Modern Art at the Berlin Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Germanys 9780755604319, 9781845118082

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ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. 1.1 John Heartfield, The Freedom of the Beast of Prey, 1959

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Fig. 1.2 Walter Womacka, At the Beach, 1962

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Fig. 1.3 New National Gallery, West Berlin, c. 1968

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Fig. 2.1 Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969

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Fig. 2.2 Wolf Vostell, German Prospects, 1958

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Fig. 2.3 Ed Kienholz, The Bench, 1975-6

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Fig. 2.4 Büro Berlin office, Lindenstrasse 39, 1980

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Fig. 2.5 Katja Ka, Wall Painting, 1980

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Fig. 2.6 Raimund Kummer, reingelegt, 1980

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Fig. 2.7 K. P. Brehmer, Walkings: Nr. 1 Sieg, 1969-70

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Fig. 2.8 Manfred Butzmann, Heimatkunde 1055 Berlin, 1985

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Fig. 3.1 Georg Baselitz, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1965

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Fig. 3.2 Willi Si�e, Kampf der Thälmannbrigade in Spanien (The Ba�le of the Thälmann Brigade in Spain), 1958

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Fig. 3.3 Werner Tübke, Lebenserinnerungen des Dr. jr. Schulze (III) (Reminiscences of J.D. Schulze, III), 1965

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Fig. 3.4 Wolfgang Ma�heuer, Der übermutige Sisyphos und die Seinen (High-spirited Sisyphus and his Comrades)

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Fig. 3.5 Bernhard Heisig, Beharrlichkeit des Vergessens (The Persistence of Forge�ing), 1977

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Fig. 3.6 Gerhard Richter, Hirsch (Stag), 1963

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Fig. 3.7 Georg Baselitz, P.D. Stengel (Stalk), 1962

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Fig. 3.8 Eugen Schönebeck, Der wahre Mensch (The True Human), 1964

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Fig. 3.9 Johannes Grützke, Komm, setz’ dich zu uns (Come, Sit with Us), 1970

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Fig. 3.10 Jörg Immendorff, Soziales handeln als Vorwand (Social action as pretext, in Hier und Jetzt), 1973

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Fig. 3.11 A. R. Penck, A Possible System (A=I, myself), 1965

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Fig. 4.1 Ilya Kabakov, Zwei Erinnerungen an die Angst (Two Memories of Fear), in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (Berlin, 1990)

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Fig. 4.2 Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall, 1970

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Fig. 4.3 Clara Mosch, Leussow-Recycling, 1978

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Fig. 4.4 Erhard Monden, Stand und Lauf Performance, East Berlin, 1981 (Galerie Arkade)

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Fig. 5.1 ‘Prisma: VI. Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden’ Program, broadcast Nov. 23, 1967

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Fig. 5.2 Willi Si�e, Die Überlebenden (The Survivors), 1964

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Fig. 5.3 ‘Die Überlebenden’ Program, broadcast May 5, 1964

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Fig. 6.1 Sophie Calle, from The Detachment, 1996

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Fig. 6.2 Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, 2005

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Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions and rights in reproducing artworks in this book. If it is the case that an image is not correctly a�ributed or there was no response to inquiries, I would be most grateful to receive notice of this fact so that it might be corrected.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I can pinpoint with some confidence the moment when the seeds of what would become this ambitious book were sown. This was in the early spring of 1983, when as a new college graduate on a Fulbright-Hays grant to Stu�gart, I traveled for the first time through the German Democratic Republic to West Berlin for a week of meetings. On the train to Berlin GDR border police held my passport photograph to my face and examined me closely. Someone in my party had the film removed from their camera a�er they were caught taking photos out of the train window. In these moments I lived the Cold War; it was at times terrifying but perhaps because of the sense of risk, it also seemed glamorous. I felt like I was in a place that was important. My American friends and I thought the divided city was impossibly cool. I entered the GDR through the brightly-lit Checkpoint Charlie. I thought myself quite clever when I asked a passer-by in the East Berlin S-Bahn how to get to Pankow—this was in honor of Udo Lindenberg’s hit song in West Germany of the time. I remember that she thoughtfully repeated her instructions twice and seemed unaware of my hilarious sense of humor. While I felt secure if not smug in the superiority of my Western tastes and habits, I learned there was a forbidden German culture that I knew nothing about. In all my frequent visits to (West) German art museums over decades, I never encountered artwork from the GDR. A�er the Wende books and exhibitions about art in the GDR became more frequent. I saw

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an East German painting or two at the Neue Nationalgalerie; I met East Germans. I decided to learn more about the mysterious and maligned art of the GDR. It was made all the more captivating because it had effectively been withheld from me for so many years. The condescending remarks I overheard West German art historians make about East German art only fueled my curiosity. This book is my a�empt to think critically about such lived experiences and about their relation to the discipline of Art History. I am grateful for the assistance and support of numerous institutions and individuals while I worked on this book. Grants from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Fulbright Commission, the Ge�y Library, and the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, UK, were essential to the research and writing of this book. The Henry Moore Institute also made it possible for me to interview several artists in Berlin. I have benefited from research and publication support extended to me by the School of Art, part of the Herberger College of the Arts, at Arizona State University. In researching this book I benefited from the a�ention and efforts of the staff at a number of different libraries and archives: the Video-Forum at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; the Kunstbibliothek/Main Archives, Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; the Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv Potsdam/Babelsberg; the Sender Freies Berlin Channel Archives (RBB), Berlin; the Henry Moore Institute Library; the Ge�y Research Library, Los Angeles; and Special Collections at the Ge�y Research Library. I owe particular thanks to many scholars in Germany for their advisement and/or their expertise at various stages of my project: Eugen Blume, Eckhart Gillen, Michael Haerdter, Kirsten Mey, Yvonne Spielmann, Helmut Herbst, Christoph Tannert, Uwe Breitenborn, and Thomas Gaehtgens. I also thank Greg Williams, Barbara McCloskey, Terry Smith, Gray Sweeney, Sabine Hake, Richard Langston, Jon Wood, Martina Droth, Penelope Curtis, Anne Rorimer, Joan Weinstein, Greg Castillo, Viola Michely, and Hava Samuelson, for stimulating conversations regarding my research.

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I am also fortunate to have spoken with several of the artists whose work I discuss in this book. I thank them for their generosity and for our memorable meetings in Berlin and Munich: Raimund Kummer, Katja Ka, Una Möhrke, Hermann Pitz, and Tony Cragg. I am privileged to have met and interviewed Wolf Vostell and his wife Mercedes Vostell in Malpartida, Spain, while I was writing my dissertation in the mid-1990s. Marianne Pohl, Eva Maria Schön, Nanaé Suzuki, and Kiki Smith provided helpful information in telephone and email exchanges. I also thank the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at the Potsdamer Platz for accommodating the most lavish conference call I’ve ever experienced. I thank my parents, who helped me see this project through, and my relatives in Germany, Egbert Mesch, Eva Mesch, and Inge and Robert Hachenberg of Wermelskirchen, for their support and for many meals over the years while I was doing research. Finally, I remain completely indebted to my husband Francisco Solis, for his saint-like patience, and his sound advice.

INTRODUCTION Modernity, Modern Art, and Fantasies of Postwar National Identity A�er World War Two both East and West Germany faced a common problem: how to recover and redefine modern art a�er the Nazis had effectively defamed and destroyed it. As I introduce it here, the term ‘modern art’ refers to what has also been termed ‘classical modernism,’ the tradition of experimental, o�entimes abstract, and self-reflexive visual art developed in the early twentieth century by Western European artists such as Pablo Picasso, the German expressionists, Piet Mondrian, and by the Soviet avant-garde, Kasimir Malevich, the Constructivists and Productivists—to name only a few examples. German museums such as the Berlin National Gallery/Kronprinzenpalais under its director Ludwig Justi or the Städtische Galerie in Frankfurt, had amassed many key modernist works of the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries and had established reputations for their progressive collections of post-World War One German contemporary art. As Peter Paret’s excellent studies of early German modernism make clear, the nationalist-tinged art politics that were already at play in Wilhelmine Germany determined that these museums for the most part acquired modernist works by German artists.1 However, the 1937 Nazi confiscations dismantled almost every major German public collection of modern art as part of the ‘Degenerate Art’ action. Classical modernist artworks were removed from their museums, with some hastily incorporated into the travelling ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition that began

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in Munich in 1937 and continued on to Berlin, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Weimar and Salzburg, among other cities.2 Within a few years these modernist works appeared on the auction block, primarily at the Swiss Galerie Fischer in Lucerne in two auctions of 1939. As a result of the Fischer auctions, many of these artworks, including those by French modernists, landed in collections throughout Europe or in the United States; some that remained unsold vanished completely.3 German and Austrian private collections, particularly those of Jewish collectors, were also subject to these Nazi confiscations. These ‘lost’ collections continue to resurface to the present day, as they are returned to heirs of their original owners by means of international arbitration and litigation.4 It is hardly surprising that the highly dramatic provenance of these paintings, and the equally dramatic story their recovery by their rightful owners, has produced best-seller books and a mass-release film.5 The cultural impact of the vacuum created by these fascist actions against German modernism extended well beyond 1945. In the period immediately a�er the German surrender, the German public in the Occupied Zones had only limited access to modern artworks, and mainly only in Dresden and Berlin. However, as some German art historians have argued, this period before the founding of the East or West German states in 1949 proved more culturally progressive in its recuperation of classical modernism. The first ‘German Art Exhibition’ (‘Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung’) in Dresden opened in August, 1946, and focused on reintroducing German modernists such as Max Beckmann, Willi Baumeister, Paul Klee and Käthe Kollwitz, to the public. In Berlin that same year the occupying French military government organized the first international exhibition in Germany since 1933, the ‘Exhibition of French Painting from Impressionism to the Present’ in the Berlin Schloss or castle. The exhibition included works by Picasso and Marc Chagall. In 1947 the Galerie van der Heyde mounted an Emil Nolde retrospective in Berlin, and in 1949 a Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich focused on these Bavarian expressionist painters. These exhibitions strove to rehabilitate contemporary German art and counter the atmosphere of

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ignorance of the international art scene and anti-modernism set in place during the Nazi era.6 However, the reception of these exhibitions remained sharply divided; it foreshadowed the dual and divided cultural ideologies of East and West of the Cold War that began to surface in the press already in 1948, and which I discuss later in this introduction. By the time the Berlin Wall was erected, both East and West German art institutions had staged important exhibitions of classical modern art. In the German Democratic Republic, modernist exhibitions were staged most frequently at the East Berlin Akademie der Künste: the highly debated Ernst Barlach exhibition in 1951; the 1957 O�o Dix and John Heartfield retrospectives; its 1960 anniversary exhibition included Picasso, Dix, and Heartfield, among other artists. Other exhibitions in West Germany focused on Max Ernst (Schloss Augustusburg in Brühl, 1951) and Hans Arp (Hannover, 1955). The progressive Galerie Henning in Halle mounted Picasso exhibitions throughout the 1950s; the state finally forced it to stop operations when it closed the border in 1961. The 1957 Picasso exhibition in East Berlin, curated by the elderly Justi, proved a great success, despite the state’s efforts to close it.7 In West Germany, the 1955 Documenta exhibition in Kassel focused specifically on classical modernism (and is discussed in Chapter 1). Perhaps most important to art in the coming decade was the 1958 ‘Dada Dokumente einer Bewegung’ (‘Dada, Documents of a Movement’) exhibition in Düsseldorf, an early examination of the avant-garde—that is, the radical, institution-critical or politically subversive directions of modernism in Dada (Ernst, Heartfield) and Marcel Duchamp. However in this same year West German art institutions began to shi� their focus away from German modernism and toward new art from the U.S.: Jackson Pollock was first shown in West Germany at the Hamburg Kunstverein with an exhibition of 60 works, followed up by the more well-known travelling exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ‘The New American Painting’, seen only in West Berlin. One might then generally conclude that while East and West German museums focused on classical German modernism in the 1950s, both states had

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only barely begun to examine the legacy of the avant-garde before the construction of the Berlin Wall. As Chapter 1 points out, a�er this watershed moment of the Cold War, museums in both states increasingly came under the sway of superpower-determined polarities of visual style: abstraction in the West; figuration in the East. They abandoned their earlier common interest in the history of German modernism and in the avant-garde. A second thread that unified East and West German culture in these years was artists’ struggle to square their respective and newly constructed histories of modern art with the weight of the Fascist past. From 1961 to 1989 new artworks across a number of mediums—painting, assemblage, performance art, photography, installations, along with the dissemination of art on television—challenged the canon of modern art promoted by German museums. In both the East and the West, amnesia toward the vast trauma of World War Two and the Holocaust seemed to be central to the new modern art of postwar Germany. At the same time many artists working in East and West Berlin forcefully contested the absolute demarcating of socialist from capitalist ideology forwarded by the art institutions of each state. This book examines art on both sides of the Iron Curtain, focusing on art produced in divided Germany, which together with Korea remains one of the most important sites of the Cold War; global tensions were physically and culturally manifested in daily life there. Of all the Soviet Bloc countries East Germany found itself closest to the West. This proximity and shared history necessitated not only East Germany’s protracted negotiation of Western classical modernism, but also West German artists’ encounter with Soviet-style Socialist Realism. A number of artists working in East and West Germany—and who are examined in this book—o�en opposed the language of modern art propagated by each German state. This book presents a series of case studies that illuminate these key moments of contestation and opposition in postwar art production. It further tracks major East and West German debates around modernism, and concerning the

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possibility of a socialist modernism. I point to the sophisticated ways that artists in divided Germany struggled to carry visual art beyond the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. This group included international, American, Jewish, as well as German, artists, many of whom chose to work in East or West Berlin. The central argument of my book is that international cultural exchange and the flow of culture across the border (i.e., the ‘Iron Curtain’) o�en characterize the painting, performance, and sculpture of divided Germany. Startling points of commonality and dialogue, and alternating flows of influence, existed between East and West German artists during the superpowers’ ba�le for global cultural supremacy. In part this Cold War culture war had to do with the postwar cultural construction, on both sides of the Cold War divide, of a fantasized global collective identity or community that went well beyond the established notion of the modern state or nation. The entity of nation has been described as an extended imagining of (modern) sociality.8 I take the term ‘fantasy’ from Jacqueline Rose; drawing from early Freud and more widely from the discourse of psychology she has powerfully argued that ‘…fantasy—far from being the antagonist of public, social, being—plays a central, constitutive role in the modern world of states and nations…’9 Rose productively links fantasy to notions of social belonging, group identification, and to the modern polity and its authority. Psychic investments that are immaterial, subjective and speculative lie beyond the realm of rational action that defined earlier studies of state power, such as Max Weber’s sociological study of alliance to the modern state, Economy and Society. The power and authority of the modern state is very real and at the same time ‘ghostly, fantasmatic’. Rose argues for the need to recognize that political identification or a kind of collective will is formed through fantasy and o�en in the wake of trauma. Fantasy, in realizing the notion of the state, can then be understood to act in realizing historical desires as well.10 National identity had to be re-imagined for the newly formed German Democratic Republic and for the Federal Republic. In order for such national and global identifications

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to be realized, elaborate cultural divisions and demarcations had to be established within the militarily defeated and warweary German population. It was a population that in actuality was unified, in that the postwar Germans both East and West shared a recent, though short and disastrous, national history. Of course a very similar geographic and cultural construction took place in Korea in 1948, and that served as a precedent for the division of Germany in 1949.11 Jeffrey Herf has described a number of myths and cultural assumptions that were resoundingly discredited with the absolute military defeat of the Nazis in 1945 and with the uncovering of the scope of the Holocaust’s destruction. Among them were various aspects of fascist ideology: the cult of masculine aggressiveness and more generally, Prussian-style militarism; and unquestioning acceptance of authority.12 Further, I agree with Irit Rogoff and Yule Heibel that the very notion of a specifically German national collective identity had also been severely compromised by means of its appropriation and perversion by the Nazis.13 The USSR began to ‘import’ (Hans Belting’s term) its own model of suitable contemporary art into the occupied zones by means of the Formalism Debate of 1948. Thus, shortly a�er the German surrender, Soviet spokemen ironically dusted off old Nazi vocabulary in dismissing the ‘decadent’ work of Picasso and the German modernists in favor of crude notions of Realism as a style. I discuss this 1948 pronouncement, the debate it precipitated, and the response of American occupying authorities, in Chapter 1. Germans in part embraced these overtures to repress national collective identity in the first decade a�er the war.14 They turned toward a fantasized global collective identity in order to disavow the memory of a specifically German modern culture in these immediate postwar years. Certainly this global identity had a long history in the East, as it was first crystallized in the formation of the Comintern shortly a�er the Bolshevik Revolution. Its successor the Cominform continued these fantasies of a multinational and multiethnic global socialism anchored in the Soviet Union.15 In the West, curators like Werner Ha�mann urged a primary cultural identification with

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American characterizations of modernism as an ‘international style’, where national permutations seemed to be of less significance. As I discuss in Chapter 1, these alliances were realized at the early Documenta exhibitions in particular, and in the key role granted to the German exile and U.S. émigré, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Mies was chosen to construct a key postwar museum of modern art in West Berlin. Mies himself can be seen as emblematic of many of the repressions that animated West German culture in the ‘50s and ‘60s. By that time the architect had refashioned himself as the court architect of corporate America; his German past and his associations with not only communist causes, but also with the Nazi party, were simply le� unmentioned. A global identification with either international socialism or the promises of Western market capitalism on the part of Germans continued through 1961. Ironically it was around the time of the building of the Berlin Wall, when the superpowers’ imposed political and ideological separation was physically realised, that the cultures of the two German states began to acknowledge the course of a specifically German modernism, largely that of the Weimar Republic. Around that time, alternative histories of the modern that originated either from the East or the West and that contested the superpowers’ canons were also first studied—for example, the rediscovery of the Soviet avant-garde by the East Germans around 1960—but others soon followed. The East and West German fantasy of a global collective identification was slowly dispelled only a�er 1960, in part by artists who began an active intervention and contestation of Cold War cultural alliances and psychic investments. Sometimes these interventions openly criticized the usual functioning of culture within each state or connected an overt, oppositional politics to art making, even in the ‘totalitarian’ East. Many artists explicitly embraced or worked with modes of art-making from the threatening ‘Other’ Germany, thereby realizing a cultural crossing of the border even when they physically could not broach it (although many artists did). O�entimes these artistic contestations or defections involved a revisiting of

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the recent past. Frequently these distasteful reminders of past trauma and shame were shunned by West and East German art institutions and marginalized in publications where the state and the market disseminated art. I find these o�en times confrontational artworks and projects created in both East and West Germany to be compelling and disorienting to our current understanding of postwar modernism. They have frequently been marginalized or forgo�en in recent histories of postwar art; they are my subject. This book is revisionist in its assumptions about what might constitute a modernist artwork and a history of modern art from our particular historical vantage point, one that sees the Cold War as an era that is rapidly fading into history. I question a number of modernist orthodoxies as they have been constructed in the discourse of modern art history: the absolute embrace of (progressive) abstraction and the denunciation of (regressive) figuration; the historical determinism that requires all art production, as well as any notion of the avant-garde, to move ever forward on a one-way road of progress and formalist innovation; the dismissal of a monolithic ‘official’ Soviet Bloc culture as homogeneously totalitarian and dictated from above at any and all points; or the refusal to engage in a meaningful way with the dissemination of modern art on television. These widely accepted ideas reinforce the ideological and political divisions of the Cold War superpowers in the realm of culture. Unfortunately, many of them endured beyond the Cold War, as evidenced in several publications and exhibitions about East German art in the 1990s. Art historian Martin Damus’ contorted account of East German painting rests on the shaky claim that while East German painters achieved a measure of sophistication and independence from state control, nonetheless GDR art ‘remained the art of the rulers and of the state’.16 This view of GDR art and culture under the absolute and dictatorial control of the SED was echoed in the highly controversial 1999 ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’ (Rise and Fall of the Modern) exhibition in Weimar. The three-part exhibition presented developments in twentieth-century modern art in Weimar up to and including the Nazi era; the last section consisted of a

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retrospective of East German art, but this was housed in the same building, the Mehrzweckhalle, as the Nazi paintings. Arguably, then, the curator Achim Preiss encouraged viewers to make connections between the paintings of these two eras of German history.17 The fact that Preiss was West German contributed to the exhibition’s particularly charged reception. The break with this facile aligning of East German art with fascist art took place in the watershed 2003 Berlin exhibition ‘Kunst in der DDR’, a title which in itself posited the co-existence of both official and autonomous art in the GDR. It also presented significant and innovative work in other mediums and therefore radically expanded the post-Cold War canon of East German art. This book draws from the revisionist art historical thinking that this exhibition first presented. Fi�een years a�er the fall of the Berlin wall, ten years a�er the collapse of the Soviet Union, and at a time when communist-party-governed nations such as China, Vietnam, Cuba and Russia have entered a period defined by historians as late socialism, post-socialism or ‘postcommunism’, I recognise many of these orthodox art historical views to be part and parcel of the hegemonic, if not neo-colonialist, views of the cultural ‘winners’ of the Cold War. It is disconcerting to read earlier (Cold War) art historians, even very good ones like Serge Guilbaut, and come across this kind of statement: ‘The cultural history of the postwar period is the history of the reconstruction of American culture on new foundations laid by changes in the world economy in general and the American economy in particular.’18 In 1983, there was no question where American art stood in Guilbaut’s Copernican-style universe of modernism. Nevertheless, I recognise that the Cold War was also a cultural embargo. Information about developments in institutionally-sanctioned and in autonomous West and East German art was simply withheld from the public. This was as true for the West regarding artistic developments in the East, as it was for the East concerning developments in art from the West. Earlier art histories suffered under this vacuum of information, another Cold War legacy. The exclusion of Cold

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War socialist art from Western art history has indeed not been due to cultural arrogance. In his more recent writing Guilbaut forwards nuanced accounts of the political and intellectual ba�les between abstract and socialist realist painting in 1950s Paris;19 yet in 1990 he makes no mention of the collapse of the GDR or of the possibility that a political dynamics of modern art might also be traced behind the Iron Curtain. T.J. Clark’s important book on the intersection of modernity, modern art and socialism in the twentieth-century, Farewell to An Idea (1999), similarly makes no reference to ‘actually lived’ socialist art a�er 1945. Clark establishes both modernism and socialism as reactive developments that sometimes coincide with cultural and political refutations or negations of a Weberian notion of modernity. Clark identifies the la�er as a process of secularization—the ‘disenchantment of the world’—as well as a shi� to empiricist and materialist understanding of the physical world, manifested in the expansion of mostly capitalist markets.20 (As we’ve seen, Rose had already cast doubt on such readings of Weber.) Clark offers a refined definition of modernism as a reactive phenomenon: ‘…[modernism] emerge(s) as a distinctive pa�erning of mental and technical possibilities’.21 At best, this is an extremely open-ended characterization. Following classical Marxism, Clark reinstalls economy at the heart of social life and money as ‘…the root form of representation in bourgeois society’.22 Modernism and modern art worked toward a ‘…recognition of the social reality of the sign (away from the comforts of narrative and illusionism, was the claim); but equally it dreamed of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed’.23 Clark’s epistemological and ontological configuration of modernism avoids discussion of the impact of World War Two, the great watershed of the twentieth century. He implicitly suggests that modernism by his definition did not survive that catastrophic event. The key paintings Clark uses as his case studies of modernism span figurative and abstract painting, by David, Pissarro, Picasso, post-revolutionary Malevich and El Lissitzsky, and

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Pollock, artworks that build from his definition of modernism: they reject or otherwise a�empt to reconfigure the sign as an alternative to a disenchanted world of things and money. Clark chooses to ignore the spoiler in his account, the imagined collective identities offered by modern notions of nation. For the sign used to construct a sense of belonging to nation— which Clark admits ‘haunts modernism’—actually remains a central problem within it. With the newly constructed collective nationalist identities that came into being in the nineteenth century also came the spectre of the non-empirical and nonrational re-entering the modern era, in an a�empt to reinfuse it with something like an a�erglow of enchantment; thus, the largely successful promotion of an aberrant nationalism and its myths by the fascists in Germany in particular. Historians continue to debate the complex relation between fascism and modernity more generally, and question if fascism belonged to modernity, was a lacuna in it, or might be seen as an ‘alternative modernity’ at different points in its development.24 Clark does not acknowledge the difficult dynamic of nationalism and fascism within modernism. As I will argue, the issue of national and international collective identifications becomes quite central to the course of modernism a�er 1945. The critical and negating force of modernism that Clark describes throughout his writing continues in postwar German art both East and West in instances where artists recognized and worked through the aberrant turns of German modernity. On the one hand this had to do with Germany’s difficult relation to modernist notions of nation, and on the other with facing up to or ‘coming to terms with’ the criminal rejection of civilization that it precipitated. Certain artists working in divided Germany in fact returned to modernism’s critical traditions. I am one of the first post-Cold War American art historians with free access to East German archives that were far less so when I wrote my dissertation in the 1990s; some of them have in fact ended up in the U.S. This book suggests that a look back at the style of ‘Socialist Realism’—which once symbolized the other side of the East-West divide and even an antidote to high modernism and the avant-garde—is in order. At the height of

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the Cold War, ‘Socialist Realism’ in visual art was rejected by the West as pure propaganda and as emblematic of totalitarian Communist regimes. Socialist Realism is an art that the West continues to cast as a style that is the most primitive (in its rejection of ‘advanced’ abstraction) and the most barbaric cultural practice of the postwar world (in its explicit politics as dictated by the state). Socialist realist art is thought to exceed the strangeness and abjection of any Western avant-garde. Historians like Greg Castillo and Paul Be�s have argued for the historical significance of socialist architecture and design during the Cold War, largely based on direct connections they establish between these cultural forms and: 1) officially sanctioned architectural programs and urban design; or 2) mass production and its impact on the GDR economy.25 However the question of where we might place Socialist Realism as an art practice—is it an ‘other modernism’? Postmodernism? Somewhere in between?—is still contested within the discipline of art history. Art historians and citizens of the former USSR and Soviet Bloc countries Boris Groys, Ekaterina Degot, Ales Erjavec, Eva Forgacs and Sergiusz Michalski, and former East German historians Annegret Janda, Eugen Blume and Kerstin Mey, continue to publish on the complexity of visual art and of socialist modernist traditions on the other side of the Cold War. As a result of this new research our entire picture of Cold War culture, and perhaps of modernism itself, is about to undergo a sea change. Like these authors, I want to raise the possibility that not only are there moments of socialist modernism to be found and studied in the visual art of the former Soviet Bloc, but also that ‘advanced’ western art was impacted by the ‘East’ at various points even during the Cold War. This book challenges a deeply held Western bias—based on some of the high-modernist assumptions I outlined above—about the unique ‘freedom’ and inherent aesthetic and ethical superiority of Western ‘advanced art’ over the art of socialist countries. Because of this bias art historians of the late Cold War era have not included postwar socialist art in art histories of postwar modernism, which is assumed to be exclusively western. Some authors have

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incorrectly assumed that political repression of artists in East Germany was so extreme that no significant art was developed there.26 In tracking instances of encounter and confrontation and points of synthesis between western and eastern notions of modern art as they developed in divided Germany, I owe a debt to Susan Buck-Morss’ watershed Dreamworld and Catastrophe, the first truly post-Cold War study of the visual cultures of the Soviet Union and the United States. Further, I am indebted to the scholar of German modernism, Irit Rogoff, who already in 1991 had commented on what might be lost and gained if the division of East and West were erased in German reunification. The overarching concern of her anthology The Divided Heritage (1991), a publication connected to the Royal Academy of Art’s exhibition ‘German Art in the 20th Century’ (1985), was the great drama of German modernist culture before and a�er 1945 and its difficult relation to history and ‘national heritage’. The essays in her book presented a German modernism of rupture and fragmentation, in opposition to the smooth and exclusively western unity the 1986 exhibition had foregrounded. Importantly Rogoff first pointed to the cultural preoccupation with collective memory, trauma and commemoration in West German art of the late 1980s, and to a corresponding ‘shi� from a discourse on history to an alternative discourse of memory’.27 In recognizing artists’ turn away from coherent notions of nationalism in favour of anti-nationalist and even post-historical aspects of identity, Rogoff uncovered the terrain that is the focus of this book. Moreover I propose that artists’ turn to the discourse on memory has a longer and more complex history, one that is a result of Cold War tensions and political instabilities inherent to divided Germany. Like Rogoff I am struck with artists’ turn to a remembering art practice in Cold War Germany. As a major philosophical development a�er the crisis of World War Two, the writings of the Frankfurt School in West Germany illuminate for me, as they do for Heibel, this cultural turn toward a discourse of memory. Although first developed in the 1920s, Frankfurt School art theory was not widely read or discussed before the 1960s. The place of memory within modernist culture had been

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a broad field of intellectual inquiry initiated by the crisis of fascism in Europe. The bleak views of exiled Frankfurt School philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment (German 1944; English 1972) assessed the cultural and epistemological landscape of the West at the mid-century. This book presented a history and critique of Enlightenment rationalization, its continued ties to mythic thought, and its relentless pursuit of the domination of nature. Adorno and Horkheimer maintained that the product of this Enlightenment project, the positivist subject, fared no be�er under the technological advances which marked mass culture society both in the U.S. and under fascism. Increasing reification of social life as loss (in Adorno’s famous phrase, ‘all reification is a forge�ing’28) caused an ever-greater regression in cognitive capacity and in cultural reception and perception. The suffering of this subject and its right to an as-yet unfulfilled corporeal gratification could, however, mark some hope for what was le� of serious bourgeois—and modernist—culture. The research initiated by the School of Social Research in Frankfurt developed a distinct thread of Western Marxism in Germany during the Weimar Republic and into the postwar period. Mostly sociologists by training, the group developed Western Marxist political and also cultural theory that, like the French surrealists, at points integrated aspects of psychoanalysis, primarily through Herbert Marcuse’s postwar publications. Many of Benjamin’s essays were first published in the ‘50s or as late as 1969. In Benjamin and Marcuse student-movementrelated theorists as well as art critics discovered a model of an emancipatory and engaged modern art and material culture for mass culture society, and even the possibility of a culturally led revolutionary moment. Horkheimer and Adorno’s art theory, but even more so that of Benjamin and Marcuse, foregrounded the possibility of revolutionary change, an element of collective memory and a critical aspect of modernist culture. Drawing from Benjamin’s work, Marcuse in the 1960s evolved an operative restorative or even redemptive notion of memory exclusive to the sphere of art and aesthetic experience, and posited memory as fundamental to

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the category of experience (Erfahrung) as an aspect of subjectivity that might be mobilized in order to resist reification.29 As I discuss in Chapter 4, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Helmut Lethen, and Michael Scharang, major cultural theorists of the West German student movement, continued this line of thought. In a parallel to the memory-focused and materialist art theory of the Frankfurt School, the art theory of the student movement and the art of visual artists working in postwar Germany would make cultural resistance and collective memory a central aspect of modern art. I admit to the dangers that are inherent in framing this project. I do not want to minimize the sometimes horrific and censorious nature of the SED regime in the GDR, which imprisoned, harassed and placed under surveillance artists who would not retreat from their own notions of the modern, like Roger Loewig (whose art I do not discuss). As a recent German conference on this topic made plain, another painter I discuss, Willi Si�e, was possibly a saboteur of careers and responsible for the obscurity and failed careers of other talented GDR artists.30 I have found remarkable East German art but I struggle not to whitewash the corrupt bureaucracy that helped set much of it in place. The same SED that supported the Stasi also seemed eager not to control the lives of many of its artists; hundreds if not thousands of artists were allowed to simply leave the GDR, to emigrate either to West Germany or to other Soviet Bloc countries, particularly during the 1980s.31 In contrast to its great importance as a theme in earlier discourse on West German art, I have found li�le in the compelling art produced in West Germany that connects to destroyed notions of German nationalism, but rather to what Walter Grasskamp has called the ‘discontinuity of the nation’.32 When West German art did so, as in Anselm Kiefer’s and Gerhard Richter’s paintings, artists dissected a dead, post-national corpse. In the East Germany, nationalist identity was socialist identity, and artworks by Si�e, Fritz Cremer and Werner Tübke contain the contortions the socialist state demanded in its histories of the recent German past. In East German art the true identity of the Jewish victims of Nazism and the Holocaust were o�en simply not recognized

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in the rush to construct fallen martyrs of German communism. The post-nationalist discourse on cultural memory, in its return to earlier art theory by Benjamin and Marcuse, instead focused on the traumas that fascist nationalism had set in place. It provides the intellectual context for much of the art this book examines. The first chapter, ‘Recuperating the Modern: The Cold War Ba�le for the “Real”’, traces the history of the cultural differentiation of the East from West in the postwar period. It considers East and West Germany’s dual agendas for the recovery of visual modernism through the 1960s. The resurrection of modern art in the two Germanies took place within key debates in art criticism and in museum exhibitions of the 1950s and ‘60s. The central commi�ee’s ‘Bi�erfeld Policy’ of 1959 advocated a particular propagandistic focus to East German painters’ cultural reflection on the recent German past. This directive, issued by the central commi�ee, also required that GDR painters live, work, and exhibit their art at specific factory and agricultural collective sites, and produce paintings depicting the workers there in an easily legible style. While these sites were culturally privileged in the East, those that bore the traces of Nazi atrocities remained far less interesting to either German state. A�er 1945 monuments and memorials to the victims of the Holocaust were erected at the largest concentration camp sites in West and East Germany: Dachau in the West and Buchenwald in the GDR. Unlike West Germany, the commission for a sculptural monument for Buchenwald, awarded to Fritz Cremer (a gentile), was widely discussed in the GDR press. Cremer had to revise his studies for a sculpture several times. The final work at best ambiguously suggests Jewish prisoners at Buchenwald; instead it privileges the camp’s communist prisoners and a mythical moment of resistance.33 Thus the SED transformed the sites of the camps into sites of communist martyrdom, and in the process masked the anti-semitic basis of the Holocaust and its primarily Jewish victims.

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Concentration camp sites were considerably removed from urban areas, and therefore it was not particularly difficult for East or West Germans to avoid the sites of destruction and any uncomfortable confrontation with direct memories of the Holocaust and the violence of the recent German past. To counter both ideological manipulation of the primary sites of memory on the one hand, and the continued repression of the recent past on the other, many artists in West and East Germany pursued strategies that centred on the postwar city. I describe some of them in Chapter 2. One strategy concerned the found object gathered from the city streets and which sometimes bore direct traces of the violent German past. One of the first West Berlin memorials to commemorate the victims of a Nazi atrocity, the group exhibition ‘Hommage à Lidice’ at the Galerie René Block in 1967, used assemblage and the found object to create a series of unorthodox memorials to the vanished Czech village. Ed Kienholz, an American artist working in West Berlin beginning in the 1970s, and the German artist Wolf Vostell, mined local flea markets for material for their art, such as Naziera radios. Kienholz and Vostell’s assemblages therefore make use of the readymade but open it to the workings of cultural memory. Influenced by Kienholz, the collective Büro Berlin (active 1978-1988) also used ‘found’ sculptural objects and spaces to investigate the relation of memory to the urban postwar material culture and architecture. K.P. Brehmer and the American artist Yvonne Rainer pursued a second strategy: their performance-based art examined the relation of filmic and photographic representation of the city landmarks to collective memory. In East Berlin, Manfred Butzmann’s photo-based posters also engaged city space and refused the state’s restrictions on where art was to take place and how the socialist public was to engage with it. Butzmann contested the restrictiveness of socialist sitespecific practice and opened new alternatives to how public art could be experienced in East Germany. Butzmann and others, like the group Clara Mosch, thereby opened East German art to ecological activism and to other politicised causes.

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Chapter 3, ‘Bonjour Monsieur Courbet: Realist Painting and the Defector Dialectic’, considers the cultural dynamic between East and West Germany within the most privileged art medium of the Cold War, painting. As was the case in the US, West Germany privileged the East German artist/defector. Several East German defectors became celebrated ‘heroes’ of the West due to their rejection of state socialism and their mastery of figurative painting. East German expatriates (or exiles) included not only the well-known artists A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and Wolf (Imi) Knoebel, but also hundreds of others. By the late ‘70s, East German painters Willi Si�e, Werner Tübke, and Bernhard Heisig were included in western exhibitions despite the protests of Western artists, defectors among them. East Germany had its greatest impact on western art within the medium of painting. Explicitly political and even vulgar Marxist forms of socialist realist painting gained caché among le�ist artists in West Germany. The pursuit of a modified version of heroic socialist realist painting by the West Germans Eugen Schönebeck (another defector) and Jörg Immendorff— who also collaborated with the border-hopping Dresden artist, A.R. Penck—provides evidence that Socialist Realism realized in West Germany could function as a radical approach to painting. Their work points to the influence of East German painting on the West. Chapter 4 examines the unifying role of performance art as an autonomous art practice in both Berlins during the Wall era. Performance reached its cultural zenith in West Berlin in the 1960s. In that performance was cast as a failure by West German intellectuals and was recognized as a leisure activity rather than art in the East, as a medium it constructed a space of experimentation and freedom that art institutions could not offer in either Germany. The chapter focuses on two major hubs of performance activity in West Germany: Cologne and Wiesbaden, where artists from France, Switzerland and the U.S., including John Cage and Fluxus artists, all converged by the early ‘60s to formulate work around ‘Concrete Art’. The Galerie René Block, in the more politicized atmosphere in West Berlin, became a centre for performance in the early‘60s. Performance

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artists from the U.S. and the rest of Europe converged there: Fluxus, Wolf Vostell, Allan Kaprow, Stanley Brouwn, Carolee Schneemann, Rebecca Horn, Ulay, and Joseph Beuys. By the 1980s the West had its greatest impact on the autonomous scene in East Germany through performance. In the GDR a working-through of Western developments in performance was delayed by more than a decade. By the mid‘70s Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), Dresden and East Berlin became centres for performance. A�er it was first shown in East Germany in 1981, some East German artists embraced Beuys’ art, particularly the art historian Eugen Blume and artist Erhard Monden. The ecologically concerned artists’ group Clara Mosch in Karl-Marx-Stadt had established performance as an art form supported by the state. They took advantage of the fact that local cultural functionaries simply did not understand their activities. The Auto-Perforationist group formed at the Dresden academy for similar reasons. SED bureaucrats’ loss of control over performance art during the late ‘80s foreshadowed parallel cultural destabilizations in East German society that ultimately led to the state’s collapse. The final chapter, ‘Art on Television: The Other Cold War Divide’, examines how each German state used television to disseminate the art practices it promoted, and how artists of the East and West made use of this alternative site for art. With the exception of a small area in the GDR, television broadcasts could be viewed by citizens of both countries, as no technology was in place to block transmission for the East German or West Berlin public. The technology of television presented an ideal opportunity for each state to present its visual art to citizens of the other state, and to disseminate art beyond the physical and geographic limitations of the modern art museum. Focusing on a number of key experiments in art broadcasting—the a�empt to televise aesthetic experience and aesthetic judgment in the GDR, and the introduction of the ‘television gallery’ and new mediums of video and performance art as subjects of West German television—I argue that televised art in divided Germany began to erode cultural divisions between East and West Germany long before cooperative exhibitions and the fall

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of the Wall. A brief postscript discusses key artworks in postsocialist, united Berlin that reassess fading cultural divisions and the issue of memory more generally. This book presents a new chapter in the history of modern art in considering the cultural struggles of artists as they coped with the wide-scale trauma of World War Two and the global ideological divide of the Cold War era. It contests the perception that an absolute cultural separation existed between the capitalist West and the communist Soviet Bloc. It therefore questions Western assumptions about East/West cultural relations that remain operative within the disciplines of art history, cultural, and media studies. In considering the artistic concerns shared by East German artists and their counterparts working in the West, the sophisticated ways that artists in divided Germany struggled to carry visual art beyond the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century becomes apparent. A range of international artists who worked in Germany during the Cold War produced artwork that engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with the issues of memory and trauma, that is far less known than official memorials and ‘counter-memorials’. International cultural exchange and flows of culture across borders (i.e., the ‘Iron Curtain’) characterize the painting, performance, and sculpture of divided Germany. This book therefore begins to apply the critical concept of the border to the art of the Cold War.

1. RECUPERATING THE MODERN The Cold War Ba�le for the ‘Real’ The GDR’s overnight erection of the Berlin Wall in August of 1961 intensified a parallel program of cultural demarcation of the two zones that had already begun in 1949 with the founding of the East and West German states. Over the years following the construction of the wall two differing definitions—one could also call them canons—of modern art would be forwarded on each side of it. In this chapter I focus on how each German state, through its art institutions, through major debates and directives, and through the key exhibitions it sponsored, recovered modern art and formed it into a useable canon that squared with each state’s evolving art politics and that served as a guide for contemporary art production. Reconstruction and the ‘Formalism Debate’ In the days immediately following the end of the war there was li�le activity around visual art in Germany, as the ma�er of survival within virtually completely destroyed cities took precedence for most of the population.1 Under the supervision and control of the occupying French, British, American and Soviet troops, political and cultural organizations took shape already by the summer of 1945: the Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany (Kulturbund zur demokratischen Erneuerung Deutschlands) was formed in July under the German leadership of Karl Hofer, Karl SchmidtRo�luff and other artists. Because they refused to recognize the

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authority of Soviet administrators that had helped establish this cultural organization, the Americans and the British disbanded this group for a time in 1947—a move that the Soviet Military Administration in Germany or SMAD seized upon to question the culture of ‘democracy’ extended by both of these occupiers. In these early years before the founding of the East and West German states (in 1949), the occupying powers intervened to cast various German art institutions in the image of their own basic assumptions about contemporary art. Yet in this atmosphere artists’ groups began to reconstitute themselves in Berlin, as well as a trade union with an arm dedicated to the Visual Arts (Freie Deutscher Gewerkscha�sbund, or Free German Trade Union). In the following year several exhibitions already presented different versions of modern art to the Germans: in August, the first ‘German Art Exhibition’ took place in Dresden. The first large-scale exhibition in Germany a�er 1945, it that a�racted almost 75,000 visitors, and vindicated the long roster of blacklisted and inner and outer emigration modernists of the 1930s including Hans and Lea Grundig, Käthe Kollwitz, Ernst Barlach, O�o Dix, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, E.L. Kirchner, Max Pechstein, George Grosz, Willi Baumeister and others. Effectively it presented a history of German modernism, with a focus on expressionism. This direction of the avant-garde was generally unknown to the German population, as it had been kept from their knowledge for fourteen years. Another exhibition in October of 1946 in Berlin presented a history of French modernism and included contemporary French artworks, which precipitated a more sceptical reception among some critics, a reaction in keeping with the history of German debates on French modernism in Germany going back to the turn of the century. Some art historians and critics I have spoken with point to the time directly a�er the war as one of relative cultural freedom in the recovery of modernism, due to the quasi-total tabula rasa of modern culture and art that was one of the many legacies of National Socialism. As early as 1948 the major and emergent cultural conflicts of the Cold War played themselves out on the stage of occupied Berlin. The so-called ‘Formalism Debate’, initiated by SMAD

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administrator Alexander Dymschitz with his article ‘On the formalist direction in German painting’, published on November 24, 1948, led to a two-year exchange between artists, critics and state functionaries in the Tägliche Rundschau newspaper (an organ of the SMAD). Dymschitz helped formulate the SED’s (Socialist Unity Party) early and dismissive position on German modernism in particular around an imported Soviet model of ‘Socialist Realism’. Dymschitz’s harangue against ‘decadentformalist art’ condemned the modernist avant-garde, and also dismissively a�acked Picasso and Chagall, but he raged with greater harshness against the le�ist and socialist artists of ASSO (Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands, Association of German Revolutionary Visual Artists), an artists’ group affiliated with the KPD and founded in 1928. These la�er German artists had unequivocally commi�ed themselves to socialism and revolution. Those who managed to survive the war, like Hans Grundig, had been imprisoned in concentration camps because of their political affiliation with the KPD. Dymschitz’s Stalinist a�ack on this legacy of German socialist modernism as ‘decadent’ certainly seems misdirected but perhaps indicative of the harsh, anti-German aspect of Stalinist culture. East German artists and institutions such as the Academy of the Arts (founded a few years later, in 1950) and the VBK, or the German Artists Union (also formed 1950), directly and repeatedly rejected this rehashing of Nazi anti-modernism filtered through the views of Joseph Stalin over the next years. Even a few weeks later the paper published Herbert Sandberg’s rejection of Dymschitz’s views: ‘We should not accuse bourgeois artists of decadence and instead consider third-rate artists more significant than Schmidt-Ro�luff just because they illustrate social themes…we are proud to be able to build on a tradition…art should not become sterile’.2 The second ‘German Art Exhibition’ in Dresden in 1949 still however featured modernist artworks by some of the German ‘decadents’ including the Grundigs and John Heartfield. And in 1951, the Academy staged exhibitions of the work of le�ist expressionists Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach. The fact that the feature essay of the Barlach catalogue was withheld from

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publication until 1981 indicates that ideological disagreement was still widespread within the party. In spite of these Academy exhibitions and clearly in accordance with the views of the central commi�ee of the SED— aesthetics and the stance against formalism was debated at the third party congresses in 1950—the Stalinist campaign against German modernism as decadent and formalist was intensified in 1951 in order to launch direct a�acks on contemporary artists who looked to modernist precedents as well as on expressionism as a direction in German modernism, using the figure of Kollwitz. Therefore the SED slowly severed East German identity from all traditions of German modernism, even those of the commi�ed le�, in an effort to wipe it out from (art) history. In 1951, N. Orlow began a series of articles, ‘Paths and wrong turns in modern German art’, in the Tägliche Rundschau; the article was published in January in two installments.3 Orlow’s primary objective in these long essays is to name and condemn the ‘representatives of formalism in the GDR.’4 A�er condemning the contemporary painters Horst Strempel, Arno Mohr and Karl Crodel, Orlow pronounces: ‘The supporters of the ugly in painting seek their precursor in Kollwitz and present her as the mother of proletarian art in Germany…Kollwitz was never the mother of a proletarian art in Germany…Kollwitz only saw the suffering part of the people in workers…The working class leads and controls all workers in the ba�le for the liberation of society from the shackles of imperialism…Kollwitz did not understand this’.5 Orlow’s anti-modernist tract therefore not only condemned specific contemporary East German artists, but also dismissed the most famed painters of the German socialist tradition in the visual arts. A single dissenting view by the Grundigs, defending Kollwitz, was published. Another article (by Wilhelm Girnus) condemned the Bauhaus as a ‘child of American cosmopolitanism’, introducing the term into this debate as a characterization of the modernism. According to Girnus and central commi�ee member Ernst Hoffmann, the ‘cosmopolitan’ severed any connection with country in order to exploit the working class and ‘rob them of their national characteristics’, a ironic remark on the part of these spokesmen

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as they abandoned German modernism to take up a Soviet model for socialist realist painting.6 Two years later these views were linked to the term ‘Socialist Realism’ as a Soviet development by then minister-president O�o Grotewohl, part of the ‘new course’ announced by the central commi�ee in the wake of the large-scale workers riots in Berlin in 1953: ‘The party supports a realist art production, as ever we are convinced that Socialist Realism is a worthy goal’.7 A major travelling exhibition of contemporary Soviet painting, ‘Soviet and Pre-revolutionary Russian Art’, coincided with this remark; its catalogue explicitly stated that the nineteenth-century circle of painters around the realist Repin, the ‘Peredwishniki’, should serve as model for GDR painters. Other contemporary Soviet exhibitions followed in the early 1960s, but none included the Soviet avant-gardes of constructivism or suprematism. Through this early insistence on the superiority of Soviet Socialist Realism based on nineteenth-century models, East German contemporary art hardened into recognizable genres during the ‘50s which were o�en cited and reproduced in art publications so as to serve as examples for other artists to follow: portraits of the (heroic) worker; the brigade picture, a similarly idealized working-collective portrait; and the discussion picture—a genre famously established by Rudolf Bergander’s celebrated House Peace Commi�ee (1952).8 The party effectively promoted these genres through commissions and public contracts extended by state institutions or by large industrial concerns; as the state allowed no private art market, any commissions to be had in the GDR necessarily had to conform to these pre-approved genres.9 Within these genres the worker as well as the working collective were to be rendered with li�le ambiguity or nuance, and not as individual personalities but as general and schematic socialist types. Even so, Bergander’s painting, shown at the ‘Third German Art Exhibition’ in Dresden in 1953, was criticized for showing its central figure with his back to the viewer. A critic understood this figure to be leading ‘the first understanding on the part of the people, under the guidance of the party of the working class, of new ideas, particularly in regard to peace’.10

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An artist like O�o Nagel, a vehement defender of Kollwitz in the formalism debate also conformed to state genres in his oddly serene depiction of a Stalinallee bricklayer of 1953, an image constructed at a point just prior or just following an event deeply repressed by the GDR: the Workers’ Uprising on the Stalinallee (later the Karl-Marx-Allee) in June 17, 1953, when martial law was declared and Soviet tanks confronted striking workers, opening fire on them at or very near the actual se�ing of Nagel’s painting. Thus in the year 1953 Nagel could express his view of the importance of Kollwitz’s work and more generally of German expressionism but not within the practice of painting. In another interesting development, a wide public discussion of the work of Picasso occupied the journal Bildende Kunst in the late ‘50s. By means of this debate, both German and other European modernisms slowly seeped into GDR art discourse and into the actual practice of painting in East Germany.11 Yet throughout the 1950s and mostly at the Academy, a number of exhibitions in East Berlin focused on classical modernism (Gabriel Mucchi, 1955; Mexican Graphic Art, 1956; Picasso, 1956; O�o Dix, 1957; Ludwig Justi’s Picasso retrospective at the Alte Nationalgalerie in East Berlin in 1957 12; Renato Gu�uso, 1960). Nevertheless, the first planned exhibition of John Heartfield’s anti-fascist photomontages in the German Democratic Republic was cancelled, and he obtained membership in the SED only a�er some difficulty in 1956. Therea�er his work seemed not to a�ract any real debate. Most certainly Heartfield’s cold-war salvos—as in his 1959 photomontage, The Freedom of the Beast of Prey (Fig. 1.1, 1959)—a�acked the remilitarization of the West under Adenauer, the allied occupation, and capitalist notions of freedom. The boundary Heartfield himself pictured in his montage/parable of 1959 had already come back to haunt him, since one might say that his own art, like the li�le frog, barely survived his border-crossing—but to the East. Bertolt Brecht’s intercession in the case of ‘Johnny Heartfield’ was not unique in the 1950s; he also defended Ernst Barlach’s work against the view that the expressionist sculptor’s work had become anachronistic to an East German culture of socialist unity. In Brecht’s words, ‘It is not a ma�er of throwing these

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Fig. 1.1 John Heartfield, The Freedom of the Beast of Prey, 1959; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

works into the same pot with the others, particularly when none of these works is dealt with in a concrete fashion. Abstract critique does not lead to a realist art’.13 In such statements Brecht, an international figure, repeatedly countered the positions of the ‘Formalism Debate’. Ulrike Goeschen argues that differing views of Socialist Realism competed within the Politburo throughout

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the GDR’s existence. The early and orthodox view, that the socialist realist art of the USSR was the only example to follow, was announced by Alfred Kurella, head of the Commission for Cultural Questions in a Neues Deutschland article of 1958, and generally retained currency to the end of the GDR. Otherwise the three main tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism—the tie to the people (proletarian art), the tie to the party, and the presentation of the typical character of socialist life—were generally accepted and adhered to until 1989.14 The Bi�erfeld Path Central commi�ee chairman Walter Ulbricht had also announced the return to conservative notions of ‘realism’ by 1959. The Ulbricht regime took up the structure of the fiveyear plan to control cultural production and monitor cultural debates more closely. Ulbricht’s cultural directives established programmatic cultural goals and activity, usually encapsulated in a slogan. This format for cultural programming would continue in the GDR until its collapse. Underscoring the importance of visual art to the socialist government, the East German state had fostered sites of exhibition both in and outside of the museum. In a kind of parallel to the integrating strategies of Western performance art like Happenings, which ambitiously sought to unify ‘art and life’, the cultural directive of the ‘Bi�erfeld policy’ encouraged socialist artists to draw subject ma�er from ‘everyday life’ which was understood to take place primarily at factory and agricultural sites. Socialist artists were to observe everyday life of the GDR’s Soviet-inspired labour brigades and agricultural collectives. The SED sought to revive labour brigades a�er their decline in the a�ermath of the Berlin uprising of 1953. The ‘Brigade Mamai’, for example, was based in an aluminium factory in the industrial city of Bi�erfeld and named in honour of the Soviet miner Nikolai Jakovlevisch Mamai, who founded a competition to reach and surpass production quotas. The state’s revival of the brigades production model in the late ‘50s a�empted to position the brigade as the true centre of socialist life and culture.

