who painted “zero” above the gallery door echoed Uecker’s rebellious attitude. These means of physically, corporeally acting out encouraged crowd members to separate themselves not only from the terror of war, but also any responsibility for the war. The dominant expressionist art of this time achieved on canvases overworked with gestural marks and dark colors. They were expressions of the horrors of the war and its effect on the human psyche. Zero artists rejected this art because it was, in their opinions, too caught up in the past and left no room for a bright future. The people in this crowd all experienced the war during their youth and most likely held in their cells the very same knowing, even if their memory did not conjure

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covertly. Courageously, enthusiastically they gathered in the dark, in the middle of a street, and made noise. Benjamin wrote: “Art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses.”35 Indeed, this is one of Zero’s most foundational goals. The crowds varied, but somewhere twice as many as the onethousand of this early demonstration in 1961. Not only did they participate together in a celebration of sorts, they had access to Zero’s largest publication, Dynamo, pages of which were on display in the exhibition space they were able to view and purchase once inside the gallery space. They were mobilized by sharing experiences and art on an international scale. As the demonstration progressed, visitors could peek through a large hole hacked through the boards that covered the window of the gallery. The wood was hacked away with an axe as visitors rushed inside. In the small gallery, people could see photographs of Zero artwork cluttering the walls including pages featuring artists from countries including: Venezuela, France, Italy, and the Netherlands. People could use a roulette machine that was mounted on the wall. An automated jukebox moved circular records—big “zeros”— and played music. A cash register was used each time a Zero magazine was purchased, and each time the drawer opened, a bell rang out.36 These physical, sonic, tactile encounters connect Zero’s artistic interventions with the corporal, bodily memory of the viewer. As Koch asserts, “We are body-environment interactions. Other people are an essential part of the environmental interaction which we are . . . We do a lot more with our bodies than we know about. That is why others can sense what we ourselves don’t know in ourselves. Our bodies live directly in our situations.” Survivors of the war lived through running, hiding, and being silent during aerial raids, their lives constantly threatened. It was through Zero events such as this one, that people could be unafraid of the dark, unafraid to be loud, and free to celebrate the night. The new environments that were created, activated a new body–environment interaction that could connect with latent effects of the physical and psychological experience of the war, and possibly create a cathartic moment that could carry them forward. But rather than becoming another one-dimensional institution of power over the masses, Zero doggedly elevated the viewer/participant to follow individual and diverse paths. Their publications contained contradictory statements and art from several countries made from completely different mediums. They understood, as did Benjamin, that the moment that the present is arrested or defined, it becomes the past and loses its revolutionary power. The present, in other words, itself has revolutionary potential. In their third and final significant publication, the final pages begin with the word

35 36

Benjamin, Illuminations, 240. Perhaps the most appropriate term for this event is “Happening,” coined by Allan Kaprow. Like Zero artists, Kaprow asked viewers to take part in various activities with everyday materials. Only Kaprow and his audience did not carry the same psychological weight that Europeans did after the war, especially Germans. Kaprow pushed the boundaries of art, while Zero, the New Tendency, and other European neo-avant-garde groups pushed artistic boundaries, while also pushing towards a new way of being. For postwar European artists, the past was something to contend with in a way Americans would never have to understand.

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“ZERO” opposite a close-up image of a closed mouth. The next two pages show the mouth saying each letter: Z-E-R-O. Then there is a countdown—10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1—occupying ten consecutive pages towards the end of the magazine. The reader participates in the countdown with the turn of each page. The final image is a photograph of the Polaris missile launching into the sky with the word “ZERO” labeled on its side appears as the final page. The Polaris is a nuclear weapon; its detonation would create something awesome, sublime—and potentially deadly. But Zero artists did not use an image of the mushroom cloud that blooms after detonation, rather the very moment when it was launched, on the verge of explosion. Zero’s attachment of their name to the missile suggests that they, too, are on the verge of something powerful and sublime; Zero’s creation is compared to the most complex wartime technology. Piene explains the logic behind this particular artistic intervention: Up until now we have left it up to war to light up the sky with colored signs and conflagrations. Imprisoned mankind achieves wonders defending itself. When will our freedom be so great that we conquer the sky for the fun of it, glide through the universe, live the great play in light and space, without being driven by fear and mistrust?37 While it is hard to take these words with any seriousness, Zero artists were acting in earnest. They even speculated how to use war tanks for a peaceful outdoor event.38 Zero artists embraced Benjamin’s ideas about war, even if only indirectly: The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society . . . Instead of draining rivers, society directs a human stream into a bed of trenches; instead of dropping seeds from airplanes, it drops incendiary bombs over cities; and through gas warfare the aura is abolished in a new way.39

Zero imagined technology that was developed for destructive warfare, technologies that posted the ultimate threat to bodily existence, for the betterment of humanity through art and collaboration. Zero sought a harnessing of technology that is even beyond Benjamin’s musings. On one occasion, an artist who worked closely with Zero artists was purported to have dropped 150,000 leaflets from an airplane over Düsseldorf.40 The pamphlet included the words: “Live in the present; live once more in Time and by Time—for a wonderful and absolute reality.”41 In a small way, the dropping of the pamphlet from an aircraft is much like a wartime bombing but it presents an 37

38 39 40

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Otto Piene, “Paths to Paradise,” in Otto Piene and Heinz Mack (eds.), ZERO, trans. Howard Beckman, with an introduction by Lawrence Alloway (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1973), 149. Benjamin, Illuminations, 240. Ibid., 242 Whether or not this event happened is debated by scholars. The photograph documenting the event was manipulated to make the airplane appear to be in the sky when it was mostly likely still on the ground. Jean Tinguely, “Für Statik” (Düsseldorf, 1959). For a full account of the event that places For Static in the context of Tinguely’s broader production, see Pamela Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2004).

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alternative use of wartime methods of propaganda, distributing hope rather than bombs. On the final page of Zero’s publication was a glued-on sunflower seed provided by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, who offers instructions for readers to plant the seed, while Daniel Spoerri instructs readers to take a match from the attached matchbox and light the book on fire. Spoerri claimed the book was made of a material specifically designed to be ignited. The reader is asked to physically partake of Zero, both in creation—through the planting of a seed, and destruction—through burning the book. No longer would their books be burned by Nazis, but the artists and readers themselves were empowered to burn this volume, which in a way passed power from the political to the personal within the collective. They chose to burn their own book, in a deliberate act to deny the authority of any text, rather than losing books to political parties based on their decisions about which books should be circulated and which books should be destroyed. One especially significant demonstration Zero planned along with artists from several other countries was to be called “Zero on the Sea.” It was originally proposed to take place in 1965, at a pier at Scheveningen, near The Hague.42 Along with collaborators from several different countries, ZERO planned their most imaginative and ambitious demonstration to date. Although the project never came to fruition, the letters sent between the collaborating artists reveal just how grandiose Zero artists’ intentions for demonstrations had truly become. The installation was meant to span the ground, the sky, and the sea. It was also to be filmed for wide international distribution. The plans seem so far beyond the range of possibility, it is difficult to imagine that so many artists believed it would happen. Uecker wrote to Mack: Well, we’ll see if people have enough money. I’ve got some good ideas: building a scaffolding over everything, it would have to be mobile so that it can be turned by the wind, so that the wind can get a hold in the gaps, which will have sails stretched over them. This whole thing like an air-, steam-fireship, white steam can be created by a machine which can boil the sea away. Big firefighting pools can be set up. There’ll be fireworks in any case.43

Uecker also planned to use large-scale spotlights, which would be one of the first such displays since the aerial raids.44 Fireworks would explode in the sky, perhaps creating a large-scale display of light achieved earlier by aerial raids. Uecker proposed that the artists and participants should make a plaster cast of themselves.45

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44 45

Thekla Zell, “The ZERO traveling circus: Documentation of exhibitions, actions, publications, 1958– 1966,” in ZERO, in Dirk Pörschmann and Margriet Schavemaker (eds.), trans. by Jennifer Taylor, Steven Lindberg, Gregory Ball, Helen Ferguson, and Howard Rodger McLean, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum; Düsseldorf: Zero Foundation; and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2015), 157. Lucie Schauer, “Kunst, die Heiterkeit erregen will: Zur Vernissage der ‘Gruppe Zero’–Abermals groβe Schau,” Der Welt, April 2, 1963, n.p. Zell, “The ZERO traveling circus,” 157. Ibid., 25.

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Embodied experience would have been taken to a new level, complete immersion in plaster. Casting all the visitors and artists in plaster would literally incorporate the individuals into the collaborative project. The project clearly demonstrates the grand ambitions of the group’s efforts; Zero sought large-scale participation at any cost. Uecker wrote: Perhaps we can dye the sea and the beach or throw many tons of gems or glass beads into the sea; diamonds would be better, then we’d have a lot of visitors, from the far south as well. There would have to be a great deal of light about these islands and you’d have to be able to walk on the sea, on a skin of silver—that would be something for you.46

The spectacle of a dyed sea with gems, glass beads, and diamonds would certainly draw a crowd, and the ability to walk on the water would give visitors divine power as if they were Christ. It would be the most intense experience Zero ever created. Uecker went on to write: It would be good to have a NATO missile there and to change it, humanize it. A good idea to paint a tank pink, or better a rocket-launcher, and to have a maneuver with war machines. How can we do it so that it’s clear that it is a life-feast; a ritual of the fantastic without intending to kill, being sufficient to ourselves??? What do you think (we can start doing something with the aircraft tomorrow)?47

The military allusions in the description are striking, especially for the period. Most intriguing is Uecker’s musings about using a missile, a rocket-launcher, or a tank. He openly grapples with how to use tools of war for a “life-feast” without inducing terror in the bystanders. In what is perhaps the clearest explanation made by a Zero artist about the project, Heinz Mack wrote a letter to Dutch artist Henk Peeters about his ideas for the event: And we must definitely build fireships for nighttime! Simple structures like roofs made of beams and roof joists, supported by empty oil barrels as floats, 500 empty food tins—strictly identical—linked with the roof structures, will be filled with magnesium and phosphorus. I shall build a wooden platform about the oil barrelslike a raft—and that will be covered with a lot of bales of straw soaked in petrol! The roof-ridge will have a long gutter filled with straw, wax and petrol. Uecker will shoot at his with burning arrows (as in the olden days) and set it on fire. Dutch television will then film the poetic spectacle.48 46 47 48

Ibid. Ibid. Letter from Heinz Mack to Henk Peeters, February, 25, 1965, unpublished, Mack Archive. Printed in Renate Damsch-Wiehager, “The ZERO spirit: Action, demonstration, and teamwork,” in Renate Damsch-Wiehager (ed.), Zero aus Deutschland 1957–1966, und Heute: Mack, Piene, Uecker und Umkreis / Zero out of Germany 1957–1966, and Today: Mack, Piene, Uecker and Artists of the Movement (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1999), 26.

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As his description makes clear, Mack’s ship would ignite explosively, the fire descending from the roof to engulf the rest of the structure in flame. The effect of an explosion, followed by a fire engulfing an entire structure, would seem eerie and disturbing in the context of the aerial raids. Incendiary bombs set roofs on fire and then fire spread down to the street level; fires became so hot they shrunk and mummified corpses. Once again, Zero planned to recreate a visceral experience redolent with memories of aerial raids, perhaps hoping to erase fear and ease the weight of such memories. The image of burning cities after aerial raids was branded on the psyche of survivors. Zero hoped that if those memories were triggered by an event presented as art, a positive experience could reach into the depths of horrific experiences and provide new, positive associations. When this is done on a large scale, people are also connected to each other in international collective. After the war, such connections were few and far between, by adopting ZERO as an identification, national identities became less pronounced, at least in the realm of art. Mock collages of event plans were made, and the group petitioned the city government, but ultimately the project failed. The project’s failure was devastating to Zero artists. They attempted to create an installation with technology and resources that were only matched by wartime collaborations. Looked at differently, however, their desire to overthrow the trajectory of history was limited, in part, by its success in challenging the oppressors. As Walter Benjamin made clear in describing the impact of warfare after the fact, “The destructiveness of war furnishes proof that society has not been mature enough to incorporate technology as its organ, that technology has not been sufficiently developed to cope with the elemental forces of society.”49 It was the failure of Zero on the Sea that presented the artists the truth that, in the end, they could not fully co-opt the creativity, resources, or technology of war to create a better world. The ruling class, the dictators, those who use technology to oppress and control the masses still had the upper hand. Yet, even in this recognition, Zero artists made clear that technology as such had the potential to be imagined, if not also used, toward other ends. Zero’s last official demonstration and exhibition was held in November 1966 in Bonn, Germany. The exhibition was limited to Piene, Mack, and Uecker’s art, Zero’s core members from start to finish. All three artists put on a brave front, but they declared they would never organize an exhibition or demonstration again as a group. The demonstration on opening night took place in the Rolandseck train station at Bad Godesberg. It was called ZERO—Midnight Ball, and indeed it was to be the zero hour of group Zero, only now the “zero hour” was the final hour. Two thousand visitors participated. A large sign read: “Zero ist gut für dich”: “Zero is good for you.” There was live music and dancing and one hand of each person was stamped with a large “0.” During the demonstration, many things took place. Hundreds of balloon clusters rose up into the sky.50 There were women in Zero costumes. A straw-filled carriage was set ablaze and pushed from the station into the Rhine, where it sank beneath the

49 50

Benjamin, Illuminations, 242. “ZERO in Bonn, Städtische Kunstsammlungen, ZERO-Midnight Ball, Bahnhof Rolandseck, November 25 to 31 December 1966,” Zero Foundation, available at: http://www.4321zero.com/1966. html (accessed August 15, 2017).

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waves.51 Zero artists became actors, instigating a theatrical spectacle developed from the years of their performances. Zero’s “limitless zone” had become limited to repeated actions and serial artworks, ultimately confining the artists, rather than liberating them. The viewers’ bodies were no longer challenged in the same way as they were at the outset of Zero. Over time, a sense of public safety and ordinary routines settled in. The economy had skyrocketed and the construction of new buildings began to fill the holes left by the carpet bombing. West German citizens became used to going out at night and many new forms of entertainment had become readily available. Zero art was still enjoyed, but the original charge of Zero art and demonstrations faded. For a somewhat brief but important time, Zero artists populated the streets and the galleries with bodily encounters that promoted making bodies visible again—they brought young Germans out of hiding into a new, modern world.

51

Irmgard Berner, “Artist group Zero: The ideal of pure light,” Goethe Institut, 2016, available at: https://www.goethe.de/en/kul/bku/20372381.html (accessed April 2, 2017).

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RAF Corpse Art The Resistant and Recuperative Body: Aesthetics of Diffusion and the Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF)/Red Army Faction Ilka Rasch

Although deceased for over forty years, photographic as well as artistic representations of the highly charged bodies of iconic founding members of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction or RAF) like Gudrun Ensslin, Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Holger Meins still provoke a wide range of readings and strong emotional responses. The public outcry, extensive media coverage and heated political debates triggered by exhibitions of Gerhard Richter’s cycle October 18, 1977 (1989) in Krefeld and Frankfurt or Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition (2005) at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin, testify to the haunting power of the images of the dead that cannot be contained or put to rest. These exhibitions contain works of art that are based on a small set of iconic, frequently republished press photographs by the mass media–to use Andres Veiel’s words, a Bilderschleife (a loop of images) showing, dead or alive, representations of terrorists that are layered and charged with conflicting symbolic meanings and were used for different political purposes. The goal is to analyze the different aesthetic deconstructions of RAF bodies and to understand why these representations stirred controversies for decades. The key to understanding the contentious reception of this group of works is the combined effect of the symbolic value of RAF bodies, in particular their corpses, and what I call the “aesthetics of diffusion.” Ernst Volland’s, Gerhard Richter’s, and Hans-Peter Feldmann’s deliberately blurred works withhold visual details from the bodies and events portrayed, making it visually impossible to distinguish between perpetrator and victims unless the viewer has an in-depth knowledge of the events and knows the context in which the original press photograph was taken. As the following analyses demonstrate, artistic representations— and the mediated forms each artist employs—capture the complex cultural, historical, and political dimensions of the RAF. The essay thereby shows the ways in which representations of primarily RAF corpses have been used to acknowledge, refuse, or at least render more complex the historical legacy of the RAF. But more than the legacy of the Red Army Faction is at stake. For several decades, the physical spaces provided 83

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by galleries and museums for displaying RAF members has led to heated public debates on how to memorialize perpetrators and victims. The essay will provide an outline of major controversies surrounding the works of Richter, Volland, and Feldmann to contextualize the presence and vanishing of corpses in the German public realm.

Perpetrators and Victims: On the Functionalization of Iconic Corpses Richter, Volland, and Feldmann use complex, layered symbolic images that challenge or even break down the perpetrator–victim dichotomy to expose the troubling diffusion of two distinct and famously violent time periods in Germany’s past: the Holocaust and a decade of politically motivated violence leading up to the climactic outbreak of terrorist activity during the so-called German Autumn in 1977. While these artists make this diffusion visible, the origins of this uncanny union can be traced back to the politicization and identity formation of the 1968ers, the generation affiliated with German student movement and its violent aftermath. Christian Schneider’s research identifies the Holocaust as the most significant generational object of the 1968ers.1 Not only former radical activists or the New Left, but the postwar generation as a whole, regardless of their political affiliation, saw the Holocaust “as generationally defining.”2 “The choice of objects—those sanctioned as articles of generational identity—does not emerge from desire but results from unconscious interpretation of collectively lived experience” and captures the “new generation’s interpretation of its identity.”3 Schneider shows how the 1968ers’ identity formation was based on the assumption that they were the first generation that “understood the full meaning of the Holocaust. Only through their esthesia, their suffering and their research was it possible to retrospectively transform this event into an emotionally compelling and comprehensible cognitive phenomenon.”4 According to Schneider, this Opferidentifikation (“identification with the victim”) allowed members of the post-Auschwitz generation to take on the double role of guardian and prosecutor of the Holocaust.5 A closer look at the writings of Ulrike Meinhof as well as other members of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (“Extraparliamentary Opposition, or APO”) reveals a far more problematic identification with the victims of the Holocaust. As Sarah Colvin has shown, Meinhof ’s uses the “dramatic rhetorical connection between Nazism and those who oppose the things she supports” to create a position that “identified her, and those who were “with” her in the Extraparliamentary Opposition.”6 1

2 3 4 5 6

Christian Schneider, “Holocaust als Generationsobjekt. Generationsgeschichtliche Anmerkungen zu einer deutschen Identitätsproblematik,” Mittelweg, 36, 13 (2004): 56–72. Christopher Bollas, Being a Character (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 260. Ibid., 266. Schneider, “Holocaust als Generationsobjekt,” 68–9. Ibid. Sarah Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof and West German Terrorism (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 28–31.

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But Meinhof goes one step further. As early as 1960, Meinhof wrote an article for konkret, “Neue deutsche Ghetto-Schau” (“The New German Ghetto Show”), in which she compares protesters opposing nuclear armament to Jewish inmates of Polish ghettos “to garner sympathy for contemporary anti-nuclear campaigners.”7 Other essays such as “The Hitler Within You” and “Emergency” further develop this idea. She finally coined the term “new fascism” in her column “Demokratie spielen” (“Playing at Democracy”) in 1968, an approach that soon becomes “a familiar rhetorical formula in the writings of the mainstream left.”8 Meinhof does not define the concept, nor does she explain its workings, nor does she provide evidence: “the specific historical and political meaning of the word gets lost in a bid for effect.”9 Meinhof was far from the only one comparing APO members to the “new Jews.”10 Alain Finkielkraut documented his frustration in May 1968, when thousands of protesters, outraged about Daniel Cohn-Bendit being denied his re-entry of France, used the slogan, “WIR SIND ALLE DEUTSCHE JUDEN” (“We are all German Jews”), during their demonstrations.11 Similar to the written re-appropriation of (new) fascism and (new) Jews, the APO also reappropriated images and metaphors originally introduced by the Allies to educate the German public about war atrocities during their protests. Slogans like “Vietnam—America’s Auschwitz” (Vietnam—Auschwitz der Amerikaner), testify to the dramatic (re)appropriation of symbolic images associated with the Holocaust within the public sphere. Habbo Knoch was the first historian to provide a detailed, well-documented analysis of the visual (re)appropriation of the Holocaust in postwar Germany up to the 1970s.12 He shows that the original function of Holocaust images, which was to inform and confront postwar German society with National Socialist atrocities, “mutated” during the 1960s, transforming these images “into symbols of political resistance” that were consciously used in very different contexts.13 The 1968ers actively participating in the German student movement did not simply employ Holocaust images as a form of evidence that suggested their moral separation from the generation of perpetrators. These activists went one step further by mimicking the underlying structure of famous Holocaust images and conflating the bodies of Holocaust victims with those of their own generation. The first iconic photograph capturing this conflation of Holocaust and 1968er bodies was intentionally staged by the notorious Kommune I (K1) for journalists of the political magazine Stern. Journalists had paid to photograph the highly provocative, performative protest.14 The resulting black-and-white photograph shows a line of seven naked male and female

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14

Ibid., 28–9. Ibid., 30. Ibid. Ibid., 31. Alain Finkielkraut, “Alles deutsche Juden? Über eine Generation linker 68er, die nacheinander die großen Underdrückten verkörperte,” Frankfurter Rundschau, March 27, 1982, 25. Habbo Knoch, Die Tat als Bild: Fotografien des Holocaust in der deutschen Erinnerungskultur (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001), 894f. Ibid. Ibid., 316. See also Gerd Koenen, Das Rote Jahrzehnt: Unsere kleine deutsche Kulturrevolution 1967– 1977 (Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002), 153, 157.

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adults and one child facing the wall with their arms and legs spread. In seemingly waiting to be searched and humiliated, the K1 mimicked the content of widely publicized photographs of violent police searches during the Third Reich. The doppelte Opferschaftssymbolik (“doubled symbolism of victimhood”) embodied in the Kommune I image works on two different levels. While confronting the public with the victims and legacy of the Holocaust, the members of the K1 also visually self-identify as victims of a fascist state. The repression and police brutality during the student movement are compared to the atrocities of the Third Reich, based on the widespread “fear driven fantasy that the Moloch of National Socialism had not really been finished off.”15 The staging of “happenings” for the media that drew attention to the Nazi past followed a pattern of successful strategies developed throughout the 1960s: gain recognition, mobilize followers, and critique the status quo. In order to maintain the level of provocation necessary to ensure media attention, however, the degree of violence inevitably increased over time. Since symbolic violence was already an established pattern, it was not long before strategies were developed that included a new kind of violence, one that blurred the line between symbolic provocation and physical threat. It is no surprise that the level of physical violence eventually escalated as well, and the RAF found that physical violence served as a key vehicle for public interventions. What distinguishes the RAF, however, from less visible leftist terrorist organizations like the June 2nd Movement is that RAF members consciously used the “doubled symbolism of victimhood” to gain recognition, mobilize followers, and reveal the fascist core of modern Germany. Unlike the happenings staged for the media by previous activists, the RAF’s “violent happenings” paired symbolic violence with physical violence against property and people and finally against themselves, garnering a degree of media attention that far surpassed that of their predecessors. Probably the most powerful example of the RAF’s use of the “doubled symbolism of victimhood” is the functionalization of photographs of Holger Meins’s corpse. Meins, together with other founding members of the RAF, was arrested in 1972. The RAF used the subsequent trial against them as a platform for a “judicial happening,” in which they constantly represented themselves as the victims of a fascist political system. They successfully used media coverage of the hearings and hunger strikes to blackmail others emotionally to take action to support or even free them. One key initiative was to mobilize their supporters against their so-called Vernichtungshaft (“extermination incarceration”) in the German prison system. According to the RAF’s founding members, like Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the state tried to break, torture, and ultimately kill the political prisoners of the RAF during their incarceration: “the political term for the dead wing, and I say this quite clearly, is the gas chamber. I can 15

Schneider, “Holocaust als Generationsobjekt,” 64. See also Habbo Knoch, “Gefühlte Gemeinschaften: Bild und Generation in der Moderne,” in Ulrike Jureit and Michael Wildt (eds.), Generationen: Zur Relevanz eines wissenschaftlichen Grundbegriffs (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005),” 316. For a detailed discussion of (post-)fascist bodies, see Julia Hell, Post-Fascist Fantasies: Psychoanalysis, History, and the Literature of East Germany (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997) and Dagmar Herzog, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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only say that my Auschwitz fantasies when I was in there were realistic.”16 They compared their emotional and physical state during their solitary confinement to the experiences of Holocaust victims in the gas chambers of the notorious Nazi concentration camps, KZ Buchenwald and Auschwitz.17 Regardless of how inappropriate or exaggerated this comparison might seem from today’s vantage point, it was a perception of contemporary events that was shared by many RAF supporters as the aftermath of Meins’s death clearly shows. After two spontaneous and unsuccessful hunger strikes, the RAF carefully staged a third, paying more attention to public relations while increasing the pressure on participants to see their actions through to the point of death if necessary. Soon after the third protest began, Meins died of starvation: the RAF’s publicity efforts paid off. Meins’s emaciated corpse was read through the lens of the doppelte Opferschaftssymbolik. Many activists believed that “he who starves himself to death has been murdered by the system”— dismissing the fact that many prisoners resisted the system’s attempts to feed them by force.18 Photographs of Meins’s starved corpse, taken after the autopsy and later on his deathbed, served as visual proof that the fascist state was once again on a murder spree.19 These photographs invoked a powerful iconography of suffering and victimization, derived from the resemblance of Meins’s body to ones found in nearly a third of Holocaust photographs published between 1955 and 1965. Many of these Holocaust images show the mutilated bodies of concentration camp inmates, some after medical testing, deportations, executions, while others after their release. Though the original function of such photographs was to educate the postwar German society about the magnitude of National Socialist atrocities, they were now mimicked to create powerful “symbols of political resistance.”20 As Knoch’s research has shown, images of emaciated concentration camp prisoners already had become symbols of political resistance during the 1960s. These images, which protested repression and expressed anti-capitalist sentiment, often were used in the contexts of generational conflict and governmental critique, particularly of the American military’s violent actions in Vietnam. Because of the many physical attributes shared by the emaciated Holocaust victims as well as Meins’s corpse, sympathizers with the RAF felt compelled to read and use Meins’s corpse for their political protests. The evocative power of the autopsy photograph of Meins’s naked, pale, emaciated corpse taken by his lawyer was widely exploited by supporters: it was distributed in flyers at demonstrations and in publications to fight the inhumane and now lethal prison conditions. In a flyer calling for participation in a demonstration showing support for the remaining captive RAF members, the caption read, “THIS MAN

16 17

18 19

20

Colvin, Ulrike Meinhof, 233f. Butz Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum: die Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 2004), 311. Karin Bauer, “Lost in isolation: Ulrike Meinhof ’s Body in Poetry,” Consciousness, Literature and the Arts, 50 (2016): 101f. Translated from the original German by the author. For a reproduction of the above discussed flyer, see Andreas Gohr, Rafinfo.de—die Webressource zur Roten Armee Fraktion. “DIESER MANN ERPRESSTE DEN DEUTSCHEN STAAT” (1974), January 12, 2009 http://www.rafinfo.de/archiv/plakate1.php?pic=105_06.jpg. Knoch, Die Tat als Bild, 894f.

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BLACKMAILED THE GERMAN STATE” (1974). This flyer successfully uses the same strategy, the doppelte Opferschaftssymbolik, that the K1 employed earlier. The uncanny resemblance of Meins’s emaciated corpse with Holocaust victims provided the necessary cues for reading his body as yet another victim of a still fascist state.21 In so doing, it also diminishes Meins’s own violent past. The violent acts, implicitly referred to as “blackmail,” pale in comparison to the violence he experienced during his incarceration that cost him his life. Other flyers, like “Nachruf ” (Obituary) (1974), which were less specific in their call for retaliation, paired a close-up of Meins’s face with the caption, “We shall not forget him, and even less so his guards and those responsible for the force-feeding.”22 Meins’s death was not forgotten and retaliation and acts of protest were imminent. Holding the legal system responsible, members of the June 2nd Movement killed Günter von Drenkmann, the president of Germany’s Superior Court of Justice, only two days later. This high-profile hit was followed by nineteen cases of arson and two bomb attacks. Prison visits and numerous press conferences by public intellectuals like the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre to prevent another “murder” sanctioned by the state followed.23 Some protesters went further and compared the Staatsschutz (“governmental security forces”) with Hitler’s Schutzstaffel-SS during their public demonstrations, as Jeremy Varon has documented.24 But Meins’s death did not just inspire immediate retaliation; the autopsy photograph with its links to the “doubled symbolism of victimhood” was used strategically and contextualized with Holocaust images during the so-called German autumn in 1977 to make its political message and the need to act more accessible. Consider the following photograph, which ensures that observers understood the symbolic significance of Meins’s body. An enlarged painted reproduction of the autopsy flyer with the caption, “THIS MAN BLACKMAILED THE GERMAN STATE,” was carried through Frankfurt next to an enlarged painting of a naked, emaciated, male KZ inmate with the headline “German Volk has a solution for everything” (Figure 4.1). The barbed wire present in both paintings, combined with the starved physical appearance of the two men, compares the lethal prison conditions experienced by Holger Meins and other RAF members to Nazi concentration camps. Once again, the paired images suggest, the “solution” to a problem will be a final one.

21 22 23

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25

Translated from the original German by the author. For a reproduction of “Nachruf,” go to: nadir.org. Translated from the original German by the author. For a detailed reconstruction of the events, see Stefan Aust, The Baader-Meinhof Group: The Inside Story of a Phenomenon (London: Bodley Head, 1987) or Peters, Tödlicher Irrtum. Jeremy Varon, Bringing the War Home: The Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and Revolutionary Violence in the Sixties and Seventies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 210–21 and 230–34. Harun Farocki, “Risking his life: Images of Holger Meins,” in Susanne Gaensheimer and Nicolaus Schafhausen (eds.), Nachdruck/Imprint. Texte/Writings (Berlin/New York: Vorwerk 8/Lukas und Sternberg, 2001), 268. For a detailed analysis of the impact on Meins’s death on the filmmakers, Gerd Conradt and Harun Farocki, see Charity Scribner, After the Red Army Faction: Gender, Culture, and Militancy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 65–72. Butz, Tödlicher Irrtum, 230. Andreas Klein, Rückkehr in die Menschlichkeit (Reinbeck: rororo, 1979), 197.

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Figure 4.1 Protests in support of imprisoned RAF members in Frankfurt (1977).

While impossible to trace the public’s response to this provocative and highly problematic comparison, testimonies of supporters who later joined the RAF’s second and even third generation provide some insights into the impact of this strategic comparison. Hans Joachim Klein, Inge Viett, Birgit Hogefeld, and Wolfgang Grams have all said that this particular image of Meins played a crucial role in their decision to join the ranks of the RAF and the obligation they felt to rescue the Stammheim prisoners and to “unmask” the “fascist” state. Klein described how the death of Meins “pushed him over the edge,” convincing him that legal actions led to nothing. For a long time, he carried around the “terrible photograph of the autopsy” in order to ensure that his “hate would not diminish.”25 Hogefeld interpreted “the murders of Holger Meins, Ulrike Meinhof, and many others” as a continuation of “the murder of thousands of Communists and Anti-fascists” during the Third Reich.26 The passages found in Viett’s biography Nie war ich furchtloser “Never was I more fearless” are even more explicit in drawing comparisons to concentration camp victims: The Situation [. . .] escalates with the death of Holger Meins. He starved to death under the cold-blooded supervision of the judiciary and the prison doctor. The last photo of him shows a dead man, an emaciated skeleton. The dead of 26

27

Birgit Hogefeld, Ein ganz normales Verfahren: Prozeßerklärungen, Briefe und Texte zur Geschichte der RAF (Berlin: ID Verlag, 196), 50 and 56. Viett, 131. Translated from the original German by the author.

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Although none of the bodies of later RAF members who died on the notorious seventh floor in Stammheim acted as much as iconic signifiers of Holocaust victims as that of Holger Meins, the deaths of these later RAF members were interpreted by sympathizers in the same way. Another storm broke loose when former journalist Ulrike Meinhof was found hanged in her cell in Stammheim prison in 1976. A series of suspicious deaths came to a climatic end when, on October 18, the bodies of the remaining Stammheimers were found in their cells as well: Gudrun Ensslin (hanged), Andreas Baader (shot), and Jan-Carl Raspe (shot). As with Meins, shortly after their deaths in 1976 and 1977, photographs were published of their corpses as discovered in their cells. The photographs’ reception once again showed the impact of the National Socialist past on the perception of contemporary events. The state’s unique treatment of RAF prisoners and their growing death rate in Stammheim prison inspired widespread comparisons to notorious Nazi prisons like the JVA Plötzensee and informed the works of numerous left-leaning artists and filmmakers, as sociologist Klaus Theweleit has shown.28

Inconceivable Corpses: Ernst Volland’s Burnt Images and Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 With regard to the highly charged symbolic layering and iconic status within the German collective memory, it comes at now surprise that artists like Volland, Richter, and Feldmann were inspired by photographs of the founding members of the RAF in their art. After creating an extensive visual archive, they independently from each other used the diffusion and blurriness as an aesthetic approach to deconstruct the iconic images of the RAF and its problematic legacy. Ernst Volland’s still developing series Burnt Images effectively confronts the viewer with the uncanny similarity of iconic photographs of Holocaust victims next to RAF related while triggering viewers’ collective memory, allowing them to identify his abstract works of art without any given context. This series of large-scale photographic reproductions, begun in 1997 and not yet completed, depicts pivotal scenes from the Second World War, the Holocaust, and postwar German history. Volland’s Burnt Images are based on intentionally blurred iconic photographs that have circulated in the media for decades. These photographs—by means of enlargement, systematic defocusing, as well as a predominantly black, white, and gray palette—present the viewer with diffuse images from the German collective memory, ones that suggest quite forcefully the resemblance between the mutilated corpses of RAF members and 28

29

Klaus Theweleit, Ghosts. Drei leicht inkorrekte Vorträge (Frankfurt a.M.: Stroemfeld, 1998), 78. See also Julia Hell and Johannes von Moltke, “Unification effects: Imaginary landscapes of the Berlin Republic,” Germanic Review, 80, 1 (2005): 77. Ernst Volland, “E1 (1997),” Eingebrannte Bilder (Berlin: Edition Voller Ernst, 2005), 2.