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Family life was also to be connected to the brigade, through visits of spouses to the factory, communal field trips to movie theatres and exhibitions, brigade diaries, wall-newspapers, and ‘Kulturecken’ featuring meetings with artists, writers and with Soviet brigades.15 The first Bi�erfeld conference took place in 1959. In an a�empt to engage the working class and to reinvigorate the established genres of painting in 1959, Ulbricht and the Politburo member Alfred Kurella refigured party policy in 1959 around the Soviet Proletkult model with the slogan Kumpel, greif zur Feder, die sozialistische Nationalkultur braucht Dich! (Reach for your pen, coal miner! Socialist national culture needs you!). This directive was outlined in their addresses to the conference in 1959, and intended for visual art to be directly connected with factory production. This program meant to encourage untrained artists who, groomed by the party, were to develop ‘true’ images of the socialist subject in visual art. Trained artists were instructed to go beyond their customary circle and work within labour collectives and industries, and to orient the subject ma�er of their art accordingly; that is, to encompass the subject of actual working collectives. Therefore artists like the Bauhaus-trained Walter Dötsch entered into ‘friendship contracts’ with specific brigades like the Brigade Mamai, not only to paint the brigade in the act of labour but also to serve as a consultant to artistic questions regarding publications or agit-prop, and to provide instruction for the drawing and painting circles within which brigade workers were to produce their own art. Through these policies of the ‘Bi�erfelder Weg’ the SED a�empted to enlist visual art a major weapon in the ba�le to raise production levels beyond those of the Wirtscha�swunder Federal Republic. The short-term results of this populist program were mixed. Workers who coincidentally showed some natural ability in visual art applied to art schools in order to be retrained as visual artists.16 When trained artists produced more interesting or genre-expanding visual results in following the Bi�erfeld Way, state-sponsored critics were lukewarm.17 For example, critics understood that Metzkes’ 1959 composition Instruction at the Polytechnic engaged with Bi�erfeld policy regarding the

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development of the working class, but at the same time they a�acked it as ‘melancholic and dreamy’, having ‘proexistentialist nuances’ and participating in ‘decadence’.18 In short they condemned Metzkes’ subtle reference to modernist forms and elements as too engaged with questions of compositional refinement. Brigades also commissioned artworks from trained artists like Dötsch. Dötsch met frequently at the Aluminumwerk with the brigade to complete extensive sketches and presumably to get to know the workers. His official commission was issued by the Advisory for Visual Art at the Department of Culture and Advisory for the District of Halle. Dötsch’s painting Schmelzer Nationalpreistrager Hübner hil� seinen Kollegen (The Nationalprize-winning Welder Hübner Helps his Colleagues) was celebrated in 1961 and exhibited in Karl-Marx-Stadt. It received the art prize of the Electrochemical Collective Bi�erfeld and was installed in local school lobby. However records show that sometime in the ‘70s the painting was ‘stored’ in the school’s a�ic where the art historian Burghard Duhm discovered it in 1994.19 The coming together of art and life at the site of socialist labour was therefore brief in the GDR. By the late ‘70s the ‘Bi�erfelder Weg’ was bemoaned as using art to compose at best a superficial view of everyday labour. As GDR production levels continued to plummet, the Bi�erfeld policy was more or less quietly abandoned. The SED’s Turn to German Modernism By 1960, the Ministry for Culture decided that working groups, similar to the circles established in Leipzig to research the history of proletarian/revolutionary literature in Germany, would also be established to research German traditions in visual art. Through the authority of the SED central commi�ee’s Institut für Gesellscha�swissenscha�en (of which the art historian Ullrich Kuhirt was a founding member), this group would lead to major reversals in policy and a liberalization of the party’s art politics in returning it over the next decades to a more sympathetic, though critical, view of German modernism as a basis for East German Socialist

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Realism. Kuhirt was a primary and important spokesman for a liberalized view of German and Soviet modernism.20 The IfG would furthermore become a training ground for art historians and art educators who served in major positions in the VBK on the federal or local level.21 In an opening address for a symposium at the Humboldt Universität in Berlin in November of 1960, Kuhirt spoke about the tradition of proletarian/revolutionary art in Germany that went back to the nineteenth century and culminated in the work of Kollwitz. Goeschen traces the beginnings of the IfG’s liberalized, inclusive definition of German Socialist Realism in this address and in Kuhirt’s dissertation in art history, filed in East Berlin in 1962.22 In sharp contrast to views aired in the East German press in the ‘50s, Kuhirt fixed the origin of socialist realist art in Germany with the founding of the KPD in 1919 and with those artists who aligned themselves with the party in creating a ‘proletarian/revolutionary’ art. Kuhirt outlines the following key components of socialist realist art: its main theme of the worker; its goal to awaken the worker’s movement in Germany; and the ‘organic’ tie it establishes between the people and art as ‘proletarian/revolutionary’ and socialist realist.23 It should be noted that Kuhirt proscribes no specific style or medium in this list. Kuhirt considered Kollwitz’s memorial print for Karl Liebknecht exemplary of this origin. In his lecture and dissertation Kuhirt largely understands expressionism to be modernism, and of the ‘subjective’ thread of modernism he privileges the Blue Rider, Klee, and Fernand Léger. However for Kuhirt both Dada and Neue Sachlichkeit do not belong to the tradition of socialist realist art. Kuhirt seems to appreciate Dada’s great criticality toward the bourgeoisie, but says that it puts nothing ‘positive’ forward in the place of its great negation; Neue Sachlichkeit has in his view no relation to reality of the working class. Kuhirt designated the ASSO artists—Grosz, Heartfield, Rudolf Schlichter, O�o Dix, O�o Nagel, Oskar Nerlinger and others—as having most significance to East German Socialist Realism, and he underscored the importance of further research into these artists. Kuhirt also went against the accepted

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knowledge that ASSO was formed to follow the precedent of the Soviet AChRR of 1922, a conservative artists group that included Isaac Brodsky and others who advocated a return to realism and to tradition in visual art. Instead Kuhirt argues the connection between ASSO and the October group as the primary and progressive Soviet precedent, based in part on the October exhibition ASSO had hosted in October of 1930. Heartfield and the constructivist Nerlinger, like the October artists, turned to photomontage or other ‘new modes’ like constructivism to respond to ‘new and complex developments in social life’.24 Goeschen notes Kuhirt’s debt to the KPD art theorist Alfred Durus, who Kuhirt revived in assembling this new prehistory of Socialist Realism. Like Durus he privileges the graphic art of the le�ist press in the Weimar Republic. Kuhirt then by 1962 clearly opens Socialist Realism to various tendencies of German and Russian modernism and even the avant-garde, including constructivism, the anti-realist distortions of ‘subjectivist’ directions like expressionism, and to new mediums including photography and photomontage. Kuhirt furthermore notes that during the war a younger generation, some of whom began with ASSO in the ‘20s—Alfred Frank, Heartfield, Heinrich Vogeler, the Grundigs, Fritz Schultze—continued to do significant work commi�ed to socialist goals and anti-fascism in exile or in the camps (Hans Grundig). These artists have brought ‘a progressive socialist realist art to the GDR’.25 Kuhirt argued that many of these historical traditions anticipated the 1959 ‘Bi�erfeld path’ in establishing a Proletkult relation between artists and workers. But open and public disagreement on the appropriate path toward German Socialist Realism continued, as less-progressive functionaries of the IfG still controlled the German Artists Union (VBK) regional exhibitions in these key years a�er the building of the Berlin Wall. As had become a pa�ern, Lea Grundig was openly critical of the work chosen as exemplary of the new direction of East German art by the jury of the Fi�h Dresden ‘German Art Exhibition’ of 1962; already in 1957 she had complained that these exhibitions evidenced how a widely ‘misunderstood and inartistic “realism”’ had become dominant in the GDR.26 The 1962 exhibition was similarly composed

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of ‘…straightforward depictions or copies totally lacking in sophistication…negative a�empts at reaching Socialist Realism through superficial depiction of people, objects and events’.27 (Fig. 1.2, 1962) Nevertheless the press continued to foreground seemingly inexplicable ‘successes’: Walter Womacka’s At the Beach was celebrated as ‘upli�ing into art the beauty of …our developing youth and their inner abundance… thus obtaining

Fig. 1.2 Walter Womacka, At the Beach, 1962; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

aesthetic generalization for the truth of life’.28 As further proof that ‘upli�ing’ content could be registered immediately by the socialist populace, exhibition visitors to Dresden voted this painting their favourite.29 The popular and critical embrace of this painting as ‘socialist’ seems mysterious. Even if one excuses its lack of compositional interest, it is difficult to find any appeal

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in the oddly distracted encounter it stages between the sexes. The erotic intimacy the scene suggests, and its suggestive depiction of the female body, may have distinguished it from depictions of labour. Alternatively as its subject ma�er focused on leisure activities away from the factory, Womacka’s painting possibly offers some release or escape to an East German viewer. Kuhirt’s art-historical redefinition of a specifically German Socialist Realism would soon be disseminated by the IfG by means of exhibitions and publications. The Academy continued to show Dix and Heartfield in 1960; an important retrospective exhibition of the constructivist-influenced Nerlinger was staged at the East Berlin Nationalgalerie in 1963. Perhaps most important was the exhibition ‘Anklage und Aufruf’ (Accusation and Appeal: German Art Between the Wars) in the following year. Here Kuhirt’s full history of German precedents for contemporary Socialist Realism in the art of ASSO artists was unveiled to the East Berlin public. In a 1964 article ‘Expression in Realism’ that concerned this exhibition, Kuhirt further expanded the scope of East German Socialist Realism in arguing that the character of realism is determined not only by a work’s formal composition but also by its reception, and by the degree to which it stimulates the viewer as a social being.30 Finally, Kuhirt dra�ed a 1966 document for the IfG and the central commi�ee with Klaus Weidner. It presented a series of theses on GDR art and culture, and in it Kuhirt unequivocally stated that the category of Socialist Realism ‘…is not a collection of strict rules, with creative mediums that are determined once and for all’, but rather a process that results in change that points to the fundamental instability of the term as it is continuously renegotiated and redefined. Within this newly unstable atmosphere, East German painters took up an explicitly anti-fascist message. The central commi�ee in these cases now appeared to tolerate modernist experimentation as long as the artist explicitly addressed the subject ma�er of anti-fascism. Anti-fascism in the recent German past was perhaps the key foundational narrative for the East German nation. It established historical roots of the GDR and the SED in the anti-fascism of the KPD during

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the Weimar Republic. In the GDR the persecution of the KPD under the Nazis was a major focus of its foundational narrative; the Holocaust and the execution of Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’ received li�le a�ention. Official GDR culture portrayed the victims of fascism as the working class and its communist sympathizers. Fritz Cremer’s memorial to the concentration camp at Buchenwald, the first GDR monument to victims of fascism, provides evidence of this myth. Cremer had to rework the piece several times (1952-58) before it was deemed acceptable for the site. The sculpture in fact commemorates the mythic take-over of the camp by its political—i.e., KPD— inmates in 1945, and only tangentially addresses Jewish prisoners. Given these parameters several of Willi Si�e’s antifascist paintings of the 1950s, but also paintings by Werner Tübke, are remarkable in that they address the Holocaust, which I discuss in Chapter 3. In spite of the ambivalence toward Picasso and the official turn away from modernism in the Bi�erfeld Way, East German painters evidenced that official cultural directives were indeed malleable and that modernist form might visually enhance socialist goals.31 Individual East German artists like Si�e worked through not only the subject ma�er but also the formalist lessons of modernism, in spite of the proscriptions of the Bi�erfeld Way. Some of these individualized views of modern art made their way into exhibitions. Moving beyond visual contestation, artists also verbally challenged the Bi�erfeld configuration of East German socialist culture at the infamous Fi�h Congress of the VBK (German Artists Union) in East Berlin of 1964, which likely precipitated the SED’s rollback of the Bi�erfeld policy in the same year. The organization had already published the party-pleasing mo�o, ‘There’s Nothing to Learn from “Modernism”’; many East German artists’ flat rejection of this view in 1964 points to the fact that the chasm between realists and modernists had in fact not narrowed since 1957. In major addresses to the body on the first day of the 1964 conference, art historian Hermann Raum, sculptor Cremer, and Leipzig painter Bernhard Heisig stunned VBK administrators and members in a�acking the dogma that rejected the methods

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of modernism as unusable for socialism. The speakers warned that artistic stagnation and provincialism would result from SED policies. Pointing to the stimulation and complexity Picasso achieved in his forms, Lea Grundig a�acked Kurella’s dismissal of Guernica as unproductive for socialism. She further called for critics like Kurella to discard immediately the crass and ‘unscientific’ term ‘decadence’ to describe modernist forms or methods.32 By the next day talks were halted, and other speakers a�acked the addresses of the previous day vigorously. Grundig was nevertheless elected as the new president of the VBK a�er voicing her dissent. That same year the ‘Accusation and Appeal’ exhibition foregrounded, as important precursors to Socialist Realism, the expressionist art of the Weimar-era ASSO artists. The central commi�ee had at least in part accepted Kuhirt and Grundig’s promotion of Expressionism. ‘Accusation and Appeal’ would have been unthinkable a few years earlier.33 It was not until the late 1970s that other mediums and practices of the avant-garde—constructivism, collage, photomontage, and performance—were more widely embraced in East German exhibitions; I discuss artists’ development of some of these strategies and mediums in Chapters 2, 3 and 5. However on an individual level and in the public sphere, by the year 1966 the traditions of German modernism had been integrated into notions of East German Socialist Realism, if even in a fragmented and individualized manner. West German Debates on Modernism and ‘Loss’ A concurrent debate on modernism took shape in West Germany, simultaneous to the ‘Formalism Debate’ in Berlin around Dymschitz in 1948. It was developed by critics who argued that a loss of spirituality and ‘dehumanization’ was evidenced in modern art and that as a result modernism, particularly visual modernism, should be rejected. Conservative German critics could agree on spiritual loss ‘inflicted’ by modernism because they appeared to be completely unwilling or actually unable to acknowledge the enormity of loss that surrounded them in physical reality as a result of fascism. These arguments reveal a general lack of knowledge concerning modernism, another

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legacy of fascism. Many directions of early abstraction, from Kandinsky to Malevich to Mondrian, were indeed based in the quest for a new kind of spirituality to be imparted in nonobjective painting. The demand in German art criticism of the late 1940s for a turn to religious belief is another dimension of the repression of physical reality and of physical destruction. Oddly, these views of modernism’s tie to ‘loss’ resonated with the politicized anti-modernist sentiment of Stalinist critics in the Soviet zones. In 1948, German art historian Hans Sedlmayr discussed Picasso in his diatribe against modernist art and architecture, Verlust der Mi�e (Loss of Centre). Like the postwar American critic Clement Greenberg, Sedlmayr purports to identify dominant trends in Western culture, but that is where any commonality ends. Sedlmayr claims to distinguish ‘master problems…each of them…a symptom’, which the reader might assume are cultural ‘master problems’, despite the odd examples Sedlmayr provides (landscape gardening, the museum, the factory).34 The diagnosis of these master problems is the focus of Sedlmayr’s book, which he believes he achieves without engaging any historical facts or any specific intellectual argument. While artworks illustrate his text, Sedlmayr does not address them with any specificity. Sedlmayr’s quasi-medical language—observing ‘symptoms’ within recent art—again borrows from the Nazi ‘degenerate art’ campaign. The few sources Sedlmayr uses to bolster his views are suspiciously almost all published during the Third Reich. Sedlmayr quotes the views of the Stalinist writer Nicholas Berdyaev, who identified Picasso as the modern artist who initiated the negating cultural ‘process of dehumanization’ that must be diagnosed and corrected.35 By this Berdyaev seems to have meant the fragmented and sometimes contorted representation of the human body that can be observed within Picasso’s art. Berdyaev condemns Picasso since his art: …tears off one cover a�er another in order to lay bare the structure of nature and in doing so penetrates ever further into the depths, disclosing while doing so the images of

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things truly monstrous, which admi�edly Picasso creates with undeniable expressiveness and power.36 Thus even if the images Picasso and other modern artists create are powerful, they are self-negating and ‘anti-humanist’ in that they are not ‘manifestations of the timeless, of the eternal’. At no point does Sedlmayr, in 1948, make any reference to Guernica, to Germany’s disastrous decline under fascism, to the end of World War Two and the destruction of much of Western Europe, or to the Holocaust. He dismisses the argument that modernism connects with the chaos and violence of the modern world, as according to Goethe, ‘only the mediocre talent is always the captive of its time’. His book refuses to recognize that civilization had just been literally destroyed around him. His lament for the ‘dehumanizing’ loss of the human figure in art however found other proponents, and as a result, it became the subject of the Darmstadt art history congress in 1950. Other conservative West German critics of abstraction connected its alleged anti-humanism to the general societal turn away from religious faith. The notion that abstraction was a symbol of nihilism indicative of a loss of religious faith was also bemoaned by Christian conservatives Wilhelm Hausenstein and Richard Seewald in essays of 1948-9. They admonished postwar German painters to take up sacred fresco painting or to quit painting altogether and start praying.37 These calls for a visual art rooted in religious faith seemed to be a broader intellectual concern of postwar Europeans. Even Willi Baumeister’s book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art, 1947), a defence of classical modernism, referenced Meister Eckhart and religious mysticism as sources for the spiritual content of modernism, which Baumeister saw as underlying Kandinsky and Mondrian’s abstracted sign-systems. Recognizing the artistic vacuum that existed in 1945, Baumeister in that year began a multi-year series of public slide lectures on classical modernists such as Picasso, Klee, Kandinsky and Mondrian. Conservative views of ‘loss’ were directly challenged during the ‘Darmstadt Talks’ (subtitled ‘The Image of Man in Our Time’) of 1950, the first major art history conference of postwar West

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Germany. Most accounts summarize this conference around the exchange between its two major opponents, Sedlmayer and Baumeister. At the conference Baumeister a�acked an entire camp of anti-modernist critics who had rallied around Sedlmayr’s reactionary stance against modernist abstraction and his call for a return to figuration. The extreme poles of this debate, which called for either a figurative or an abstract style, solidified around the artists of ‘inner emigration’ like Baumeister who had stayed in Germany through the war and painted in seclusion. Baumeister and Julius Bissier are regarded as the primary abstract painters of ‘inner emigration’.38 A second contingent of ‘inner emigration’ artists of the early Federal Republic—Karl Hofer, Richard Oelze, and Franz Radziwill—a�racted less a�ention in the ‘40s and ‘50s, possibly because they were figurative painters of ‘apocalyptic’ scenes that related directly or implicitly to the recent Nazi past. Hermann Glaser calls work by the figurative ‘inner emigration’ artists, such as Hofer’s Black Rooms (1943), ‘catacombs art’ that was doomed to remain in the catacombs, or to be simply ignored, in the intense focus on expressive abstraction in West German discourse of the 1950s.39 Werner Ha�mann’s 1954 survey of modern art describes Hofer not as a contemporary painter but as a ‘disenchanted’ artist of the interwar period, emerging into a ‘personal style’ that offers ‘bi�er images’ of postwar reality.40 Ha�mann does not mention Hofer’s paintings of the 1940s, nor does he include him in his account of ‘inner emigration’ artists of note, E.W. Nay, Fritz Winter, Hans Hartung and Wols, all incidentally abstract painters.41 Thus Ha�mann casts the artists of inner emigration as having to do with a continuing exploration of abstraction, and having less to do with a more plainly readable anti-fascism. Hofer’s inflammatory, anti-intellectual essay, ‘Zur Situation der bildenden Kunst’, published in the February 1955 issue of Der Monat (a ‘CIA-financed journal’), lashed out against what he understood was Ha�mann’s and others’ dismissive stance toward figurative art like his own.42 Hofer argued that painting’s greatest achievements had only been possible in figuration. Hofer cites the ‘mo�o of Expressionism’: a refusal

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of painting as ‘Abbild’—mere representation—conceiving it instead as ‘Sinnbild’—an emblem or allegory. Insisting that emblems can only be created in the ‘mysteriousness’ of a transcendent figurative art, Hofer ridicules the poor quality of ‘so-called’ Expressionist compositions that to his mind never achieve the emblematic.43 For Hofer only the human form in art (of a certain level of quality) can achieve the spiritual. Hofer saves his harshest treatment for the critics who herald ‘the new’, specifically, abstraction: they are ‘the hysterics and snobs who are blooming in America in particular’ and because of their influence in Germany, the cultural situation ‘…comes close to that of the Nazi state, with Gauleiter (district captains) and SS. Even a Goebbels is around, probably a Führer too’.44 Hofer twists the debate into an all-or-nothing affair: either one is for ‘vacant’ abstractions or for a transcendent and spiritual art based in images of man. Will Grohmann and Carl Linfert’s responses called for tolerance and a more measured tone in the debate. Linfert quotes the painter Rudolf Schlichter on the bi�er debates around modern art circa 1949: ‘In the chaos that one finds today in all European countries, who could expect to find anything beyond a general brawl for the securing of one’s own existence?’45 Grohmann and Linfert criticized Hofer’s linking of new art to a ‘party line’ and to the totalitarian past, and emphasized that promoters of ‘Informel’, the new abstract painting, had not. Both questioned Hofer’s claims for the totalitarian nature of the discourse on abstraction, pointing instead to Ha�mann’s survey text for its more ‘patient’ language.46 This exchange reveals the extreme bi�erness that o�en characterized West German discourse on modernist painting through 1955. Hofer was correct in asserting that certain West German critics—like Grohmann, Zahn, Linfert, and Franz Roh— generally favoured German painters who René Drouin would include in his 1955 Paris exhibition, ‘Non-figurative Painting in Germany’. He perhaps did not consider that his own bleak depictions of fascism and its wake of destruction, and not figuration more generally, may have disturbed the West German critics he a�acked. Following Drouin’s example, Ha�mann used

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Documenta to connect German abstraction with directions in French and American abstract painting, even when these connections were rather forced. Ha�mann and other West German critics li�ed the term ‘Informel’ from the French critic Michel Tapié’s 1951 exhibition ‘Signifiant de l’Informel’ at the Studio Face�i in Paris, a show that also connected to the work that had been shown in 1945 at René Drouin by the German expatriate Wols, and by Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier.

Fig. 1.3 New National Gallery, West Berlin, c. 1968

Learning the ‘Universal Language of the Present’: West German Modernism A Mondrian exhibition inaugurated the West Berlin New National Gallery building in 1968. (Fig. 1.3, 1968) From the start this national museum situated West Berlin culture within advanced international directions in abstract art: the internationalism of de Stijl was well-established already in the 1920s, and the architect Mies van der Rohe was a key figure tied to the Bauhaus tradition of German modernism and the ‘international style’. The New National Gallery’s earliest exhibitions reprised in West Berlin a project the curator, Werner Ha�mann, had already established in West

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Germany: the curatorial and art historical reengagement of the German art world with the most advanced directions of the avant-garde, most specifically, with the tradition of non-objective or abstract art. In his writing Ha�mann revived terms Vassily Kandinsky originated in his essay ‘On the Question of Form’ of 1911 in The Blue Rider Almanac. Following Kandinsky, Ha�mann described the direction in art that tended toward non-figuration ‘the Greater Abstraction’. Ha�mann had already identified this ‘great stylistic pa�ern’, in opposition to its polar opposite, the ‘Greater Reality’, in his influential Painting in the Twentieth Century (published in German in 1954, and English in 1965), the first German postwar art history of twentiethcentury art. Ha�mann thereby adapted Kandinsky’s early categories to the polarizing language that characterized West German debates on visual modernism of the ‘40s and ‘50s.47 Ha�mann institutionalized this language in West German beginning with the 1959 Documenta, the cornerstone of West German cultural reconstruction, and that had his book as its conceptual core. Beginning in the late ‘50s West German painters and critics rushed to embrace expressionistic abstract painting coming out of France, known as ‘informel’ or ‘tachism’, and from the United States, known as ‘abstract expressionism’ or ‘action painting’, which West German art institutions would also celebrate. Ha�mann effectively institutionalized a marginalization of the figurative, anti-fascist tradition of modern painting, as well as of the constructivist tradition of abstraction tied to Soviet state socialism. Only sca�ered West German critics spoke sceptically about the euphoric reception accorded to painters like Jackson Pollock and Hans Hartung and the condemnation of figurative painting. However, Picasso as the wartime painter of Nazi atrocity remained the great repressed figure in West Germany during this period, as art institutions busily canonized alternative lineages of modern art. New York critic Clement Greenberg’s views and his power within the New York art world soon extended beyond US national boundaries. His life-cycle narrative of rise and fall,

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pi�ing a new and vibrant New York School against Picasso’s exhausted postwar painting, found a large European audience. As Eva Cockcro� has noted, the International Council of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1956, began to export exhibitions of American abstract expressionist painting to numerous venues around the world. The 1956 ‘Modern Art in the US’ exhibition of artwork from MoMA and organized by the London Tate Gallery was not only shown in London but also toured twelve European cities including Vienna and Belgrade. In 1958-59 another of these MoMA initiated exhibitions, ‘The New American Painting’, travelled to eight European countries, including Madrid, Amsterdam and Berlin.48 Greenberg bu�ressed his developing view of American cultural supremacy. Greenberg read his related essay, ‘Modernist Painting’, as part of the ‘Voice of America Forum Lectures: the Visual Arts’, which was broadcast over the Voice of America in Europe in 1961, with an estimated audience of between 30 and 50 million.49 Certainly Germans in both the East and West would have had the opportunity to become familiar with new approaches to painting coming out of New York by means of such exhibitions and broadcasts, though it appears that Greenberg’s ideas generally did not directly influence art discourse in either West or East Germany. Modernism Lost and (Re)found: Documenta The high-profile, federally-supported West German embrace of abstract art as the universal language for West German contemporary art finally took place at the 1959 Documenta exhibition. In the short term Documenta overshadowed another important exhibition of the previous year, ‘Dada Documents of a Movement’, that proved to be far more influential on the course of contemporary art in West Germany in that it introduced the heterogeneous strategies and techniques of the historical avant-garde to practitioners of performance like Wolf Vostell. This 1958 exhibition was organized by Ewald Rathke for the Kunstverein in Düsseldorf and travelled to Frankfurt and Amsterdam. Dada and Duchamp otherwise remained almost unknown in Germany.

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There was no trace of either Duchamp or Dada to be found at Documenta in 1959. Funded by the almost-completely-destroyed city of Kassel, the state of Hessen, and the federal government, and accompanied by lavish catalogues, Documenta was from the start an expensive and elaborate staging of West Germany’s cultural re-entry into the civilized west. Ha�mann was the primary art historical force behind it.50 His role there, and his subsequent appointment as director of the New National Gallery in West Berlin—a showcase for the staging of cold war divisions and conflicts—cemented his role as the most influential West German modern art historian of the late twentieth century. Borrowing language first coined by Tapié, Ha�mann made international commonalities in gestural abstraction the centrepiece of Documenta in 1959, at the height of the Cold War. His exhibition promoted this direction of abstraction as representative of most, or even all, contemporary art production. This kept to the general view he articulated as early as 1952, that ‘all of European painting in its broadest sense has swept into the camp of abstraction’.51 For Tapié, the Drouin artists, and others he deemed significant in his 1951 exhibition— Georges Mathieu, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Henri Michaux— crystallized an expressive, abstract and gestural direction in painting, which he labelled ‘Informel’. Drouin’s later 1955 exhibition, ‘Non-figurative Painting in Germany’, included abstract painters Fritz Winter, Georg Meistermann and E. W. Nay. Ha�mann would inappropriately apply Tapié’s term to German Drouin painters like Winter and Nay, even if the dynamic between form, formlessness and chaos appears never to have concerned these painters (in contrast to the painters Fautrier, Dubuffet and Wols).52 Tapié and Mathieu had also shown Pollock together with Wols, Hartung, Mathieu and the Canadian artist JeanPaul Riopelle at the Parisian Dausset Gallery in 1951, which Ha�mann surely also noted when he established a link between German abstraction and American abstract expressionism.53 Ha�mann claimed that American gestural abstraction ‘emphasized dramatic potentialities’ while European painters focused on ‘lyrical elements’54; he therefore extrapolated the

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term Mathieu developed to describe his own distinctive abstract painting, ‘abstraction lyrique’, and applied it to all directions of contemporary French and German abstraction. At the 1959 Documenta Ha�mann systematically marginalized other developments, be they in geometric abstraction, in ‘Concrete Art’, as it was called in Europe, or figurative painters. Ha�mann pointed to the figurative traditions of modern art at Documenta in 1955 and in his survey book of 1954. However at Documenta in 1959 there was almost no contemporary figurative painting on view, or indeed much Happening in contemporary abstract painting that didn’t have to do with gestural abstraction. Hewing to his own definition of modernist abstraction as ‘a universal language of the present’, the 1959 Documenta unified Euro-American directions in gestural abstraction of the 1950s, and the representation of sculptural work was greatly expanded through Eduard Trier’s participation.55 In 1959 Ha�mann included a great number of American paintings, placing them at the very centre of the exhibition. As Kurt Winkler and Michael Nungesser have noted, the ‘massive appearance’ of U.S. art in Europe during the immediate postwar years paralled, if not helped to realize, the shi� of the international art world to New York.56 A British critic called the new American painting ‘inspiring’, but at the same time characterized the broad exposure of contemporary American abstract painting in Europe as an ‘invasion’57. A commi�ee including Will Grohmann (Berlin Hochschule der Künste), Kurt Martin (Director, Bavarian State Collections), Werner Schmalenbach (Kestner Gesellscha�, Hannover), Eduard Trier, Heinrich Stünke, Herbert Freiherr von Bu�lar, and Ernest Goldschmidt selected paintings and sculptures for the 1959 Documenta; Porter A. McCray, thendirector of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was called in to coordinate all of the American works. Ha�mann deemphasized the nationalism of the artists involved, keeping to his own idea of a supra-national abstraction produced by ‘all the European countries and America as a single whole’58. With McCray’s input, Ha�mann staged a newly ‘internationalized’ West German, or indeed a Euro-American, postwar modernism. Ha�mann interspersed the works of German abstract painters

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with French and American gestural paintings at Documenta in 1959, underscoring their commonalities. One could therefore also speak of Ha�mann’s conscious turn away from notions of German or even European modernism in his refusal to engage with nationalist aspects of modernist culture. At the same time, he aggressively promoted American painting.59 Installation photographs of the 1959 exhibition record Ha�mann’s remarkable juxtaposition of one of Picasso’s Weeping Women with a Suprematist composition by Malevich. The inclusion of a key Russian painting is odd given Ha�mann’s disinterest in Concrete Art, which some German critics called the ‘new constructivism’; here was another modernist legacy that Ha�mann le� unmentioned. Picasso was an artist who Ha�mann clearly believed belonged to the past. Ha�mann included Picasso in the ‘Arguments’ section, along with one of his drawings for the Vallauris murals La Guerre et la Paix. Almost an anomaly among the art at Documenta in ‘59, these drawings and the Weeping Women, which Picasso painted alongside Guernica in 1937, also reference the loss and trauma of World War Two. It is significant that Ha�mann had almost nothing to say about these figuratively based works. He proclaimed that the gesture of abstract painting that he hung on almost every wall of the Fridericianum contained ‘man’s bodily understanding of himself and his world…as though man has placed himself in the apocalyptic onslaught, let the cosmic flood pass through him, hung like a radar-man with extended antennae in the cosmic and cathartic movement and entered this, his situation, as bodily gesture inscribed as pictorial gesture.’60 The apocalypse remains undefined and unspecified in Ha�mann’s speech. With the exception of these Picasso works and a sculpture by Ossip Zadkine,61 the possibility of its historical specificity in Germany’s recent past remained unexplored at the first Documenta exhibitions. Ha�mann’s 1968 Mondrian exhibition at the New National Gallery underscored the association between Mies van der Rohe and de Stijl that had repeatedly been made by Ludwig Hilbersheimer and others in the literature since 1945.62 The focus

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of the inaugural exhibition on a European but non-German modernist reprised Ha�mann’s notion of an international, post-nationalist modern art. A year later a National Gallery exhibition featured German industrialist Karl Ströher’s collection of recent art. The exhibition included American Pop Art and the West German artists Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys. By this time large-scale Warhols were suspended from the steel-coffered ceiling. This exhibition appeared to rehearse West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ in offering specific evidence of the full financial recovery of the West German art market. Ströher was celebrated as an economic success, a German collector of advanced Western art. ‘Successful’ West German artists were aligned with highly marketable American works. Mies’ transparent pavilion was frequently rendered opaque by a floor-to-ceiling curtain drawn against the weather. The drawn curtain rendered the glass surface into a de facto wall in a traditional sense, and made any views onto the city impossible. The upper hall then slowly came to resemble the far more conventional spaces of the permanent collection galleries that Mies had designed for the lower level, or the ‘basement’, as critics referred to it. These lower-level galleries housed West Berlin’s collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and the museum’s administrative offices, storage, the library and a café. Alfred Neumeyer recounts that the history of German modernism unfolded in these lower-level galleries, which included German Neo-classical and Romantic painting (with Friedrich and Runge), German Realism (Adolf Menzel) and Impressionism (Corinth, Liebermann and Slevogt). Neumeyer noted that the recent German past was discernable in the ‘great gaps, [and] truly tragic losses, many of which can never be filled’ in these lower galleries; 63 that is, in the absence of works that the Nazis had removed, sold, or destroyed. Further absences could be a�ributed to another kind of loss: due to the chance storage locations of the Prussian state collections during World War Two, many modernist works, from Gauguin, Picasso, and Kandinsky, had landed in the collections of East Berlin’s modern art museum. In fact almost no Kandinsky and Picasso works remained in the collections of the New National Gallery. The

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loss inflicted by the traumas of World War Two were intimated only by the absences made plain in the ‘basement’. Particularly in West Germany, amnesia toward the vast trauma of World War Two and the Holocaust seemed to be central to the new postwar German modernism. At the same time artists working in East and West Berlin began to challenge the absolute demarcating of socialist from capitalist ideology forwarded by the art institutions of each state. Artists working in the east and western sectors—some of them Americans and other foreigners—developed new strategies and even new art mediums to contest such divisive definitions of modern art. Many of these artists rejected traditional sites of exhibition in turning to performance as a medium, or in working in the streets or at other city sites. Some used the material evidence of destruction and trauma uncovered there as found objects or spaces for their art. They began to examine the postwar city of Berlin as a chaotic space of absence, loss, and forced divisions, a place considerably less placid than the planar bands of ‘exterior space’ that the architect Mies had envisioned around his museum.

2. MARKING THE POSTWAR CITY Toward a Mnemonic Modern Art During the 1960s, East and West German art museums and art criticism constructed a myth of total and irreconcilable East/West division. However artists working in postwar German cities, and particularly in the eastern and western sectors of Berlin, developed related strategies, and even new art mediums, in directing their art toward a commemorating or mnemonic function. Sometimes this occurred in the pursuit of an engaged and even activist art production, other times with less explicitly socio-political aims. Artists at work in West Germany o�en based their work on the material aspects of the postwar city space, using the objects and detritus that li�ered it. Wolf Vostell developed the process of ‘dé-collage’ within assemblage; in a parallel, the American artist Ed Kienholz worked with found objects in West Berlin to create sound installations that literally resonated with the Nazi past. Consistently refusing gallery representation and the insularity of conceptual-style institutional critique, the artists collective Büro Berlin—Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz, Fritz Rahmann, and a changing list of other international artists—began their public installation/interventions in and around the West Berlin borough of Kreuzberg in the late ‘70s. The group continues to show work, most recently in 2003. Using found spaces and objects for their interventions or ‘situations,’ the Büro Berlin explores the limits of collaboration and recognizes the role of administration within projects that construct spaces of ‘common

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interest’—the term is an economic one—o�en at the margins of the city where capitalist production has burned itself out or is otherwise intensely contested. K.P. Brehmer and the American artist Yvonne Rainer in the West, and Manfred Butzmann in East Berlin, deployed the photographic and filmic image of the city in order to explore fundamental instabilities between public space, representation and personal and collective memory. In East Germany Butzmann’s posters of Pankow criticized the state’s neglect of socialist public space. Butzmann participated in a developing East German discourse on conservation and ecology. His art marked the emergence of an ecological activism in East Germany that had its roots in the action/performances of the Karl-Marx Stadt group Clara Mosch (see Chapter 4). Butzmann’s art publicly condemned the environmental destruction and urban blight brought about by industry under state socialism. Retooling Assemblage in a ‘Mnemotechnic’ Space Think about the unmastered past! Think about the unmastered present!1 A number of artists active in West Berlin, several Americans among them, based their work on the material aspects of the postwar city space and of the objects and detritus that li�ered it. In this section and the next I will consider their differing strategies in retooling what has been termed the ‘extreme actualism’ or material realism of the readymade, assemblage and site-specific installation as a weapon against the cultural repression of the fascist past during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Their materialist art confirms a shared generational anxiety that the fascist past was not yet reckoned with, and as a result was not yet completely past. In their work the postwar city space becomes a kind of ‘mnemotechnic device,’ to use Benjamin’s phrase, for remembering destruction.2 The Auschwitz Trials in Frankfurt of 1963-65 placed details of the Nazi past in newspaper headlines, leading younger Germans, some for the first time, to deal with the specific crimes

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and cover-ups of their parents’ generation. Concentration camp sites were considerably removed from urban areas, and therefore it was not particularly difficult for East or West Germans to avoid these sites of massacre and uncomfortable confrontations with direct memories of the Holocaust and violence of the recent German past. Building on the Institute of Social Research’s sociological studies of the authoritarian personality (including the work of Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno in New York), leading psychologists such as Alexander Mitscherlich published on the Germans’ ‘inability to mourn’ and on the psychic and cultural effects of a ‘fatherless society’.3 This discourse impacted artists who channelled these cultural and generational anxieties into their own encounters with the images and material culture of reconstruction Germany. There was also a legacy of entire villages that Nazi troops destroyed: Guernica in Spain, Lidice in Czechoslovakia, Oradour-sur-Glace, France, and many villages in Ukraine. The massacre at Lidice, ordered in response to the assassination in Prague of the SS administrator of Bohemia and Moravia Reinhard Heydrich by Czech resistance fighters in June of 1942, is infamous as a ruthless and senseless act of vengeance on Hitler’s part—senseless because the Nazis claimed that one of the resistance fighters came from Lidice, but it is likely that a different Czech village, also named Lidice, was in fact connected to the resistance. Shortly a�er Heydrich’s death occupying Nazi troops shot all male residents in the village of about 400 people and shipped boys, with women and girls, to concentration camps; all buildings were demolished, fields ploughed over or levelled, and the name of the village was removed from German maps. A young gallerist in West Berlin, René Block, organized the exhibition ‘Hommage a Lidice’ in response to a call put out by the British-based ‘Lidice Shall Live’ commi�ee. The commi�ee was organized in the ‘40s to aid the reconstruction of the village. Twenty-five years a�er the massacre, in 1967, the commi�ee issued a second call for contributions and established a new foundation for an art museum in Lidice.4 Block’s exhibition invited artists, with their own difficult relation to this hideous

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legacy, to become involved not only memorializing this vanished village but further in contributing to a new beginning for it. Block gathered together 21 objects for an exhibition from the artists he represented in his West Berlin gallery. A�er West Berlin he planned for the exhibition to travel to Prague Spála Gallery. It opened to a divided reception in West Berlin in October, 1967, where le�ist critics lambasted the entire idea of a gallery exhibition as trite and bourgeois, thus missing the commemorative content of the exhibition entirely. Block packed the assemblages, paintings and objects into a beige Volkswagen van and drove across the ‘iron curtain’ to Prague, where things did not go any more smoothly for the exhibition. The exhibition was allowed to open in July, 1968, only a�er Czech artists protested the ban invoked by a local art organization; some female survivors of the village were present at the opening. The exhibition however became one of many victims of ‘Prague Spring,’ for when Soviet tanks entered the city on August 20, it was closed for good. The works in the ‘Hommage’ exhibition include painting, found objects, assemblage, and ‘object-painting’; Block united many of these artworks around a theme of generational horror shared by Germans who were the children of those who took part in the war. K.P. Brehmer enlarged postage stamps bearing Hitler’s image and the swastika and the phrase ‘Deutschland erwache’ (Germany awaken), some obscured by postwar occupying forces’ censorship. Blinky Palermo submi�ed ‘objectpaintings’ which shi�ed painting onto other means of support or used new materials for it (Composition Red/Orange, 1967); Chris Reinecke (Jörg Immendorff’s wife at the time; Matchsticks, 1967, a painting on a tin can); C.O. Paeffgen, Karl Horst Hödicke (Blue Pane, painted glass), Go�hard Graubner, K. P. Brehmer (German Values, 1967), and Dieter Rot (an untitled canvas of 1967 with oil paint, glass, gauze and cardboard). Objects and assemblages were another major part of the exhibition: Joseph Beuys’ For Lidice (1962), Chair (1967) by Stephan Werwerka, Vostell’s Hommage à Lidice (1959-67) and Hans Peter Alvermann’s Waiting for Nürnberg II (1966). Alvermann’s fragmented body object, torsoless and footless and sporting a helmet, implies that more

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war crimes tribunals are needed before the beast of fascism can be eradicated. Some of these works, like Wewerka’s untitled assisted readymade, do not forge an explicit connection to the Lidice massacre but instead reference an act of sudden violence, absorbed by an object. All the works in ‘Hommage à Lidice’ evidence major rethinking in Germany of two major modernist mediums, painting and the sculptural object, in the wake of fascist violence. Beuys would finally appropriate Block’s van as the central found object within his installation The Pack (Fig. 2.1, 1969). Beuys then commemorates Block’s journey across

Fig. 2.1 Joseph Beuys, The Pack, 1969; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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cold war borders in this work; rather egotistically, he makes reference to the artworks Block had transported by means of his own objects, the sled-multiples that spill from the back of the van. The Pack is quite literally what Beuys termed ‘vehicle art’. This concept becomes particularly important given the role this artwork played in bridging East and West. Beuys explained that his objects and multiple-editions were conceived as stimuli for discussion, and as conduits for contact and communication between different viewers of art. In speaking of his multiples he commented: There’s a real affinity to people who own such things, such vehicles. It’s like an antenna that is standing somewhere and with which one stays in touch. There are also cross-connections between people, or deviations. One person says: Yes, I’ve got such a bo�le. Another one has such a wooden box and a third one says: I’ve heard something about political activities, and so all sorts of different concepts converge, and that’s what I’m interested in, that a whole lot of concepts come together.5 Beuys was significantly older than many of the other artists in the ‘Hommage à Lidice’ exhibition. He was part of the generation that had played an active part in World War Two; as a kind of father figure, he proved difficult for younger artists to reckon with. Beuys consistently addressed the war in his art, but by the late ‘60s it took on an optimistic and political direction (see also Chapter 5). For him art was always a possible agent in social and political change, and served as a point of connection and discussion, transgressing and transcending the iron curtain. Never interested in critically examining the institutions of communication set in place by mass media in the postwar era, Beuys seems to have believed that the particular communication carried by art could remain unaffected by the media or could in fact be served by it. Other artists would develop their own strategies for art within the tensions of cold war Europe, with mnemonic and at times also revolutionary ends, but

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o�entimes with a much bleaker and historicizing view of the German media.6 As the ‘Hommage’ exhibition indicates, one frequently deployed strategy concerned the found object or the materials for assemblage gathered by the artist in the city streets. Art historians have termed not only German assemblage-based work but also New York and California assemblage of these years ‘neo-dada’. The term is taken from numerous exhibitions of the same name staged in the ‘60s in the U.S. and in West Germany, where the term was widely celebrated in the art press as a kind of a unified artistic return to a specifically German avant-garde, Berlin Dada.7 William Seitz argued in the 1961 exhibition ‘The Art of Assemblage’ that these postwar works continued earlier modernist traditions of Dada, for example, in focusing on social and cultural critique. This reengagement with Dadaist sensibility has fuelled recent arguments around the existence of a toothless ‘neo-avant-garde’ that characterizes the postwar period.8 While assemblage was pursued by Dadaists like Raoul Hausmann in Berlin and by Kurt Schwi�ers in Hannover, the term ‘neo-dada’ is not adequate to describe the focus on material history and the deep distrust of media technology that led artists like Vostell and Kienholz to develop a mnemonic dimension to assemblage and installation in West Germany. In the case of Wolf Vostell’s event/exhibitions of the 1960s, the gathering of material became a collaborative action shared by artist and audience within performance. In 1958 Wolf Vostell started work on a series of assemblages composed of materials ‘altered—or dé-collaged—through events: destroyed radios, pieces of car wrecks, airplane parts, barbed-wire objects, newspapers’.9 Vostell later retitled the three pieces with the cycle name Black Room. The assemblage cycle Auschwitz Floodlight, Treblinka and German Prospects (also translated as ‘German View’ by Gillen, Figure 2.2) is among the few postwar artworks in West Germany of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s that explicitly takes on the subject ma�er of the Holocaust and the camps of the Second World War.

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As they are consistently mediated by participatory performance in public space, Vostell’s dé-collage assemblages cannot be placed in the modernist tradition of assemblage as autonomous works of art. Nor can they be best described in terms of models which define the horizon of aesthetic experience solely in an artist’s or viewer’s personal history (which is sometimes claimed for Rauschenberg’s analogous combines).10 Vostell’s first dé-collage events of the 1950s and early ‘60s were orchestrated around materials and objects found in the city streets, and always a�empted to fuse performance and object. The public working over of these materials in Vostell’s dé-collage performances Tour de Vanves (Paris, 1958), Cityrama (Cologne, 1961), and Salon de Mayo (Barcelona, 1962), also performs, collectively, the process of distancing of the public from these materials and their usual place in public space. Like Vostell’s dé-collage works, New York performance/ Happenings of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s by Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg o�en focused on the everyday urban environment. However the New York Happenings did not take place in the streets, but recreated the urban environment as stage sets consisting largely of handmade objects, sometimes made to look like found ones (as was the case with Oldenburg’s Store), and arranged in a proscenium-type performance space. Performance remained so central to Vostell and to his o�enrecited interest in the sublation of art into life that in addition to a wri�en explication of the aims of ‘dé-collage,’11 he performed it in a joint ‘action lecture’ on the subject of ‘The Art of the Happening,’ at the Cricket Theatre in New York in April, 1964, in tandem with Allan Kaprow.12 Vostell’s slide-‘lecture’ began with his narration of the origins of the technique and Weltansschauung of ‘dé-collage’ on the streets of Paris. Walking on the Rue de Buci-Boulevard in St. Germain one day, he heard a newspaper vendor call out the headline ‘Peu apres son décollage…’ (the rest of the headline ran: ‘un super-constellation tombe et s’engloutit dans la rivière Shannon…’/’shortly a�er takeoff, a plane plunged into the Shannon river’).13 The news story described an aircra� that had crashed into the Irish river Shannon shortly a�er it had taken off. For Vostell, the essential contradictions

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of the concept of dé-collage, the idea of li�ing off in terms of the start of an airplane but also of removal, or the ‘li�ing off’ of affixed material, and finally also the implication of death (used similarly to the German slang abkratzen—‘scraping off’ or dying) already contained within it a critique of the modernist form of collage. Where collage was constructed in an additive process made possible by gathering fragments, composing and manipulating materials into a compositional whole, dé-collage removed material fragments from an object in a destructive process. Dé-collage stages the process of arrest inherent in destruction, that moment between the initiation of a line of movement and its violent end in catastrophe. The simultaneous beginning and end implicit in destruction is lodged in the term ‘dé-collage’ itself. Vostell went on to outline a second aspect of remembrance in dé-collage in his Cricket Theatre lecture. Dé-collage also aspires to the remembrance of daily life, in the form of phenomenological relations to objects located in the physical space of the postwar city. As Vostell describes it, dé-collage aims to uncover the potential for catastrophe inherent in these objects, the underside of their use value: The phenomena of the events and actions that exist around us, compel us to a position whose ambivalence is located in that we find an object, an automobile for example, useful and pleasant but experience the opposite seconds later, namely, its uselessness and terror which spreads like a chain reaction onto other aspects of daily life…in contrast to beautiful painting or the beautiful spirit (‘Schöngeistigkeit’) of theatre which withholds this true and realistic side of the object.14 Vostell’s awareness of the ‘realistic side’ of technological objects remains constant in dé-collage. Dé-collage presents the mass-produced technology/commodities of the postwar period—television, the automobile, the airplane, or even older forms such as the advertising poster—together with evidence of the terror these objects contain: the capability to unleash death

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on the one hand, and, on the other, the absolute coordination and rationalization of daily life in the propaganda of consumption. This sense of impending disaster, or the potential for terror in catastrophe which the technological object contains, is one aspect of the anti-aesthetic element at work in Vostell’s décollage performances and related assemblages and silkscreens (Verwischungen or ‘wipings’). Fragments of technologies of reproduction are impacted in Vostell’s assemblages: in German Prospects, photojournalistic images and a television monitor that glows behind the framing assemblage (Fig. 2.2); in Auschwitz Floodlight, a high-intensity electric light source; in Treblinka, motorcycle parts, film and a transistor radio. Vostell presents each of these technological devices as ruins that clearly no longer function in the way they

Fig. 2.2 Wolf Vostell, German Prospects, 1958; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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once did as commodities; with his juxtapositions Vostell suggests that the modernist celebration of the utopian possibilities of technology has burned itself out. Both Treblinka and German Prospects materialize the moment of the awakening from the dream of technology a�er the Nazi progrom of coordinated and industrialized genocide, aided by that technology. Vostell’s inclusion of motorcycle parts, radios, and film bits in his assemblages, which he then entitled with the names of concentration camps, connects these techno-commodities and the material of mass culture to the Holocaust (for example, in the enclosure of barbed-wire, in the surveillance capabilities possible through a floodlight, in the psychic manipulation of Nazi film). The swathe of destroyed metal in German Prospects, the charred wood slats, freeze and inscribe the momentum and impact of violence onto their surfaces. Vostell suggests these objects are now hollowed out ruins of their former significance; the role and place of this communication technology must be redefined a�er the Shoah. In considering the specifics of communication technology, Vostell points to the potential for collective experience and empowerment still contained within these technologies. However the successes of the fascist manipulation of these technologies comprises the other side of this issue, which Vostell indicates by including photographic images of Nazi troops, positioned under an alarm. In these assemblages Vostell configures the material of modern technology as modernist emblems emptied of their former utopian aspects by means of their instrumentalization under fascism; the viewer must finally reckon with the loss of meaning of these objects, and must rethink not only the function of technology within democratic society but also the necessity for a more critical posture towards these technologies given the history of their successful political manipulation under fascism. By means of his juxtapositions Vostell presents the postwar technology of television as another emblem of barbarism and death in German Prospects: television is literally framed by, or is seen through, photographic images of Nazi militarism, which Vostell further elides with images of the occupying armies of postwar Germany. Vostell connects the

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militaristic German present with its recent militaristic past. In a parallel to these Black Room assemblages shown in the Galerie Parnass, Vostell staged a dé-collage performance that took place on the exhibition’s opening, September 14, 1963.15 He thereby established a relation between the destructive moment of dé-collage as art object and as live(d) experience, in performance in the city space. This relation is the root of Vostell’s repeated phrase, ‘art is life/life is art’.16 Vostell therefore moved dé-collage beyond the meditative and ‘enacting’ posture vis à vis the object of the Fluxus event and its ties to the gallery or theatre space. Made apparent in his 1963 exhibition and performance in Wuppertal, Vostell’s ambivalence explicitly rejects the celebratory sentiments of one camp of the avant-garde toward technology (Futurism, Constructivism, Bauhaus, Dada) while also rejecting technology’s romanticization by another (Surrealism and Benjamin’s infatuation with its strategies, for example). Dé-collage recalls the potential for terror lodged in certain technological commodities. In the postwar world, the memory of technological destruction, experienced in the landscape of Vostell’s personal past, was also visible in the present of reconstruction in the ruins and rubble of the postwar city. Within this European postwar context, Vostell’s dé-collage objects and actions shi� perceptions of mass-produced objects away from the celebratory and toward the suspect. As I discuss in Chapter 4, East German performance would connect to some of Vostell’s themes by the late ‘80s. Edward Kienholz and his wife and collaborator Nancy Reddin Kienholz moved to West Berlin in 1973 in time to see Vostell’s Black Room assemblages in a 1974 Neuer Berliner Kunstverein retrospective. Kienholz had became infamous in Los Angeles in 1966 for his disturbing environment/ assemblage/ tableaux, a reputation set in place by means of the scandal that surrounded his retrospective exhibition of that year and its most provocative piece, The Back Seat Dodge ‘38. Like other ‘60s assemblage artists Vostell, Robert Rauschenberg, the French artist Arman, and the famed West Coast assemblagist circle that included Wallace Berman, George Herms and Bruce

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Conner, Kienholz composed his works from everyday found objects. Kienholz’s careful collecting of objects particular to a specific era or time period of American history was distinctive to Kienholz’s California-style assemblage. He wove these objects into elaborate theatrical stagings or tableau vivants to achieve a kind of historical authenticity. In contrast to other artists’ more abstracted use of assemblage (Vostell or Rauschenberg) Kienholz’s earlier works made the connection to the tableau vivant explicit in positioning actual mannequins or anthropomorphic constructions throughout his compositions; he thereby created characters who inhabit extensive stage-like and historical sets. The art historian David Joselit has argued that California assemblage presents models of ‘psychic exchange’ involving the process of disavowal within Freud’s psychic mechanism of the fetish.17 Psychic tensions and the dynamics of repression can clearly be gleaned from the composition of outmoded objects that comprise many of Kienholz’s tableaux. However throughout Kienholz’s art and particularly in his West Berlin works, the process of collecting becomes a dominant structure of assemblage. Walter Benjamin considered the collector of commonplace, even industrially produced objects a major icon of nineteenthcentury modernism in his essay ‘Eduard Fuchs, Historian and Collector’ (1937), and in his notes for ‘Dossier H’ of the fragmentary and incomplete Arcades Project.18 In this dossier Benjamin paints the collector as an obsessive type guided by a distinct ‘tactile instinct’ that differentiates him from the optical concerns of the flâneur. The collector’s primary goal is to a�ain knowledge—Benjamin even notes that ‘collecting is a primal phenomenon of study’. For the collector knowledge is somehow lodged in the material object and its particular past: in its origin, characteristics, previous owners, purchase price, its current value and other considerations. Benjamin connects this knowledge to history: What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind.

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This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this ‘completeness’? It is a grand a�empt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection. And for the true collector, every single thing in this system becomes an encyclopaedia of all knowledge of the epoch, the landscape, the industry, and the owner from which it comes. […] For isn’t this the foundation (to speak with Kant and Schopenhauer) of that ‘disinterested’ contemplation by virtue of which the collector a�ains to an unequalled view of the object—a view which takes in more, and other, than that of the profane owner and which we would do best to compare to the gaze of the great physiognomist?19 Reconfigured into groups that comprise the ‘magic encyclopaedia’ of the collection, Benjamin understands the collector’s found object or readymade through the lens of historical knowledge and memory, which gives an ‘unequalled view’ of that object. This collector’s gaze is closest to the techniques of physiognomy that train analytic powers to read or even divine temperament and character, inner characteristics, from outward human appearance. In Benjamin’s collections as historical systems, objects take on the expressive qualities of a human face that only the collector can decode. Already in 1961 Kienholz’s assemblages displayed this quality of an historical system composed of everyday objects. History as a Planter, a non-narrative work, references the history of Jews in Germany as well as the repression of the Holocaust in the U.S. Body fragments are carefully hidden or repressed elements; Kienholz’s chilling incorporation of a stove points to the grisly reality of the camps. In amassing banal material objects that in their naming intimate stereotypical references to Jews—in the name of a ‘wandering Jew’ plant or in a ‘jew harp’—Jewish history is ironically silenced. Kienholz implies that this collection of objects could easily be widened, and that

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a simultaneous cultural obsession and also a total repression of Jewish culture could be materially excavated in American culture. In Kienholz’s Volksempfängers (People’s Receivers) series (1975–6), assemblage takes another explicit turn toward encyclopaedic content.20 The object of Kienholz’s ‘tactile instinct’ in Berlin was the historical phenomenon of fascism as lived experience. While the issue is still a ma�er of ongoing debate, historians have characterized fascism as resting on several basic developments: governance under a single party with a distinct ideology; terroristic control by police; and monopolistic control of all institutions of communication, economics and armed force.21 Fascism gained much of its power through state control of the mass media. The totalizing Nazi coordination of the press and especially radio, a new mass medium of the 1930s, only allowed for one major presence, that of the Führer. As the actual apparatus-device of mass media, the Volksempfänger or ‘people’s receiver’ radio was an industrially produced object that served as a one-sided channel of mass communication and thereby contributed to the fascist control of power. The Volksempfänger became a repeated cultural symbol of the Führer himself, in ‘high art’ official paintings and in remarkable Nazi-era propaganda posters. Thus fascist culture came simultaneously to equate the radio address of the Führer, broadcast into public space and also into domestic space, with the actual physical presence of the fascist leader, and also with the passive ‘people’ who ‘received’ his messages. In this manner the fascists used the material technology of radio to construct the German public into mere ‘receivers,’ a construction that was strengthened by brutal censorship laws that imprisoned ‘receivers’ who ‘listened intentionally’ to foreign radio broadcasts or executed those who ‘spread or publicized’ such foreign broadcasts.22 In West Berlin Kienholz collected the mass-produced Volksempfänger; in his series the radio becomes a kind of media-readymade. A�empting to a�ain the ‘completeness’ that Benjamin spoke of, Kienholz bought as many of them in West Berlin flea markets as he could.23 The Volksempfängers series

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consists of several separate assemblages named a�er their primary structural component: the works The Bench, The Ladder, and The Washboards, among others, each establish Kienholz’s role as a materialist historian of fascism. In earlier assemblages like Back Seat Dodge Kienholz had used radio as an object and as an acoustic element; many of his assemblages are in fact also sound art. Several works in the Volksempfängers series have a sound component that can be activated by the viewer in depressing a foot pedal. The Volksempfängers works play excerpts from Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, chosen by Kienholz for their specific references and thematic resonance. In a sense his aural references to Wagner in the series point to how music-as-sound came to carry the message of the ruthless pursuit of power (also a major theme of the Ring).