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the victims of the Holocaust. The aesthetics of diffusion’s elimination of details allows for recognition of the physical similarities among Holger Meins, Ulrike Meinhof, and Andreas Baader and the emaciated bodies associated with the victims of the Warsaw ghettos and notorious Nazi concentration camps like Bergen-Belsen and Plötzensee Prison. Volland’s picture DW2 (1999), for example, based on a photograph of Ulrike Meinhof wearing a prison uniform and holding her hands above her head in a gesture of surrender, can easily be mistaken for one taken at the Warsaw ghetto uprising in 1943, which is also included in Volland’s series.29 The lack of details reveals the uncanny similarity of Meinhof ’s gesture to what Knoch calls the “powerless hands” of Jews. Similarly, the representation of Meins’s death mask in DW5, characterized by his beard and emaciated facial features, invites comparisons to Holocaust iconography associated with starved orthodox Jews. A comparison of ZJ1 (2000), showing Baader’s dead body on the floor of his prison cell, with A1 (1997), a reproduction of the iconic Holocaust photograph titled Ecce Homo 1945 of an emaciated male corpse with outspread arms lying on the ground in Bergen-Belsen, further reveals the uncanny similarity of these two corpses.30 Like Ecce Homo 1945, the position of Baader’s corpse suggests his human suffering, inviting the viewer to draw comparisons to images of the crucified Christ, and in so doing turns a perpetrator into a martyr. Taking Charlotte Klonk’s research into account, this comparison appears to be part of a larger pattern. The similarities between the visual representations of bodies of religious martyrs and members of the urban guerilla, including Che Gueveara as well as the founding members of the RAF, suggest an “histrionic link between leftwing terrorism and a quasi-religious promise of salvation.”31 Keeping the RAF’s violent history in mind, this comparison is fraught at best, but it provides another explanation as to why these powerful images continue making viewers uncomfortable and why the absence of the RAF’s victims might be problematic. The juxtaposition of symbolic images of the Holocaust and the RAF in Volland’s series can help us see what is latent but powerfully present in Richter’s October 18, 1977: the fifteen paintings that comprise the cycle similarly deconstruct the functionalization of various Urbilder (photographic archetypes) of the RAF. They are the main subject of Richter’s cycle. Seven of the fifteen paintings are terrorist corpses bearing witness to their cause of death either by hanging or gunshot wound: Ensslin (“Erhängte”/“Hanged”), Meinhof (Tote 1-3, Dead), Baader (“Erschossener 1 & 2”/“Man Shot Down 1 & 2”), and the funeral proceedings of Baader, Ensslin, and Raspe (“Beerdigung” “Funeral”). The remaining eight paintings are more eclectic. Three feature Ensslin facing a camera in prison, two are of the arrest of Meins and Baader, and one is a youth portrait of Ulrike Meinhof. The remaining two paintings show the record player used to hide Baader’s gun as well as the inside of a Stammheim prison 30

31

Volland, “ZJ1,” in ibid., 25. See also “DJ5,” in ibid., 31. For a reproduction of Ecce Homo 1945, see Schönberner or Eric Kligerman, “Transgenerational hauntings: Screeing the Holocaust in Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 paintings,” German Monitor, BAADER-MEINHOF RETURNS: History and Cultural Memory of German Left-Wing Terrorism, 70 (2008), 59. Charlotte Klonk, “Bilderpolitiken & Medien: Bilderterrorismus von Meins zu Schleyer,” in Inge Stephan und Alexandra Tacke (eds.), Nachbilder der RAF (Cologen: Böhlau Verlag, 2008), 199.

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cell where the founding RAF members committed suicide. The paintings are based on police photographs and mass media coverage that can be traced back to Richter’s visual archive, Atlas. Started in the 1960s, this artistic source book consists of approximately 4,000 photographs, reproductions, and illustrations. Atlas is an eclectic assortment of images, including portraits, pornographic imagery, landscapes, and pictures of famous historical figures and events. Of them, 100 are RAF-related images, often blurred reproductions of press photos. Richter amplified the degree of diffusion of his source material, erasing the many details included in the originals before starting the painting process. Using an episcope to project the photographs—or mere excerpts from them— onto canvas further obscured details of the iconic source photographs, forcing the viewer to work through Richter’s created layers of diffusion. Richter’s cycle hit a nerve upon its debut, and audiences’ strong emotional responses became part of the viewing experience, influencing the cycle’s perception and ultimately the paintings’ display in the public sphere. When, in February 1989, a small local museum in a Rhineland city put the cycle on display, the cycle was instantly controversial. To avoid, in Richter’s words, the “sensationalizing of the story of the socalled Baader-Meinhof gang” and “in deference to the families of the deceased,” he restricted the media’s publication of the six harrowing images of Ensslin’s, Baader’s, and Meinhof ’s corpses. He also declined having a vernissage or formal opening of the exhibition: “The relatives and friends of these people are still alive. I neither wanted to hurt them, nor did I want an opening with people standing around chatting and drinking wine.”32 Richter further declared that since the paintings were “public works” and “depended for their meaning on the horrid fascination, anxiety, ambivalence, and denial experienced by the nation that had lived through” these events, the cycle would be sold to a museum rather than a private collector. While most art historians, like Robert Storr and Benjamin Buchloh, celebrated the cycle as a recuperation of an entire genre, the “history painting,” other critics, despite Richter’s clear attempts to keep the exhibition low key, condemned Richter’s directives as a mere publicity stunt. 33 The cycle triggered heated public debates, even finding their way into the German parliament and extending to whether imprisoned RAF members should be pardoned. The debate became even more heated when the cycle was exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (“Museum of Modern Art”) in Frankfurt. One of the major sponsors of the show, the Dresdner Bank, whose spokesman was killed by the RAF in 1977, rescinded its financial support in protest against Richter’s work, which, the bank executives felt, rendered the RAF’s victims invisible. This critique mirrored Walter Grasskamp’s public condemnation of Richter’s work, arguing that the absence of the RAF’s victims in the cycle and the blurring of the images amounted to no more than a sentimental mystification of the RAF and a pointless exploitation of its “radicalness” to get attention.34 Richter himself, who usually does not respond to critics, openly 32

33

34

Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 29–30. Ibid., 121–33. Benjamin Buchloh, “A note on Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977,” October, 48 (Spring, 1989): 88, 93. Waler Grasskamp, “Gerhard Richter: 18. Oktober 1977,” Jahresring. Jahrbuch für moderne Kunst, 36 (1989): 226ff.

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dismissed this criticism as “heavy-handed,” “tendentious,” and “helpless nonsense” in an open letter to Grasskamp. These conflicting readings and responses are rooted in Richter’s careful selection of symbolic images in combination with the aesthetics of diffusion. In interviews and his writings Richter, ambiguity and confusion play a crucial role in provoking his viewers. He has described the unsettling effect of his cycle as follows: “All the pictures are dull, gray, mostly very blurred, diffused. Their presence is the horror of the hard-tobear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion.”35 Robert Storr convincingly argued that the cycle’s “horror of the hard-to-bear refusal to answer, to explain, to give an opinion” confronts the viewer with the unsettling “incompleteness and the fleetingness of recorded history in general.” While these limitations play an important role, Richter’s technique brings the symbolic ambiguity of bodies and corpses of the RAF to the surface, creating the unsettling viewing experience Richter described. The impossibility of capturing and containing the RAF members for good— whether due to the group’s powerful appeal and legacy, or the state’s inability to incarcerate and try all of its members—is not just something that has come with the perspective of hindsight, but was acknowledged at the time.36 The use of blurriness in black-and-white photography for the purpose of denying the viewer a clear picture of the RAF—the very strategy employed by Richter and Volland—can be found as early as 1972 on the cover of the issue of Spiegel published upon the arrest of Baader, Meins, and Raspe on June 5, 1972 (Figure 4.2). The cover featured an out of focus black-andwhite photograph of the imprisoned Baader sitting with his back against the wall on the floor of a prison cell with the headline “Gefaßt” (“captured”). The contrast of the crisp headline and the fuzziness of Baader’s image, which is also cropped, thematizes the tension between the physical capture of Baader and the difficulty of fully understanding the origins, power, and impact of the RAF. The headline is also a play on words, since gefaßt can mean both “captured” and “calm,” notions utterly at odds with the public hysteria surrounding the RAF. But it is not only the question of the Unfassbarkeit of the RAF that is thematized in Richter’s cycle; the work also attempts to unmask the wide range of mechanisms and interests that influence our reading of the subject matter without assigning a particular value to any of them. A closer look at Richter’s letters describing the cycle reveals that several completed oil paintings have been withheld from the public: What have I painted? Three times Baader shot. Three times Ensslin hanged. Three times the head of the dead Meinhof after they cut her down. Once the dead Meins. Three times Ensslin, neutral (almost like pop stars). Then a big, unspecific burial—a cell dominated by a bookcase—a silent gray record player—a youthful

35

36

Gerhard Richter, “Notes for a press conference, November–December 1989,” in Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), The Daily Practice of Painting: Writings 1962–1993 (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 175. Robert Storr, “In Memoriam: Reflexionen über zwei Experimente partieller Erinnerung,” in Klaus Biesenbach (ed.), Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: Die RAF-Ausstellung (Göttingen: Steidl, 2005), 30–3.

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Figure 4.2 Andreas Baader “Gefaßt” (1972).

portrait of Meinhof, sentimental in a bourgeois way, twice the arrest of Meins, forced to surrender to the clenched power of the State.37

Two of the three versions of Baader shot and one of the three versions of Ensslin hanged were included in the final grouping. But more importantly, only one motif was eventually overpainted and left out altogether: the picture of the starved Holger Meins 37

Richter, “Notes,” 175.

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on his deathbed.38 Storr has deduced the composition of this painting from “a photograph in an album of images the artist kept for reference and bits of the compositions that can be glimpsed in the margins of the gestural painting that replaced it.”39 Thinking about Richter’s work as the attempt to reflect on a series of events that lead to the climactic outcome of the German Autumn, Meins’s absence as the first high profile RAF martyr to die in prison is surprising, an absence also noted by Storr.40 The functionalization of the emaciated, naked corpse of Holger Meins photographed over 15 years prior to Richter’s cycle would have been at odds with Richter’s “hard-to-bear refusal to answer, explain, to give an opinion,” to encourage contradictory readings and ambiguity.41 Because the functionalization of Meins’s corpse in public discourses drew on the “doubled symbolism of victimhood” and represented the unequivocal breakdown of the perpetrator-victim dichotomy, any painting of Meins’s emaciated body would have tilted the balance and disrupted the complex layering achieved in the remaining paintings of Richter’s cycle. Richter has openly expressed feelings of sorrow and mourning for “those who tried to change history and failed,” suggesting an “emotional affinity” that is an intrinsic part of the aesthetics of diffusion.42 The act of mourning in combination with the layered aesthetics of diffusion creates an “Orphic Space” that allows the artist to search for the beloved in the realm of death at the same time that it stages “an artist’s reflection on the very act of artistic production in the face of catastrophic events.”43 But more importantly, Richter’s “Orphic Space” can be experienced by viewers the moment they enter the confined exhibition space and engage with the paintings. Richter’s decision to not merely copy but to obscure his source photographs of easily identifiable terrorists like Meinhof, Baader, and Ensslin and to “hide” them behind a veil of diffusion differs drastically from their exploitative display in public discourses. Richter’s veil of diffusion functions much like the white sheets used to cover the bodies of the RAF’s high-profile victims, shielding these victims from the public’s voyeuristic gaze and protecting the memories and feelings of their families and loved ones. In employing a veil of diffusion, Richter acknowledges that these RAF members suffered; he offers them the respect that an uncensored publication of their corpse photos would deny. In marked contrast to such uncensored reproduction, photographs of RAF members’ dead bodies that exhibit concern neither for the dead nor the living, the aesthetics of diffusion constitutes a powerful, disturbing act of empathy. A strong example for the transformative experience created by Richter’s “Orphic Space” is Astrid Proll, a close friend of Baader and Ensslin and member of the RAF’s first generation. Proll, by engaging with Richter’s cycle, revisited the past.44 Inspired by 38 39 40 41 42

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Storr, Gerhard Richter, 96. Richter, “Notes,” 175. Storr, “In Memoriam,” 31. Richter, “Notes,” 175. Quotes taken from Gregoria Magnani, “Gerhard Richter: For me it is absolutely necessary that the Baader-Meinhof is a subject for art,” Flash Art (May/June 1989), reprinted in Museum für Moderne Kunst und Portikus (ed.), Presseberichte zu Gerhard Richter “18. Oktober 1977” (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 1989), 67. Hell and von Moltke, “Unification effects,” 76. Ibid.

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Richter’s paintings, she penned her own book and thus honored, mourned, and remembered the dead publicly. As she explains: Other photographs, however, the pictures of dead people, I was unable to look at for many years, they shocked and hurt me too deeply. Thanks to the painter Gerhard Richter, I was finally able to approach them. His interpretation of these pictures in “Cycle October 18, 1977” freed them from their mass media context and their exploitation for propaganda purposes. By carefully transferring these images to canvas, Richter managed to turn banal tabloid photographs into an act of memorial [the translation provided is not accurate: “ein Akt des Gedenkens— act of remembrance”] for those who died in Stammheim.45

Proll found a way to “get close to [her] own history as well as the history of the RAF which has been distorted by myths” and to reinsert a “forgotten part of the mosaic in the history of the RAF.” Her own contribution, the “forgotten part of the mosaic,” takes shape as Hans und Grete: Bilder der RAF 1967–1977, published in 1998. Proll curated the largest known collection of RAF related images for her collection, which includes tabloid images, “most wanted” bulletins, and a series of personal photographs previously unavailable to the public. Despite the inclusion of two series of photographs taken by RAF members themselves, her mosaic also reminds people of the many lives lost, such as her lesser-known friend Ingrid ‘Eva’ Schubert, who committed suicide in prison several days after the Stammheimers.46 Proll’s book is an important resource for a more nuanced picture of the RAF, but she shares Richter’s blind spot and can neither acknowledge nor take a closer look at the RAF’s numerous victims. Along with Proll, other artists, most notably Hans-Peter Feldmann, reflected upon Richter’s cycle and revisited the RAF’s violent past. Feldmann, in the same year Proll released her book, tried to tackle the complex subject matter and, with the help of a more inclusive, affordable, and publicly available visual archive, addressed Richter’s and Proll’s blind spots.

Return of the Dead: Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Tomb A conceptual artist, Feldmann who, like Richter, Sigmar Polke, and Joseph Beuys, belonged to the influential Düsseldorfer art scene, is driven by the need to come to terms with Germany’s violent past and present. However, Feldmann did not attain the same visibility of his peers due to his overtly political position as well as his strong reproach of the commercialization plaguing an increasingly conservative art market. Certainly, his complete withdrawal from the art world in the 1980s made him less accessible for collectors and museums. The nature of Feldmann’s art, primarily photographic books selling at low prices as unsigned and unlimited editions, also

45 46

Astrid Proll, Hans und Grete: Bilder der RAF 1967–1977 (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 2004), 6f. Ibid., 7.

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made it challenging either to display or profit from his work. Within his extensive corpus, Feldmann’s photographic book Die Toten (“The Dead”) is one of his most successful interventions. Published in 1998, ten years after the opening of Richter’s controversial exhibition in Krefeld, the book responds to several controversies triggered by the famous cycle: the mystification or potential glorification of the RAF, the absence of the RAF’s victims, and the recent discovery that New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased the paintings for an undisclosed amount in June 1995 directly from the artist. Die Toten consists of grainy reproductions of newspaper images of 87 people who died and three who were missing because of politically motivated violent acts, as suggested by the book’s subtitle, “Student Movement, APO, Baader-Meinhof, June 2nd Movement, Revolutionary Cells, RAF . . .” The book neither distinguishes between perpetrators and victims, nor does it treat images of the high-profile dead any differently from the others. The images—of students, bystanders, high-profile victims, terrorists, and policemen alike—range from private snapshots, portraits, to photographs of corpses and are organized chronologically by the date of their violent deaths. Under each picture, Feldmann printed the name of the deceased followed by a cross and the exact date each met a premature death. Both the format of the images and the font are uniform. Feldmann’s photographs do not allow spectators to distinguish between the bodies of victims and perpetrators unless they know the specific historical background. Although the source photographs were widely publicized at the time, only a small number are remembered today. While it is relatively easy to identify some of the highprofile dead such as Hanns-Martin Schleyer, Alfred Herrhausen, Ulrike Meinhof, or Andreas Baader, the vast majority of the dead viewers are confronted with, are no longer recognizable, like for example the driver and security details who were executed during Schleyer’s kidnapping. Feldmann calls attention to the forgotten dead that outnumber the high-profile ones by far and thus confronts his spectator with the limitations of cultural memory. But he also takes stock of the true costs of politically motivated violence in postwar Germany. Feldmann’s use of three kinds of photographs reinforces this disjuncture in his visual archive of the dead. Some photographs show bodies or even corpses providing sufficient information for the spectator to reconstruct the circumstances of a death, as in the case of Herbert Schoner, a policeman shot during a bank robbery. Alternatively, this same photographic type has become part of the collective memory through numerous reproductions, as with the images of HannsMartin Schleyer holding the sign “prisoner of the RAF” and Holger Meins on his deathbed after his hunger strike. The artist’s second kind of photograph contains misleading cues that prevent the spectator both from determining if the dead were victims, perpetrators, governmental officials, or bystanders and from identifying the cause of death. Feldmann’s third way of “(mis)leading” the viewer is to use photographs that show a prominent perpetrator pursuing routine human activities, thus undermining deeply held assumptions about Germany’s most wanted terrorists. For example, Gudrun Ensslin is seen pushing a stroller; Zuhair Akkash, the leader of the Palestinian Martyr Halimeh Commando, which hijacked the Landshut, is depicted on the beach. Only a small legend, tucked away at the end of the book, provides any information regarding the age of the deceased and his/her profession, the death’s date

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and location, as well as any circumstances surrounding the cause of death. Most entries in this terse legend are between two to three lines long. Although Feldmann considered “the book itself the work of art,” he made an “exhibition copy” in enlarging the original Din A5 to a Din A3 paper format, and lining them up symmetrically in chronological order without using any frames.47 Die Toten was first shown in 1998 at the Kunstverein Karlsruhe, where, comparable to the Richter exhibition in Frankfurt, the ensuing local debate nearly resulted in terminating the institution’s public funding. The debates sparked over the Richter’s cycle and Feldmann’s Die Toten foreshadowed what the progressive exhibition house, Kunst-Werke in Berlin, would face several years later while curating the controversial Zur Vorstellung des Terrors: die RAF-Ausstellung (“Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition”) between 2003 and 2005. Prior to the opening of the exhibition, over 400 articles were written, voicing the concerns of intellectuals, contemporary witnesses, and relatives of the dead of both victims and perpetrators. The victims of the RAF were represented by the widow of the former president of the Treuhand Detlev Karsten Rohwedder and the son of the former president of the Federal Union of Employer Association (“Bundesvereinigung der Deutschen Arbeitgeberverbände”) Hanns-Martin Schleyer. They argued that this exhibition would “glorify the RAF,” and asked Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, a former political activist and so-called 1968er, to revise the decision of Berlin’s Senate Department of Science, Research, and Culture and withdraw any federal funding for the RAF exhibition.48 But also the relatives of deceased RAF members, including the children of Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin (Bettina Röhl and Felix Ensslin), actively contributed to the public debate surrounding the exhibition. While Felix Ensslin joined Ellen Blumenstein as a curator of the exhibition to create a “reflective experience” for viewers, Bettina Röhl, a freelance writer, published a series of articles critiquing the exhibition for being “banal, slightly lowbrow,” failing to tell “the real stories” and thereby merely revisiting the myths surrounding the RAF.”49 The exhibition’s main floor captures the curators’ attempts to prevent the “glorification of the RAF,” yet it also creates a space permitting visitors to encounter the dead in different contexts. The former factory ground floor, transformed into a classic white cube exhibition hall, was the exhibition’s core. In its center was a smaller white cube that reached to the ceiling and displayed Feldmann’s series Die Toten on its inner walls. The outer walls of the interior cube, except for the one facing incoming visitors, were empty. The floor’s main walls, which surrounded the cube, presented a media timeline consisting of 29 panels featuring newspaper articles and television footage. Before entering Feldmann’s tomb hosting the dead, visitors passed by a media timeline composed of countless newspaper clippings and television news coverage by

47

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Dieter Roelstraete, “Art in and out of the Age of Terror: On Hans-Peter Feldmann’s Die Toten,” Afterall, 17 (Spring, 2008): 65. Wolfgang Kraushaar, “Zwischen Popkultur, Politik und Zeitgeschichte. Von der Schwierigkeit, die RAF zu historisieren,” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History, Online-Ausgabe, 1.2 (2004), passage 1, available at: http://www.zeithistorische-forschung.de/16126041-Kraushaar-2-2004. Bettina Röhl, “Die geilen Täter,” Der Tagesspiegel, August 25, 2003; ibid., “Terror verkauft sich,” Die Zeit, January 25, 2005; ibid., “Ich bin nicht das Sprachrohr meiner Mutter,” Der Spiegel, January 17, 2005; and ibid., “Die Zumutung darf sehr weit gehen,” Die Tageszeitung, January 24, 2005.

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the main media outlets of that time (Figure 4.3). The timeline begins on June 2, 1967 with the death of Benno Ohnesorg, the first student to be shot during the student protests by a policeman, and ends with the RAF’s declaration on April 20, 1998 that the group would cease its armed struggle. The timeline’s emphasis on the years 1970–7 (21 out of 29 reference points) suggests the importance and impact of the RAF’s first generation, as already suggested in the earlier works of Volland and Richter. This highly selective timeline—best described as a timeline of death—suggests the curators’ overriding concerns. The events feature one death after another—those of terrorists, their famous victims, bystanders, and other casualties of the student movement. Dates making no reference to violent deaths were limited to the arrests of the first-generation RAF leading members and the RAF’s declaration of ending the armed rebellion. Aside from capturing an underlying narrative of ongoing war, replete with assassinations, shoot-outs, and violent governmental countermeasures, the countless photographs and headlines visualize the public’s morbid obsession with terrorist bodies and their corpses juxtaposed against the meager coverage and near invisibility of largely unknown victims. The separate exhibition room at the center of the factory floor, a white cube, hosting Feldmann’s series Die Toten serves as a powerful counter narrative to the media timeline (Figure 4.4 and Plate 6). When read in combination with the media timeline, Feldmann’s series, specifically its inclusion of victims not already part of the cultural memory, exposes the media’s erasure of these corpses, the RAF’s primary targets, and thus their disappearance from the communicative memory. Feldmann, by giving photographs of the dead equal space and attention in his timeline of death, creates a far more inclusive space for mourning. His tomb of death confronts visitors with the

Figure 4.3 Regarding Terror: Timeline of Death (2005).

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Figure 4.4 Regarding Terror: Entrance to Die Toten (1998).

numerous forgotten dead while destroying the symbolic value of the RAF body: no single body holds a special place among countless others. Biesenbach used Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” as an allegory for the main floor’s design, which he hoped would remind the viewer of contemporary responses to events and allow him/her to develop an independent “picture of the past.”50 Benjamin’s 50

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Biesenbach, Zur Vorstellung des Terrors, 11. See also, Holger Liebs,“Engel der Geschichte,” Tagesspiegel, December 11, 2004; Holger Liebs, “Engel der Geschichte,” Berliner Zeitung, December 11, 2004. Benjamin, 245–55.

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“Angelus Novus” perceives history as a “single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” hurled “in front of his feet.” This perspective differs drastically from the human perspective, which interprets history as a chain of events. Unable to stay and to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” progress “propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”51 Feldmann’s series has a very similar effect, “piling” dead upon dead in front of the viewer, who is neither able to revive the dead nor to interpret history as a chain of events when confronted with these bodies. The doubled symbolism of victimhood used to charge the representations of the RAF’s bodies and corpses has been buried and put to rest by yet another layer of corpses.

Vanishing Corpses: Where are they Now? Today, after decades of heated debates on the proper memorialization of the RAF and their victims, the final resting place in the museum is no longer contested. Richter’s cycle has left Frankfurt for good and is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum for Modern Art in New York. In explaining the move, Richter argued that the “meaning of the paintings will only develop in an art context” and not in an area marked by RAF activity, where “one was so affected by the subject matter that the paintings were almost exclusively viewed in political terms-or even as a kind of family affair.”52 As he continued: Due to their distance from the RAF, maybe the Americans can see the overall aspect of the subject that affect almost every modern or even non-modern country: the general danger of belief in ideology or fanaticism or madness. This is a current [issue] in every country, including the United States that you so lightly call conservative.53

Because a contemporary audience encountering Richter’s cycle in New York may not “have learned about what happened in any degree of detail, if at all” or “witnessed the turmoil of those days,” Richter’s cycle is now shown in combination with study rooms and his source notebooks displayed. Without the shared cultural memory, viewers need the historical framework in order to see what is hidden in plain sight. Proll also welcomed Richter’s decision to permanently relocate the cycle to the United States: “Through this transfer away from Germany and into modern art, my friends and comrades, who were so thoroughly demonized in Germany, are no longer at the center of the ever returning German row about the RAF.”54 The photographs of the dead Holger Meins also no longer haunt public discourses and have been put to rest.

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Storr, “In Memorium,” 36; and Hubertus Butin, “Mit der RAF ins Museum of Modern Art: Gerhard Richter im Gespräch,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, international edn (October 23, 1995): 21. Storr, “In Memorium,” Proll, 6f. Klonk, 212.

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According to Syndication Stern, their distribution is no longer permitted due to the violation of general personality rights.55 Thus, Feldmann’s series, as envisioned and staged by the Kunst-Werke, has the final word on how to memorialize the dead. Donated by the artist, Die Toten is now part of the permanent collection of the Nationalgalerie. Away from the Kunst-Werke, Feldmann’s dead remain of great interest to the public—but without causing controversy. The aesthetics of diffusion, to erase the distinction between perpetrators and victims, has become acceptable as long as an empathetic, humanist approach neither celebrates life nor glorifies the dead, but instead objectively takes stock of the immense costs of politically motivated violence and ideology.

5

Penis-bodied Specimens in Körperwelten (Body Worlds) Sebastian Heiduschke

Gunther von Hagens’ traveling exhibition Körperwelten (Body Worlds) has polarized since its inception in 1995.1 The trained anatomist von Hagens presents preserved bodies in a type of human taxidermy, and arranges bodies and body parts in a variety of titillating and irritating postures. For the conservation of the deceased, von Hagens uses a patented procedure he calls plastination. During the initial stage of the conservation process, the body is flushed with formalin. An anatomist then removes all of the skin as well as fatty and connective tissues, but leaves the organs intact, and submerges the skeleton and muscle structure in a chemical bath. The body then needs to be shaped, molded, and positioned in the way it will be presented in the exhibit, before bone tissue and myostructure are cured in a final stage to protect the body from decay and decomposition. Upon completion of the plastination process the body has turned into a museum object ready to be displayed. Bodies preserved by von Hagens are shown in permanent locations and in traveling exhibits known under the umbrella term Body Worlds. Since 1995, different variations of the exhibit have attracted more than 47 million visitors in over 130 cities across four continents. The purpose of the exhibit is, in the words of chief plastinator Gunther von Hagens and exhibition curator Angelina Whalley, “to educate the public about the inner workings of the human body and to show the effects of healthy and unhealthy lifestyles.”2 Indeed, the bodies on display feature a wide range of health conditions. For instance, the exhibit juxtaposes bodies with healthy and smoker’s lungs, illustrates the effects of alcohol on the liver, displays hearts with coronary diseases, and presents the function of artificial joints. Even more, the variety of bodies on display “allows visitors to understand that each and every body has its own unique features, even on the inside.”3 Yet, the exhibit ostensibly privileges 1

2 3

The biggest issue raised about his work is the question about ethics. One enlightening example about the debate is Lawrence Burns, “Gunther von Hagens’ BODY WORLDS: Selling beautiful education,” American Journal of Bioethics, 7 (2007): 12–23; and the twelve open peer commentaries that engage with Burns’s piece. Available at: https://bodyworlds.com/about/philosophy/ (accessed January 7, 2019). Available at: https://bodyworlds.com/about/faq/ (accessed January 7, 2019).

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one type of body on display over the others. The display of penis-bodied specimens dwarfs that of the vulva-bodied person, causing an imbalance that reinforces the notion of the penis as an object of power. A “masculinist utopia” where “gender meaning is fixed,” Body Worlds serves as a patriarchal mouthpiece demonstrating the superiority of the phallus in an aseptic Shangri-la, where the penis protrudes as salacious object of multiple desires, while vulva-bodied persons are reduced to their reproductive biological function.4 In the following, I take a look at gender politics of the popular exhibit through a study of the penis. I investigate the display of the nude penis-bodied person within the exhibit to localize heteronormative gendering at play, and I inquire to what extent this exhibit reinforces notions of heterosexuality as standard. Second, I ponder the penis as the object of a voyeuristic gaze. I suggest that penis-bodied specimens appear in larger quantities due to the prominent visibility of penis and testicles, and thus produce mesmerizing moments for visitors. Finally, I contemplate the role of the foreskin in the exhibit. I read the removal of the foreskin as a form of ritualized circumcision that obfuscates the color of skin, religion, and cultural background. As the plastination process gradually strips off these layers it disallows the ocular bias of a viewer and creates a penis-bodied universal being. Pondering the penis as object of visual pleasure and power mandates a language free from conflating sex, gender and genitalia. In this essay I coalesce these parts into the concepts of the penis-bodied and the vulva-bodied person, an approach that allows me to leave behind stereotyping, gender dichotomies and heteronormativity in favor of the easily identifiable sex organ. This enables me to avoid the linguistic troubles we encounter in many studies about Body Worlds. Research conducted on questions of gender in relation to concept, methods, and presentation style of the nude bodies often upholds the gender binary, and converges notions of sex, gender, and genitalia. Even though scholars acknowledge the belief that the specimens occupy a fringe position between the binary human/non-human, their research nevertheless time and again falls back on the gender binary in their discussion of the bodies on display.5 For instance, one sociological study about Body Worlds assumes a corporeality as it associates genitalia with gender. The author who analyzes audience reception to the specimen “Chess Player” states that the body was “a man’s [my emphasis] skeleton that reveals some tissue and nerve fibres leading from the brain along the spinal cord and the body’s limbs.”6 In this instance, the association of gender and genitalia resulted in a reading of the exhibited specimens within the gender binary that correctly described the penis-bodied specimen as the model for intellectual pursuit and vigorousness, but remained deeply entrenched in the idea that the existence of a sex organ enables the viewer to deduce another person’s gender.

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T. Christine Jespersen and Alicita Rodríguez, “Forced impregnation and masculinist utopia,” in T. Christine Jespersen, Alicita Rodríguez, and Joseph Starr (eds.), The Anatomy of Body Worlds: Critical Essays on the Plastinated Cadavers of Gunther von Hagens (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009), 166–75. José van Dijck, “Bodyworlds: The art of plastinated cadavers,” Configurations, 9, 1 (2001): 99–126. Dirk von Lehm, “The body as interactive display: Examining bodies in a public exhibition,” Sociology of Health and Illness, 28, 2 (2006): 230.

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The same problematic association of gender and genitalia bears true for feminist critiques of the exhibit. The author of a study on the carnal character of Body Worlds argues that the interaction between visitors and the displayed bodies resembled a “hierarchy of power between subject and object that is suffused with gender relation” while there was a “particular emphasis upon these bodies as consumable objects— metaphoric meat—[. . .] borne most heavily by female bodies” as “erect nipples and breast tissue are reattached only onto female bodies.”7 In this instance, the proposition of a gender power relation took for granted a heterosexual gaze, yet ignored all other permutations of pleasure visitors may derive from the nude body of a person with the same or with different body parts than their own. The difficulty of approaching the gender of the specimen in Body World becomes evident even further in an essay published in the field of education. There, the authors attempt to solve the dilemma of body parts, gender and traditional gender roles by placing inverted commas as an indicator of critical examination: “ ‘Women’ most often appear demure, are posed passively and gazing off into the distance, while ‘men’ are active and/or intellectually engaged; they assume serious, scholarly poses, reflecting Rodin’s The Thinker, for example, or are absorbed in a game of chess. Others are active, expansive and assertive, posed powerfully in masculine stances, engaged in pole vaulting, skiing or basketball. Faces are set to express considerable authority.”8 However, their choice to retain the words “women” and “men” in their description of the way the curators positioned specimens further corroborated the view of two genders identifiable by looking at their body parts. It should be evident why my analysis of the plastinated nude bodies requires the linguistically unwieldy phrase of the “penis-bodied specimen.” Using it allows me to acknowledge that the penis is considered the most significant body part shown in Body Worlds without falling back into troubling language. It is most remarkable how von Hagens foregrounds the penis and its sexual connotations when he arranges penis-bodied specimens in pairs or groups. In all instances I am aware of, we see heteronormative gendering and a focus on the gender binary that corroborates notions of heterosexuality as status quo. When plastinates are set up interacting with each other in pairs or groups, they only pretend to touch each other, and they do so in ways that reinforce the gender binary. For example, two or more penis-bodied specimen generally interact with each other in non-sexualized settings, such as in the arrangements of two football players trying to gain control of the ball, three specimen playing cards, or a specimen bent over another specimen like a doctor performing surgery on a patient.9 7

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Rosemary Deller, “Dead meat: Feeding at the anatomy table of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds,” Feminist Theory, 12, 3 (2011): 245–6, my emphasis. This is no longer true. Skin and nipple grafting is now also done to penis-bodied specimens, for instance to one of the poker players I discuss in this essay. Joyce Davidson, Leah Huff, Jen Bridgen, Andrea Carolan, Ashley Chang, Katherine Ennis, Kathryn Loynes, and Jen Miller, “ ‘Doing gender’ at Body Worlds: Embodying field trips as affective educational experience,” Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 33, 3 (2009): 307, my emphasis. Available at: http://blog.castac.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/WBP_FootBall_02.jpg, https://flic. kr/p/e2EsSR, and https://www.esslinger-zeitung.de/cms_media/module_img/429/214766_1_ gallerydetail_KW_Surgeon.jpg (accessed January 26, 2019).

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The two football players are set up in a pose that shows one specimen leaping on one leg, leaning forward into the opponent, while clutching the ball firmly with two hands. The wide-open eyes are locked onto the ground in anticipation of the impact, the mouth open to simulate the player breathing hard, the left shoulder turned inward, ready to make contact with the defending player. This specimen’s skull is sawed off on the top to reveal a surprisingly intact brain without the deformities one would expect to see, given the high probability of concussion in American Football. The defender’s arms are opened wide to tackle the ball carrier, but the body is shown falling backwards, with the head whipped forward to indicate the tremendous force of the impact on the defender. Noteworthy here is especially that we do not see the actual impact, but what appears to be the moment immediately following their initial contact when the two bodies briefly separate before crashing into each other a second time to eventually end up on top of each other on the turf. Although this moment of separation after the collision lasts only a split second in reality, the exhibit shies away from having the two penisbodied specimens touch. The choice to freeze the two players in this brief moment of unlinking after the impact has caused the displacement of the defender evokes the curator’s discomfort with body contact between penis-bodied people, even though the purpose of a contact sports such as American football consists in perpetual touching, embracing, wrestling, and piling on top of each other. In this pairing of specimen, there might be even more than distress at play; this particular arrangement also carries homoerotic associations, such as one of “naked football” that would be reminiscent of the Lingerie Bowl, now renamed into Legends Football League (LFL), in which vulvabodied players clash, wearing undergarments instead of uniforms. As the football players in Body Worlds reveal more than their vulva-bodied living counterparts and leave nothing to the imagination, one can imagine how the spectacle of the exposed penis on two athletic bodies might prompt the comparison with either the LFL or with pornographic films featuring intercourse between penis-bodied people, in which a football game would serve as the narrative frame.10 Other group arrangements of penis-bodied specimen are ostensibly set up to perform activities associated with heteronormative conduct in order to counteract these homoerotic associations. One familiar set-up of Body Worlds, featured in the James Bond movie Casino Royale, presents three penis-bodied people playing a game of poker. The arrangement is remarkable: each player shows mannerisms we recognize from watching the World Series of Poker (WSOP), a world-wide poker tour dominated by penis-bodied people.11 Sitting around a poker table with poker chips stacked up in different heights to indicate lucky streaks of the specimen, we see one specimen with the lower abdomen pried open wide to reveal its intestines. The fingers are bent and clutch the cards tightly. The mouth is slightly opened, the tongue pushes on the inside of the lower lip, creating a bulge in the skin of the lower jaw. It is slightly contorted to

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For the idea of body porn, see Geoffrey Gorer, “The pornography of death,” Encounter, 5, 4 (1955): 49–52; and Jacque Lynn Foltyn, “Dead famous and dead sexy: Popular culture, forensics, and the rise of the corpse,” Mortality, 13, 2 (2008): 153–73. Available at: http://www.wsop.com/players/stats/ (accessed January 30, 2019).

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a sly grin, the head tilted, the eyes locked with those of the player on the opposite side of the table. The body sits in a pretentious position, slumped in its chair, leaning back with only the shoulder blades touching the chairback, the right leg stretched out underneath the table while the left foot is planted firmly onto the ground. The second specimen, sitting on the opposite side of the table, appears to be waiting anxiously for a move of the first player. The legs of this body mirror those of the first: here, the left leg is stretched out, the right knee bent at a 90-degree angle, and marginally slanted to the outside, the sole on the ground. The eyes of this specimen return the gaze of the opposite person, the lips are opened and rounded as if the body was addressing the other player. This specimen is left intact in the front of its upper torso, with nipples grafted back onto its body. The backside on the other hand is largely removed to reveal the spine and bone structure from the start of the neck all the way to the lower backside. The skull is pried open in the back and pulled back a bit to have the head appear elongated and shaped like a cone. This specimen holds the cards with the left hand and uses the index and middle finger of the right hand to pull out a card from their own hand in an awkward motion. The third specimen is seated at the table so that the three card players form a triangle. This body differs from the two other penis-bodied specimens significantly. It lacks any muscle mass or tissue on its skeleton—we see only its bare bones. The bones are partially removed to allow a clear view of the organs nested in the rib cage. Our attention is immediately drawn to the black lung sitting on top of the heart, indicating that the specimen was a heavy smoker during its lifetime. Underscoring the dangers of smoking is an incomplete left leg that suggests it was amputated right below the knee. The body exhibits what has become known as “manspreading”, as it is shown sitting in a comfortable position that allows the penis and testicles to hang loose, a move that intimates that the third specimen is also a penis-bodied object despite its lack of penis and testicles. The right forearm rests on the poker table, causing the upper torso to turn towards the first player, whereas the left hand touches its left hip. The specimen’s eyes glance at the first player’s cards awaiting the next move. All three specimens are arranged in stereotypical postures penis-bodied people exhibit, yet it is conspicuous that there is no physical contact between any of them, even though the curators set up the poker round as a scenario that necessitates tactile contact. When we look underneath the poker table, we see the reason for the mirrored arrangement of the two players’ legs and feet: the player on the left uses the right foot to pass the ace of hearts to the foot of the player on the right. The cheating motion is frozen at the moment the card passes from one foot to the other, wedged between the big and the second toes to prevent it from dropping to the ground. While both size and the slippery surface of a playing card would demand gripping it firmly at its center and seeking perceptible confirmation about the successful transfer from the other player, the toes are arranged in a way that a small gap remains between the two bodies, as if the curators felt constrained to avoid even the slightest homoerotic subtext. This is even more absurd in that the illicit exchange between the two card sharks becomes only possible because of their bare feet. These naked feet allow us to read the poker game as more than a game for chips or money. Here, the association with a game of strip poker comes to mind, in which the two cheating players would collaborate to

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presumably get the third player undressed—a feat they seem to have accomplished already, as the third specimen was ostensibly unable to save its skin and had to undress down to the bones. The missing leg as part of the interaction between three penisbodied poker players turns the scenario into entertainment with a fetishized amputated body, given the missing limb of the third player, and subverts the heteronormative setting of the WSOP into a tableau of a potential ménage à trois.12 Specimens are not shown touching each other even in scenarios that convey moments in which heteronormativity sanctions these contingencies between two penis-bodied people. The two-body setup known as “The Surgeon”, for instance, shows one specimen standing up, the back bent at a 45-degree angle, hunched over a second specimen lying on a white, oval operating table. The surgeon’s body appears to be intact, with only the cranium and sides of the skull removed to reveal the doctor’s brain. The association is quite obvious in this instance: we are to deduce from the exposed brain that the surgeon performing the operation is well-trained. The face echoes attentiveness to the task at hand, completing an organ transplant, as the heart in the surgeon’s right hand makes unmistakably clear. The eyes scrutinize the body cavity the heart is about to be fitted into, the lips pressed together tightly, and the left arm still bent, but with the open hand moving towards the vacuum in the chest. Remarkable on the surgeon’s toned body is the well-defined skeletal muscle structure on arms and legs that stands in contrast to the poor condition of the patient’s body. A malfunctioning heart, a detached hamstring and an overall deteriorated muscle system, a splay foot on the right, knock knees and a smoker’s lung are some of the deficiencies that are immediately visible to a layperson. The patient’s eyes are closed. Curiously, both arms are not relaxed next to the body as one would expect from an anesthetized patient. Instead, the left elbow hovers over the operating table, with the arm angled at 90 degrees pointing up, and the hand and fingers slightly curled towards the chest. With the right arm stretched out and the hand bent inward, the patient appears to have just been startled by something, and is now settling down again. A penis-bodied doctor touching a penis-bodied patient is one of the few instances when such an interaction would not be considered awkward from a heteronormative perspective. However, even under these circumstances, von Hagens’ constellation of two penis-bodied people not only avoids to display the direct contact, but it conveys subliminal messages that distract from the caring act on display. Although the surgeon is about to save a life by transplanting a heart, the act takes place without any visible signs of empathy for the patient on the table. Rather than showing emotions, the surgeon comes across like a car mechanic swapping a defective part. Handling the delicate organ casually like a water pump gives us the impression that the penis-bodied surgeon perceives of the body in front as an object, not a human. The disparity in body

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The debate about fetishization and attraction to the amputee body originates in research about the attraction of penis-bodied people to the amputee bodies of vulva-bodied people. See, for instance, Per Solvang, “The amputee body desired: Beauty destabilized? Disability re-valued?,” Sexuality and Disability, 25, 2 (2007): 51–64; and Charlene Weaving and Jessica Samson, “The naked truth: Disability, sexual objectification, and the ESPN Body Issue,” Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 45, 1 (2018): 83–100.

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appearance adds to the unlikeliness of this surgeon being attracted to the nude patient on the table. From the perspective of a heteronormative viewer, the surgeon’s healthy, muscular body would not be sexually aroused by another penis-bodied person in poor health. Such a setting is exclusively reserved for two specimens with different sex organs. When penis- and vulva-bodied specimen appear together, they are assembled in poses that depict them performing activities from a heteronormative perspective. In contrast to groups of exclusively penis-bodied specimens, in which the curators go to great lengths to avoid showing bodies touching, pairs of penis-bodied and vulvabodied people rely on a presentation that interlocks their nude bodies. The best known examples are an ice-skating couple in a pose that shows the penis-bodied person lifting up the vulva-bodied specimen, and also specimens arranged in various positions having intercourse.13 In both instances, the interlocking of the specimen causes the relinquishment of their individual characters, a move that morphs them into one sculpture consisting of two elements. Reserving such a unity in death exclusively to different-bodied specimen makes a clear statement of heteronormative privilege that avoids gender debate at all cost. Here, the exhibit demonstrates backwardness instead of embracing the opportunity to break down heteronormative thinking in society in favor of equality. A good example for a missed opportunity is apparent in the ice-skating couple performing the star lift as part of a pair skating routine. In this lift, the penis-bodied person lifts and holds the vulva-bodied person up in the air, while the other arm is stretched out parallel to the ice. The vulva-bodied person’s arms are also stretched, while the legs are held in a split scissor position, with one knee pulled up and bent to have the toes form a straight line with the top of the foot. In the exhibit, the set-up places the vulva-bodied person in a position that is even more vulnerable than in real pair skating, as the plastinated body positioned for the star lift reveals the sex organs similar to the way it would be viewable in an all-nude strip club when the dancer lasciviously cradles the pole. This is even more disturbing as some ice skaters are only fifteen years old, and recent news revealed systemic sexual abuse of young athletes among the coaching staff organized in US Figure Skating.14 The gender binary still rules in the constitution of the International Skating Union ISU, along with the strict regulation that a couple in pair dance is to consist of “1 Lady and 1 Man” who have to follow guidelines when performing on ice that strengthen a heteronormative world view.15 One past performance that won a gold medal at the 2010 Olympic Games was described by the athletes as “bringing an edge or sexuality or darkness.”16 As on-ice

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Available at: http://noiselab.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/hagens6-1024x681.jpg and https:// www.umweltbildung.at/fileadmin/_processed_/csm_Koerperwelten_Paarlauf_c_NHM_Kurt_ Kracher_01_5be552a3b6.jpg (accessed January 26, 2019). Available at: https://www.athleteabuse.com/us-figure-skating-banned-list/ (accessed February 10, 2019). Available at: https://www.isu.org/inside-isu/rules-regulations/isu-statutes-constitution-regulationstechnical/17913-constitution-general-regulations-2018/file (accessed February 10, 2019). Available at: https://www.thestar.com/sports/skating/2018/01/13/virtue-and-moir-heating-up-forthe-olympics.html (accessed February 10, 2019).

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dances in general recreate heteronormative behavior time and again with the penisbodied person sexually dominating the vulva-bodied person, Body Worlds endorses these patterns of power. Body contact under the guise of permissible, even required patterns of touch is one of the means that allows the penis-bodied ice dancer to exert control over the vulva-bodied person. The exhibit’s most controversial portion features penis-bodied and vulva-bodied people in a variety of sex positions. Among those, we find non-penetrative sex shown in a constellation where the vulva-bodied person kneels on the legs of the penis-bodied specimen while holding firmly onto their neck and head.17 Another setting shows two specimens standing up, having penetrative sex in the shower. In a third setting, the curators place the vulva-bodied person lying on top of the penis-bodied person. The decision to arrange two dead bodies in the sex act stirred up controversies. When a court in Cologne, Germany, ruled that von Hagens was not allowed to show the two specimens having sex, the plastinator reacted by covering the copulating couple in gold foil.18 Later, Body Worlds partitioned off a section in the exhibit that housed this and other sex acts, but also other specimens related to heteronormative sex and pregnancy. The set-up was eventually changed by cutting off most body parts and reducing the couple to their penis and vulva. Presenting the various sex acts as part of the Body Worlds exhibit caused public debates about ethics and human dignity, which in turn fueled curiosity and became the best advertisement for the exhibit since 2004, when the city of Frankfurt thwarted von Hagens plan to host Nackte Nächte (naked nights). At that time, von Hagens hired ten penis-bodied and ten vulva-bodied people “to be compared to the plastinates” wearing nothing more than “top or tanga” while roaming the exhibit halls.19 While these comparisons never took place, Body Worlds still benefitted from the promise to see sexual intercourse, albeit only one type performed in what remains a heteronormative setting. The arrangement that provides the most clearly visible examination of the sex organs during intercourse shows two specimens having sex in the reverse position, with the vulva-bodied person straddling the penis-bodied person. The back of the vulva-bodied person’s skull has a large window sawed into the back to provide a view of the brain.20 The head is tilted back and sideways, continuing the body’s overall tension, which also translates into the eyes looking up into the sky, and is further extended in a contorted mouth. While the right hand touches the penis-bodied specimen’s right knee, the left hand grabs the partner’s left forearm tightly, indicating that the vulva-bodied person is experiencing pleasure. Just below the breasts with grafted nipples, viewers see inside of the vulva-bodied person through a long opening

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Available at: https://www.bz-berlin.de/data/uploads/2015/02/img_8174_1423843901-768x432.jpg (accessed February 10, 2019). Available at: https://blob.freent.de/image/980444/847x565/847/565/b0/fb203b77f615ed7d6df54a 60a707b129/kq/der-verhuellte-sex-bei-koerperwelten-40632263.jpg (accessed February 10, 2019). Available at: http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/koerperwelten-frankfurt-verbietet-von-hagensnackte-naechte-a-302055.html (accessed February 10, 2019). Available at: https://www.bz-berlin.de/data/uploads/multimedia/archive/00065/Hagens1_65519a1200x1080.jpg (accessed February 10, 2019).

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in the skin that is pulled to the side. Here, the two bodies are cut in a cross-section to reveal the position of the partner’s erect penis inside the vagina. The penis-bodied person is positioned lying on the back, both hands grasping the hip of the partner on top, with the head slightly lifted. The specimen gazes not at the partner on top, but into the nowhere, mirroring the ecstasy of the vulva-bodied person. At first glance, the position displayed appears to favor the vulva-bodied person, as it grants control over the sex act by setting a rhythm for thrusting, and by varying the depth and angle of penetration. Looking at the facial expression makes us believe that both people are climaxing at the same time. On top of a synchronized orgasm, the two bodies having sex are pleasing to the eye: they are muscular, have athletic figures, and they look healthy without any signs of organ deterioration or external deformities. The penis-bodied person is slightly taller than the vulva-bodied partner who sports b-cup breasts. Although we are unable to see the penis-bodied person’s pectoral muscles because they have been removed during the plastination process, we would expect no less than to find a perfectly shaped chest with a six-pack abdomen. In other words, Body Worlds feeds the imagination of a heteronormative audience with a sex act that is scripted similar to mainstream pornography, perfect bodies included. Yet, by privileging heteronormative sex of two people with idealized bodies, Body Worlds reduces sex to a “vanilla” version. It reiterates a simplified formula of accomplishing an orgasm through penetration of the vagina with a penis. There is no space in the exhibit for oral and anal sex, sex between partners with the same sex organs, sex with toys and gear, BDSM practices, kink, or anything other than intercourse between a vulva-bodied and a penis-bodied person. The exhibit further favors sex as an experience with an erect penis, but it completely disregards the significance of clitoral stimulation in addition to vaginal penetration for the vulva-bodied person. The setting shows sexual intercourse at a pace and style imagined by penis-bodied people, in which the size of the penis and depth of penetration lead their partner to an orgasm. It promotes unrealistic expectations of simultaneous orgasms as much as it presents the orgasm as sine qua non for passion and fulfillment. Finally, choosing a sex position with the vulva-bodied person on top instead of the missionary position is largely necessitated by the presentation of the erect penis in the vagina, and not a nod to the vulva-bodied person in control. Placing the penis-bodied specimen on top would have required a removal of large portions of the bodies obstructing a clear view of the vaginal penetration. Regardless of the position of the vulva-bodied specimen, the penis is the only body part that enters the other person’s orifice. It interlocks the two bodies and puts the penis-bodied person in control as it celebrates the aesthetics of vaginal intercourse. In the entire exhibit we never encounter arrangements in which the vulva-bodied person dominates the penis-bodied specimen, in which a penis-bodied specimen exerts control over another penis-bodied specimen other than in a sports competition when we would expect contact between bodies, or instances of penis-bodied specimens having sex with other penis-bodied specimens. By limiting the type of body constellations, Body Worlds sanctions the system of heteronormativity and tells a story of power that privileges the penis-bodied specimen in these group settings.

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Power and privilege of the penis-bodied specimen can function as overarching narrative due to the prominence of the penis in the exhibit. Statistics speak a clear language here. The ratio of specimens is starkly skewed at seventy percent penisbodied specimens and only thirty percent vulva-bodied specimens. Von Hagens explains this discrepancy with differences in bone density and a general structural weakness in the skeletal structure of vulva-bodied specimens as far as plastination is concerned. Stronger bones caused by variances in the human growth period that lasts three years longer on average—eighteen years for the vulva-bodied person compared to twenty-one years for the penis-bodied person—and a narrow pelvis less prone to drift apart during the conservation process due to the missing parturient canal make the penis-bodied skeleton much more robust and therefore easier and cheaper to plastinate. From the scientific standpoint of an anatomist, the professional experience of a plastinator and the business decision of an entrepreneur, von Hagens decision to gravitate towards the penis-bodied donor as the most durable object should make sense to even his harshest critics. With the exception of child birth, biological functions of vulva-bodied and penis-bodied specimens are identical with each other; thus, poses and scenarios in the exhibit ought to contain the sturdiest artifacts. That said, the question about heteronormativity and latent sexism in Body Worlds remains. Aside from rational considerations that favor penis-bodied specimens as paradigm of the human body, I suggest that this type of body offers additional stimuli beyond rational considerations, as penis and testicles distinctly protrude from the rest of the lower body structure to hang clearly visible to onlookers, whereas evolution designed the human vulva as visually less prominent. In contrast, the breasts of the vulva-bodied person and, to a lesser extent a wide pelvis, attract the gaze, an action which reduces the vulva-bodied specimen to the role as child-bearing person.21 Body Worlds advocates for a passive role of the vulva-bodied as recipient instead of agent of sex due to setting them as object of the onlooker’s gaze. Yet, there seems to be a discernible difference between vulva-bodied specimens with breasts that have nipples grafted onto them in order to feed oedipal desires of nurturing and comfort, and those with a penis and testicles. In the case of the latter, the viewer’s attraction shifts towards something deliberately voyeuristic and exhibitionist in nature. The penis becomes an unveiled object of a sexual desire far beyond its purpose as a reproductive organ; its particular presentation on many Body Worlds specimens deliberately directs the viewer’s focus towards the groin area, and turns the penis into a visual magnetic pole onto which all eyes eventually wander. We find visual evidence for the fascination with the penis on plastinated objects when we look at photos of Body Worlds that were not necessarily curated or approved by Gunther von Hagens team, but were snapped by visitors or taken for press coverage of the exhibit. For instance, in a revealing image that accompanied a report in the German daily Die Welt announcing the opening of the exhibit in the city of Bremen demonstrates how the eyes of visitors gravitate towards the groin area of the specimen. 21

Uli Linke, “Touching the corpse: The unmaking of memory in the Body Museum,” Anthropology Today, 21, 5 (2005): 13–19; and Natalia Lizama, “Afterlife, but not as we know it: Medicine, technology and the body resurrected” (PhD diss., University of West Australia, 2008).

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This particular photo features a person dressed in black pants, black shirt and a red vest standing behind the poker table of the three penis-bodied poker players. A black background in the exhibit makes the visitor blend smoothly into the environment, and accentuates their flesh-colored skin of the face and their light blond hair put into a ponytail.22 The person has stepped as closely to the poker table as the set up allows; they stand in the middle between the skeleton poker player and the cone-headed player on the right, their hands folded behind their back, the weight shifted on the left leg, the upper body bending slightly forward, twisting to the left, with the neck stretched even more to allow a better view of all three players at the table. The visitor’s head is tilted forward and the eyelids are fully visible, revealing how the visitor is squinting in order to improve their focus. If we use the position of the head and draw a line extending the direction of their eyes we see how this visitor’s gaze has locked on the penis of the poker player on the left. The visitor’s facial expression exposes their immediate reaction as they very slightly raise the left corner of the mouth to show appreciation. It is fascinating how the photo requires us to take a second look to understand the message that visitors to the Body World exhibit get to peek at plenty of penises. At the same time, the composition of this image plays with precisely this fact as we picture ourselves in the place of the visitor, imagining what we would see. If we visualize the position between the skeleton player and one of the other specimens we understand how these are ideal locations to have all three penises in full view—including the skeleton’s phantom penis. The image further alludes to the pleasurable experience of what we cannot see. While the visitor’s face indicates that they discovered the penis of the specimen on the left, and we know that standing next to the specimen on the middle provides a clear view of their genitalia, the camera lens adds the information we lack about the specimen on the right. When we look at the armrest of the chair, we notice the white penis that is halfway covered by the left leg and the arm rest. Since we can distinguish the glans we have the ability to gauge that the specimen’s penis is substantially sized. Thus, while the penis is already the point the eyes will fixate on, Body Worlds curates the exhibit in a way that foregrounds the penis. Comments in online forums are further proof as posts such as “ ‘Haha penis’—everyone” and “dontstareatthepenisdontstareatthepenis” attest to.23 While this effect of the eyes peeking at the penis appears to be inevitable, given human predisposition and plastination strategy, further inquiry into the meaning of the prominence of the penis reveals voyeuristic and exhibitionist predispositions alike. In addition to arranging the specimen in ways that grants unrestricted view to the penis by positioning legs strategically out of the line of sight, curators also mount the specimen on platforms and pedestals to raise their bodies—and with them the penis— by a foot or more. Doing so places the viewer in a position of a voyeur who looks onto a nude body positioned there for the sole purpose of being gazed upon, yet not as equals, since the viewers remain clothed, look on from behind a glass pane, and have the ability to change the position to observe the penis from various angles and in close 22

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Available at: https://www.welt.de/img/vermischtes/crop100516167/4026934453-ci3x2l-w900/ poker2-DW-Vermischtes-Bremen.jpg (accessed February 21, 2019). Available at: https://imgur.com/YHjAvg2 (accessed February 25, 2019).

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proximity as the distance from the eyes to the penis shrinks. The nude penis-bodied specimens offer an unveiled view of the penis in a way reminiscent of ethnologists observing primitive societies with exposed sex organs. This does not mean that penis-centered positioning is restricted to specimens on pedestals. However, doing so amplifies the voyeuristic experience as it is no longer the entire body, but the sex organ that actually draws a viewer’s visual interest. Let us take two examples from Body Worlds that underscore how penis-centered positioning steers the viewer into becoming a voyeur. Often, specimens are arranged in ways that simulate moments in which body motions are frozen, much like hitting the pause button on our remote controls, to allow us the close study of events that would not be possible in real life. On the other hand, specimens shown in resting positions evoke different associations, when we know that we are invited to study carefully and pay attention to the details of a body. One instance in which viewers are not only invited to do close readings of a human body, but when studying a nude body is required and sanctioned, is the act of nude life drawing, when the naked model is positioned and required to remain motionless for an extended period of time to allow the artist to study the nude body carefully. During these moments, the artist and voyeur conflate into one being, since nude life drawing aims to have the onlooker take an active role as they copy the body parts onto paper. Body Worlds simulates this moment of a naked model with the positioning of a penis-bodied specimen sitting on a tree trunk, inviting the viewer to become the artist studying the nude.24 However, the body is placed on the trunk in such a way that the buttocks barely touch the wood, causing the whitened penis and testicles to drop down in front of the dark brown trunk, creating a chiaroscuro effect of a well-defined, toned, and specifically illuminated sex organ as core of this sculpture that turns the setting into an easily accessible voyeuristic act. Voyeurism develops into participatory action in the set-up known as “Chess Player.” Here, a penis-bodied specimen is shown sitting on one side of a chess board, their elbows resting on their knees to create a stable support mechanism for the hands that are put together to prop up their chin, the eyes intently staring at the board as if they were brooding over their next move.25 The skull is partially opened up to show their intact brain, likely suggesting that chess contributes to a well-functioning brain. Regardless, this specimen draws viewers for the unobstructed view of their penis and testicles rather than for their brain. Positioning the elbows on the knees necessitates a spreading of the legs wider than the shoulders, which reveals the specimen’s sex organs and causes them to drop similar to the person on the trunk. In this instance, however, the viewer is coerced into the role of voyeur through the simple means of a folding chair positioned on the opposite side of the chessboard, which leaves them no choice other than to stare at the specimen’s penis.26

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Available at: http://www.china-tac.com/images/bbxs/rt7.jpg (accessed February 25, 2019). Available at: https://www.ksta.de/image/11807914/max/1920/1080/a8548e98fcede6c868f09e727f 4996f6/Ew/koerperwelten-plastinate-3--1252085929083-.jpg (accessed February 25, 2019). Available at: https://www.visitcopenhagen.com/sites/default/files/styles/news_and_article_image/ public/asp/visitcopenhagen/Visit-sites/1024x576/Attractions/eksperimentarium. jpg?itok=rO0UHVXu (accessed February 25, 2019).

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The most egregious attempt to turn visitors into voyeurs comes into play in the arrangement entitled “Floating Sexual Act,” which shows a structure, in which a vulvabodied pelvis sits on top of a penis-bodied pelvis, with the stiff penis visible as it is situated inside a vagina.27 Von Hagens created this setting, when a German court censored the arrangement of two specimen having sex, by sawing off legs and torsos.28 Ironically, the remaining portion funnels the attention of viewers even more so to the sex organs than in the previous setting. If the plastinated sex act fed voyeurism before, the reduction of two bodies to their sex organs elevates the experience as there are no body portions left that distract from the erect penis penetrating another body. The visual pleasure and sexual excitement about the voyeuristic experience for the viewer is further emulated as a mirrored experience for the penis-bodied specimen who is being gazed at, as a sort of exhibitionist sensation of someone displaying their sex organs to others. The act of being-looked-at might serve a variety of purposes: for some, presenting their penis resembles showing off their sexual prowess in the hope to attract a sex partner, whereas others might be content knowing that their nude bodies are being taxed. Common to all of them is the hope of achieving sexual gratification, either by watching others watch, or at least by knowing that others are watching. The latter instance might be the key for those penis-bodied specimen who donate their bodies to be plastinated: even though they will not experience as their nude bodies are put on public display, they know that their penis is not only exposed to thousands of spectators every day, but they are thrilled about the idea that virtually everyone walking through the exhibit will cast their eyes on their penis and marvel at their naked body. Looking at the collection of penises in Body Worlds reveals a further interesting fact about the penis-bodied specimens who become part of the exhibit. Based on my own visits to the Body Worlds exhibit and the study of images available online, the average penis size of the plastinated specimens that are exhibited is slightly above average in comparison to the average penis size among Europeans.29 A plastinated prostate, penis and testicles that are exhibited separately from its original body show a penis measuring approximately 6 in (15 cm) in length from the top of the glans to the end of the shaft.30 The angle between penis and testicles appears to be 65 degrees wide, which suggests that we see the penis in a slightly erect state, in which the erectile tissue has become engorged with blood and has started to enlarge the penis. This decision to present the functional interaction between prostate, penis and testicle by showing an erect penis is consequential, given that most settings depict snapshots of movement and freeze specimens in time, but remarkable, since we observe a penis on its way to a

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Available at: https://www.thieme.de/viamedici/aktuelles-medizin-und-wissenschaft-1650/a/koerper welten-5288.htm (accessed February 25, 2019). Available at: http://pinnunity.de/attachments/hagens-koerperwelten-beim-sex-2-jpg.1078/ (accessed February 25, 2019). The most comprehensive data spanning over a decade of medical studies about penile length I am aware of is Shahid Khan, Bhaskar Somani, Wayne Lam, and Roland Donat, “Establishing a reference range for penile length in Caucasian British men: A prospective study of 609 men,” British Journal of Urology International, 109, 5 (2012): 740–4. Available at: https://www.diomedia.com/stock-photo-berlin-germany-gunther-von-hagens-humanmuseum-body-worlds-image21049507.html (accessed February 25, 2019).

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complete erection. At that point, we know that it will have grown in size even further, which would bring the displayed penis to a size above the 4.8–6.3 in (12.1–16 cm) of an average erect penis. What we encounter on display in Body Worlds is thus the sex organ of a well-endowed person. This display sets the tone for expectations in penile length, given the penis size of other penis-bodied specimens in the exhibit. In fact, the exhibit suggests that a long penis is the norm, since the average penis size of the vast majority of healthy and athletic specimens, as well as those with visible handicaps, deformities or signs of aging, is unmistakably above that of the general penis-bodied person. As far as we know, no correlation exists between one’s body ability, age and penis size, yet Body Worlds suggests so and thus deliberately deceives those visitors who use the exhibit to learn about the human body. A telling photo shows a child behind a specimen suffering from kyphosis. The specimen is hunched over, holding a walking cane in their right hand, plastinated in a manner to conjure fragility, yet featuring an extremely large penis.31 The child’s face shows uncertainty, the hands are clenched together as a sign of slight disconcertedness about the display. Given the large penises the child has seen up to this point in the exhibit, they probably expect all penis-bodied people to have a long penis. In the rare case of a specimen with a smaller penis, visitors are exposed to problematic racial undertones. One photo, for example, shows a Western visitor look at the average-length penis of an Asian person.32 The visitor stands a few feet away from the specimen, with the hands folded behind the back and the upper body leaning forward to get a better view. The eyes look at the specimen’s penis, grinning, as the wrinkles around the eyes, cheeks, and in the corner of the mouth reveal. We do not know the reason for the amusement; while the visitor might be gleeful because of the sight in general, it is equally probable that the penis size of this specimen in comparison to the other, non-Asian, bodies educed this reaction. As most penis-bodied specimens exhibited are well endowed, one also wonders if those who donate their bodies are eager to show off their well-sized penis or if the curators give a preference to specimens with big penises to create a riveting atmosphere for visitors. Regardless, blog posts of those who visited the exhibit testify that the slogan “size matters” bears true at least for some of those who bought tickets to see the exhibit. One visitor admitted that they “had the most fun when comparing penis size of the different cadavers” before going out for cocktails,33 while the blog “Peniseum” dedicated a series of over thirty images to big penises in Body Worlds, proving how audiences take pleasure in the copiousness of penis-bodied specimens, and how the candid display of bodies attracts visitors with interests beyond learning about the

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Available at: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hDo1MZOGuRI/U2zdviiro0I/AAAAAAAAIDk/2a7Nhhl TJQU/s1600/0023ae6cf3690f06005503.jpg (accessed February 25, 2019). Available at: https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-R175-KbEfgo/WApYvIRM9sI/AAAAAAAAER8/ UCBi1o5Ms-ATK0qo6qwkAJvrL3zkmEOBACLcB/s1600/resizer%2BBodies%2BGunther%2Bvon %2BHagens%2BPeniseum.blogspot.com.jpeg (accessed February 25, 2019). Available at: http://www.jodibeansblog.com/2014/01/weekend-recap-body-worlds-cook-her-and. html (accessed February 25, 2019).