Fig. 2.3 Ed Kienholz, The Bench, 1975-6; New National Gallery, SMPK, Berlin

The Bench (Fig. 2.3) points to its own character as a collection. Kienholz does not present a narrative tableau but an ordered, linear display of eight mass-produced radio-objects

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on two plinth-like benches, where subtle variations can be distinguished between them upon closer examination. An antenna runs from each unit to a horizontal one that connects all of the units together. The radios come from different years of their production, beginning with its first issue in 1938 in Bakelite housing, the le�-most object. To its right others begin to feature prominent swastika emblems, with some units showing two; one luxury unit towers over the others to the le�. At the centre one radio is constructed of cardboard clumsily disguised with glossy black paint. The swastika has disappeared from the radios to the right, and one contained in a homemade wooden housing. The last two radios date from the ‘50s and the ‘70s, and Kienholz separates the latest model spatially from the others while emphasizing that it descends from them. Kienholz’s physiognomist’s sensibility is never far off in his Berlin assemblages. Kienholz spoke of The Bench as ‘a portrait of a man who was politically young in the ‘30s’.24 In his account the radios come to depict a German man’s life at various points in chronological time, first accepting an affiliation with the party and then concealing this fact. Kienholz also traces the movement of the German economy under fascism in these radios, moving teleologically from Bakelite boom to cardboard-clad bust and later, to the economic upswing of ‘60s-era reconstruction. Kienholz sets off the last and most recent radio from the others; it is no longer part of the bench’s continuum. While it has the general shape and size of the historical ‘people’s receivers,’ it rests alone on a metal plinth. It is white where the others are black. Yet Kienholz makes the connection between the historical and present-day radios explicit: while they are separated and in a way oppose each other starkly the West German ‘people’s receiver’ draws power from the same source as the fascist radios. Within this trajectory of the mass-produced object, Kienholz implies that the past is always still in the present, especially where a mass medium like radio is concerned. Radio, perfected under fascism, connects present-day Germany to a shadowy past. If as Benjamin claimed the collection presents an ‘encyclopaedia of all knowledge of an epoch,’ Kienholz transforms the readymade into a bearer of a (linear) history

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of German fascism and into a model of how knowledge might be extracted from it. To underscore the undeniable connection to the Nazi past in the present of the Federal Republic, one sound element of The Bench, the foot pedal on the right, plays contemporary radio programs which meld with the Wagnerian music issuing from the speakers to the le�. The work then creates a visual, material, and aural continuum between the mass media, personalities and economies of the Nazi past and Federal Republic present, and reminds viewers that postwar radio has a dark origin within fascism. Kienholz also leaves his mark as a collector and constructor of this historical system in the coating of fibreglass that he habitually applied to the surfaces of his finished assemblages.25 Assemblage ‘magic encyclopaedias’ of the German past (to borrow Benjamin’s phrase), or assemblage-ruins as Vostell practiced them, were rarely found in West German art museums. Kienholz utilizes what William Seitz termed the ‘extreme actualism’ of assemblage to cra� material evidence of that past into history, primarily for German viewers of his art. Kienholz shared Vostell’s pessimistic and historicizing view of media technology. Their assemblages stand in strong contrast to the technological optimism of not only Weimar-era theorists Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht, but also of later student movement theorists like Michael Scharang and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.26 Kienholz’s collections of readymade objects write a materialist history. In his collector’s obsession with material culture, he shared the empathetic and mnemonic aesthetic that Max Horkheimer and other Frankfurt School thinkers had earlier theorized, and that sought to uncover moments of past suffering in the (material) present. The Office as Installation and ‘Production Concept’: the Büro Berlin A loosely associated and changing roster of artists active in West Berlin since 1978 also concern themselves with the specific place and site of West Berlin. The ephemeral installations of the Büro Berlin (Berlin Office, Fig. 2.4) engaged found objects and abandoned spaces in West Berlin—and at the height of its

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Fig. 2.4 Büro Berlin office, Lindenstrasse 39, 1980; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

activities, exclusively in the borough of Kreuzberg—where the process of industrial production had been withdrawn. The Büro Berlin also concerned itself with the constructing of ‘alternative space’ for installations and exhibitions—also known as the ‘alternative space movement’—a tendency that gained currency in New York during the 1970s, and was well known to West Berlin artists through René Block’s major 1976 exhibition New York—Downtown Manha�an: SoHo at the Akademie der Künste.27 The phenomenon of the Selbsthilfegalerie (the artistsrun gallery) had by 1966 already manifested itself in West Berlin at ‘Grossgörschen 35,’ founded by painters K.H. Hödicke, Markus Lupertz, Bernd Koberling and L.M. Wintersberger. The institution of the self-help gallery continued with great commercial success into the 1980s with the Galerie am Moritzplatz in Kreuzberg, and that is considered the birthplace

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of the ‘Neue Wilden,’ the Neo-expressionism of Middendorf, Fe�ing, Zimmer and Salomé. The Büro Berlin emphatically rejected this local precedent and set itself in strong opposition to it. The Büro Berlin connected to a constellation of contextual and critical determinants shared by Western, urban-based artists of the 1970s: the new availability of public funds for art in aging industrial centres such as New York and West Berlin, a by-product of the Cold War28; the turn to ephemeral, context-driven, possibly nonsaleable and short-term artworks—coined ‘projects’ by Brian O’Doherty; a critical distancing toward established art structures and institutions, with artists taking over curatorial and administrative functions; and perhaps most importantly, an extended exploration of the managerial/technical ‘office’ within installation as a means toward a materialist understanding of the bureaucratic/administrative as an essential component of the artistic process. Brian Wallis has argued that, as director of the NEA’s Visual Arts Program from 1969 to 1976, O’Doherty was instrumental in creating the funding category of ‘alternative spaces’ and in channelling federal money into it. Wallis also claims that O’Doherty defined alternative spaces in a manner that neutralized their goal to work outside of the realm of ‘quality’ established by a hegemonic network of galleries and museums. Citing the writing of Grant Kester, Wallis implies that the funds channelled to alternative spaces by the NEA in these years and into the 1980s corrupted the NEA granting process: ‘…the managerial class of artist/administrators and the NEA’s staff transformed the relatively amorphous funding philosophy of the Endowment into a highly nuanced paradigm centred on the artists’ space…’29 Kester and Wallis then appear to share a widely-held and suspicious view of management/ administration that has come to characterize much of American art and art discourse from the ‘70s onwards, and that I discuss below. Wallis goes on to suggest that the rapid de-funding of the NEA and the drop in state funding for the arts that took place in the later 1980s was in some manner justified. Like the artists involved with the alternative space phenomenon in New York, Büro Berlin sought to radically

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expand the ‘institutional and framing conditions’ for art beyond the confines of commercial art institutions. However there is stark contrast between the course ‘alternative space’ artists and collaborative groups took in New York and its development in West Berlin. Throughout the Cold War in West Berlin, state funds continued to be distributed liberally for cultural projects, and artists continued elaborate projects in alternative space venues there. Unlike New York—and due to the fact that the city continued to be subsidized by West Germany—West Berlin remained an inexpensive city in these years. This also had an impact on the effectiveness of state funding there; with cheap or even free rents, arts funding tended to go a long way. Perhaps because of this disparity in state funding levels, West Berlin alternative space artists did not so much distrust administration and bureaucracy functions as they tended to participate in it. Much important work remains to be done on the international expansion of federal arts funding that occurred during the ‘70s, much of it resulting from Cold War cultural policies. With the rise of conceptual art there has been wide agreement within recent art discourse that managerial and administrative functions are largely suspect and unethical, even when they are pursued by artists. In keeping with this point of view much recent art production squeamishly avoids the spaces of whitecollar labour where administrative functions are typically carried out. Curiously the look or aesthetic of that space has caused far less consternation, or has even been embraced: in Mel Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art of 1966; deriving from David Lamelas’ earlier work, the non-functioning office-like space staged as part of Seth Sieglaub’s ‘January Show’ of 1969 simulated the accoutrement of an office. Michael Asher’s 1974 installation at the Claire Copley Gallery in Los Angeles is perhaps most emblematic of this posture: Asher removed partition walls in the space to reveal to visitors—as a kind of primal scene—the office and the gallerist carrying out the actual procedures of the gallery. Asher has noted his strategy in revealing the ‘system of economic reproduction’ in this work as a possible means toward annexing that economic function to

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the artwork itself.30 Thus in Asher’s piece the office symbolically represents the pure exchange value of the artwork as well as the functions of the art market. In contrast to these market-driven approaches to the apparatus of the office, David Lamelas’ 1968 installation Office of Information About the Vietnam War at Three Levels: the Visual Image, Text, and Audio positioned that apparatus as a fulcrum for the dissemination of information. Joseph Beuys would later take up this aspect of dissemination in his office-centred installation of 1972, Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum.31 Thus from its beginnings within conceptual art production (with Lamelas’ and Beuys’ installations) the office apparatus pointed to a range of functions that included the market but went beyond it to include the exchange of (possibly political) information. According to widely accepted art histories of conceptual art, the functions of dissemination and of management are not to be found in it. Nevertheless, the dissemination of information is also central to management, i.e., the coordination or harnessing of the contributions of a larger group toward a collective goal— an aspect of production. This is the terrain that Lamelas, Beuys and the Büro Berlin explored; their projects indicate that varieties of collaboration can take place within the dissemination of information and management, which is, therefore, productive. Like the Soviet Productivists before them, these artists concern themselves with the office’s productive functions of dissemination and management as an alternative strategy to bypass the market system. Their work makes bureaucratic production central to key conceptual art projects of the ‘70s and 1980s, a situation ironically precipitated by the cultural struggles of the Cold War. In it refusal of the usual distinction between production and management/administration the Büro Berlin generally echoed the capitalist-critical dimension of the GDR’s economic reforms, beginning with its adoption of the New Economic System in the early 1960s; the NES would promote planning (management) and profitability as central aspects of the socialist economy. Reconnecting with the early Productivist theorists of the Soviet avant-garde, the Büro Berlin sought to position the

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administrative ‘office’ as site and function within the artistic process, and to materially situate the artist as producer/organizer/ administrator within other streams of production as they were found in the neighbourhoods of West Berlin. This European (if not West German) concern distinguishes their enterprise from the alternative space scene in New York. The Büro Berlin therefore did not share the view of the general autonomy of the art institution that characterizes much institutionally focused conceptual art. Its core artists have asserted that the Büro Berlin did not do installations; the spaces of several offices remain the only works that can be credited to the entity Büro Berlin. There were however many and numerous installations realized by individuals who worked under its auspices, however loosely.32 Politics no longer served as the engine for Büro Berlin projects at the end of the industrial age in West Berlin of the 1980s. The goal for them was again to end the notion of the autonomy of art and to usher it into production processes, but their process had more purely analytic and critical ends. In their situations the Büro Berlin had no interest in taking over extant processes and sites of production. Perhaps their liminal location in West Berlin, poised as it was on the cusp between two different models of production, one socialist and one capitalist, led to the desire to rethink the notion. One goal of the group in the ‘80s was to investigate the artist’s potential role as a producer/ organizer/administrator within the other streams of production that took place in the neighbourhoods of West Berlin. This said, some caveats: four major critics and the core artists themselves—Pitz, Rahmann and Kummer—precede me in this a�empt to represent the scope and activities of the Büro Berlin.33 The artists first theorized and re-presented this quasi-corporate entity by means of a 1986 artwork/catalogue they produced in conjunction with the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Büro Berlin. This catalogue presents a conceptual framework for a decade’s worth of past activity in and around the Büro Berlin that included a shi�ing roster of sometimes collaborating artists (in addition to Pitz, Rahmann and Kummer) who ran into the hundreds, including well-known figures Tony Cragg, Kiki Smith, Ben Vautier, Juan Muñoz, Ter Hell, Eva-Maria Schön, Marianne

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Pohl, Raffael Rheinsberg, and Olaf Metzel. The artists at times constructed quasi-collaborative ‘situations’ that explored the medium of installation; at other times individual painters and sculptors fiercely retained their autonomy from this vaguely collective body. Some artists worked only once under the Büro Berlin aegis while others continued to work with them over decades. Even the main organizers—Kummer, Pitz and Rahmann—simultaneously showed their work at traditional gallery sites: at the progressive Galerie Fahnemann, or in-situ in Cologne (with Anne�e Baack), or in New York (Kummer). Thus any account of this loose association must foreground that neither the conceptual framework of the core artists nor the work of any individual can alone characterize the enormous flow of artistic activity that Büro Berlin channelled and administered in West Berlin. Both however contribute to its understanding.34 Their 1986 Künstlerhaus Bethanien project established the office as the core of the Büro Berlin’s quasi-corporate identity. The office remained the nucleus of the physical space the Büro Berlin occupied at its various locations: in the Lützowstrasse, the Lindenstrasse, to its longest-standing home in the Boeckhstrasse 7 (each location abandoned when the building was demolished), and a mobile Büro (Lastzug) that Pitz proposed in 1981. Since 1986 the artists have staged new ‘situations’ and have (re)presented the entity Büro Berlin. One such representation is the archive-as-website that contributed to the exhibition ‘Quobo: Art in Berlin 1989-1999’ (curated by the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations, 2000). Representing the Büro Berlin’s contribution to the exhibition, the website contains the first English translations of much of the office and archive.35 More recently the Büro Berlin appeared in the 2003 ‘Berlin—Moskau/ Moskau—Berlin 1950-2000’ exhibition (which travelled to the State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, in 2004). This constitutes the most recent representation of the Büro Berlin. As a long-standing conceptual and quasi-corporate project, it is an entity determined solely by the artists, while it simultaneously strives to be free of any singular, determining personality or subjectivity.36

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A�er ventures that dated back several years, the group established a physical office for organizational activities in 1980 which they called the ‘Büro Berlin’ at Lindenstrasse 39, the location of the Kroll Trucking Company (Fig. 2.4). They began weekly office hours for planning and discussion. Büro Berlin included as part of its concerns coordination and other organizational activity (which they termed the ‘apparatus’ in their 1986 catalogue) as well as its individual or collaborative activity of producing art objects (‘product’) within the development of ‘product complexes’. Thus collective discussions concerning possible projects, the establishing of the exhibition site, the granting of funds to elicit participation in these situations, other coordination, and even the sending of invitations to the situations themselves, are included as the ‘product’.37 The core artists or ‘management’ become an essential component of this chain of production. A�er the demolition of the Lützowstrasse building the Büro Berlin staged other indoor situations in another building in the Boeckhstrasse in Kreuzberg starting in late 1980 until this second building was demolished in August of 1982. The situations in Kreuzberg began to involve a growing roster of artists, some well established. The administrative arm was re-established in the ‘Merkur—Vier Tische’ show, which was actually a series of office hours sessions held every Thursday from 6 to midnight in November and December, 1981. Several documents were drawn up during office hours/planning meetings convened by Pitz, Kummer, Jochen Bentrup, and Rahmann that included a list of questions regarding the future work of the Büro Berlin; another was titled ‘Modalities of Collaboration’. Careful diagrams detailed the physical set-up of the office and mapped the location of furniture, equipment and key objects. The weekly office hours were held and a list compiled of those who a�ended and contributed, including the anonymous ‘three Australians’.38 Most likely installations for the coming year were discussed, and any advance administrative or coordination-type work completed. An invitation to ‘Merkur’ pictured the Boeckhstrasse building (which appropriately had once housed a furniture factory of the same name); therefore these sessions were open to the art-going

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public. The collaborative planning and key administrative tasks of a very loosely defined art organization had then become the exhibited work of the Büro Berlin by 1981. In addition to sessions involving administrative spaces and functions, the artists who worked at/with/for the Büro Berlin most o�en positioned—as markers of the convergence of various lines of production—readymades or other objects and paintings at various West Berlin sites. This positioning could involve the problematizing of production at various sites. The readymade and its companion installation have from their origins in twentieth-century art practice been linked together. This convergence disagrees with the modernist accounts, by Benjamin Buchloh and Miwon Kwon, for example, to keep these lines of development separate from what they see as a unique thread of conceptual institutional critique; the practices of installation, readymade and of conceptual art have in fact at times converged.39 The artists working with the Büro Berlin—as well as the corporate entity itself—connected to the context of Kreuzberg’s squa�er culture in refusing the autonomous and confined space of the modern art gallery with its standardized divisions of labour and lines of production and dissemination between studio, gallery and collector. They therefore moved beyond the autonomous confines of the art institution (the continuing focus of much installation and conceptual art practice) and looked instead to resituate installation, readymade and exhibition space in sites independent of the workings of the market. The culture of the squa�er in Kreuzberg—seen as a kind of frontiersman of the city who claims ‘wild’ or dead urban spaces as a rightful home, and who effectively suspends the workings of property law—can be traced in the Büro Berlin’s rejection of the art market’s system of economic exchange. The artists who worked within it used ephemeral installations to refute, if only for a time, two main cornerstones of capitalism. In a departure from the lessons of Duchamp the Büro Berlin came to understand and theorize the artwork as a site of production that involved a process of constant renegotiation between artistic ‘individual interest’, and the group’s and

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the city’s ‘common interest’. They further believed that this necessarily shi�ing terrain of collaboration and compromise in art production was the origin of individual (artistic) identity: ‘…participation within the production begins with their asking themselves who they are and what they want to be…’ This is also the source of an unknown but determining element within production, the unpredictable dynamic of ‘romantic’ individuality, which, perhaps in reference to Cold War stereotypes, the Büro Berlin termed the ‘Russian’. The Büro Berlin believed that the negotiation between production and individual (artistic) identity could most effectively be explored in production sites outside of art institutions.40 Their activities point to an acute awareness of local production in West Berlin through the consideration of production that had once taken place there. The Büro Berlin ‘product-complex’ was most o�en realized in the form of an installation in one of the buildings the group rented, and sometimes at public sites like a subway station, a construction or a demolition site. In Büro Berlin projects at the demolition sites that were common in Kreuzberg, artists used painting or the readymade to gauge and recycle the transformation of architecture into detritus. Katja Ka’s large-scale public painting, simply titled Wall Painting (Fig. 2.5) was realized at Nos. 38-44 Fränkelufer in the stairwell of a building that was partially demolished. Ka painted the entire exposed interior wall (up to the fi�h floor) different shades of a brilliant blue, which was clearly visible from across the street; an opening was held there on August 10, 1980. Her painting functioned like an intervention, incorporating into the concerns of painting a span of wall that in fact marked an entire vertical cross-section of an architectural structure. Her painting unified five stories of the structure as a single uninterrupted surface, creating interesting effects in terms of scale and an illusion of depth—the gestural brushmarks in a darker blue make the surface recede somewhat along the lower floors. As is characteristic of her art, Ka’s painting is gestural but moves beyond the compositional distinctions of abstract easel painting that still generates these relations according to the scale of interior space and concomitant notions of the ‘wall,’

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Fig. 2.5 Katja Ka, Wall Painting, 1980; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

a relation O’Doherty had earlier theorized in ‘Notes on the Gallery Space,’ his analysis of colour field painting.41 O’Doherty mentions that the exchanges between surface/mural/wall are central to modernism. Ka’s Wall Painting comes closest to the relations of the mural; she rejects salon-type placement which is instead absorbed into the internal workings of composition. She furthermore experiments with how the edge of the painted surface might be negotiated over the span of five stories. The le� edge hugs the architectural support. This is however contrasted on the right where Ka establishes a variable edge or shape that makes the entire span readable as a subtle shaped painting that does not mark the entire exposed wall surface as a kind of predetermined composition. The painting fuses with surface in the manner of the mural, but by reason of its

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transitory status moving between interior and exterior wall—it can generate no ‘aesthetic force’ (O’Doherty) off of this support in the manner of painting deployed inside an exhibition space. The main tension of this painting comes from the contrast between its position marking an unaestheticized space and its highly gestural aspects: legible dark brushstrokes, and the expressive use of resonating colour. Ka explores the dynamics of aestheticizing this surface through the introduction of gesture and the element of colour; at the same time she establishes a continuum between interior house painting completed by manual labourers in the past and the same practice as carried out by an ‘artist’. Perhaps most emphatically Ka rejects any notion of permanence of the variety that is usually bestowed by the exhibition space. The work exists only as a photograph, but one that not merely documents but rather is technically fine enough to register its subtle compositional dynamics. Ka moves abstract painting radically away from any possibility of market exchange in exploring how compositional relations of shape, colour and the edge might be regauged on an ephemeral surface, at very large scale. Arguably experiments with mural-type painting at such a scale could only take place in the frontier-type space of Kreuzberg, and in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the socialist GDR. A year before Ka’s mural, Una Möhrke’s contribution to ‘Lützowstrasse Situation,’ a 1979 project on the fourth floor of an abandoned factory building at Lützowstrasse 2 that predates the founding of the Büro and the projects I’ve mentioned, similarly investigated the importance of painting, and surfaceas-readymade, within installation.42 Möhrke’s work of these years, which spans drawing, performance, and photography, returns to the surface of paper. In Lützowstrasse Situation 9 Möhrke distributed equal-sized square sheets of industrialgrade crepe paper across the entire floor, we�ing some of the pieces down with water and thereby fixing them at some points. By means of opening the windows and using a fan the air currents would bend or alter some of the sheets by chance, into a composition that she did not fully control. The paper surfaces were not otherwise worked with markings that

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normally constitute ‘drawing,’ and they are also serial units. The identical size of each of these square sheets underscores their property as a readymade, albeit one that has to do with surface and two-dimensionality that is typically associated with vertically situated artworks. In a performative gesture Möhrke threw additional sheets out the window, and she we�ed a series of sheets to an exterior wall that adjoined the factory building., Möhrke’s installation also establishes the connection between readymade and industrial space—a leitmotif of ‘Lützowstrasse Situation’—but does so by means of the two-dimensional surface. Her installation furthermore refuses to engage interior walls which would thereby gain an aesthetic component though this orientation.43 In 1980 Kummer also investigated colour to produce an assisted readymade at another demolition site in the Naunystrasse in Kreuzberg, titled reingelegt (meaning ‘to have

Fig. 2.6 Raimund Kummer, reingelegt, 1980; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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put’ but also ‘to finish off’).44 At the site Kummer painted the steel girders that had been removed from a demolished building and were stacked and ready for the salvage crew to remove them (Fig. 2.6). He painted the girders a brilliant, glossy red; like Duchamp’s Fountain this readymade had also been rotated out of its original vertical alignment within the steelframe structure of a building. Some of the beams had been bent or curved in the demolition process; according to Pitz’s account, Kummer painted some girders that were exposed but still impacted in the partially demolished wall. In another resonance with the originary readymade which, as it has been argued, must be disseminated by means of photography, Kummer photographed the piece early in the morning before the demolition process continued.45 With the exception of one girder that Kummer himself hauled away, the piece was removed and destroyed by salvage crews the next day. Kummer rented a gallery space nearby and displayed his assisted readymade in it, along with an information sheet that contained the observations of three ‘passers-by’ about the work as it was installed and which explained, ‘A few people saw this work and among them three are known to me. I asked them to remember this situation’.46 An intervention in an active production (demolition) site and also an assisted readymade in introducing aesthetic elements to it, Kummer’s work was reabsorbed and destroyed by the very production process in which it intervened. Kummer includes the memories of those who had experienced the Naunystrasse during a particular period of time during the summer of 1980 as part of his piece. These memories, along with the photograph and the physical souvenir Kummer wrested from the site, add to the power of this project in pointing to the aesthetic potential to be realized as part of the city’s sites of destructive production.47 The ephemeral interventions of the Büro Berlin therefore did not enact the sustained oppositionality of site-specific installations like Serra’s Tilted Arc (1981).48 Serra used his sculptures largely as critical interrogations of the architecture that surrounded them; it seems that while he built a fundamental instability into his own sculptural forms, he

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assumed that the architecture and public space surrounding his works would remain stable entities.49 The Büro Berlin situation positioned its ‘materialist critique’ differently. They inhabited but also acknowledged the aging, death and decay of the process of production which marks sites, and which forms the life cycle of not only architecture but also the city itself in a market economy. In keeping with architectural changes and cycles in postindustrial Kreuzberg, the Büro Berlin recognized architecture as a fundamentally unstable function of production. A later product complex begun in 1982 also explores sites of production within the service economy. Res Ingold’s INGOLD AIRLINES at the Boeckhstrasse building consisted of an observation platform and a number of bright (navigation?) lights installed on the roof and on neighbouring buildings. In 1988 as part of the Büro Berlin’s Emotope project, Ingold hosted a well-a�ended reception inaugurating the carrier’s opening of the new Bern-Berlin route; currently an elaborate website details the continuing expansion of the airline.50 Ingold’s complex consists of a (fictional) site of production, an airline, that he has deployed by means of installation, performance and media imagery over the course of 25 years. Ingold does not position his work within the actual production site of a functioning airline— something he desired to do but was financially impossible.51 His production complex continues as an internet site or presence, and in various installations such as the ‘Investors Heliport Cologne,’ a heliport constructed at a Cologne construction site in 2003 and purportedly serviced by Ingold Airlines. By means of its use of the language of airline advertising, Ingold Airlines as an entity is a parallel to other European airlines. It continues to explore and manipulate the careful aesthetics that support the functions of a highly lucrative sector of the German economy. Ingold expands the Büro Berlin’s critical view of production in adding the ephemeral concept of air transportation to it, along with its vast webs of planning and administration. More so than other artists who worked within ‘alternative space’ outside of divided Berlin, the Büro Berlin returns to the underlying motives and procedures of the Constructivists,

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an artistic strategy devised at the dawn of the avant-garde in the Soviet Union. The constructivists at INKhUK (‘Institute of Artistic Culture,’ Moscow) in 1921 sought to synthesize art and industry on the levels of appropriate use, construction and actual manipulation of material. They intended to reposition art in proximity to the proletariat, motivated by science and engineering in a totalizing pursuit of industrialization. As part of this agenda, artists became workers and sought to bring what was once called art into production: ‘From laboratory work the constructivists have passed to practical activity’.52 This first, sustained encounter of the avant-garde with the conditions and processes of production resulted in various products including textiles, workers’ clubs, theatre sets, lecturing kiosks, and photographic imagery that propagandized for the social, economic and political success of the Bolsheviks. At the dawn of the USSR Constructivists like Osip Brik, Boris Kushner and Rodchenko debated how the separate lines of production of industry and of art might be united or at least reconciled to each other within a new configuration. The Productivist theorist Kushner argued for the place of the ‘technical office’ within the production process. In papers that he delivered at INKhUK in 1922 Kushner pointed to one major role of the engineer within production: work with calculations and designs that he completed in the office, separate from the workshops. The ‘technical office’ was the site where the constructivist artist-engineer laboured.53 Kushner otherwise suggested that in order to improve production, artists should increasingly be placed in the technical office to put forward prototypes that would lead to be�er-designed objects. In its critical focus on the tasks completed administratively and o�en collectively in the office, even if it was at odds with other artists involved, the Büro Berlin returned to Kushner’s earlier insistence on the place of administration and the office within the advanced art. It has been argued that the intentions and preoccupations of the historical avant-garde have only become fully understood and implemented with postwar art production; this is clearly the case with the Büro Berlin’s sustained artistic engagement of the office.54

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Büro Berlin installations re-established production sites in the ruins of industrial production, inserting their projects into the local destruction industry or the service sector, modes of postindustrial production unknown to the historical avantgarde. In their investigations of the dynamics of local production they made use of the readymade, painting, photography and performance—in the guise of the administrative and organizational tasks that a traditional division of labour delegated to gallery personnel—to infiltrate pre-existing, sites of production and to explore the dynamics of the entire negotiating process between author and object, the local site and its coordination, as art. If the product complex sometimes failed to materialize from the Büro Berlin’s moments of intervention, they successfully exposed the dynamics of production and the drama of collaboration, or the navigating of individual identity within complex interpersonal processes, that remains a true engine of all production. West Berlin as ‘Concrete Abstraction’: Filmic Representation Yet one problem, I believe, passed unnoticed (perhaps even in the eyes of many Germans): the fact that the reality of this wall was destined to throw into abstraction the unity of a big city full of life, a city that was not and is not, in reality—its profound reality consists precisely in this—a single city, not two cities, not the capital of a country, not any important city, not the centre, nothing but this absent centre. In this way, the wall succeeded in concretizing abstractly the division, to render it visible and tangible, and thus to force us to think henceforth of Berlin, in the very unity of its name, no longer under this sign of a lost unity, but as this sociological reality constituted by two absolutely different cities. The wall’s ‘scandal’ and importance consists of being, in the concrete oppression it represents, essentially abstract, and it thus recalls what we continually forget: that abstraction is neither simply an inexact manner of thinking nor a manifestly impoverished form of language, but that

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abstraction is our world, the world in which we live and think, day a�er day.55 Like Wolf Vostell, K.P. Brehmer worked in West Berlin’s public spaces in the 1960s. His film series Walkings (1969–70) pictured the city. Brehmer was never associated with Fluxus or with Happenings, but his work evidences his interest in exploring the activities of everyday life and his sympathy with the concerns of these two directions in performance and film. Brehmer’s six Walkings films are all set in West Berlin and each is only a few minutes in length. The Walkings films are more like exercises than individual films, an aspect underscored in that each film is assigned a number, i.e., Nr. 1 Sieg (Nr. 1, Victory). Each film has to do with the relation of filmic representation to the objects that orient the walker or flâneur in West Berlin. Brehmer minimizes his authorial control within the films, a strategy more common to conceptual art than to film. Brehmer’s mini-’documentaries’ critique romanticized notions of flaneurie and expose the problematic nature of some of the city’s public objects or monuments. Brehmer runs the flâneur’s aimlessness through various readymade structures, like maps, printed text, or predetermined lengths of film itself. In a parallel to Vostell (discussed in Chapter 1), Brehmer questions the stability of (filmic) representation and whether flaneurie holds out any possibility of collective memory and with it a sense of identity in the postwar city. In the contemporaneous urban projects of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, the public spaces of the city still held the possibility of the uninhibited movement of the flâneur on the one hand and redemptive experience on the other. Brehmer and Vostell point to the impossibility of the SI’s avant-gardist belief in unrestricted movement in the divided Cold War spaces of Berlin. Two of the films, Nr. 1 Sieg (Victory) and Nr. 4, Passer (Fi�er), concern themselves with the Victory Column or Siegessäule in West Berlin. In 1964 Andy Warhol had first focused on the city landmark as a subject of experimental film in Empire, an eight-hour film consisting of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building in Manha�an, a film that Brehmer surely was

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aware of. Warhol’s film unwinds in real time and displays minimal intervention on the part of the director. Ultimately, however, Warhol’s film is an hommage to the building’s monumentality and to its role as an icon of New York City. In Brehmer’s comparatively ultra-short films Nr. 1 Sieg and Nr. 4, Passer, the filmic image explicitly doubles or reproduces the monument or critically suggests the object be replaced with an embodied gesture; Brehmer thereby reduces monuments into mere objects. Nr. 4, Passer presents an almost identical sequence several times: the camera focuses on a photograph of the Victory Column, and with a shaky movement a second filmic image is superimposed or ‘fi�ed’ on top of it. Brehmer predetermines the content of his film as having to do only with imitating or doubling a photographic image as closely as possible; like Warhol, Brehmer minimizes his intervention. Brehmer allows himself greater commentary on this object in Nr. 1 Sieg (Fig. 2.7), which also has to do with replacing the object with a filmic one. In this film the camera frames the Victory Column in the distance. With a consistent gait, a figure (Brehmer) walks toward the camera. As he approaches it, the camera begins to distort the approaching figure, which soon appears to be the same height as the column in the distance and finally eclipses it. As Brehmer reaches the camera, the shot cuts to his upraised forearm outlined against the sky, making a peace gesture. The object/monument is obscured and replaced by another object/body. Brehmer replaces the celebration of Prussian military conquest and violence that is the historical origin of this nineteenth-century monument with the communicated gesture of ‘peace’. It is hardly an hommage but rather a wishful filmic rearrangement of the West Berlin landscape. Brehmer uses another strategy to structure two other films in the series, Nr. 2 Mauer (Wall) and Nr. 6 Parallel/Identität, (Parallel/Identity). Again his filmed objects in the cityscape are subjected to a predetermined schema that minimizes Brehmer’s own filmic authorship and that foregrounds the materiality of film in composing the images themselves. In both films an intertitle states that either the length or the speed of the film is

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Fig. 2.7 K. P. Brehmer, Walkings: Nr. 1 Sieg, 1969-70; © 2008 Estate of K.P. Brehmer and Common Film Produktion GmbH, Berlin

equal to the distance or speed travelled by the walker carrying the camera. Nr. 6, one of the shortest films in the series, consists of almost illegible single downwards-oriented moving shots of a sidewalk showing nothing but blurred concrete punctuated by planted trees at its periphery. Nr. 2 employs a similar tactic but with the camera trained on the horizon by the walker. In a film that is as physically long as the walker’s own path, the camera approaches a wall, which we realize is the Berlin Wall, until it stops a few inches short of its concrete surface. In his film the

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wall functions primarily as a marker of the distance of 18 meters from the camera’s original starting position. While Brehmer clearly selected this object because of its cultural importance in the landscape, he ironically minimizes its significance. Brehmer renders the wall, arguably the most important physical manifestation of the Cold War, as almost incidental. Brehmer offers a deflating interpretation of the activity of the flâneur in Nr. 6 Out/In Imaginär (Out/In Imaginary), a film that takes up language as a predetermined structure for urban wandering, in this case, by car. The film shows several le�ers being traced into a map of the borough of Neukölln. The next sequence is shot out the front window of a moving car, as it drives down various residential streets. The car’s path presumably traces the word ‘OUT’ in driving this particular route. An intertitle states ‘the word “IN” is wri�en into the sky by the movement of the camera’. What follows appears to be blank film; the predetermined movement of the camera across an overcast sky is almost imperceptible.56 Like a number of other conceptual artists, Brehmer makes use of text, the predetermined schema to structure urban motoring as well as a series of camera movements within his film. He thereby lessens his subjective control of each in the process. The film Nr. 3 allegedly includes the (off camera) participation of the artist Stanley Brouwn, who had some years earlier staged his direction-seeking performances titled This Way Brouwn in West Berlin. In them Brouwn stopped passers-by and asked them to sketch directions to a particular location in the city.57 Brehmer’s Nr. 3 starts with the text, ‘On a beautifull (sic) day S. Brouwn and I went this way’. In an ironic parting of synchronisation of sound and filmic image, the voiceover describes visiting ‘remarkable’ sites with Brouwn; meanwhile the camera traces a path down mundane sidewalks, residential streets and cuts between buildings, with the image sometimes jerking so violently that it becomes difficult to make out the images. A viewing platform overlooking the wall is ascended and descended while the camera focuses exclusively on trivialities like the platform, the stairs, or the garbage that has accumulated there.

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At the end of the film the voiceover tells us that a�er Brouwn viewed the film and noted he did not remember the walk this way, he requested that it be destroyed and his name removed from it. Brehmer renders the wandering stroll in Berlin as a fully unremarkable film but finally also as a failure. Brehmer’s films simply cannot represent the transcendent moment of urban wandering, although he also seems to imply, perhaps without cynicism, that the ‘beautiful day’ of wandering he shared with Brouwn was somehow in itself transcendent. Brehmer communicates that in the end you should neither trust your friends (who tell you to destroy your art) nor filmic representation. Vostell had similarly problematised whether the photographic image can access the temporal experience of physical space, which includes the capacity for memory, for the viewer. Both Brehmer and Vostell suggest that the idea of public space and the collective interactions enabled by that space have receded into an atomized experience of the photographic or filmic image. Self as Place: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1979) In the period immediately following the suicide in prison of suspected terrorists Ulrike Meinhof and her female colleague Gudrun Ensslin—Meinhof was a West German student activist, journalist and Red Army Faction organizer—feminist cinema flowered in West Germany. Nowhere is the interrelation of these two events examined more closely than in Yvonne Rainer’s powerful avant-garde film Journeys from Berlin/1971. Unlike Brehmer’s short films, Rainer’s Journeys is not primarily visual; it withholds the comforts of visual orientation in filmic space. The film does not rely on the visual image of the physical locus of West Berlin and the objects in it, but rather uses West Berlin as the psychic and historical space where Rainer herself experienced a powerful identification with Meinhof as an historical figure who connected to the legacies of political anarchism in pursuing the act of violent resistance against state power. Berlin is a point of departure and not a destination for Rainer, and therefore the title of her film.

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Journeys from Berlin/1971 bridges what Teresa de Lauretis identifies as the two opposing concerns of feminist film culture of the 1970s: ‘…one called for immediate documentation for purposes of political activism, consciousness raising, selfexpression, or the search for “positive images’ of woman; the other insisted on rigorous, formal work on the medium—or, be�er, the cinematic apparatus, understood as a social technology— in order to analyze and disengage the ideological codes embedded in representation’.58 Journeys is an autobiographical film about Rainer’s own development as an activist artist, and an extended formalist reflection on the psychic mechanism of identification. Rainer also addresses the ethics of how cinema plays into identification by means of the ego-ideals it holds out for its viewers, feminist and otherwise. Theorists Laura Mulvey and de Lauretis have pointed to identification as the major preoccupation of feminist film theory of the 1970s. They understand the process of identification in two ways: within cinema as the female spectator’s identification with an onscreen female image; but also as ‘…the operation itself whereby the human subject is constituted’59 on an ideological level, drawing upon Althusser’s notion of the ideological function of the process of identification within bourgeois representations of the subject. Through the lens of psychoanalysis, a motif that she literally foregrounds in the film, Rainer scrutinizes Meinhof’s activist anarchism as a violent ‘renunciation of the ego’ and questions the relation between an interiorized and sometime unstable (female) subjectivity on the one hand and women’s’ social and political agency on the other. Other West German filmmakers, mostly women, also responded to women’s’ increasing involvement in the violent actions of the RAF. They also considered the moral dilemma such violence posed for the goals of the feminist movement and whether or how it might be reconciled with it. The most explicit films about the Baader-Meinhof incidents are by Margarethe von Tro�a, particularly in Die bleierne Zeit (or The German Sisters or Marianne and Juliane, 1981); more recently Volker Schlöndorff also addressed this issue and period in West German history in Die Stille Nach den Schuss (The Legend of Rita, 2000). Other

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West German filmmakers used the Meinhof tragedy to frame sustained investigations of the situation of feminism and feminists in West Germany, including the narrative filmmakers Helke Sander (Redupers, 1981) and Ulrike O�inger in Bildnis eine Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1981), among other of her films. Rainer was in West Berlin on a D.A.A.D. fellowship during this key period, 1979-1981, identified by Thomas Elsaesser as the era of the ‘New German Cinema’. Rainer’s film implies that either she or Meinhof visited West Berlin at other times, including during the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961; a�er her divorce in 1968, Meinhof moved to West Berlin where she lived until going underground in 1970. She was found dead in her cell in Stammheim near Stu�gart on May 9, 1976. In contrast to these narrative-based feminist films, Journeys foregoes traditional relations between sound and image as well as traditional editing and framing in order to analyze the process of identification and ultimately of the stability of female (and artistic) identity itself, particularly that of the film’s author, Rainer. It is quite difficult to describe the film given its disparate quality, particularly in terms of the disjunction between sound and image. Rainer makes clear that her own presence in West Berlin coincided with historical events, and that conversely historical events that took place in Berlin resonated with her own life. In the first minutes of the film, three of the film’s major and recurring textual ‘voices’ are introduced: one is a visual crawl script oriented like a newspaper column that scrolls upwards (moving vertically), and presents historical and personal information about West Germany and West Berlin. Two soundtrack elements are juxtaposed over this text, which is interrupted by cuts to an aerial and rather illegible image of Stonehenge: the first is a conversation between two New Yorkers, a man and a woman, who argue about political consciousness, political anarchism, and the events around the RAF in West Germany (also detailed by the scrolling text) while they prepare dinner; the second is a mostly unrelated monologue, a young woman reading from what appears to be her diary (and which Rainer has identified as passages from her own diary).

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The visual text outlines several events and conditions that speak to or took place in West Berlin: the exemption from military conscription for German men; the beginnings of the Berlin Wall; the death of student protester Benno Ohnesang, shot by a West Berlin policeman in 1967; the a�empted assassination of Socialist Students Party leader Rudi Dutschke; and the increasing violence, bombings and shootings, by the Red Army Faction in the spring of 1972. At the conclusion of the film, while Rainer faces the camera and gives a (feigned) ‘emotional’ address to her own mother, the sequence is intercut with another female voiceover, one that reads a le�er by Meinhof to fellow prisoner Hannah Krabbe. An association between Rainer herself and Meinhof is consistent in the film. Rainer does not otherwise privilege Germany or West Berlin as a locale. As script cues tell us, the camera cuts to different locations, both visually and aurally: to the Bowery in New York (coinciding with the New Yorkers’ conversation), to London (the se�ing for the therapy session), and to Berkeley. The one repeated visual sequence that is filmed in West Berlin features the entrance to Ernst Paulus’ Asian-inspired Expressionist building, the Kreuzkirche (church) in Berlin-Schmargendorf. This entrance was completed by the sculptor Felix Kupsch. In the sequence two figures, a man and a woman, walk back and forth in front of this entrance (they are referred to as the actors ‘Cynthia and Antonio’ in the script). London and Berlin are recapitulated in two other recurring aerial shots: one of Stonehenge, which becomes increasingly legible, and the other an almost unrecognizable view of the Berlin Wall, slightly out of focus and difficult to make out or place. These landmarks instead become punctuating metaphors for the tensions Rainer stages in the film between the interiorized self (via the young woman’s voiceover and the therapy sessions featuring the analysand, Anne�e Michelson) and an ‘exteriorized’ one, the socialized/politicized self, via the couple’s conversation and their reading of the writings of various nineteenth-century anarchists. In addition to the scrolling vertical script (which remains visual in that it is presented without sound), Rainer uses

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an audio text, the voiceover of the New Yorkers’ domestic conversation, as another important point of historical and political orientation: they present a short history of political anarchism by means of a series of first-person texts they read to each other over the course of the film. The two are also never seen. The couple’s soundtrack conversation (delivered by Vito Acconci and Amy Taubin) mirrors the intense exchanges of the therapy session between analyst, who says very li�le, and the analysand, who delivers long monologues. The couple’s conversation has to do with the issue of social responsibility, and the extent to which the female voice (‘she’) identifies herself with the words and actions of anarchists. She first reads aloud Vera Figner, whom she then compares to Meinhof; in the course of the film she alternatively talks about, or reads first person texts by, Sofia Berdina, Angelica Balabanoff, Emma Goldman, Rosa Luxemburg, and in an extended sequence, Vera Zasulich’s 1877 account of her a�empted assassination of a St. Petersburg magistrate to avenge a savage prison beating (of which a jury later acqui�ed her). Part of the so-called ‘Nihilists,’ these socialist activists emerged from the generation around 1850 in tsarist Russia; some emigrated for a time to New York City in the late nineteenth century, like Goldman and Alexander Berkman. The male voice, ‘he,’ reads a long passage from Berkman’s narrative of his 1892 a�ack on Henry Clay Frick; and so, Rainer underscores the gendered aspect of identification that takes place in their conversation. These long voiceovers are punctuated by static views out of an upper-story window onto the Bowery and a Berlin street, and finally with the silent filmic wanderings of ‘Cynthia and Antonio’ in front of the Berlin Kreuzkirche. Rainer leaves it to the viewer to forge possible connections between sound and image (i.e., are the views out the windows point-of-view shots from the couple? Are these images of two people the two who are conversing in the soundtrack?), but none are made explicit. The New York couple of the soundtrack compare the actions of the RAF to these Russian predecessors and argue over the ethics of violent activism in each case. ‘She’ concludes that where the Russians were justifiably motivated by gross social injustice

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and inequality, Meinhof and the others ‘…show(s) a muddled vindictive streak in her nature that got in the way of her social thinking. A lot of their violent acts were carried out in a spirit of personal revenge rather than social justice…The li�le I’ve read (of Meinhof’s writings) sounds like hysterical rhetoric…’60 Despite this dismissal, the two empathetically discuss the state’s harsh treatment of Meinhof and the RAF in prison. Finally and in a self-reflecting turn, ‘she’ confesses her difficulty in accepting ‘political imperatives’ because she cannot, as habit, empathize with others. It remains to the viewer to decide as to whether in this quality ‘she,’ for be�er or for worse, is similar to Meinhof. A�er this point her voice is intercut with that of the analysand or ‘patient’ played by Michelson, and her voice is accompanied by the static shot of the ongoing therapy session; ‘she’ at this point merges with the ‘interiorized’ voice of the female subject of psychoanalysis. The therapy session is visualized throughout the film and it lies at the heart of the film’s content, which is ironic given Rainer’s tendency to marginalize the visual element. Rainer uses it to examine the relations of power and identification inherent in the psychoanalytic situation between analyst and analysand as it is constructed by various schools, and finally also to empathize with Meinhof’s turn to self-destruction and her refusal of psychoanalysis and compassion when it is appropriated as a means of repression by the state. In the film the therapy session is intercut with the voiceover of the young American woman reading from her diary (which Rainer identifies as her own). The young woman o�en discusses her parents: a forceful and politicized ‘anarchist’ father, and her alternating shame and compassion for her overly emotional (prefeminist?) mother; this voice then represents the Oedipal situation (arguably Rainer’s own). In contrast to this soundtrack Rainer visualizes the therapy sequences where the Oedipal relation is reconsidered, as an interiorized space where female subjectivity is negotiated (and which Rainer suggests, through her editing, is in London). At various points a small group of people or chorus moves behind the analysand in a manner that recalls Rainer’s earlier

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choreography. The therapist is alternatively played by a man, a woman and a male child and is positioned very close to the camera and with his/her back to it. Throughout the film a table separates the analyst and the analysand who sits behind it. This suggests that the camera, and by extension also the viewer, takes up the authoritative position of the therapist, whose reactions to the patient’s monologues go from silence to ridicule, but who finally suggests that empathy and ‘mutual respect’ are means to counter the patient’s (or Meinhof’s?) self-destruction and violence. The patient signals the realm of psychoanalysis in her first speech, about a dream, the traditional subject ma�er of analysis and she recounts other dreams over the course of the film. She discusses her sexual fantasies and experience, including her fear of the erect phallus when she was ‘young and innocent’. At one point she addresses the therapist/camera as ‘a properly constituted authority,’ but she also takes on a mocking tone to lessen that authority, as when she babbles in baby-talk. She thereby presents a (false) infantilization of herself as herself, an insincerity that would make true psychotherapy impossible. Several of her monologues debate the measure of equality that exists or not between herself and the faceless therapist. It is clear that the power relations inherent to therapy will be tested, by the patient on the one hand, and perhaps by the case of Meinhof on the other. In another test, the patient refuses Freud’s views of female identity, declaring, ‘…my cunt is not a castrated cock. If anything it’s a heartless asshole!’61 She also states that psychotherapy has failed her in the past despite its best efforts. Rainer then shares with other feminists a critical view of the sexism, among other pitfalls, of the talking cure. The patient relates a ‘search for a final exit,’ and a ‘decision,’ which she repeatedly links to the site of the Mariannenplatz (in Kreuzberg) and the year 1971, a year when Meinhof may still have lived in Berlin. Perhaps this decision means suicide, but as ‘she’ announces in voiceover moments later, it is more likely the conscious choice to ‘renounce egoism’ in taking on a mission for others to ‘gain justice’ that might erase or destroy the self. It is the choice of historical political anarchists like

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Andrei Isaev and the others whose voices ‘she’ has read aloud from the beginning of the film. In another sequence the therapist also cues the patient to articulate the emotion she finds most foreign, compassion; when she manages to say the word, the therapist reads from D. W. Winnico� on compassion as a ‘natural virtue…a disposition suitable to creatures so weak and subject to so many evils as we certainly are…’62 The patient’s breakthrough follows when she states: ‘Suicide then can be seen as a failure of imagination…a failure to imagine a world where conscious choice and effort might produce mutual respect between you and me’. The final sequence of the film presents both the image of Rainer herself and a long text in the soundtrack, the voice of Meinhof raging, shortly before her death, against the ‘psychiatrification’ that was turned on her and an imprisoned RAF colleague. As Rainer presents it, Meinhof’s motivation for ‘fighting against them’ remains unclear at best and at the worst, it seems to have to do with a rage she has rechanneled and turned upon herself. Rainer’s message seems to be that while feminists can learn from the image and case of Ulrike Meinhof, the direction of violent activism she pursued, was in the end pathological. As of the writing of this book, we are still waiting for a response from a filmmaker or artist from former GDR to Rainer’s reflections on Meinhof and her place in the history of anarchist oppositionality. Meinhof continues to command an almost mythic status in Germany. Some recent biographies use her to reaffirm old Cold War notions, positioning Meinhof first and foremost as a kind of depraved ‘radical communist’ who only redeployed the amoral and anti-democratic standards of the old KPD.63 These recent studies confirm Meinhof’s connections with SED-sponsored organizations within the Anti-Atomic Movement, her working relation with the journal konkret (also funded by the SED), and her plans to emigrate to the GDR in the 1970s. Interestingly several of these recent books on Meinhof were themselves wri�en by women. The complex connection between the female psyche and acts of terrorism commi�ed in the face of brutal state

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suppression demands further cultural exploration, as it has clearly outlived its original Cold War context. Counter-histories of the Kiez: Butzmann’s East Berlin Strategies The major changes in the world economy that hastened the end of urban industry and manufacturing once based in major cities of the U.S. and Western Europe also impacted the industrial centres of the Soviet Bloc like Warsaw and East Berlin. By the 1970s the decay of urban housing and public space in certain neighbourhoods (the Kiez in German) in East Germany, particularly in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin but also in older neighbourhoods in Dresden and Leipzig, had become a major problem for the SED. As the urban historian Brian Ladd has documented, individuals in East German inner cities began to transform the government-sanctioned neighbourhood organizations or Wohnbezirksausschüsse into grassroots organizations that advocated the preservation and renovation of nineteenth-century structures and protested the tabula-rasastyle ‘progress’ of the infamous Pla�enbau, the GDR’s answer to public housing. At times these activist organizations even scored moderate successes.64 Old and decaying East German neighbourhoods were found to house younger intellectuals and other nonconformists—some have even called Prenzlauer Berg the ‘Montmartre’ of Berlin65—and a growing dissatisfaction with the environment and the conditions of public space. For another unfortunate and long-term result of the coming together of socialist industry and everyday life that the Bi�erfeld Policy initiated proved to have had a far more lasting and profound effect: extensive pollution due to industrial wastes released into the environment. The graphic artist Manfred Butzmann tread gingerly on this terrain; his restrained photo-based postcards and posters, dating from 1977 to about 1982, are emblems of grassroots resistance to actually-lived socialism’s disinterest in ecological issues and the problems of the inner city or the environment. Butzmann’s photo-based works likely served as social and political catalysts that led grassroots reforms that urban historians

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have chronicled in East Berlin. It is remarkable, or a sign that there were like-minded progressives who had gained positions in the VBK, that Butzmann received awards for his critical posters beginning in 1979 and almost annually therea�er.66 Despite his activist works—and his controversial paintings of rabbits on the East side of the Berlin Wall which were destroyed during the tumultuous events of November, 1989—Butzmann navigated a fairly successful career for himself as a graphic artist and illustrator in the East Berlin borough of Pankow. He was recognized and commended for cityscapes that depicted Berlin as an Arbeiterstadt or workers’ city,67 or more strangely, for ‘showing…the environment with all its contradictions…long rows of parked cars or mutilated and dead trees appear…and thereby gain qualities of renderability’.68 Even Butzmann’s early prints had a critical undertone, and he met with difficulty in having them shown in major exhibitions. His early print portfolio Eindrücke (Impressions, 1976) took on the bleak subject ma�er of the landscape he experienced during mandatory army training. His pacifist tendencies are apparent in some of these depictions of gas masks, training fields and dorm rooms u�erly bere� of any human quality. While the juries of both the Berlin Art Exhibition of 1978 and the VIIIth Dresden ‘German Art Exhibition’ of that same year accepted this portfolio, individual prints had disappeared from public view by the time the exhibition opened, as the juries quietly reversed their decision. The hastiness of Butzmann’s exclusion at the VIIIth, which must have been devastating to the young artist, is underscored by the fact that one of his prints in this portfolio, Stube (barracks), is illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, which had already made its way to the printer.69 Butzmann reported that even two days before the opening, five prints were still on view in the galleries at the Albertinum.70 If the subtle criticality of his print series almost passed by the Dresden jury and party officials, the poster Butzmann submi�ed for the Berlin exhibition in 1978 did not, as it was immediately rejected.71 Photography was still not exhibited as art in the GDR in 1978, as the exhibition catalogues of the Dresden exhibitions indicate. Photography, with its indexical

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qualities and documentary capabilities, proved to go against one of the main objectives of Socialist Realism as it was formulated in East Germany: a system of representation that somehow simultaneously documented but also projected an imagined future state onto things in physical reality.72 The state therefore kept photography as a medium well isolated from recognized artistic practices. With the timely title International Year of the Child—the theme for 1978 that had been announced by the United Nations—the picture of East German childhood Butzmann’s photograph presented was not fla�ering. Without any text beyond the title of the work, the photograph depicts two boys with delighted grins on their faces, displaying their toy machine guns; one of them takes aim at the photographer. Butzmann has masked out their identities, a procedure usually taken by the West German media when photographs depicted criminal or pornographic content, and to protect the subjects against incrimination. Thus in depicting the systematic introduction of deadly force and weaponry to children as a typical or even determining scene from male childhood, one that spawns future violence and criminality, Butzmann delivers a blow to notions of East German masculinity that tapped into the militarism the state promoted. The poster is then a perfect pendant to Butzmann’s critique of the dehumanizing state of the Volksarmee (people’s army of the GDR) and its young recruits in the portfolio Eindrücke. Although this particular poster was not exhibited, it opened the door to Butzmann’s future photobased works. Butzmann would not only deploy his photo-based posters in public ‘non-art’ venues but he also managed in the next years to get his photography exhibited as graphic design— for which he also won numerous awards throughout the 1980s as part of the juried ‘Die 100 besten Plakate’ annual exhibitions. Presented as posters, Butzmann cleverly managed to get his photography publicly exhibited in the GDR, where it otherwise would not have been. Lothar Lang furthermore points out that Butzmann almost single-handedly continued the critical and activist tradition of photomontage initiated by John Heartfield. But in the manipulation of text and photographic image Butzmann was

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also clearly encouraged by the West German poster artist Klaus Staeck, whom he met in a�ending the pleinairs of the KarlMarx-Stadt group Clara Mosch (see Chapter 5). Butzmann’s posters and postcards opened new alternatives to the official institutional networks of state-sanctioned art-making. Beginning in 1977 Butzmann hung, with necessary official permissions, his grid-based posters in Pankow’s shop windows, libraries and other public sites throughout the borough. He also served as photographer of these early posters. Butzmann’s photobased works were however never included in nor mentioned in his exhibitions, not even at his retrospective (1978) or at the exhibition of artists’ posters (1977) at the progressive Berlin Galerie Arkade, one of the few East German galleries officially designated as part of the ‘GDR state art trade’.73 Butzmann’s ambiguity most likely saved his art from censorship and allowed for its continued display, albeit in ‘non-art’ sites of exhibition. This would indicate that there was a clear distinction between officially exhibited high art and graphic art production on the part of the VBK and by galleries like the Galerie Arkade. There was in fact debate about whether Butzmann’s posters should be understood as art or not; an art critic excitedly commented that because of the ‘political engagement’ Butzmann urged from his viewers, his works were actually not art, and that his posters must be kept accessible and placed in public spaces and not be ‘carried to the grave in art exhibitions’. This critic then openly condemned the political impotence of Socialist Realism and underscored his view of the socio-political irrelevance of most of East German art as it was disseminated in recognized art institutions by 1982.74 Butzmann’s posters functioned on two levels: they documented and condemned the degradation of public space, and, in reformist mode, they urged an altered behaviour and a�itude regarding public space from the socialist viewer. Butzmann grew bolder in his critique when the viewer he targeted in these posters clearly shi�ed from neglectful individual GDR citizens to the SED party and its bureaucrats, who had allowed devastating levels of pollution and urban blight. The earliest posters function as urban parables wherein

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Butzmann delivers moralizing reprimands that focused on individual responsibility toward public space in city neighbourhoods. Ironically Butzmann took it upon himself to instill a sense of ownership, or responsibility, toward public urban spaces in the socialist state. Butzmann’s early posters appeared only to address individual citizens, and therefore the tolerance and permissions Butzmann received from officials at first to install these posters in Pankow neighbourhoods is understandable. Butzmann’s posters for one series are explicitly political: his ironically-captioned series of empty planters at streetside where trees had once grown with the text ‘Ein Platz für Bäume’ in 1979 arguably points to the culpability of party officials and their shameful neglect of urban neighbourhoods. Butzmann’s photos clearly document that street trees throughout Pankow had died out years before, possibly as a result of severe air and water pollution throughout East Berlin (it should be remembered that a major, aging municipal gas plant was located in adjacent Prenzlauer Berg). Butzmann condemns the degradation of the street on the part of GDR official policies in offering overwhelming photographic evidence of the absence of street trees that characterized the East German inner city. In the related didactic series of posters and postcards Zum Beispiel (For Example)—it is not clear how these postcards were distributed, or to whom—Butzmann prints text above photographs depicting the crumbling building façades of Pankow, punctuated with boarded up or partially bricked-in windows. These photographs document the decrepit state of architecture along East German city blocks and with the text, the postcards imply that the architectural decay depicted in the photograph is only one example among many others, or, that the photograph delivers evidence to refute arguments to the contrary (such as, for example, the GDR’s sunny announcements about urban housing). Butzmann’s critique in these images is political and pointed to city officials; Eugen Blume has eloquently described the risk Butzmann took on with such an image, which may appear now to be rather innocuous.75 In other images from the Zum Beispiel series Butzmann simply used the phrase

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with photographs that gave ‘examples’ of what ordinary East Germans might do to combat such a depressing lack of greenery in the city: he cultivated ivy to grow up the sides of numerous concrete pillars that li�ered Pankow’s neighbourhoods and photographed these a�empts to cultivate plant-life and ‘green’ the Kiez. In these photo/text works Butzmann urges a kind of ecological and preservationist activism on the part of citizens that runs counter to the actions of the state. In his most powerful series, generically-titled Heimatkunde (‘Homeland’ history and geography) of 1984, Butzmann delivered a veiled but stinging critique of the destruction of local historical architecture and natural sites on the part of political leaders, and the resulting loss of any sense of collective memory and history because of it. The title of the series is u�erly ironic, given that the posters documented the state’s consistent disregard for historical industrial buildings and for the opinion of preservationist/citizens who argued forcefully for the cultural importance of these structures for the history of the German working class, the alleged lynchpin of GDR history. The posters in this series present photographs of the same site over a period of generations or shorter periods, and label each poster with the specific address where the photographs were taken. Many document the steady loss of any architectural ornamentation (more common on older buildings), of greenery, and the lack of any public postings giving information about the historical significance of certain structures. Butzmann’s series exposes as fraudulent the GDR’s widely heralded concern with historical preservation, along with its new preservation laws passed during the ‘European Architectural Heritage Year’ of 1975.76 But none of the posters do so more damningly than the 1985 poster in the series that commemorated what was for many East Berlin preservationists a catastrophic event: the complete and practically unannounced demolition of the city’s three nineteenth-century gasometers by city officials, in order to clear the area for a housing development and memorial park dedicated to Ernst Thälmann (Fig. 2.8). A wide grassroots effort had emerged across many organizations in East Berlin to save these gasometers (where fuel was stored but not processed).