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composition of the human skeleton.34 Altogether, the penis serves as the most crucial body part in Body Worlds. However, we technically face an incomplete presentation of the penis. When the chemicals used to plastinate the bodies break up and dissolve the skin matter, they also remove the skin wrapped around the shaft along with any foreskin. The complete removal of the prepuce changes the subject’s appearance and, paradoxically, shrouds its meaning by removing the cover of the glans. The plastination process strips the body of one of its most identifying features in a form of ritualized circumcision that eradicates a piece of religious and cultural identity. This is not negative per se, as the elimination of a small amount of skin creates universal penis-bodied beings that are no longer divided into two groups of “have and no-longer-have” subjects, and as such the trigger for ethnic or spiritual disputes. On the other hand, the presence, or absence, of the foreskin, divulges much about a person’s upbringing within a discrete community. In Judaism, for instance, circumcision is required as it guarantees “male fertility and the gift of the land.”35 Whereas Islam does not demand compulsory circumcision, it is believed that it may boost virility and sexual power.36 In Japan, we see the exact opposite. Circumcision is generally not done unless a person requests to be circumcised—perhaps due to the fear that losing one’s foreskin might symbolize a loss of virility, or even worse, that the procedure resembles castration.37 Finally, many African countries see circumcision as a means to curtail the spread of sexually transmitted infections. The penis-bodied specimens of Body Worlds lack any indicators of such communities. We can only guess if we are encountering a doubly denuded specimen’s penis, or one who entered the plastination process without a foreskin. Curating penis-bodied specimens with their prepuce intact would be possible through skin-grafting—the frequently criticized method von Hagens used to equip vulva-bodied specimens with nipples. Even large portions of skin can be preserved, as evidenced by the “Flayed Man” holding up their own skin in their outstretched arm.38 Thus, Body Worlds has made a conscious decision to present only the circumcised penis. As a result, visitors encounter an assimilated mass of penis-bodied subjects suited to please the eyes of an audience by the eradication of this cultural signifier. Even more, removing the foreskin exerts power and sexual dominance of the curators over the penis-bodied subjects on display. Circumcision permanently exposes the glans as the most sensitive organ to touch and subsequently desensitizes over the course of time. Although the dead penis-bodied subject no longer feels any pain,

34 35

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Available at: https://peniseum.blogspot.com/search?q=bodyworlds (accessed February 25, 2019). Shaye J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 12. S. A. H. Rizvi, S. A. A NaqviI, M. Hussain, and A. S. Hasan, “Religious circumcision: A Muslim view,” British Journal of Urology International, 83, 1 (1999): 13–16. Genaro Castro-Vázquez, Male Circumcision in Japan (New York: Palgrave, 2015). Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/pss/233841690 (accessed March 4, 2019). This set-up references Michelangelo’s image of St. Bartholomew holding out the flawed skin. See: https:// external-preview.redd.it/yl2iTImv_a2mGqteS9ILTXVZaOZHqa0ifsT-v8-bHdo.jpg?auto=webp&s =43a265c6ca0051ce4470ce5b76afba70b612fdfa (accessed March 4, 2019).

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performing the ritualized circumcision intimates at a sadistic act executed to visualize a system of power that results in the creation of a universal penis-bodied subject. I have shown how Body Worlds privileges the penis and foregrounds heterosexuality as norm in its cleansed display of the human body. Essentially, the disputed exhibit revives the long history of displaying bodies in public as popular entertainment.39 In contrast to these spectacles that regularly presented deformities and abnormal bodies in “freak shows,” von Hagens stages a renaissance of the immaculate body that harks back to German body culture of the early twentieth century, during which the nude human body became a beacon of health and delight.40 Body Worlds exploits a primordial desire to see other, “perfect” human bodies without having to expose one’s own imperfections such as stretch marks, orange skin, saggy breasts or a crooked, “small” penis. Here, the “body is presented as a quarry with different layers” arranged to be visually unearthed.41 Knowing about the visitors’ probing gaze and admiration of a perfect body bestows validity on the specimens’ decision to be exposed in a permanent state of nudity. As the exhibit takes the display of the nude body even further by sexualizing the experience in its foregrounding of the penis-bodied person, it flaunts the penis no longer as a reproductive organ, but as an object of yearning. Given the prominence of the penis, Body Worlds might be the first penis-bodied corpse review.

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Elizabeth Stephens, Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). Petra Kuppers, The Scar of Visibility: Medical Performances and Contemporary Art (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 37.

6

For the Porn Connoisseur: Cinema Joy Jennifer L. Creech

“Five cum shots were missed during the making of this movie.”1 These words emerge as a kind of postscript during the final credit sequence of Petra Joy’s 2006 collection of pornographic shorts, Female Fantasies. A “porn connoisseur”—Joy’s self-named target audience—should immediately identify it also as a feminist in-joke. For, in fact, to “miss” five so-called “money shots”2 is to (seemingly) miss the point of pornography per se: the “proof ” that the sexual act performed onscreen is non-simulated and, perhaps most important, the “proof ” of (male) sexual climax: “visual evidence of the mechanical ‘truth’ of bodily pleasure caught in involuntary spasm. . . .”3 Yet, as Linda Williams has argued, “while undeniably spectacular, the money shot is also hopelessly specular; it can only reflect back to the male gaze that purports to want knowledge of the woman’s pleasure the man’s own climax.”4 It is thus both a “substitute for what cannot be seen,” namely female pleasure that derives from “less visible but more ‘direct’ instances of genital connection,” and also “the most blatantly phallic of all hard-core film representations . . ., the most representative instance of phallic power and pleasure.”5 In referencing her “failure” to capture five moments of male ejaculation, Joy’s postscript can be read as a tongue-in-cheek nod to her enlightened viewership that she does not recognize these moments as representative of “ultimate climax.” Ignoring the generic currency of the money shot also serves as a rallying call to fellow feminist pornographers to continue resisting such oppressive tropes by creating porn from, as she argues, “the female perspective.” Thus, to get the joke is simultaneously to get the complexities of being a feminist who enjoys pornography and thinks it is a genre worth engaging. Joy’s postscript positions her work within larger feminist debates about

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Female Fantasies, dir. Petra Joy, 2006. The cum shot, also known as the money shot, is so called because it costs the most money to produce: porn producers pay their male performers extra for it. See Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1989), 95. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 94. Ibid., 95.

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pornography’s relevance, both politically and aesthetically, for achieving gender and sexual equality. This essay investigates the feminist gaze in German director Petra Joy’s 2006 collection of pornographic shorts, Female Fantasies. Drawing on contemporary feminist theories of pornography and on interviews with the director, I situate Joy’s self-described “porn from the female perspective” within the larger history of feminist debates on pornography and provide close readings of Joy’s work as representative of contemporary sex-positive feminist porn. In actively resisting cis-heteronormative tropes typically associated with the pornographic gaze and in privileging feminine desire through scenarios considered taboo in mainstream pornography—cunnilingus, masculine bisexuality, and women wielding strap-ons—Joy fashions the female body and feminine desire into porn for the feminist connoisseur.

Porn and Feminism Pornography’s relevance for a volume on “the body” seems obvious. In her essay, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, Excess,” Linda Williams connects the generic excesses of pornography, horror, and melodrama with the forms of bodily ecstasy they produce (orgasm, screams, and tears, respectively).6 Williams articulates the three main features of these “body” genres as: “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion;” the focus on a “form of ecstasy . . . uncontrollable convulsion or spasm;” as well as the traditional function that women’s bodies in particular play on screen “as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain [respectively].”7 A genre whose contested nature has often centered on the distinctions between “actual” and “feigned” bodily pleasure, particularly as concerns the women performing in mainstream productions since the 1970s, pornography centers the body and its ecstatic climax—both in terms of its performers and its viewers—as its raison d’être. Pornography—both as a genre and an industry8—has long been a focus of feminist political action and thought. In the 1970s and 80s, what has since become known as the

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Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” (1984), rpt. in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 602–16. Ibid., 604–5. The limited scope of this essay does not allow for a more lengthy engagement with the varied spectrum of pornographic industries producing content today. Alongside larger mainstream production companies like Bang Bros, Evil Angel, Kink.com, Vivid, and Wicked, there exist many smaller independent production companies (including many feminist, queer, and BIPOC producers) such as Aorta, Bonus Hole Boys, Blue Artichoke, Bright Desire, Crash Pad, Erika Lust Films, Heavenly Spire, The Lust Garden, and Pink & White Productions. There also exists a plethora of cottage industries such as altporn sites that subsist on user-generated content, peer-to-peer porn, charity porn, eco porn, and various forms of amateur porn. Petra Joy owns her own small independent production company, Petra Joy Ltd. For a brief introduction to the cottage industries, see Susanna Paasonen, “Labors of love: netporn, Web 2.0, and the meanings of amateurism,” New Media Society, 12, 8 (2010): 1297–312; and Eleanor Wilkinson, “The diverse economies of online pornography: From paranoid readings to post-capitalist futures,” Sexualities, 20, 8 (2017): 981–98.

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feminist “porn wars” created a clear and strong dividing line between anti-porn and sex-positive feminists.9 For anti-porn feminists, whose perspective is most often associated with the work of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon in the United States and Alice Schwarzer in Germany10, pornography is understood as “the active subordination of women, suppression of women, [and] brutalization of women.”11 It is a “form of forced sex, a practice of sexual politics, an institution of gender inequality . . .; along with rape and prostitution in which it participates, pornography institutionalizes the sexuality of male supremacy, which fuses the eroticization of dominance and submission with the social construction of male and female.”12 For anti-porn feminists, porn is violence, it is “sex forced on real women [by and for men] to be sold at a profit [and] to be forced on other real women,” and as such, should be legally banned.13 Sex-positive feminists, on the other hand, have taken a very different approach to the issues of pornography. While they are certainly in agreement with anti-porn feminists that most mainstream heterosexual porn could be described as misogynist and violent, they do not agree that porn per se is necessarily either. This openness to porn’s potential lies in feminist sex positivity’s inherent belief in the positive value of sex and an ethical approach to sex that actively resists the imposition of sexual norms, is non-judgmental and anti-shaming, and insists on the sexual rights of all persons within a context of radical consent and respect for all forms of sexuality.14 The sex-positive feminists emerging in the 1980s consisted of a diverse group of women working in various fields whose approaches to sexual self-knowledge and selfpleasure were rooted in feminist aspects of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. During that earlier period, groups in the U.S. like the Boston Women’s Health Collective were resisting the paternalism and suppression of women’s knowledge in social, medical, and educational discourses by disseminating information and resources on relationships, sexual pleasure, contraception, childbirth, abortion, lesbianism, and women’s empowerment.15 By the 1980s, women such as Betty Dodson, Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, and Candida Royalle placed women’s 9

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I have chosen to use the terms “anti-porn” and “sex-positive” feminists because these are the terms used by members of these respective “groups” themselves. In some of the secondary literature, the term “pro-porn feminists” surfaces. However, this is not a self-identifying marker of said group but is rather the term used and emphasized by anti-porn feminists when talking about sex-positive feminists. With her PorNO! campaign, Alice Schwarzer pushed the anti-porn position in West Germany through her popular women’s magazine, Emma, beginning in 1978. By 1987, the campaign had drafted a law to ban pornography that, similar to the laws drafted by MacKinnon, were not passed. See “Der Papiertieger: Emma,” January 27, 2003, available at: http://www.datenschlag.org/ Papiertiger/lexikon/emma.html (accessed February 23, 2019). Andrea Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood: Censorship, Pornography, and Equality,” in Drucilla Cornell (ed.), Feminism & Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 25. Catherine MacKinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” in Cornell (ed.), Feminism & Pornography, 171–2. Ibid., 170. Dr. Carol Queen, “What Sex-Positivity Is and Is Not,” Good Vibes Blog, September 13, 2014, available at: https://goodvibesblog.com/sex-positivity-carol-queen-phd/ (accessed February 23, 2019). See Betty Dodson, Liberating Masturbation (New York: Bodysex Designs, 1974); Xaviera Hollander, The Happy Hooker (New York: Dell, 1972); and Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (Boston, MA: Boston Women’s Health Collective, 1984).

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sexuality at the center of their political activism and creative practices. Their deployment of various forms of erotic activism resist patriarchal, heterosexist culture by creating safe spaces for feminist sex-positivity. The groundwork laid by these US-based, sexpositive pioneers in conjunction with shifts in the material availability and access to modes of production and distribution [VHS followed by DVD and later streaming videos on the internet] made it possible for feminist pornography to emerge as an international force by the late 1990s and early 2000s. Betty Dodson’s groundbreaking bodysex workshops were perhaps most obviously aligned with feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. The bodysex workshops, which have been offered since the late 1970s, invited women to sit nude in small-group workshops to openly discuss their relationships with their bodies, to “show and tell” their genitalia, and to learn and practice masturbation together as a form of feminist liberation. Dodson’s sexual consciousness-raising work dovetailed with her experiences as a feminist leather dyke with a preference for consensual S&M. As a feminist whose own sexual proclivities had incited disdain and anger from other feminists, and who had “fought against censoring information about birth control, abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism,” she found the idea of feminists wanting to censor pornography “absurd,” becoming one of the earliest lesbian feminists voicing public support for pornography.16 Susie Bright’s work, while different, similarly attests to the political importance of sexual pleasure for feminist activism. Bright is perhaps best known as the cofounder and editor of the first women-run lesbian erotica magazine, On Our Backs, whose title was a pithy satirical reference to Off Our Backs, a long-running feminist newspaper known for publishing the work of anti-porn  feminists. While working a day job at Good Vibrations in San Francisco, the first feminist-owned sex toy shop in the U.S. Bright became keenly aware of the lack of pornography made by and for women— whether they be straight, bi, or gay. On Our Backs aimed to fill that gap with erotic writing, photography, and video.17 The success of On Our Backs led to Bright’s being recruited to write monthly porn reviews for Penthouse Forum which, she argues, was a feminist historical event as it was the first instance in which mainstream journalism considered pornography a legitimate topic: she was asked to cover the “economics, aesthetics,” and the “workaday world of the adult film industry.”18 But Bright wasn’t just any B-movie critic. As she became more familiar with what she calls the “pop-andson business tradition” of the adult industry, she realized that the ways in which “obscenity” was defined, that is, what counted as legitimate (and legal) versus illegitimate (and therefore illegal) pornography often rested on heterosexist definitions of sexuality and a failure to understand female anatomy and pleasure.19 Thus, rethinking the 16

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Betty Dodson, “Porn Wars,” in Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York, 2013), 27. Susie Bright, “The Birth of the Blue Movie Critic,” in Taormino et al. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, 33–4. Ibid., 33, 35. For example, female G-spot ejaculations were considered illegal “water sports” or “golden showers” in places like Oklahoma or Florida. A more physiologically correct understanding of this female sexual experience would categorize this under orgasmic ejaculation (like the money shot). See Bright, “The Birth of the Blue Movie Critic,” 37–8.

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(hard core) erotic from a feminist perspective became a cornerstone of her work. She began curating movie nights for friends which then were expanded into educational show-and-tell events—“How to Read a Dirty Movie” and “All Girl Action: The History of Lesbian Erotic Cinema”—and shown in local independent theaters in San Francisco. She eventually offered courses at the university and took her show-and-tell events on university tours. What she discovered: most women and many, many men had never watched a pornographic feature; nearly all of those attending her events learned more in those few hours than they had in their entire sexual lives.20 Pornography as a potential vessel for learning about and representing women’s diverse experiences of sexual pleasure is what unites the remaining feminist pornographic pioneers listed at the beginning of this essay. It was also a primary motivating factor for the adult entertainment artists Annie Sprinkle, Nina Hartley, and Candida Royalle to move from a position in front of the camera to one behind it. Having gotten their start as porn stars, each of them were well acquainted and quite disappointed with the mainstream porn industry’s representation (and misunderstanding) of feminine pleasure. Pornography became a tool for them to explore their own sexualities and the sexualities of others, to express and enjoy their sexual autonomy—their natural “birthright”—without guilt, to earn a living doing something they love, and to “give back” to their sisters in the fight for equal sexual rights.21 Acknowledging that “porn . . . is the only place in our culture for people to actually witness sex,” these feminist pornographers simultaneously recognize “porn’s most critical social use, which is to challenge the notions of what sex can be.”22 For these and other feminist pornographers, challenging mainstream heterosexist porn’s definition of sex involves not just rethinking the conventions of the genre, but also reimagining and implementing ethical production practices, including but not limited to: creating a collaborative relationship during the filming process by empowering performers to choose what kinds of sexual acts they want to perform and with whom; paying performers a fair wage and providing them with nutritious snacks and proper hydration during a shoot; and enforcing safe sex practices such as the use of condoms, gloves, dental dams, and lubrication, and complying with the industry’s self-mandated testing policy.23 It also includes making particular aesthetic choices, such as prioritizing and celebrating feminine and queer desires, pleasures, and orgasms; emphasizing consent and safe sex practices onscreen; counteracting mainstream marginalization of under-represented groups by depicting diversity in race, gender identity, sexuality, body size, ability, and age; representing femininity and masculinity as complex and varied, including what constitutes beauty, desirability, and sexiness;

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Ibid., 38–9. See Nina Hartley, “Porn: An Effective Vehicle for Sexual Role Modeling and Education,” in Taormino et al. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, 228–36; and Candida Royalle, “What’s a Nice Girl Like You . . .,” in ibid., 58–69. Interestingly, both Hartley and Royalle reference the published works of the Boston Women’s Health Collective as texts that were formative for their feminist sexual liberation. Hartley, “Porn,” 232, 234. Tristan Taormino, “Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice,” in Taormino et al. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, 260–1.

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modeling diverse modes of desire, fantasy, communication, pleasure, and orgasm; and opting out of the standard aesthetic choices of cis-heteronormative porn (e.g. the money shot, particularly in its most offensive form, the “facial”).24 Rethinking porn from a feminist perspective thus necessarily involves creating an alternative porn production and distribution process—a feminist porn industry—that enacts a feminist politics of equality in all of its aesthetic and economic processes.

Cinema Joy: “If you can dream it, you can do it.”—Walt Disney (quoted in Female Fantasies) A contemporary of feminist porn pioneers Royalle, Sprinkle, and Hartley in the US, Petra Joy is a self-identified sex-positive feminist pornographer—born in Germany, working and living in the UK—who is known and celebrated for what she calls “artcore” pornography: erotic films that emphasize safe sex, intimacy, authentic female pleasure, humor, non-normative bodies, men as sexual objects, and male bisexuality.25 An award-winning feminist director, producer, and distributor of pornographic films, Joy entered the porn industry in a rather unanticipated way. After having studied Film and History at the University of Cologne—she wrote her MA disseration on female sexuality in Nazi films—she began shooting erotic photography for individuals and couples. At these shoots, she was often asked by her clients to recommend “good” porn, especially porn women could enjoy. Sadly, Joy says, she was unable to recommend anything because the images of “woman” and the version of feminine sexuality depicted in mainstream pornography were marked by a “lack of imagination” and was simply a vehicle to “deepen the cult of male potency.”26 In her book, Die Pornographin: Female Fantasies—Meine Revolution der Lust [The Female Pornographer: Female Fantasies—My Passionate Revolution], Joy focuses specifically on the dearth of female writers, directors, and producers in both the porn industry and the mainstream film industry, citing women’s absence from moving image production as one of the primary reasons why women’s sexuality remains misunderstood and misrepresented. Joy argues that increasing women’s professional representation in the industry is key to revolutionizing how we understand gender, sexuality, desire, pleasure, and storytelling per se: For us, as women, it is important, therefore, that we find our own erotic language of images [Bildsprache], so that we can express ourselves, so that we have the opportunity to identify with the fantasies and desires of other women, and so that we can show men who we are and what we want. To exclude us from actually 24 25

26

Ibid., 261–3. Ibid., and Anne G. Sabo, “Feeling it! Petra Joy’s ‘art-core,’ ” Good Vibes Blog, October 13, 2001, updated October 29, 2015, available at: https://goodvibesblog.com/feeling-it-petra-joys-art-core/ (accessed February 23, 2019). Interview mit Petra Joy im Wortlaut, “Sex und Porno sind politisch,” Frankfurter Rundschau, August 31, 2009, available at: http://www.fr.de/panorama/interview-mit-petra-joy-im-wortlaut-sex-undporno-sind-politisch-a-1074747 (accessed February 23, 2019).

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participating in pornography would only enable male myths of our sexuality to persist, which would have negative consequences not only for women but also for men: porn that reduces women to widely spread “cunts” and men to eternally hard “cocks” limits every one of us, and it definitely limits our ability to give each other pleasure and to come on our own terms. We need more freedom of expression and variety in our pornography, and less assembly-line fucking [Ficken wie am Fließband] where the only valid goal is male orgasm and the cum shot.27

As a young feminist Joy was, like many other women of her generation, against pornography. An early supporter of Alice Schwarzer’s “PorNO!” campaign28, Joy eventually became dissatisfied with simply being “against something—I also wanted to be for something, to create an alternative, something that would satisfy me and hopefully inspire other women and men. I didn’t want my fantasies to remain a secret, hidden away; rather, they should be seen and heard.”29 Frustrated by the lack of visual pornography produced from the “female perspective,” as she describes it, Joy began making her own pornographic films. And yet, the material conditions of the filmmaking process—in particular, funding and distribution networks—remained very real hurdles to her political filmmaking process: “Unless we build it ourselves, we won’t have a cohort because distribution is still stacked against us. Most sex shops and porn sites are still run by men and stocked for male buyers, hence the importance of having our own chains of distribution.”30 With the growth of the feminist sex toy and video market beginning in the late 1970s (with Good Vibrations) through the 1990s (with such staples as Adam and Eve, Babeland, Eve’s Garden, SheBop, and The Smitten Kitten), those conditions slowly, but steadily, improved. Through the work of sex-positive erotic activists, a slowly emerging grass-roots movement of feminist erotic activism found its anchor in a small network of feminist-owned and -run stores selling sex toys, erotica, and pornographic videos.31 Joy’s films were first released on VHS and DVD in the US through Candida Royalle’s “Femme Productions” line via Adam & Eve, one of the first feminist porn distributors in the world. In addition to reinvesting profits from her own films into additional productions, Joy has also used donation and fundraising campaigns to raise money for her films. And after having received numerous awards at international festivals for both her cinematic oeuvre and for her vocal and financial support of other women and queer filmmakers, she now runs one of the most successful feminist porn production and distribution companies in the (feminist) industry. Her website offers a subscription

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Petra Joy, Die Pornographin: Female Fantasies—Meine Revolution der Lust (München: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 2012), 11. See fn. 7 above. Petra Joy, Die Pornographin, 12. Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films and Sex From a Female Perspective,” in Sex Out Loud with Tristan Taormino, July 26, 2013, available at: https://www.voiceamerica.com/rss/itunes/2096 (accessed February 23, 2019). See also Petra Joy, Die Pornographin, 13. See Lynn Comella, “From Text to Context: Feminist Porn and the Making of a Market,” in Taormino et al. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, 79–93.

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service for streaming her own films while also showcasing the work of other important feminist porn directors, such as Maria Beatty, Candida Royalle, Morgana Muses, and Shine Louise Houston.32 For the remainder of this essay, I will focus on two films: one from Joy’s second short-film collection, Female Fantasies (2006), and one from her fourth collection, The Female Voyeur (2011). Joy’s assertion that her films are shot “from the female perspective” is formally foregrounded at the beginning of the framing story that opens Female Fantasies: a tall brunette dons a black leather sleep mask, crawls under red silk sheets, and proceeds to fantasize about an orgy in which she is the center of attention. The other characters surrounding her are men and women in various states of undress, some cross-dressing, wearing devils’ horns and sequined masks, pleasuring her with feathers, riding crops, ice cubes, and a glass dildo. The suggestion is that feminine desire is at the core of what we’ll be watching over the course of the next 53 minutes. Even more interesting, perhaps, is the opening sequence of The Female Voyeur, entitled “She Calls the Shots.” As the opening credits run, we hear the sound of high heels walking over a wooden surface after which the camera cuts to a close up of a woman’s eyes staring into the camera. Suddenly, she raises a Nikon to eyelevel and the camera cuts to a long shot of the female protagonist (Scarlet Lecoq) photographing two men (Scott and Jess) in bikini underwear. The camera continues cutting back and forth from medium shots of her shooting footage to close ups of the images she captures: male torsos with bulging sacks, male hands reaching into black leather and red mesh underwear, triceps and tattoos on display. We see her arranging one man’s hand to reach under the red leather triangle covering the other man’s mound of flesh, after which she straddles one of them to get a better shooting angle. Here, as in the opening sequence of Female Fantasies, it is clear that the “female perspective”—and, perhaps, the representation thereof—is the focus of Joy’s collection. Joy states outright that her own and other women’s interest in voyeurism—“having men perform for me”—was a major impetus for her entry into pornographic filmmaking to begin with.33 For Joy, appealing to the female voyeur means creating a cinematographic style of representing bodies that refutes and plays with generic porn conventions. Joy takes many of porn’s classic tropes—the meat and money shots, threesomes and gang bangs, women as dominants—and turns them on their heads, all while depicting in extended detail female desires that have been erased by mainstream pornographies: cunnilingus, masculine bisexuality, pansexual orgies, gender-bending strap-on sex, and the female orgasm.34 In assuming a feminine viewing perspective, Joy directly confronts the foundational assumptions of anti-porn perspectives presented earlier in this article: that porn is created by men, for men;35 that porn is the active subordination of women;36 that in 32

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See at: https://www.cinemajoy.com/ (accessed May 19, 2019). Joy’s films are also available streaming at: https://www.pinklabel.tv (accessed May 19, 2019). Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films.” Ibid. Norma Ramos, “Pornography is a Social Justice Issue,” in Cornell (ed.), Feminism & Pornography, 45–7. Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood,” 25.

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porn, woman is made into an end for male pleasure;37 and that porn is the material means of sexualizing inequality.38 In fact, Joy’s pornography refuses the binaristic reification of gender and sexuality per se as reflected in anti-porn arguments that insist on the genre’s inherent straight male gaze. As Jay Daniel Thompson has argued, antiporn arguments have naturalized the relationship between patriarchy and heterosexuality, implying that heterosexuality itself is inherently oppressive for women, which has meant that heterosexuality as a political category remains largely invisible in anti-porn arguments. Thus anti-porn perspectives have also tended to assimilate any discussion of gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender porn into naturalized, hierarchical categories of binaristic gender and sex.39 As a result, anti-porn feminism erases gender and sexual diversity from its analysis, as “heterosexuality is the past, present, and eternal future of gender.”40 The anti-porn perspective thus refuses any recognition of or engagement with non-patriarchal heterosexual, queer, and fetish pornographies, and the cultural and political revolutionary as well as therapeutic potential these other forms offer.41 Joy, herself, has asserted that, while her perspective is “female” and primarily “heterosexual,” it’s not that simple: Many women enjoy . . . watching men putting on a show for them, watching men touch and kiss and fuck each other, which is something that’s massively taboo in mainstream porn. There’s a huge desire from both genders to break free from classic stereotypes and labels. It’s fun to forget about “straight” and “bi” and just play . . . Men want to be fucked in the ass; it’s not about humiliation or degradation, but about anal pleasure without ridicule . . . it doesn’t fit the gay/straight/fetish categories [offered in mainstream porn].42

Joy has said in interviews that she is particularly eager to work with bi-sexual men, as these actors are often straightjacketed into performing either in gay or in straight porn. Taboos against male bisexuality in mainstream heteroporn have led to overt censorship in the industry: one cruising scene in Joy’s Female Fantasies (discussed below) took her German distributors in particular aback; they told her they would only distribute the film if she cut the scene, “because it’s dirty!”43 Joy’s pornography also illustrates the potentially transgressive role that heterosexuality can play in questioning binaristic understandings of gender and

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Mackinnon, “Not a Moral Issue,” 181. Dworkin, “Against the Male Flood,” 30. Jay Daniel Thompson, “Invisible and everywhere: Heterosexuality in anti-pornography feminism,” Sexualities, 18, 5/6 (2015): 756–7. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 89. On the therapeutic and sociopolitical revolutionary effects of sex-positive pornography, see Chris Donaghue, Sex Outside the Lines (Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2015); and Keiko Lane, “Imagining Possibilities: The Psychotherapeutic Potential of Queer Pornography,” in Taormino et al. (eds.), The Feminist Porn Book, 164–76. Both texts are discussed in the conclusion of this essay. Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films.” Ibid.

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sexuality. In his article on anti-porn feminism, Thompson uses the example of pegging—a typically heterosexual act in which a woman wears a strap-on and fucks her male partner in the ass—to theorize heterosexuality not as patriarchal but as potentially transgressive because it both makes visible and challenges sexual normativity: “the correlation between masculine/male and feminine/female, as well as between feminine/passive and male/dominant, are thrown into question in the context of this sex act. Relatedly, the notion that sexual penetration is always carried out by men, and that it is a key symbol of male power is also questioned.”44 Joy’s inclusion of male bisexuality and gender-bending strap-on sex in her work, discussed in further detail below, are only two instances of such resistance to patriarchal heteroporn. At the beginning of this essay, I argued that “missing” the money shot was a politically motivated aesthetic choice. This is the case for several reasons. First, Joy’s cinematography refuses to privilege the money shot or to equate it with sexual pleasure per se by literally refusing male ejaculation visual representation. In mainstream hard core, on the other hand, the money shot is not only a standard trope but a privileged one: it is presented in extreme close up and often, as in the porn classics of the 1970s, is shot in extreme slow motion with special effects.45 Joy’s cinematographic choices, however, overtly resist the genre’s “perverse . . . [and] frequent insistence that this visual confession of a solitary male ‘truth’ coincides with the orgasmic bliss of the female.”46 This has been the narrative weight given to male ejaculation since the cult classic Deep Throat entered theaters. In Deep Throat, the female protagonist’s clitoris is narratively displaced into the base of her throat, thus making deep-throat fellatio the solution to her sexual dissatisfaction while simultaneously ushering in the only generic trope to rival the previously privileged “meat shot.”47 Joy refuses to accept this “poor substitute for the knowledge of the female wonders that the genre as a whole [or, at the very least, the feminist viewer] still seeks.”48 Instead, she captures the “truth” of feminine sexual pleasure by “dismantl[ing] the hierarchy of norm and deviation and so creat[ing] a plurality of pleasures accepting of difference.”49 One way in which she does this is by playfully revising traditional porn tropes. In The Female Voyeur, Joy reimagines the gang bang in a lavish group sex scene (“Pleasure Slaves”) in which one woman (Lili/Ms. Velour) is worshipped by a group of men and women whose entire focus is on pleasing her. In “Pleasure Slaves,” women initiate and run the sexual exchange, including keeping their male sex “slaves” in

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Thompson, “Invisible and Everywhere,” 759. Extreme slow motion and overlapping editing is used in Deep Throat and Behind the Green Door to greatly extend the amount of time viewers can view the money shots, much of which occurs as a facial. In the climactic sequence of Behind the Green Door, the money shot is presented in extreme slow motion, with overlapping editing, with and without light filters, and mirror-image doubleexposure for a grand total of 5 minutes and 45 seconds. Williams, Hard Core, 101. Williams argues that this is because it “extend[s] the visibility [of the genital show] to the next stage of representation . . .: to the point of seeing climax,” ibid., 94. Ibid. Ibid., 102.

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cages before they are led out on long leashes to pleasure her. In another short, “XXX Men,” Joy turns the concept of a beauty pageant on its head by having different men parade out on a stage before an all-woman team of judges. One man performs a steamy striptease and another masturbates for his audience. The winner, of course, is the contestant who performs cunnilingus on two of the judges, bringing both of them to chair-shaking climaxes. In two of the short films I will analyze in closer detail below—“She Calls the Shots” and “Cruising”—Joy offers viewers threesomes with one woman and two (or more) men, instead of the industry standard of one man and two women. In Joy’s own words, these are very deliberate genrefucking choices, “There is a message. What happens sexually isn’t scripted, although the story outline is. There is humor, there is fun [involved in] creating an alternative to mainstream porn, the changing of roles is fun . . . let’s change things around and celebrate female orgasms!”50

“She Calls the Shots”: Let’s celebrate female orgasms! “She Calls the Shots,” the photo-shoot short at the beginning of The Female Voyeur, gives particular attention to women’s desire to ogle the male body and to get off on male bisexuality, all while privileging the female orgasm. In placing the woman protagonist behind the camera, Joy overtly refutes simplistic anti-porn arguments that porn is made by men, for men. In “She Calls the Shots,” porn is not the active subordination, suppression and brutalization of women, nor does it institutionalize the sexuality of male supremacy by aligning dominance with masculinity and submission with femininity. Instead, we see a sexual scenario unfold at the behest and under the direction of a “female perspective.” As was briefly described above, the short begins with a close up of the female photographer’s eyes, thus conditioning the viewer to assume her perspective over the course of the short: it is her eye that will be our diegetic surrogate for the duration of the film. But what does that mean exactly? It does not mean that the female protagonist’s vantage point is the only one being offered to the viewer. Rather, it is the perspective of female fantasy per se—one (of many) that stands on the margins of mainstream pornographic representations—that is being offered to the viewer. To better understand what I mean here, I draw on Drucilla Cornell’s prescient theorization of the scene of fantasy in porn: Pornography . . . enacts a powerful fantasy scene. In any sophisticated account of fantasy, we have to note that fantasy never simply consists of the object of desire, but also of the setting in which the subject participates. In fantasy no subject can be assigned a fixed position. The fantasy structure of pornography allows the subject to participate in each one of the established positions. . . . But as I have also

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Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films.”

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argued, the dominating pornographic scene is frozen. There are two positions: the prick, the imagined phallus in position of agency and assertion, and the woman, the controlled dismembered body, reduced to the bleeding hole.51

Judith Butler makes a similar argument about spectatorial positioning vis-à-vis the fantasy scene, suggesting it is erroneous to assume that the spectator automatically identifies with a “single position;” rather, Butler argues, “identification is distributed amongst the various elements of the [fantasy] scene.”52 Thompson further connects Butler’s argument to Rebecca Beirne’s study of lesbian pornography, suggesting that the familiar model of “split gazes”—masculine-active-objectifying/feminine-passivenarcissistic—is also premised on a false “assumption of a pervasive and hierarchical heterosexuality (where men are always positioned as voyeuristic spectators, and women are always positioned as the subjects of this gaze.)”53 In “She Calls the Shots,” the woman protagonist, Scarlet, is, at first, the voyeuristic spectator: she arranges the two men, Scott and Jess, in provocative positions and snaps photos as they touch each other, kiss, and bite each other’s butt cheeks. She then directs Scott to unbutton her blouse as she continues to take photos. Thus, at first glance, the sexual acts taking place appear to be gay and directed by a female gaze. But as Scott pulls her in for some intense kissing, it becomes clear that the opening sequence will become a ménage à trois. As Jess takes up the camera to catch Scarlet and Scott on film, the mise-en-scène playfully alludes to the constantly shifting position of desire and identification for the viewer. “She Calls the Shots” also immediately provides the porn connoisseur with a provocative reimagining of the “dominant pornographic scene” that Cornell and Williams focus on. In line with both Cornell and Williams’ arguments, the very first pornographic shots in “She Calls the Shots” give primacy to the phallus: in the first shot, Scott’s red leather bikini underwear are pulled down to reveal his raging hard on; in the following shot, his hard on is being sucked. However, Joy’s representation of phallic pleasure immediately confronts the viewer as one that “dismantles the hierarchy of norm and deviation,” for it is the other man in the threesome, Jess, who both uncovers Scott’s dick and also sucks it, followed by Scarlet placing Jess’s hand on Scott’s balls because it’s what she wants to watch. Thus, Joy allows for a brief primacy of the phallus/ meat shot, as suggested by Cornell’s and Williams’ arguments regarding the “dominating pornographic scene,” while simultaneously breaking with generic convention to resist normative taboos about male bisexuality and female desire. Formally speaking, Joy also playfully takes up the issue of identification and the distribution of desire over the various elements of the fantasy scene. Joy’s editing techniques make the distribution of identification manifest by concretely scattering those elements across the screen itself via the use of multiple split screens. Joy thus

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Drucilla Cornell, “Pornography’s Temptation,” in Cornell (ed.), Feminism & Pornography, 562. Judith Butler, “The Force of Fantasy: Feminism, Mapplethorpe, and Discursive Excess,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 2, 2 (2019): 109. Thompson, “Invisible and Everywhere,” 760; and Rebecca Beirne, Lesbians in Television and Text after the Millennium (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 151.

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literally refuses a singular vantage point by presenting much of the ménage à trois via these multiple secondary screens, and what she creates across those secondary screens is “a plurality of pleasures accepting of difference.”54 Joy introduces the aesthetic trope of the split screen in the very opening sequence of the short to show us in close up the images Scarlet captures of the men’s torsos with bulging sacks, butt cheeks peeking out of underwear, large and small muscle groups, and tattoos. As the film progresses, however, the split screens reveal in miniature the multiple potential sites and focal points of pleasure scattered across the scene. After the first meat shot, Scott returns the favor by performing fellatio on Jess, and then both men turn their attentions to Scarlet. As mentioned above, Joy suggests that she directs her films from the “female perspective” and that part of what women want to see is themselves as the center of attention. Thus, all of Joy’s films tend to emphasize a woman at the center of the pornographic goings on. In “She Calls the Shots,” we see this emphasis as Scott and Jess take off Scarlet’s shoes, kiss her ankles, remove her pants, and lick her from midriff to breasts. Then, very uncommon for mainstream porn, the viewer is treated to the following sequence: close ups of Scott kissing Scarlet’s mouth, Jess performing cunnilingus, Scott and Jess kissing, Jess kissing Scarlet’s mouth, and finally Scott performing cunnilingus. At this point, the first instance of diegetic sound is introduced: Scarlet moans from off-screen. In a chapter dedicated to genre, Williams discusses the traditional “numbers”55 that typically appear in feature-length pornography starting in the 1970s and 1980s— masturbation, straight sex, lesbianism (for the male gaze), fellatio (with some cunnilingus), ménage à trois, orgies, and anal sex—and the way in which “a dubbed-over ‘disembodied’ female voice (saying ‘oooh’ and ‘aaah’) may stand as the most prominent signifier of feminine pleasure in the absence of other, more visual assurances. Sounds of pleasure . . . [become] aural fetishes of the female pleasures we cannot see.”56 In “She Calls the Shots,” Scarlet’s pleasure is never invisible nor are the sounds of her pleasure disembodied; rather the sounds of her pleasure become the primary diegetic soundscape as we watch her achieve multiple orgasms over the course of the remaining eleven and a half minutes. The first round of orgasms come as both men perform cunnilingus at the same time. Joy first presents this in a medium shot from behind the two men, and then cuts to a triple split screen that redistributes our attention in interesting ways (Plate 7). In the first medium shot, our eyes are drawn to three things: at the top right of the screen, we see Scarlet’s face—eyes closed, mouth open and panting, hand reaching up to grab and hold on to her hair—one of her erect nipples, and Scott’s anus and balls hanging low between muscular thighs. Here, Joy provides her viewer a most uncommon vantage point: we no longer see the phallus, but pleasure registered on the woman’s body (mouth, hand, nipple). In addition, the prominence of Scott’s anus is typical of

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Williams, Hard Core, 102. Williams uses the term “numbers” in conjunction with her assertion that pornos, like musicals, permit “the staging of song and dance spectacles [or sex spectacles, in the instance of porn] as events themselves within the larger structure afforded by the storyline,” Hard Core, 130. Hence, masturbation is like “the solo,” straight sex is like “the duet,” orgies are like “finales,” etc. Ibid., 122–3.

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gay porn, but certainly not of mainstream “straight” porn. Then, as the camera cuts to the triple screen, the vantage points are redistributed with new emphases. The first secondary screen appears in the bottom right, showing us a long shot of the ménage à trois from behind Scarlet, such that we are now focused on the movement of her legs, her hands pressing down on the men’s heads, and her heaving torso as she moans. The second secondary screen arrives to fill the left third of the frame and the focus is, once again, Scott’s anus. As we hear Scarlet’s moans become more intense, we watch (in both screens) as Jess moves his right hand along Scotts butt cheeks, just past his anus, to squeeze his butt while still not obstructing our view of the anus. Finally, the third secondary screen fills the top right third of the frame and we see the act of cunnilingus in close up from Scarlet’s perspective. In this third and final screen, the camera slowly pans up from Scarlet’s genitals toward her head. As her moans near screams of orgasm, the third screen cuts to a close up of her right foot, flexing and pointing (Plate 8). The camera returns to a single frame close up of cunnilingus from Scarlet’s perspective as she comes a second time. The men continue to pleasure her and one minute later, she comes again, and then again. Thus, in the first five and half minutes, we have a rather “prominent signifier of female pleasure in the [presence] of other . . . visual assurances . . . of the female pleasures we [most definitely can] see.” The final sequence reiterates the female voyeurism that underlies “She Calls the Shots” and the collection as a whole. Here we see Scarlet pick the camera back up to snap photos of Jess tossing Scott’s salad while Scott masturbates and strokes Jess’s member. The camera then cuts to the final scene in which we see Scarlet lie down to masturbate while watching Jess suck Scott off, thus achieving her most intense orgasms in the film. This final scene ultimately mirrors for the viewer the goals of Joy’s porn: getting women off by representing women’s fantasies. In interviews, Joy argues that all viewers (not just women) need a more balanced view of the world and in order for that to happen, more women need to pick up the camera and shoot films: it’s “important that women express themselves visually to empower ourselves, so we have choices, things to watch that turn us on.”57 In “She Calls the Shots” and in the next short I will discuss, “Cruising,” what women want is presented in ways that challenge the taboos of mainstream porn, particularly in an overt resistance to the rigid and antiquated binaries “gay” and “straight.” As more women, queer, trans and BIPOC people, people of various ages, abilities, and sizes begin shooting from their own pornographic perspectives, the landscape of sexual norms and expectations will continue to change, leading to less shame about and more celebration of various sexual-relational models. Because we can’t be what we can’t see.

Cruising: “No wimpy, limpy gimps.” “Cruising,” the second short considered here, also formally embodies Cornell’s insightful theorization of the scene of fantasy, namely “that fantasy never simply consists of the object of desire, but also of the setting in which the subject participates. In fantasy no 57

Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films.”

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subject can be assigned a fixed position. The fantasy structure of pornography allows the subject to participate in each one of the established positions . . .”.58 “Cruising” begins with a close up of a public restroom door with the traditional “male” symbol and then pans through the doorway to two male punks (played by Maxxx and Marco Kalistar) stroking and sucking each other off in front of a urinal. Tattoos, mohawks, piercings, chains, and leather collars adorn their bodies, and their rough sexual play—pushing, pulling, pinching—emphasize their “hardness.” The film then immediately turns into a ménage à trois as they are joined by a third punk (played by Marc Cuirass), who gets on his knees to suck them both off at once. We see them grip each others’ necks and we hear deep growls of satisfaction. Joy shoots the men from a variety of angles, including an extreme low shot that shows their tongues and their members crossing and rubbing, followed by close ups emphasizing their pectoral, abdominal, and gluteal muscles. We then watch as one of them is fucked from behind while masturbating. Again, Joy begins her film with the objectification of male bodies in a scene typical of what most would assume is a “gay” fantasy: anonymous sex between three men in a public restroom. What about this fantasy scene suggests a “female perspective”? Comella argues that the “fantasy structure of pornography allows the subject to participate in each one of the established positions.” In this case, then, a female viewing subject would be “embodied” with a phallus, stroking it or wielding it. Two minutes into the short, this is exactly what happens on screen. As the threesome fucks in the corner, we see a cigarette in a theatre-length cigarette holder emerge from the right side of the frame. The carrier is Lili La Chrosse (aka Ms. Velour), dressed in a red vinyl dress, red lace gloves, a red sequin choker, and red satin corset. As she unzips her dress, we see she is also wearing red sequined heart-shaped pasties and a black silicone strap-on. The men are immediately drawn to her: stroking her strap-on and fondling her breasts (Plate 9). We then see Marc suck her off while stroking Marco’s cock, Marco licking her tongue, and then Lili and Marco stroking each other’s cocks while the other two men look on. In the final scene, Lili has climbed onto the back of a toilet bowl to stroke her own cock while Marc licks her clitoris, Maxxx masturbates and comes in the doorway, and then fucks Marco from behind as Marco masturbates and watches Marc bring Lili to climax (Plate 10). While “She Calls the Shots” refused the money shot and emphasized the dispersal of female pleasure over various sites of the body—clitoris, nipples, mouth, toes, etc.— through the editing technique of the split screen, “Cruising” in particular highlights Joy’s pleasure in genrefucking and gender play. In “Cruising,” Joy emphasizes the arbitrariness of binaristic categories like “gay” and “straight,”“male” and “female” through the potentially transgressive function of the strap-on. Above I emphasized Thompson’s analysis of pegging to theorize heterosexuality not as patriarchal but as potentially transgressive because it both makes visible and challenges the sexual normativity assumed by the very category “heterosexual.” I would argue that Joy takes this a step further by beginning her short with an assumption of phallic primacy that is traditionally marked as “gay”—a male threesome sucking and fucking each other—but then through

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Cornell, “Pornography’s Temptation,” 562.

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the introduction of an effeminate dominant in a red vinyl dress wielding a phallus, Joy disrupts generic conventions and viewer expectations. In an interview with Tristan Taormino, Joy emphasizes the pleasure women experience when watching men engage in anal intercourse. Her films, she argues, take a genrefucking position because they radically refuse the strict binaries perpetuated in mainstream hardcore. In her films, men enjoy being fucked in the ass—by men and women—because it feels good: it isn’t about humiliating the men or degrading them . . . it’s always about mutual lust, and breaking boundaries and having new experiences. And [what] I find very strange in porn [is that] very often you only see dominant women and submissive men in fetish films and . . . the men are ridiculed [as] ridiculous wimpy, limpy gimps . . . and the kick seems to be for the makers or the audience . . . that he doesn’t enjoy it, he doesn’t have a hard on, and he doesn’t moan out of pleasure . . . . It’s a real shame [that] it only exists within this context. And I love to show a man being fucked with a strap-on and he has a raging hard on during it. And then another man might come in and suck this hard on off . . . but sometimes people can’t take it. Especially the industry can’t. They find it really confrontational . . . because they want to think in categories.

What Joy does not overtly address in this interview, however, is the pleasure women often take in wearing and wielding the phallus. By “pleasure,” I mean both the emotional joy experienced while pleasuring one’s partner(s) and assuming the “dominant” or “dominating” member, and also the physical, erotic pleasure experienced while wearing a prosthetic dick: The dildo’s powerful fascination lies in, among other things, the way it usurps the sensation that accords to the male member, or . . . how [one] feels the inert object . . . as if it is [one’s] own penis. The denial of the interplay between flesh and silicone, the reading of the dildo as impossibly inert, denies its status as a phantom limb, the imaginary penis that, even if inorganic, is felt as real.59

Indeed, strapping on a dildo has often been described as creating a feeling similar to phantom limb sensations.60 In “Cruising” the pleasure of wearing and wielding the

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Carellin Brooks, Every Inch a Woman: Phallic Possession, Femininity, and the Text (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2006), 144. See, for example, Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues (Ann Arbor, MI: Firebrand Books, 1993); Melissa Broder, “How I Discovered the Power of a Hot-Pink Fake Penis,” The Cut, April 5, 2016; and Lizxnn Cobalt Chrome, “A Dildo of My Own,” Idols of Sheela, available at: http://www.idolsofsheela. com/a-dildo-of-my-own/ (accessed February 23, 2019). Interestingly, the phantom penis is something commonly experienced by trans men. Vilayanur Ramachandran, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California San Diego, has also done extensive research on phantom-penis sensations in trans men, citing that 62 percent of them experienced such feelings prior to receiving gender-confirmation surgery. See Megan Bridges, “The curious case of the phantom penis,” Brainstorm, March 23, 2013, available at: http://pennbrainstorm.blogspot. com/2013/03/the-curious-case-of-phantom-penis.html (accessed February 23, 2019).

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phallus is exactly what Joy emphasizes. In contrast to Thompson’s emphasis on the act of pegging as troubling traditional notions of heterosexual sex, “Cruising” emphasizes the sucking and stroking of Lili’s prosthetic cock in a way that destabilizes the viewer’s understanding of homosexual sex. While pegging offers the viewer a radical redistribution of power by detaching penetration from masculinity (and thus denying the naturalized, binaristic power hierarchy attributed to the genre by anti-porn feminists), the stroking and sucking of Lili’s dildo emphasizes the pleasure experienced not just by the queer/male-identified recipients but also by the queer/female-identified wearer: More than any other narrative act, the taking of the dildo into the mouth is entirely symbolic and utterly subversive. If the dildo is . . . merely a hunk of rubber coincidentally sculpted into the shape of a cock . . . then it is the blowjob that gives the lie to such innocuous reassurances. As one woman writes in a self-styled butch confession: “When we strap one on, it becomes ours . . ..” The act of inert fellatio bridges the gap between what the dildo supposedly only incidentally represents and what it can become. It insists on recognition.61

This insistence on recognition is exactly what confronts the viewer of “Cruising.” In close up and medium shots, Joy highlights Lili’s pleasure in having her cock stroked and sucked, and in the final scene we see this pleasure combined with cunnilingus. The sight of Lili’s pleasure is also anchored by the sounds of Marc’s sucking and licking, and Lili’s moaning. The prosthetic dick thus functions simultaneously as a site of pleasure for the recipients and the wearer in the film. Perhaps equally important to emphasize here is the collaborative feminist process of the pro-filmic event and the role personal fantasy played in the creation of “Cruising.” In interviews, Joy has stated that consent and mutual pleasure are of the utmost importance, and that most of her performers are neither professional nor semiprofessional. Rather, she states, many have “agreed to participate in certain scenes because that’s what they want to experience.”62 On her website, she features biographies of her performers. The bio pages of the three male performers emphasize the ways in which their personal desires informed their collaboration with Joy in this short porn. Marc’s desire to “question gender stereotypes” through dress—“He loved wearing fishnet tights and a Minnie (sic) skirt with his biker boots. He also enjoyed breaking free from the limitations imposed on male sexuality and experimented freely”—is perhaps the most obvious example, while Maxxx’s page emphasizes that his lover, Marco, “surprised him” by bringing him to the shoot of this “subversive and awardwinning” short porn where he “loved getting his hands on to the wide-eyed and willing Marc Cuirass as much as sucking Lili La Chrosse’s giant strap-on.”63 After meeting Joy at the Sexual Freedom awards in London in 2003, Marco Kalistar and Joy “decided that

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Carellin Brooks, Every Inch a Woman, 143–4. Interview, “Petra Joy on Art-Core Films.” https://www.cinemajoy.com/performer/marc_cuirass/view (accessed May 19, 2019) and https:// www.cinemajoy.com/performer/maxxx/view (accessed May 19, 2019).

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together they would shoot a unique scene where a woman is cruising the male public toilets to take advantage of the gay boyz.”64 Joy thus implements an ethical production practice by creating a collaborative relationship during the filming process and empowering her performers to play out their sexual fantasies. Considered in concert with her aesthetic choices—to celebrate female and queer desires, pleasures, and orgasms; to represent maleness and masculinity as complex and varied; and to refuse the standard aesthetic choices of cisheteronormative porn (particularly the money shot)—Joy reimagines the pornographic genre from a feminist perspective.

Porn as Therapy Petra Joy’s feminist pornography turns traditional, static notions of gender and sexuality on their proverbial heads. Her destabilization of sexual normativity makes an important contribution to sex-positive feminist interventions in the public sphere. Her refusal of binaries, her emphasis on mutual consensual pleasure, and her insistence on presenting a “female perspective” is what marks her particular contribution to larger debates about the potentially educational, therapeutic, and revolutionary role of feminist pornographies. Sexual education and social change have, from the beginning, been important precepts of sex-positive feminism. Sex-positive pioneer Nina Hartley, a trained nurse practitioner who spent over 28 years performing in adult entertainment, has made it her life’s work to advocate for pornography as an effective vehicle for sexual education, role modeling, and wellness: Porn . . . is the only place in our culture for people to actually witness sex . . . [it] houses our sexual dreams, which are vitally important to our happiness. It’s important to see on screen things barely imagined, if only to allay our fears that we’re somehow disturbed or messed up in the head . . . [it] challenge[s] the notions of what sex can be . . . [and] offer[s] us tantalizing clues about why to have sex, or to have a different kind of sex than we might otherwise have considered. At its best, it expands our definitions of pleasure rather than circumscribing them.”65

Porn can be liberating and healing. It can repair the damage done by a culture of sex negativity and sexual shaming. In his provocative book on modern sexuality, Sex Outside the Lines, Chris Donaghue has argued for the importance of creating space for more sustainable and relevant sexual-relational options and “visions of sexual ‘health.’ ”66 Asserting that “the concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ sex always align themselves with normative trajectories of both sexual-relational development and

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https://www.cinemajoy.com/performer/marco_kalistar/view (accessed May 19, 2019). Nina Hartley, “Porn: An Effective Vehicle for Sexual Role Modeling and Education,” 232, 234–5. Donaghue, Sex Outside the Lines, x.

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‘appropriate’ ways of being,” Donaghue maintains that sex positivity demands a rejection of normalcy: “Sexual activism, sexual health, and sex positivity are about a perspective and a lifestyle of not perpetuating or creating ‘norms’ or policing the borders of what is ‘acceptable’ when sex is consensual, non-damaging, and pleasurable.”67 Watching porn, Donaghue argues, is not pathological, but rather healthy and common, and can be a powerful tool for sexual liberation and freedom. In her work as a psychotherapist, Keiko Lane has used queer and feminist pornographies to help her queer and trans clients broaden their ideas about sexual practices and desires, and combat socialization processes that use sexual shaming to enforce normative cultural expectations. In her graduate-level courses, she uses feminist pornography to help future psychologists “build somatic and visual vocabularies” that will enable them (and their future clients) to make empowered choices and articulate feelings and fantasy scenes they would like to explore.68 Many of Lane’s clients are survivors of sexual abuse and violence, and are “searching for language and images to help them articulate their experiences, fears, and fantasies . . .. Pornography can [thus] show us not only what we desire, but also what we grieve.”69 Petra Joy’s pornography, shot from a “female perspective,” broadens our understanding and acceptance of our sexual selves. Her feminist informed, genrefucking films provide viewers with non-normative perspectives on masculinity and femininity and mutual, consensual pleasure. In actively resisting cisheteronormative tropes typically associated with the pornographic gaze and in privileging feminine desire through scenarios considered taboo in mainstream pornography—cunnilingus, male bisexuality, and women wielding strap-ons—Joy creates an aesthetically pleasurable and politically engaged visual vocabulary of healthy sexuality.

67 68 69

Ibid., 4–5. Keiko Lane, “Imagining Possibilities,” 169–71. Ibid., 172–3.

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Orientalized Bodies at Work Cultural Zaniness in Berlin’s Sayonara Tokyo Revue Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick

On the streets of Berlin in summer 2017, blocks of eye-catching posters flanked walls and advertising columns. The background dissolves from neon pink to laser yellow, while three East Asian women in glammed-out body-hugging gowns brandish musical instruments atop a red platform, mimicking the rising sun of the Japanese flag. From left to right, the women’s three different facial expressions reveal all the show has to offer: seduction, high energy, and fun. The Japanese words ⱁ⪅ (geisha), ࡓࡲࡈࡗࡕ (Tamagotchi), and ࢚࣮ࢹࣝ࣡࢖ࢫ (Edelweiss) surround them. Other typical Japanese emblems adorn the poster, such as Mount Fuji, a koi fish, and cherry blossoms. So, how did this Japan Variety Revue make its way to Berlin in the first place? As it turns out, the show Sayonara Tokyo: Geishas! Tamagotchis! Edelweiss! was born in the Federal Republic’s capital city and set its targets on Western/German-speaking audiences. In order to decipher what this German showcase of Japanese bodies achieves and how it signifies, this study relies on the three major theoretical components of Fredric Jameson’s postmodernism, Sianne Ngai’s aesthetic of the zany, and Edward Said’s critique of Orientalist discourse. Combining these three concepts opens up avenues for interpreting both Sayonara Tokyo’s dubious handling of Japanese culture, as well as audience responses to it. The revue breaks from past traditions of Asian film and stage representation by only casting Japanese performers. This emphasis on Asian embodiment, rather than costuming, makeup, or prosthetics, draws added attention to the amount of effort the Japanese performers exert through their bodily talents. The revue’s constant presentation of unbridled zany cultural performance results in distancing the viewer. The alienation afforded by these zany bodily performances possesses strong critical potential to call into question the audience’s expectations of Orientalized representation in the Western context. However, based on audience and press responses to Sayonara Tokyo, this critical potential remains largely untapped. A glance to the East for artistic inspiration, such as the one guiding Sayonara Tokyo, does not represent a new phenomenon by any means, whether in the Western world or specifically in Germany. From works like Karoline von Günderrode’s Mahomed, der Prophet von Mekka/Muhammad, The Prophet of Mecca (1805) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West–östlicher Diwan/West-Easterly Divan (1819), August von Kotzebue’s 139

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Indians in England (1847), the haunting Chinese ghost in Theodor Fontane’s realist novel Effi Briest (1895), Else Lasker-Schüler’s Der Prinz von Theben/The Prince of Thebes (1914) and Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. Eine indische Dichtung/Siddhartha: An Indian Tale (1922), one sees vast inspiration from Asia and the wider Orient spanning centuries, authorial circles, and literary movements in the modern Germanspeaking world.1 These poems and novels demonstrate continued interest in channeling or at least referencing an Eastern Other, in order to lend their works an exotic flavor, or more profoundly, to probe the limits of the Western self.2 In the twentieth century, the new commercial medium of film also continued the tradition of looking eastward for inspiration and soul-searching, beginning with numerous silent films bringing Western viewers to far-flung destinations like China, Japan, and India. The film medium’s foregrounding of the visual introduced a new level to the encounter with the Other not explored in the primarily textual works of prior centuries. Some directors, such as Fritz Lang, repeatedly returned to Asia as a subject or a backdrop, such as his Madame Butterfly adaptation Harakiri (1919), featuring silent film star Lil Dagover in Japanese robes and a black hairpiece. Lang continued with his full-color two-part revival of 1920s epic Das indische Grabmal/The Indian Tomb produced in 1959, starring Hollywood actress Debra Paget; with tanned skin, a bindi on her forehead, and a scandalous outfit covering only her breasts and genitals during the famous snake dance sequence, Paget played the role of a half Indian temple dancer, primed for Orientalizing objectification. Cinematic examples from the early twentieth century saw white Germans helming the construction of their own versions of Eastern worlds complete with studio sets and actors performing in yellowface/ brownface, which, similar to blackface, describes the antiquated practice of dressing up as Asian via costumes, makeup, and even prosthetic teeth or eyelid. One can find a few rare examples of Asian actors starring in earlier German productions, including Anna May Wong’s three silent films from 1928–30, Valéry Inkijinoff in Taifun/Typhoon (1933), and Michiko Tanaka in the Austrian Letzte Liebe/Last Love (1934). Meanwhile, contemporary director Doris Dörrie has made a handful of films focusing on German-Japanese intercultural encounters, such as Erleuchtung garantiert/Enlightenment Guaranteed (1999), Kirschblüten—Hanami / Cherry Blossoms (2008), and Grüße aus Fukushima/Greetings from Fukushima (2016). Dörrie’s films strive for a more authentic representation of her Japanese subjects, through the use of Japanese actors and on-location shooting. Moreover, her filming style “ethnographically record[s]” Japanese bodies by showing these figures carrying out various rituals and cultural performances, such as the butoh dance in Cherry Blossoms, symbolizing “older values of pre-modern Japan.”3 Such scenes purport a documentary effect for the 1

2

3

Chunjie Zhang, “German Indophilia, femininity, and transcultural symbiosis around 1800,” in Veronika Fuechtner and Mary Rhiel (eds.), Imagining Germany Imagining Asia: Essays in AsianGerman Studies (Rochester: Camden House, 2013), 204. Cf. Debra N. Prager, Orienting the Self: The German Literary Encounter with the Eastern Other (Rochester: Camden House, 2014). Alice Kuzniar, “Uncanny doublings and Asian rituals in recent films by Monika Treut, Doris Dörrie, and Ulrike Ottinger,” Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 27 (2011): 177; Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock (eds.), Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 192.

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Western viewer that renders the representation more real than a feature film experienced as purely fiction. The filmic encounter with racial and ethnic Others from the Orient has evolved over time, demonstrating an ongoing negotiation with questions of embodiment. While past casting scandals in stage productions have shown that white bodies in yellow- or brownface were ultimately deemed “more pleasurable, more comprehensible . . . more profitable” than Asians in these same roles, such attitudes have shifted somewhat.4 Over time, Western spectators have become less likely to endure white bodies attempting to masquerade as racial and ethnic Others via costuming and makeup, insisting instead on a so-called real or “authentic” body to fill the role, as tenuous as the concept of authenticity may be.5 “Visible differences”, such as skin color, hair color and texture, and certain facial features all contribute to a material understanding of various kinds of embodiment.6 However, this impulse does not necessarily stem from a place of social justice and tolerance, but rather from the increased valorization of realism and the perception of authenticity in the mimetic arts. For instance, the strict embodiment requirement applies only to those actually seen by an audience, namely, actors. The dearth of recognized Asian talent behind the scenes in Germany speaks to this shortcoming. Some exceptions do exist, however. Video artist Hito Steyerl recently ranked #1 on the UK-based ArtReview Power 100 list, deeming her the most influential person in the art world in 2017. Prize-winning author Yoko Tawada takes inspiration from her own German and Japanese bicultural and bilingual background to write linguistically playful short stories and novels. Uisenma Borchu, of Mongolian heritage, recently won the best new director Bavarian Film Prize for her 2015 film Schau mich nicht so an/Don’t Look at Me That Way. While Steyerl, Tawada, and Borchu are Asians who have taken the reins of artistic output in various creative industries in Germany, white directors such as Dörrie still dominate the representation of Asia and Asian bodies in the German context, as in the Sayonara Tokyo revue. That a show like Sayonara Tokyo would be based in Berlin of all German cities is not much of a surprise. Following labor migration and the asylum of refugees from the Vietnam War, Berlin is now home to one of the largest Vietnamese communities outside of Vietnam. The cult restaurant Monsieur Vuong serves a curated rotation of chic culinary specials and cocktails, all while paying tribute to the Vietnamese owner’s father with an iconic portrait that decorates the main wall and commands the attention of all visitors. The Dong Xuan Center, named after a massive market in Hanoi, brought the Asian market experience to the Lichtenberg district of Berlin, complete with specialty food suppliers, wholesale shopping, Vietnamese eateries, and hair and nail salons. For every Imbiss (snack stand or fast-food establishment) in Berlin selling staples like curry sausages or Turkish döner kebab, one is also likely to find an Asian 4

5

6

Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 48. Yutian Wong, Choreographing Asian America (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2010), 146. Emily S. Lee (ed.), Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 11.

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eatery nearby, offering a variety of Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai, and/or Japanese dishes. Another gastronomic mainstay of Berlin is the unofficial Thai Park, where vendors gather under colorful parasols on summer weekends in Wilmersdorf ’s Preußenpark to nourish visitors with the likes of shrimp rolls, chicken satay skewers, fresh spring rolls, fried insects, mango sticky rice, and coconut water. Many Asian German community groups were also founded in Berlin, such as the pan-Asian network Korientation, the activist collective DAMN (Deutsch Asiat*innen, Make Noise/German Asians, Make Noise), the Asian Film Festival Berlin, and the Koreanisches Kulturzentrum (Korean Cultural Center). In mid-2018, KaDeWe (abbreviation for Kaufhaus des Westens/ Department Store of the West) initiated its massive Super Asia campaign using East and Southeast Asia as muses for high fashion and home décor. Finally, in summer 2018 the Arsenal arthouse cinema at Potsdamer Platz ran a retrospective on the internationally renowned Chinese-American silent film star Anna May Wong. While by no means an exhaustive list, these examples exhibit the diverse manifestations of Asia in Berlin, whether by and/or for various self-identified Asian groups or aimed at broader community interaction. Within this larger context of Germany’s nods to Asia through the ages, Sayonara Tokyo represents the latest iteration, this time as a high-profile stage production in the capital city. It premiered at the Wintergarten in Berlin-Mitte in July 2017 and played until February 2018. The story depicts three happy-go-lucky friends—an American woman, a Japanese woman, and a German woman—travelling to Tokyo for an adventure. Once there, they encounter numerous background dancers and circus-like Japanese performers and sing their way through a two-act roller coaster of sumptuous visuals and sound; some of the intercultural song covers consist of the Germanlanguage “Happy Yokohama” by 1960s Japanese duo The Peanuts, the Japanese folk classic “Kawa no nagare no you ni” (Like a Flowing River), German new wave track “Big in Japan” by Alphaville, and more obvious international selections like The Vapors’s 1980s hit “Turning Japanese.” The star Japanese performers in the show include the balancing artist Senmaru, the virtuoso yo-yoer Naoto, the four-person extreme jump roping team Tokyo Jumpz, the contortionist and aerial acrobat Arisa, and the lederhosen-clad yodeler Takeo Ischi (see Figure 7.1). The mechanical robot arm/platform UliK, used in combination with other performers throughout the show, rounds out the ensemble for a dash of futuristic flair—something Westerners commonly attribute to Japan. Theater producer Stephan Prattes came up with the show’s idea, co-wrote the script, led stage design, and also directed. An entire team handling choreography, music direction, artistic consulting, lighting, sound design, and much more also helped execute Prattes’s vision. Sayonara Tokyo boasts a twenty-first-century postmodern performance experience and Fredric Jameson’s 1988 Postmodernism and Consumer Society offers a useful description of what the postmodern entails. While Jameson’s famous writings originated in the late 1980s, the internet and social media have exponentially increased postmodern production, consumption, and circulation, making his formulation more relevant than ever. Postmodernism demonstrates “the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture”; Jameson cites how B-movies, kitsch art, and science fiction novels started catching the attention of

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Figure 7.1 Takeo Ischi, the Japanese yodeler (2017). Courtesy of Tristar Media/Getty Images.

academics who previously only focused on a more traditional canon.7 The new global economic system of the post-Second World War world “variously described as postindustrial society, multinational capitalism, consumer society, [and] media society” created the conditions for postmodernism.8 In conjunction, “[n]ew types of 7

8

Fredric Jameson,“Postmodernism and consumer society,” in Vincent B. Leitch, William Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wells (eds.), The Norton Anthology of Criticism, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 1847. Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 1860.