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These protests had been encouraged by earlier announcements that official preservationists and city officials intended to save the gasometers and remodel them for use as a kind of entertainment and cultural centre. A document presented to the Bezirksbauamt in 1978, titled ‘Thälmann Park Study,’ indicates the plan for a cultural centre inside the gasometers, as well as plans to reconstruct Mies van der Rohe’s 1926 monument to Communist victims of fascist violence in the park.

Fig. 2.8 Manfred Butzmann, Heimatkunde 1055 Berlin, 1985; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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By 1985 the party had run out of money, patience and initiative to realize these ideas. In the early ‘80s a Soviet sculptor, Lev Kerbel, was instead commissioned to create a bombastic sculpture of the figure of Thälmann with a raised fist in front of a flowing flag. Kerbel’s monument was finally placed in front of rows of cheap housing that had been built on the land cleared by the demolition of the gas works and the gasometers; the monument was dedicated in April, 1986. It ironically marked the last years of the GDR.77 Presented to a sympathetic audience at the Humbolt University, Thomas Flierl’s passionate 1984 plea for the preservation of the gasometers included an argument for the historical significance of these early industrial structures as monuments to the development of Berlin as a ‘worker’s city’. Clearly at one point SED officials had been in agreement with such views.78 Butzmann’s poster captures what must have been a wide sense of betrayal and of the SED’s complete indifference to the views of East Berliners when the gasometers were demolished on July 28 of that year. The SED had decided that the official history of the worker’s city would have the typically iconic and heroic face of Thälmann, positioned before the blank walls of a housing development. They privileged their mythic icon instead of preserving the historical buildings of the city. Butzmann’s image marks a moment that was as damaging to the reputation of the SED city officials as was the stripping of Wolf Biermann’s citizenship in 1976: it further corroded the faith many citizens may have had in the city’s leadership. As Eugen Blume commented in 1992 when the posters were reprinted: ‘The Heimatkunde posters are warning signs, paths of investigation, and pictures of hope. As corrections they worked against the loss of Heimat, the daily dismantling through demolition, destructive renovation of historical structures, permanent destruction of the environment and the conscious falsification of history’.79 In a strategy that connected with those of the West German artists Vostell and Brehmer, Butzmann turned to the photographic image. He used it to forward a critique in his posters of the East German state’s neglect of public space and of local history. In so doing he displayed an optimistic trust in

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the evidentiary and even legalistic quality of the photographic image. Butzmann’s images found real resonance in a culture where photographic images were usually deployed for official and propagandistic purposes. His photographs demanded an active role of intervention on the part of the socialist viewer; Butzmann subversively urged socialist citizens to take on a sense of ownership toward public space, even to rescue it, and particularly to guard and remember the material sites of nature and history as origins of the socialist state that remained in the city around them. His important works present a counterhistory of a socialist, industrialized Germany that is at once local—specific to the Kiez of Pankow—and also universal to the rise of modernity. Butzmann’s works insisted that the neighbourhoods and industrial spaces in the urban centres of the GDR were indeed of significance and had their own (socialist) stories to tell.

3. BONJOUR MONSIEUR COURBET Realist Painting and the Defector Dialectic In 1965 the former East German painter Georg Kern created a painting titled Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (Fig. 3.1). He had recently changed his surname to Baselitz to mark his border crossing to West Berlin. Baselitz’s painting leaves li�le doubt as to his concerns as an artist in West Berlin around 1965. It was painted at the conclusion of a period of intense collaborative work with another émigré from the East, Eugen Schönebeck. The contrast between Baselitz’s painting and Courbet’s 1854 The Meeting is of course glaring. Baselitz has transformed Courbet’s green landscape around Montpellier into an almost blank horizon marked by clouds of black and rust brushstroke. Baselitz’s figure references the artist himself, but he reconfigures Courbet’s iconographic references to a proverbial encounter of the ‘Wandering Jew’. Instead Baselitz isolates the single wanderer figure in this scarred landscape: the figure is long-haired and hatless, shoeless, clad in possibly bloodied rags that dissolve into ever looser brushwork, absentmindedly crushing a plow underfoot as he strides past the viewer and almost out of the frame. Baselitz applies Courbet’s nineteenth-century fusion of transience and modern painting to the postwar German landscape. As does his own pseudonym, the resulting painting thematizes defection, a mode of transience specific to the Cold War. Perhaps even more importantly, in this painting Baselitz establishes a touchstone for contemporary painting on the

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Fig. 3.1 Georg Baselitz, Bonjour Monsieur Courbet, 1965; © 2008 Georg Baselitz, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York

west side of the Berlin Wall: Baselitz’s ‘realism’ laid claim to the legacy of an engaged avant-garde initiated by Courbet in mid-nineteenth century France. It appeared perverse to paint Realist pictures in West Berlin, a�er having trained in the GDR’s primary agenda of Socialist Realism, since it was assumed that

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with the passage to the West, artists would certainly abandon the ‘primitive’ tendencies of Soviet-style Realist painting. Why would Baselitz invoke an originary figure of Realism and reprise the French supporter of the working class a�er arriving in West Berlin? This and other of Baselitz and Schönebeck’s (West) Berlin paintings, as well as those of other German painters of the ‘60s and ‘70s, fly in the face of what critics have maintained about postwar painting in divided Germany. Many of these claims were advanced during the Cold War, and they cling to the myth that each Germany retained its own ideology of painting— figurative ‘Socialist Realism’ in the state socialist East, and a formalist or stylistic ‘abstraction’ in the capitalist West— which each state obediently imported from its corresponding superpower, and never did the two meet or ‘cross-over’.1 A major American curator still claimed in 1987 that New York School painting, or American abstract expressionism, was most influential in West Germany and West Berlin.2 But an overview of art institutions and exhibitions of these years in West Berlin indicates that abstraction had far less impact than directions in figuration a�er 1960. The artists’ gallery Grossgörschen 35, founded in 1964, became a home for the exploration of (Neo)expressionism; an offshoot, the ‘Secession Grossgörschen 35’, positioned itself in the Realist/Verist and le�ist tradition of the Weimar-era Realists; the Galerie Poll founded 1968 became a centre for ‘Critical Realist’ painting. Moreover, Peter Sager’s book Neue Formen des Realismus in 1973 tied Realist tendencies in West Germany to GDR Socialist Realism, as did the major touring exhibitions Prinzip Realismus (1972) and Berlin: a Critical View, Ugly Realism (1978). Thus different directions in Realist painting, which harkened back to French as well as German precedents of nineteenth-century Realism and to those of the Weimar Republic, of Neue Sachlichkeit and the ASSO artists, had far more currency in West Berlin than is commonly thought. Another shared concern of East and West German painters in these years was the influence of Picasso and Léger, as well as Expressionist and the Surrealist styles, on directions in postwar figuration. These earlier styles of modernism remained engaged

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with the figure and continued to concern many postwar painters in both Germanys. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the Realism promoted by the East German state was at best a vague concept that shi�ed over the years from 1955 to the 1980s. As early modernists like Courbet or the German Realists Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Lesser Ury pursued it, Realism had to do with an unidealized depiction of the labouring body within industrialera production. Based on their analyses of Courbet, T.J. Clark, Stephen Eisenman and other art historians have pointed out that technique itself became central to the agenda of Realist painting. Realist artists began to use devices or modes of representation they found outside the boundaries of recognized high art, such as Courbet’s references to the sign systems of nineteenth-century popular prints. This strategy sought to force a shi� in the relations of art production that would also realign art’s publics and its institutions. Courbet and other Realists hoped that these changes in art would precipitate a shi� of these relations in other spheres of French society. Their work intimated the need for social and political change—in short, for social activism or interventionism—on the part of artists. Much of the painting recognized by the GDR had to do with the construction of working-class icons as heroes of the state. The GDR deployed them as a foundation for its history and national identity, in contrast to that of the Federal Republic. The socialist state promoted a thoroughly rhetorical form of painting where party functionaries a�empted to eliminate the issue of style (‘formalism’) by privileging subject ma�er and particular moments in German socialist history that were deemed to reveal the ‘new man’ of socialism. Or, as functionaries at the VBK congress (German Artists Union) of 1959 put it, ‘…the work of artists in the last years…makes apparent a growing break with the influence of late-bourgeois notions of art and a strong turn to socialist themes, an effort to represent the lively new man…’3 The SED’s notion of ‘Realism’ was enforced by central commi�ee (ZK) member Alfred Kurella, a student of the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács, who became a major non-Soviet theorist of Socialist Realism. From Moscow Lukács

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famously argued against Brecht’s modernism, as well as that of the Expressionists, in favour of one that represented an objective social reality—as it was revealed by the nineteenth-century Realists like Balzac.4 Generally Kurella reflected his mentor’s views as his position paper of 1959 indicates.5 However, the next VBK congress made clear that many artists did not share Kurella’s views. Artists Fritz Cremer and Bernhard Heisig, and art historian Hermann Raum, openly stated their disagreement at the 1964 congress. They maintained that artistic form was an entity indifferent to physical reality and that modernist techniques and methods might be valuable to socialist artists. A hardline response ensued and resulted in Heisig’s removal as rector of the Leipzig Academy. All three were ridiculed in the press for the ‘inaccuracy’ of their statements, deigned too sympathetic to ‘decadent’ modernist formalism.6 Heisig, Si�e and others were increasingly subjected to surveillance through what appeared to be friendly in-studio ‘critiques’ by critics and art historians, but which were dutifully wri�en up as reports and were likely submi�ed to local VBK officials and functionaries in the Ministry of Culture.7 Yet despite party functionaries’ close monitoring of artists and their a�empts to repress any discussion or examination of style as relevant to socialist art, Heisig and several other painters from the cities of Leipzig and Halle including Willi Si�e, Werner Tübke, and Wolfgang Ma�heuer, continued to explore the relation of modernist style to Socialist Realism throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s. They were given major exhibitions in the GDR, particularly a�er their work began to be collected in the West by Peter Ludwig and others. Later, both Si�e and Tübke retreated into a self-censored antimodernist Realism. While they kept to socialist themes and iconography that increasingly had to do with the troubled German past, Heisig and Ma�heuer focused their painting on questions of formalist ‘style’, that is, on the styles of Expressionism and Surrealism, respectively. They therefore at points anticipated West German artistic debates on Neo-expressionism or the Neue Wilden, and later postmodernist debates having to do with the instability of sign systems per se.

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Paralleling the iconography of the East, some painters in West Germany questioned the foundations of West German identity. The painters Eugen Schönebeck, Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter and A.R. Penck (Ralf Winkler), all émigrés from East Germany, developed an iconography based on the human form, and examined its problematic relation to ideology. Their paintings linked to ‘German issues’ of rhetorical or history painting. The ‘new man’ of the postwar era that characterized state socialism particularly concerned these West German artists. Painters in East and West Germany furthermore acknowledged that this new man faced an identity crisis precipitated by recent German history. The communist Jörg Immendorff developed a Maoist agit-prop sign system that relied on Brecht’s socialist modernism. He collaborated on paintings with A.R. Penck in Dresden; working independently, ‘Penck’ (Ralf Winkler) had earlier developed ‘Standart’, a selfreflexive language within painting. Like Ma�heuer, the West Berlin Realist painter Johannnes Grützke engaged with Critical Realism in turning his focus to the corrupting force of the West German managerial class. All of these painters, both East and West German, made consistent use of a style, or a visual language or iconography, that characterized the other German state. The Eastern painters explored stylistic vocabularies widely accepted in the West, the modernist styles of Surrealism and Expressionism, in their paintings. The West German painters focused on the human form and with it, made explicit reference to the conventions, forms and iconography of Socialist Realism. This iconography directly referenced tenets of socialism or communism that were otherwise shunned in West Germany. This chapter will trace the manipulation of style and iconography in specific works by these painters during the Cold War. This reciprocal defector dialectic in German painting animated some of the most significant painting of the period. It was at times realized in direct collaboration, at other times through an indirect dialogue, with styles and genres from the opposite side of the Iron Curtain. Actual defectors participated as well as painters who did not leave the East or West sectors but whose act of inner

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defection lay in abandoning a state-supported visual ideology. In this way Realism recovered its avant-garde aura as a kind of subtle political intervention. Realism became an ideological bridge that was deliberately reconfigured on each side of the Berlin wall. This chapter traces these major exchanges between East and West. The Primacy of Style, or, East German Socialist Modernism I begin here by recapitulating Paul Kaiser’s provocative characterization of artists who were hailed as the great successes of the ‘workers’ and farmers’ state’ of the GDR. He mentions Si�e and Heisig specifically, but several others might be included. Kaiser identifies a ‘double strategy’ undertaken by East German artists who produced two parallel tracks of artwork, which Kaiser claims were almost fully unrelated. One track was devoted to an extended examination of the feasibility of modernist form or of a critical history painting within socialist culture; the other was designed solely to satisfy the pe�y requirements of SED functionaries seeking to maintain a conservative vision of Socialist Realist culture. Kaiser claims that these dual tracks of art production pursued by some East German artists allows us to understand the portraits of Marx and Lenin that prominent GDR painters like Si�e and those of the Leipzig School rather uncharacteristically produced during the 1960s.8 Kaiser then presents a provocative reading of Si�e’s dramatic transformation from a rebuked modernist ‘decadent’ to highranking party functionary (Si�e served on the SED’s Central Commi�ee beginning in 1986). However the trajectory of Si�e’s privileged career remains unique within the history of East German painting and is indicative, as Kaiser concludes, of an artist who forged unusual access to the highest echelons of state authority through his extraordinary skills in political advancement. Si�e’s path to artistic success in the GDR may not have been as easy as Kaiser describes it. One is struck by the animosity levelled toward Si�e in accounts of this period. They point to the trail of victims his ascendancy in East German politics le� behind. Like the other big names

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of East German painting I discuss here, Tübke, Heisig, and Ma�heuer, Si�e explored modernist formalism. Si�e and Tübke were the shortest-term modernists; no one dri�ed away from modernism more quickly than Tübke, who arguably painted the most critically penetrating painting of the 1960s in either Germany before he abandoned modernism altogether. Their paintings should instead be read in the context of the cultural instabilities of the GDR during the 1960s, and as part of artists” navigation of the hardline reactionary pronouncements of the 11th Plenary of the SED, convened in December, 1965. It is indicative that Heisig and Ma�heuer resigned their positions at the Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst (Academy of Graphic and Book Art) in 1968 and 1974 respectively, to work as ‘freelance’ artists. Ma�heuer remained freelance for the rest of his life. For these East German painters the defector dialectic was an ideological minefield that threatened their very survival. Tübke and Si�e in particular could not sustain the level of social estrangement that their modernist paintings demanded. And by the mid-’70s the state granted two of these painters, Ma�heuer and Heisig, far greater freedom in the wake of their market success in Western Europe. As a result they were able to become inner defectors, artists who remained in the East but who produced modernist socialist art that was critical of the state’s official cultural directives. I focus on their art and not on that of other inner defectors—also called ‘inner emigration’ artists—like Carlfriedrich Claus and Gerhard Altenbourg, because of the formers’ influence upon the state art system and their official role as international representatives of GDR painting. The Western art market remained a powerful enabler of the defector dialectic that resulted in East German socialist modernism. Invariably other painters like Si�e and Tübke who held teaching or political positions were forced to reconcile themselves to conservative notions of Socialist Realism. This resulted in a self-policing of style that is evident in their later paintings.

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The Quick Retreats I: the East Vigorous debates around the place of Realism in socialist culture reopened in the early 1960s around the time of the illfated 1964 VBK conference. President O�o Grotewohl declared in 1953 that the SED’s promotion of Socialist Realism was a goal for East German culture. The new Ministry of Culture (founded 1954) emphasized that Soviet Realism was the model that East Germans were to emulate. By the later 1950s, progressive art historians like Wolfgang Hü� began to move away from a Soviet model, declaring that Realism cannot ‘…be reached through theory alone, but above all through the artwork’s confrontation with the reality that it has itself used to make an arranged statement’.9 Hü� and Lothar Lang also suggested that the stylistic vocabulary of Expressionism could be a legacy useful to younger artists.10 They tied Realism to socialist politics, emphasizing that technique and style must be subordinate to a socialist mode of representation (even while they did not define this la�er mode). Underscoring the disconnect that clearly existed between the critics and historians writing in Bildende Kunst in the ‘50s and journalistic (party) criticism, Politburo member Kurella stated unequivocally in May of 1958 that ‘Soviet art is the model for artistic development for the entire socialist bloc’.11 The suggestion of progressive critics from Halle and Leipzig that German Socialist Realist painting could open itself to explorations of style gave further encouragement to artists like Si�e and Tübke as they prepared works for annual district VBK exhibitions. Following his travel to the CSSR in 1956, Si�e was occupied with several subjects, particularly the lessons of earlier socialist painters Fernand Léger and Picasso, the Nazi massacre at Lidice of 1942, and depictions of the East German labourer. Si�e’s work of the early ‘50s, and particularly his sketches for Massacre I and II, make clear their debt to Guernica. Si�e also produced another anti-fascist historical painting in accord with party expectations, a treatment of the subject of the ‘Thälmann brigade’ of German communist soldiers during the Spanish civil war. He exhibited Kampf der Thälmannbrigade in Spanien at the district VBK exhibition of 1958 (Fig. 3.2).

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Painted in the triptych format that Si�e favoured for historical themes, his panels represent soldiers in trenches; on the predella three bodies turn their gazes toward the viewer. The arms of one extend into the upper panel. It still clutches a pen and a scrawled note. The right-hand panel depicts planes diving as the soldiers return fire. Although less pronounced than Si�e’s more explicitly Guernica-derived composition Massacre II of 1959 (which dealt with the Lidice massacre), the Thälmannbrigade is clearly influenced by Picasso’s Charnel House (1944-45, now at the Museum of Modern Art, New York). In Si�e’s treatment of the contorted corpses and his stylized depiction of hands and the vengeful airplanes overhead, one discovers parts of the composition that explore pa�ern and avoid description. Si�e shows li�le interest in representing the contours of three-dimensional space or the specifics of the Spanish

Fig. 3.2 Willi Si�e, Kampf der Thälmannbrigade in Spanien (The Ba�le of the Thälmann Brigade in Spain), 1958; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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landscape. This contributes to the disorienting, claustrophobic and fla�ened space that Si�e aligns in the three panels. His focus remains on these soldier/workers and their heroic sacrifice against fascism. By 1958 Si�e reveals his interest in rhetorical painting and in shaping his story to conform to a particular set of ideological expectations. In this case, it is a representation of the German communist contribution to the anti-fascist international brigades of the Spanish civil war as an unproblematic political and moral foundation of the GDR. By indicating a debt to Picasso, Si�e limits style to its most superficial formal aspects since he does not use it to critically examine the aspect of sacrifice or militarism but rather to celebrate a particular historical moment. One can argue that in this early work Si�e signals a simplistic conception of modernism as purely decorative. The reception of the Thälmannbrigade painting was dismissive. It was not Si�e’s most inventive painting from this period—he did a series of paintings of workers positioned on scaffolding that borrows in more complex ways from Léger. Perhaps party functionaries sensed the weakness in Si�e’s connections to modernism and they rushed in to a�ack it publicly. In a statement the SED of Halle issued a paper on the ‘overwhelmingly decadent’ Halle district exhibition. It urged Si�e and others who taught at Burg Giebichenstein to state publicly the basic tenets of ‘our politics’ and to air their mistakes.12 Writing in Junge Kunst Eberhard Bartke in 1959 singled out Si�e’s work as evidence of the spreading use of formalism as the ‘not yet conquered influence of decadence’.13 As was a pa�ern of the SED, Si�e was ridiculed for weeks a�erwards in the local and national press. Perhaps this humiliating reception led the idealistic painter on the path to his own personal crisis and breakdown in 1961. He recovered enough to submit work for consideration for the important Fi�h (national) German Art exhibition in Dresden of 1963. Exactly what he submi�ed is unclear but only one painting, his 1962 My Parents from the LPG (the Agricultural-Production Cooperative), was accepted. Si�e’s painting is a modest portrait of workers that expanded the genre of state production models by conjoining the traditionally individualistic genre

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of portraiture with the goals of Bi�erfeld policy. It represents his parents as brigade workers. The 1962 painting contains a guarded exploration of papier-collé within the still life Si�e presents in the centre of the composition. As it is depicted, his father’s shirt, for example, dissolves into flat areas of colour. Yet even this was too much for the SED cultural hardliners who had emerged triumphant from the recent completion of the Berlin Wall. They now manoeuvred to silence any discussion of modernism. By 1961 General Secretary Walter Ulbricht le� no doubt about the regime’s antimodernist position: ‘…one cannot make works that enrich the socialist thought and feelings of workers with formalist, decadent or even modernist means of organization that can be taken from late bourgeois art, that is, none in the actual sense of socialist art’.14 A Halle party secretary, commenting on Si�e’s 1962 painting, clucked that Si�e would make an outstanding artist if he could only commit himself to Socialist Realism.15 In another tested and proven SED maneuver, Si�e’s works were allowed public exhibition but were policed through ridicule in the press. Si�e appeared to agree with these assessments. A genuflecting ‘self-critique’ appeared in Freiheit on Feb. 2, 1963, where he thanked his detractors for showing him the error of his ways and concluded, ‘…I submit myself completely and fully to the resolutions of my party’. One year later he played the role of conciliator when Heisig, sculptor Cremer and art historian Raum launched their blistering a�ack on official antimodernism at the 5th national VBK congress in East Berlin, an act which le� functionaries so stunned that it took them a day to regain control and terminate the congress.16 A�er that, the SED fell back on Si�e as their ideal schill. He abandoned the defector dialectic, agreeing to work ‘with and not against the party’. He began his ascent to the top administrative post of the VBK. To cement his position he produced the propagandistic Hollensturz in Vietnam (Hell in Vietnam). It was another triptych history painting that equated the U.S. imperial presence in Southeast Asia with the Nazis. It could have been a press release from the Central Commi�ee. His Arbeiter am Schaltpult, 1968, was praised for its depiction of an East German

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worker heading into the bright future of automated industry, where distinctions between management and the working class would vanish. It is a well-cra�ed painting that touches upon the cubist fracturing of space but then draws back, since the worker Si�e depicts is situated squarely in an uninterrupted perspectival and a ‘real’ or illusionary space. It is a modernist painting only in the most superficial sense. It has been suggested that over the next 25 years Si�e never varied from the assigned rhetorical genres of East German painting that he took up in 1964, but I would submit that his final embrace of the fully anti-modern nude is a further retreat from the demands of critical modernism. This is emphatically clear in works such as The Three Graces, Hommage à Rubens (1982!). I will only observe here the sexism of his depiction of women in the GDR, who in his later compositions are invariably packed into revealing clothing. Si�e regularly pictures female figures as the bo�om of a ‘socialist’ missionary position (held to be best for conception?). Si�e never depicts women in his worker paintings; they are only explored in the genre ‘nudes’. The West German feminist protests and leaflets that greeted his exhibition at the Hamburger Kunstverein in 1975 already recognized that the insulting objectification of women in his paintings helped maintain sexism and inequality within East German society.17 There are a few exceptions in Si�e’s art: his sympathetic portrayal of Angela Davis in 1972 is a singular instance where he treats a powerful female subject; his haunting post-RAF painting, Portrait of a Terrorist (1977), also merits further a�ention. For the most part Si�e’s later works of the ‘80s drown in waves of Rubenesque flesh, almost as though in filling every inch of the surface of his paintings with nudes Si�e hoped to elevate them out of pornographic vulgarity. In the later stages of his career Si�e returned to imitate Picasso, painting nudes as emblems of the struggle of modern creativity. In his 1984-6 SelfPortrait in a Swamp Si�e gazes out at the viewer as his chin and body are swallowed in a thick muck of paint. Si�e a�empted to depict himself as the heroic painter of socialism emerging from the primordial ooze, but the painted surface instead becomes an engulfing trap for the artist.

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It appears that Si�e abandoned his concern with modernism at the door of the East German bureaucracy. This assured him a comfortable living, well-funded international travel, and importance within the state apparatus of art patronage. Werner Tübke similarly took leave of modernism, although by the 1970s Tübke’s antimodern paintings were well-represented in European galleries and sold well in the West. This may be why he was included with the other Leipzig painters at the 1977 Documenta. It has been pointed out that Tübke was protected and promoted by the Politburo, particularly by his mentor and patron Alfred Kurella. Kurella steered numerous state commissions Tübke’s way, especially a series of murals in the Interhotel Astoria in Leipzig in 1958. As part of the Leipzig School Tübke benefited from the dynamic atmosphere that surrounded painting at the Hochschule and that produced among the most interesting German painting of the Cold War. Like Heisig and Ma�heuer, Tübke’s participation in the Leipzig district VBK exhibition of 1965 proved a turning point in his career. His submission, Lebenserinnerungen des Dr. jr. Schulze (III) of 1965 (Reminiscences of J.D. Schulze, III; Fig. 3.3) was an explosive work that established Leipzig as a centre for painting in the GDR. The painting is the high point of Tübke’s production, which a�erwards se�led into a strangely anachronistic quasiNorthern-Renaissance style. Tübke’s art culminated in an oddity of twentieth-century art, his remarkable historical panorama of the sixteenth-century farmer’s rebellion at Bad Frankenhausen. Tübke served at the Hochschule at various points in his career, beginning in 1963. He served as rector (when Heisig resigned this post) from 1973 to 1976, and later he worked as a freelance artist, which was made possible through the strong sales of his paintings. Tübke’s 1965 version of the Lebenserinnerungen was the third in a series; he produced eleven paintings, numerous watercolours and 65 sketches and drawings around the character of ‘Schultze’. The works can be read not only as an indictment of the murderous Nazi bureaucracy, but also as a veiled critique of the functionaries that oversaw GDR culture. The painting

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Fig. 3.3 Werner Tübke, Lebenserinnerungen des Dr. jr. Schulze (III), (Reminiscences of J.D. Schulze, III), 1965; New National Gallery, SMPK, Berlin

suggests the importance of surrealism as a touchstone for the Leipzig School painters, a unique incidence in East German art history. Tübke’s long tenure at the Hochschule following the public display of the Lebenserinnerungen painting is surely a testament to Kurella’s patronage. The painting is Tübke’s modernist watershed. Therea�er he permanently retired from modern painting.

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Unlike earlier versions in the series, Lebenserinnerungen (III) makes clear reference to the compositional techniques of early surrealism, particularly that of Giorgio de Chirico. Tübke borrows compositional structure from de Chirico’s World-War-I-era paintings—especially The Seer (Prophet) and The Disquieting Muses—in Tübke’s placement of a faceless mannequin figure in the foreground of a deep landscape described by rapidly-accelerating perspective. This outsize, inhuman figure, presumably representing the lawyer Schulze, gazes blindly toward the violence and carnage on the le� side of the composition, which is framed in the distance by a swirling vortex of clouds and flaming archangels. The term ‘Lebenserinnerungen’ brings with it a connotation of fond memories that the painting’s violent iconography renders ironic. Tübke’s composition throws together what appear to be unrelated objects and figures. The Surrealists understood that these juxtapositions provided a means to access the realm of the marvellous.18 Tübke uses these juxtapositions to critique corruption and criminality found in the recent German past, and it is implied, that extend into the present. The Lebenserinnerungen is also a kind of postmodernist pastiche that draws upon photographic images of the Holocaust and combines them with motifs from paintings by Bosch, Bruegel, and Italianate landscape painting. It also draws on the imagery of the apocalypse and of the Last Judgment. Tübke confines landscape to the right half of the composition. At the feet of the giant Tübke places a number of figures representing bourgeois life, including an entire living room scene, identified by Eduard Beaucamp as a ‘world of the perpetrators’. The landscape that unwinds behind this scene is allegedly based on the Suchumi resort in the Caucasus, a vacation spot favoured by Soviet political functionaries.19 In a further Cold War reference, Tübke positions in the foreground a pedestal with a sculptural relief featuring Picasso’s peace dove and a memorial wreath. This image was frequent in the GDR throughout the 1950s, and with it Tübke situates his fragmented allegory within the East German present, forcing it to look upon the violence of the recent German past. The

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Picassoesque relief furthermore functions as a kind of bridge that links the past to the Cold War present. Tübke’s painting strikes at the heart of the SED’s favoured genre of history painting. By depicting a GDR founding myth of antifascist heroicism, it implies that fascists exist in the present and not just in the West, but possibly also in the USSR and in East Germany. However given the almost encyclopaedic intricacy of this composition it was surely difficult to read its iconography in any quick viewing. It was not reproduced in any of the reviews that ran in Leipzig of this exhibition, which instead featured Ma�heuer’s Kain. Beaucamp further reports that in 1965 Tübke was, as a result of this painting, expelled from the Hochschule, but this information is not corroborated by other sources. In response to the 1965 exhibition the Leipzig press and Bildende Kunst concerned themselves with more ‘complex’ definitions of Realism. In a le�er to Hermann Raum five years later, Kurella cautioned against any Tübke exhibition and revealed his frustrations with his protégé. Against Kurella’s advice, he complained that Tübke’s ‘whole symbolic bric-a-brac and… arbitrary jumping around with time and space…’ continue and put into question accepted notions of Realism.20 A�er this Tübke retreated into historical art to become a Northern Renaissance painter of the twentieth-century. He used a technique and style that would dazzle party functionaries and the public with its technical virtuosity. He both reassured the East German viewer with an academic depiction of ‘reality’ while overwhelming them with iconographic detail. The question of whether Tübke continued to encode his paintings with a critical and even iconoclastic content can only be answered by means of a close reading of his individual paintings. But his strategy for survival in the GDR relied on his own metamorphosis from a modern into a sixteenth-century painter. Ma�heuer, Heisig and the Crisis of Painting the Working Class The 1965 Leipzig district exhibition featured several other artists, Ma�heuer and Heisig, who as inner defectors engaged in a more extended way with the defector dialectic. Their

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artwork hastened the reconsideration of the entire definition of East German realism that would continue into the late ‘80s. It is not coincidental that Ulbricht would first characterize the ‘Weite und Vielfalt’ (breadth and variety) of socialist art in the same year as this exhibition, a phrase that was repeated until 1989. Party functionaries then did their best to confine this breadth. At the time of the exhibition both Ma�heuer and Heisig served on the faculty at the Leipzig Hochschule. Supported primarily by the West German collector Peter Ludwig, Ma�heuer resigned his position in the a�ermath of his critical ‘Sisyphus’ series, and worked as a freelance artist a�er 1974. This allowed him to produce the Leipzig School’s most trenchant commentary on the socialist cult of the worker. Ma�heuer’s paintings deal directly with East German national identity. He understood that identity to be at the brink of existential crisis. Heisig’s history paintings became increasingly psychologized and entered a biographical realm that raised questions about an unmastered German past within the ‘antifascist’ GDR. In contrast to Ma�heuer, Heisig’s paintings of the 1970s and his rise in the VBK bureaucracy depended on the SED’s tolerance of Heisig’s stylistic references to ‘le�ist Expressionism’ in the manner of Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz, among others. The SED deemed this style to be the mode of modernism unique to Germany. This tacit approval of Expressionism was communicated in GDR exhibitions as early as 1964. Most central to the defector dialectic of both painters was their mutual interest in applying Brechtian notions of a critical distanciation to key genres of painting. Both artists achieved this distanciation in returning to Surrealist modes: in focusing on landscape (Ma�heuer), or on the psychic processes of traumatic experience (Heisig).21 The East German critic Peter Feist first developed the term ‘dialogic picture’ to describe the complex content of paintings like Ma�heuer’s Kain in the 1965 Leipzig exhibition. Feist used the term to describe paintings that were not literalist but that rather ‘…necessitated independent thought’ and a ‘productive viewer…of socialist impulses’.22 Ma�heuer’s painting had as its subject the biblical story of fratricide. As a turn away from worn-out genres and literalist didacticism in its presentation of

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a biblical allegory, this painting raised much discussion in the Leipzig press. Both Günter Meissner and Dieter Gleisberg wrote positively that it ‘can’t be understood in a quick way’. None of these reviews mention Socialist Realism as a concern, and they generally conclude that the painting presents an allegory about war.23 Ma�heuer kept to this reading as well, pointing to his concern with the recent Algerian War and with the idea of civil war. The painting could also connect to SED theories about the Western imperialist pursuit of oil as a cause of the Algerian conflict. For this reason it may have been tolerated by party functionaries.24 As he later recounted, the state would ask Ma�heuer to retract ‘two or three’ paintings that he submi�ed for public exhibition. This limited censorship underscores the painting’s open-ended quality, one that could accommodate numerous and contradictory readings of its codes. It was therefore permi�ed within the strict rhetorical confines of East German painting. Kain also marks a shi� in the use of fables and myth to illuminate the individual, psychological struggle of the working class subject in GDR painting. Abel was a�er all a farmer, and his till stands in the background of the composition, held by a witnessing figure that mirrors the position of the viewer. To the right Ma�heuer opens the landscape to a city in a valley—Leipzig? —thus se�ing the conflict in the ‘workers and farmer’s state’. Ma�heuer uses various formalist elements of the Dalíesque surrealist landscape here: the intense contrast of light and shadow, and an extremely deep and receding space. These elements likewise signal a descent into psychic interiority. Ma�heuer’s narrative engages with existentialism, here focusing on violence as a choice for the (socialist) everyman, a theme that concerned both Dostoevsky and Camus. Ma�heuer continued to encode the existential dilemma into his paintings as an inescapable condition of the socialist subject, most famously in his painting Die Ausgezeichnete (the awardee, 1973-4). This painting is a rare instance in the East German worker’s portrait genre in that its subject is the female worker. Ma�heuer foregrounds the aging worker’s doubt and questions the meaning of her exhausting labour. Even as she receives

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recognition for her production, it is at best fleeting; the spotlight of the award ceremony has moved on to the next worker and leaves her, already forgo�en, in the shadows. The composition is subtle in its critique of socialist management, which is unrepresented and lurks outside of the frame. The Friendly Visit to the Lignite Coalfields (1974) continues this line of critique. The painting depicts the customary Bi�erfeld-policy of the party officials’ and artists’ visit to state-run industrial sites like a strip mine.25 Ma�heuer depicts these visitors as inhuman, with no heads or feet, and they move unseeingly past a miner. This ‘visit’ seems to include no contact to the workers. In the painting Ma�heuer also focuses on the degradation and pollution of the landscape around Leipzig, since large mines were located directly south of the city. The remnants of a tree mark the foreground; chimneys and brownish plumes of exhaust and other fumes accent the horizon. Ma�heuer worked extensively in landscape, a genre largely neglected in the GDR. His many placid renderings of the land around Leipzig (Das blaue Leipzig, 1971; Ein merkwürdiger Abend, 1975) at once return to Friedrich’s romantic notion of landscape and suppose a nature less ravaged by industry. Something is always slightly amiss in Ma�heuer’s landscapes, revealing the idyll of the East German landscape to be an illusion. Following Camus, Ma�heuer returns to the worker-portrait genre in a group of paintings that focus on the figure of Sisyphus as an existentialist worker-hero, the absurd ‘proletarian of the gods’. Camus described Sisyphus as a figure who ‘makes of fate a human ma�er’. In accepting and concluding that he is actually content with his limitless task (‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy’), Camus” Sisyphus seizes control of his own fate and pitiable condition of relentless and meaningless physical toil.26 In several works Ma�heuer furthermore casts Sisyphus in the act of artistic creation, making the figure a kind of alter-ego of the artist (Sisyphus Carves the Rock, 1974). In others he depicts alternative choices Sisyphus might make: in The Flight of Sisyphus (1972) he abandons the senseless labour to which he has been sentenced. Der übermutige Sisyphos und die Seinen (High-spirited

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Sisyphus and his comrades, Fig. 3.4), 1976, addresses state socialism directly. Here the rock is carved into a human likeness and appears to be at the moment when the task results in failure. Roused by a green-clad figure (Sisyphus?), the mob nevertheless runs at it furiously, in lockstep. In collectivized labour has the task itself been overcome or has it merely been replaced with the satisfaction of having toppled the capitalist profiteer who formerly controlled it? Ma�heuer implies that truly productive labour simply cannot exist in such circumstances, or, that collectivized labour necessarily eliminates individual control and denies the absurdist and necessarily individualistic choice to embrace happiness. In Realist fashion the Sisyphus series paintings point to the exhaustion and discontent of the worker under state socialism. They foreground the psychic toll of labour which earlier Socialist Realist images of beaming workers had disavowed.27

Fig. 3.4 Wolfgang Ma�heuer, Der übermutige Sisyphos und die Seinen (Highspirited Sisyphus and his Comrades); © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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Bernhard Heisig’s defection within the arena of history painting (called the Epochenbild in East German criticism) also began at the 1965 VIIth Leipzig VBK exhibition. It had been a difficult year for Heisig as a result of his speech a year earlier at the 5th congress in Berlin. There he had accused the state of infantilizing its artists and had warned that without a major change from the governing body regarding the permissible boundaries of artistic production, East German artists were doomed to stagnate.28 With Raum and Cremer, Heisig was ‘invited’ by the Central Commi�ee to a ‘Parteiactivtagung’ on June 10, 1964 at the Berlin Club ‘Die Möwe’, with the agenda: ‘Evaluation of the 5th Congress of the VBK and the 2nd Bi�erfeld conference’.29 It was the forced self-critique and confession required by the state, necessary since Heisig was at the time rector of the Hochschule in Leipzig. Despite his self-critique, was nevertheless dismissed from his position that same year; he became a freelance artist between 1968 and 1976. Heisig served as rector again when he returned to the Hochschule; this return points to the state’s reaction to Heisig’s success on the Western art market, due largely to Peter Ludwig’s interest and that of the state-approved Galerie Brusberg in Hannover. Heisig’s painting Pariser Kommune (Third Version) of 1964 raised the most consternation in 1965. The commune was an important historical link to European socialist history and was a founding myth of the early GDR, as also evidenced in Brecht’s 1948-9 treatment of the topic in Die Tage der Kommune. The painting depicts a final moment of the commune’s existence before the Versailles troops massacred the communards at the barricades in Paris in late May, 1871. Heisig’s painting recalls certain motifs from Goya to O�o Dix and Max Beckmann, and he utilizes the stylistic qualities of Expressionist gesture and brushstroke. Heisig creates a fla�ened space to emphasize the trapped radicals, with bayonets creeping in at the lower right and repeated throughout this mob, which Heisig identifies with a banner reading ‘Vous êtes travailleurs’. The captured wave their weapons with an animalistic ferocity that foreshadows the burst of violence to come. The press faulted Heisig for deviating from heroic symbols regarding the ‘trail-blazing achievements

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that the international workers movement can draw from these few weeks’,30 and for depicting a moment shortly before the communards’ defeat. While Heisig could be praised for finding an emotional pitch in the historical moment that would fascinate viewers, he was criticized for erring too much toward subjective treatment of this historical moment. This subjectivity indicated a state of doubt about the eventual victory (of socialism) that was not acceptable in ‘party-focused art’.31 As a result of this reception, another blow on the heels of his self-critique, Heisig destroyed the painting and every other treatment of this theme through the tenth one, and four additional canvases. He effectively ended his engagement with historical events he did not himself experience. His only other history paintings proper concern the Nazi defence of Breslau, in which he participated (Festung Breslau, die Stadt und ihre Mörder, 1969; Die Festung, 1979-80). Heisig developed a biographical focus in his painting, and he stopped teaching two years later. He made clear that the overarching concern of his art was history painting but also the history of painting, and he consistently linked the two in his compositions.32 Heisig devoted his oeuvre to the struggle to represent the traumatic experience of war from the point of view of a subject within militaristic Prussian culture. Heisig is of the same generation as the novelist Günter Grass. It has been revealed in the last years that both men served in the Waffen SS, a fact long hidden from public view. This aspect of his past nearly cost Heisig a commission for the new Reichstag building in Berlin a�er reunification. Around 1960 Heisig began a series that focused on traumatic and repressed memories of the war recoverable only in dream. Heisig expanded upon the basic motifs of Weihnachtstraum des unbelehrbaren Soldaten (Christmas dream of the ignorant soldier, 1964) in numerous canvases over the next 40 years, most importantly in his key painting Beharrlichkeit des Vergessens (Fig. 3.5, The Persistence of Forge�ing, 1977). The basic structure of these compositions remains consistent: Heisig depicts, with extremely loose and expressionistic brushwork, a flat, cramped space with a reclining figure who clutches his iron cross and thrashes about on a sleeping surface of a Persian rug.

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Fig. 3.5 Bernhard Heisig, Beharrlichkeit des Vergessens (The Persistence of Forge�ing), 1977; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

A small-scale tank rests on the figure’s abdomen and bayonets, helmets and other paraphernalia of war enter threateningly from the bo�om of the composition. Later paintings such as Die Ardennenschlacht (The ba�le of Ardennes, 1978-81) depict this figure prostrate and nude. In this positioning of the central figure Heisig invites comparison to Hans Grundig, an honoured, founding artist of the GDR, and to Grundig’s famed painting, To the Victims of Fascism (1946/9). But this comparison is not complimentary to Heisig. Grundig, a founding member of ASSO (the association of German revolutionary artists) in 1929, was a towering presence in the early GDR. Heisig shows no interest in non-combat, Jewish or other victims of the Nazi regime in his major paintings. Grundig and his wife Lea counted among these la�er victims. Lea was Jewish, and Hans Grundig served time in the Sachsenhausen camp, where many of his Communist colleagues were murdered. Eckhart Gillen has read Heisig’s painting as representing a father’s traumatized and absurd reaction to his children’s’ Christmas toys. In this composition Heisig focuses on the

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hallucinatory dreams of the returning middle-class war veteran. Gulliver-like, the veteran figure uses his iron cross to swat at the unconnected images and objects that float by him. In some versions of the painting open-mouthed figures, old ba�lefield instruments like trumpets, or loudspeakers, add an auditory element and point to the remembrance of sound that also occurs in dream. These figures and objects become a veritable flood in The Persistence of Forge�ing, with the figure now a multipleamputee. Heisig includes a number of self-reflexive references to the painted surface in this composition, most importantly in including the middle panel from Dix’s triptych Der Krieg (War, 1932) in it. To the le�, the figure’s bed consists of a barely visible Nazi flag, and spanning the composition’s surface (further emphasized by its anchoring strings), Heisig positions a banner bearing the placating slogan, ‘Wir sind doch alle Brüder und Geschwistern’ (but we are all brothers and sisters). The banner seems to emerge cartoon-like from a series of images to the extreme le� and which resemble a strip of film. In Persistence mass media images have become indistinguishable from dream images, even in their most ludicrous manifestation (the tubaplaying circus clown and his colleague to the lower right). A couple in the sex act float in from the right. It is not clear whether this is a memory or a cinematic representation. Heisig plants his veteran in a culture-industry-bred forest of signs of pseudo-memories, which push Dix’s canvas further into the background. It is unclear if this figure is to be pitied or to be seen as a source for the carnival of mass entertainment. Heisig questions if the soldier will remain ignorant, since it is doubtful that any coming-to-terms with the past and with trauma can take place when memory has become mediated.33 It is Heisig’s contention that history painting, including his own, retains a privileged status as a sphere where remembrance can happen. Heisig elevates Dix as exemplary of this possibility within painting. By the time this painting was exhibited in West Germany in 1979 (Heisig participated in Documenta 6), the Honecker regime had rehabilitated Heisig. He regained his old position at the Hochschule and took leadership roles in the VBK. At the 4th

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Plenum of the Central Commi�ee (1973) Honecker had grandly stated that ‘no taboos’ should operate in the sphere of culture. Arguably this statement indicates that GDR art policy was being reconfigured in deference to a painter like Heisig. This influence is likely, given art historian and functionary Ullrich Kuhirt’s statement: ‘…realistic representation is…always also a ‘self-presentation” of artist-personality’.34 Heisig’s subjective treatment assured that the dynamics of the human experience of violence, and not merely heroics, would be included in GDR history and in the history of working class revolution as it was represented in East German history painting. Heisig’s paintings introduced the trauma of (his own) life under the Third Reich as an aspect of East German identity. The ma�er of the Nazi past then became a problem for the socialist state. Heisig was one of the first German postwar painters to devote his art to the moral difficulties of German fascism and the Holocaust. This would later become a major focus of some of the West German Neo-expressionist painters such as Immendorff (whom I discuss later), Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer. This la�er generation of artists had not seen combat during World War Two. Heisig’s view of war is that of a veteran and artist. The next generation could not comment on this past as lived experience or as lived memory; their art drew upon cultural and literary precedents to the Third Reich instead. Heisig is a final artistic link to the war generation and to a critical tradition of veterans representing war in modern painting (as Dix did). Heisig does not simply position himself or his soldier alter-ego as a victim. In his painting the ‘ignorant’ German soldier assumes a role that oscillates between victim and perpetuator of a culture that continually embraced war as an honourable and quasi-religious experience.35 The Primacy of Form, or, Objectivist/Figurative/Realist Painting in West Germany When Manfred Schneckenburger asked Lothar Lang to curate a section of Documenta 6 devoted to East German painting in 1977, Lang chose the Leipzig School painters to represent the GDR for the first time in an international, Western exhibition. Two

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years later the Cologne collector Peter Ludwig staged his own collection of East German art, again foregrounding the Leipzig School works. By the 1980s they were the most privileged, widely travelled and internationally recognized East German artists. As Karl-Siebert Rehberg has argued, the Leipzig School was transformed into a ‘West product’ and the de facto face of East German art in West Germany (despite the West German art world’s protests). However their art encountered considerable resistance and negative press on the other side of the Wall; there, both the biography and the artwork of the early GDR wall-jumpers/defectors such as Georg Baselitz, Gerhard Richter or Sigmar Polke were the preferred instances of East German art. These artists, who also worked in various figurative modes, had early on chosen the West and had implicitly denounced the Soviet Bloc. To underscore this rejection on the one hand and to distinguish themselves emphatically from the Leipzig School on the other, Baselitz, Markus Lüpertz and Richter withdrew from Documenta 6 in protest of the GDR’s inclusion (though it is o�en suggested that Richter withdrew because of a reinstallation of his work). It is also reported that A. R. Penck’s works were removed by curators, presumably Lothar Lang, possibly in reaction to the orders of GDR party functionaries. The withdrawal of the West German artists may have been in protest of Penck’s last-minute exclusion.36 If Penck’s exclusion was unjust, so was the generalizing assumption on the part of the West German painters that, with the exception of Penck, the GDR painters were merely pawns of the state and unworthy of being seen in the West. Thus the high-profile re-embrace of the West by two defectors could be politically useful in the culture-war dimension of the late Cold War. Their protest rejected Schneckenburger’s move to integrate socialist modernist art within the history of a post-war modernism produced in the West. The massive 1981 exhibition ‘Westkunst,’ a joint project of the museums of the city of Cologne (capitol of the West German art market) and curated by Kasper König, reaffirmed the rejection of an inter-German history of modern art. Focused on the development of modernism since 1939, the postwar component of this exhibition consisted

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exclusively of American, some European and West German artists, and Penck. Hans Haacke symbolically erected a second Berlin wall in his 1984 installation Weite und Vielfalt der Brigade Ludwig at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in West Berlin. He also installed paintings that appropriated portions of a recent work by a lesser GDR painter, Walter Womacka, in order to mock Peter Ludwig’s corporation and presumably also his artistic interest in Soviet and Soviet Bloc art. Haacke’s installation seemed to imply that Ludwig’s interest in East German painting was primarily connected to expanding his corporate empire to the Soviet Bloc. He offers no concrete connection between this corporate presence and the female factory worker who is the focus of Womacka’s painting. His generalizing dismissal of East German painting indicates a desire to uphold a (le�ist?) Western art market uncontaminated by socialist art.37 Despite Haacke’s a�empt to keep socialist modernism out of the West, other artistic strategies (in addition to Ludwig’s efforts) endeavoured to open West German painting to the East. These West German artists had considered the possibility of an overtly political, and sometimes socialist and Realist, German painting in the cold war era. I focus on their paintings in the remaining sections of this chapter. Quick Retreats II: the West In 1963, the year that he graduated from the Düsseldorf Academy, Gerhard Richter took up what would become a recurring survival strategy for new GDR painter/defectors to West Germany: he entered into a close collaboration with another painter, soon to become a pre-eminent gallerist, with the nom-du-plume of Konrad Lueg (his true surname was Fischer). Perhaps Richter already knew of a similar working arrangement that had taken place a few years earlier between two painter/ defectors, and had culminated in memorable exhibitions shut down by West Berlin police at the Werner & Katz Galerie, and that I discuss later in the chapter. This pa�ern of close, shortterm collaboration with another painter would repeat itself with slight variations in West Germany throughout the Cold

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War. Sometimes the painting partners were both defectors, as was the case with Schönebeck and Baselitz in West Berlin; or, one was a Westerner and the other a recent Eastern transplant (the Lueg/Richter circle); or, one artist had one foot in both East and West (as in Immendorff’s collaboration/performance with Penck in Dresden). As will become clear, while the collaborative work always differed, it invariably focused on the medium of painting. Painting was central to the identities of these mostly trained painters, even to Penck, a naïve artist who had moved in circles with trained painters of the GDR. In their actual defection to the West (for Richter, Baselitz, Schönebeck), the stability of the enterprise of painting became an anchor for the self, while other aspects of cultural and locational identity were in great flux. Several of these defector/painters submi�ed to the formal process of artistic assimilation in being retrained in the West, including Richter, Schönebeck, and Baselitz. Penck’s rejection of formal art training marks an entirely different strategy. It is not too far-fetched to consider the small painting circles they formed to be quasi-support groups for a moment of personal transition, crisis, and recovery. In order to take an oppositional or resistant position to West German culture and painting, one had to orient oneself within its social forms, its history, and its primary cultural forms. In the wake of the successful Documenta exhibitions, the re-entry into international modernism remained an overwhelming West German cultural concern (I discuss these exhibitions in Chapter 1). International modernism was understood as looking like American Abstract Expressionism or a European variant, Informel. A�er Ha�mann’s Documenta 3 in 1964, that internationalism looked like American Pop Art to West Germans. Richter has spoken about a�ending Documenta 2 in 1959 as a formative event that sealed his resolve to defect to the BRD two years later. By 1959 he had completed several major public mural commissions in Dresden as a master-student of the academy, work that would have assured him the privilege, extended to only a few, of travelling widely outside the GDR. All of these early Richter works have been painted over, some as recently

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as a�er reunification. Richter’s large-scale public commissions included the 1956 Lebensfreude at the historic Deutsches Hygiene Museum (1956) and the generically titled history painting Arbeiterkampf at SED party district headquarters in Dresden of 1959. Both of these themes were accepted conventions within what was then understood as Socialist Realism (including cooing children bonding with parents in the Hygiene Museum mural). In order to receive the commission a major work for party headquarters had to be ve�ed by the VBK and party functionaries in Dresden. It is likely that Richter’s 1959 mural depicted either events in Berlin in 1918 around the failed revolution, or, the geographically more proximate ba�le at Leuna (in neighbouring Saxony Anhalt). Si�e painted this same subject to great criticism in the 1960s, but there seems to be no discussion in the enormous literature on Richter that indicates there were any objections to his Dresden murals of the late ‘50s. As Immendorff noted, Richter was already an established artist in the GDR by the time he arrived at the Düsseldorf Academy. It remained for him to make a mark there, in the West German art centre of the Rheinland. Richter’s anonymous standing in Düsseldorf changed with his close collaboration with Lueg. Their collaboration was exemplified with one evening’s performance piece/ exhibition at the Möbelhaus Berges, a Düsseldorf furniture store. Richter and Lueg titled the event ‘Leben mit Pop, eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus’ (Living with Pop, a demonstration for capitalist realism, held on October 11, 1963). The performance/exhibition had been many months in planning, and one must admire Richter and Lueg’s success in convincing a retail shop owner to host the event. Richter and Lueg’s decision not to hold their event in an art gallery is of central importance, and indicates their view that established art galleries were also subsumed by a market. This locale also placed the painters themselves firmly in the context of a West German marketplace packed with commodities and surrounded by a web of commodity images in print and television media (both television and newspapers appeared in the installation).38

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The exhibition on October 11 was carefully devised to make use of four floors of the retail store with most activity on the third floor ‘waiting room’ and ‘exhibition room’.39 The other floors included furniture displays where the artists hung several of their paintings. A famous photograph documents the ‘sculptures’ by Richter and Lueg on the fourth floor: the artists were seated on the store’s furniture, atop pedestals in a common space. Hung in a wardrobe in the same space was the ‘official costume’ of Joseph Beuys, his usual clothing with hat circa 1963, which placed him in this retail/performance space as a symbolic participant. A television ran in the background and a small table was set for a coffee and cake break with some liquor bo�les thrown in for good measure.40 Copies of illustrated magazines and the Frankfurter Allgemeine were placed throughout the two rooms for visitors to peruse. Therefore Richter and Lueg had woven a media web throughout the retail space. Important to this exhibition was its designation as ‘demonstration’, which is defined as ‘a public display of group feelings for a person or cause’. The tenor of this group feeling had already been outlined by Richter some months earlier in a le�er to the local television station which urged that this ‘…unusual exhibition…not a commercial undertaking but purely a demonstration…[the] first exhibition of “German Pop Art”’ merited coverage.41 Richter makes clear that the event encapsulates the work of an entire group including himself and Lueg but also Polke and Manfred Kü�ner, and that this group also participates in the ‘international currency’ that Pop Art has already achieved. He writes, ‘For the first time in Germany, we are showing paintings for which such terms as Pop Art, Junk Culture, Imperialist or Capitalist Realism, New Objectivity, Naturalism, German Pop and the like are appropriate’.42 It is clear from Richter’s comments that painting was the focus of the event. Pop has recognized the media landscape, he continues, and has transported the media’s ‘a�ributes, formulations and content’ into the realm of art; this has forever changed earlier conventions of painting. Susanne Küper describes a print announcement for the event that appeared in the local paper, and that included an installation photograph of a Claes

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Oldenburg piece from the recent Sidney Janis Gallery exhibition ‘New Realists’, with the caption, ‘The exhibition “Leben mit Pop” will be something like this’.43 Certainly Richter and others in his circle drew from Oldenburg’s exhibition/installation The Store (1961) as an icon of early Pop and as a model for their painting exhibition. It is significant that Richter repeatedly reaches for the term ‘Pop Art’ in this le�er. In this planning stage the politicizing term he would later use as a title for the event, and that René Block would revive in his one-man show of Richter’s work in West Berlin in 1965, ‘Capitalist Realism’, is far less important. Richter sought to situate his painting alongside that of New York galleries and within a recognized international context of advanced art that constituted the horizon of meaningful contemporary art in West Germany. The use of the Oldenburg photograph pushes this act of contextualizing into the realm of pure imitation, as it suggests that the group exhibition is not original but rather pa�erned a�er a particular source. The audience could then apply this act of imitation to the work itself. This brings into play the collapse between original and copy, a major concern of Pop and of postmodernism generally. A closer analysis of the paintings on display indicates a key moment in Richter’s development of a technique that would link photography and painting. He would continue to investigate this link for the next forty years; in contrast, Lueg’s paintings have fallen into obscurity. Interspersed among the furniture displays on the lower floors of the store, Düsseldorf visitors could find Lueg’s Praying Hands and Bockwurst on Paper Plate, and Richter’s works Mouth, Stag and Neuschwanstein Castle, all completed in 1963.44 Küper reads the exhibition as an extended allegory about the private sphere in West Germany in the early ‘60s. The subject ma�er of many of these paintings supports her reading in that it points to the general décor of German middle-class domesticity: the fascination with alpine animals, the forest and a famed Bavarian castle; and Lueg’s reference to the ubiquitous presence of reproductions of Dürer’s Praying Hands drawing.