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consumption” also develop, which further detach the cultural referent from its origins. As a result, parody, a representational mode used for humor, satire, and subversive potential, loses its edge and becomes emptied of its significance. Such postmodern pastiche or “blank parody” eludes the context and historical connection to what Jameson terms the “normal” thing that inspired imitation in the first place.9 The “erosion of . . . distinction” between high and low culture so characteristic of the postmodern permeates the show at every level of Sayonara Tokyo, from venue décor and accompanying meal to stage design and costuming.10 The 89-second YouTube trailer offers a concise overview of the revue, including the performers and hostesses, in action.11 The show’s bilingual German and English program brochure offers the first insight into the postmodern forces at work, as it promises “an exciting kaleidoscope of Japanese themes from everyday life and peculiarities between dance and acrobatics, live music and theatre, between kimono and cherry blossom, manga and anime—full of surprises and Japanese inspired delights.”12 The word “kaleidoscope” demonstrates the revue’s eclectic, postmodern approach by bridging the traditional and hypermodern, as well as high and pop culture in its range of seemingly disparate pieces. The revue’s subtitle Geishas! Tamagotchis! Edelweiss! incorporates three key points of reference. First, Geishas refer to the professionally trained female entertainer with her signature white makeup and elaborate hairpiece. Second, Tamagotchis are a popular handheld digital toy of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Third, and finally, the edelweiss is a flower native to the Alpine regions of Europe and a popular symbol of Bavaria, Austria, and Switzerland. These three elements in the title already point to the revue’s diverse, intercultural influences. For example, throughout the show the three hostesses switch between glitzy color-coded dresses and Japanese floral-print kimono, showcasing some fluidity between the Eastern/traditional and Western/modern. Some performers like balancer Senmaru and acrobat Arisa wear traditional Japanese robes and striking white makeup, while others don costumes under the guise of well-known video game characters like Pokémon’s Pikachu and Super Mario. Additionally, lesser known in the West, but a staple of Japanese children’s animation for decades, the blue robotic cat Doraemon and his geeky human friend Nobita, played by Naoto the yoyoer, also make cameos (see Figure 7.2). The background design pulls from atmospheric ukiyo-e prints such as Hokusai’s world-famous Great Wave Off Kanagawa (c. 1830), as well as bubbly anime visuals of characters with the typical oversized eyes and unnatural, garish hair colors. During the show’s run, service personnel of various races wore casual kimono-inspired robes and readily greeted incoming guests into the transformed Wintergarten venue. Red lanterns provided warm ambient lighting in the lobby. Gilded framed photographs around the room attempted to reconstruct the full gamut—or as 9 10 11

12

Ibid., 1849. Ibid.,” 1847. “SAYONARA TOKYO—Die Japan Varieté Revue,” YouTube, uploaded by Wintergarten Varieté, August 1, 2017, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSEZI1MQsc (accessed April 20, 2018). Wintergarten Berlin, Sayonara Tokyo: Geishas! Tamagotchis! Edelweiss! Die Japan-Varieté-Revue (Berlin: Wintergarten Berlin, 2017), print program.

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the program states, “kaleidoscope”—of Japanese culture: cherry blossom viewing, samurai armor, calligraphy, Japanese brands like Fuji, and rebellious youth subcultures, such as cyber goth and punk. Music featuring the traditional stringed shamisen instrument also played in the background prior to the show to set the mood, sonically. Finally, the venue’s gastronomical offerings included a variety of appetizers, entrees, and snacks, from miso soup and cucumber salad to sushi, teriyaki chicken, and greentea flavored Pocky snack biscuits. Sianne Ngai’s 2012 study, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, introduces a concept which is integral to analyzing performance in this postmodern revue: zaniness. Set against older Western aesthetic theories like Immanuel Kant’s, “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime” (1764), Ngai sees the zany, the cute, and the interesting as owing their existence as aesthetic categories to the specifically “hypercommodified information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.”13 Ngai illustrates the zany through the wacky full-body performances of comedic actors like Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy or Jim Carrey during the heyday of his buffoonery. More recent examples, I argue, would be the rapid-fire energy of the 6-second Vine videos that were becoming a pillar of social media in the

Figure 7.2 Anime icons Nobita (played by Naoto the yo-yoer) and Doraemon (2017). Courtesy of Tristar Media/Getty Images. 13

Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 1.

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mid-2010s until the platform’s abrupt shutdown, or so-called “fail” and accident video compilations, which exploit humanity’s secret enjoyment in witnessing the misfortune of others. The cute aesthetic is exemplified, for example, in the sharing of posts or videos about adorable animals and babies. The interesting is illustrated by Wikis, news, and other unsensational forms of relaying information. Furthermore, none of these aesthetic categories carries a clear value judgment of inherently positive or negative, generating “ambigu[ity]” in all three cases.14 Sayonara Tokyo is replete with instances of the zany, which Ngai identifies as “between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and laboring . . . it is an aesthetic of action in the presence of an audience.”15 She notes that the zany, which focuses so intently on its labor, evokes “something strained, desperate and precarious.”16 In fact, zany actions prove so off-putting that Ngai declares, “Much as we might admire the . . . physical virtuosity of their performances zanies are not persons we imagine befriending” and that the zany aesthetic even “forecloses identification” for audiences.17 Thus, zany actions have negative influence on a spectator’s ability to identify with what they see. This differentiates zaniness from the cute aesthetic, for example, which invites closeness through its diminutive, endearing forms.18 Ngai’s identification of the postmodern conditions of her aesthetic theories, namely, the “hypercommodified information-saturated, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism” apply directly to Sayonara Tokyo. Commodification naturally rears its head in a for-profit show, with the highest-tiered tickets featuring an accompanying threecourse meal selling for €60 (approximately $70). The venue’s gift shop sold Japanese candies and Asian knickknacks in order for attendees to take home a fabricated piece of Japan with them after the show. The revue’s poster and subtitle Geishas! Tamagotchis! Edelweiss! already hint at the “information-saturated” superficiality of Sayonara Tokyo, as neither the three Asian women from the poster, nor any of the three symbols from the subtitle assumes any direct role in the show. Instead, they collectively entice audiences, as they conjure up more well-known shorthand referents of Japan than what occurs in the revue itself. For example, geishas and Tamagotchis point to the poles of tradition/high culture versus modern/pop culture in Japan, while the edelweiss flower serves to anchor the show in a German context, though this Alpine regional symbol has more limited signification than the other two. Sayonara Tokyo’s “performance-driven” aspect emerges in the show’s variety format, which frantically switches between skits, talent displays, song and dance numbers, and more, with the apparent hope to cram as much into its running time as possible. Ngai highlights the postmodern conditions which facilitate aesthetics such as the zany, with the internet serving as an important avenue for spreading content. Using the internet to Sayonara Tokyo’s advantage, a pre-show announcement made clear that

14 15 16 17 18

Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 19. Ibid., 182. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 10.

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audience members could photograph and record the show. In fact, unlike the standard ban on personal recordings at most theatrical or opera productions, the Wintergarten venue even encouraged the sharing of pictures and videos via social media with hashtags, in order to ensure postmodern proliferation of the revue’s attention-grabbing antics for even non-attendees to consume. Virality through meme-ification, sensational animated GIFs, and other clickbait are the most surefire means of generating publicity in the postmodern age of the internet. Social media users can easily locate an array of fan-uploaded photos and video snippets of the show on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube by searching “Sayonara Tokyo Wintergarten.” In terms of the zany’s “foreclos[ing] identification” in the audience, almost all of the Japanese star performers’ talents rely on a chaotic or “precarious” element, where bodily harm remains a looming threat. For instance, Senmaru with his traditional art known as Edo-Daikagura balances and rotates a tea kettle on a small pipe that he holds with his mouth, teeters a tall pole with a glass of water on top using only a string, twirls a baseball on a swiftly spinning parasol, and plays a large drum in a hazardous manner, strapped to the mechanical robot platform which moves him in every direction—even upside down (see Figure 7.3). He risks dropping his ceramic prop or hurting his teeth, shattering the glass, wildly flailing the baseball into the audience, and falling to the ground on his head. During each of his acts, he makes strained facial expressions, made even more exaggerated thanks to his bold kabuki-style red and white makeup. Yo-yoer Naoto flings his neon instrument, sometimes two at a time, at full force and the audience hopes his strings will endure and that the yo-yos will neither fly into the crowd, nor retract at the wrong moment and strike him in the face. The Tokyo Jumpz group incorporates flips and other hazardous stunts into their strenuous routine, such as jumping while on one another’s shoulders. Acrobat Arisa subjects herself to constant peril, whether contorting her body into unnatural shapes, artfully falling from the dangling aerial fabric before catching herself at the last moment or allowing the UliK robot to drag her body across the stage like a ragdoll. These various dimensions of performance lend themselves to the specific form of “zany” that Ngai examines, as she theorizes that audiences enjoy zaniness most optimally at “a safe or comfortable distance.”19 As if to preemptively counteract the negative impact of zaniness on spectators, promotional art shared on the venue’s Facebook as well as in the program brochure transforms all major characters into diminutive anime figures, morphing their bodies with a visual trope known as chibi. Rather than betray zaniness, these cartoon promo images with large heads and expressive eyes help to lure audiences in, as is consistent with Ngai’s definition of the cute. However, once viewers attend and witness the sheer “precari[ty]” displayed in the numerous dangerous scenarios, they are not positioned to identify with the zaniness of the star Japanese performers. Instead, audiences are poised to identify with the revue’s triumvirate of hostesses: American Nancy in yellow, Japanese Yoko in red, and German Heidi in blue. Their names evoke prominent characters and celebrities like the popular German-language

19

Ibid., 9.

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Figure 7.3 Senmaru practicing one of his precarious Edo-Daikagura balancing acts (2017). Courtesy of Tristar Media/Getty Images.

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children’s character Heidi who provides a clear link to the Alpine edelweiss in the revue’s subtitle, while the Japanese hostess’s name likely references Yoko Ono, internationally renowned avant-garde artist and wife of John Lennon of The Beatles. Nancy’s name is less emblematic of a particular American figure, though singer Nancy Sinatra and fictional detective Nancy Drew do come to mind. Furthermore, the women embody three different races—Black, Asian, and white, respectively—and different phenotypes with Nancy sporting naturally textured dark brown hair, Yoko with straight black hair, and Heidi with wavy strawberry blonde hair. The three women also wear color-coded outfits in the three primary colors. With the presence of multiple spectrums of color, in the constructed racialized sense—Black, white, and “yellow” as a more pejorative term for East Asian skin color—as well as in the optical senses with the primary colors and different hair colors, the hostesses’ appearances are carefully curated to ensure an all-encompassing appeal for a wide audience; they are potential reflector figures for a broad range of viewers. When interacting with one another, the women generally speak in their respective languages, though they do sing songs in all three languages and understand one another, demonstrating multilingual fluency and a level of fluidity in identity. However, as Sayonara Tokyo is ultimately made for a German-speaking audience, Nancy’s English remains fairly simple and Yoko’s Japanese is inferable or explicated with the context of Nancy and Heidi’s replies. Ultimately, the German Heidi speaks, by far, the most and can be considered the main hostess. The three women weave the show’s various acts together through narration, but they also observe the different performances as an onstage three-person audience. Closely scrutinizing the hostesses’ bodily reactions to the stream of zany performances reveals unease and lack of identification. Early in the show, they encounter the balance artist Senmaru. Multiple times, their bodies recoil in exaggerated fashion, in response to his loudness and unexpected movements (see Plate 11). In one instance, they arch their backs away from him, choosing a paradoxical relief through discomfort, in order to escape his presence. His zaniness proves so potent that it also briefly infects the hostesses, like a contagion. As he precariously balances the tea kettle in his first major stunt, they clutch their hearts and make faces betraying worry. Only once he effectively lands the kettle do they let loose hyperbolic sighs of relief discernible from all the way in the back of the auditorium—not necessarily that Senmaru succeeded, but that his act has concluded and that they, as well as the spectators, can finally rest easily. The hostesses’ body language reveals them to be on edge, rather than feeling any sense of immediate pleasure from viewing the talented performers. All of these reactions point to Ngai’s positing that spectators, even performing spectators like the hostesses, prefer to experience zany acts like Senmaru’s balancing at a “safe and comfortable distance.”20 Finally, Sayonara Tokyo, a production centered on an Eastern culture—Japan—for consumption by a Western audience—Germany—opens itself up to a critique of Orientalist representation. Within the context of culture, race, ethnicity, and geographical divisions like East and West, Edward Said has shown in Orientalism (1978) that Orientalist stereotyping arises from centuries-old Western discursive

20

Ibid.

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practices.21 Through generalization and the forging of fixed categories and binaries, Said contends that Europe constructed the concept of the so-called Orient, “help[ing] to define Europe (or the West)” through a process of delineating a discursive East.22 This Orient supposedly represented “the different, the strange, the distant,” and assumed all that was “passive, seminal, feminine, even silent and supine.”23 Conversely, the West or Occident was positioned to be all that the Orient was not. Said states, “The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined . . . a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”24 Given the premise and set-up of Sayonara Tokyo, the sort of Orientalism outlined by Said is built into the show which literally takes place on a stage and intends to be a window into the Far Eastern world of Japan. Although Said utilizes solely textual examples in his investigation, visual arts such as film and theatre introduce the crucial element of embodiment. In a stage production like Sayonara Tokyo, not only do décor, music, and even gastronomy demarcate East from West, but the revue also mobilizes bodily accoutrements like makeup, garb, props, and specific cultural acts to cash in on pop-Orientalism. Among the show’s three hosts, the white German Heidi presents the most overwhelmingly Orientalist perspective and as the only white body onstage, this difference stands out. Upon arrival in Japan, she deems it a “magical world.” The first performer she encounters, Senmaru, with his white and red face paint, elicits the following remark: “I find this native enchanting”. When commenting on the Japanese language she hears from him, she considers it “slightly exotic, slightly erotic,” showing that even at the linguistic level, she attempts to objectify and sexualize the Japanese performer. Finally, Heidi emerges following yo-yoer Naoto’s talent display. The lighting lowers on Naoto and the numerous Japanese background dancers on the stage, with their bodies creating a freeze frame effect. Heidi sings “Oriental people are a mystery. Strange little ladies make origami . . . they got traditions and electronics, imagination and kimono chic . . . Oh, how I love Japan,” with the lyrics acting as narration over a tableau, describing, while also commanding the Japanese bodies surrounding her. The song, simply titled “Japan,” stems from 1980s French singer Amanda Lear. It evokes exactly the kind of language noted in Said’s study, coincidentally released just two years prior to this song. “Japan” characterizes Japanese people as a whole, as indicated by the all-encompassing title of the song, as supposedly “myster[ious]” and “strange.” Additionally, the lyrical mentions of origami, traditions, electronics, and kimono would fit perfectly in Sayonara Tokyo’s program brochure. After all, according to one Berliner Zeitung reviewer, director Prattes “simply takes the images that one associates with Japan and pieces them together.”25 Nonetheless, the statement “how I love Japan” enables the less critical revue visitor to gloss the rest of the clichéd Orientalizing lyrics,

21 22 23 24 25

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 3. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 137–8. Ibid., 63. Birgit Walter,“Jubiläumsrevue mit Industrieroboter: ‘Sayonara Tokyo’ im Wintergarten,” Berliner Zeitung, July 21, 2017, available at: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur/theater/-sayonara-tokyo--imwintergarten-jubilaeumsrevue-mit-industrieroboter-28003648 (accessed April 24, 2018).

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because if Heidi claims to love Japan and everything that the Japanese onstage bodies perform for her culturally, then surely, she holds no malicious intent. Despite the various overlaps with race/ethnicity and nation, I utilize the broad term “culture” to remain consistent with the show’s official language provided in the program brochure. As cultural materialist Raymond Williams defines it, the term culture accounts for “a particular way of life” and “practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity.”26 Part of inspecting the inextricable role of Japanese culture within Sayonara Tokyo includes attention to its intervention in the zany. Hypercommodification and information-saturation occur in the show’s promise of a “journey through the culture, lifestyle, and music of Japan,” as stated in the program booklet. The condensing of an entire culture into a two-hour show naturally encourages an essentializing perspective for audiences. Loyal to its postmodern origins, the revue interestingly enlists various micro-celebrities and virally famous Japanese cultural artists who can trace their fame to postmodern consumption practices and proliferation via television and digital platforms, such as YouTube. For example, Senmaru won second place on Germany’s Supertalent show in 2010 with his balancing act.27 Naoto the yo-yoer has won two world championship titles for his craft.28 Finally, the elderly yodeler Takeo Ischi reemerged as a recent viral hit, with his silly “New Bibi Hendl” music video amassing over 15 million views total on YouTube. The song features Bavarian dialect and yodeling inspired by chicken clucking. Naoto’s yo-yoing may signify more generally as unracialized play, though his dressing up as a classic anime character within Sayonara Tokyo alters this. However, one cannot overlook the Japanese cultural component of Senmaru’s and Ischi’s popularity within Germany. Ischi even acknowledges this in an interview: “My entire life I’ve played the role of the exotic yodeler.”29 These performers’ incongruity within a relatively homogenous German culture launched them to visibility, but they remain marked by the cultural difference between their Japanese bodies and their German environment. One remarkable aspect of Sayonara Tokyo’s division of labor is its conscious choice to hire only Japanese performers to play the roles of all those whom the three hostesses encounter. One critic assesses this casting decision as “logical.”30 The reviewer maintains that in times of globalization, audiences should no longer have to endure “FakeNippons,” or fake Japanese performers. Although so-called fake, or yellowface

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Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1976] 2015), 52. Max Müller, “Tanzende Industrieroboter,” Berliner Morgenpost, July 20, 2017, available at: https:// www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article211306251/Tanzende-Industrieroboter.html (accessed April 28, 2018). Wintergarten Berlin, “Presseinformation: SAYONARA TOKYO—Geishas! Tamagotchis! Edelweiß!—Die Japan Varieté Revue,” Berlin Bühnen, 2017, available at: https://www.berlin-buehnen. de/media/productions/sayonara-tokyo/20171026140144.pdf (accessed April 20, 2018). Max Müller, “Beeindruckende Kitschhölle bei ‘Sayonara Tokyo,’ ” Berliner Morgenpost, July 15, 2017, available at: https://www.morgenpost.de/kultur/article211250701/Beeindruckende-Kitschhoellebei-Sayonara-Tokio.html (accessed April 20, 2018). Gunda Bartels, “Unterm Fudschijama ist gut jodeln,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 20, 2017, available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/kultur/wintergarten-premiere-sayonara-tokyo-unterm-fudschijamaist-gut-jodeln/20088114.html (accessed April 20, 2018).

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performances, have generally fallen out of favor, controversies still occasionally crop up in the world of the arts. In June 2019, the award-winning play production by Schauspiel Leipzig, entitled Atlas, sparked strong debate among Asian German activists for portraying a specifically Vietnamese-German story, with only white actors.31 Performing artist Olivia Hyunsin Kim critiqued Atlas for using Asians only as inspiration, while simultaneously keeping them invisible. In Berlin’s Sayonara Tokyo, real—the opposite of fake—Japanese performers do take the stage. However, while Japanese bodies carry out the show’s wonder and entertainment onstage, an almost universal presence of whiteness/Germanness permeates all other aspects of the show, from direction, writing, and stage design to music, costuming, and production. Onstage bodies receive more scrutiny than the members of the nebulous production team, who remains behind the scenes—or behind the seen. In Kritik des Okzidentalismus, Gabriele Dietze points out the recent shift in political discourses bolstered by medial representation.32 She argues that this discursive “visual turn” privileges the immediately visible, i.e. the embodied. Sayonara Tokyo’s program brochure does not even attempt to hide this calculated divide, plainly stating that: “The exceptional artists from Japan . . . bring the stunning visions of the staging by Stephan Prattes to life” (my emphases). In other words, their Japanese embodiment and cultural performances breathe life into his German production. When factoring in potentially racist notions of Japanese cultural difference, the lack of identification with zany performers assumes more troubling implications. One wonders if the hostesses’ hyperbolic flinching away from the balancing artist Senmaru is a response to his Japanese-ness, rather than solely to the zany “precari[ty]” of his act. Despite the hostesses’ wish to travel to Japan for an adventure, their bodily reactions reveal their reluctance to experience something too different from what they already know—they prefer to maintain a “safe or comfortable distance” from this native Japanese Other.33 One might initially believe that the Japanese hostess Yoko’s part in the collective reaction would safeguard against such an interpretation. But, unlike the variously marked Japanese performers they meet, the three hostesses bare almost no stereotypical markers of their respective cultures. Yoko and her friends embody a cultural cosmopolitanism and fluidity that ensures a role more akin to a so-called global citizen. Therefore, besides her use of Japanese speech and the occasional culturally informed insight, Yoko has more in common with her worldly friends than with the Japanese artists. Her seemingly essential Japanese-ness, achieved through her natural embodiment, could strategically soften any accusations about the Orientalizing response to the performers. Beyond the hostesses’ first encounter with Senmaru,

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Max Oppel, “ ‘Atlas’-Inszenierung in Leipzig: Künstlerin kritisiert Reproduktion von Rassismus,” Deutschlandfunk Kultur, June 6, 2019, available at: https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/atlasinszenierung-in-leipzig-kuenstlerin-kritisiert.2156.de.html?dram:article_id=450733 (accessed September 15, 2019). Gabriele Dietze, “Okzidentalismuskritik. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Forschung sperspektivierung,” in Gabriele Dietze, Claudia Brunner, and Edith Wenzel (eds.), Kritik des Okzidentalismus: Transdisziplinäre Beiträge zu (Neo-)Orientalismus und Geschlecht (Bielefeld: transcript, 2009), 33. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 9.

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cultural difference consistently combines with the zany’s blocking of identification, culminating most pointedly in Heidi’s consistently Orientalizing discourse and her “Japan” music number. The enjoyment of bodies displaying cultural difference at “a safe or comfortable distance” finds an historical precedent in the abhorrent late-nineteenth-century Völkerschauen or human zoos. Started in Germany by Carl Hagenbeck in 1874, such zoos imported indigenous bodies from cultures abroad.34 Once in Europe, the indigenous peoples would serve as living, breathing exhibits, with their alterity heightened in contrast with the surrounding industrial, supposedly civilized, mostly white Europe. Western visitors would marvel at exotic and authentic, yet supposedly primitive, natives dressed in cultural garb and often holding fabricated ethnological artifacts. Anne Dreesbach reports that those on display would even inhabit reconstructed dwellings from their homeland.35 Ultimately, the Völkerschauen offered German and Austrian spectators “local access to remote places through the physical dislocation and display of foreign peoples.”36 Yet, the Europe of today simply is not the imperial and colonial one of the late nineteenth century, when the Völkerschau emerged. Nevertheless, while the same exploitative colonial context expressly does not exist in Sayonara Tokyo, one can also recognize the correlations to those exhibited in the human zoos. In Sayonara Tokyo, audiences crave the same “local access to remote places . . . and display of foreign peoples.” The Japanese artists have their culture commodified and condensed for consumption. Their roles as the entertaining, seemingly authentic cultural performers, who are directed, costumed, equipped, and ultimately constructed by Germans and for German-speaking audiences does ally with the general historical concept of a human zoo. The relative silence of the Japanese performers figures as another troublesome element of the show; Said identifies silence as one of the defining traits of the Orientalized. For example, performers like Arisa and Tokyo Jumpz do not speak at all. Instead, traditional Japanese music and video game sound effects propel their scenes, respectively, marking them as Other even on the level of audio. Naoto the yo-yoer does speak, but only in loud, cartoonish Japanese, in keeping with his hyperactive anime character persona; in any case, the content of his speech will not have any bearing on the average German audience member. Senmaru occasionally speaks German, but only in short shouted spurts, like “Wunderbar” and “Guten Tag,” delivered like catch phrases. The majority of the dialog in the show takes place between the three hostesses. While it makes sense in the context of the circus-like variety format that the hostesses

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Richard John Ascárate, “ ‘So that Asia can become great’: The representation of Eastern cultures in Fritz Lang’s Die Spinnen (1919),” in Lee M. Roberts (eds.), Germany and the Imagined East (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), 148; Eric Ames, “From the exotic to the everyday: The ethnographic exhibition in Germany,” in Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 316. Anne Dreesbach, “Colonial exhibitions, ‘Völkerschauen’ and the display of the ‘other,’ ” European History Online, May 3, 2012, available at: http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/backgrounds/europeanencounters/anne-dreesbach-colonial-exhibitions-voelkerschauen-and-the-display-of-the-other (accessed June 14, 2018). Ames, “From the exotic,” 314.

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would run the show, the performers’ relative silence still has practical implications. Silent performers invite more directed focus on the acts themselves, which, thanks to their uncontrolled zaniness, ultimately distance the viewers. Meanwhile, the hostesses narrate the encounters with the Japanese, thus, controlling the trajectory of the intercultural interactions and, as a result, the entire show. Moreover, they very much emphasize the act of looking at the Japanese Other, due to their amplified reactions and the fact that they often remain on the stage and marvel at the performers in action. Thanks to the undeniable cultural difference and the element of Orientalism, all of this points to an ethnographic form of gazing, another continuity from the age of the human zoo. The hostesses, then, implicate audiences into such gazing practices, due to the stronger identification with them. The audience of the zany is key to understanding Sayonara Tokyo. Recall that Ngai deems zaniness “between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and laboring . . . it is an aesthetic of action in the presence of an audience” (my emphasis).37 The phrase “cultural and occupational performance” precisely encapsulates the role of the Japanese artists—it is their job to convey their culture to a crowd. At the same time, “acting and service, playing and laboring” suggest how multivalent the zany enterprise can be, able to signify as both playful performance and work as a means to an end. As an aesthetic of action, zaniness relies on a lively sense of dynamism. Lastly, the display of said action in front of an audience implies interaction, reception, and identification—or lack thereof, in this case. The German tradition of the Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect) inscribes Sayonara Tokyo’s zaniness with critical potential. Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht deployed the technique in his didactic dramas to jolt viewers out of a state of complacency. By alienating viewers through unconventional dramatic techniques, such as ill-fitting music, cue cards that would disclose upcoming plot occurrences and more, Brecht used form to spark critical thought in his audiences about the content of his plays. Arthouse filmmakers, such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder of the New German Cinema movement, also utilized the alienation effect for similar outcomes.38 Sayonara Tokyo’s director Prattes claims in interviews that his show cleverly implements clichés. Due to the distancing effect of the revue’s zaniness, a theoretical opening emerges for critical reflection on the Western representations of Japan. However, after the show’s premiere, one attendee remarked in a clip released on the Wintergarten venue’s official YouTube channel, “This is, I believe, how Tokyo, Japan is.”39 Another likens the revue to an “excursion to another land, another culture.” These examples demonstrate that the clichés Prattes insisted on remain undetected as exaggeration. Because the venue included such sound bites in its official press video, one can consider the comments as representative of how the revue was meant to be received. Even if Prattes created the

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Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 182. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 78. “SAYONARA TOKYO Premiere 19. Juli 2017,” YouTube, Wintergarten Varieté, August 2017, 4, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQvTN1CBquQ&ab_channel=WintergartenVari et%C3%A9 (accessed April 20, 2018).

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show in a tongue-in-cheek manner, the audience did not have enough familiarity with the “normal”—to use Jameson’s term—Japanese cultural referent in the first place to be able to recognize any subversive or satirical play with clichés. Instead, the bulk of the target Western/German audience interprets Sayonara Tokyo as an authentic, instructive representation of Japan. Multiple reviews of Sayonara Tokyo, which were quite positive overall, resort to a similar Orientalist positioning that upholds distance from the cultural zaniness onstage. One Berliner Morgenpost review notes that the show offers a “downright exotic rush of the beauty of Japan.”40 Another Berliner Morgenpost review remarks on Japan’s mysterious side brought out in the revue.41 The Tagesspiegel claims that audiences will enjoy the “exotic flair” and the Berliner Kurier promotes the show’s radiating of the “delicate magic of far Eastern mystique.”42 The common discourse in the critical reception points to a fixation on difference, conveyed through Asian embodiment and cultural performance. The word “exotic” recurs most frequently in the press reactions to the show. Combined with other terms like “mysterious” and “magic,” the reviews reify the dominant hostess Heidi’s highly Orientalist and specifically German point of view vis-à-vis Japan—after all, the other two hostesses do not directly take part in her kind of Orientalizing discourse in their dialog. On the contrary, the American and Japanese hostesses merely add innocuous banter and are present primarily to help energize the crowd throughout the revue. Evidently, a fundamental lack of familiarity with the Japanese cultural material within the German audience spurs on such Orientalizing. For instance, star yodeler Ischi shares his impression in one interview that “people here [in Germany] cannot really distinguish between the cultures of Japan, China, and Korea.”43 In other words, Ischi believes that German audiences have a very tenuous understanding of the different aspects of East Asia. On the topic of the show’s depiction of Japan, one critic even concedes “No one can complain that it feels wrong, because no one quite knows. That is Stephan Prattes’s trump card.”44 Essentially, German audiences were in no position to complain of stereotyping, simply because they did not have enough of a frame of reference in the first place. However, the second sentence in the quote indicates that this actually works to the show’s advantage. Prattes’s intentional clichés expose the audience’s struggle to identify with zaniness; many German reviewers misconstrued

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“Glanz, Intensität, Energie: Sayonara Tokyo,” Berliner Morgenpost, September 21, 2017, available at: https://www.morgenpost.de/incoming/article211993613/Glanz-Intensitaet-Energie-SayonaraTokyo.html (accessed April 20, 2018). Müller, “Beeindruckende Kitschhölle.” Christopher Stollowsky, “Sayonara Tokyo oder: Japaner jodeln jut,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 9, 2017, available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/jubilaeumsshow-im-berliner-wintergarten-varietesayonara-tokyo-oder-japaner-jodeln-jut/20036594.html (accessed April 20, 2018); Karim Mahmoud, “Fernöstliche Mystik Land der aufgehenden Sonne im Wintergarten,” Berliner Kurier, July 19, 2017, available at: https://www.berliner-kurier.de/27999774 (accessed April 20, 2018). Yukai Japan, “Sayonara Tokyo im Wintergarten Berlin—Teil 1,” Yukai-Japan.de, October 3, 2017, available at: http://www.yukai-japan.de/2017/10/03/sayonara-tokyo-im-wintergarten-berlin-teil-1/ (accessed April 28, 2018). Walter, “Jubiläumsrevue.”

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the clichés as authentic or real. Perhaps only those intimately familiar with Japanese culture, such as the Japanese performers themselves, could pinpoint irony in Sayonara Tokyo. For example, in an interview, balancing artist Senmaru comments, “For the Japanese, it is definitely funny how a Japanese show is, when made by a German,” and that the show ultimately does not showcase what he considers the real Japan.45 One could imagine a moment of unintentional fun for him upon witnessing the ubiquitous Western-created Asian guitar riff that opens up “Turning Japanese,” one of the many song covers in the revue.46 However, it should be noted that Senmaru’s idea of a “real” Japan is also a problematic one; Homay King rejects the notion of an “authentic Orient” as an “antidote” to a “false Orient.”47 Sayonara Tokyo’s issues point towards underlying challenges of representing cultures conceived of as fundamentally different. The program brochure reveals the show’s international aims, seamlessly incorporating German and English for all major text passages. It also intersperses Japanese words throughout, such as “arigatou gozaimasu” and “domo arigatou”—both ways to express “thank you very much”—and, of course, the words from the title of the show. However, inconsistency emerges in the spelling of each Japanese word. For example, spelling “arigatou” with a “u”, the most direct romanization of the Japanese characters ࠶ࡾࡀ࡜࠺, while leaving that same “u” off of “do(u)mo” and “sayo(u)nara” indicates a seemingly haphazard process of localizing for the Western audience. Such arbitrariness also extends to the show’s entire approach. The commendable inclusion of lesser-known Japanese figures and performance arts for Westerners to behold, like the Doraemon anime character or Senmaru’s Edo-Daikagura balancing act, clashes with the clichéd lyrics, “Oriental people are a mystery. Strange little ladies make origami,” in Heid’s “Japan” song cover and the incongruous distribution of fortune cookies, of Chinese American fame, upon exiting the venue which worked so hard to construct a Japanese world. Ngai illustrates this paradoxical relationship of the zany to labor productivity, deducing, “On first glance, zaniness seems purely a symptom of the ‘perform-or-else’ ideology of late capitalism . . . Yet for all its spectacular displays of laborious exertion, the activity of zaniness is more often than not destructive; one might even describe it as the dramatization of an anarchic refusal to be productive.”48 Seeking audience’s “pleasure,” the Japanese artists use their bodies to go to “extreme lengths to perform a job,” but their zany talents paradoxically defy productivity as the performers exert and generate so much action, precarity, and “sheer out-of-controlness” that viewers can no longer identify.49 While the majority of reviewers retreat behind descriptors of exoticism and

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Yukai Japan, “Sayonara Tokyo”; Botschaft von Japan, “Interview mit dem Edo Daikagura-Künstler Senmaru,” Neues aus Japan, Nr. 155. October 2017, available at: https://www.de.emb-japan.go.jp/ NaJ/NaJ1710/post_interview-senmaru.html (accessed September 10, 2018). Kat Chow, “How the ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ melody came to represent Asia,” NPR.org, August 28, 2014, available at: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/08/28/338622840/how-the-kung-fufighting-melody-came-to-represent-asia (accessed September 10, 2018). Homay King, Lost in Translation: Orientalism, Cinema, and the Enigmatic Signifier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 9. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 12. Ibid., 11.