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But subject ma�er is secondary to formal innovation in these Richter paintings. Mouth (Brigi�e Bardot’s Lips), an almost abstract painting, presents a detail of a larger photographic image we might recognize as the French film star. The painting does not carry any trace of its originating photographic image in the manner of Richter’s later holistic copies from photographoriginals: the composition is not in grisaille, nor does it simulate the photographic framing of its source photograph. Richter determines the frame and the composition of this fragment/ copy. Brushstroke is exaggerated in a swirling central spiral that adds texture and movement to the composition. The orifice represented (almost unrecognizable as a mouth) becomes a vortex surrounded by circling brushstrokes that serve to distribute colour over the entire surface, and thereby disrupt this element’s descriptive function. Richter experiments with this strategy of the photographicfragment-as-source in the other paintings, which surely came chronologically a�er Mouth. Neuschwanstein Castle is surprising for its texture, achieved by means of an almost pointillist treatment of a mountainside against the horizon. Richter subtly distributes colour over the surface. The building itself is painted in grisaille as though it were a photographic fragment; this gives the appearance of a ghostly, photomontaged element. Richter has sutured a photo-like fragment into the centre of a larger composition that contributes to a plausible landscape. Stag (Fig. 3.6) marks a decisive break. Richter has abandoned colour; the animal named in the title is again centred in an all-over composition consisting of cursorily drawn vertical and horizontal lines that might describe a wood. Richter in contrast more carefully models the animal form. It appears blurred yet mysteriously without brushstrokes. A large vertical form bisects this form violently and disrupts the viewer’s gaze. These paintings evidence Richter’s gradual manoeuvring of composition around a main and centred element, one means of lessening his control over the whole. He also dri�s toward a more ‘illusionistic’ reference to the black-and-white photographic image, and banishes texture. In Stag Richter

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Fig. 3.6 Gerhard Richter, Hirsch (Stag), 1963; © 2008 Gerhard Richter, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York

invents the traces of the mechanical photographic image as they are transmuted into painting—its smooth chemical surface, its grey-scale quality, its sharp indexical quality as the ‘real’—as he struggles to lessen his grip on the compositional whole. It is only with later paintings that he could say: ‘I want to leave everything as it is. I therefore neither plan nor invent; I add nothing and omit nothing. At the same time, I know that I inevitably shall plan, invent, alter, make and manipulate. But I don’t know that’.45 The complexity of Richter’s paintings was surely difficult to appreciate in the expanse of retail displays, like finding a needle in a haystack. Küper further understands the ‘Leben mit Pop’ performance as a ‘caricature’ of a populace removed from actual events and withdrawn into a cocoon of commodities and media information. The artists set the context with a paper maché sculpture depicting Konrad Adenauer (he resigned as chancellor the day of the performance, and the television was tuned to a documentary on him), one of John F. Kennedy (who would be assassinated the next month), and one of the Düsseldorf gallerist Alfred Schmela. These sculptures were arguably just

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as significant in establishing a context of Cold War alliances for the West German art market. But if Leben mit Pop caricatured the West German populace, it also counts painters—Richter, Lueg and the others in their circle—among those duped into the new ‘cultural phenomenon’ of media representation. Richter invites the audience to accept this media and commodity web as a kind of empirical fact in the manner that he as a painter has accepted it—that it henceforth has subsumed the medium of painting, and more broadly, of art. Richter had earlier also accepted the cultural hegemony of certain political or technological forces in East Germany, i.e., the fact that rigid socialist subject ma�er went hand in hand with large-scale public painting. He railed against ‘socialism’ (ideology per se) only years later, and from the other side of the Berlin wall. The term ‘Capitalist Realism’ was never a good fit for Richter’s work, and one doubts that he originated it. The ‘Leben mit Pop’ performance was an aberration in his production, although Richter has indicated his admiration for Fluxus, which is affirmed by photographs of him, Al-Hansen-like, with tape on his face. Richter was not a Realist—in its interventionist and socialist sense—but rather an objectivist painter. His assimilation of the objectivist lessons of Duchamp’s readymade, a subject that was to the best of my knowledge never broached in East Germany, largely determined Richter’s painting strategies a�er his transition to West Germany. Therefore his recent protests— that the term ‘capitalist realism’ was not really applicable to his work in this period, but rather a label applied by René Block— are understandable. Richter’s exhibition Volker Bradke at Schmela in 1966 was a rejoinder to Leben mit Pop; Bradke was a local Düsseldorf art student. Photographs show Richter ‘exhibiting’ or presenting Bradke in person in the gallery which was outfi�ed with Richter’s photographs of Bradke, a large photo-based painting of Bradke, and a film that showed Bradke in Richter’s studio.46 The one-day show can be read as an extended critique of the treatment of the figure of the everyman, the worker, as in the genre of the brigade worker portrait. Richter positions the West German everyman as a subject that gains individuality largely by means of its representation as a photographic or filmic

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image. The class position of the individual filtered through media is of no consequence. Back in West Berlin, René Block thought the term ‘Capitalist Realism’ resonated strongly with other kinds of ‘new realism’ taking place there, in the shadow of the GDR. In 1971 he used the term again for a show of prints, but disappointedly admi�ed that both Richter and Polke had already distanced themselves from it, since Richter had ‘fled into beaux arts’. He also notes: I never understood Capitalist Realism to be in confrontation with Socialist Realism. It is known that every Realist art doesn’t only develop out of its society but also with its society. Since our late capitalist society recognizes itself increasingly as a ‘social order” (I don’t want to clarify why here), and that of socialist society is not yet fully developed (I don’t want to clarify why here), I now recognize that Capitalist Realism, if it had taken seriously its taking up of a party for the masses, would as a consequence have had to become Socialist Realism (I don’t want to clarify why here)…For me Capitalist Realism remains an epoch of mid-1960s-art, with which I feel deeply connected (I don’t want to clarify why here).47 Certainly Richter the objectivist could not have agreed. The term he only half-heartedly adhered to, for an ephemeral performance, had a short shelf-life. He did not share the views of Western le�ist artists, but rather was able to adapt painting quickly to the dominant cultural and political ideas of either state, socialism, or free market, media-driven, capitalism. He made use of these systems and their conventions to further his own rise in the West German art world. Richter wrote in 1964, ‘I don’t want to be a personality or to have an ideology. I see no sense in doing anything different…I think that one always does what is being done anyway (even when making something new)…’48 It is apparent in his art that he deeply believed the found photographic image to be the ‘perfect picture’, dislodged as it was from any context or meaning and thereby possessing an absolute autonomy. It became his mission to import this quality

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into painting. It is the view of a survivor and also of a convert, to Western Cold War views of autonomy-as-modernism. Picturing the ‘New Man’ Two painters had established their small circle in West Berlin to almost no notice in 1961, when they exhibited a few newspaper clippings, drawings, poems and a flurry of odes to Antonin Artaud as well as their manifesto, ‘Pandemonium I’. There is almost no record of this first public encounter between Eugen Schönebeck and Georg Baselitz, as he had recently renamed himself—a�er the Oberlausitz countryside, bordering Poland, where he was born. His surname then related him to that East German landscape. Baselitz and Schönebeck would never show their closely connected paintings together in the 1960s. Both had abandoned their course of study at East Berlin art academies around 1955-6, defected to West Berlin, and were now students at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste there. Within two years they had trained with professors who were recognized for their achievement, in line with the dominant views of the art academy of each state, first in the East and then in the West. The two bonded over this whiplash experience in art education. However neither was won over by the assumptions and conventions advocated in West Berlin around the virtues of abstraction as they were promoted by Hann Trier, a rising Informel painter and Baselitz’s teacher, nor were they convinced by the Pollock paintings they saw at the Hochschule in the Fall of 1958. In their paintings of the early ‘60s the two sought to recover the figure in painting. At first they explored the body as abject ma�er, as flesh, and as the sometimes-obscene grotesque. As their two manifestos make clear, in this venture they looked to historical precedents, which they found in Artaud and in French Existentialist painters like Jean Fautrier and Jean Dubuffet, or in Francis Bacon. All of these painters had also devised strategies to explore surface as flesh or decay in the immediate postwar era. Dubuffet and Bacon had worked between genres, merging the figure with the depiction of meat in the still life tradition, with all its Christological implications and its relation to modernity.49

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In a related vein both Baselitz and Schönebeck explored the crucified figure (in The Poet or Fixe Idee by Baselitz, or in Schönebeck’s Crucifixion, 1963). Fuelled by Ducasse and Artaud they together produced a second ‘Pandemonium’ manifesto. That text gave rise to a series of pictures that channelled the Ducassian ramblings of ‘Pandemonium 2’ into the realm of the visual. There they lyrically celebrate the plural subject, not least of their own collaboration. They intoned a plurality that leaves behind the uncertainty of the self: ‘Audacious twinness (deux, deux, deux)…we are still the only friends of our happy intercourse. The enticing, seductive WE. Fastidious contemporaries, democratic visitors—wealth of this city. It stinks’.50 Artaud is cited repeatedly, as is Ducasse, and obscure European painters like the Finn Axel Gallén. At one point the collective subject is abandoned and gives way to a descriptive passage: Le� to my own devices, with no fear of the sudden break. I look into myself. Now I am here! Hygienic solace maintains the advantage gained by my isolation. First my restless eyes—mould gathered between ecstatic reactions of erectile tissue, then caress the gristle in the randy evening hours. Fantastic reality!…Demoniac vulgarity is constantly visible beauty. This is the essential malice. Demoniac vulgarity is constantly visible beauty. This passage finds resonance with Breton’s notion of ‘beauté convulsive’, but also with Baselitz’s own onanistic or ‘prick paintings’ of 1962- 3. The Berlin police famously impounded some of these canvases for obscenity when they were shown at Werner & Katz in West Berlin in 1963. Most infamous—because it is the most quickly legible figurative composition of this series—is Nacht im Eimer (Night of the Senses, 1963), now at the Ludwig Museum, Cologne. But the other paintings, G. Antonin (1962), Der Acker (The Field, 1962), and P.D. Stengel (Stalk, 1962, Fig. 3.7), depict a knot of bodies in onanistic activity or figures oriented horizontally as a field of erect phalli. Finally, in P.D. Stengel,

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the landscape gives rise to a plant-like phallus (a faint horizon line can be made out in the distance). In these paintings Baselitz reconfigures landscape itself as not just anthropomorphized but as fully embodied, and inherently vulgar and masculine.

Fig. 3.7 Georg Baselitz, P.D. Stengel (Stalk), 1962; © 2008 Georg Baselitz, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York

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In a manner that recalls drawings by O�o Dix, Schönebeck’s vicious ink drawings of 1963 also engage with this consideration of body as phallus and landscape: pockmarked half-animalistic and half-human figures seem to threaten each other with open jaws or elephant trunks, or ignore each other and suck contentedly on either hose objects or their own phalli (Untitled, 1963). Other readings of these paintings have suggested that this depicted masturbating body negates and a�acks the fascist body of the father in repositioning it, and figurative painting more generally, as obscenity.51 In tying this body to the actual landscape Baselitz and Schönebeck present the ‘night’ that has fallen upon that figure/landscape as an allegory of painting and of the painted surface itself in its newly metamorphosed state a�er fascism. It is an historical context that calls for explicit negation and vulgarity in the spirit of Bataille’s basesse. The two then turned to the fragmented body, again a motif borrowed from Surrealism. Schönebeck’s carefully centred compositions of 1963, Bait and Ginster, present the human/animal form that violence has already acted upon, or, that is positioned helplessly, awaiting rescue or something else. Like the sides of beef painted by Bacon, Schönebeck’s extensively gestural working of the mass in Ginster achieves the actual merging of a fleshy volume with surface. Another series by Baselitz, P.D. Fuss (foot) depicts almost unidentifiable fleshy stumps or masses that are extensively worked with brushstroke and colour to the point where forms dissolve. Some are also titled ‘Alte Heimat’, old hometown or state. In presenting these passive masses as awaiting a particular fate, Schönebeck positions the viewer to assume responsibility, in the manner of the Existentialist who is condemned to choose. Quite mysteriously, both painters abruptly reverse course in this extended argument about the figure, turning their focus from the depths of decay to the heights of idealism. No longer seeking to position the abject body-as-ma�er within painting, they sought its opposite: the ideal, the ‘new type’, the ‘true human’. Although they no longer collaborated, by 1965 both produced a ‘hero’ series or otherwise focused on the subject of Der wahre Mensch (Fig. 3.8, The True Human, 1964). These

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Fig. 3.8 Eugen Schönebeck, Der wahre Mensch (The True Human), 1964; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

paintings can be read as extended responses to Pop painting’s contemporaneous occupation with the photographic celebrityicon of the Western media. The central figure of Schönebeck’s painting of this title is an oddly geometricized human form in a business suit; part of the figure distends into rectangular areas delimited by a cartoonishly thick black contour line. Other lines invade the picture plane from the right; one ends in a T-formation under the nose of the figure. Schönebeck limits gestural marks; detailed elements suggest that these

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lines function as a kind of quasi-architectural scaffolding with joints that connect to the figure itself. The figure holds a similar structure in its extended le� hand. A screw or other mechanical element (a key?) emerges from the figure’s le� shoulder and links the mechanical or industrial component with this human form. Schönebeck’s ‘true human’ is closest to the metaphors of Duchamp’s Large Glass, where Duchamp equated mechanical devices with the human figure. Like Duchamp, Schönebeck presents the figure-in-painting as constructed or otherwise mediated by industrial processes. This figure is a commentary on the slick photographic images of the media celebrity as presented by Warhol or Richter, or the figure of the exemplary citizen/worker in East German painting. In contrast to Pop, Schönebeck’s figure is constructed solely by painterly means, using techniques of painting more current in East Germany. However the painting points to its own constructed nature, distinct from any function as a signified. This critique of the socialist icon is more apparent in his treatment of the figure of Lenin. Schönebeck similarly depicts this historical figure with supports and scaffolds obscuring his face (Bildnis L.; Lenin 2, both 1965). In the same year Schönebeck became a portraitist of the icons of international state socialism and socialist culture drawn from photographs, but not those of East Germany; he did not paint Thälmann or Brecht, for example. Schönebeck also painted, in this same year, in his familiar block-like forms and generally Expressionist pale�e, Mayakowsky, Mao Tse-tung (holding the socialist rose), the anonymous Der Rotarmist (red army soldier), and Siqueiros (1966). A drawing of 1965-66 features Ho Chi Minh. More so than a facile expression of admiration, these paintings underscore the West’s aversion to the socialist icon. The Western media consistently marginalized these images in the name of Cold War ideology. They thereby underscore the ideological bent of Western media culture more generally. Conversely, Schönebeck depicts the icons of socialist modernist culture like Mayakowsky and Siqueiros who were marginalized in East and West German, and also American, culture at this time. It should be remembered that Warhol, ever keeping to American Cold

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War sentiment, did not paint Mao until 1972 and Lenin until 1986. A�er defecting against Western Pop’s obsession with the icons and technology of Western media, Schönebeck completed the final defection of his career in giving up painting altogether, in 1966. And unlike Duchamp, Schönebeck’s departure from art has unfortunately proven to be permanent. While Baselitz also focused on the figure, the paths of Schönebeck and Baselitz diverged in these years. Baselitz worked in the interstices between figure and landscape in an historicizing manner that went beyond his earlier engagement with Surrealism. He took as precedents Gallén and the German nineteenth century landscape painters Ludwig Richter and Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, both of whom he references with their initials in the titles of paintings of these years. In the painting Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1965), Baselitz also conjoined the genres of figure and landscape that he had first explored in the Foot series. Courbet had also realized this fusion in early Realist painting. Baselitz’s roughly rendered ‘Expressionist’ figure takes on a decidedly less political tone. Sometimes presented as the ‘painter’, the ‘shepherd’, the ‘blocked one’, or simply ‘the new type’, it is invariably depicted striding out at the viewer in the foreground, at times with a large phallus and carrying in its hands or on its arms schematic iconographic elements like a plough, a burning house, animals or tree-like objects, that establish the figure-as-landscape. The landscape that surrounds this figure is mostly desolate and marked by an empty horizon. The figure holds a pale�e in Different Signs (1965); we might then read it as a figure representing the artist-in-the-landscape. In Different Signs, the figure is trapped in a tight enclosure. In other paintings like Blocked Artist (1963) or A Blocked One (1965), Baselitz depicts the right hand of the figure caught in a device, with blood falling like rain down the canvas. In these paintings, the symbolic self-portrait melds with the landscape tradition. Presumably Baselitz makes reference to the destroyed German landscape. He underscores the break that this destruction and violence necessitates with earlier historical traditions of painting.

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This makes the continued painting of landscape in a German manner impossible. Baselitz’s art then differs substantially from Anselm Kiefer, whose works revive the German Romantic landscape tradition. In later paintings Baselitz would make specific reference to the landscape of Saxony, as in his paintings of Meissen Woodsmen, 1968. Baselitz consciously reconnected with Expressionism, particularly Munch and the Brücke, or northern Expressionism, by the late 1960s. Since then he has devoted himself to the formalist pursuit of a figuratively based Neo-expressionism in both painting and sculpture. Well a�er these collaborations had ended (Richter/Lueg; Baselitz/Schönebeck), another far larger group of West Berlin artists engaged extensively with the figure, and explicitly called themselves Realists. There was li�le agreement as to what the term meant exactly, and their styles and concerns within figuration varied so greatly so as to put in doubt any actual collaboration. Some have argued that only these West Berlin groups carried on Lueg and Richter’s aborted concept of ‘Capitalist Realism’.52 These groups explicitly rejected Informel, or abstraction, and the gestural qualities of Expressionism as Baselitz and Schönebeck pursued it. One group, founded in 1966-7 by the artists Hans Jürgen Diehl, Wolfgang Petrick, and Peter Sorge among others around the West Berlin artists’ gallery Grossgörschen 35, called themselves ‘Secession Grossgörschen 35’. In 1972-3, also centred in West Berlin, the smaller groups ‘Aspekt’ (including Maina-Miriam Munsky, Be�ina von Arnim, and Klaus Vogelgesang) and the ‘Schule der neuen Prächtigkeit’ (School of the New Magnificence, including Manfred Bluth and Johannes Grützke), followed. All of these painters were occupied with the subject ma�er of middle-class life and desire in consumerist West Germany. Several focused on sex and violence as general elements within this landscape. Their critical target was the middle-class, male subject who they a�ack and parody on moralistic grounds as a glu�onous consumer: greedy, bloodthirsty, with an almost uncontrolled id, though it is expressed only in terms of heterosexual desire. This is the ‘everyman’ envisioned by the West Berlin Critical Realists. He is

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not defined by his production of use value, as in the idealizing images of the worker of state socialism, but rather only by his visual and physical subjugation of others as a function of his desires. Concentrated into one figure, it personifies ‘Western decadence’, as it was coined in the East in order to condemn the hedonistic individualism of the West.

Fig. 3.9 Johannes Grützke, Komm, setz’ dich zu uns (Come, Sit with Us), 1970; © 2008 Johannes Grützke

The most famed member of the Critical Realists, Johannes Grützke, declared, ‘I maintain that the small reality that surrounds me also represents reality as a whole. Therefore I also maintain that my person represents all persons…’53 Grützke uses his own face for all of his painted figures, an approach that led him to dismiss photography as inadequate tool for painting. Outfi�ed with his own face and with contorted expressions or greasy smiles, Grützke’s figures focus aggressively upon the viewer. Grützke places them so as to imply that the viewer completes their circle of fellowship, so to speak. His compositions picture a dystopian, if not existential, ‘economic miracle’ world inhabited by West Germans. His composition

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Come, Sit with Us (Fig. 3.9, 1970) places figures at the very front of the picture plane, lounging against a Mercedes. They address the viewer in a manner of an overzealous salesman, simultaneously ingratiating and threatening. Grützke suggests that cycles of consumption have spawned these grotesques, and they remain the workers that perpetuate it. Grützke is deeply suspicious of the prosperity enjoyed by West Germans, but he also implicates himself as a participant in this predatory ‘new magnificence’. The Critical Realists declared themselves le�ists that shared the oppositional posture of the ASSO artists and other figurative painters of the Weimar Republic. While they shared the East’s preference for a figurative style that foregrounded an ‘everyman’, their Realist paintings were neither heroic nor visionary of a new order, but rather harshly critical of the despicable and voracious middle class of the booming West German present. Their paintings were therefore of great interest to East Germans, as is indicated by their treatment in Hermann Raum’s survey text; but they were still generally not shown in the GDR.54 Their deflating picture of the German ‘everyman’ also embodied avarice, the darker characteristics of the modern worker that were denied in East German painting. The Turn to Language in German/German Painting In the ‘60s Jörg Immendorff wrestled with the relation of theory and practice in regard to painting that strove to be Realist, or, that meant to position itself as interventionist in a social and political sense. How could Realist painting combat the Western market’s affection for the artist-persona, the great cult of the author who could be both celebrated and marketed? Sarcasm provided one route toward a question that proved foundational to Immendorff’s entire artistic practice: who exactly is addressed by painting, and to what end? To answer, Immendorff first distanced painting as far as possible from concrete social concerns, which for Immendorff meant regression. His ‘Baby Picture’ series of 1967 featured pneumatic infant figures o�en wrapped in cellophane like carnival prizes, sometimes painted on shaped canvases and presented with the scrawled text beneath the figures which commanded, ‘Hab” mich lieb’ (love

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me), or stipulated their recipient: ‘Für alle Lieben in der Welt’ (for all the dear ones in the world). These paintings also put forward an infantilised painter pandering to what he hopes is an audience for his art, which he makes irresistible in forcing it to regress to the point where it presumably addresses the painter/viewer relation, isolated from any other worldly cares or tribulations. As Immendorff pointed out, a baby is prior to language (i.e., Lacan’s imaginary). Yet he combines the baby with language to issue a command or to address the image to a particular recipient. Thus from the start language is Immendorff’s means to enter ‘participation in the world’ within painting: language signals the moment of intervention/entry into the symbolic, the realm of the social, but also the possibility of transforming theory into the practice of painting. Immendorff furthermore used the Babys (sic) as masks for 1967 performances in Cologne and Aachen where the word ‘Vietnam’ was wri�en on the floor.55 Thus the baby serves as an imago for the painter himself; it is manipulated within performance as an anti-war symbol, along with the throwing of flowers, a common anti-war movement gesture, which Immendorff adds as an iconographical element to other paintings in the series. The Babys are simultaneously mesmerizing and u�erly ridiculous. They signal Immendorff’s early distain for notions of autonomy as pure narcissism, which to his mind is an impossibility. The paintings were at first deployed within (the exegesis of) performance as antiwar protest, and a�erwards positioned their viewer explicitly through language. The stage beyond or before language is really an impossibility for Immendorff, who therefore from the start proved himself to be a political painter. In this early series Immendorff makes use of language as an element of painting in a manner that has been associated with the concerns of conceptual art. Immendorff continued to use language as the critical instrument of his investigation of the boundary between individual autonomy and social/ political intervention in painting. Despite his extensive work in performance with the Lidl concept that he and Chris Reinecke developed—a mobile and collaborative alternative space for

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art and social activism that opened itself to numerous other organizations including the student movement, the KPD and Maoists (1966-1970)—Immendorff remained a painter throughout the most important years of his practice, that is, before his transformation into a Neo-expressionist around 1980 with the Café Deutschland series. In some ways the term ‘Lidl’ returned to a Dadaist mode of quasi-anarchism. It marked a collective realm outside of and resistant to established institutions and social movements that could include an entire range of activity as art. However at every stage of Lidl, in the Lidlraum (also constructed as an extention of the Bundestag in Bonn in 1969), the Lidl Academy, the Lidlsport phase, the Büro Olympia Lidl in Cologne (slogan: ‘Viel Sand auf das Olympische Feuer’), the Renter’s Solidarity action in Düsseldorf of 1969, Rote Zelle Kunst of 1971, and the pro-KPD demonstrations and Gruppe Revolutionäre Künstler in London in 1973, Immendorff continued to produce paintings. As he became increasingly convinced of the solutions provided by state socialism, some of his paintings consisted solely of language elements—works like Aufruf, 1978 or others included in his important catalogue, Hier und Jetzt: das tun, was zu tun ist (1973). While Immendorff remained sceptical of the GDR’s Stalinist socialism as a system tipping toward totalitarian controls, he ironically embraced those forwarded by Mao or Ho Chi Minh, even during the Cultural Revolution. One series of works included in Hier und Jetzt, ‘Eine Künstlerfaust ist auch eine Faust, ein Buch für Künstler’ (an artist’s fist is also a fist, a book for artists) is copied from a Chinese source. Immendorff was then a kind of primitivist socialist who embraced a distant and exotic worker’s movement as a kind of fantasy, a position that was shared by others within the student movement in Germany and France and even Jean-Paul Sartre. But more important was Immendorff’s sustained connection to Brechtian techniques of distanciation which he achieved through language as an element of painting; in his paintings image and text do not coincide but take a critical stance toward both representation and the issues presented to the viewer.56

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Immendorff’s own brand of Maoism-filtered-through-Brecht is evident in his paintings connected to the post-Lidl group ‘Rote Zelle Kunst’, begun in 1971, a collective that strove to continue the Renters’ Solidarity protest. Immendorff produced numerous broadside-like paintings for this group that express what he understood as socialist art at the time. Generally this included cartoonish figures framed by slogans; as we have seen, this is certainly far removed from paintings produced in the GDR in 1971. In paintings like Soziales Handeln als Vorwand (Social action as pretext, Fig. 3.10), Immendorff uses language to connect to the activist tradition of street and chalk painting, which he was also involved in doing at the time.57 Most striking in this composition is the critique that the first-person narrative’s a�ack on the notion of the artist’s persona and agenda: ‘…My intention was social action but my practice is oriented toward egotism, and so I could not take the view of the working person, I couldn’t fight for their interests…’ The artist struggles to intervene, to fight for the worker in painting, but simultaneously sees himself outside of those interests by reason of his ‘achievement’. The text works to undermine the ego and persona of the artist and admits to its inability to act out of pure solidarity through the medium of painting. Immendorff’s other important paintings of the ‘70s return to this critical combination of text and image, particularly in Kann man damit etwas verändern? and in the painting Wo stehst Du mit deiner Kunst Kollege? (1973), both examples of Immendorff in a more confident frame of mind concerning painting’s activist potential but still forcing the viewer to recognize that art-activism demands constant self-struggle. These are o�en referred to as Immendorff’s ‘agit-prop’ paintings. By means of their self-reflexive criticality and the horizon of self-reflexive political failure that each encapsulates, they transcend such simple propagandistic categories. Immendorff uses language in them to both interrupt and politicize the painted surface while at the same time pointing critically to his own role as painter, a task which according to him always has failure encoded in any a�empt to take on the Realist mantle of intervention.

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To make his connection with his predecessor Brecht more explicit, Immendorff produced the six-part Brecht Series (Questions of a Reading Worker) in 1976, book-like paintings of Brecht’s 1935 poem of the same title. The poem pointed to the lack of historical memorials for workers but their abundance for

Fig. 3.10 Jörg Immendorff, Soziales handeln als Vorwand (Social action as pretext, in Hier und Jetzt), 1973; © 2008 Estate of Jörg Immendorff, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York

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tyrants. In the same year Immendorff travelled to East Berlin to speak with A.R. Penck; is it possible that he saw Werner Stötzer’s 1961 sculpture of the same name at the State Library on Unter den Linden, which inspired him to take on the poem himself? Immendorff claims the poem for painting, and seems to answer Brecht’s question literally in the last canvas. The composition includes a figure of himself, which points to a painting-withinthe-painting. In response to Brecht’s concluding words ‘ So many reports. So many questions’, Immendorff emblazons the canvas with the words, ‘‘There’s my place [at the table]’. Immendorff positions himself as the painter/worker here but he mostly memorializes only Brecht and his own painting. In this painting Immendorff continues to struggle with the tensions between the ideals of socialism and his own artist’s ego. This ba�le against the artist’s own ego is mostly lost in Immendorff’s long series Café Deutschland (1977-1983). While he unfurls an impressively complex allegory in it, Immendorff centres himself rather unproblematically in this series and pictures his East German collaborator Penck as li�le more than a sidekick. Language recedes as a significant element, and with it the question of representation in painting also has become less problematic. Immendorff continues this struggle between the painter’s role as worker/interventionist and his more privileged one as the artist-persona in the collaborative series of paintings on paper that he completed with A.R. Penck in his Dresden studio in 1979, Immendorff Visits Y. The two artists had first met three years earlier, when Immendorff allegedly served as an intermediary for Michael Werner who was selling Penck’s work in the West. In the intervening years the two had engaged in an extensive correspondence by mail.58 The most compelling works in this series are like a ping-pong match: they are furthermore failed demonstrations of the total oppositionality that is said to characterize the East/West divide. A word is proposed and another counters it (‘commune’/’communication’; ‘Klischee’/ ’Schnee’). Highly schematic figures appear and vanish: a figure hurling over barbed wire; a house with an open door and a guitar in front of it; a figure playing a guitar with the word

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‘schmelze’ (melt; the figure refers to Penck who played in several bands). A painting Freundscha�svertrag (friendship agreement) pictures a printed page, dated and signed ‘Y. Ralf’. One painting has a word scratched out, and under it, another redacted word, as response and non-answer to the first. Far more so than the photographs that document this socialist/capitalist art summit, oppositions lose their clarity in these paintings, with each hand cancelling the other out. The contract function of the paintings in this series goes beyond one ego, and between presumably determining ideological systems, to establish a shared surface. The certainty of any singular sign or any singular authorial gesture is impossible when painting becomes a channel of communication, as it does here. This collaboration however owed a great deal to ‘Y’ and ‘Ralf’, the only referents in these paintings that more or less clearly identify Penck. In part out of necessity, ‘Penck’ (also not his given name) had used a number of different pseudonyms since about 1966, when as Ralf Winkler from Dresden he a�empted to gain membership in the VBK, which was denied. This was part of a repeated pa�ern of rejection that Winkler/ Penck had faced beginning with his numerous applications to both the East Berlin and the Dresden academies. Even a�er he was included in a young artists exhibition at the East Berlin Akademie der Künste in 1961, he continued to be rejected from any art school. With his rejection from the VBK in 1966, Winkler took up another name, A.R. (for ‘Ralf’) Penck, appropriated from the geologist/geographer of the ice-age Albrecht Penck, of Leipzig (died 1945). The pseudonym was perhaps a strategy to keep VBK and party bureaucrats off guard for the sake of future ventures, and it was successful in that it made his continued activities outside official culture possible. It is no exaggeration to name Penck the father of alternative art in East Germany. Other pseudonyms would follow: Mike Hammer; T.M.; α, and then Y. The earliest namesake was a scholarly and empirical investigator of an archaic period in geological time, and in part Penck hoped to gain this manner of analytical distance to painting, his own object of study. Since 1961 Penck developed a particular iconography in his paintings that showed a

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connection to archaic pictographs or petroglyphs. His early World Pictures (1961-1965) present schematic figures denoting humans assuming particular poses and gestures, o�entimes oriented in profile and holding up small squares with similar markings that appear to be paintings within paintings. Several sources point to a 1961 mural painting Winkler completed in a student club (in Dresden?) titled Das geteilte Deutschland; his painting World Picture of the same year continues to engage with this theme. The composition is generally divided by a central axis which groups the schematic figures into two opposing groups; some figures gesticulate toward other figures, and some point weapons or arrows. Each side depicts a hierarchy among the figures. The space is otherwise unarticulated, with only a curved horizon at the bo�om that the figures rest on. The surface is marked with lines as though it were aged. In the painting Large World Picture (1965) Winkler expands on this format to enclose all the figures in a kind of bubble form; some of the large figures reach their arms to the edges of the bubble, and some appear to look outside the bubble with instruments. Because it is depicted with five legs, a small figure seems to run in place in the lower right and holds a square reading ‘Ralf’; none of the other figures interact with it. Winkler/Penck’s schematic and sketchy compositions from these years reference the opposition of two groups around the small square that references painting, or, knowledge production. Other paintings like A Possible System (A=I, myself, 1965, Fig. 3.11) or Untitled/System Picture (1966) dwell on issues of education or indoctrination into dominant ideologies. Penck here presents three distinct camps, relief-like, across the surface; a didactic figure on the right waves its square reading ‘A= myself; myself = B’ at a group that dismembers figures with an axe, and on the other side figures hop excitedly around a second figure waving paintings, while a third group is imprisoned around another didactic figure at its centre. Penck makes reference to the process of indoctrination, and the connection between painting and identity on the one hand, and to painting as a possible path that leads both toward and away from violence on the other. In this work Penck raises the possibility that many sign systems of knowledge/painting can

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Fig. 3.11 A. R. Penck, A Possible System (A=I, myself), 1965 (Museum Ludwig Cologne); © 2008 R. Winkler, Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, Berlin and New York

co-exist without the dominance of one over another. However all systems can lead to subjugation and violence. In using visual elements or signs that seem to be archaic or derived from the prehistoric past, Penck distances himself from accepted treatments of the figure (in depicting it with no modelling or articulation), even as he keeps these figures very legible as signs for the viewer. Furthermore Penck seems to want to describe the hierarchies and institutions of the GDR, and of its opposite, the West, in the most schematic manner possible. He abstracts that structure or system into a diagrammatic whole while representing the complexity of interests and forces that keep it in place. In reducing his own presence within this system, Penck increases his own distance to it. In casting this system in archaic terms, Penck’s present becomes more distant and analysable; the state’s ideology and control over the realm of painting is cast as part of a larger Cold War culture war, and as the ba�le of one system against another. It is a remarkable survival strategy that diagrams the repressive culture of rejection and marginalization that Winkler himself inhabited in East Germany. It is then no surprise that in his book ICH Standart-Literatur Penck links the survival abilities of men in the ice age to their knowledge of signs and their ability to adapt to new behaviours based on the signs they encountered.59

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However Penck’s World Picture and Systems paintings of the early ‘60s still engage in a rather simple functioning of a legible sign that is only slightly ambiguous to its reader. In an o�encited le�er to his friend Georg Kern (now Baselitz) in 1965 Penck states, ‘I have moved away from things artistic and am applying myself to mathematics, cybernetics and theoretical physics, for what is in my mind is a sort of physics of human society, or society as a physical entity’.60 Penck then considered this turn to be against art—in the West conceptual artists had made a similar decision—and it would take him a number of years to theorize this new framework. His new theoretical framework could cast the conflicts of his first series into another analytical frame, that of systems theory and cybernetics. However unlike Western conceptual artists Penck remained resolutely faithful to painting as a medium, even as he expanded his activity as an artist in the 1970s to include his work as a poet, a filmmaker, and as an improvisational jazz musician. One presumes that Penck also introduced himself to structuralist thought by the ‘60s. Penck called his new category for art ‘Standart’. This encapsulated a wide range of art practice that connected to these aspects of theory; Penck published a number of books on his theory of Standart.61 Standart brings Penck closer to the painting of signs and elements and to a less expressive use of signs or mark, although Penck consistently refuses stable dichotomies like expression vs. analysis, or figuration vs. abstraction. He titles a range of work ‘Standart’, including a set of gridstructured paintings including Primitive Computer (1968), a set of eighteen drawings of 1970 (Standart Drawings), the text-based Standart-science-image (1973) and Flugbla� (Macht—Besitz, Leaflet, Power/Ownership, 1974), the print portfolio End-Ur-Standart (1972), a 31-piece series of paintings with a central stick-figure (also exhibited in a grid), and the books I’ve already mentioned. Standart is both information product and the process required to produce it. It also links signifiers to signifieds in the mind, although Penck does not use this language. Penck’s process of linking signified with signifier seems based on an understanding of the process of perception and not so much on the shared codes of language. If perception has to do with

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quantities of identical and non-identical elements within the visual experience, then Standart can be used to stimulate visualization in increasing the viewer’s capacity for ‘storage ability’, or the ability to perceive. A combination of elements offers an incentive for the viewer to assemble an ‘overview’ of them which, according to Penck, can then become a ‘determinant of behaviour’.62 Once the leap toward the meaning of the identical and the non-identical has taken place in a moment of perception, the elements themselves can be reproduced by anyone. Penck understands Standart painting as a kind of utopian art-pictography that will democratize the production of visual art and erase any distinction between artist and amateur. He furthermore devised a similar grouping of Standart ‘models’, three-dimensional realizations of combinations of elements. Standart must then be understood as Realist art, in its interventionist sense and in its a�empt to realize the social equality of true socialism. The elements of his Standart paintings of 1968—grids of circles with various designs in them—can be taken up as a language by anyone to produce visual meaning, as can the elements spread over the surface of Primitive Computer. The most well-known Standart is Penck’s adaptation of the stick-figure as a central component in his long paintings series of 1971, posed in the ‘surrender gesture’ that Dieter Koepplin has discussed as signifying a surrender to sign structure itself or to the flow of visual information. Penck’s later introduction of lists of directions in theory in the le�-hand section of the 1973 series Standart-Theorie, follows the other sections of the picture plane given over to the arrangement of repeated geometric shapes and lines. Language itself is simply another element, or, becomes a more central element in Flugbla�. In this work Penck arranges anonyms (signifiers with political signifieds), geometric and other visual elements as critical, mutually cancelling components, while also denying a unification of the whole. Penck’s Standart Drawings of 1970, with their combination of text and image, served as the model for Penck and Immendorff’s collaboration in 1979. Both series sought to invite the leap of

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perception that would catapult the viewer into a moment of acute perception, one that might urge them into action to realize a higher or even true level of both socialism and democracy. Standart has in fact been called ‘social realism’.63 Outside of a few of Penck’s close friends—perhaps Baselitz, or Peter Herrmann or Jürgen Bö�cher (Strawalde, his old mentor)— no one took up Standart. Penck considered it a failure since it was not the basis of a new information- and system-based art. Michael Werner began to show his work in Cologne in 1968, and Penck began to construct his own alternative venues for exhibition in East Germany. From 1971 to 1976 he exhibited with the group he organized, ‘Lücke frequentor’, in Dresden; in 1974 he was a focus of the first show at the pioneering alternative gallery, in the apartment of Jürgen Schweinebraden in Berlin/ Prenzlauer-Berg. In 1977 he founded the Obergrabenpresse, an alternative press that produced a number of significant print portfolios. Penck was therefore at the centre of an expanding alternative art scene in the GDR. The continuation of his career in East Germany became more difficult in 1975 when he was awarded the West Berlin Akademie der Künste’s Will Grohmann Prize. This event, in addition to the fact that his works were smuggled to the Werner gallery in Cologne (as Immendorff a�ested to), led to the SED’s increasing harassment. Penck’s artworks, which he had o�en just sent in the mail, were impounded at the border (and were returned in 1993). Finally, many of his works were destroyed in a mysterious break-in at Penck’s Dresden studio in 1979, the same year as Immendorff’s visit. The following year, like his friend Wolf Biermann, he was stripped of his East German citizenship and emigrated first to Cologne, then to London. However the alternative network of exhibition spaces and activities that Penck helped set in place continued without him and helped to open East Germany to performance art, as I discuss in the next chapter. Ironically the works of Immendorff and Penck that led to Penck’s deportation from the socialist state had devoted themselves, in Realist fashion, to the ideals of socialism. They were, simply, not identical to those put forward by the central commi�ee. In a further irony both of

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these artists had constructed a bridge across the iron curtain in their common ba�le against the socialist-artist-ego. Building on Penck’s theory of Standart, the two had launched a new and collaborative language for Realism in German painting in 1979. It was a language too extreme for the GDR and for Immendorff, who could not sustain this cross-wall collaborative painting when he returned to Düsseldorf. Their new language of Realism marked the end of Penck’s ability to live even on the margins of his home country. Penck and Immendorff’s conceptual Realist painting coincided with the twilight of the GDR. The state would collapse less than ten years later, due in part to its own rigid inability to recognize new forms of socialism and the art dedicated to it. In this chapter I’ve discussed how German/German artists— Si�e, Tübke, Ma�heuer and Heisig in the East, and Richter, Baselitz, Schönebeck, Immendorff and Penck in the West— engaged in a dialectic of painterly defection. I would finally like to pose the question of what was achieved in this defection of painting from one set of state-dictated norms to another. Clearly many artists in both East and West were pushed into this dialectic by the unusual circumstances of divided Germany and by the Cold War culture war that developed in each state. Perhaps some were simply compelled to respond to the ideological assumptions at play in this specific historical context. Within the practice of painting, defection is a complete refusal or negation of one (sign) system in favour of another. One can say that the defection process in paintings by the artists I’ve discussed here points to their insistence upon the independence or autonomy of art over the restrictions that cultural politics o�en wants to foist upon it. It is also clear from the painting produced in the Cold War Germanys that this posture of autonomy was asserted by means of figurative painting and its legacies of Realism, and not exclusively through modernist abstraction, as American critics have maintained.64 Modernist figuration and Realist modes played a far greater role in the ‘international context’ of postwar art, and of European Cold War culture, than has been assumed.

4. PERFORMANCE WEST AND EAST The Freedom of Failure By the early 1960s West Berlin had become a ‘stage’ highly conducive to performance. A series of found photographs— Russian artist Ilya Kabakov’s catalogue contribution to the first major exhibition of the reunified Berlin, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (1990, Fig. 4.1; also discussed in the epilogue in this volume)—present East and West Berlin as an elaborate theatrical stage for the performing of the Cold War itself. Almost every major politician of the era, including Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, Nikita Khrushchev and others, was photographed there. The physical space of the city, as well as the wall itself, was in constant use as a backdrop for photographs that made global sympathies and positions within the Cold War conflict visible.1 This propagandistic use of Berlin’s physical space and of the wall-as-proscenium carried over into the culture war; at every turn West German arts funding was to result in an iconic product that ‘proved’—as did Mies’ New National Gallery, but also with countless other works—that superior art and cultural innovation could only come out of the West.2 Ulrike O�inger’s feminist film Bildnis eine Trinkerin (Ticket of No Return, 1979) similarly makes clear that performance artists were particularly a�uned to the theatrical spaces of Cold War Berlin. Her protagonist ‘Sie’ (the formal second-person pronoun), a woman who embodies the excess of Joan Rivière’s notion of feminine masquerade, comes to Berlin to simultaneously perform her femininity and drink

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Fig. 4.1 Ilya Kabakov, Zwei Erinnerungen an die Angst (Two Memories of Fear), in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (Berlin, 1990); © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

herself into a persona-loosening stupor. Throughout the film Sie appears with West Berlin’s performance demimonde of the late ‘70s: Wolf Vostell, punk rocker Nina Hagen, and Martin Kippenberger. Kabakov and O�inger grasped the negating stance of performance and its potential as a critical tool to loosen fixed notions of individual and national identity. A huge range of performance artists—fluxus performers, practitioners of the ‘Happening’ such as Allan Kaprow, feminist performance artist Carolee Schneemann, the Viennese actionists, and the conceptual artist Stanley Brouwn—met at the Galerie René Block in West Berlin, which became a capitol for performance in the early ‘60s. Many of these performers made the trip to West Berlin from Cologne in these years. The Rhineland, Cologne and Wiesbaden in particular, was the first site in the postwar period where an international scene of performance art came together, with artists from France, Switzerland and the U.S. all converging there by the early ‘60s. John Cage’s series of

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concerts in Cologne in 1960 were central to the development of performance art in postwar Europe. There, a number of artists, musicians, and poets formulated work around a notion of what they called ‘Concrete Art’. Both Cage and Fluxus engaged with this established cultural context of Concrete Art practice in the Rhineland. Concrete Art was largely a parallel development to the Cagean aesthetic of silence particular to Europe, sharing some of its characteristics, and it achieved greater cultural resonance in the Rhineland. Because the concerns of their art overlapped with those of Concrete Art, Fluxus was assured of an informed audience for their art in West Germany. This remains a core reason why Fluxus by and large remained a ‘very very European phenomenon’, as Emme� Williams has claimed.3 The engagement of performance with Concrete Art seems to have been localized in the Rhineland. When they reached West Berlin where they were o�en surrounded by students and other Le�ists, many performance artists found that their art and sometimes they themselves became more politicized. O�entimes performances—as in the case of Brouwn’s 1964 This Way Brouwn—risked failure. They strained to garner the sustained a�ention of an audience and to make its own commitments legible. The psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich had described performance in his radio address of 1965 as a kind of affirmative art or event that to his mind did nothing to contest or refuse the suffering and injustice of everyday life. Performance was then deemed to be a failure. In that West German intellectuals had already cast performance as a failure, as a medium it arguably constructed for itself a space of experimentation and freedom that recognized ‘art’—that of established mediums and galleries—could not offer. In East Germany a working-through of such Western developments in performance was delayed by more than a decade. Cage and Fluxus remained unknown there. A�er they were first shown in East Germany in 1981, a group of East German artists embraced Beuys’ art objects and performances enthusiastically; some began to integrate aspects of ‘social sculpture’ into their own work. In the wake of Erhart Monden’s performances in East Berlin a fairly sustained

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debate on performance first emerged around this time and would return as a topic of contestation shortly before the collapse of the state. Yet even by 1977, the artists’ group Clara Mosch in the cultural backwater of Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) had more inadvertently established performance as an art form supported by the state, simply because it was not understood by local cultural functionaries. With the assistance of the Stasi, the same bureaucrats later moved to end the further development of the group. Perhaps because it developed at a point where the state apparatus and art functionaries were not prepared to counter it, Clara Mosch exercised the greatest impact on East German culture in establishing a space beyond state control where artists could pursue performance as art. Dresden was another breeding ground for performance since bureaucrats and their institutions there effectively ignored work in any medium outside of painting; they therefore did not terminate the development of the Auto-Perforationist group at the Dresden academy. I consider each of these episodes of performanceoriented practice in East Germany as a series of cultural destabilizations, which led to the state’s loss of control of the public discussion and reception of ‘art’, a development that foreshadowed the state’s loss of control in other social and political spheres. Fluxus Between Cage, Concretism and Surrealism Cage had already achieved considerable notice in the United States, where his work had begun to go beyond the sphere of musical performance to affect aesthetic directions in dance and painting by 1952. Cage was drawn to Germany by the international school for new music that had been established at Darmstadt in the ‘50s. His works, such as the seminal 1952 performance at Black Mountain College in North Carolina (entitled, in hindsight, Theatre Piece #1), marked a point of convergence of music, dance and painting that might be considered an early articulation of the concerns of Concrete Art. The basic principles behind Cage’s work galvanized many others over the next decade in Europe.