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mystery, one reviewer does grapple with the ostensible overload of the show’s zaniness, declaring that at some point, people “get enough of hectic Japan and would rather get back into cold Berlin.”50 For at least one jaded critic, the revue resulted in some solace in his German identity, upon confronting the zany Japanese Other. One figure who potentially complicates the otherwise too neat divide between Japanese and German, more so than hostess Yoko, is the Japanese yodeler Takeo Ischi, who almost singlehandedly accounts for the edelweiss component of the show’s subtitle. In fact, in contrast to the rather unmarked Heidi, he represents the strongest example of any stereotypical German cultural signifiers, despite his visible Asian embodiment. Ischi, now in his 70s, came to the Alpine region during his 30s to become the first of his kind, a Japanese yodeler.51 In the Alps, he began perfecting his vocal craft. One Berlin television profile on Sayonara Tokyo considers Ischi the “personification of the melding of Japanese and German culture.”52 Even the current spelling of Ischi’s name reflects this mixing, as the “c,” not present in the original Japanese, reveals consideration of German phonetics. On this note, Ischi’s aesthetic categorization and his critical reception are worth considering within the revue. As a singer, rather than someone with a physical act or talent for his body to precariously display, Ischi embodies the least amount of zaniness among the show’s Japanese performers. That means he would logically have the most potential to facilitate identification for viewers. However, Ischi’s part in the show, dominating the much slower second act, stands as one of the only elements to receive particular criticism from the press. One review describes his scenes as gimmicky: “a bit too much . . . in the long run somewhat stale.”53 About five months into the show’s run, another reviewer echoes similar sentiments, stating that Ischi’s singing becomes “too much of a good thing” and that his final “cheesy” song should have been omitted.54 Nonetheless, such critiques of Ischi were not unanimous. The Tagesspiegel review even deems him the “essence” of Sayonara Tokyo.55 In conclusion, the presence of the zany aesthetic in Sayonara Tokyo presents a situation that can exacerbate additional forces, such as Orientalism, as evidenced in this revue. Yet, as dubious as the show’s division of labor may be—Japanese in performance, while almost universally German in production—the assumption that a solely Japanese production would have automatically fixed the issue or guaranteed a more authentic show is also a chimera. As influential as Said’s writings on Orientalist discourse have been, it is also incredibly difficult to approach a show such as this one without in some way referencing Orientalism. Homay King cites Rey Chow to critique Said for not providing any “practicable” method for “go[ing] beyond the parameters of Orientalism,” indicating more deep-seated problems of representation and language

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Volker Thomas, “Einmal Tokyo und zurück,” Forum: Das Wochenmagazin, December 15, 2017, available at: https://magazin-forum.de/de/node/6922 (accessed April 29, 2018). Müller, “Beeindruckende Kitschhölle.” “SAYONARA TOKYO im Wintergarten Berlin—ZIBB TV Beitrag,” YouTube, uploaded by MERCUTIOmedia, July 12, 2017, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzg_ kJbcPZg&t=106s&ab_channel=MERCUTIOmedia (accessed April 20, 2018). Bartels, “Unterm Fudschijama.” Thomas, “Einmal Tokyo und zurück.” Stollowsky, “Sayonara Tokyo.”

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when the dominant culture faces another one, perceived as different.56 Nevertheless, acknowledging this difficulty does not justify the complacent perpetuation of Orientalist discourse. Western producers must dismantle the Oriental “stage affixed to Europe” and pursue other avenues of portrayal that do not exploit the supposed illegibility, authenticity, or exoticism of another culture.57 Because the zany, an aesthetic wrapped up in movement and action, remains inextricably linked to embodiment, one cannot ignore how the body figures under paradigms such as race, nationality, and/or Orientalism. While those privy to postmodernism may plausibly contend that no “real” Japanese culture exists anyway, one must consider the lived reality of those affected by persistent stereotyping and also understand that the average person does not view the world through a consciously postmodern critical lens. Although Sayonara Tokyo is just one show in Berlin, the questions raised by it belong to larger discussions surrounding significations of Asia, the discursive Orient, and the East in the multicultural Western context. As argued above, the revue theoretically brims with critical potential by combining exaggerated Orientalist clichés with alienating zany performances. Even if the revue genre does not necessarily set out to make a political statement, one unintentional outcome of Sayonara Tokyo could have been the critical reflection on Orientalist representation, due to zany-induced alienation. However, in practice, and based on the revue’s reception, audiences seem to have missed this critical opportunity. Without this critical engagement on the part of the audience, the revue ultimately does not do much to move beyond the West’s fixation on “cool” and “weird Japan.”58 The audience maintains a distance, mystified by the zany Japanese spectacle they see onstage and, then, are encouraged to proliferate the Orientalized zaniness online for others to see, in hopes of going viral. These videos and photos can only add fodder to the excess of articles and countdown lists already perpetuating Japan as a strange, crazy space. A simple Google search of “crazy Japan” yields over 360 million results, with some of the top results entitled “25 Crazy Things You Will Only Find in Japan,” “29 Pictures that Prove Japan is the Most WTF Country on Earth,” and “10 Reasons Why Japan is So Weird.” Instead of submitting to this impulse, Western audiences should be able to express a sentiment like, “Oh, how I love Japan,” one of the final lines of Amanda Lear’s “Japan” song, without first reducing the country, its people, and its cultural performances to a caricature of mystery, kimonos, and electronics, as in the rest of the lyrics. By recognizing the pitfalls of Orientalized embodiment and postmodern aesthetics affecting the production, which an undiscerning audience nonetheless consumes as authentic, new opportunities emerge for a less distancing representation of Asian/ Orientalized cultures in the German/Western context.

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King, Lost in Translation, 5. Said, Orientalism, 63. Mark McLellan (ed.), The End of Cool Japan: Ethical, Legal, and Cultural Challenges to Japanese Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016), 126.

8

Ai Weiwei’s Body in Berlin1 Thomas O. Haakenson Perhaps no other contemporary artist speaks as forcefully about the challenges of the body, and of making the body, than Ai Weiwei. He has become a global art superstar. His work is featured in many international venues. He receives multiple awards weekly for his artistic efforts to challenge censorship and to highlight the plight of refugees. Yet, increasingly lost in Ai’s work, is the separation that might otherwise make his interventions politically, socially, and even culturally more impactful. To be more specific, the separation increasingly absent from Ai’s work is one that would otherwise mark his practice from his person, his artwork from his affect. The separation is evident in much of Ai’s work, including this still image from the artist’s first cinematic effort, Human Flow (2018). In one still image (Plate 12), one of many like it in the film, the camera focuses the viewer’s perspective on a touching, somewhat disconcerting scene: Ai sits in partial profile, his face visible to the viewer, as he appears to speak to a refugee, a woman, who sits in a metal folding chair with her back to the camera, her head facing downward. Because of the way in which the camera has framed the scene, the viewer cannot see the refugee’s face. Her identity, in effect, is masked, hidden. The staging is purposeful. The focus of the scene is not really the refugee and her plight, but rather the benevolence of Ai Weiwei in engaging the woman and apparently giving her a voice. In other words, the scene is not an illuminating portrait of the refugee crisis but rather one of renewed separation; it is another erasure of refugees themselves, albeit this time in the promotion of a well-known, privileged artist. In highlighting the inseparability of Ai’s artwork from his own corporeality—an indistinguishability that the artist himself often encourages—the following essay examines in detail the artist’s creation of a “refugee affect”: the indistinguishability of Ai the artist and Ai the “refugee,” Ai the exemplar of Chinese suppression and Ai the epitome of global humanitarianism, Ai as “just another” refugee to Ai as the representative of all victims of the so-called global refugee crisis of the twenty-first

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Ideas for this essay were developed in conversation with Deniz Göktürk and Rei Tarada during the University of California, Berkeley, conference, “Affective Realisms,” February 21–23, 2019). Portions of this essay, and further development of its content, were made possible through conversations with Randall Halle (and Gisela Gross) in preparation for the publication of, “The refugee affect: Ai Weiwei in Berlin,” part of a special issue of, “United in Diversity,” in EuropeNow (April 4, 2019).

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century.2 The following pages seek to engage critically the conflation of Ai’s own body with his body of artworks and the refugees he purports to represent. To be clear, the following essay neither argues from an humanitarian perspective for refugee lives in all their complexity and difficulty, nor does this text seek to represent these refugees’ hopes and desires. Rather, the following engagement is concerned specifically with the ways in which Ai Weiwei has benefited, even profited, from the conflation of his own body, often via his artistic works, with the bodies of the many refugees who make up the so-called global refugee crisis.3 Ai’s artistic practice grew out of the turbulent Chinese art scene of the late 1970s, and the rapid—if disjointed and fleeting—flowering that occurred in response to political developments of the 1980s. By the time the reintroduction of Chinese political and artistic restrictions occurred in the late 1980s, symbolized by the Tiananmen Square protests between April and July 1989—the so-called June Fourth Incident—Ai had already begun to develop an international profile. Yet, his Berlin residency between 2015 and 2018, and his related focus on the so-called global refugee crisis, marked an important, if also problematic, development in his artistic output. Key in understanding Ai’s transition from an exemplary to synecdochal “global refugee” is the way in which he, and others, employ affect in relation to his artworks. It is therefore important to understand exactly how affect operates with respect to Ai’s aesthetic, political, and even personal practices. Affect theory allows important insights into the ways in which non-linguistic, even non-rational forms of understanding, inform our viewing and decision-making processes. Writing in 1908, Henri Bergson suggested in his Matter and Memory a particular role for affect, one that hints at the revolutionary potential of art and the aesthetic experience: Affection is, then, that part or aspect of the inside of our own body, which we mix with the image of external bodies; it is what we must first of all subtract from perception to get the image in its purity.4

It is in this vein that Bergson also noted a particularly vexing indistinguishability between viewer and image, between perceiving subject and perceived object. Bergson claims that when the body itself coincides with the object to be viewed, the “distance is 2

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Numerous scholars have questioned the logic, and noted the rhetorical trap, of the phrasing “global refugee crisis,” which seems to say these individuals have no place “in the world” and that there is a “crisis” which may bring about the end of civilization as we know it, if not also the end of the world itself. Georges Didi-Huberman makes a related point in his essay, “From a high vantage point,” Esprit (October 12, 2018), republished in Eurozine, trans. by Laura Garmeson, at: https://www. eurozine.com/high-vantage-point/ (accessed June 12, 2019), that point to similar concerns with this phrasing: “Refugees don’t need us to turn their meat kebabs for them, hold out a bucket for them to vomit into, or pretend to give them an artist’s studio in Berlin. They demand simply to be seen as equals, or in other words to have a civic and legal status once set in stone by the guiding principles of our democracies, but in stone alone” (9). The idea of synecdoche and metonymy might be related here, but the slippage between those terms is burdened by their psychoanalytic—and, specifically, Lacanian—associations within critical theory. In using the distinction between exemplary and synecdoche, in contrast, this essay seeks to emphasize the material dimensions of the elision. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans.by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, 8th printing (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 58.

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reduced to zero.”5 In other words, and in Bergson’s terms, when body and object coincide, the distinction between sensation and perception, between real action and possible action, is rendered indistinguishable. It is this problematic reduction “to zero” that makes Ai Weiwei an excellent case study for a discussion of the limits of the body, of art’s ability to influence politics, of the limits of the aesthetic encounter, and—above all—the limits of the artist’s own affect. The history of avant-garde artistic practice in China in the 1980s is key to understanding Ai’s rise to global artistic stardom, but even this history fails to explain fully the problematic turn in the artist’s artistic practice in the late 2010s and the related, massive explosion in his global profile. To these ends, Ai’s affect is a key point of focus. Ai’s body here must be understood in two, often inseparable, senses. His body is both that of the artist—Ai Weiwei’s physical presence—and also the artist’s collection of artworks, works that are experienced by viewers and participants as his artistic interventions. Ai’s physical body, as distinct as it at times may seem, is often inseparable from the art he makes. The artist often uses his body to focus the viewer’s attention on the absences of others’ physical presence. It is Ai Weiwei’s body in this double, irreducible sense—as his body, and his body of artworks—that is the increasingly problematic, visible cypher through which to read his affect.

The Chinese Avant-garde Born in 1957, Ai emerged from the Chinese art scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s, during a period in which officials increasingly, if intermittently, altered cultural policies in the country and allowed for aesthetic engagement outside of China. Formalized and less programmatic art education was allowed again in the country, starting around 1977, when arts academies were reopened in the aftermath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Ai studied and produced art for a period of time in the 1980s and early 1990s in San Francisco, Philadelphia, and New York, where he became directly familiar with the works of artists such as the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, the Neo-Dadaist Jasper Johns, and Pop artist Andy Warhol. Ai returned in 1993 to China and continued an active practice and spoke openly about Chinese censorship. Throughout the mid2000s, the artist engaged in an active web-based practice critical of Chinese policies via such portals as Sina-Weibo, a microblogging website. It was as a result of Ai’s collaboration for the 2008 summer Olympics with architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron on the Beijing National Stadium—the so-called Bird’s Nest—that Ai’s criticisms of the Chinese government found an even broader, more receptive international audience. He developed a robust social media presence, increasingly using now notorious platforms such as Twitter to call attention to human rights abuses, primarily in China, and to present almost real-time criticisms of governmental policies and police actions. As a result, Ai was arrested numerous times by Chinese authorities, most notably on April 3, 2011, when he was held for nearly

5

Ibid., 57.

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three months. A period of enforced silence, followed by extensive travel restrictions, prevented the artist from leaving China. Finally, in July 2015, Ai Weiwei’s passport was returned by the Chinese government and, despite ongoing governmental surveillance, he was again allowed to leave the country. He departed almost immediately for Berlin, where he began a delayed threeyear artist residency at the Universität der Künste (University of the Arts, or UdK). In the face of continued discussion about extending his stay in Berlin, the artist announced in early 2018 that he would be leaving the country at the end of his UdK residency. Ai’s rise to prominence on the international stage, especially since his engagements with Chinese censorship and the various controversies surrounding the so-called Bird’s Nest, has been impressive. Christian Sorace, for example, argues in “China’s Last Communist: Ai Weiwei,” that Ai’s earlier “celebrity status as a human rights activist and subversive” is dependent upon the context of his engagement with Chinese censorship. Sorace notes that, despite the “fanfare and celebrity bestowed on Ai by his reception in Western art circles and human rights communities,” little real understanding exists with respect to the context of the artist’s political and humanitarian interventions.6 Written prior to Ai’s Berlin residency, Sorace assessment is equally applicable to this later, more recent period of the artist’s output: “the targets of Ai’s polemics are almost entirely the failures of the political system to live up to its own ideals.” Clearly this would seem to be the case in Ai’s attacks against Western liberal democracies, and they ways in which they are complicit with both human rights abuses in China and humanitarian negligence with respect to refugees. Yet, the hagiography art critics and scholars like Sorace create miss the ways in which the maintenance and expansion of the artist’s celebrity—much like that of Andy Warhol, whose aesthetic strategies Sorace and others associate with Ai—are the primary foci of Ai’s work. Meiling Chen even emphasizes this performative dimension of the artist’s activities in describing numerous, in-person encounters and interviews with him: “Ai is a consummate performance artist, whose most fascinating trait is his play with the gray areas between seeming and being, simulation and earnestness.”7 Ai Weiwei’s international celebrity contrasts significantly with that of other artists active during the resurgence of Chinese avant-garde activities in the 1980s. Many of these avant-garde movements, although influencing Ai’s practice directly and sometimes indirectly, remain unfamiliar to many scholars in the West. At the onset of the Reform and Opening era in 1978–9, Ai joined an experimental artistic movement known as the Stars Group (xingxing). After the authorities shut down the Stars Group exhibition in Beijing on October 1, 1979, artists, poets, and intellectuals staged street protests demanding freedom of expression and fusing artistic creativity with political activism. These demands were met intermittently throughout the 1980s, but often with frequent, pendular returns to censorship. Other avant-garde groups helped continue pressure on Chinese officials. These other groups also demonstrate an important historical context in understanding Ai Weiwei’s rise to global celebrity.

6 7

Christian Sorace, “China’s last communist: Ai Weiwei,” Critical Inquiry, 40, 2 (2014): 396. Meiling Cheng, “Comment: Ai Weiwei: Acting is believing,” TDR: The Drama Review, 55, 4 (2011): 10.

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The Stars Group, and Ai’s involvement, were early indicators of the increasing opportunities for artistic exploration in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these artistic developments were grouped together later with the so-called 1985 New Wave Art movements (Bawu yundong, Bawu xinchao) in response to China’s so-called Cultural Revolution. The Revolution marked Mao Zedong’s return to a position of power after a program known as the Great Leap Forward, an economic and social campaign by the Communist Party of China from 1958 to 1962. Launched by Mao, then Chairman of the Communist Party of China, the Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 to 1976, although it continues to influence Chinese culture and politics in varied, complex ways. The explicit goal of the Cultural Revolution was the preservation of “true”—that is, Maoist—communist ideology. This preservation often resulted in violent class struggle at the hands of the Red Guard, a group composed of students, as well as military personnel, urban workers, and Communist party leadership. With the gradual easing of policy in China after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1979s and intermittently throughout the 1980s, artists began to explore openly and publicly the critical functions of their aesthetic practices. Put reductively, the so-called 85 New Wave Movement (Bawu yundong, Bawu xinchao) was a series of avant-garde developments which flourished between 1985 and 1989. Gao Minglu coined, in particular, the term “85 Art Movement” (bawu meishu yundong) during a lecture given at the National Oil Painting Conference held by the National Artists Association on April 14, 1986. The lecture was published in the Summer Art Newsletter (Meishujia tongxun) following the conference. After government officials objected to the phrasing, the phrasing “85 Art New Wave” (bawu meishu xinchao) was adopted as a less objectionable alternative to the coupling “85 Art Movement” (85 meishu yundon), because the words “new wave” (xinchao) were considered less political than the word “movement” (yundong). Gao Minglu identified the artistic developments of this period at their most robust, developments that clearly influenced Ai’s practice during his stay in the West in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as upon his return to China in 1993. In only two years, between 1985 and 1986, members of some 79 avant-garde groups emerged to organize exhibitions, hold conferences, and write manifestos and other literary engagements. Unlike Ai, however, many avant-garde artists in China in the 1980s rejected materialism, egoism, and self-promotion.

Ai Weiwei in Berlin These radical artistic developments in China in the 1980s had both direct and indirect influences on Ai’s practice—and his efforts to appeal to Western sensibilities. Even prior to his Berlin residency, Ai had developed artworks that challenged governmental and regulatory organizations, often by incorporating in his work material substitutes for actual, lost refugee bodies. Some art critics and scholarly commentators have argued Ai’s artistic practice has not changed; he still depends up mass media, including social media, as springboards to ensure both a global reach for his messages as well as a global profile as an artist:

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It is worth noting that during the years when Ai Weiwei aimed his activism mainly at the Chinese Party-state (i.e. 2008–2014), news outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN played a key role in establishing his celebrity status. As Chloe Preece wrote in 2015, they framed Ai Weiwei as ‘a political hero/ martyr’ who fought for freedom of expression against a repressive regime—a narrative that provided ‘reassurance of the West’s ideological superiority’ and thus contributed to his popularity among their audience/readership.8

Rather than situate Ai’s work on the so-called refugee crisis in terms of continuity, however, it is important to see the important elision that has taken place in the artist’s work. His pre-Berlin artistic output, focusing on his own body as a victim of Chinese censorship, suppression, and abuse is not supplanted rhetorically by the bodies of the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of mostly nameless, mostly faceless refugees that his work purportedly represents. Unlike other artists whose exploitation of tragedy for artistic credential rightly might be criticized and called into suspicion, Ai has avoided such charges, primarily because rather than simply a Chinese dissident or expatriate, he increasingly identifies as a refugee—as “the” refugee positioned to speak for all other victims of the supposed global refugee crisis. Ai’s increasing conflation of his own position, his own identity, with those victims of refugee conditions has been a gradual one, evident in the development of his artistic output during his Berlin residency but also emerging prior to that period as well. In Remembering, his 2009 piece for the Haus der Kunst, in Munich, Germany, for example, the artist placed backpacks on the museum’s outside facade, creating a memorial wall to represent victims of an earthquake the year prior in Sichuan, China. Each backpack represented one child killed in the catastrophe. Spelled out in Mandarin on the backpacks, viewers could read the phrase, “She lived happily for seven years in this world.” Key for understanding this work, and the conflation of bodies—his own, and those of others—in Ai Weiwei’s work during his Berlin residency, is the conspicuous absence this work represents: There are no children here, no victims. Only backpacks. Only signifiers of lost lives, representations of the victims that might otherwise be present. Increasingly during his Berlin residency, Ai would develop his strategy of utilizing victims’ absent bodies in his efforts to create a “present absence:”: The allusion to victims, the deployment of signifiers of victims’ bodies, even as these victims’ identities themselves were not widely circulated. Turning his critical lens away from Chinesespecific events to ones decidedly more global in nature, his various works examining the plight of refugees across the world took many forms. Often these works were not focused on a specific country, but rather on regional or even global policies around refugees, migration, and access. In 2016, Ai placed some 14,000 life jackets on the columns of the Konzerthaus on the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin as part of an installation, which was accompanied by a 8

Giorgio Strafellaa and Daria Berg, “ ‘Twitter Bodhisattva’: Ai Weiwei’s media politics,” Asian Studies Review, 39, 1 (January 30, 2015), available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2014.990357 (accessed February 21, 2019), 198.

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large, vertical sign with the Twitter-ready coupling #safepassage. Much like the backpacks used in Remembered, these life jackets serving as signifiers were used to represent bodies that themselves were not present. In contrast to the artist’s display at the Kunsthaus in Munich several years earlier however, these 14,000 life jackets presumably represented living people: individuals fleeing Syria, Iraq, and other countries that had arrived on the Greek island of Lesbos. The display, while seeking to draw attention to the global refugee crisis, made no mention of the fact the life jackets themselves most likely were non-functional, the product of an industry developed by smugglers in which these objects would never actual function for their supposed purpose: life jackets that could actually prevent their wearers from drowning. This fact, however, was shared in a film about the global refugee crisis that Ai would later release. Ai Weiwei continued into 2017 his focus on the global refugee crisis, employing again and again signifiers of refugees, signifiers of their absent bodies, without actually circulating these refugees’ identities. Appearing at both the National Gallery in Prague, Czech Republic, and later on Cockatoo Island as part of the Sydney Biennale in Australia, Law of the Journey, used materials similar to those found in actual lifeboats to create a replica of these vessels, albeit a replica filled with faceless refugees in apparent transit to Europe and to safety.9 Some of the boat’s inhabitants appear to have fallen overboard, lying outside the raft and on the gallery floor, presumably dead. The didactic material for the Czech exhibit emphasized the artist’s vision for this work: The National Gallery in Prague hosts the Law of the Journey by Ai Weiwei, focusing on refugees. Himself a refugee, Ai has almost entirely focused his work on advocating the refugees’ human rights and documenting their tragic condition throughout the past two years.

In the didactic material, the artist’s Law of the Journey is situated in terms of personal experiences, experiences that are seen as emblematic of the subject of his art. The conflation of artist and artwork, messenger and message, further blurs the boundaries between Ai’s body and the real bodies of the faceless, nameless victims that inspired the work. These victims’ bodies are present but only in their absence; it is Ai whose identity is central. Similar to #safepassage and Law of the Journey, Ai Weiwei’s collection of abandoned shoes, clothing, and other artifacts that comprise his Laundromat installation reference bodies that are not present. First shown at the Deitch Projects in New York in 2016, and reinstalled in 2018 for exhibition at the Fire Station’s Garage Gallery in Doha at the invitation of the Qatar Museum, Laundromat is comprised of 2,046 pieces of refugee clothing washed, ironed, and sorted by type.10 According to the artist, refugees left the

9

10

Jiří Fajt and Adam Budak, “Ai Weiwei: Law of the Journey,” Národní galerie Praha, December 8, 2016, n.p., available at: https://www.ngprague.cz/en/exposition-detail/aj-wej-wej (accessed February 21, 2019). Joey Aguilar, “QM welcomes Ai Weiwei’s Laundromat,” Gulf Times, March 15, 2018, n.p., available at: https://www.gulf-times.com/story/585204/QM-welcomes-Ai-Weiwei-s-Laundromat (accessed February 21, 2019).

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items in Idomeni, Greece, at a makeshift refugee camp near the Macedonian border when the camp was shut down in May 2016. Ai and his team brought the items to his Berlin studio in order to prepare these items for the installation. In addition to showcasing these abandoned signifiers of refugee bodies, the exhibition space’s floor was covered with articles about the refugee crisis. A wallpaper made from over 17,000 images Ai had taken on his phone at the camp was spread across the exhibition’s walls. The camp at Idomeni features extensively in the artist’s 2017 cinematic effort, Human Flow. Comprised of extensive, on-site footage of Ai and his crew of assistants, photographers, and camera operators, the film depicts numerous scenes of refugees in crisis, in transition camps, on extensive journeys to seek safety, shelter, and refuge. The film is shot extensively using hand-held cameras, cell phones, and drones. The technology used to shoot the film at the various sites is almost as omnipresent as the artist himself. Few cinematographic conventions are employed to disrupt the viewer’s experience of the refugee crisis as itself a kind of serene, poetic event, strategies most evident in the numerous wide-angle shots and extensive use of scenes filmed using drones. There are no jump-cuts, for example, and few shots that incorporate the unsteady imagery of the cinematographer’s own hand. The artist appears repeatedly in the film, acting in turns as catalyst for confrontation with local authorities, impassioned interlocutor, and—occasionally—as substitute for the refugees themselves, as when he jokes about trading passports with one of the residents or gets a shave and a haircut from a barber at the camp (Plate 13).11 The film Human Flow has generated a surprisingly mixed reception. It is a problematic film for a number of reasons, including the fact that it continues to encourage the conflation of the artist’s body with the body of the countless, often faceless refugees referenced as catalysts for the work. Nevertheless, the film has earned Ai a number of awards. In one interview, he jokes that he is scheduled to receive four or five awards per week now, some of which are in direct response to the film. But the critical engagement with Human Flow has focused on several dimensions, including the extensive use of volunteers and paid employees to make the film, raising the question as to whether the film is “really” Ai Weiwei’s artwork or something much different, the result of thousands of hours of sometimes paid labor on the part of many, passionate enthusiasts of the artist’s ideas as well as his particular projects. Georges Didi-Huberman suggested in October 2018 that the film exposes many other problems with the artist’s work. In emphasizing the ways in which the film “looks” at the problem, Didi-Huberman also suggests the need for the viewer to look critically at Ai’s artistic ambitions. Didi-Huberman takes issues with the various cinematographic and on-screen techniques noted above. But Didi-Huberman also emphasizes the fact that Ai is no longer an “emerging” or a “struggling” artist:

11

Lorena Muñoz-Alonso, “Ai Weiwei gets a haircut in Greek refugee camp: Ai is now opting for more subtle gestures,” artnet, March 18, 2016, n.p., available at: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/aiweiwei-haircut-refugee-camp-452864 (accessed February 21, 2019).

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newspapers and even dictionaries persist in defining him as a “political,” “activist” and “dissident” artist, in spite of his commercial strategy, which more closely resembles that of Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, and his remarkable standing within the art market (his Map of China sold for 2.5 million dollars at Christie’s in New York in 2016).12

Rather than take Ai to task for his commercial success, Didi-Huberman focuses on the filmic techniques employed in Human Flow. In so doing, Didi-Huberman reveals an important dimension of the artist’s artistic and rhetorical strategy: “let us first try to understand how he looks and what such a gesture says about him in terms of his relationship with the other, that is, his relationship with the refugees filmed around the world in this work.”13 In this turn toward film technique, Didi-Huberman reveals an important insight that resonates with many of Ai’s refugee projects in general, and with the period of his Berlin residency in particular: through its treatment of panoramic shots, the high vantage points achieved by neither crane nor plane, the motion speeds, and the carefully re-contrasted colours, it ends up producing visual clichés—as opposed to truthful images—of our world, like the glossy pages of certain so-called geographical magazines which are, in truth, more touristic than anything else.14

But Human Flow is just one example of the distancing effect Ai achieves through his artistic work on the refugee crisis. While in filmic terms such a distancing requires drone imagery and digitally manipulated footage from cell phone cameras, Ai achieves a similar effect in his installation work by conflating his own position with that of the refugees that serve as motivation for many of the pieces. Certainly throughout his Berlin residency and his engagement with the global refugee crisis, Ai Weiwei has become increasingly vocal, if not also increasingly aware, of the complicity of the West’s socioeconomic policies with Chinese humanitarian abuses. Late in January 2019 and in anticipation of a large-scale exhibition of his work titled Unbroken, Ai released a statement through the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada. In the statement, the artist suggested that it was the West that is “the hidden force behind China’s rise” and accused the West of “profiting from the status quo.” Ai’s statement is worth quoting at length: Today, China is the second biggest economic power in the world, only behind the United States of America. Though China has quickly developed, the West has also greatly benefited from this partnership through the exploitation of many Chinese basic rights in terms of labor, environmental damage, corruption, among other such issues.

12 13 14

Didi-Huberman, “From a high vantage point,” 1. Ibid. Ibid., 3.

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The West has pretended to not notice [sic] or, more insidiously, has been a willing partner. They are the hidden force behind China’s rise. And while China has become an ever more powerful machine, it still has not changed its authoritarian tendencies . . . China has been the perfect dream of the West. Under the banner of globalization, China has been able to do everything that the West could not and [has] been instrumental in helping the democratic states become what they are today. The West’s apparent conflict with the situation in China is because of its refusal to acknowledge its complicity in creating this monstrous regime.

The recognition of the West’s mutual benefit from Chinese policies, while perhaps not altogether new for the artist, finds one of its most explicit denouncements as he transitions from a long-term stay in Germany. As much as his departure is a condemnation of the West’s relationship to China, Ai’s decision to leave Berlin is also inseparable from his rejection of Western political impotence in the face of increasing neo-national and xenophobic activities. In a sense, Ai’s decision to leave Germany— apparently to relocate his home to the United States, specifically to Connecticut—does not mean he is abandoning his Berlin base however. He plans to retain his studio in Prenzlauer Berg, much as he continues to have active studios in other cities, including Beijing. But Ai’s departure from Germany points to the limits of the ability of his work to engender change—and is, as the artist himself notes, a result of his own encounters in his host country. In a late December 2018 interview published in The Guardian, Ai clarified his decision to leave Berlin. The focus of the interview was a commission Ai received from arts organizations and human rights charities in the United Kingdom. The commission was for the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for which the artist was asked to design a flag. When pressed on his reasons for leaving Berlin during the interview, however, Ai conveyed a personal story and related it to the plight of the refugees for whom he sees himself as spokesperson. A German taxi driver refused to transport the artist and his son when Ai, who apparently was listening to a message from his mother, would not shut off his mobile phone. The driver, according to Ai, “told me to get out of the car, and when I said I wouldn’t he slammed on the brakes and we all fell forward. My son hit his head. [The driver] used his vehicle on a public street to express his anger.”15 Connecting this personal encounter to the state of public discourse and political policy in Germany as a whole, Ai continued: So you see I am fighting battles wherever I go—including with German people who say I should be grateful to them because I am a refugee, and they paid for my life. This is the mood in Germany right now, the posters I see in the streets saying: “We can make our own babies, we don’t need foreigners.” It’s the mood in much of

15

Kate Connolly, “Ai Weiwei: ‘The mood is like Germany in the 1930s,’ ” interview, The Guardian, December 9, 2018, available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/dec/10/aiweiwei-interview-un-declaration-human-rights-70th-Anniversary (accessed February 21, 2019).