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On the level of music, Cage rejected traditional notions of harmony and melody arranged by a composer, and he pointed to ambient or banal sounds as equally important to those created on the stage. The bodily presence of the performers was recognized only insofar as the body is engaged in the physical movement of dance, which becomes an integral component of the multifocused and unrelated activities of the piece. However, the physical body that is connected to the making or framing of sound was made almost invisible. Cage’s use of aleatory technique would be his means to replace traditional compositional methods and thereby lessen the participation of the composer within physical production of the art. These chance methods, however, were themselves consciously imposed by the composer. The activities contained in the performance seemed completely self-referential and lacked any narrative form or drive. For Cage the visual component of the musical performance was as important as aural experience for both the composer and the listener. Instead of reference or intentionality, Cage’s notion of art opened to the primacy of the immediate, present moment in the artwork and the liberatory possibilities it might enable. His composition 4”33’ presents this conception of silence most directly. The pianist sits at the piano and carefully marks the designated duration of time on his watch, and exits the stage. Cage loosened the positions of both the composer and listener: the former in using aleatory techniques, and the la�er in being free to focus, listen, see, taste, or smell anything—though Cage privileges the senses of vision and hearing—he or she desires within the experience of art, and even to participate in its creation. These strategies would further allow absolute freedom from earlier composition as well as a completely self-determined aesthetic experience. In West Germany artists like Nam June Paik, Vostell, and Beuys continued to rework Cage’s performance model in invoking the body and its corporeal experiences in performance practice. They actively concerned themselves with the issue of memory that had been foregrounded as a German cultural priority in the postwar world; their performances would

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construct an experience of art that went beyond optical experience in its struggle to revive memory. For the Cage/Cunningham/Tudor ‘Balle�abend’, performed in Cologne at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Gymnasium on October 5, 1960,4 Cage and Tudor as usual appeared in tails, and the dancers Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown in costumes designed by Rauschenberg. The next day Cage performed one of his first properly concrete music compositions, Cartridge Music with Solo for Voice 2, at the Bauermeister studio in Cologne. Cartridge Music used phonographic recording equipment to amplify chance sound and points of contact with the equipment. Nam June Paik’s piece, Etude for Piano, which concluded the evening, strongly challenged elements of Cage’s works. Paik began by playing one measure from a Chopin piece, le� the piano in order to file a piece of paper in a binder, returned to it and continued with another section of the Chopin. He again abruptly quit the piano, making his way into the audience with a pair of scissors and a bo�le of shampoo. Although it is not clear in what order these events occurred, Paik approached Cage and poured shampoo on his head; he then cut portions of Cage’s white shirt away with the scissors, and finished by cu�ing off his tie. He also shampooed Tudor. Paik then played several more pieces on the piano (traditional compositions by Chopin and Stravinsky), at times banging his head against the keys, or breaking off to ‘jump on a piano and trampel mit finesse and lie down and scream for a while…then stand up and write on the blackboard “Are you a gentlemen (sic)?”’5 The piece shook Cage. Though he appears smiling in photographs a�er the performance, he spoke of this event as a ‘terrible memory’: ‘Paik suddenly came upon me and cut my tie off and tore my clothing as if he wanted to rip it from my body. An open window was directly behind him, we were on the sixth floor, and everyone suddenly had the impression, that he would throw himself out the window…’6 Others be�er acquainted with Paik’s aggressively physical performances were not as shocked, since he had in earlier performances screamed and initiated violent incidents with his own body. Commenting on this encounter with Cage in later interviews, Paik stated: ‘I thought,

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it’s hypocrisy, for him to break with all laws of music and of concerts and then appear in tails. In case he did it, I would cut them off…’7 He elaborated: Zen-masters pursue, or make, an art that is not beautiful, but a kind of life. A Zen-master practices and contemplates. From morning to night, so he can always have this kind of purity and harmony or catharsis. And when I have this kind of life-practice in me, then perhaps one does not need to compose. And I asked Cage why he composes. He can’t answer it, I asked him several times. He said, because Schoenberg was my teacher and I had promised him I would. And he [Cage] understood, that it isn’t always beautiful, or it’s nonsense, or not necessary. I said, that doesn’t speak to the concept of Zen-Buddhism but rather to French Existentialism…I told him, when you don’t differentiate art from nature then you don’t have to compose. Then one only needs a certain kind of practice, so that one can elevate this nature to art by oneself.8 Paik’s comments are significant for a number of reasons. He points to the colonizing aspects of Cage’s appropriation of certain Zen tenets and its basic paradox. Cage’s radical inclusiveness of any and all sound into music elevated banality to an autonomous art, and in so doing he created a concept of ‘absolute’ sound and of a universal aesthetic experience available for all listeners and viewers of that music. Then all listeners and viewers have ‘ears…in connection with a mind that has nothing to do, that mind is free to enter into the act of listening, hearing each sound just as it is’ (since, following Cage, there is nothing but music to listen to). Paik rea�aches the harmonious and disembodied ear/mind of the Cagean aesthetic to the accumulated cultural and social experience of the physical body of each viewer/listener of art. Paik understood his own physical exertions, the quasi-Expressionist vocal and physical spasms of his body within his performances, as exercises inherent to making art, labours necessary to achieve the Zen-like harmony and pure presence. This is what Cage’s absolute sound, rescued

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from the everyday, offered. It is not coincidental that Paik’s Etude for Piano staged a physical a�ack on Cage. One might argue that in this a�ack Paik reasserted his Asian past—he was born in Seoul, Korea and studied culture and philosophy at the University of Tokyo—as well as his experiences with the culture and theology of Buddhism as lived experience and as memories that played a role in his own definitions of music, and in his critical negotiation of Cage’s ideas, which deeply impressed him. The physicality of Paik’s performances, his constant reminders to the audience of the materiality of his own body and its connection with the production of sounds, and to a particular history of cultural and social experience, marks a decisive departure from Cage’s principles. In a set of notes regarding his performance Hommage à John Cage at the Bauermeister studio in June, 1960, Paik writes, ‘The second movement is a warning. About the economic miracle of the Germans, where diligence and stupidity are rolled into one’.9 While Paik uses a Cagean prepared piano in this piece, it also has to do with Paik’s direct concern with contemporary social events, an issue foreign to Cagean aleatory technique. Paik’s performance illustrates that well before Maciunas’ establishment of Fluxus in Germany, performance in the Rhineland departed from Cage’s model of absolute and nonreferential sound, and raised the role of bodily experience and memory as points of connection to the climate of cultural reconstruction. Paik is perhaps the first artist to critically negotiate the field of performance as it had been established by Cage and to expand it, as part of its embrace of everyday life, to include aspects of materiality, the body and material objects.10 Other musicians and poets were also developing ‘Concretist’ tendencies in Europe at this time.11 Wilfried Dörstel has identified the following common characteristics of the disparate visual practices that comprised the concerns of European Concrete Art by 1964: the use of completely nonreferential and self-reflexive visual components or elements; the rejection of the subjective gesture of the artist within the physical production of art in favour of mechanical and industrial processes, and

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therefore a break with abstract expressionistic facture and tachist tendencies; a subsequent ‘freeing’ of the viewer; the work’s meaning existing in its idea or in its sense as a model; the insistence on a ‘direct realism’ through the appropriation of aspects of concrete and banal everyday reality; and lastly, the use of aleatory processes as possible means of construction.12 Maciunas arrived in Germany in 1962 and appears to have wanted to position the newly formulated group of ‘Fluxus’ into the broad and interdisciplinary frame of Concretist practice. He first pronounced on Fluxus there in his essay, read in German by C. Caspari as a lecture, ‘Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art’, as part of the concert Après John Cage at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in June, 1962. Despite the introduction of the term ‘neo-dada’ in the title of this talk, Maciunas hardly discusses it; the essay announces that this new art engages with Concretism.13 Performance first became central to Fluxus activity as Maciunas defined it in this talk in Wuppertal. In the States, he had envisioned Fluxus as a series of publishing projects.14 The Wuppertal talk explicitly linked many elements that had already been explored by European Concretism in its various guises. In this way Maciunas established Fluxus in the shadow of Concrete Art, which was already established in Germany, and therefore assured that this group would be welcomed to perform at venues like the Bauermeister studio where aspects of Concrete Art had already been exhibited and staged. A number of Fluxus concerts in Germany followed. These early Fluxus performances are characterized by single concrete events of an ‘impersonal readymade sort’, like George Brecht’s Exit, which, as Maciunas outlined, ‘does not demand that any one of us perform it, but it happens every day without a special “presentation.” Likewise all of our festivals would be eliminated (that is the necessity of our participation) if they were totally ready made (like Brecht’s Exit)’.15 Owen Smith defines the event as the smallest unit of early Fluxus performance; the event could be, for example, the simple act of exiting a room, or of counting in unison in different ways.16 Henry Flynt has argued that George Brecht’s 1959 show, ‘Toward Events’, at the Reuben

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Gallery in New York, is ‘post-Cagean’, and central to the further development of Fluxus. By taking up the event structure from Brecht and presenting many ‘event’ type activities on stage simultaneously, Fluxus performances recalled Cage’s earlier conception of simultaneous and unfocused actions. Maciunas refined the scope and nature of the performative activity of Fluxus in a series of texts. These writings document a particular direction of early Fluxus performance that is corroborated in practice in the first European Fluxus festivals. In all of these texts Maciunas agitates for the nonprofessionalism of the producers of art, and therefore a levelling of the roles of artist and audience. He condemns modernist formalist art as ‘a useless piece of merchandise whose only purpose is to be bought to provide the artist with an income’.17 Fluxus is instead ‘in the spirit of the collective’, anti-individualistic, aiming at the elimination of an institutionalized market for bourgeois art, which Maciunas condemns as the ‘world of Europanism’ (sic). Part of this idea of the evaporation of art is to be realized in an accompanying expansion of the role of art in society, where art ‘must be unlimited, obtainable by all and produced by all’. The content of this universally produced art must also change, becoming ‘substitute art-amusement’. It must be simple and ‘concerned with insignificances’ like vaudeville.18 Therefore, no single producer of art can claim to be significant, and artists ‘demonstrate [their] own disposability’ in a dismantling of individual subjective expression. Maciunas also demands that artists shi� their a�ention to the ‘socially constructive goals’ of the applied or graphic arts, since these areas of art activity ‘offer the artist be�er career opportunities’.19 What the ‘revolutionary tide’ of Fluxus was meant to bring is not clear. Maciunas’ conception of ‘social goals’ seems to involve refiguring art activity as a means to jump-start local job markets, and he rejects the isolated elitism of the art market. Ironically the venues where Fluxus performed in these years— museums, galleries, and concert halls—were certainly the traditional sites of high culture that continued to a�ract the ‘elite’ that was already an audience there. His Wuppertal essay

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points toward an altered perception of individual consciousness desired by concrete ‘neo-dada’: a realization, on the part of both producers and consumers of art, of the inherent ‘beauty’ of incidents of ‘nature’ or of ‘true reality’, such as rainfall, a sneeze, or the flight of a bu�erfly.20 By defining the anti-art nature of Concretism, Maciunas at first seems to revive the self-pronounced life-affirming tenor of Cage’s performances. When he cites the Soviet Constructivist tradition as an antecedent to Fluxus activity and announces the shi� of all Fluxus activity toward applied or industrial arts like engineering and design, he departs from his earlier formulations of Fluxus as Concrete Art. Fluxus performance did not share the technological optimism of the Constructivists; if anything, it embraced ‘low’ technology by utilizing only traditional musical instruments (pianos, violins), water buckets, ladders, toys, light bulbs, and plastic throwaways, and o�en focused not on industrial process of construction, but on the destruction of these materials in performance. As Maciunas pointed out, it is the act of kicking the piano, the physical activity of destroying it, that results in concrete sound. Maciunas resuscitated aspects of the European avantgarde of the early twentieth century in titling his short pieces ‘manifestos’, in reviving an orthodox Marxist language of classbased opposition to bourgeois art as ‘ruling class culture’, and in linking notions of anti-individualism to older definitions of collectivity for Fluxus. Even if almost all other Fluxists immediately rejected this move toward an overt politics, Maciunas persisted in portraying Fluxus as the descendant of the historical avant-garde. Not everyone in Germany was convinced by Maciunas’ assertion. Several years before his analysis of the psychic traumas of the German nation was published (The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behaviour, 1967), Alexander Mitscherlich delivered his pronouncement on recent developments in art in a 1965 radio/lecture, ‘Are Happenings dangerous? Thoughts on the unconquered present in art’.21 In his address, a review of the Jürgen Becker/ Vostell anthology Happenings Fluxus Pop Art Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation (Rowohlt, 1965), Mitscherlich critiqued

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the new cultural revival of performance in postwar Germany. He set the tone of discourse around performance in West Germany. Citing both Beuys (particularly his 1964 concert in Aachen and his use of a Cagean prepared piano) and Vostell, Mitscherlich condemns the work of this ‘new realism’ as revisiting many previous artistic forms of realism ‘with a noticeable lack of [artistic] talent’. Mitscherlich particularly points to a statement by Beuys: These, what you might consider primitive mediums, would be until now in the position to activate centres within many individuals who remain fairly unmoved by the most grisly representations of human suffering, illness, war, concentration camps, etc. For many, the causal is juxtaposed with the acausal—nonsense. A rationality connected with reality finally includes both aspects of thought.22 The acausal meaning that Beuys’ ‘nonsense’ performance presumably points to, Mitscherlich continues, is meant to transcend the banal and propel the viewer into a state of wonder. Mitscherlich conceives of wonder in terms of what Walter Benjamin called ‘profane illumination’, that is, the moment when the shabbiness of life conditions under capitalism is revealed to the individual. Mitscherlich claims that what actually transpired in Beuys’ performance is only the invocation of chance, since the state of wonder can no longer be activated. The promise of activation of the viewer by the artists in Becker’s anthology isn’t fulfilled; what a difference, Mitscherlich goes on, from the work of the Surrealists and their enormous ambition to alter human consciousness by connecting the realms of art and daily life. Mitscherlich opines that Thomas Schmit’s performance of Zyklus für Wasserreimer [oder Flaschen] (1963) manages only to replicate the banal activities which comprise many individuals’ employment. Christo’s street installation refers to the Parisian barricades of the revolution, but it is not clear what it protests in 1963, arranged as it is in a small Parisian side street. Even the

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‘guilty’, Mitscherlich continues, are no longer easily identified in mass-culture society, since they have been dissolved into the apparatus of serialized mass production. For Mitscherlich the dictum of European Concrete Art and of much contemporary performance art—the refusal of determined and isolated roles for a passive viewer and an active performer, and the consequent denial of the customary distance between art and its public—is merely false consciousness. Due to this art’s retreat into the acausal and its removal of any tension between art and lived reality, Mitscherlich claims it no longer protests injustice and murder but instead plays with fantasies of the same, since ‘the goal is the absence of all tension, the tension-free society of a 1,000-year Reich’. The coziness that Pop Art feigns with the masses is equally false, for, as Mitscherlich maintains, …Shabbiness becomes accessible as cult material for everyman. And this is to be emphasized: cult [material], and not the means of art. Pop Art becomes the cult of the poor, one which deceives about its distance, that is, deceives them about the hope that times could get be�er, to encounter and to enter the “never-been-there.” A false fraternization occurs between art and the public in that by a slight of hand it is falsified into one of cult and public, and it conducts a total dumbing amusement.23 This art shrinks from the act of ‘healing’ the differentiation of roles in a society ruled by anonymous products and by the conformity of consumers. Mitscherlich notes that the unrepeatable nudes of the Third Reich, generated as they were from fascist ideology, most emphatically represent the self-delusion, individual powerlessness, and isolation of that epoch. These images function as representations of the relation between the masses and the Führer. Mitscherlich’s stinging assessment of Pop and the new performance-centred art in Germany is based on what he sees as two shortcomings: first, it cannot sustain the critical tensions toward the everyday which were successfully staged

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by the Surrealists; and second, the lapse of this art into deluded and uncritical ‘fantasy’ repeats the impotent delusions of art produced under Nazism. Mitscherlich’s condemnation finally rests on the lapses of memory this new art reveals. His demand for critical cultural engagement invokes the recent past and the mass manipulations of fascism. His insistence on an autonomous art that achieves a kind of Brechtian and critical distance to lived reality and that retains the lessons of the totalitarian reign of terror within the cultural sphere has a distinctly modernist ring. Mitscherlich’s disappointed complaints about Vostell, Beuys, and Fluxus grow from his conviction that these artists no longer evidence the kind of ‘unbearable visual obsessiveness’ that drove the Surrealist Max Ernst to develop fro�age in the series Natural History, a technique he based on a memory of the pa�erns of artificial mahogany wood in his room as a child. Mitscherlich points out that Ernst classified his involuntary memories of unconscious experiences (‘eine Passage durch Stationen unbewussten Erlebens’) as building blocks of his style. The cultural power of surrealist art therefore lies in its fundamental revision of the process of human perception. Yet Mitscherlich cannot close the door on developments in recent art: ‘It may be’, he concludes in his radio lecture, ‘that the playing field of the modern masses is so vast and is so thoroughly saturated with technical products that nothing more than traps are to be hunted out…no one knows, if that which disappoints us today in its banality, in its childish means of provocation, in the poverty of its techniques, might still not become the breeding ground of great talents’.24 Maciunas a�empted to reconcile the impossible: the avantgarde’s class-based opposition, or its le�ist politics, with Cagean aesthetics, which rejected the avant-garde tendency toward negation in favour of universally individualistic, meditative, immaterial, and almost theological moments of harmony and presence already existing within daily life. Cage believed his performances and music would simply affirm this harmony. Mitscherlich was not alone in objecting to the complacent stance of the new art as a too-quick celebration of abundance

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and satiation within the new commodity culture which seemed to occur without a thought to the destruction upon which it was rebuilding itself. Adorno posed the question, ‘Should we consider it pathological to burden oneself with the past, while the healthy and realistic person is absorbed in the present and its practical concerns?’25 Wolf Vostell also performed within the framework of Fluxus in Europe and the United States, his notion of dé-collage went beyond the concerns of Fluxus. Maciunas and the American contingent of Fluxus’ enthusiasm for banality and consumer culture was alien to Vostell and to other Europeans like Beuys and to the artist-poet Diter Rot. For them, the emphasis on the materiality of the body, of place, and of the objects of daily life in the ‘concrete realism’ of Fluxus finally had to be connected with the ruins of the postwar landscape and the material evidence of destruction within the recent past. Vostell’s allegorizing performances reworked the fragment, the form of collage, and other ruins into dé-collage. Vostell based this critique in part on re-establishing a sense of estrangement with technology and its affects in the postwar city space, while pointing to technology’s capacity for almost unlimited destruction. Vostell’s major dé-collage performances of this period, Tour de Vanves. Theatre is in the Street (Paris, 1958), Cityrama (Cologne, 1961), Salon de Mayo (Barcelona, 1962), PC-Petit Ceinture (Paris, 1962), 9-Nein-dé-collagen (9-No-dé-collages, Wuppertal, 1963), In Ulm, um Ulm und um Ulm herum (In Ulm, around Ulm, Surrounding Ulm, Ulm, 1964), and Phänomene/Berlin 100 Ereignisse (Phenomena/ Berlin 100 Events, Berlin, 1965), were carried out while he also performed in Fluxus concerts. Orchestrated around the materials and objects found in the city streets, Vostell’s first dé-collage events of the 1950s and early ‘60s took the form of déaffiches and assemblages consisting of scrap paper bundles or other mostly unworked debris; these works are discussed in Chapter 2. Challenging the admiration of new technologies revealed in postwar reconstruction, dé-collage encourages a sense of the ‘falling height’ of a given technology, or a sense of

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its deep capacity for catastrophe and trauma. It recovers the deep ambivalence toward technology which marks German twentieth-century thought.26 The Galerie René Block Like other Fluxus-related artists, Vostell found a home for his performances at the West Berlin Galerie René Block. The gallery has been described as an oasis for progressive art in the otherwise artistically conservative city. As Block has himself stated, Fluxus concerts there arrived long a�er their first successes in Wiesbaden and Düsseldorf in 1962-3.27 Where the Rhineland— Wuppertal, Cologne, Düsseldorf and Wiesbaden—had been the locus for Fluxus’ negotiation with Cage and Concrete Art, the Galerie René Block made possible the convergence of several other international directions of performance. There Fluxus came in contact with Stanley Brouwn’s strategies of conceptual performance, Kaprow’s post-Happening ‘activity’, feminist body art as forged by Carolee Schneemann, and the Beuysian action. I would argue that many of these artists came to sharpen and refine their own approaches to performance in the atmosphere of René Block’s gallery. Even those who performed under the umbrella of Fluxus continued to refine their own performance strategies in West Berlin. West Berlin was furthermore a point of departure for the few Fluxus performances that took place in the Soviet Bloc, in Prague, beginning in 1966, and led by the Czech artist Milan Knizak; no Fluxus performances took place in East Germany. Beuys proved to be the most influential figure in East Germany, due not only to his art but also to his repeated and unsuccessful a�empts to travel to the GDR a�er his short visit for an exhibition of his work in East Berlin at the West German Ständige Vertretung in October of 1981. As this chapter will make clear, Beuys faced a far more rocky reception in West Berlin, where he had staged some of his most infamous performances of the 1960s at Block’s gallery. It has been observed that on the stage of the public spaces of West Berlin much performance took on a more politicized tone. This was particularly the case with Brouwn when he le� the rarefied confines of Block’s exhibition space in the Frobenstrasse and ventured into public space. There performance o�en

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encountered the tensions inherent in West Berlin’s public sphere, most specifically, the le�ist-APOs’ (extra-parliamentary oppositional organizations, such as the Student Movement, etc.) extraordinary suspicion and distrust of a bourgeois artworld, which led them to reject contemporary art entirely (in a parallel with Maciunas’ sentiments). According to their Maoist or orthodox Marxist beliefs, the West Berlin student/le�ists condemned Beuys et.al. as not sufficiently radicalized at the same time these le�ist orthodoxies were being contested in East Berlin. West-Berlin students’ rejection of high art, which ironically paralleled the goals of many these performances, brought Beuys’ 1969 performance to an end. In spite of West Berlin student le�ists’ claim to ownership of the most emphatic rejection of bourgeois art, they neither recognized nor appreciated how Beuys and Fluxus challenged their own conservative preconceptions about engaged art. Conceptual Performance, ‘Fluxus Feminus’, and the Wall as ‘Activity’ The performance arm of Block’s gallery opened with Brouwn’s first performance of This Way Brouwn (October 27, 1964; reprised in 1969 and 1970). On invitations Block described this piece as an ‘action and demonstration’ of the participatory drawings that Brouwn had earlier produced. To generate his drawings Brouwn would walk in a city and ask random passers-by for directions to a particular place by means of a drawing. For his ‘demonstration’ Brouwn received directions from visitors to the Block gallery via walkie-talkie, in an effort to create an ‘imaginary drawing through the city streets’.28 Things went rather less efficiently than Brouwn had planned, and by the time he reached his destination and returned to the gallery, the impatient audience had already le�. Brouwn’s mixture of language and data gathering initiated a conceptual direction of performance, also fuelled by his desire for anonymity as a generator of art. How could a performance mean the absence of the artist himself? Clearly even the cognoscenti of West Berlin were not prepared for this notion of performance, which took

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some years for both the public and artists to process (see my discussion of K.P. Brehmer’s collaboration with Brouwn in Chapter 2). The immediate interaction between various directions of performance in West Berlin is perhaps most apparent in Vostell’s early works. Vostell began to stage ‘Happenings’ at the Block Gallery in 1965, including Phenomena and Berlin 100 Events. The term linked Vostell to Kaprow and paid homage to Kaprow’s distinct development of performance. Vostell had met and worked with Allan Kaprow in New York: in April of 1964, Vostell and Kaprow had presented a joint ‘action lecture’ on the subject of ‘The Art of the Happening’, at the Cricket Theatre in New York.29 Therefore well before Kaprow set foot in Berlin, his Happening form was already known there. Fluxus appeared frequently at the Block Gallery or in venues arranged by Block until the gallery closed in 1979. Fluxus had its debut at the Block Gallery in West Berlin in May of 1965, with a pieces by Paik and Charlo�e Moorman, followed a week later by Tomas Schmit.30 Other Fluxus concerts followed in the next decade, the grandest of which included the Festum Fluxorum in the key year of 1970 (with Robert Filiou, Al Hansen, Carolee Schneemann and Emme� Williams, among others) and the Fluxus-Harpsichord Concert at the Akademie der Künste of 1976. Like Brouwn and Vostell before them, Paik and Moorman immediately took Fluxus-based performance out to the streets in West Berlin in 1965, in their Robot Opera, which had to be relocated because military police—participants in many of the Block Gallery performances—halted the first version of it.31 New alliances and collaborations within Fluxus were initiated there; the ones between Schmit, Ludwig Gosewitz and Gerhard Rühm have been noted but had li�le resonance outside of Berlin. Notably Maciunas did not travel to West Berlin until 1976, when he helped install the Flux-Labyrinth for another show Block coordinated, Soho Downtown Manha�an. Perhaps Maciunas’ absence in West Berlin had to do with maintaining his vision of a ‘pure’ Fluxus? As I’ve recounted, Paik had early on dispelled the notion that Fluxus in Germany related exclusively to Maciunas’ announced

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definitions, or that it was a carefully choreographed parallel to Concrete Art. Carolee Schneemann’s important contribution to the 1970 Festum Fluxorum, Schlaget Auf, likewise critiqued the assumptions that underpinned Maciunas’ definitions of avantgarde performance. She focused more closely on how gender functioned within post-Cagean performance. Schneemann’s 1970 performance set an important precedent for feminist art in West Berlin, which was almost unknown at that point. With the exception of Renate Weh in 1969, the few female performers who were featured in Block’s program to that point had male partners, such as Charlo�e Moorman or Alison Knowles.32 As Kathy O’Dell has convincingly argued, Maciunas wanted to proscribe a particular relation between body and text in and for Fluxus; women who performed within it challenged this relation most forcefully. O’Dell points out that Maciunas repeatedly denounced and excommunicated women in Fluxus like Moorman, Schneemann, or Kate Millet (although he also excommunicated a number of men including Vostell and Beuys). He and other male Fluxus members seemed to police the forms of ‘Fluxus Feminus’ most stringently.33 Photographs of Schneemann performing in Addi Køpke’s Music while you work at the Festum Fluxorum show her seated at the edge of the stage, alternatively watching the action on the stage around her or the audience in front of her.34 Her active gaze and her position at rest distinguished her from the absorption in tasks and events of the other performers around her. She continued this stance of distance and evaluation when she took the stage alone. It is not clear whether the Køpke piece was formed before or a�er her contribution. When Schneemann took the stage for Schlaget Auf, she stationed two male assistants on it: one a scholar of poetry to translate into German the speech she delivered, and the other the performer Gosewitz, who she instructed to repeatedly play parts of a recording of Bach’s cantata #53, Schlage doch gewünschte Stunde, but also to just drop the needle on the record. She has recounted that she knew the Bach piece well from the U.S.35 Schneemann has published a series of photographs documenting the performance captioned with English and

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German excerpts from her speech onstage: only the German appears in old medieval script in the published version, but the language itself is modern and not in the medieval German as she had requested. Describing her performance as making use of her body to demonstrate ‘…some recent tendencies of the inter-relatedness between material and movement’, Schneemann disrobed and catalogued the ‘ingredients’ that she asked participants to apply to her nude body: foam rubber tubing, grease paint, various tortes and cakes. As participants tied the tubing around her she observed, ‘Increasing density of (the) material-organic, (of) rhythmic forms…’ Schneemann then threw herself off the chair to the words ‘a muscular impulse, to bring the energy of falling into movement’, (the published translation is incorrect). She comments on elements that add to ‘…change the possibilities of movement’. She then requested the audience to pelt her with the pastries and tortes as she ran. The performance ended with the nonsense phrase, ‘schlaget gestalten’ (roughly meaning ‘chimes (verb) arranged’). Positioned as it is within the context of a Fluxus concert, Schneemann’s performance is a counterpoint to Maciunas’ notion of Fluxus performance and to the core concepts of Concrete Art. In the midst of this experimental music forum Schneemann played a recording of traditional music, and furthermore, focused the performance on her ongoing concern with the issue of gender as it impacted traditional mediums such as painting or sculpture. I would argue that in this performance Schneemann engaged less with painting and most directly with sculptural form and with gestalt theory, as her earlier performances did.36 The term ‘gestalt’, as it is used in English discussions relating to gestalt theory, is a probable source for the nonsense phrase in German with which she concluded the performance. Schneemann’s performance works against a Fluxus-type exploration of the material-based sources of sound. In appropriating Bach and Bach’s evocative title (‘chime, desired hour’), the performance makes reference to sound. Nothing in her performance concentrates on the actual production of sound, since the recording only reproduced it. Aleatory technique, a cornerstone for Cage and Fluxus, is also of no interest to her;

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Schneemann outlines the entire performance with her spoken text, which also, more in the manner of the Happening form, circumscribes any audience participation. Neither did she lessen her own role in the performance, since only she and not many others had the ‘istory’ of deploying her nude body in the manner that she did in performance, nor could other women easily replicate her body and its actions on stage.37 Like Beuys she did not participate in the usual strategies and goals of postCage performance or of Concrete Art. Schneemann’s performance focused on her own body as a gestalt to be worked therapeutically by the audience. She utilizes language directly and self-reflexively in her self-focused ‘istory lecture’ (Schneemann’s alternative discourse to art history) concerning the manipulation of elements across her own body and the movements she initiated with her body. Schneemann took on the voice of the art history lecturer (which in 1970 was usually male) in this speech to comment on her own body, but otherwise not she but her male assistant gave voice to her words for the audience. As her gaffes in German a�est—at some points she spoke a kind of Ger-lish (German/English) to the German audience— she lost control of language in a ‘semiotic havoc’ that differed from what has previously been described.38 In this performance Schneemann wanted to connect with the main tenet of gestalt therapy, which strove for the perceiving and ‘feeling’ of an enlightening holistic experience of physical reality. As is most psychotherapy, this holistic perception was meant to be therapeutic,. In her account of the West Berlin performance Schneemann announces that she wanted to ‘relieve[d] the containment’ and anxiety that she had experienced in everyday life in Berlin, and expand visually the communal pleasures of what she understood as the oral fixation of the Germans.39 As O’Dell has noted, Schneemann is not a simple feminist essentialist who sees gender difference concentrated biologically in the female body. Nevertheless Schneemann centred a visual, tactile and therapeutic experience of her own gendered body for participants in Schlaget Auf. Most participants on the stage with her in the final moments were men, including Viennese Actionist O�o Mühl, who actively engaged with her passive body in a

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tactile manner (in the application of body paint and in throwing sweets at her). Schneemann controlled and determined this dynamic, thereby seizing female authority over performance per se. This was an important step forward for feminist art in Germany; however, the therapy Schneemann staged in West Berlin otherwise reinforced conventional heterosexual norms that support patriarchy. Allan Kaprow arrived in Berlin this same year, just as he was developing his work away from the Happening form. Kaprow’s Happenings of the ‘60s mostly presented carefully scripted moments of ‘banal’ activity—like bouncing a ball or playing a recorder—within a larger stage-like se�ing which had distinct participants and audience members. While Kaprow required that these roles be rotated in the Happening, and that the audience would become participants and vica versa, the score or script determined when and how. The Happening is then a form of theatre, but one that does not present narrative but ‘people being people’, in introducing banal activities as performance. O�en Kaprow staged the Happening in spaces with an audience that produced large-scale public spectacles, like Yard (1961) or Calling (1965). In contrast to these Happenings, Kaprow titled his 1970 work for the Block Gallery an ‘activity’, and Block’s invitation asked viewers to call the gallery ahead for the location, time and duration of this activity on November 11, 1970. Some six years later Block published photographs and the score to this activity in the catalogue Sweet Wall/Testimonials. The event was both photographed and filmed.40 The score for it reads: -Berlin -empty lot -near the Wall -cementing blocks with bread and jam -toppling wall -removing material -empty lot41

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Fig. 4.2 Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall, 1970; © 2008 Research Library, The Ge�y Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (980063)

From the photographs one can gather that the audience and participants were a very small group of perhaps five people on a rainy day, that included Kaprow, Higgins, Block, an unidentified woman, and the painter K.H. Hödicke. The site for the activity was a vacant lot next to a partially ruined building, perhaps a former factory, down the street from the actual Berlin Wall. Other participants included three members of the West Berlin police, who at one point stopped the activity and questioned Block and the others; a police presence was considered fairly normal in areas around the Berlin wall. (Fig. 4.2) The participants took various roles in lining up the cement blocks, topping them off with bread and jam, and then placing a new layer on top of them, until six layers had been completed. Finally the ‘wall’ was toppled, and all the materials collected and removed. Kaprow experimented here with aspects of performance that departed from the Happening: individuals were not scripted for their activity in the project but rather seemed to chose and

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coordinate their various responsibilities from a schematic score. But Sweet Wall still adhered to the more spectacle-oriented sites of the Happening; it demonstrated the highly sensitive and militarized physical space of Cold War division in including the police presence as part of the performance. The construction of a wall is not a banal, everyday activity, which is otherwise a requirement for Kaprow’s ‘activity’. As Kaprow would develop it, the ‘activity’ or ‘self-performance’ would rely solely on banal intersubjective actions taking place within a small group or couples of participants (I discuss a televised Kaprow activity in Chapter 5).42 Sweet Wall took place in a non-art context, an empty lot, and explored a particular, though contrived, social transaction.43 These aspects went beyond the Happening form. Sweet Wall examined a ‘natural framework’ for the materials that are being manipulated in the performance, and made reference to the actual Wall, constructed of Soviet concrete. This was another departure from the Happening. However Sweet Wall focused on a collective task that leaves li�le room for what Kaprow would develop as the focus of his performance ‘activity’ over the coming years: individual ‘self-reflection and self-absorption’.44 In Sweet Wall Kaprow examined the collectivized labour process contained in both state socialist and capitalist models, and focused less on the individual’s psychic dynamics within that process. In completing the entire cycle of construction and destruction of a wall in close proximity to the Berlin Wall, Kaprow reminded the participants, and any later viewers, of the nonsensical, constructed aspect of Cold War divisions, and of the fact that the Wall could easily be dismantled—which it was. Beuys and the Freedom of Failure (I a�empt to set (make) you free, 1969) Beuys determined that he would stage his social-sculpture-asperformance, Ich versuche dich freizulassen (machen) (I a�empt to set (make) you free), before a West Berlin student audience in 1969. His first overtly Fluxus-style concert took place at the Akademie der Künste, and was performed with Henning Christiansen. The performance was to open Blockade, a year-long

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series of installations at René Block’s space in the Schaperstrasse in late February, 1969. There is li�le to discuss about what transpired in the actual performance itself, as it was halted a�er only ten minutes.45 As is clear from photographs, Christiansen and Beuys refused to yield the stage and a�empted to continue. The reception of I a�empt to set (make) you free and its failure in West Berlin repeated some of the inadvertent scheduling problems that had plagued the equally disastrous Aachen Fluxus performance of 1964 (discussed in Chapter 5): on the same day, February 27, Richard Nixon, president of the U.S. and symbolic representative of the Vietnam War, arrived for a state visit to West Berlin. The police had contained hundreds if not thousands of student protesters to university campuses that day, and by the evening, there were conspiratorial suggestions circulated among the students that the Beuys/Christiansen performance served as a cover for Nixon’s visit. The need for an alternative student political organ such as the SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund, or Socialist German Student Association) or the Düsseldorf DSP (Deutsche Studenten Partei, discussed below) had gained urgency in West Germany and particularly in West Berlin a�er the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by West Berlin police in June, 1967. The West German government’s growing repression of the oppositional student movement, in addition to ‘the acute threat posed by an idea-less, materialistically oriented politics and the stagnation connected with it’, further radicalized student le�ists there.46 In a parallel to Mitscherlich’s negative views on performance, West Berlin student leader Peter Schneider had already established his and by extension the SDS’s dismissive position toward Fluxus in a number of essays. Beuys’ performance also staged a confrontation between his distinctive vision of a politicized Fluxus with the conservative faculty at the Hochschule der Künste, and with the West Berlin student movement’s Marxist orthodoxy, in ma�ers of art. As Schneede has described it, the disruption of Beuys’ and Christiansen’s Fluxus performance stemmed from the students’ rejection of the notion of liberation or ‘freedom’ that Beuys’ particular variation on Fluxus performance put forward, one that differed

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substantially from their own. Generally Beuys did not adhere to Maciunas’ ideas about Fluxus either. However one can conclude that the students did not grasp the complexity of Beuys’ notion of performance or of his variation on Fluxus. The reception of I a�empt to set (make) you free precipitated a turning point in Beuys’ oeuvre, leading him to engage more openly in activist politics as an aspect of his art a�er 1969. The general program of I a�empt to set (make) you free can be reconstructed using Schneede’s account of the chaos in West Berlin and the reconstructed performance as it was re-presented a month later in Mönchengladbach under the new title …oder sollen wire s verändern? (…or should we change it?). A grand piano with a wooden crate as a seat, a metal music stand, a record player, and two microphones, were placed on the stage. A flyer, distributed in the lobby and which has since been credited to the head of art education at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste, Johannes Gecelli, dismissed any artistic or other significance for the performance. A copy of the flyer was a�ached to the side of the piano on stage. As was always the case with Beuys’ performances, he delineated the performance space personally beforehand, in this case, by sweeping the floor. It is estimated that 700 already-incensed students from the Hochschule der Künste had amassed to see the performance that evening at the Akademie. This performance made use of a number of Beuys’ and Christiansen’s earlier pieces, most of which were recorded on tape and were to be played back while Beuys played the piano and Christiansen played an out-of-tune green-painted violin: only the taped piece ‘Ja Ja Ja Ja Ja Nee Nee Nee Nee Nee’, recorded in 1968 (featuring Beuys intoning these words) was played before the performance ended. Beuys also made use of what he referred to as the ‘Sauerkraut score’ a�er playing the piano: he distributed clumps of Sauerkraut on the piano’s music stand and also on the metal one that Christiansen used. By the time this took place members of the audience had begun to fill the stage and to vandalize objects they found there, several pianos, a film screen, and the stage curtain. Finally a sculpture student turned a fire hose on what remained of the audience. As photographs indicate, Beuys a�empted to perform his piece ‘ö-ö’,

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a gu�ural, bleating sound that he had used in his performances The Chief (1964) and in his controversial participation at the 1967 Düsseldorf Academy matriculation ceremony, titled ö ö Programm. Using the microphones Christiansen also continued to play his violin until neither could be heard or seen. Beuys’ shi�ing relation to Fluxus has not been sufficiently explored in the literature.47 It has been argued that Beuys launched his career in performance under the umbrella of Fluxus and continued to make reference to it, as a means to align himself with a known direction in performance. Yet Thomas Kellein has noted that Beuys developed his performance practice and methods to ends which are completely opposed to those of Maciunas’ Fluxus, or to the avant-gardist strategies of John Cage; unlike the avant-gardist Maciunas, Beuys did not want to eliminate, but to radically expand, the category of art.48 Beuys spoke freely and perhaps too frequently about the principles driving his work, and o�en offered up clarification or interpretation of his art, usually within the framework of journalistic interviews. Beuys worked actively to eliminate, or at least to minimize, the role of chance as a determining framework for his performances. For Beuys performance was the primary carrier of his theoretical program, an act of communication between himself and his audience carried out in real time. Beuys’ actions never centre on everyday banality in the manner of the Brechtian or Fluxus event. He displayed the greatest concentration and absorption throughout his performances. He underscored the strict separation of his performances from everyday events in his careful preparation and transformation of the space of performance into a liminal territory that hovers on the edge of transformation, or even transubstantiation.49 Beuys’ theoretical program consisted of the concept of social sculpture; Beuys’ performance of this theoretical program was, on one level, intimately linked to memories of his own past and also to those of the collectivity. I discuss the discourse on emancipatory models of memory in Germany as an intellectual context for Beuys’ art in the introduction to this volume.

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The Berlin performance largely kept to a notion of Cagean and Fluxus-style performance (i.e., the presence of the piano and violin), but it included a number of deviations. For example, Beuys played the piano in a traditional manner; a month later Johannes Cladders would describe his piano performance as ‘…giving the impression of a professional who could have done much more but in this context only presented short passages…’50 This refused the Concretist approach of Fluxusbased piano. The recordings or other sounds by Beuys in the Berlin performance made reference to his earlier performance works. Beuys continued his investigation of the tone ‘ö-ö’, and of the place of sound within sculpture more generally. In addition to its invoking at the matriculation ceremony in November of 1967; ‘ö-ö’ was recapitulated as an acoustic element in his 1984 performance with Nam June Paik, Coyote III, at the Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo. Beuys specifically placed this acoustic work within a notion of sculptural possibility: ‘One hears sculpture before one sees it. The ear as an organ of perception for sculpture’.51 Thus following Beuys’ notion, sound can also be formed into social sculpture and can be transformational toward other social aspects. In including the sound ‘ö-ö’ in the disrupted Berlin performance, Beuys meant to remind students of the transformative and even theological possibilities of social sculpture.52 The emancipatory element of social sculpture that was inherent in Beuys’ performance went unrecognized by the dismissive and anti-avant-gardist West Berlin student audience.53 Ironically they too demanded an art that took on a resistant and transformative role in social and political spheres, a position several student leaders had already enunciated in essays of the mid-‘60s. As I discuss in Chapter 1, the antiauthoritarianism of Frankfurt school thinkers—evidenced in their analysis of fascism and the authoritarian personality, and also in Herbert Marcuse’s metapsychological analyses of capitalism and repression—a�racted student theorists who were less tied to orthodox notions of socialism and who struggled with Germany’s fascist legacy. SDS writer Peter Schneider had carried forward Benjamin and Marcuse’s mnemonic notion of

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a modernist culture that reconnected with certain impulses within Surrealist art that had envisioned ‘cultural revolution’.54 However the connection between contemporary engaged art and Surrealism was not explicitly developed by the SDS and related West German writers. Indeed Schneider’s Lukácsian and at times anti-modernist definitions of art and literature did not allow for modernist nor radical avant-garde forms such as performance art or the found object, as his complete dismissal of Happenings and Fluxus in 1966 makes plain.55 In their programmatic 1968 statement ‘Art as a Commodity of the Consciousness Industry’, the Berlin SDS Group Culture and Revolution had rejected Marcuse and Adorno’s arguments about the negating and dialectical force of an autonomous modern art. Instead the statement counted high art as part and parcel of the culture industry. Thus high modernist art of the variety Marcuse and Adorno privileged was in the SDS Group’s view actually an ‘instrument of domination’ complicit in the same hegemonic dynamics as the culture industry itself, and could not hold open any escape or resistance to its workings.56 Schneider’s interesting and contradictory essay the following year, ‘Die Phantasie im Spätkapitalismus und die Kulturrevolution’, reasserts this purportedly anti-elitist (and anti-modernist) position. He reductively dismantles the dialectical workings of modernist form above and against the capitalist commodity, and makes impossible any position of critique toward the culture industry or the relations of production, as Andreas Huyssen has eloquently argued.57 Nevertheless the SDS and Schneider still held out the possibility that an art could be pursued that would not participate in the forces of domination over the working class. In his essay Schneider was somewhat more specific in terms of visual art, and his vision is decidedly anti-modern: he approvingly describes paintings by Bosch, Goya, and Bruegel, and mentions that poems by Brecht and Mayakovsky are currently studied and enjoyed by new city planners and workers’ councils.58 Disagreeing with Marcuse (‘who in ma�ers of art is under the influence of Adorno’), Schneider claims that serial music is ‘not a sublation (Au�ebung), but a further development of bourgeois forms of music,

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a parallel to the further capitalist development of the forces of production’.59 Surprisingly, he believes that the very traditional forms of bourgeois painting that he favors would not contradict the new order established a�er cultural revolution takes place. Schneider’s animosity toward the radical forms of the avant-garde is first expressed in his reductive but nonetheless interesting essay of 1966. The reader also senses Schneider’s discomfort with recent art’s reference to memory and to the great traumas and technological violence of World War Two. One can be fairly certain that at least some of the students who a�ended I a�empt to set (make) you free were familiar with the SDS or with Schneider’s anti-avant-gardist position, one that approached some of the central notions of Socialist Realism, if not older, Trotskyite views of a resuscitated bourgeois art a�er the revolution. If the Berlin SDS was aware of the DSP in Düsseldorf, they most likely viewed it as an amateurish or ineffectual effort at resistance, since it was not aligned with state-sponsored socialism but rather put forward a ‘third path’ that somehow passed through Fluxus. This is a view Immendorff arguably shared. The unique atmosphere of the student movement in West Berlin made for the most radicalized students. The fact that West Berlin universities allowed for far greater student participation in university processes also led to Herbert Marcuse’s teach-ins at the FU a�er the Ohnesorg shooting in 1967; one might understand Beuys’ 1969 performance as a kind of parallel to Marcuse’s activities. The students’ censorship of Beuys’ vision of freedom was based on their own conservative dismissal of performance art as irrelevant to emancipatory politics. The reception of I a�empt to set (make) you free precipitated a turning point in Beuys’ work, leading him to engage openly in activist politics. He not only focused on activist goals a�er 1969 but also pursued contact with the student leader Rudi Dutschke, who because of Beuys’ invitation participated in public discussions in the mid-‘70s about what would become the Green Party.60 Beuys would however receive a different but even more divided reception

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on the other side of the Wall, where he became synonymous with performance or actionism itself as medium. The Rise of East German Performance and the Decline of the GDR In the growing literature on performance in East Germany, it has been argued that three distinct directions characterise the history of performance in the GDR.61 One group, the ‘Selfperforation artists’, has been put forward as the culmination of performance in the former GDR, as several books focus almost exclusively on the group of Dresden theatre-design students formed around 1985. Although it has been denied that they were aware of this direction in ritual-based performance, the group borrowed from Viennese Actionism in terms of its material concerns and its interest in the abject; the critic Christoph Tannert has been a commentator and a spokesman for this group.62 Another view argues that East German performance owed its greatest debt to Beuys, who helped launch an interest in performance as a distinct medium—although it was generally not discussed as such in East Germany—in his legendary and singular appearance in East Germany during an exhibition of his work in 1981 at the newly-established Ständige Vertretung der BRD (permanent representation of West Germany) in East Berlin. This second history of East German performance comes largely from the pen of Eugen Blume in East Berlin, who with the artist Erhard Monden planned numerous collaborative performances with Beuys in the years a�er his initial 1981 visit, none of which were realized with Beuys’ physical participation. Even a�er Beuys’ visit and the ensuing performance debate there, was no discussion in East Germany about different directions of performance well known to West Germans (Cagean performance, Fluxus, or Kaprow’s Happening or activity); it appears that Beuys’ reliance on certain Fluxus strategies and structures was also not discussed. A third direction of East German performance points to an isolated but influential group of painters and graphic artists based in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz), or more specifically in Adelsberg, a small village outside of it. This group called itself

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‘Clara Mosch’ and began its activities as an independent ‘selfhelp’ gallery and expanded its ‘pleinairs’—quasi-countryside retreats—in the early 1980s. Despite extraordinary state security infiltration of their activities (which happened to the Dresden performance circle as well), Clara Mosch events/actions and pleinairs a�racted artists from other cities across the country and became well known in the GDR. Clara Mosch: Performance as By-product Like the later Auto-Perforationists, performance works by the small group that called itself Clara Mosch—the name corresponds to the first le�ers of the surnames of its members, Claus (Carlfriedrich), Ran� (Thomas), Morgner (Michael), Schade (Gregor Torsten), with the single female member, Dagmar Schinke, ironically excluded from this feminized nomenclature—grew out of the parties or ‘Festen’ loosely associated with art institutions, like the annual soccer match of Karl-Marx-Stadt artists against their Leipzig rivals. The group’s name evokes the Schwi�ersian and Dadaist muse Anna Blume, but for the most part, their art production did not take up Dadaist forms like photomontage but instead conformed to traditional mediums of painting and graphic art (with a limited production of postcards, posters and mail art). Later member Ralf-Rainer Wasse, the group’s confirmed Stasi mole, produced their forays into photography, which mostly consisted of documentation of their plein air activities. Clara Mosch was first an alternative ‘self-help’ gallery in Adelsberg, formed to follow the example of the Galerie Oben, which ranks with Schweinebraden’s East Berlin gallery as one of the most important independent exhibition sites in the GDR.63 The collector Georg Brühl had instituted a number of reforms of the local Karl-Marx-Stadt artists union or VBK; for example, Brühl allowed many artists who had been banned from other local VBK organizations to join. In contrast to Dresden or Leipzig, Karl-Marx-Stadt lacked an art school or program. It is thought that for this reason party functionaries were generally unconcerned with the art politics there. This disinterest enabled Brühl to institute unprecedented administrative change with almost no oversight. Brühl also

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came to control the already-existing Galerie Oben, which he transformed into a progressive gallery of national significance, and that featured jazz concerts and showed work by Gerhard Altenbourg and other independent artists. Due to its liberal art policies as well as those of the affiliated artists union that oversaw it, Karl-Marx-Stadt gained a local reputation, and it began to a�ract art students from nearby Leipzig. The Clara Mosch group first knew one other as students in Leipzig, and they moved to Karl-Marx-Stadt to participate in the atmosphere Brühl had set in place. Without the necessary permissions (private galleries were illegal in the GDR) the group had scheduled their gallery opening in neighbouring Adelsberg for May 30, 1977. While it was not allowed to open on that day, a hearing with VBK and other party officials determined that it could open if it were supported as a small gallery partially controlled the VBK, which the artists agreed to. The Karl-Marx-Stadt VBK furthermore agreed to assume all the costs for the venture. A�er this astonishing turn of events the group appeared to se�le into a gallery program of mostly group exhibitions in their tiny space, o�en making reference to the mysterious and veiled figure of Clara Mosch (an exhibition invitation by Lutz Dammbeck featured her identification card with an image that evoked Breton’s Nadja). The Galerie Oben had begun its ‘plein air’ week-long outings around 1975, coordinated in part by the art historian Klaus Werner, then-director of the progressive Galerie Arkade in East Berlin. Soon the Clara Mosch gallery followed suit, and artists and others from the art community participated in popular outings to Leussow (1977), Gallenthin (1981) and Tabarz (1983). Even the language connected to the ‘pleinairs’—of collaborative work in the landscape or ‘open air’—implied a loosely liberatory aspect of the creative work completed in rural or wooded areas, presumably beyond direct VBK oversight. However because the Clara Mosch gallery was sponsored by the local VBK, both it and its pleinairs were officially sponsored by the Staatlichen Kunsthandel der DDR (GDR state art market). Werner could therefore later produce and sell a multiple relating to the group, which led to a major debate at the 1983 VBK congress.

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At first not even the artists themselves regarded the Clara Mosch pleinairs as art.64 They were instead seen as a combination of leisure activity and social outing. The performances of Clara Mosch first grew from this festival-like and even pagan or carnival atmosphere. Bakhtin had described the la�er as a social institution where customary social, political and economic identities are suspended and alternative collective identities might be formulated.65 The festival atmosphere in these wooded clearings, and their literal physical distance from the art institutions controlled by the VBK in Adelsberg, incited a wider group of East German artists to experiment and participate in an underground culture which embraced performance in the landscape as part of the activity of artists. The Clara Mosch artists’ dismissive a�itude about the aesthetic significance of the pleinairs changed dramatically a�er Werner published the multiple Leussow-Recycling in 1978 (as a

Fig. 4.3 Clara Mosch, Leussow-Recycling, 1978, photograph by Ralf-Rainer Wasse; Research Library, The Ge�y Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (94-B503)

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joint Arkade/Clara Mosch edition) based on photographs and work related to their September 1977 outing near Mecklenburg (Rehberg erroneously dates this event to 1975; Fig. 4.3, interior of Leussow-Recycling). In areas that had been cleared a�er lightning had struck, the sometimes naked Clara Mosch members climbed denuded trees or their own fragile scaffold structures, enacting a relation between their own bodies and the dying substance of trees as a means of establishing a kind of corrective control of the space (and that Wasse’s photographs document). The 1978 multiple is a small wooden suitcase containing numerous photographs, prints, and four test tubes containing an ashlike substance. The group explained that in order to return the material to a state of ‘naturalness’ and thereby call into question its status or state as an art object—which Werner recognized as ‘recycling’ in 1978—they burned the scaffolding and other objects they had fashioned in the landscape and inserted the remnants as relics in the test-tubes. Another element in the multiple, Klaus Werner’s text, discussed the ‘spontaneous confrontation’ of the Leussow pleinair as a performance (‘action’). His text also explored the communicative function of the relic, which is here performed and thereby returned or ‘given back’ to nature.66 In contrast the relics of the Gallenthin plein-air had a theological dimension: photographs are titled, for example, M. crosses the sea by Gallenthin (1981). By 1992 Morgner declared that the 1983 Tabarz plein-air protested the destruction of the forest in the GDR; it is however doubtful that he held this view 10 years earlier. In 1982 Wasse produced a sticker resembling an obituary that announced the death of Clara Mosch. Under increasing Stasi surveillance and subjected to various plots of intrigue, the group disbanded in that year as a collective and as a gallery, but its plein-airs continued into 1983. Stasi files verify the agency’s efforts to plant discord and tension within the group, with the aim of disbanding it. They planted evidence that it led other group members to conclude that Schade was a Stasi informant, which he was not. Mata-Hari-like, a Stasi agent began an affair with Ran� and then mysteriously moved to Austria. This intrigue almost ended Ran�’s marriage as well as his art

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production. Finally, Stasi files point to the fact that the true informant or IM (‘informal colleague’, the Stasi’s terminology) was Wasse, the photographer of the group, under the cover name of ‘Frank Körner’; ironically the Stasi actually provided the photographic paper Wasse used, thereby underwriting some of the group’s art.67 It appears that a�er the freedom the group was first accorded by the VBK, it was decided that the group’s performance-oriented works and popularity had destabilized control of the art production of an entire area of the country. On the heels of Clara Mosch activities and events in Coswig around the Intermedia I exhibition of 1982 (coordinated by Christoph Tannert in Dresden), a subcommi�ee was formed as part of the 1983 9th VBK congress to investigate performance. It primarily urged caution and a new vigilance toward this unruly development. These declarations underscored that party functionaries now took performance far more seriously. It was even suggested that a new section of the VBK be formed for ‘action art’. This idea was ultimately rebuffed; instead it was decided that the damage had to be reversed, requiring drastic measures. Brühl had resigned from his positions in 1978 and was replaced as the director of Galerie Oben. The state was harshest with Klaus Werner, on the basis that certain protocols had not been observed regarding the Leussow plein air and its related relics. Werner was summarily fired, released into ‘freelance employment’, and banned from SED membership. In contrast to Penck, he declined the invitation that was issued for him to emigrate to West Germany. A�er heavy surveillance the Galerie Arkade was closed in December, 1981. Even subcommi�ee recommendations had limited effect in the VBK, since its president Si�e had famously vowed that performance art would not gain any legitimacy so long as he was in office. However, other artists’ groups would continue the underground process that Clara Mosch’s performance-oriented art had initiated in the final years of the GDR. Erhard Monden’s ‘Expanded Notion of Art’ The Galerie Arkade exhibition of the work of Erhard Monden in June of its final year in existence (1981) led to the first

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extended East German debate about performance. Like the Auto-Perforationists, Monden studied with the progressive teacher Günther Hornig at the academy in Dresden, and it is therefore probable that Monden may have participated in the Clara Mosch pleinairs. As his erstwhile collaborator Eugen Blume has recounted, Monden began planning his ‘Stand- und Lauf Aktionen’ as early as 1980, when he proposed to run between two art-institutional sites in the city of East Berlin in close proximity to Checkpoint Charlie. By the time he was able to realize this performance in February of 1981 (Fig. 4.4), he shu�led between his own studio and what was called ‘environment K’, the elaborate installation created by Stefan Kayser in his former studio; Kayser’s maze-like orchestration of detritus was in the spirit of Schwi�ers’ Merzbau. Kayser had already defected from the GDR, but Monden and other artists struggled to maintain his work by paying the rent on the studio until they were no longer able to.68

Fig. 4.4 Erhard Monden, Stand und Lauf Performance, East Berlin, 1981 (Galerie Arkade); © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

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In her Bildende Kunst review of Monden’s 1981 ‘Time-SpacePicture Realizations’ exhibition at Werner’s Galerie Arkade, which consisted of photographs, performance diagrams and obscured self-portraits, Gabriela Ivan accused Monden of simply exhibiting photographic documentation that included the February stand-and-run performance, a 1980 gymnastics floor exercise routine (by Sylke Baar), and his work with the Brigade Obersteiner, foundational engineers, at their various construction sites (a Bi�erfeld directive commission). She castigated Monden for indulging in a ‘boring’ solipsism that she recognized from Western ‘Concept Art und Performance’, and that she could not reconcile with a purposeful socialist art.69 She noted that Robert Rehfeldt’s film on Monden’s photo-based self-portrait series underscored Monden’s claim of investigating the ‘identity of the author and of the work’, but she noted that such an investigation was largely meaningless since it did not relate to other people—this is despite Monden’s work with a construction site brigade. A string of responses followed, many of which refused to recognize performance as any kind of legitimate cultural or artistic expression. Blume’s responses argued for the origin of performance in Beuys’ art, since he defined performance not as a new medium going back to Dada but as ‘an expanded concept of art’.70 Throughout his exchanges with art historians Hermann Raum, Hermann Peters, Klaus Weidener and Peter Pachnicke (who all evoke the mantra that performance is not art), Blume positions this term to emphasize not an opening of art to other cultural forms and actions (which Monden and Beuys indeed proposed) but to argue that old criteria for art no longer apply to it since in its emphasis on communication and process, performance integrates the act of reception of art into itself. The respondents further positioned performance as a form of elitist Western art ‘for the snob layer’; using the controversial Leussow Recicling (sic) multiple as an example, Raum noted that in spite of the metaphysical arguments offered for its refusal of any object, performance served to feed new objects or ‘relics’ into even the GDR’s art market. The anti-object nature of performance seemed most incomprehensible to other writers. Therefore, as

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Rehberg has noted, the difficult reception of performance in East Germany (which was paralleled in West Germany but in different ways) rested on its pointed opposition to painting, which singularly constituted many party functionaries’ definition of art.71 Monden’s stand-and-run performances between the studio and sites of exhibition revealed the condition of art as a network of institutional frameworks, even in the socialist state. This network isolated and contained the artist and blocked the possible wider reception of art. Monden’s performances are then related to the institutionally critical work that was simultaneously being pursued in art centres in the West. Monden’s art particularly opposed painting-as-medium. With their collaborative performance Monden and Blume marked the end of the ‘Ninth’, the Dresden national exhibition of 1983, from the nearby banks of the Elbe. They also meant the performance to be a long-distance collaborative ‘broadcast’/ performance with Beuys in Düsseldorf. It was a pointed rejoinder to the jury’s banning of any performance-related work from the ‘Ninth German Art’ exhibition. For their second planned collaboration in the following year, East Berlin border police (who allegedly stated ‘You won’t get into the GDR for even five minutes, Mr. Beuys!’) turned Beuys back at the border. A�er the Wende Monden founded a ‘school for expanded pictorial work’ in his Prenzlauer-Berg atelier that in some ways paralleled the FIU. While Monden clearly studied Beuys’ notion of social sculpture, Beuys’ work served as a point of departure for him. Unlike Blume, whose entire definition of performance is based on Beuys’ work, Monden rejected the notion of the artist’s subjectivity as stable (see also the discussion of Monden’s performance on television in Ch. 5). This critical dimension of Monden’s art and performance rejected Beuys’ smooth expansion of the artist-persona into media celebrity. Performance, the Abject, Collective Disgust: the Dresden Scene Just as officially-supported alternative galleries had at first provided a framework for performance-oriented art in Karl-

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Marx-Stadt and Berlin, the young art historian Christoph Tannert was similarly able to use the official support of the VBK to fashion a space for the presentation of performance, sound and film/video art for the first time in the GDR in the area around Dresden. Tannert was appointed head of the national VBK’s working collective of ‘Young Art’, and he arranged the first widely a�ended performance festival in the GDR (in Coswig near Dresden, 1985). Even a�er he was released into ‘freelance employment’ for organizing this event, Tannert published articles on performance art in Bildende Kunst (‘Au�ruch in die Verwirrung’, He� 9, 1988), and, as if knowingly marking the end of the GDR, organized with Eugen Blume the month-long performance festival Permanente Kunstkonferenz in Berlin in June, 1989.72 The term was taken from Beuys, who had discussed this notion with Caroline Tisdall in 1979: In retrospect the students’ movement was characterized by the domination of ideology at the expense of Unity in Diversity.[…] Many groups, particularly Marxists, had difficulty in understanding our insistence on the widened concept of art, freedom and creativity as an anthropological and phenomenological system. The mood then was charged with emotion, and things were done hastily, so discussion of differences was impossible; hence my conviction that the idea of ‘permanent conference’ is essential.73 A�er the limited viewing his work was accorded in the tightly-controlled 1981 Ständige Vertretung exhibition, Beuys’ art was shown more openly in the GDR only a�er his death in 1986, at the Marstall in Berlin in 1988 (although this exhibition was limited to the early drawings). By 1989 Tannert and Blume then aligned the idea of ‘permanent conference’ with Beuys’ notion of the expanded concept of art as an overarching category for developments in performance in the GDR. This festival generally followed the tone of a 1988 event that had been organized by Judy Lybke at the Leipzig gallery Eigen + Art and that more specifically had asked performance artists

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to react to Beuys’ drawings in the Marstall exhibition. In their clever contribution, the Auto-Perforationists not only lived for several days in the performance space, but they also ingested sleeping pills and then slept in front of the audience. Thus by 1989 Beuys was firmly linked to the medium of performance in the GDR and particularly to practices coming out of Dresden, even if, with the exception of Eugen Blume’s scholarship, there was still li�le known or published in East Germany about Beuys’ performance and activist work. Well before the festivals and performances that Tannert organized in the area, the Dresden scene had garnered a reputation for popular and critical exhibitions of artwork by young artists, due mostly to the 1979 Dezennien I exhibition at the Leonhardi Museum, also known as the ‘door exhibition’.74 The exhibition featured artworks that used doors in various ways and that were construed—particularly in Stasi reports on the exhibition—as offering a thinly veiled commentary on the closed or even captive societies of the Soviet Bloc. A followup exhibition, Dezennien II, was closed by local authorities. A�er this precedent at the Leonhardi Museum, the presence (or rather absence) of the Dresden academy professor Günther Hornig became central to further developments. Hornig was a professor in the area of theatre design, with whom Monden had already studied. Because of illness Hornig took a longer leave from his duties, and the students leapt to work in the vacuum of oversight and authority. In 1985 the students Micha Brendel, Via Lewandowsky, Else Gabriel, and Rainer Görss, began to stage various performances and even moved in to live on the floor designated for theatre design, sometimes se�ing fire to paper and other objects. There was apparently no reaction from the rector about these activities, which some members of the group a�ributed to the school’s single-minded support of painting and the general incompetence of its administrators.75 Thus this group, which came to call themselves ‘Auto-Perforationists’, effectively occupied the academy and began to refashion its spaces into an alternative space of art production. According to several members, they chose the term to avoid already solidified categories around performance and actionism. The

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term was also to make plain that their concern was an extensive investigation of the self and its boundaries in a society that forced a notion of collectivity upon its citizens.76 Primary to this investigation was the body, its materiality and its limits, be it human or animal. Like Clara Mosch, the Auto-Perforationists began their underground performances during the celebration of Fasching, or traditional carnival, during Lent. However this la�er group understood its activities specifically as performance, and they used the parties as a cover for what would not have been recognized as art or even permi�ed in the academy. Their first performance, Spitze des Fleischbergs (Tip of Meat Mountain) in 1986, took place during carnival; the artists had been preparing for weeks.77 Each artist presented an activity on a makeshi� stage. Clad in a quasi-Bavarian outfit and with an animal lung swelling out from her décolletage, Gabriel blow-dried a chicken; Lewandowsky, in drag, appears to have sung in the manner of a chanteuse using a cow throat as a microphone. This use of abject ma�er (animal carcasses and body parts) that was probably not immediately identifiable to audience members, meant to shock and to deliver a visceral sense of disgust (the meat may also have had a foul odour). In exhibitions in Berlin and Dresden (Menetekel) in 1988-9, the group presented animal carcasses, including pig brains and cow legs, as material, and within various mediums from sculpture to painting. Lewandowsky has commented on his interest in tracking the affects of dictatorship upon the body in his art during this time. In the manner of Max Ernst’s collages, many of Lewandowsky’s large-scale ‘reproductive paintings’ from these years feature outmoded, appropriated, and distorted depictions of the body.78 Others in the group, Gabriel and Brendel, have mentioned that daily life in state socialism was among their concerns; some of the tools and objects they used during their performances invoked the state of ‘permanent improvisation within all life situations’ necessary because of the various and continuing scarcities in the GDR.79 Their performances a�acked Socialist Realism’s optimistic view of the socialist body, as well as notions of hygiene that had infiltrated aspects of domestic life in

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the GDR from childcare to communal showers. Lewandowsky equated the GDR discourse on hygiene with those of fascism. The Menetekel exhibition was closed ‘for hygienic reasons’ by authorities allegedly fearful of an outbreak of pestilence, but a doctor retained by Brendel helpfully reported to the local hygiene authorities that an antiseptic foot spray would be a sufficient to contain any hygiene problems in the exhibition space. A�er inspection the installation reopened.80 As has widely been discussed in relation to Julia Kristeva’s writings, the abject works to destabilize a secure notion of the self as separate and distinct from ma�er.81 The abject as the Auto-Perforationists used it jolted the GDR citizen back into an almost primal notion of their own body as individuality. The use of unidentifiable meat as material and as performance object by the Auto-Perforationists created a liminal if not disgusting atmosphere for its audience. The Bataillian repulsiveness of the spaces of the Auto-Perforationist performances focused on the body as visceral material, and repositioned performers and audience as participants in a quasi-religious event. The AutoPerforationist actions functioned almost as memories of pagan ritual, of a variety that was not acceptable to the broader East German population. This primal space rejected notions of order or of socialist collectivity. The group’s performances of 1987-9 (Herz Horn Haut Schrein, Dresden, 1987; Homunkulusmonolog, Dresden, 1989; contributions to Permanente Kunstkonferenz, Berlin, 1989) began a new focus on the experience of pain, another strategy intended to reorient the audience toward a primal, visceral experience of the body. During a 1989 performance Lewandowsky allegedly suffered a concussion and seriously burned his hand.82 As has been suggested elsewhere, the AutoPerforationists were part of a strategy adopted by a number of Soviet Bloc artists that made use of the body as a critical tool to counter the suspension of certain notions of the self under state socialism.83 In contrast to the medium of painting—through which East German artists arguably most affected the West German scene—performance art moved from the West eastwards, and

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most directly by means of the figure of Joseph Beuys. John Cage and Fluxus, mostly through its spokesman George Maciunas, developed highly influential models of performance in the Rhineland, due in part to the confluence of some of their ideas with those of Concrete Art, an already-established direction in art in postwar Europe. The Happening form, the ‘activity’, and feminist performance, were further influences on the West German scene, through Allan Kaprow’s and Carolee Schneemann’s work there and in Wolf Vostell’s adaptations of aspects of the Happening in his performances. Fluxus and Happening forms were generally not carried over into East Germany. The group Clara Mosch first established performance there independently, in the culturally insignificant city of Karl-Marx-Stadt. In the larger art centres, Beuys’ travel to and exhibitions in East Berlin made him the most influential Western artist in the GDR. Short-lived progressive galleries like Arkade in East Berlin or Clara Mosch in Karl-Marx-Stadt allowed artists such as Monden and the Mosch group to develop their art before these organizations were terminated by the state. The Dresden Auto-Perforationists pursued a kind of body art and transformed spaces within the academy into progressive galleries where they staged their performances. In forming an East German audience for their performances, GDR performance artists established alternative sites for art where the state’s control of the public sphere was effectively, if temporarily, suspended, and where differing notions of the self, and critiques of the institutions of art, or of the state’s indifference to the land and environment, could be carried out. In the West as well as the East, such moments may have been more possible because each state’s art institutions and major critics did not recognize performance as a legitimate medium of modern art. With low expectations, li�le or no institutional support, and no official oversight in either East and West Germany, performance gained a considerable measure of autonomy. One might claim that the 1989 ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Leipzig similarly drew upon such strategies.

5. ART ON TELEVISION The Other Cold War Divide In the West in the late twentieth century, art and television had a tense, if not directly adversarial, relationship. Germany did not share American television’s aversion toward contemporary art during the Cold War. Within the ba�le for global cultural supremacy that defined the Cold War each German state promoted its own view of modern art by means of new museums, art organizations, and in exhibitions. As the jamming of television signals in Europe was not possible at the time, each German state shared a concern about the fact that its citizens could watch television programs produced by the other state, and therefore be swayed ideologically in the Cold War conflict. Television played a key role in penetrating the border as a cultural barrier in Cold War Germany. East and West German art broadcasting—specifically those programs that focused on modern and contemporary art—established points of cultural connection across the Iron Curtain and even at the height of the Cold War facilitated a dialogue about contemporary art between East and West. Televised contemporary art from the GDR was received and viewed in West Germany long before it appeared in exhibitions there, and West German programs on modern art could be seen in the East as early as 1953.1 Claudia Di�mar notes that with the exception of small areas around Dresden and in the extreme north—dubbed the ‘valley of the clueless’ (Tal des Ahnungslosen)—West German television could be received by almost all households in East Germany, since the jamming of

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powerful West German television signals was generally not a possibility. In contrast, less than 10’ of West German viewers could see East German broadcasts. Despite the West’s upper hand in terms of broadcasting power, administrators of East German television fought back to compete against Western programs for the a�ention of the East German television viewer, a strategy that is discernable in East German art broadcasting.2 In this chapter I trace the conventions of art broadcasting devised by state-controlled East and West German television in the ‘60s and ‘70s, and how key moments of contemporary art’s critical engagement with the medium of television contested these assumptions through the mediums of performance, film and video. The subject of art on television in divided Germany certainly merits a book-length study of its own.3 The Universität Siegen research group estimated that approximately 10,000 programs on visual art were broadcast over three decades in West Germany, during which time they increasingly focused on late modern or contemporary art.4 Early East German television programs showcased open disagreement concerning contemporary socialist art. At the Dresden-based ‘Exhibitions of the GDR’ the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture comprised the entire horizon of contemporary art; East German television perpetuated this view. East German television furthermore showcased artworks that problematically rewrote the recent German past around the Marxist notion of class warfare, thereby disseminating important founding myths of the GDR. In a gendered division of labor, East German television represented the moment of viewing and of aesthetic experience as generally female while privileging an exclusively male subject, ve�ed by the state bureaucracy, as the singular source of art and creativity in socialist culture. Modernism and Postwar Art Broadcasting Art broadcasting as a television genre is an interdisciplinary subject that remains peripheral to both art history and media studies; it has until recently occupied the cultural no-man’s land between the conventional exhibition sites of the gallery or museum and the mass media. John Walker and the Universität

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Siegen research group have studied the changing nature of art broadcasting since the 1950s in England and in Germany, respectively. Building on the work of Hans Belting and debates concerning the ‘end’ of art history, the Siegen group provocatively claims that ‘the end of art history means its beginning as media history’. There were competing cultural claims made in the U.S. and West Germany, but artists and television producers continued their a�empts to connect television with (modern) art over the next decades. Already in the postwar period, art and media critics in the U.S. and West Germany fell into camps either against (Clement Greenberg and Theodor Adorno) or for (Gerhard Eckert) the artistic possibilities of the new television apparatus. By 1960 film critic Siegfried Kracauer analyzed the new ‘film on art’ genre that German television would develop over the next decades. In their study of art broadcasting the Siegen group follows Kracauer’s analytic focus on the particular dynamics and characteristics of the mediation of visual art. Modernist critics Greenberg and Adorno approached television with great skepticism. Already in 1939 Greenberg had separated modern art from the forms of mass media, when he defined modern art as a culture that opposed ‘kitsch’, the urban and industrial products of mass production and mass media, such as ‘…magazine covers, illustrations, ads, Tin Pan alley music, tap dancing, Hollywood movies, etc., etc.’.5 According to Greenberg, modern art instead demands the cultivated viewer’s effort in ‘reflecting upon the immediate impression le� by (art’s) plastic values’.6 Due to its nature, genuine modern art necessarily opposes the easy ‘short cut’ to a false experience of art of its ‘synthetic’ counterpart, kitsch. American television’s disinterest in modern art helped maintain Greenberg’s absolute separation of modernism from television throughout the Cold War.7 To this day, mainstream American television programs on contemporary art tend to focus on controversies that have surrounded artworks and rarely on the works themselves (though some exceptions exist, such as the PBS series Art 21). Media commentator Gerhard Eckert instead insisted that television would be the ‘art of the future’ and he analyzed how perception itself might be altered by new ways of seeing and

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new reception situations that television had already established by 1953.8 Eckert further sought to legitimate television in categorizing it as ‘art’. Eckert was one voice in the mass media’s euphoric celebration of West German television during the ‘50s. It has been noted that early West German television programs and publications carried into the postwar period a nationalistic ‘technological myth’ of the German origin of television technology that was first concocted by the National Socialists around the figure of the German inventor Paul Nipkow.9 This myth may have been comforting to Germans struggling with reconstruction, an evaporated sense of national identity, and a fragile economy. Adorno’s critical stance toward television of course coexisted with these celebrations of technology. Adorno’s assessment of the evils of mass media matched Greenberg’s, but he acknowledged the power of film and television in postwar culture. Adorno wrote on television as a major mass medium. In his 1953 essay ‘Prolog zum Fernsehen’ Adorno understood television as the newest and perhaps most potent weapon in the culture industry arsenal, and he anticipates the arguments of later media critics such as Guy Debord: ‘Through television one comes closer to the goal, that dreamless dream, of having a reproduction of the entire material world in an image that penetrates all the organs, and at the same time one can inconspicuously smuggle into this world anything that one considers becoming to the real world’.10 In contrast to Adorno’s disinterest in the media’s engagement with high art, Siegfried Kracauer made special note of a new postwar film genre, the ‘film on art’, in his discussion of documentary film in his Theory of Film (1960). As the ‘film on art’ became a major element of Cold War television programming, Kracauer’s comments on the film on art remain very relevant to the subject of art broadcasting. German television came to imitate the structure of the ‘film on art’ in television productions. Citing specific examples of the postwar film on art such as Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso and StorckMicha’s Le Monde de Paul Delvaux, Kracauer classifies them into two elastic categories: the ‘documentary’ and the ‘experimental’, respectively.11 An experimental film like Storck-Micha’s uses the

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artwork as a ‘point of departure’ and creates new ‘contemporary art’; the film and the originating artwork are both ‘isolated’ from the workings of reality or are autonomous. In contrast the documentary film situates the artwork as an ‘element of actuality’, primarily by means of two structures: the screen biography, where the artwork is contextualized in a narrative about its creator’s life, or, in a filmic narrative that focuses on the creative moment (as in Clouzot’s film). Kracauer’s ‘experimental’ film on art—which one might define as a modernist film on art, that is, one that retains a critical distance to physical reality and representation and that instead refers to itself and its own materiality—hardly exists. He concludes that the experimental film on art is neither documentary nor film but rather a rare kind of interpretive ‘art’. Kracauer concludes that almost all filmic representations of art render it as a part of ‘actuality’ and do not offer interpretation but rather recognizable ‘actuality’. Kracauer’s views concerning the purely ‘documentary’, and not interpretive, quality of film in regard to specific artworks, were shared by German television directors in the East and West. The great majority of films on modern art that were broadcast on television in divided Germany were documentary films that took up these assumptions of documentary ‘realism’ in the examination of art. Walker and the Siegen group have traced the growing awareness on the part of European television directors in the ‘70s and ‘80s of the process of mediation within representation. In these years television directors began to acknowledge the transformation of a visual art image into an electronic ‘screen image’ delivered by the television apparatus into a ‘private reception situation’.12 Walker understands John Berger’s series ‘Ways of Seeing’ (1972) as part of this consciousness of the television medium in Britain in the early ‘70s. During these years performance and video artists came to be featured on U.K. and West German television programming.13 Broadcasting on contemporary art in East Germany largely concerned itself with traditional documentaries on painting, following Kracauer’s definition; there was no wider integration of avant-garde art mediums with television in East Germany.

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Early art programming of the 1950s in the two Germanys, the U.K., and the U.S., had an educational basis. Most programs of the 1950s presented images of an art object and an ‘expert’ who commented on it on camera. The live program ‘Wie betrachte ich ein Bild?’ (How do I view a picture), the first West German art series (1955), featured author and director Hans Pla�e as he discussed different works with his students in the Hamburg Kunsthalle. As an audio-visual medium, Western television presented both sound—in terms of the voiceover of the ‘expert’, o�en combined with atmospheric and mostly classical music— and art-image. Walker notes that the later ‘pundits’ of the British art-series, like Sir Kenneth Clark (in his series Civilization of 1969) or Robert Hughes (in Shock of the New of 1980), insisted that the content of their programs was delivered only by the artworks ‘themselves’. Therefore their trust in the transparency of the televised representation of the art image seems total.14 In keeping with the populist basis of socialist art and of Socialist Realism, the figure of the ‘pundit’ art historian or art expert only rarely appears on East German television, and never in conjunction with contemporary art. A 1973 feature on Picasso, broadcast to commemorate his death and on deposit at the Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv Babelsberg, opens with an unidentified figure on camera who introduces the program and who then becomes the voice-over narrator; a montaged series of photographs, film excerpts, and reproductions of paintings complete the program. This is a rare instance in East German art broadcasting. Despite their invisibility in front of the camera, art historians worked behind the scenes on GDR art broadcasting; Marie-Luise Rohde, an editor/producer (Redakteur) at East German television, had some art history training and specialized in art broadcasting over two decades. She also adapted writing by the East German art historians Lothar Lang and Hermann Raum into television programs.15 In lieu of the pundit figure, East German television presented art ‘expertise’ in three different ways: through the voice and body of the artist in the interview format; through ‘polemic’, or the collective discussion of artworks; or in visitor interviews. In the 1980s art broadcasting in the GDR shi�ed toward West German

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magazine-format entertainment and feature profiles of painters. This shi� is in keeping with Di�mar’s claim that in order for East German television to remain competitive with West German television for an audience, it took on some of the new tendencies resulting from the privatization of West German television. Martina Dobbe views the photographic reproductions of sculptural works by Auguste Rodin, Mendardo Rosso and Brancusi as precedents for the technological process of mediation that takes place in art broadcasting. She argues that Wölfflin’s three-part essay, ‘Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll’ (How to photograph sculptures, published 1896-7 and 1915) is also significant to the filming of the art object.16 The Siegen study exhaustively catalogues the complex pa�ern of pans and zoom shots used by West German television in representing a painting or sculpture on television, and that introduced movement into these still images. These camera movements became conventions of televisual presentation and were in themselves interpretive. A filmed sequence that presents a succession of shots of details of a composition privileges some details while hiding others from the viewer. Camera movements across a canvas imply connections between details of a composition in a process that means to simulate the actual process of viewing; in actuality however they interpret a painted surface, a sculpture, or a building. The Siegen study returns to Kracauer’s analysis of the ‘gain in three-dimensional naturalness’ and the ‘resonance effect’ achieved through the camera’s ‘panning, traveling and tilting’ over the surface of an artwork, and in other qualities of the filmic medium. Kracauer claims that any filmic representation of an artwork dematerializes it. The work then ‘gain(s) in spatial depth’, and as a result almost any composition becomes more realistic. This quality therefore works against modernist materiality and self-reflexivity. Responding to a film’s tight, fragmentary ‘detail’ shots of figures depicted in a composition, the viewer places the ‘free floating’ figures within the real-life context of her or his own choosing. The traveling of the camera across the painted surface also releases a ‘resonance effect’ in the viewer: the physical movement of the camera through

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a composition leads the viewer to a ‘kinesthetic response’ and to ‘project the spatial sensations he experiences in its wake into his simultaneous perceptions’.17 In this way the film or television viewer can perceptually ‘enter’ a painted landscape or a more abstract canvas as though it were a physical space. This ‘naturalness’ and ‘realism’ added by the film camera can therefore render even modernist art more familiar to the viewer, as it becomes part of the physical reality each viewer knows well. Kracauer begins to explain the popularity of the film on art (and later, the television program on art) in that it may have rendered artworks more familiar to viewers who had not studied art history. The filmic phenomena Kracauer describes make difficult modern art understandable, even transparent, to the viewer. The viewer’s comfort in encountering the filmed artwork to some extent went hand in hand with West and East German television’s general assumption that films on art on television could achieve a transparent ‘informational’, objective, or factual presentation of artworks. With a few interesting exceptions, East German television kept to this notion of educative and documentary transparency in its visual art programming far longer than did West German programs. Televising East German ‘National Humanistic Culture’: the Dresden Art Exhibitions A�er consulting with the Television Centre in Moscow, formerly the Komintern Station, and under increasing pressure from West German broadcasting and from neighbouring West Berlin, the administration of German Democratic Republic Broadcasting broke ground on a Television Centre in East Berlin in 1951. A 1955 report issued by the Berlin Television Centre to the state broadcasting commi�ee concerning proposed official programming specified that cultural politics would be emphasized on television, and foreground ‘…the GDR as a centre to nurture our national humanistic culture…and to a�ain an exemplary cultural life of active workers in securing the full development of the creative power of our artists and in developing cultural work in factories and villages’.18

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Employees of East German television spoke about a wide range of ‘Kunstpropaganda’ (art propaganda) disseminated via television.19 Culture, including ‘people’s’ or amateur art (Volkskunst) and also books, plays, and author or artist personalities, would be featured within the ‘Aktuelle Kamera’ (contemporary camera) news program and in cultural magazine formats that reported on various East German exhibitions. The most important of these was the ‘German Art Exhibition’ of contemporary painting, staged in Dresden every five years until 1989. The West German Documenta exhibitions can be seen as the West German answer to the ‘German Art Exhibition’ exhibitions. As East German television makes clear, these exhibitions constituted the entire known horizon of contemporary art practice for GDR citizens, as contemporary Western art was generally not shown in East German art institutions nor widely discussed outside of art circles until well into the 1980s. (West German art and video was however easily available to most East German television viewers.) Many of the ‘German Art Exhibition’ broadcasts feature long shots of individual paintings and sculptures, with the camera then cu�ing or zooming in on various details or the camera moving between them, while a voice-over reads the name of the work, the artist, and its general theme. These conventions are in keeping with those discussed by the Siegen group in their study of West German art broadcasting. The East German state fostered television as a kind of alternative site of exhibition for artists, but it was constantly announced that the television program should never substitute for a visit to the artworks themselves in the museum.20 East German television therefore never challenged but instead promoted GDR art institutions. The televised coverage of the ‘German Art Exhibition’ in Dresden from 1962 to 1987 developed other conventions that varied only slightly over the years. Televised exhibition reports regularly featured views of visitors, including prominent politicians, in the galleries, and interviews with artists and visitors. The earliest extant report on the ‘German Art Exhibition’, from 1962, begins against the backdrop of an actual artwork and then cuts to shots of central commi�ee chairman

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Walter Ulbricht and his wife a�entively contemplating works in the museum’s galleries. Ulbricht is then shown in discussion with the artist Lea Grundig, president of the exhibition, who shows them one of her artworks; she is then interviewed before one of her works. The image of heads of state either arriving at or viewing art in the galleries is an East German media convention, like the circulated photograph of Soviet secretary general Leonid Brezhnev touring a 1971 exhibition in the GDR. By the late ‘70s only special exhibitions marking East German history became media opportunities for chairman Erich Honecker. Television cameras followed Honecker into the 1984 Berlin exhibition commemorating the 35th anniversary of the GDR, ‘Alltag und Epoche’, in the company of Bernhard Heisig and Willi Si�e among others, and signing the guest book of the exhibition. Later programs emphasized the popularity of the ‘German Art Exhibition’ exhibitions with shots of visitors standing in line outside the Albertinum and interviews regarding their expectations. Given their huge a�endance numbers and the assurance of many former East Germans I have spoken with, these national exhibitions were anticipated and popular cultural events.21 The visitor and artist interview in the galleries of the ‘German Art Exhibition’ are another standard of East German television. While reporters questioned visitors of all ages, including children, it is overwhelmingly female visitors who offer their comments to the camera. The broadcasts particularly focus on the moment of the experience of art in the museum institution; some visitor interviews are staged to take place during the moment of aesthetic experience itself. East German television privileged the experience of a female and socialist viewer of art and a distinctly male subject who produced it. One might even go so far as to say that the Dresden exhibitions and other related broadcasts present socialist aesthetic experience from the point of view of this gendered subject, suggesting that the art experience of the socialist public is mediated by a female gaze and a corresponding socialist sensibility. This female viewer arguably replaces the exclusively male ‘pundit’

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of western television as the television subject who interprets and imputes meaning to the artwork on display. In a two-part program of 1966 on an exhibition celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the SED, several women of different ages are questioned on camera about their reactions to the artworks. The camera follows an older woman who is identified as a ‘worker’ as she moves through the gallery. The camera zooms in on her facial expressions, then cuts to a POV shot of the artwork that she views. She expresses disappointment in one particular painting, as it is ‘melancholy’ and therefore to her mind not expressive or indicating a positive view of the future. The program also tracks a young girl ‘Iona’ as she moves through the gallery, and the voiceover notes that the subject ma�er of several works touch upon her love of animals and her vocational plans. Later several party members extol their ‘excitement’ about particular paintings to the off-camera interviewer. These male viewers are however not shown in contemplation. Admi�edly, the insights offered by the female viewers are rather superficial commentary on subject ma�er, but the program implies that the female gaze constitutes the moment of socialist aesthetic experience.

Fig. 5.1 ‘Prisma: VI. Deutsche Kunstausstellung in Dresden’ Program, broadcast Nov. 23, 1967; Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv Babelsberg

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A 1967 program investigates challenges facing docents and art educators in making artworks accessible to layman museum visitors. Again, a female mediator for the socialist public is presented. The show follows the young and vivacious Frau Gabriele Jahr as she leads groups of visitors through the ‘Sixth German Art Exhibition.’ (Fig. 5.1) The television reporter asks her how the young visitors to these exhibitions might be encouraged to develop more of an interest in art. The woman complains that more pedagogical effort needs to be made to engage them. Some visitors reveal that they have never previously been in an art museum. Presumably to get at unfiltered and more honest reactions, a hidden camera is then taken though the galleries to investigate the problem of visitor disinterest, and various student groups fidget, look bored, or discuss the artworks. A university professor is then interviewed regarding her relationship to visual art and the issue of creativity. Li�le is said about socialist content of the art in this program; the program rather seems geared to convince school teachers and parents of the importance of a connection to visual art. The program suggests that if intellectuals find aesthetic experience useful, so should the average television viewer. The theme of this early East German program is the problem of access to art’s meaning, and aesthetic experience is again mediated and enacted by women. East German television-art programs therefore made clear that visual art should enrich the life of the layman, and they repeatedly imply that women are major mediators of aesthetic experience in the GDR, and not male art critics. There is no parallel to this pa�ern in Western television. In contrast, televised artists’ interviews on East German television identified art production as an exclusively male domain. These interviews reinforced the reputations of high-ranking painter/bureaucrats such as Grundig, Si�e and Bernhard Heisig. Pronouncements on the socialist intentions of artists are a mainstay of coverage of the televised Dresden reports well into the 1980s, o�en involving a staged declaration of ‘Volksverbundenheit’, or partnership with the working class. Si�e proclaims ‘I assert myself as a socialist’ when he is

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interviewed before his paintings in the 1972 exhibition. Artists are asked to comment on visitors’ reactions to their artworks, or to discuss their art with them on camera (the case in the 1972 program). The artist-profile was another mainstay of East German television, and increasingly so in the GDR’s last decade. Picasso (1973, 1981), Si�e (1978), Heisig (1974), Arno Mohr (1977), Gerhard Altenbourg (1990), Tübke (1980, 1989), and Bert Heller (1978) all had long profile programs devoted to them. The profile kept to certain conventions: the artist is first shown in the creative act, at the easel or in the studio. ‘Profile’ films feature relatives or neighbours of the artists, particularly of those deceased, who offer details of the artist’s everyday life and who in actuality say nothing regarding the artworks themselves. No art professionals are interviewed. These programs then presented very banal information to the viewer as somehow relevant to the art in question. Particularly in the ‘80s the profile programs become completely apolitical in that they make no mention of the socialist goals or identity of the artist, nor of any politics whatsoever. O�entimes shots of the local landscape of the artist’s village or city alternate with personal reminiscences. Finally the profile is punctuated with shots of several different paintings by the artist, some presented in more detail than others and, if the artist is alive, he takes questions from an interviewer in his studio. These profile programs unequivocally establish art making as an exclusively male domain in the GDR, and suggest that artists led conventional lives in the socialist state and that their labour and products didn’t differ much from those produced by other socialist workers. East German television made contemporary artworks accessible by means of soundbites and superficial examinations of the artist’s life, even at the cost of lessening the significance of specific artworks and indeed of art itself. The 45-minute television ‘profile’, like interviews with artists in the galleries of the Dresden exhibitions, implied that the most important source of meaning for contemporary art is to be found in the subjective claims, intentions and statements of the male artist. This investing of authority in the voice and body

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of the artist himself was another strategy towards rendering visual art completely accessible and familiar to the public. This presentation of the artist further made the voice of any art critic or expert superfluous. In a late variation on this convention a 1989 program titled ‘At home with Willi Si�e’ combined the formats of interview, coffee klatsch and studio visit. Even when art historians wrote artist profile programs, as is the case with a 1978 program on Si�e by the art historian Hermann Raum, Raum never appears on camera. The televised East German artist was also a bureaucrat/ artist the system had already ve�ed, and other artists were marginalized. In 1977 the Dresden exhibition program featured sculptures by the neo-constructivist Hermann Glöckner, which the voiceover claimed ‘…challenge and ask questions of the viewer’. The program does not offer visitor reactions to Glöckner’s art nor the comments of the artist. Glöckner was never the subject of a television ‘profile’ broadcast. It is implied that Glöckner’s work is almost without meaning. In their celebration of artists like Si�e who were already ve�ed by the state bureaucracy, the profile programs reasserted the patriarchical basis of state power and provided evidence that the state art bureaucracy worked effectively in fostering ‘excellence’ in art. Of all its conventions, the most interesting but short-lived genre of East German art broadcasting was the so-called ‘polemic’ program. In collectivizing the moment of aesthetic experience through group discussion, this program destabilized the gendered division of labour that was otherwise pursued by East German art broadcasting. These discussion-oriented programs returned to the directives outlined in the Bi�erfeld conference of 1959 and that urged artists to work closely with and for working collectives. A 1966 program features members of the VBK (German Artists’ Union); another ‘observes’ the discussions of the jury for the Dresden exhibition of 1967. One program featured well-known writers Christa Wolf, Herrmann Kant, Paul Wiens and others addressing the question, ‘How can art and literature help with the construction of socialism?’22 A 1978 a program from Neubrandenburg documented the

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commissions process and recorded negotiations and discussions between hired artists, architects and other party officials (‘Wohnungsbaukombinat’) in charge of a Pla�enbau, the largescale public housing projects of the GDR.23 The key point of discussion of Bi�erfeld-connected television in East Germany was the tie to the people established by the art in question. A main focus of a 1966 ‘polemic’ program was the extent of the Volksverbundenheit of Si�e’s painting Leuna 21, which the program announced was the ‘highpoint’ of the exhibition ‘Wir Lieben das Leben’ at the Neue Berliner Galerie marking the twentieth anniversary of the founding of the SED. The almost comical title of this exhibition (‘We love life’) connected it to the Soviet-designed ‘peace movement’ that sought to distinguish the humanist and ‘life-loving’ Warsaw Pact countries from NATO’s obsessive concern with weapons deployment. Si�e’s ‘counterrevolutionary’ history painting presents the worker’s strike and armed uprising of 1921 at the ‘Leuna Works’ factory in the state of Sachsen Anhalt, a key moment of recovery for the German Communist Party a�er the debacle of the failed 1919 revolution. Si�e’s painting is part of the SED’s program of monumentalizing of the site of the Leuna uprising and of establishing historical martyrs for the SED. Although Ernst Thälmann remained the most important GDR martyr, the SED reserved a special place for the armed resistance of the working class at Leuna. The state added markers to the gravestone on the site that Thälmann had dedicated to the fallen workers in 1927. (Apparently the SED also supported the reconstruction of the ‘tank train’ built by workers during the siege in March 1921, although the tank was not used in actual ba�le with state police; the tank is visible in Si�e’s painting.) Si�e’s painting established the historical roots of the SED in the Leuna uprising and enshrined the communist martyrs who had died there. The ‘Polemik um Willi Si�e’s Leuna 21’ program was broadcast on the evening of June 7, 1966. It presented the critical judgment of art as a collective process within socialism, but at the same time, this ‘open’ process consolidated the power of the state’s bureaucratic bodies. The ‘polemic’ program therefore

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demonstrated the authority and efficiency of the GDR’s cultural bureaucracy. It further established Si�e as a youthful but central figure in the Artist’s Union—he would go on to be president of the organization for over a decade—and a major artist of note in East Germany. Still, the 1966 program demonstrates that differences of opinion and a degree of openness had taken hold in the Artists’ Union in the wake of ‘Prague Spring’. The program explicitly rejects the ‘isolation of the artist within the socialist state’ (as a voiceover states in the broadcast) and emphasizes the importance of Si�e’s painting as a ‘thematic painting of socialism’. The program perhaps dangerously opens the meaning of socialist art to instability and collective contestation in deemphasizing the authority of the artist in fixing meaning for visual art. Critical statements on Si�e’s painting by the sculptor Jürgen Voisky and the Dresden painter Eva Schulze-Knabe open the program. Both artists mention the failings and ‘inaccessibility’ of Si�e’s painting. The motif of the ‘tank train’ is praised but several discussants return to the central, three-headed figure of the painting as an unrealistic ‘problem’, one commenting on how it fails to adhere to the ‘proportionally correct’ standards of Realism. Dr. Ingrid Beyer, a bureaucrat tied to the Central Commi�ee of the SED, defends the complexity of the symbols in Si�e’s ‘demanding’ composition. She suggests that the lesson of history is itself a theme of the painting, and that the people must work toward such lessons. Lea Grundig states that the painting is an ‘event’, and forwards new notions of the tie to the socialist public, a view echoed by Halle art historian Wolfgang Hü� at the conclusion of the program. Si�e somewhat stonily thanks the group for public discussion, and in response to the issue of Realism, notes that he met with survivors of the uprising at Leuna and included what he learned in the painting. In closing the discussion he reminds the group that his painting is also tied to other paintings within art history, which he implies is an issue that should be as important as the tie to the public in socialist modernism.

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The clearly unscripted disagreements in this program around the notion of Realism within socialist painting revisit certain aspects of the East German Picasso debate ten years earlier. Clearly the tension between East German Realism and modernism had not been resolved. In an article in Neues Deutschland, central commi�ee member Alfred Kurella dismissed Beyer and Hü�’s ‘fawning songs of praise’ for Si�e, saying that his ‘a�empt’, as well as that by Werner Tübke (presumably in his painting Lebenserinnerungen des Dr. jur. Schulze III of 1965, a sensation of the district VBK exhibition in Leipzig and discussed in Chapter 3), must be recognized as failures and as a mistaken path away from socialism.24 The open disagreement within the SED that was televised on the ‘Polemik’ program, put party officials on the a�ack. It is perhaps not surprising that this program format was not continued on East German television. By the late ‘80s these television program conventions seemed to fade. The final broadcast of the Dresden exhibition in 19871988 was in a magazine format. Photographs from the opening feature Willi Si�e, president of the VBK, greeting Honecker in front of a cheering crowd, but the central commi�ee chairman is not filmed viewing the exhibition. This final broadcast evidenced an open ambivalence toward the Dresden exhibition and explicitly acknowledged developments in West German art. One of the two artists interviewed in the Dresden galleries (Wieland Förster and Peter Makulis) notes that the exhibition contains ‘traditional, not experimental’ artworks, and the voice-over admits the show is a ‘ma�er of taste’ and is ‘not spectacular’; nothing is said about socialist content. A sculpture titled Portrait of Joseph Beuys is presented in the report. A female painter, Angela Hampel, is the subject of the artist’s interview for the first time. Portraits by other women artists, some of them Czech, are featured on camera. The broadcast makes clear that women had finally crossed the gender barrier of art production in the GDR. Yet in comparing aspects of Western visual culture to East German art displayed at one of the most venerated venues in the GDR, the program seems to admit to the public that the East German art is not as impressive.

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Modernist Interventions East German television generally kept to the notion that film could represent visual art transparently and accurately for the viewer, or that it could be purely ‘documentary’, to use Kracauer’s category. There were however imaginative and exceptional ‘experimental’ moments on East German television that questioned these conventions and assumptions. Die Überlebenden (The Survivors), an interpretive, montagebased film about a Si�e painting of the same title by Heinz Seibert and Peter Voigt, the la�er an editor for the famed East German documentary filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, was broadcast in East Germany in May of 1964. Voigt used montage editing and film clips taken from Eisenstein and other sources to underscore the GDR founding myth of ‘anti-fascism’ and to elevate the martyrs of communism. Almost thirty years later, an instalment of the music video program for teenagers, ‘Elf 99’ is the stage for a performance by Erhard Monden, and marks the debut of performance art on East German television. The Monden program deals critically with the operations of television itself. The short film The Survivors is a dramatic, interpretive film concerning the meaning of a history painting. Si�e’s diptych (Fig. 5.2) presents three bandaged Wehrmacht soldiers si�ing in the snow above a second canvas that depicts three gruesomely sca�ered bodies. In his composition Si�e focuses on two sheets of paper that he centres in the top panel and that bear the words ‘Nationalkommi�ee Freies Deutschland’. A�er a long shot of the painting, Voigt juxtaposes details of the painting with monologues delivered to the camera by agit-prop theatre actors from the troupe ‘Red Star’. (Fig. 5.3) The actors’ speeches are delivered directly to the camera or to each other. In these monologues the actors take on the roles of the characters within the painting. Their anti-illusionistic, modernist style of acting points to the techniques of Brechtian theatre and avoids any trappings of a traditional tableau vivant: the actors do not wear traditional costumes, and they pointedly address the camera.

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Fig. 5.2 Willi Si�e, Die Überlebenden (The Survivors), 1964; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Voigt’s film cuts between Si�e’s painting, the actors’ monologues, and montage segments comprised of clips from Eisenstein’s Potemkin and from documentary World-WarTwo footage, some of which depicts soldiers preparing for or in ba�le, or airborne shots of ruined cities. Si�e’s painting memorializes the founders of the National Commi�ee for a Free Germany, an anti-fascist and communist group of German soldiers who were Soviet prisoners of war. The NKFD was another historical anchor for the GDR’s foundational myth of the resistant anti-fascism of the German Communist Party (the proto-SED). Voigt’s film sets 1939 as the founding date of the commi�ee, although other sources point to a later and more likely date of 1942. Voigt cuts from statements by the actors to

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a documentary film segment of a meeting of the NKFD where German soldiers sign a petition, presumably calling for Hitler to surrender to the U.S.S.R. Given Si�e’s painting and the actions of those in this meeting, the viewer must presume that many of these participants died in captivity or were executed by the Soviets or the Nazis. Statements by the actors in the film— ‘this was not our war but the war of the ruling class, the military elite’; ‘I did not sacrifice my family, my family was taken from me’— communicate the view that the key conflict of the Third Reich was neither Hitler’s imperialistic expansionism nor his persecution of Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’, but rather class warfare. The central message of Si�e’s painting, underscored by Voigt’s film, is that the German working class was the true victim of Hitler, as exemplified by working-class martyrs of the NKFD. Over a montage sequence of scenes from Potemkin, the film concludes with the actors’ voice-over that relates the story of a Soviet woman whose husband and son are killed before her for having sung the ‘Internationale’. Voigt’s film culminates with the anthem itself; this narrative heightens the ‘lesson’ of

Fig. 5.3 ‘Die Überlebenden’ Program, broadcast May 5, 1964; ‘Roter Stern’ troupe actor; Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv Babelsberg

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communist martyrdoms, shared with Soviet culture, as the history of the recent German past. In this short film Voigt uses montage editing and Brechtian acting techniques, both hallmarks of a distinctively socialist modernist aesthetics, to interpret a figurative oil painting. I could find no other dramatic enactments of paintings that were broadcast on East German television, and one can conclude that so this film did not lead to a new East German television genre. Voigt’s powerful reading of Si�e’s painting, that elaborated upon Si�e’s flawed reading of German history, reasserted the language and medium of film as a truly socialist art form. Voigt uses the power of montage—Eisenstein’s socialist legacy—to interpret Si�e’s painting. His film thereby criticized the state’s singleminded insistence that the traditional mediums of painting and sculpture exclusively carried all possibilities of socialist visual culture within them. It reminded East Germans of socialist and avant-garde filmic techniques that the GDR had le� behind. Voigt’s film foregrounds the role of film itself in constructing the interpretation of visual art, not simply in ‘documenting’ it. This critical understanding of the power of montage and of film was lost in later films on art on East German television. The 1991 post-reunification appearance of the performance artist Erhard Monden on the teenage program ‘Elf 99’ critiqued the GDR convention of the artist-profile and its production of the male artist-genius. In the early ‘80s Monden established himself as the enfant terrible of the underground performance scene (I discuss his performances in Chapter 4). He also steeped himself in the actions of Joseph Beuys and his notion of ‘social sculpture’. In his performance on the program, Monden stood in a jumpsuit before his series of incomplete, photo-based, and airbrushed, self-portraits; the stencils he used to create the images were still affixed to several of them. A�er removing his shoe, he placed his bare foot on a canvas positioned on the floor, and traced its outline with an airbrush. As the moderator of the program approached him and asked the first question in a concluding ‘interview’, Monden responded by drinking water from a glass and gargling with it, then repeated the phrases, ‘to the destruction of the ego’, and ‘it destroys the ego’. He

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then turned to respond to the interviewer’s request to define ‘Aktionskunst’ (performance art), whereas he had in fact just demonstrated it. Monden’s performance foregrounds the process of the artist’s self-presentation, which is always part of performance practice. In staging himself in proximity to his self-portrait series, Monden makes clear that the (self)-construction of performance, achieved in the artist’s actual physical presence, parallels the representations of the self achieved in other media such as painting, photography, or a videotape of a performance that is broadcast on television. In devoting most of his performance to the fashioning of a representation—in this case, an actual indexical imprint of his body on a canvas—Monden heightens the viewer’s awareness of the relation between the artist/body and the two representations of the artist that confront the viewer, the televised image and the painted one. He positions himself as the subject of both of those representations, as the creating subject who also controls this representation of the self. Monden’s short statements refuse to communicate the ‘artistcreator’ as a coherent personality, something that television variety programs and the East German artist-profile program regularly purported to offer. Monden appears to provide himself and his performance to the television camera but his statements imply the dismantling of a singular, coherent ‘ego’ or artistpersona. When called upon to speak, he refused in using his voice to deliver a different series of sounds through gargling, a Fluxus-inspired moment. This does not immediately offer a verbal ‘explanation’ of his own art or life. Monden refuses to deliver himself up as a standard product of television. When the interviewer asks about the boundary between performance and charlatanry, Monden urges the viewer to think about their creative energies within the pursuit of social sculpture (a category Monden drew from Joseph Beuys). In his appearance Monden wrests back the control of the East German artist’s own image. He also critiques the product-personas of television and asks the viewer to channel their efforts into a greater social good. In suggesting a ‘destruction’ of a singular and coherent

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artist-product that is delivered to the viewer, Monden moved beyond the work of Joseph Beuys. Beuys’ actions usually and problematically staged an elaborate and coherent persona for viewers. He therefore could be smoothly integrated into the functioning of the mass media, which Beuys never a�acked but instead used to disseminate his work and ideas. Monden suggests that the production of social sculpture might best take place when the viewer thinks more critically about the artistpersona product they are accustomed to consuming and instead work toward social change. Art as West German Television: Artists’ Film and Video ‘As I see it the only chance for visual art is the conscious use of the medium of television.’25 – Gerry Schum Visual art programming on West German television exploded in 1965, and continued to grow through the late 1980s. The increase in the number of art programs has been linked to the addition of a third channel by the state in 1964; the new channel diversified programs on art from the special-program format that had been prevalent in the ‘50s to those in a magazine format or in a series. In the next years the ARD and ZDF also shi�ed to the new format.26 The marked rise in reporting on contemporary art on television in West Germany is also linked to the new format of the television magazine, which presented a variety of short segments on different subjects within one broadcast. In a kind of parallel to journalistic television ‘news’ programs, the magazine highlighted new cultural developments and contemporary art: several exhibitions, artists, or even performance events, might be included within one magazine program, united by a voice-over commentary which not only described but also critiqued the subject of the segment. West German television’s focus on Documenta in Kassel added to the intense media focus on contemporary art production. Beginning with the two programs on the exhibition in 1959 and reaching a high point in 1987 with 31 broadcasts devoted to the exhibition, West German television covered Documenta more extensively

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than any other exhibition, and it remains the most heavily mediated exhibition of the postwar era.27 Media scholar Martina Dobbe has described the shi� to ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’ art television programs in West Germany, where television studios invited artists to take over the actual production of programs involving their art. These network/artist collaborations began in 1968. The U.S. station WGBH in Boston opened its facilities to artists in the same year, and WNET in New York followed; these stations effectively functioned as patrons for video artists in providing facilities and material (to Nam June Paik and Ed Emshwiller, for example). Network directors however continued to ‘document’ Happenings and performance art for magazine programs. Performance artists, even the video artists who focused on video performance, had considerably less freedom on West German television. Their work continued to be represented for them on television with at times disastrous results. West German television was far less generous in its coverage of almost all variations of performance practice. The privileging of film and video art by West German networks and directors is in keeping with the West German enthusiasm for—if not fetishisation of—the ‘newness’ of media technology as a cornerstone of the ‘Wirtscha�swunder’ economy. As was the case in the U.S., video practice was quickly institutionalized in West Germany, on state-run television, in key exhibitions including ‘Prospect ‘71 Projection’ in Düsseldorf, ‘Projekt 74’ at the Cologne Kunstverein, and in the ‘media Documenta’ of 1977, and in the establishing of the world’s first video collection, the Video-Forum at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (established 1972). A first generation of media artists took on television as a subject around 1960 in works that consisted mostly of the actual physical destruction of the physical television set, in a parallel to high modernist views of television. Günter Uecker and the Fluxus artists Paik and Wolf Vostell all worked in this direction.28 In 1963 Vostell and Paik began to produce works that distorted the actual broadcast image through the use of magnets. As the electronic technology of television was not available to artists, this was as

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far as they could go. This aggressive posture toward the receiver unit certainly communicated dissatisfaction. West German television seemed to take a liking to these early and violent media sculptures, which appeared on the program ‘Flood of Nails’, part of the ‘gallery d’ on the HRF (Frankfurt), which in 1963 broadcast a nailing performance featuring television sets by Günter Uecker.29 A ZDF Düsseldorf broadcast in December, 1964 featured Vostell ‘dé-collaging’ a television set as part of ‘Die Drehscheibe’, a performance that included Beuys and Bazon Brock.30 This situation changed quickly due to the availability of portable video cameras by 1965 and the fact that networks in the U.S. and West Germany had opened their facilities to artists. ‘Black Gate Cologne’, the earliest broadcast collaboration between the ‘Zero’ artist O�o Piene, Aldo Tambellini, and WDR television director Wibke von Bonin, aired in 1968 and purported to ‘report’ on a piece Black Air that had been performed at the Gate Theatre in New York. The artists and a team of fi�een WDR employees reportedly edited the renamed Black Gate Cologne, filmed in the WDR studio on two occasions with two different audiences, ‘for a week of 10 hour days’.31 Much of the film focused on the camera’s and the audiences’ interaction with Piene’s kinetic light sculptures and with Tambellini’s projected films which included documentary World-War-Two footage, a boxing match, and an excerpt from the CBS news, ‘The shooting of Robert Kennedy’ (which had taken place that year). The film ‘Black Gate Cologne’ seems curiously disconnected, as it simultaneously foregrounded the ‘sculptural’ and spatial experience of light observed by a viewer as well as light’s constitutive role in violent mass culture images. The nature of Tambellini’s critique of journalistic television is not clear. Von Bonin went on to become, with Go�fried Sello, one of the most prolific West German television directors of art programs of the ‘70s and ‘80s. Although she spoke in glowing and even utopian terms about the collaboration with the two artists, von Bonin and the WDR never repeated the project, as it was expensive and a�racted few viewers. Piene and Tambellini participated in WGBH’s The Medium is the Medium, broadcast in 1969 and that

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also featured Alan Kaprow, James Seawright, Nam June Paik and Thomas Tadlock. Therefore artist/director collaborations continued with the help of American public television stations. Gerry Schum’s programs with the SFB (Sender Freies Berlin) in West Berlin were breakthroughs for ‘television as art’, since he retained complete control over the production and collaborated directly with several artists. Although he worked extensively in film, Schum is also credited with introducing video art practice to West German television. Trained in film schools in Munich and Berlin, Schum began as an arts-programs director, and like von Bonin produced art films for the WDR (1968), although he quickly broke with this type of film production. Schum’s thirty-minute ‘Television Gallery Gerry Schum’ was televised twice: on April 15, 1969 on the SFB and on November 30, 1970, on the SWF Baden-Baden channel under the title ‘Video Galerie Gerry Schum’.32 Schum’s short-lived program/gallery rejected what he called ‘the triangle studio/gallery/collector’, as well as the museum-institution, as aspects of Western consumerism. Schum (tele)envisioned art ‘objects’ and not ‘art possessions’ beyond borders and beyond the ideological intercession of these art-institutional systems and markets. Schum introduced each broadcast with a critical statement. By the final broadcast in 1970 he subtly shi�ed the emphasis of his project to address the ‘medium of television’ and its points of connection with film and with art ‘objects’. Ironically Schum began the first television gallery with a traditional art gallery ‘opening’ on a television sound stage. Even in his ‘gallery’s’ realization as a television broadcast, Schum clearly thought that the trappings of the physical space of the gallery needed to be imported in order for it to be understood as art by the television viewer. However in transplanting the accoutrement of the art institution he aimed to critique into the institution of television, Schum returned to the pundit/galleryvisit convention of ‘50s art programming. The 1969 West Berlin broadcast featured a series of films by Schum himself, all of Land Art works in North America and in Europe by eight artists: Richard Long, Barry Flanagan, Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Marinus Boezem, Jan Dibbets, Walter de Maria and

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Michael Heizer, who, as Dorine Mignon reports, withdrew his film from the series a�er the 1969 broadcast.33 Schum envisioned these films as documents, interpretations and artworks in their own right, conceived specifically ‘either for the medium of film or for television’.34 As Schum explained in his introduction to the program, he realized that ‘today the larger part of our visual experience happens in reproduction, and in filmic and photographic reproduction’.35 This was particularly the case with land art ‘objects’ that because of their remote locations could o�entimes not be experienced outside of reproduction. Thus Dutch artist Jan Dibbets, in his work 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, marks the Dutch coast with an irregular trapezoidal shape with the objective of recording it photographically as an exact square, a process that reveals the irregular distortions that a ‘natural’ and aesthetically pleasing perspectival view carries with it. Schum’s film on de Maria’s piece in the Mohave Desert, Two Lines Three Circles, underscores the collaborative and intermedial nature of Schum’s films for the Fernsehgalerie. Schum’s camera placement, lens adjustments and camera movement are integral to each piece and to each film. By means of the film camera’s placement, Schum’s ‘correction’ completes Dibbet’s piece on the Dutch coast. Schum films de Maria securing rope in the desert landscape and following the ‘lines’ they create toward the horizon. In the film sequence the ‘three circles’ then follow; three 360-degree pan shots of the entire desert landscape are realized through Schum’s slow rotation of the film camera on its axis and the work is ‘completed’. The piece coheres as an ‘object’ somewhere in the coming together of several mediums: film, drawing—inasmuch as de Maria places two ‘lines’ in the landscape and follows them—and in the moment of its broadcast as television.36 Schum commented on the intermediality and the ‘communicative’ mass-media quality that distinguished the new ‘objects’ of the Fernsehgalerie. While on the one hand many of Schum’s ideas connect to notions of the ‘dematerialization’ of art advanced by a new direction in art of the time that has been called ‘conceptual art’, and also anticipate conceptual art’s mode

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of ‘institutional critique’ of the ‘70s, the three-way intermedial link the Fernsehgalerie established between a ‘dematerialized’ artwork and the mediums of film and television, not video, appears to have no precedent. Schum read the following to the camera as his introduction to the West Berlin broadcast: ‘Communication with a larger audience through publications or television instead of private art ownership that blocks further publication of artworks. […] Communication by means of art objects replaces art ownership’.37 Schum’s new art ‘object’ refused the consumption-oriented object as it is normatively passed through the studio/gallery/collector triangle. Schum noted that artists’ increasing use of film and photography was a response to the nature of visual experience in 1969. The artwork migrates from a ‘real object of departure’ and is ‘stored’ in its photographic reproduction as itself an artwork. This la�er work is communicated through further publication or through television.38 For the second ‘video gallery’ broadcast and using the journalistic mise-en-scène of news broadcasting, Schum alone faced the camera behind a desk. The camera pulls back to reveal another camera, thereby focusing on the technical apparatus of television production itself. In the ‘videogalerie’ program Schum adopted the magazine format of West German television and presented a series of films. He then recalibrated his performance and the broadcast structure to conform to the conventions of broadcast television. The 1970 program featured a series of twenty films ranging in length from five minutes (Beuys) to thirty seconds (Hamish Fulton). Schum vowed that the Baden-Baden broadcast would not repeat the main ‘problem’ of the Land Art broadcast, the distraction of viewers and critics from the works’ more significant challenges due to aesthetically pleasing landscapes. Identifications would focus on ‘pure gesture, an a�itude, or simply a statement by an artist’; would feature ‘film reduced in favour of the essence of an object’; and would present the artwork with its producer, the artist, so that his alienation from his work, enacted by the art market, might be overcome through ‘identification’ and visualization of the idea.39 The aspect of Schum’s camera as a collaborator disappears from

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the Identifications films; the camera position does not vary and with no camera movement, the films take on the static qualities of pure documentation. Like ‘conceptual art’ from the U.S., where ‘the idea as work of art, (is) manifested through many possibilities of communication’, the new art of Schum’s ‘Video Galerie’ would, through television broadcasting and ‘video recording’, make clear the three-part unity—idea, visualization, and the ‘artist who invents the idea’—as the object. By 1970 Schum understood the television broadcast as a necessary feature of conceptual art. Daniel Buren’s contribution in particular both reinforced and cast some doubt on Schum’s definition. His film appropriated the SWF logo for ‘technical difficulties’ for 48 seconds, but distorted the icon by cu�ing it into a number of vertical stripes. The film was only shown during the 1970 broadcast, as Buren immediately withdrew it from the series as it was then sold by Konrad Fischer and Schum in his videogalerie schum in Düsseldorf in 1971. Buren’s entire oeuvre avoided ‘identification’ in order to silently occupy certain public spaces usually controlled either by mass media’s corporate concerns (advertising), or in this case, the television apparatus. In presenting the works anonymously, Buren shi�ed the entire focus of the work to these spaces of the public sphere by interrupting their typical use, and allowed the viewer to both see and imagine that space used for something else. Anonymity also became a strategy of an entire direction of conceptual art practice. However in limiting the film to be screened only once, Buren makes the chronological and unrepeatable moment of television broadcast (that day in 1970, on a specific southern German channel) the basis of the work. More than any other artist in the Identifications program, Buren is interested in the moment of broadcast. It is difficult to imagine a more crystalline realization of Schum’s communicated object. Given the intermediality of Schum’s ‘objects’ and the way he placed television at the very centre of art practice, it is difficult to reconcile a recent claim that Schum’s films realize a high modernist object, that emphasizes the medium of film and his ‘minimal’ intervention in presenting—transparently?—a ‘singular’ art object, ‘…build(ing) an imaginary object in the

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mind of the spectator that is both self-sufficient and unlike any other, and that cannot be conceived apart from the specific medium of its realization’.40 From its inception the Schum film was to be intermedial, somewhere between film, object, and television, and only to be completed at the moment it is disseminated via television. Schum wrote: ‘In regard to the possibilities of communication of art objects or art ideas, our situation is possibly analogous to that of literature before the invention of Gutenberg’s press…As of today artists have not succeeded in finding a modern system of communication. As I see it the only chance for visual art is the conscious use of the medium of television’.41 The weaving of narratives of loss and mourning around Schum’s ‘failed’ television project also seems to me to be entirely too quick, as is casting blame on Schum himself for realizing films that were not consistently ‘well conceived’ as modernist films. As the phrase goes, Schum operated under other criteria, which insisted that broadcasting, or the medium of television, must become an integral part of new art if the la�er was to survive.42 Similar broadcast-centred work was simultaneously pursued in the U.S. In the same year as Schum’s Video Galerie program, WGBH broadcast Paik’s four-hour ‘Beatles from Beginning to End’, and in 1975 WNET began ‘VTR’ (video and television review), hosted by Russell Connor, which would have 50 broadcasts over the years. The American programs marked the total shi� to video by a wide range of artists. By 1977 Wulf Herzogenrath, the curator for Documenta that year, foregrounded video practice at the exhibition and as part of the television programming that typically reported it. His eight-part series, ‘Video-Kunst auf der Documenta’, was broadcast each week over the course of two months during the exhibition and on three different channels throughout West Germany. The eight programs totalled almost six hours of single-channel video, and presented 28 works by 20 artists included in Documenta. Herzogenrath appears as a pundit throughout the series. He spends most of the first instalment, ‘Video was ist das?’ demonstrating equipment for videotaping, the formal elements of feedback, and the blue box effect. The first program goes

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into a magazine segment tying video technology to its reallife applications. A short segment of corporate trainers making use of videotaping and playback demonstrates video’s feature of simultaneous playback—‘to see right away and redo’—as a function that leads to improvements in the corporate workplace. Herzogenrath profiles the ‘Bornheimer Video Werkstadt’, a ‘selfhelp’ group of unemployed and self-trained video cameramen who are, through their familiarity with video, now retrained for such corporate work. Herzogenrath introduces video as a pervasive, corporate West German technology that can affect the lives of almost every (West) German. In concluding with excerpts from works by Hermine Freed and Emshwiller, Herzogenrath connects video to both high art and everyday life beyond broadcast television. Herzogenrath’s 1977 series had the admirable educational goal of familiarizing West Germans with the new technology and new medium of video. It also rendered public the normally hidden technological processes of television editing and transmission and made new media art more accessible to the West German public. The series reveals Herzogenrath’s general discomfort with the body-focused direction of video performance, where artists used the video camera primarily to position their own bodies as media images, particularly the video performance by women that touched upon feminist issues. Some of Herzogenrath’s programs focus on single artists, like Emshwiller, Paik, and Peter Campus, none of whom worked in video performance. Of the 20 artists Herzogenrath broadcast, only a few were women: Charlo�e Moorman, for example, appears largely as an actor in the program on Paik and comments on his art. Herzogenrath separates Joan Jonas’ work from a feminist context by presenting it between several other works in the broadcast, ‘Personal experience of reality’. The program ‘As They See Themselves: three female artists’ is among the most interesting and difficult Herzogenrath instalments. The three artists, Rebecca Horn, Fredericke Petzold and Ulrike Rosenbach, are all involved in ‘performance for the video camera’. Herzogenrath presents these important early feminist pieces without titles (Horn’s Berlin Exercises

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of 1974-5, which get the most air-time, is titled incorrectly), and he makes no mention of feminism as a philosophy. In the moment these works were broadcast in 1977, they resonated with every image of the female body as it was unceasingly paraded in advertisements or across a gamut of other television programming that presented that body as a sexualized object. Horn’s film exercises follow the event structure of Fluxus performance, but this is lost on the viewer given that Herzogenrath has edited out the instructions that begin each ‘exercise’. Horn manipulates various body extension sculptures or tools, including two scissors that she uses to cut her own hair shorter and shorter as she stares confrontationally into the camera. Petzold’s Die neue leibha�ige Zeichensprache (The new embodied sign language, 1973-76, approx. 120 minutes) is drastically edited down to short, 30 second excerpts. Petzold’s ghostly black and white images have the quality of a silent film; each segment (‘Mouthwork’; ‘Thighwork’, ‘Genitalswork’) is a study of a particular female body part and its relation to the video camera lens. In presenting her own body as a wholly disembodied and primitive film image, Petzold gauges what the slightest changes in movement of specific female body parts might communicate to the camera. The slow images, while rendered grotesque through black lipstick, for example, are immediately familiar to a film and television viewer. Petzold reconstructs the codes at work in presenting the mediated female object. It is difficult for the viewer to enter the deeper levels of meaning in the work as it was broadcast, since its pacing and analytic quality are destroyed in editing it to the length of a television commercial. Rosenbach’s 1975 work You Shouldn’t Believe I’m an Amazon (Glauben Sie nicht, das ich eine Amazone bin) is presented as an excerpt. In it, Rosenbach, clad in white against a white background, positions herself before the camera, then prepares and fires a succession of arrows directly into the camera lens; the only sound is the firing of the arrow and the tap as it bounces off the camera. Key portions of this 15-minute piece, which include the reproduced face of a fi�eenth-century Madonna by Stefan Lochner blended over Rosenbach’s own face, and

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that becomes penetrated by arrows, is not shown. Her examination in this work of the female image caught between the extremes of the passive child/woman and of violence is lost. Rosenbach had from the start referred to this work and its initial performance at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris as ‘feminist’.43 The 1977 television viewer gets no help in accessing the powerful critique of West German consumerism these films and videos presented concerning images of women. In grouping them only as ‘women artists’ and not underscoring the deeply political nature of the female subject in control of the female object, compounded with various technical blunders and ruthless editing (of which several male video artists of the series were spared), Herzogenrath blunted their feminist critique. A similar dulling and outright mockery of the critical force of performance art also took place in its televised presentation from its beginnings in the mid-‘60s. Most disappointing is that as late as 1977, even a presumably progressive West German curator could not reckon with the challenge of a performancebased feminist art. Performance Art as West German Television As I discussed in Chapter 4, live performance art, revived as ‘Fluxus’, ‘Happenings’ or ‘actions’, broke with the course of modern art beginning in the late ‘50s. West Germany became a major hub for performance art in the ‘60s, with Cage, Kaprow, Schneemann and Fluxus artists all performing in West German cities. Television cameras were quick to follow them, particularly Fluxus events that included German artists like Vostell and Beuys. West German television most o�en presented Fluxus performance. Fluxus concerts began to appear on television already with a report on the ‘Fluxus International Festspiele neuester Musik’ in Wiesbaden in 1962. A good number of Fluxus concerts and Happenings were covered on television in the key years 1964-5, including the ‘Festival of New Art’ at the Technical Academy in Aachen, Vostell’s Phenomena, the 24-hour Happening at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal, and several other performances by Beuys.