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Europe, including the UK. It’s very scary because this kind of moment is a reflection of the 1930s.16

The degree to which Ai’s personal encounter in the taxi compares to the plight of refugees in contemporary Europe, or in 1930s Europe for that matter, is troubling; but what is perhaps as problematic is the way in which Ai Weiwei again aligns himself in the interview with the often faceless, nameless refugees who serve as the catalyst for his artworks. In seeking to draw attention to these faceless, nameless refugees, Ai Weiwei often draws more attention to himself and his celebrity, thereby increasing his profile globally. The rhetorical strategy occurs repeatedly in Ai’s statements, his interviews, and his visual and textual productions. Here, as elsewhere, Ai is not only an artists and a victim of Chinese censorship, he is also a synecdoche for all refugees, for all victims of the so-called global refugee crisis: “freedom of speech, human rights are related to my early struggle, or my family’s or the whole generation’s struggle, in fighting for those basic rights.”17 Ai’s continued appeal to mass media and social media have only reinforced the elision, acting to make his refugee-related artworks placebos, if not also gratuitous displays, of humans in crisis for the benefit of the artist. This, despite insistence from many, that Ai’s work continues to be political and continues to act as an important force for political change: Ai Weiwei’s ‘transmedia’ narrative on the refugee crisis unfolds beyond the artwork across platforms, such as: Instagram, where one can pore over a first-person documentation-cum-spectacle of the journey that brought about the works of art . . .; Twitter, where one can peruse the artist’s own selection of news articles on the issue and thereby appreciate its importance; interviews in newspapers and magazines in which the artist expounds his vision; YouTube videos; a documentary film; etc.18

Efforts such as this situate Ai’s Berlin-residency intervention into the so-called global refugee crisis uncritically; the text positions the artist’s work as “transmedial”— even “transcultural”—without fully situating the work in the context of its production and reception. Approaching the artist’s Berlin residency and his focus on the so-called global refugee crisis in terms of reception would also take into account the lack of political, even social action the works have engendered. And, of course, would reveal the simultaneous and exceptional elevation in the artist’s global profile. Clearly, as much as Ai Weiwei tried in other works to separate his own body from the art he created, his body proved inseparable from the impact he hoped to achieve. Not so much by accident as by design, however. There remain clear distinctions between the earlier work Ai created, targeting Chinese censorship, and his current focus on the global refugee crisis, a crisis he is clear to note with which the West is 16 17 18

Ibid. Ai quoted in Strafellaa and Berg, “ ‘Twitter Bodhisattva,’ ” 197. Ibid., 199.

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complicit. His celebrity, his identity as a Chinese dissident artist, an enfant terrible embraced by the West, increasingly make nearly impossible a focus on the artwork’s message independent of his celebrity, and his own body often replaces the body of these refugees in press releases, public engagements, and even in some of the works themselves. Ai Weiwei’s stature as a globally recognized artist gives him an impressive public stage on which to showcase his artwork and his artistic message. And the artist has chosen to focus on a cause with global appeal during his three-year residency in Berlin—and now beyond it as well. As Ai notes in an interview in November 2018 in artnet, the avowed reason for his artmaking is, still, the potential it has to impact others, to engender a kind of very powerful affect: “I think art touches very essential emotions, a way of judging ourselves. Those are very important human activities.”19 That artist Ai Weiwei’s body is a vehicle for his political messages will come as no surprise for those familiar with his work. Marie Leduc, in Dissidence: The Rise of Contemporary Chinese Art in the West, suggests that artists such as Ai Weiwei engage in “activist or social interventionist art” that “mobilizes the value of dissidence” and plays on the trope of “Chinese-artist-as-dissident.”20 But it is difficult to continue to label Ai merely a “Chinese-artist-as-dissident.” Beginning in 2015 with his UdK residency in Berlin, he became increasingly an artist engaged in the refugee crisis as a global art project. Intentionally and unintentionally, Ai’s body has become inseparable from the affect of his art. Yet, the West’s reception of Ai’s output during his Berlin residency has been anything but critical. Giorgio Strafella and Daria Berg describe Ai’s Berlin period in familiar terms:“a Chinese artiste engagé based in Berlin has employed installations, documentary filmmaking, as well as a sizeable social media presence to try and sensitise the West to this ongoing tragedy . . . Ai Weiwei represents one of the most influential figures in the global art scene and his exhibitions attract hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world.”21

The Aesthetic Affect The impact of Ai’s work can be understood in a number of ways. But it is the particular equivocation of his focus on the so-called global refugee crisis and his Berlin residency that offers important insights into the ways in which affect theory helps illuminate not only the uncritical appeal of his refugee projects to Western observers but also the ways in which Ai has conflated his particular experiences with the countless, often nameless and faceless bodies that serve as the catalyst for his interventions.

19

20

21

Ted Loos, “ ‘Who needs another show?’: Ai Weiwei says he’s over the whole museum thing and is moving to Connecticut,” artnet, November 15, 2018, n.p., available at: https://news.artnet.com/artworld/ai-weiwei-moving-to-connecticut-over-museums-1396012 (accessed February 21, 2019). Marie Leduc, Dissidence: The Rise of Chinese Contemporary Art in the West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 12, 14, 34. Strafellaa and Berg, “ ‘Twitter Bodhisattva,’ ” 196.

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Affect theory has had a broad impact on scholarship, mostly in the humanities, in the last decade or so. But its origins go even further back. Bergson’s Matter and Memory from 1908 has become something of a touchstone for many historians of affect theory, historians who see in Bergson’s now century-old study, and others like it, the beginnings of a focus on pre-cognitive or non-rational theories of knowledge and corporeality.22 Affect theory’s emphasis on precognitive knowledge reveals the way in which Ai Weiwei has conflated his art and his corporeality. In other words, Ai is at a loss to separate the works he creates from his own experiences as a Chinese dissident art—a “refugee,” to be sure—but one who is now exceptionally privileged, and one who receives exceptional media and financial support for his activities. To be more specific, affect theory helps explain the conflation of Ai’s body and his art, a conflation encouraged by the artist and often uncritically reproduced by galleries, museums, and the media. Ruth Leys argues in her essay of 2011, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” that the turn to a “neuroscience of emotions” embodied by much of affect theory has had the deleterious effect of equating precognitive, nonrational responses to critical, reflective insights: The claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at our peril—not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the potential for ethical creativity and transformation that “technologies of the self ” designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.23

Key for Leys’s assessment of affect theory and its shortcomings is an understanding that there are no precognitive insights, nothing that really act as “ ‘inhuman,’ ‘presubjective,’ ‘visceral’ forces and intensities that influence our thinking and judgments but are separate from these.”24 To be even more specific, Ai has positioned himself as inseparable from his art, not only for himself but for the public as well. In response to Leys’s challenge to affect theory, Charles Altieri focuses on affect in relation to aesthetic experience and thereby helps clarify the conflation of the artist’s body and his art. Altieri discusses a work not

22

23 24

For readers less familiar with affect theory, a number of key texts have emerged since the most recent fin de siècle. A few of these sources, although by no means a comprehensive list, might include the following: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Patricia Ticineto Clough (ed.) with Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) and The Politics of Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Presss, 2004); Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (eds.), The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010); and Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ruth Leys, “The turn to affect: A critique,” Critical Inquiry, 37, 3 (2011): 436. Ibid., 437.

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by Ai however, but by the painter Paul Cézanne.25 Altieri suggests that in Cézanne’s landscapes of the 1890s, the painter “makes rocks virtually balloons that have no weight or mass . . .” such that the trees “serve the counter-intuitive role of providing stability for the painting.” Altieri continues: I submit that these trees and rocks elicit powerful feelings, precisely because the stance of the painter, and eventually the stance of the viewer, recognize what cannot be coherently conceptualized except insofar as one honors the logic of the painting itself. And that logic is insistently particular in the sense that it holds only insofar as we see the painting as a distinctive event with qualities that depend on imagination rather than cognition.”26

For Altieri, there are “diverse and valuable forms of nonconceptual emotions” associated with moods and more specifically with respect to “esthetic [sic] experiences.”27 Altieri is speaking of the work of art—in this case, a particular Cézanne painting—as having a singularity reducible neither to pre-existing cognitive categories nor to already-formulated ideas about the work’s meaning. As Altieri notes, “logic is insistently particular in the sense that it holds only insofar as we see the painting as a distinctive event with qualities that depend on imagination rather than cognition.”28 The ideas Altieri puts forth with respect to aesthetic experience echo Jürgen Habermas’s ideas, outlined decades earlier in, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” that the aesthetic experience offers up the possibility of significant transformation of worldviews even as the viewer struggles to grasp fully the meaning of the aesthetic event.29 And Georges Didi-Huberman, citing the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, echos a similar point in challenging Ai’s filmic intervention, Human Flow, and the artists general effort to “communicate” information rather than create an art of resistance in relation to the so-called refugee crisis: Through this wholehearted affiliation with the media and official bodies of communication, Human Flow thus presents none of what Gilles Deleuze described as counter-information advanced by the work of artists to the level of an act of resistance: “What relationship is there between the work of art and communication? A work of art has nothing to do with communication. [. . .] In contrast, there is a fundamental affinity between a work of art and an act of resistance. [. . .] Counterinformation only becomes really effective when it becomes an act of resistance.”30 25 26

27 28 29

30

Ibid., “A response to my critics,” Critical Inquiry, 38, 4 (2012): 882–91. Ibid., 890–1. Charles Altieri, “Affect, intentionality, and cognition: A response to Ruth Leys,” Critical Inquiry, 38, 4 (2011): 799–805. Altieri, “Affect,” 879. Ibid., 880. Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An incomplete project,” in Hal Foster (ed.), The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on the Postmodern Condition (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 13. Habermas writes, “The aesthetic experience then not only renews the interpretation of our needs in whose light we perceive the world. It permeates as well our cognitive significations and our normative expectations and changes the manner in which all these moments refer to one another.” Didi-Huberman, “From a high vantage point,” 7.

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Clearly there is a kind of hope for the aesthetic experience as a kind of counterinformation, as a form of resistance outlined in Altieri’s, Habermas’s, Didi-Huberman’s, and Deleuze’s points of view. Ai Weiwei’s Berlin residency, and the related projects addressing the so-called global refugee crisis, however, do not offer, in Deleuze’s terms, the kind of “counter-information” that would distinguish his art, and enable the visitor’s aesthetic experience of these works, to become true acts of resistance. Instead, Ai’s works become mass and social media fodder, reductive captions widely circulated to placate public interest in the refugee phenomenon and gratuitously placate viewers’ felt sent of responsibility: to see Ai’s work is to have “done something” for the refugees, at least, because one is engaging the crisis by engaging Ai’ work.

Conclusion It is the moment before the work of art transforms our worldview that is both the promise, and the peril, of the “refugee affect” created by Ai Weiwei’s Berlin residency and his engagement with the so-called global refugee crisis. As Ai’s various works invoking refugees make clear, there is a fungibility of the artist’s body and the artist’s work that depends upon a willful, if not also precognitive, conflation of the aesthetic object and the artist identity: Ai Weiwei’s work is an intervention into the refugee crisis because he, himself, is a (self-identified) refugee. The conflation of Ai’s own body with those of countless, nameless refugees is highly problematic however. Erika Doss, writing in American Art, notes that affect indeed has a very special relationship with respect to aesthetic experience: “Works of art are the physical and visual embodiment of public affect.”31 The special role affect plays in explaining aesthetic experience also explains the special role affect plays in public perceptions of Ai Weiwei’s work—and, of course, the artist’s self-perception and self-representation in relation to that artistic corpus. As the public supposedly transitions away from a reliance on visual forms of knowledge production, away from the supposed truth of visual information, Doss suggests that there is increasingly “a cultural shift toward public feeling, toward affective modes of knowledge and comprehension that blend physical experience and emotional response and that are perceived as being more substantial, more genuine.”32 Disrupting this aesthetic affect, however, may be the key not only to articulating a common experience but also to engender critical engagement. In late 2015, the artist Ai Weiwei collaborated with photographer Rohit Chawla from India Today to recreate a now-iconic image: the photograph of Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Turkey. Ai’s body lies, beautifully positioned and in black and white, on a pebble-strewn beach. Compare this image to the original image of Kurdi, the young victim, taken by photographer Nilüfer Demir, and which circulated widely in newspapers, television programs, as well as on social media and

31 32

Erika Doss, “Affect,” American Art, 23, 1 (2009): 9. Ibid., 10.

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the internet.33 Articles in The Washington Post published Ai’s restaged beach photograph and declared that the dead boy “just got a huge artistic tribute.”34 The artist himself was at pains to understand concerns with the restaged photo, with replacing the body of a young, dead refugee with his own body: “I think the so-called criticism I have received has no merit . . . Where does this anger come from? They can’t accept this reality? When people try to guard certain topics, it only shows the weakness of their minds and their own moral standings.”35 Ai and Chawla were not the only individuals to engage the original image of Kurdi in order to draw attention to the plight of refugees. The public shock when confronted with the image of Kurdi’s lifeless body was magnified by the great number of reproductions and reinterpretations of the original image, and many of these reproductions sought to engender sympathy with respect to the plight of refugees coming to Europe, in particular. But it is Chawla and Ai’s reproduction of the image of Kurdi, and the specific decision to put the artist’s own body in place of the drowned boy’s body, that crystalizes an important point concerning Ai’s affect, an affect that results from conflation of the artist’s position with that of his art, with his body for victims’ bodies vis-a-vis his installations, statements, and films. Disrupting the affective elision of artist and artwork, affect and action, may be necessary in order to engender, as Bergson makes clear in the opening paragraphs of this essay, real action. During his Berlin residency, Ai’s body became synonymous with his work and with the bodies of countless faceless, nameless refugees. The distance between artist and artwork, observer and action, is, in Bergson’s terms, “reduced to zero”—and that, of course, is not a solution but rather itself a problem that leads both to self-serving congratulations and to self-congratulatory inaction.

33

34

35

See, “Artist Ai Weiwei poses as Aylan Kurdi for India Today magazine,” India Today, February 16, 2016), available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/amp/india/story/artist-ai-weiwei-poses-as-aylankurdi-for-india-today-magazine-306593-2016-02-01 (accessed February 21, 2019). Both images were printed in the India Today article. The staged photograph of Ai was taken by Rohit Chawla; the photograph of Kurdi was taken by Nilüfer Demi. Rama Lakshmi, “Syrian refugee crisis: Artist Ai Weiwei poses as Aylan Kurdi for India Today magazine,” India Today Magazine, February 5, 2016, n.p., available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/ india/photo/syrian-refugee-crisis-artist-ai-weiwei-poses-as-aylan-kurdi-for-india-todaymagazine-377881-2016-02-05/3 (accessed February 21, 2019). Jacoba Urist, “How should art address human rights?,” The Atlantic, April 24, 017, n.p., available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/04/how-should-art-address-humanrights/521520 (accessed February 21, 2019).

9

Afrolocken Natural Hair in German Literature and Media1 Jamele Watkins

My own hair journey is similar to other Black German first-person accounts of hair that this essay deals with. My interest in hair and hair care derives from my own transition from relaxers to natural hair. Natural hair is commonly referred to in Black communities as hair that is not chemically straightened with relaxers or texturizers. Chemically processed hair is forced straight(er) with harmful chemicals like lye, and natural hair is typically textured and curly and without any permanent change to the texture or curl pattern. Once I transitioned to natural hair, no one in my family could help me care for my new hair texture (their hair was all chemically processed at the time). So, when I cut my hair short to get rid of the chemically processed part of my hair, they were angry and confused. Family members told me (and continue to tell me) over and over that they could not believe I cut off my long, straight hair—that it was something to be admired. I rejected this notion and I searched YouTube for videos on the best hair products, styling tutorials, and haircut inspiration for my new texture. For me, YouTubers offered information and knowledge that I didn’t have in my family and could not find in mainstream media. YouTubers’ Black hair videos center audiences like me, thus decentering a white gaze. I was empowered through the knowledge of hair care that I gained via YouTube. It was there that I found a community of fellow Black women who were encouraging and supportive of everyone’s individual hair story. Through these personal stories on various YouTube videos, I gained a community across the world with whom I felt connected. Importantly, autobiographical stories such as these are important not only on YouTube, but also in theoretical and narrative interventions as well. My experiences with hair are not unlike the experiences of Black Germans. However, there are several experiences of Afrodeutsche, Black Germans, that are different from other parts of the Black diaspora. Whereas the United States cannot ignore slavery (but likes to), Germany has and can ignore the centuries of Black people living there. Unlike

1

I have included a small number of images in this article in order to limit a gaze on black bodies. The images included here were given with the express permission of the person included.

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other groups of minorities living in Germany, Black Germans do not have a single story, that is, a narrative to describe the migration to Germany.2 Recently, Black Germans have shared their stories of being made outsiders in Germany despite having grown up in Germany. Within the pages of Farbe bekennen (1986), Fürchte Dich nicht, Bleichgesicht! (1996), and Daheim unterwegs (1998), Black German women explain the constant fetishization and racism they endured. While many other factors need to be considered in Black German experiences, hair is a central component to this feeling of “outsiderness.” In this paper, I use Afrodeutsche and Black Germans synonymously, but I will not use Afro-German, as Noah Sow has recently explained that the English use of the word is colonizing.3 The term was created by Black Germans themselves against the hurtful terms previously used. The English, Afro-German, is a translation of what Black Germans called themselves, instead of the original words or the more inclusive Black German. As someone who is not part of that community, I defer all terms to those within the Black German community and their preferences. It is crucial to note that the importance of hair in the Black German community has also evolved through history. At the Initiative of Black People in Germany (ISD) annual meetings, Bundestreffen, Black Germans included sessions on hair care and maintenance.4 Digital forms, like social media, are the latest iterations of knowledge of hair maintenance. Hair is a significant marker of race for Afrodeutsche regardless of gender, especially in a majority white nation5 that often rejects blackness, particularly through toxic discourses regarding black hair. The complexity of hair for Black Germans is that it often signifies a negative trait that they need to change; at other times it represents a space for self-love, empowerment, community, and acceptance. Personal narratives, autobiographies, and films by Black Germans illustrate the impact of growing up with black hair in Germany and how doing so can help manifest a process of self-love. A close analysis of the impact of growing up with black hair, the larger significance of that experience and the critiques thereof, and the development of Black German hair vlogs (video blogs) all reveal an alternative site for knowledge formation and self-empowerment in a majority white European society. Through these videos, Black viewers see potential for transformation and beauty in a society that dismisses this physical attribute. The YouTube channel Joannas Essentials, an Afrodeutsche wellness channel, charts one particular Black German intervention that counters the toxicity of white beauty standards for Black women and works to transform the negative connotations of black hair. Many Black feminist and womanist theorists have researched beauty standards and blackness or, that is to say, they have revealed the multiple ways that whiteness does not

2 3

4

5

Tina Campt, “Reading the Black German experience,” Callaloo, 26, 2 (2003): 290. Noah Sow, Black German Heritage and Research Association, University of Toronto, May 2018. See also, Maureen Maisha Eggers and Ekpenyong Ani, “Afrodeutsch/Afrodeutsche_r,” in Susan Arndt and Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard (eds.), Wie Rassismus aus Wörtern spricht: (K)Erben des Kolonialismus im Wissensarchiv deutsche Sprache (Münster: Unrast, 2011), 577–9. Tiffany Florvil, Mobilizing across Differences: Black German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (Urbana, IL : University of Illinois Press, 2020). Asoka Esuruoso and Philipp Khabo Koepsell, “Introduction Alpha,” in Asoka Esuruoso and Philipp Khabo Koepsell (eds.), Arriving in the Future: Stories of Home and Exile (Berlin: epubli, 2014), 12.

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allow for the possibility of Black beauty. Beauty standards often favor whiteness and constantly place blackness in contrast to it. Hair texture, too, plays a central role here. Patricia Hill Collins charges for a redefinition of beauty standards, explaining, “Dealing with prevailing stands of beauty—particularly skin color, facial features, and hair texture—is one specific example of how controlling images derogate African American women.”6 Collins illustrates the way in which society fashioned white skin, hair, and thin bodies as the norm, and blackness as antithetical to this standard. Further, bell hooks describes the way the fight against a white beauty standard has always involved a Black radical reframing against it: Exposing the myriad ways white supremacy had assaulted our self-concept and our self-esteem, militant leaders of Black liberation struggle demanded that Black folks see ourselves differently—see self-love as a radical political agenda.7

For hooks, validating different types of beauty and unsubscribing from white beauty standards serve as self-love. However, rejecting those Anglo-European standards is not easy; it requires a deprogramming of sorts and a revolt against everything Black people are socialized to understand as normative within white majority nations. It also entails redefining beauty on one’s own terms. Hair care and hairstyles are just one important way Black women can see themselves differently, outside of white standards of beauty. Beyond adornment, hair enables a person to curate a self-image that is positive and empowering. Black hair has recently emerged as a topic of relevance in contemporary scholarship. In the article “Decolonizing My Hair, Unshackling my Curls: An Autoethnography on What Makes My Natural Hair Journey a Black Feminist Statement,” Carolette R. Norwood reflects on her own hair journey and also engages with Collins on knowledges, consciousness, and empowerment.8 One particularly powerful passage on rebellion and black hair is relevant for my discussion of “krause Locken” [nappy curls]. Norwood reveals: Embracing the natural Black aesthetic is often read as rebellion—and, in some ways, it has to be. It is the reality of Black-skinned people, who can decide that they are fine just the way God made them and choose not to adhere to Western, white standards. Not to stand invisible or neutral within the white norm essentially means standing deviant and in rebellion.9

Norwood’s reading of her own hair journey as inherently political is also relevant for Germany, where the traditional standards of blonde hair and blue eyes are even more

6

7 8

9

Patricia Hill Collins, “Mammies, matriarchs, and other controlling images,” Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), 89. bell hooks, “Back to Black,” Outlaw Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 173. Carolette R. Norwood, “Decolonizing my hair, unshackling my curls: An atoethnography,” International Feminist Journal of Politics, 20, 1 (2018): 69. Ibid., 81.

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extreme. Minorities in Germany face the real-life implication of constantly being considered outside of the German nation based on their appearance—including hair color and hair texture. Furthermore, hair in the Black diaspora is an important symbol of political dissidence. Audre Lorde has written about this in her article “Is Your Hair Political?”10 and Angela Davis has spoken about this regarding her iconic afro in “Afro Images: Politics, Hair, and Nostalgia.”11 Kobena Mercer’s work in England has shown that black hair is “bad” and described as “woolly” or “tough.”12 Similarly, Berlin-based AfroPortuguese critical theorist and artist, Grada Kilomba, considers the social and cultural relevance of hair within the Black/African diaspora in her book, Plantation Memories (2008). Kilomba recognizes the significance of black hair because historically it was associated with enslavement. Kilomba argues: More than skin color, hair became the most potent mark of servitude during the enslavement period . . . [black] hair became a symbol of ‘primitivity, disorder, inferiority and un-civilization.’ African hair was then classified as ‘bad hair.’ At the same time, Black people were pressured to relax ‘bad hair’ with the appropriate chemicals, developed by European industries.13

As Kilomba asserts, bad hair is so often synonymous with black hair. It is because of this historical and contemporary maligning of black hair that Black people have manipulated it in order to appease those who have oppressed them. In this way, black hair as a racial marker cannot be over-determined. As William Morrow, author of 400 Years without a Comb, explains, “Hair . . . is the basic, natural symbol of the things people are and want to be-everywhere, and its social-cultural significance should not be underestimated.”14 If hair is/William Morrow argues, “the basic, natural symbol of the things people are,” then it symbolizes Black humanity. And if/Kilomba asserts, Black hair can’t exist within the world of white beauty standards, then, by extension, Black people cannot exist; this then leads to an existential crisis. For Black people, there is no rest from white oppression and within white supremacist systems Black humanity is subject to diminishment. Scholars of the Black Diaspora, Black feminists, womanists,15 and Germanist16 agree that hair is a prominent marker of blackness. Natural hair is negatively signified as bad hair, and in a majority white society, those with black hair are mocked and teased. In Plantation Memories, Kilomba interviews a few Black Germans, including an interviewee named Alicia. Alicia admits that she used

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

Audre Lorde, “Is your hair still political?,” Essence, 21, 5 (1990): 40, 110. Angela Davis, “Afro images: Politics, hair and nostalgia,” Critical Inquiry, 21, 1 (1994): 37–45. Kobena Mercer, “Black hair/style politics,” Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studoes (New York: Routledge, 1994), 101. Grada Kilomba, Plantation Memories (Münster: Unrast, 2016), 73. William Morrow, 400 Years without a Comb (San Diego, CA : Morrow’s Unlimited, 1973), 17. Wendy Cooper, Hair: Sex, Society, and Symbolism (London: Aldus, 1971). Silke Hackenesche, “In the doing of hair, one does race,” in Jens Elberfeld and Marcus Otto (eds.), Das schöne Selbst: Zur Genealogie des modernen Subjekts zwischen Ethik und Ästhetik (Bielefield: transcript, 2009), 288.

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to straighten her hair because of fear of “public humiliation.”17 However, by wearing her natural hair, she disrupts white majority society. Kilomba argues, “In a certain way, the insults warn Alicia that she is becoming too Black by showing too many signs of Blackness’; they might also sign that she was showing signs of independence and decolonization toward white norms, a disturbing fact for her white public.”18 Alicia disregards white beauty norms in the way bell hooks describes and radically engages in self-love and Black liberation through her hair. Alicia recalls a moment of violence that is discursively connected to the so-called primitive; her white male partner sings the children’s song, “Who stole the coconut?” after smelling the coconut oil in her hair. Kilomba considers this song part of the white fantasies placed on Alicia by her intimate partner who was a doctoral student. This extra information about her partner, that he is completing his doctorate, undoes sociocultural constructions that educated people cannot be racist. Furthermore, his relationship to Alicia also proves that intimacy with Black people does not eradicate racism.19 Kilomba contends: “Racism is not biological, but discursive. It functions through a discursive regime, a chain of words and images that by association become equivalents: African-Africa-jungle-wild-primitive-inferior-animal-monkey.”20 Alicia’s hair places her “in the bush”; the song her partner sings suggests that she belongs elsewhere. In connecting the smell of her hair with an imagined primitive space, he situates her outside of civilized German society, placing her with animals, and thus positioning her as lower than him. In this anecdote, hair serves as a signifier that links notions of one’s position and belonging on both an intimate and national scale. Failing to subscribe to white advertising for hair care, Alicia uses a product useful for her hair. This results in harmful racism and emotional attacks directed toward Alicia—a person who refuses to acquiesce to white beauty standards. Alicia’s product choice leads to racial violence; and yet, embracing her natural hair and by using products suitable for her hair, she redefines beauty. This scene between Alicia and her partner thus becomes symbolic of many Black German women’s experiences. By nurturing their hair in an alternative way, they abandon the practice of manipulation in order to achieve white beauty stands and in so doing care for themselves and partake in their own liberation. Importantly, accounts of self-liberation through hair is somewhat new; in certain periods, there were real life ramifications for Afrodeutsche who did not have blonde hair. Black Germans were subjected to racial attacks and racial violence. In this way, hair has a long and complicated history that is intertwined with race and ethnicity. In her book, Other Germans, Tina Campt interviews two Black Germans, Hans Hauch and Fasia Jansen, who lived through the Third Reich: “The Nazi sterilization of the Black children of the Rhineland occupation represents one of the most extreme

17 18 19

20

Kilomba, Plantation Memories, 74. Ibid., 73. Sherrée Wilson, “They forgot Mammy had a brain,” in Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Angela P. Harris (eds.), Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Boulder, CO : University Press of Colorado, 2012), 65–77. Kilomba, Plantation Memories, 75.

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consequences of the discourses of race and racial purity that converged in the Rhineland campaign as well as the most concrete response to the threat posed by this imaginary specter.”21 While the interviews in Other Germans provide rich analyses of race, hair emerges as a key focal point. Campt’s interviewee Hauch explains that the “Aryan paragraph” excluded him from rights in Germany.22 Aryan Germans were considered to be “racially superior” to any other population.23 Campt points out: “Throughout these discussions an essential, biological notion of racial difference, superiority and hierarchy resonates, a scientific discourse of race that pervades these debates.”24 The anxiety around “pure race” or Aryan race has a heightened meaning in the German space—a striking difference from other Black diasporic groups. While there are many similarities among Black diasporic communities, it is important to not forget the very real racial anxiety manifested that because of hair in Germany during the Nazi period and beyond. For instance, Hauck describes that he straightened his hair with sugar because he wanted blue eyes and blonde hair. Theodor Michael mentions hair briefly, stating that while he was “on exhibit” in the Völkerschau (Human Zoo), people would touch his hair and sniff him “to see if he was real.”25 The invasion of Black German bodies by white Germans during this time ranged from touching and smelling to scientific experimentation and sterilization. I use the word “invaded” here because this was forced and non-consensual touching; white people have pillaged nations and take that same attitude to black bodies, thinking that they have a right to them, as illustrated by personal experiences within this essay. Hauck saw straightening his hair as an opportunity for social mobility and acceptance. He explains that he aspired to a career as a civil servant, and that this career was not available to him as a Black German: I knew though, for example, that I could never become a civil servant . . . because of my heritage. I was non-Aryan . . . That’s what they told me . . . Of course, I always wanted to be [Aryan]. I always wanted blue eyes and blond hair. As a child I even straightened my hair with sugar water, because . . . it was kinky . . . But that didn’t work.26

In admitting he had wanted to be Aryan, Hauck addresses the marker of eyes and then hair. It is unclear how much he passed for white, but for him, his hair was his biggest obstacle. Next, he discusses his failed attempt to straighten his “kinky” hair. Somehow, hair held him back from fitting it; there was no way to be part of German society if his hair was not straight. Hair was often a gendered marker associated with

21

22 23 24 25

26

Tina M. Campt, Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press, 2005), 27. Ibid., 50. Ibid., 65. Ibid, 49. Theodor Michael, Black German: An Afro-German Life in the Twentieth Century, trans. Eve Rosenhaft (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2018), 24. Campt, Other Germans, 73.

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women,27 but it also impacts Black German men, as seen in this example. Hauch explains, “[When I got older and was clearer] about my heritage, about my existence . . . it was too late by then.”28 In the context of this quote, Hauch describes the acceptance of who he was and how hair impacted him. Hauck’s source of pride in his identity exists in between the moments he mentions (and is a process he does not share), but for him, it took years for that pride to emerge, and the process itself is nebulous. Hans Hauck is not the only man who struggled with his hair growing up during the Third Reich. In his autobiography, Destined to Witness, former editor of Ebony Hans Massaquoi describes his relationship to his hair, first mentioning it when describing his entrance into the German school system. In order to be less conspicuous, his mother had his hair cut off. He explains: But fear of teachers, which I shared with most school beginners, was only one of my problems. My biggest worry, which I carefully tried to keep to myself, was having to face hundreds of strange children and the certainty of racial taunts and ridicule. In an obvious attempt to make me less conspicuous, my mother told my barber—albeit with a heavy heart—to get rid of my generous Afro, which I wore decades before it became the rage in the United States and that my mother loved as much as I detested it.29

Here, Massaquoi indicates that hair was a huge priority to “fix” in order to fit in so as to not be subject to violence and ridicule. Interestingly enough, he frees his mother from any blame in the scenario. In any case, his attempts to fit in were in vain: a classmate taunted him by touching his hair and calling him the N-word.30 Massaquoi describes his rage with a boy who “put his hand on my head and mockingly stroked my hair. ‘Why do Negros grow sheep wool instead of hair on their heads?’ he asked me.”31 Massaquoi responds by kicking him. The children also teased him, calling him, “N- N-, Schornsteinfeger” (N* N*, chimney sweeper).32 Massaquoi’s classmates use skin color and hair to tease him. Massaquoi’s internalized hatred of his hair resurfaces in relation to his cousin. When describing his cousin, Fatima, Massaquoi depicts her hair as follows: “long before I made the discovery that black was beautiful, she wore an Afro so huge it would have aroused the envy of a Fiji Islander.”33 He compares the afro to a particular movement, “Black is Beautiful,” and recognizes that he does not feel that way about himself. Furthermore, when Nazis yelled at Hans and Fatima on the street, Massaquoi compares her afro to a Fijian and not to another African American (although there

27

28 29

30 31 32 33

Ingrid Banks, Hair Matters: Beauty, Power, and Black Women’s Consciousness (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 2. Campt, Other Germans, 73. Hans Massaquoi, Destined to Witness: Growing Up Black in Nazi Germany (New York: W. Morrow, 1999), 34. Ibid, 38. Ibid, 37. Ibid., Destined to Witness, 37. Ibid, 60.

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were plenty of options). Decentering African Americans from the style is interesting, as is his choice to connect to the Pacific Islanders, where there are indeed known links to the African diaspora.34 Perhaps for him, an afro put him and his familial identity on the other side of the globe. The afro, as a catalyst for Massaquoi’s nonbelonging, might explain part of the embarrassment Fatima’s afro causes; he called her visits “periodic unavoidable embarrassment.”35 In any case, hair was significant for him as a child, and his attempt at fitting in by cutting his hair was unsuccessful. Historically, changing one’s hair was a way to fit in. Massaquoi was teased for his skin color and hair; both marked him as an outsider in Germany. Massaquoi and Hauck offer interesting examples of gendered politics of hair and belonging. Thus, Black Germans, even in their attempts to conform, cannot accommodate white norms of beauty and citizenship and so are excluded from both. Black German feminist activist Katharina Oguntoye acknowledges that Black women “don’t fit the European ideal of beauty.”36 In a piece from Kleinerdrei [less than three,