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The most important televised performance of the ‘60s in West Germany was the ‘Festival of New Art’ that took place in the university auditorium at the Technical University Aachen on June 20, 1964. The evening was arguably the first and perhaps only Fluxus concert given for a general, non-art and even immature public, in this case, for students working outside the disciplines of the fine arts. The concert descended into chaos because of continuing audience interference with the performances that culminated in a melee between artists and audience members, with police entering the auditorium and ending the event prematurely. Later two groups, one local and the other a student group, filed criminal lawsuits against AStA (the student government organization) and the artists, alleging ‘public nuisance’ and ‘defamation’, which went to trial that same year.44 Like earlier Fluxus concerts, ten artists shared equal billing for the event. Emme� Williams was the only American artist involved. It has been argued that one could therefore speak about this concert as an early and uniquely European interpretation of Fluxus.45 A representative of AstA together with Tomas Schmit invited the artists, Bazon Brock, Beuys, Eric Andersen, Williams, Stanley Brouwn, Henning Christiansen, Robert Filliou, Ludwig Gosewitz, Addi Køpke, and Vostell. According to the reconstructive account of Adam Oellers and Sibille Spiegel, it was a well-a�ended event. A number of amateurs filmed the event, and the WDR later used this material to edit together a sensational report which ran in the ‘Prisma des Westens’ program on September 7, 1964. Repeating the dismissals of the print media, the WDR program vindicated the violent actions of students and laid blame for the event with the artists.46 The date of the event, July 20, had been arbitrarily and clumsily set by the university and became a crucial factor. It is the date of the a�empted assassination of Hitler in 1944 and a milestone in the history of the resistance to fascism. Schmit apparently decided the date was a coincidence that some artist could chose to involve in their performance, as it referenced the Nazi past directly. However, there is no evidence that any coordinated planning or communication took place among the

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artists on this point.47 Nevertheless the date would force some of the artists to consider engaging the theme of the recent past or, to decide to focus on the structure and form of Fluxus, or their own line of performance practice, or to work somewhere between these two modes. This was clearly a deeply complex artistic decision. The evening was planned as a Fluxian simultaneous performance, where several pieces would be presented by different performers co-temporaneously. The reconstructed film is very chaotic, and it becomes difficult to distinguish performer’s voices from those of the audience or to follow the actions. Several artists made references to events of World War Two and the Third Reich in their pieces, including Vostell, Brock, Andersen and Christiansen, but the most telegenic of these were Vostell and Beuys. Beuys did not address the recent past directly in his performance until he was physically assaulted. The 1964 television report focused almost completely on these two artists. Vostell’s careful plans for his ‘Happening’-based performance solicited audience participation in queuing them with a blue light. Wearing a gun mask, Vostell flashed the light to signal ‘reflection’ on the part of audience members, who were then to knock on desktops, listen to their heartbeat, or whistle. Eight performers lined up on the stage, and at every whistle, they collapsed into a pile of yellow powder that had been spread on the stage. Vostell’s Happening examines the exercising of authority and makes the audience grapple with whether or not to take the role of ‘executioner’. The students however refused the moral dilemma entirely by blowing indiscriminately and continuously on the whistles. Vostell communicated his annoyance with their refusal to engage seriously with the performance.48 Another dimension of authoritarian control communicated in Vostell’s piece was someone walking a dog, presumably a guard dog, through the aisles; the students continually pushed the man to the ground. The television report represented the chaotic a�ermath of the Happening as the entire event, thereby ‘evidencing’ the charlatanry and failure of the art. At no point in the television

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presentation was it a�empted to understand Vostell’s intentions or his plans for the piece. Beuys’ actions were also covered on the television report, due simply to the fact that a student among the crowd that had flooded the stage—another refusal of the audience to respect the parameters of Fluxus and Happening—had physically a�acked him. Beuys shi�ed between very Fluxusoriented actions at the beginning of the evening, to a kind of object-making process on stage that had no connection with Fluxus and no precedent in his own performances. At first he sat at a piano on stage and prepared it in the Cagean manner, as he had done in two previous Fluxus concerts.49 He also appeared to play cards, showing some of them to the audience. The film shows that the trouble with the audience heightened during this second series of actions. Beuys stood at a hotplate at the edge of the stage, checking its heat, and proceeded to melt margarine to be placed in a box-shaped mould. The students then stormed him and one punched him repeatedly in the face.50 In the film Beuys is shown lunging to defend himself amongst a larger group of students. Others rush to stop the brawl, and the event was ended soon a�er. With a bloodied nose Beuys faced the cameras and raised a crucifix, which seems to have angered the audience further. The WDR segment concluded with a group interview of Brock, Beuys, Abolins, and Vostell. The entire interview scenario as it was staged by the WDR is suspect, as the questions posed by reporters to the artists and to Abolins place the interviewees into a defensive position. The interview had a castigating tone, of the variety that is exercised on children when they are asked what they have learned from their mistakes. Despite its condescension, Vostell and Beuys answered questions openly. Vostell pointed to the demands for participation that he had placed on the audience members and which may have led them into frustration. Beuys believed that the ‘aggression’ had been planned beforehand, but that the students had learned from their exposure to the performance. The last word belonged to Brock, who contributed a short film and statement. Seated before the camera, Brock tells the story of an infamous pirate

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Jack Cow who had captured another ship and demanded the sailors recite their names to him before they were cast out to sea. As the seated Brock told this story he lined up matches on his thigh, lit one and collected the others. The sailors stated their names and were banished one by one, but one stated ‘Jack Cow’. The pirate fled, scared away by the mention of his own name. Using banal materials, Brock’s performance points to the ‘inflammatory’ nature, in 1964, of even evoking the name of the Third Reich to the German public, as enough to make it flee in panic or to demand silence on the issue. In a brilliant gesture, Brock suggests that the German media and German public are those who need to learn from the Aachen performance. He also takes up the banal aspect of Fluxus (the matchsticks) combined with storytelling to deliver his critique. Brock used the same medium, performance, that the public had physically a�acked in the ‘Festival of New Art’, and that the media then ridiculed, to make his point. He thereby certainly rescues performance per se from any possible accusation that nonsense was its only content. As Helmut Herbst proves in his excellent 1981 documentary film, West German print and television media continued this tone of intolerance or ridicule in its programming on Fluxus and Happenings throughout the ‘60s.51 Thus while it is impressive that Fluxus received television coverage in West Germany, this fact by no means reveals a progressive a�itude on the part of television directors toward performance. West German television broadcast Wolf Vostell’s Happening Phenomena, which was staged before a small and enthusiastic audience of participants at the auto junkyard Sperber in the Sachsendamm in West Berlin on March 27, 1965, and sponsored by the Galerie René Block. This piece was generally critical of the tactics of American consumerism, and of the American military in the Vietnam War. Twelve artists including Hermann Nitsch, René Block, and art critic Peter Chotjewitz, participated in this ‘Happening’. The public was also invited to participate and to follow paths traced with strings into a number of ‘auto bodies’ where performers were located (o�en surrounded by American flags).

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Shots taken out of context from this Happening were shown on the UFA Wochenschau in the summer of 1965 on the SFB and NDR Hamburg52; Herbst’s film includes extended footage of Phenomena. At the start of the news magazine, a bemused voiceover intones, ‘We don’t understand this but…’, and proceeds to quote from Vostell’s published writings on the Happening form, particularly, on the use of improvisation, and banal objects and places. The radio music Vostell and others played at the junkyard is edited down on the soundtrack to vacillate in a silly way between opera and a commercial jingle, which is played over quick cuts to performers seated in abandoned cars and to paint being dumped on another participant. No activities are related thematically or to each other in the sequence, leaving the viewer to conclude there was no organization or indeed connection between these ‘silly’ events. No mention is made of the gallery involved, or of the painters who participated; thus the Happening is not presented as art. Vostell is interviewed seated in a car, but the voiceover leading into his statement says, ‘The artist and organizer of the event, Wolf Vostell, told us, full of self-confidence, the following…’, a mocking statement that undercuts Vostell’s eloquent comments therea�er on the convergence of art and life in the Happening. It is doubtful the viewer could have listened to his statement. The Happening’s political critique of militarism and consumerism was not addressed; instead the media focused on the incorporation of banal activities in Happenings as an offence to notions of high art. Clearly Happenings were an offence—they rejected the framework of the art gallery and the notion of the precious and eternal objet d’art—but this offensiveness had a particular point both inside and outside the sphere of art. Vostell’s Happening is subversive for its own sake, but it was also part of the West (and East) German anti-war movement and opposed the West German state’s position on the ma�er. The ‘Kunst und Ketchup’, broadcast on the SDR in February, 1966, similarly cut together shots from the 24 Stunden Happening at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, from June 5-6. First describing Beuys’ piece as ‘a kind of yoga’, the report ended with shots of Beuys’ and the

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voiceover noting, ‘…the meaning of Prof. Beuys’ actions here remain hidden to us’. A more open and educative posture toward Happenings on the part of television, particularly on the West Berlin channel SFB, becomes evident only in the later ‘70s. A short broadcast by reporter Ilona Schrumpf on the SFB in October, 1976 profiles contributions by Allan Kaprow and Vostell at the Berliner Festwochen. Each artist is interviewed and states his view of ‘Happening’, or, in Kaprow’s case, his pursuit of ‘activities’. Clips of Vostell’s piece Regen, and Kaprow’s piece Frames of Mind, are shown with the artist’s commentary as a voiceover. In an interesting convergence with the pa�erns of East German television, two women who participated in Kaprow’s activities are asked to compare the two artists’ works. One participant concludes the program dramatically with her statement that in the Kaprow activity ‘…you focus on the self intensely, even in activities with others…I experienced my own intensity, which is something I can take with me into my life’. Her unexpected and powerful experience of Kaprow’s performance underscores the significance of Kaprow’s piece as art of the highest calibre. In honour of an exhibition marking his 50th birthday, the SFB broadcast a traditional artist’s profile of Vostell in October, 1982, focusing on his new work and featuring a new Fluxus performance with the participation of filmmaker Ulrike O�inger at the artist’s residence in Malpartida, Spain. The ridicule of Beuys at least slowed on West German television, as films of his performances Eurasienstab (Eurasian Staff, 1967) and Celtic (1970) were broadcast.53 Certainly television reports in the Rhineland followed Beuys’ high-profile dismissal from his position in 1972 and the lawsuit that ultimately reinstated him at the Düsseldorf Academy. Beuys gave an extended televised statement as part of Herzogenrath’s Documenta 6, and about his trip to Japan in a program of 1984. In a remarkable turnaround a�er his dismissive treatment by the public in Aachen in 1964, Beuys’ frequent appearances on West German television helped him emerge as a media figure by the mid-’70s. His path parallels West German television’s grudging recognition of Fluxus, Happening and the action as art.

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The End of Art on Television? What might we conclude from the far more constant presence of visual art on Cold War television in Europe, and from the astonishingly central place television secured for visual art in the daily life of East and West German citizens during the postwar era? The flourishing presence of challenging contemporary art on West German television and the privileging of visual art on television in East Germany now seems isolated in history and a media moment that may never be repeated. It is quite fascinating to consider that American art and media may not have explored the dynamics of contemporary art on television because no direct propagandistic use could be made of it within the Cold War conflict. The explosion of art broadcasting in divided Germany may have been powered by the dialectical counter-force of the other Germany’s art-ideological presence on television, which clearly needed to be constantly countered or at least competed against. In the West, television reported on video and performance art of the ‘60s and ‘70s to the point where commentators could speak about ‘art as television’ in West Germany.54 The time-based character of video and performance practice presented powerful and self-reflexive moments of critique of state-supported television in engaging directly with its raw materials: its demand for the quality of ‘liveness’, and the electronic processes of the video medium. Video and performance artists on West German television effectively a�acked the state’s entire notion of ‘television’. West German television covered ‘Happenings’ and performance only half-heartedly, but in doing so it allowed the development of radical showcases for art film and video by Gerry Schum, Aldo Tambellini and O�o Piene, and Wulf Herzogenrath, and aired key performances by Allan Kaprow and German Fluxus artists like Vostell and Beuys. The scandal surrounding the televised ‘Festival of New Art’ in Aachen in 1964 raised the issue of the German past at a time when public discourse in West Germany refused to address the implications of the recent Nürnberg trials. When East German television addressed the Holocaust through visual art, it promoted a narrative that established the working class, particularly the

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members of the KPD, as the primarily victims of fascism, and not Jews, Romas, homosexuals and others. In so doing the SED could cement the ‘anti-fascist’ dimension of its national identity within the Soviet Block. East German television’s ‘Prague Spring’-inspired experimentation with the genre of the ‘polemic’ discussion in the years 1966-67 reconfigured the critical reception of art as a collective public sphere. The ‘polemic’ discussion promised the end of an hermetic art world of art critics and historians, but art historical expertise continued to shape art broadcasting, and in fact outlived the SED’s populist approach to the reception of contemporary art in the GDR. Photography, video and performance became subjects of discussion in East Germany only in the state’s final years, and East German television did not explore these new mediums until reunification.55 Beginning in 1984 the ‘Videowerksta�’ began holding quarterly ‘production days’ for interested employees of East German television. The Artists Union recognized this video group officially but it did not participate in national and international exhibitions until 1987, when the Videowerksta�e was included in the tenth and final ‘German Art’ exhibition in Dresden. East German television programs of the 1980s evidenced the state’s decision not to promote media art or photography as legitimate socialist art. This administrative blunder paralleled the U.S.S.R.’s luddite formulation of Socialist Realism as true socialist art. Thus postwar socialist culture continued to turn its back on some of the most innovative artwork produced by the Soviet avant-garde in photography and film. In spite of its sometimes trivialising treatment by the West German media, it is hard to imagine coverage of performance art ever taking place in the more commercialized sphere of U.S. television (or on German television presently). Performance art clearly offered the greatest challenge to the institution of television as it could not be as easily accommodated, as could video art, within West German art programming. There was no framework in place within art programming that could open up these works for lay viewers. In these programs television directors abandoned the educational angle of much

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West German arts programming and instead hoped to a�ract viewers with dismissive and populist sensationalism. Television directors, following the reaction of the students who a�ended the important 1964 Aachen concert, made no effort to understand Fluxus as new music or indeed as any kind of ‘serious culture’, a complex notion that Fluxus had set out, in avant-garde fashion, to question in the first place. The Aachen concert raised public consternation—in the form of a lawsuit and press coverage— mostly because the artists involved dared to use performance to raise a taboo subject. As a defensive response to this concert and to other Happenings and actions, West German television programs and ‘reports’ throughout the ‘60s mocked and dismissed Fluxus by framing it as nonsense or by otherwise obscuring its criticality. In doing so the West German media refused to recognize the views Fluxus, Happenings and actions shared with increasingly powerful Western European protest groups, like the student and anti–war movements, concerning the repressed fascist past, increasing remilitarization during the Cold War, and the enormous cultural effects of escalating consumerism. The question remains as to how specific West Germans, let alone East Germans, understood Schum’s television art ‘objects’ or Vostell’s or Kaprow’s televised Happenings when they first viewed them. As Chapter 4 explored, performance was not widely pursued by East German artists until the 1980s. But the fashioning of contemporary art into media events was already well known to Cold War Germans both East and West before that time. Art broadcasting has undergone a steady decline in Germany since the dismantling of the West German system of public television networks into a fragmented and privatized media landscape. It is clear that contemporary art as a subject is no longer an engine to the market-oriented and arguably homogenizing cultural interests of a globalised corporate media that has taken hold in European Union Germany.

EPILOGUE

Pyramus: And to think that was No Man’s Land. Thisbe: What are they selling? Pyramus: Everything. Everything is for sale. Thisbe: Do say it’s be�er. Please! Pyramus: Of course it’s be�er. We don’t have to die. Thisbe: Then let’s go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have a Club Cola. Pyramus: Freedom at last. Thisbe: But don’t toss your can on the ground. Pyramus: What do you take me for? Thisbe: Sorry. It’s just that—. I’m sorry. Yes, freedom.1 Like Shakespeare, Susan Sontag appropriated the ancient story of a disastrous unification of parties formerly separated by a wall. In Sontag’s case, she used it to address the situation of unification in Berlin around 1990. Her short theatrical sketch captures the breathless, rushed atmosphere of high-velocity change that was clearly palpable in the newly unified city. She simultaneously communicates an impending, post-celebratory hang-over of epic proportions. A similar pall can be detected in the literature and reception that surrounded the u�erly premature Berlin public-art exhibition Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit (the Finality of Freedom), masterminded by Heiner Müller, Rebecca Horn and Jannis Kounnellis in 1990, realized by the documenta curator Wulf Herzogenrath, and bankrolled as a ‘Freundesprojekt’ by the West German government to the

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tune of 1.5 million Marks.2 Envisioned as a kind of cultural analogue to the ‘reintegrating’ 1955 Documenta, critics heralded the exhibition as ‘West-Kunst’—whereas in fact it also featured Ossie-artists, one Soviet and another East German—and was meant to mark the transition into unification as a state of wholeness, resolution, and with it, a commitment to forge�ing. Old national identities were quickly readjusted to coincide with Western (mis)conceptions of the East or were simply assumed to be ‘West.’ With the slow disintegration of the USSR and the Soviet Bloc during the early ‘90s, Cold War global identifications in Germany also began to metamorphose into a nebulous and newly global identity. The la�er sprang from the economic structures of late capitalism, and around what would become the hallmarks of globalization: the phenomena of ‘emerging markets’ and their related worldwide digital communications networks. In that parts of the Soviet Bloc had been absorbed into western markets as well, national identities and the depressing history that had put them in place could be renovated or saniert, or even discarded wholesale. A cultural example of the la�er trajectory is Tom Tykwer’s euphoric celebration of Berlin-inreconstruction, Run Lola Run (1999). In my analysis of the film I discuss the film’s references to the history of the representation of the city in film as well as the pa�erning of its plot a�er the procedures of computer gaming.3 Tykwer’s Berlin not only resembles the terrain of computer games; it also implies a Berlin that is thoroughly wired into a (postmodern) global network. Run Lola Run forwards a new identity for reunified Germany that effectively abandons earlier Cold War relations in embracing the network as its primary global identification. This cinematic fantasy of total movement, either physical or by means of digital communication, abandoned the obstruction-strewn, contested and actual physical spaces of the city where old national monuments and memorials seemed to disappear overnight or be replaced by newer models, like Sir Norman Foster’s Reichstag building, stocked with its own extensive and overwhelmingly Western collection of contemporary art.

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Like Tykwer’s film, the media-event of Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag, completed in 1995, seemed less a work focused on absence and memory than a stage for the globalised media’s embrace of the ‘new’ Berlin. The work further functioned as an extensive advertisement of the arrival of the federal government to this Wilhelmine structure.4 It is indeed difficult to square the intense media focus on the building with my experience of it around 1990. Riding in a friend’s convertible, we drove fullspeed up the main drive to the front entrance of the blackened, pockmarked shell of a building. We were alone with this ruin; it and its huge grounds were entirely deserted. Christo’s Reichstag served as the cocoon from which the (reconstructed) bu�erfly would emerge in a few years’ time, again disseminated by intense media coverage. It cleared the way for the revamped, sanitized and ruin-free Reichstag that was to follow. Amid these mass-media celebrations of unification and metamorphosis, critical artworks continued to pose inconvenient questions about old national identities that were being cheerfully discarded, and about the role of art as an accomplice within that process. Many post-unification artworks in Germany examine the widespread dynamic of effacement realized in the 1990s and its relation to memory that arguably is the engine to the new cultural identities that are being generated by mass media, new technologies, or by the new post-unification FRG, now expanded to contain the neuen Bundesländer (new federal states). The cultural examination of absence, memory and loss has mostly been based in Berlin, where the end of the Cold War was physically most evident, following the state’s decision to rebuild large sections of the former GDR. In the context of united Berlin, the most dramatic landscape of post-Cold War historical change, the conceptual and post-minimalist artists I discuss below explicitly distanced themselves from high-modernist notions of the imperative for modern art to retain an absolute autonomy towards its national and social contexts. This was a larger development, identified by Jack Burnham in already in 1968 as a new ‘systems aesthetic’ in art—the idea that artists had become very interested in positioning art to ask questions about

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scientific, political and social systems outside of the realm of the gallery space and the museum. As Burnham explains, one result was artists’ desire to escape a singular authorial voice and instead place pre-existing systems in control of the creative process.5 Artists within the context and se�ing of united Berlin during the 1990s rethought the strategies and structures of postminimalism and conceptual art within that context. Perhaps this was due to the liminality of the place at the time of the Wende (change), and the a�raction of exploring the unse�led situation of passage of an entire city so full of twentieth-century history, and that was temporarily suspended between, or existing beyond, a controlling system. Of course this situation did not last for long. It appears that Helmut Kohl, West German chancellor during the early 1990s, also played an active role in determining specific removals or alterations of memorial sites (in the Neue Wache, for example), and in approving new memorials, particularly Eisenman’s large-scale Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. In one moreor-less direct response to Tykwer’s utopian vision of Berlin as a technofest of global belonging, the digital artists Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter’s Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall, a public virtual reality installation, uses digital technology to effectively reinsert a section of the Berlin wall from the former border crossing at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse up to the Engelbecken/Adalbertstrasse.6 Thiel and Reuter re-realize the physical barrier virtually in a manner that also underscores the wall’s continuing absence, or its vanishing into history. They digitally restore the disruptions of everyday life that once determined everyday life there. By using interactive VR dramaturgical techniques such as simulation, interaction and time travel, their three-dimensional installation for various sites in the city is to be fully interactive. Through their actions viewers or users will be able to determine a sequence of scenes, some drawn from archival sources, about life in the city while the wall was present. Thiel and Reuter have therefore made use of VR technology to render the ghosts of past demarcation and of the wall visible, all the while retaining the quality of physical absence of the city’s history.

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Even as they were marginalized or declared to be the newest voices of ‘West-Kunst,’ East German and Soviet Bloc artists like Via Lewandowsky and Ilya Kabakov used found locations, and at times the most banal personal memories, to foreground the reality of Cold War anxiety that characterized daily life. Both artists point to the culture of the Soviet Bloc as an integral though repressed part of the history of a reunited Germany. Using a process of veiling or obscuring that Christo later would also turn to, Lewandowsky’s Zur Lage des Hauptes (On the Situation of the Head), part of the Finality of Freedom exhibition in 1990, focused on the German imperial Siegessäule or Victory Column. Lewandowsky examined how this earlier monument to German nationhood connected to recently-abandoned, and o�entimes removed, monuments that had been dedicated to a utopian socialist German state. (This la�er action of disappearance and of fading memory was also of interest to the conceptual artist Sophie Calle.) The column spanned both Wilhelmine and Nazi eras: the structure was first located in proximity to the later-realized Reichstag, and celebrated Prussian military victories over Denmark, Austria and France. The Nazi regime relocated the column to its current location on the Grosser Stern in 1939 in order to realize Albert Speer’s redesign of Berlin. With its crowning gold figure of Victoria, and modelled by Heinrich Strack a�er the ill-fated Vendôme Column in Paris, the structure rests on a foundation and a circular-colonnade base that contains a mosaic based on allegorical paintings by Anton von Werner. Lewandowsky focused his 1990 installation on two sites: the column and, connected to it by a web of tunnels constructed during World War Two, the former Ministries Building of the GDR, previously the Business Commission of the SovietOccupied zone. These institutions had in turn occupied the former Reichs Aviation Ministry, completed in 1938. The columned lobby of this la�er building, on a direct East/West axis with the Victory Column, contained two celebrated Socialist Realist paintings by ‘national prize winner’ Max Lingner. A�er several modifications to his compositions as ‘suggested’ by GDR Minister President O�o Grotewohl, Linger’s painting

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was transferred onto Meissen-produced tiles for the Ministries Building and dedicated in 1953. Lingner’s composition is typical of GDR Socialist Realism in its strictest phase: in a shallow space Lingner depicts marching, smiling masses of mostly women and children holding alo� red flags emblazoned with the word ‘Sozialismus’. In a display of patriarchical power, Lingner balances the two largest figures, a manager in suit and tie on the le�, with a bricklayer on the right. The father continues to build the new German (socialist) state. In his installation Lewandowsky symbolically ‘removed’ von Werner’s mosaic in abstracting it by means of a to-scale rubbing or ‘fro�age’, a distinctly Surrealist technique. He further obscured the mosaic in illuminating it with highpowered floodlights. He then spanned the rubbing directly over the Lingner tiles, further obscuring the images. Lewandowsky described this second action: ‘the phallus sacrifices its foreskin for a sanitized partnership with the East’.7 He thus connected this public artwork to his earlier, performance-based AutoPerforationist investigations of the body, in connecting and ‘purifying’ two allegorical visions of German nationhood as a phallic, patriarchical repetition, staged in an old fascist building. In keeping with the Auto-Perforationist critique of German cleanliness, Lewandowsky furthermore circulated a disinfectant solution along the lower edge of the Werner fro�age, ‘like the cleaning rag that hangs over the edge of the bucket’. Its distinct aroma surely permeated the lobby, but as Lewandowsky remarked, the space itself and the work more generally functioned as ‘a sign of the impossibility of disinfecting history’, or of any possible erasure, of the corrosive repetitions of the very fantasy of nation itself. The installations by the Ukrainian artist Kabakov—like Ed Kienholz an excavator and collector of detritus and other found phenomena—were less welcomed in Berlin. His proposed installation for the Reichstag collection would have simply framed the Cyrillic graffiti that Kabakov found on the walls of the building, traces of the Soviet troops that first arrived there during the fall of Berlin in 1945, or that were inscribed during the Cold War. One wonders if this graffiti was simply

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sandblasted away, along with the complex textures created by the bullet holes that laced the building. A�er a review by the art selection commi�ee for the Reichstag collection, the commi�ee declined Kabakov’s proposal and took the unusual step of securing the participation of another Russian artist instead. Perhaps their decision was influenced by an earlier, 1990 Kabakov installation work that, like his proposed work, addressed the perceptions and authority of the anonymous ‘everyman’ as the true voice of the collective—real or imagined— at various points in history. Kabakov had installed Zwei Erinnerungen an die Angst (Two Memories of Fear) on a field on the Potsdamer Platz near Ebertstrasse for the ‘Endlichkeit’ exhibition (also discussed in Ch. 4). It consisted of a doubled structure: two identical, crude wooden corridors whose walls were only a few feet from each other. He placed one wood structure to the east of the other, and both equidistant to an imaginary demarcation line. As Durs Grünbein has noted, these makeshi� corridors referenced other liminal spaces or points of entry from West to East and vica versa that had until recently been operational nearby, like the Checkpoint Charlie, and where one passed between ideological systems.8 Upon entering these narrow corridors, the viewer looked upwards to individual objects suspended from wires across the top, some of them crumpled paper, some twisted bits of metal, all of which had a small text dangling from them. Kabakov had gathered debris from the immediate area, the former location of the no-man’s land strip that surrounded the wall. He a�ached phrases to these bits of rubbish. U�ered by imaginary citizens, the phrases evoke the atmosphere of shared fear that emanated from the ‘seam’ of this militarized space: …I was told yesterday they would a�ack us from the air. They would land in the night; the day and hour it would happen had already been set…Yesterday I thought I had been bi�en by one of their insects. Their culture especially those flies which carry paralysis and eye sickness…I feel some kind of odd dust that comes with the wind from over there, from over the Wall…I have the feeling it is

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senseless to oppose them…It would be interesting if there was someone similar to us on the other side? […]9 Kabakov points to operations that were themselves fictions, and that supported the cultural Cold War—like the furious production of a quasi-monstrous ‘other’, and with it, one’s own paranoia-generated identity. In the end these fictions of the self and the other became quite interchangeable. Similar excavation and study of the strip ended shortly a�er 1990, when major corporate plans for the development of global entertainment ventures laid claim to the Potsdamer Platz and silenced further critical assessments of a vanishing culture and space. Finally, I would like to comment on two post-Wende artworks realized in Berlin by the French artist Sophie Calle and the American architect Peter Eisenman. These two works powerfully, if not always successfully, address the issue of loss in relation to the German past, the German nation, and to the ghosts and voids of history that still inhabited the city. These ghosts threatened to grow more distant as Berlin reinvented itself yet again, this time as a member of the European Union and a global community. These two artworks also concern themselves with the fallibility of human memory or, alternatively, with the basic inability of art to present a smooth memorializing of loss and a disappearing past. These works certainly link to the postmodernist crisis of representation that also suspended and refused the notion of the monument in modern art. The cultural historian James Young has most extensively analyzed the postmodern countermonument of contemporary Holocaust commemorative sculpture, and work in other mediums, that have reconfigured the memorial genre. One must also mention Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin (2001), a structure of architectural complexity and sensitivity. Libeskind’s o�en metaphorical staging of architecture as museum experience is profound— the main entrance ‘void’ begins in the neighbouring Berlin City Museum (1735), proceeds as an underground corridor, and ends in an ascending staircase into the Jewish Museum—thus staging a link between Jewish and Berlin history. As a means of incorporating the notion of absence and loss into

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the very architecture of his building, Libeskind positioned voids or spaces throughout the building and grounds, some of which suspend functionality; his structure furthermore eschews rectilinearity. The building itself engages less with the history of the memorial or monument, but is rather part of a museological coordination of commemoration, presented to the visitor through its rich collections of Jewish-German material culture. The museum is revisionist in presenting the ethnic and religious diversity of the Jewish cultural heritage of Berlin before the fascists destroyed it, a diversity that the city hopes to (re)a�ract. In contrast, Sophie Calle’s The Detachment of 1996 (now part of the art collections of the Reichstag) presents what might be understood as evidence of the u�er unreliability of not only of history, but of the functioning of human memory, in a complex and changing environment, in this case, of post-unification Germany. Her project also illuminates the way in which memory conforms to state-sponsored ideology, even a�er the la�er has been discredited. Calle chose several sites in the former East Berlin where a public artwork, either a monument or a commemorating plaque, had been removed from its original position, usually by order of an independent commission of the Berlin Senate. This commission was formed in 1992 to expressly deal with the possible ‘preservation, redesignation and removal’ of reviewed monuments in East Berlin.10 She visited the East German sites in question—the Palast der Republik, the Russian Embassy and United Nations Square (formerly Lenin Square), the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, the street sign at the newly renamed ‘Torstrasse’ (formerly the ‘Wilhelm Pieck Strasse’, a�er the co-chair of the SED from 1946 to 1954)—where plaques, emblems or monuments had recently been stolen or removed. She asked passers-by to ‘describe the objects that once filled these empty spaces’. In the catalogue that accompanied this work, Calle combined the texts gathered from passersby with photographs before and a�er these objects had been effaced. The project shares the concerns of conceptual art in that, like a kind of sociological or anthropological study, it largely consisted of the action of collecting documentary photographs

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(some of which were found) and data, or statements, from a random public. She then re-presented this data in the work and catalogue without further commentary. As individual comments make clear, there was limited public debate and input about whether some of the monuments should remain; one person mentions signing a petition to retain the plaque commemorating Lenin’s use of the library at the Bebelsplatz, for example.11 The comments Calle gathered are rarely sentimental and they o�en contradict each other directly in discussing a particular site. They sometimes point to a cynical resignation toward the enormous ideological changes that characterize Germany in the twentieth century. One passer-by, remarking on a changed street sign, notes: ‘It was probably called Adolf-Hitler-Street once, otherwise they wouldn’t have changed it. A pile of shit stays the same, only the flies are different. Who’s supposed to make heads or tails of all this?’12 Monumental figures are o�en anthropomorphized in reminiscences. The monumental figure of Lenin of the former Leninplatz, where it had accompanied a housing project, is remembered fondly (‘a kindly uncle’), with the acknowledgement that the figure had ‘…the same facial expression as all other Lenin busts: fierce, looking straight ahead’, ‘majestic’, or ‘like certain figures in horror movies with squarish heads roaming the city, or like Constructivist busts of Mussolini’. Several commentators express a sense of loss concerning a relief sculpture of a dove pa�erned a�er Picasso’s famed drawings of 1949 and ‘50 with the text ‘Berlin City of Peace’, that once hung on the side of a building directly off the Spree in the Nikolaiviertel (Fig. 6.1; the sculpture and text has since been reinstalled). The ambiguity of this object is duly noted by the interviewees: they comment on the irony of the need for the West to remove what they personally found to be an important, rare symbol of the notion of peace, and also point to its close association not only with the SED and Erich Honecker, but also its extensive use as a marker of Cold War, Soviet-Bloc identity. Calle’s collected remarks about the recent changes to Schinkel’s nineteenth-century Neue Wache are perhaps most

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Fig. 6.1 Sophie Calle, from The Detachment, 1996; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

telling in terms of how they evidence the continued influence of past configurations and ideology concerning a collective cultural site. The structure was built in 1816 and was dedicated as a guardhouse for the troops of the Prussian royal court. It thus served as a spatialised imprimatur of Prussian militarism, a cornerstone of the nineteenth-century construction of the

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German nation. In the GDR the site was rebuilt and rededicated in 1961 as a ‘Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism’; later, an eternal flame was placed inside. In GDR times the remains of an unknown German soldier from World War Two and an unknown victim of the concentration camps were interred there as well, underscoring the idea that the victims of the Nazis were both military and civilian, but that the la�er was not of a particular ethnicity. Given the GDR’s pa�ern of identifying the victims of the camps as wronged, ethnic-German communists—staged most emphatically around the figure of Ernst Thälmann—the GDR Neue Wache remained nationalist but without any reference to the ethnicity of fascism’s victims. Calle’s commentators recount the elaborate military ritual performed there during the GDR. These comments sometimes indicate their acquired and questionable assumptions about German identity and ethnicity: for example, the comment that the soldiers selected for this duty were ‘the best of the best’[…]’… These were men who represented Germans in the best possible way…not balding, not long-nosed…’13. Others note the irony of utilizing a memorial to the victims of military violence as a stage for an honour guard’s elaborate public performance of militarism. One person said: ‘Once I took my baby son there, to show him these incredibly ludicrous, meaningless rituals. That’s probably where his dislike for the army stems from’.14 The passers-by don’t comment on the post-unification rearrangement of the structure by Helmut Kohl. Kohl unveiled the Neue Wache in 1993 as the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’, where the East German elements had been replaced with an outsized version of Käthe Kollwitz’s Mother with her Dead Son, an unusually religious work for the artist. While Kollwitz’s sculpture is powerful, in the Neue Wache its resonance with the Christian iconography of the Pietà form becomes insensitive in this space that memorializes all the victims of fascism. As Beatrice Hanssen has noted, references to the specific targets of German fascist violence within modernism and twentiethcentury history has been removed from the space. Calle’s Detachment project takes on greater significance a�er such

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politically motivated effacements; it charts the cultural dynamics of unification in Berlin. She foregrounds how even a�er their removal, individual and collective investments in (East German) nationalist monuments continue. Across all the commentary and the images in The Detachment, Calle foregrounds the inequities of power realized within the process of effacement, since these political symbols, many of them tools toward the construction of national identity, also served as anchors of daily life and individual identity for East Berliners. One person remarked, ‘It’s really about the Wessies not wanting to leave anything for us’. Another lesson of Calle’s work is that with few exceptions, most monuments u�erly fail to invoke serious and identity-changing commemoration. As James Young has noted, that work is o�en deflected or is simply not taken on by the general public. With the return of a united federal government to Berlin, city planners and federal officials were clearly concerned with the question of how the new German nation might be culturally articulated in distinction to Cold War national identifications and investments of the former West and East Germany. The strength of Calle’s Berlin artwork is her recognition of the presence of history as a tool toward identity that is articulated in cultural and architectural symbols and sites of memory that are found throughout the city. As the ‘Endlichkeit der Freiheit’ exhibition made clear, the void in the landscape that once surrounded the wall offered great possibilities. Its former role as a liminal space faded from memory as it was reconfigured for new ventures. As one sees in the new Potsdamer Platz, many came in the form of shining new and mostly commercial and mass entertainment venues—with the major exception of two important cultural centres, the Film Museum and the legendary Arsenal Cinema, both located there. In its proximity to the cluster of new government buildings, Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe (2005) is a work realized as a political collaboration which means to put forward a new site or symbol of post-unification national identity. The debate about a Holocaust memorial in (then West) Berlin began in 1988, when it was first proposed by the

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Berlin journalist Lea Rosh and a citizen’s initiative was formed to see the project through; it was decided that its location would not mark an actual site of Nazi persecution. An initial competition for the work was completed in 1994. However the special body that had been convened by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Berlin senate Culture office to promote a monument to the ‘murdered Jews of Europe’ withdrew this a�er public criticism.15 A second competition in 1997 resulted in the acceptance of the Eisenman/Richard Serra proposal; in the next year Serra withdrew from the project. This proposal was also nearly scrapped. The project allowed to go forward only a�er various compromises had been made: the addition of an information centre (Eisenman and Serra planned that no text should accompany the work), and the addition of trees planted alongside one part of the work. The site was dedicated and opened to the public in May, 2005 (Fig. 6.2). The work covers 4.75 acres in the centre of Berlin and can generally be described as a field of over 2700 equally-sized

Fig. 6.2 Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe, Berlin, 2005; Courtesy of Eisenman Architects

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rectangular blocks or ‘stelae’ of various heights, from flat to 4.5 meters, configured into a grid. When viewed from above the varying heights of the stelae are arranged to create the illusion of undulation or waves; to accommodate the tallest stelae, the ground is lowered at various points in the field. There are numerous equally-sized pathways within this grid. One enters the field from its edge and in parts of it can walk downhill to a depression of somewhat less than the 4.5 meters, at which point one no longer sees out over the field. The pathways are also undulating, given their up-and downhill orientation at various points in the grid. The stelae are made of concrete and treated with a graffiti-resisting substance. Several commentators in the English-language reception of the work interpret the Eisenman work as a representation of a graveyard, or misidentify it as a labyrinth or as a minimalist work.16 Eisenman has continuously underscored that the work is completely abstract, without any referent, or, alternatively, that it symbolizes a void of meaning itself (contradicting his other claim). However as has been pointed out, the title of the work indicates that it is a memorial dedicated to a particular group; therefore, the viewer is led to expect that group to be represented in some manner. The freestyle assigning of symbolism or even anthropomorphizing that characterizes many readings of the work is therefore quite understandable, as is the Information Centre below the field, that arguably puts names and faces onto the ‘tombstones above’ in its rooms of historical documentation of the Holocaust and stories of the tragic fates of many Jewish European families in the 1940s. The Memorial is hardly labyrinthine, since at all points the walkways keep to the grid and what lies outside of the sculpture field is always within sight of the viewer. It is clear that Serra’s contribution to the project was substantial. Like other works by Serra, the Memorial shares minimalism’s resistance to optical qualities and its particular anticipation and positioning of the viewer’s presence as part of the experience of the work. Like minimal sculpture Eisenman’s memorial makes use of repeated forms arranged in a manner that rejects the organized, hierarchical, and stable formalist

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composition of modern art. However in the Memorial’s focus on grand scale, and in the physical instability that characterizes the work throughout—from uneven surfaces to dipping walkways— it expressly departs from minimalism. Such instability of form has no place in minimalist practice. Eisenman’s embrace of a traditional title of ‘memorial’ distinguishes the work from another important and more minimalist precedent, Sol LeWi�’s Black Form (Dedicated to the Missing Jews), installed and removed as part of the Münster Sculpture project of 1987. LeWi�’s title explicitly distanced his work from memorial sculpture and its conventions. It may be the case however that Eisenman placed too much emphasis on the power of phenomenological relations, a central concern of minimalism, as the most important aspect of the work. In Michael Blackwood’s documentary film he delightedly points out that visitors to the Memorial seem compelled to move restlessly through it without being able to come to rest or ‘find’ anything (a conclusion contradicted by numerous photographs of visitors lounging on top of the stelae).17 Eisenman has internalized his preferred reading of the work: a metaphor for a post-optical and phenomenological investigation that references the crisis of meaning that has itself been precipitated by the Holocaust. It is therefore a highly theorized and less experiential artwork; it functions as a kind of metaphor/memorial for what Eisenman believes is an epistemological and philosophical effect of the Holocaust. This is quite a departure from the phenomenological concerns at the heart of postminimalist works like Richard Serra’s. Rosalind Krauss long ago charted Serra’s participation in the intensive American engagement with the notion of inner and outer horizons, or with shi�ing perspectives generated in the seer’s relation to the seen. This set of perceptual relations and network of spatial connections define locationality; MerleauPonty, in the Phenomenology of Perception (1945), terms this world of space, location and perception ‘preobjective experience’.18 Krauss connects Merleau-Ponty’s theorizing of the complex relation and spatialisation that occurs between objects that perceive each other with the process Serra used to generate a

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work like Shi� (1970-72). In it Serra uses the points of view of two people surveying an open, hilly field to generate an enormous abstracted object as a kind of solidified spatialisation of the flux of perception between the two and the land. The object represents the ‘seen’ to yet another viewer, a ‘sited vision…a situation and a lived experience’. The process, like the resulting object itself, is purely abstract. While the phenomenological inner horizon of perception of an object concerns Krauss in her reading of Serra’s art, far less is said about the perceptual relations contained within an outer horizon. It is perhaps related to the ‘real horizon’ perceived in the physical landscape, or has to do with the object perceived as part of a context or a whole. Krauss implies that Shi�, as a verb, embodies an oscillation between these horizons, a kind of model of spatial networks and perceptions, there. This spatialised modelling of perception as a kind of test of the philosophical field of phenomenology is not what Eisenman and the Berlin Cultural Office put forward in the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. It appears that Eisenman wills it to be something like that. The object’s outer horizon becomes a spatial symbol for post-Holocaust philosophy and history, or, as Juli Carson suggests in her reading, it serves as an intersection of this symbol with other theoretical models. (On this count Eisenman’s work parallels recent projects by Thomas Hirshhorn, who has also created monuments to philosophers and theory, but Hirshhorn’s works head in a markedly different direction.) I am of the view however that as a political work of art, Eisenman’s Memorial is powerful in its disjunction between what its postminimalist forms desire it to be and what it is as a national memorial in Germany, as determined by its site and process. The almost twenty-year record of debate, disagreement and political manoeuvring that surrounded this work is of fundamental importance to Germany a�er unification. Because of the lengthy and extensive debate about the cultural place of the Holocaust in German history that the Memorial continues to generate, it is a gauge of the strength of democracy in unified Berlin. Democracy o�entimes does not culminate in consensus but might rather be characterized by bi�er dispute between parties over common

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interests, or over common (historical) identifications. One wishes that Eisenman and the Förderungskreis had tied this intense and recent debate more explicitly to the work and its site, in addition to the representations of specific victims that it now also memorializes. By way of a conclusion I’d like to make use of Eisenman’s Memorial and its disjunctions as another case in point about what I’ve argued about the specificity of German postwar modernism and its relation to modernity. In the Cold War era, German art over many mediums, and not always in a commitment to the ‘advancement’ of abstraction, drew closer to or distanced itself from one of the two political systems that surrounded it. In great distinction to the U.S., for example, avant-gardist transgression and negation sometimes took on the aesthetic forms or the political beliefs preferred by the other system, even in sophisticated West German art centres. Innovative and challenging art that continued the critical traditions of modernism also took place in East Germany. German and nonGerman artists took on the theme of the violent fascist past and its victims in the Holocaust, or engaged with the mechanics of the resistance toward the ‘working through’ of that trauma, or the resistance toward acknowledging the anti-semitic and racist goals of Nazi ideology. These artists also began to work in public space to critique the repressive aspects of local (art) institutions and governments, or to point to the state’s disregard for ecologies of the German landscape and cityscape. Artists’ sometime interventions on state-run art television were equally public, since the televised media could not be censored or withheld by East or West from its citizens. These artworks could finally only have been produced in Germany and within the particular context of the difficult, tragic and split path that modernism took there. Like Eisenman’s Memorial, the works of German postwar modernism cannot be viewed with the same lens that purports to define or explain modernist form as a kind of universal path to modernity in the twentieth century, or that expects modernism to behave in the same way in highly varied national and global historical contexts.

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In coming years art historians might study the art of occupied Iraq, for example, and its cultural struggle to bridge its indigenous Islamic codes of representation with the national and global identities imposed by the modernising West. The complex cultural coordination of new national and global identities is also to be found at institutional sites such as the newly opened Istanbul Modern (art museum) in Turkey. Modernism’s difficult negotiation of national legacies and identifications continues to the present day. This book also presents a potential model for the art historical study of cultures locked in global conflict that characterize our, twenty-first, century.

NOTES

Introduction 1. See especially Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980), and his German Encounters with Modernism, 1840-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2. See Christoph Zuschlag, ‘An “Educational Exhibition”: the Precursors of Entartete Kunst and its Individual Venues’, in Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Abrams, 1991), 83–97, as well as his essay ‘“Chambers of Horrors of Art” and “Degenerate Art”: On Censorship in the Visual Arts in Nazi Germany’, in Elizabeth C. Childs, ed., Suspended License: Censorship in the Visual Arts (Sea�le: University of Washington Press, 1997), 210–234. 3. Stephanie Barron, ‘The Galerie Fischer Auction’, in “Degenerate Art”: the Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, 135–169. 4. The most well-known recent example is Gustav Klimt’s 1907 portrait of Adele Bloch Bauer, which Ronald Lauder purchased in 2006 from the niece of the si�er, Maria Altmann, shortly a�er an arbitration court ruled that Austria must return five paintings to her as the rightful heir to the Viennese collector Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer. Bloch-Bauer went into exile in Switzerland in 1938; his property was then confiscated by Nazi officials. Some of the Bloch-Bauer collection was

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sold, and several paintings were placed in the public Austrian Gallery. 5. Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: the Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), and the documentary film The Rape of Europa (2006), Dir. Bonnie Cohen, Richard Berge, and Nicole Newnham. 6. I am drawing from two very useful postwar German exhibition history compilations included in: Kunst in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1945-1985, ed. Dieter Honisch, et.al. (Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 1985), 454 ff.; and Günter Feist and Eckhart Gillen, eds., Kunstkombinat DDR: Daten und Zitate zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik der DDR 1945– 1990 (Berlin: Nishen, 1990). 7. See Brigi�a Milde, ‘Picasso in der DDR’, in Ingrid Mössinger and Beate Ri�er (eds.), Picasso et les Femmes (New York: Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, 2002), pp. 373–374. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, rev. ed. 1991; 1983). 9. Jacqueline Rose, introduction to States of Fantasy, based on the Clarendon lectures she presented in 1994 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 4. 10. Rose, pp. 4–15. 11. On art in divided Korea see Jane Portal, Art Under Control in North Korea (London: Reaktion, 2005). Unlike this volume, Portal does not investigate any artistic or cultural contestation of the Korean Cold War border in her book. 12. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: the Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 11. 13. Yule Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western Germany 1945–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Heibel uses Adorno’s 1969 formulation to foreground the primacy of an autonomous ‘subject’ which has rendered taboo any ‘tribalised’ collective identity in Germany a�er 1945 (her choice of words is quite interesting). She traces a struggle with this phobia of the collective in the works of a group of abstract painters, ZEN49 and the independent painter

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Ernst Wilhelm Nay. She generally does not consider any of the widespread contestations of abstraction that marked that period in Germany and that have occupied me in writing this book. As a result the ‘subject’ in question becomes a ‘free-wheeling identity’ that is fully ahistorical, without any memory or tie to the recent past. I also agree with Rose that particularly in the German instance, ‘The carapace of sel�ood and nations cannot be willed…away.’ Heibel’s analysis of these painters is noteworthy and sophisticated, but one problem is that she takes Adorno too much at his word and thereby constructs a highly restrictive art history that defines the tasks of modernism in Germany a�er 1945 too narrowly. Rose, p. 2. 14. Heibel mentions the avoidance of collective identity as characteristic only of abstract painters in the immediate postwar years. I see this repression as psychically driven and as an overall characteristic of postwar German visual culture across mediums and styles. 15. Greg Castillo writes about the importance of architectural exhibitions in the USSR in establishing this multiethnic construction during the Cold War. See Castillo, ‘Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and the National Question,’ in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds.), Socialist Realism Without Shores (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 91– 119. 16. Martin Damus, Malerei der DDR. Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen Sozialismus (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1991), p. 12. 17. Jonathan Osmond, ‘German Modernism and Antimodernism’, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 141, No. 1158 (Sept. 1999): 574–757. 18. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 8. 19. Serge Guilbaut, ‘Postwar Painting Games: the Rough and the Slick,’ in Guilbaut (ed.), Reconstructing Modernism. Art In New York, Paris And Montreal 1945–1964 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 30–79. 20. T.J. Clark, Introduction, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press,

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1999), 1–13. 21. Clark, p. 7. 22. Clark, p. 10. 23. Clark, pp. 9–10. 24. Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), pp. 12–13, and footnote 48, pp. 255–256. See also Paul Be�s’ overview of the cultural studies literature on this question in ‘The New Fascination with Fascism: The Case of Nazi Modernism’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Oct., 2002): pp. 541–558. 25. Paul Be�s, ‘The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture’, Journal of Modern History 72:3 (September 2000): 731-65. Greg Castillo has focused on the Cold War tensions around a�empts to resuscitate the Dessau Bauhaus and on the development of ‘socialist realist’ architecture. See Greg Castillo, ‘Peoples at an Exhibition,’ and Castillo, ‘The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany,’ in Kathleen James-Chakraborty (ed.), Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), pp. 171–193. 26. Ales Erjavec, (ed.), Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition. Politicized Art under Late Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 27. Irit Rogoff, ‘The Aesthetics of Post-History’, in Stephen Melville (ed.), Vision & Textuality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 199. 28. M. Horkheimer and T. W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Seabury Press, 1972), p. 230. 29. Their major texts concerning visual art of the period are: T. W. Adorno: Negative Dialectics (German 1966, English 1973), ‘The Culture Industry Reconsidered’, (German 1967, English 1975), ‘The Aging of the New Music’, (German 1954, English 1988), Notes on Literature (German 1958-61, English 1991), and Aesthetic Theory (German 1970, English 1984, retranslated 1997); Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (1955), One-Dimensional Man (1964), ‘Art in the One-Dimensional Society’, (1967), Negations (1968), An Essay on Liberation (1969), ‘Art as a Form of Reality’, (1970), Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972), ‘Marxism and Feminism’, (1974), and The Aesthetic Dimension (1978). I discuss

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the Frankfurt School’s engagement with earlier theories of memory in chapter 2 of my dissertation, ‘Memory in Modernist Art: A Historiography.’ 30. A retrospective of Si�e’s art had been planned for the summer of 2001 at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Germanic National Museum) in Nuremberg. Such exhibitions are normally staged a�er an archive is deposited at the GNM. Si�e cancelled the exhibition in part due to questions and accusations of his collusion with state authorities in denying advancement or employment to other East German artists during the 1970s and ‘80s. A conference was convened on the cancelled exhibition and questions of the GDR culture in 2003: G. Ulrich Grossmann, (ed.), Politik und Kunst in der DDR. Der Fonds Willi Si�e im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, (Nürnberg: Verlage des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, 2003). 31. Drawing from records of the archives of the GDR Verband Bildende Künstler (German Artists Union), Hartmut Pätzke compiled an index of every recorded artist’s emigration out of the GDR from 1950 to the final day of the GDR on October 3, 1990. He points out that at particular times the number of emigrated artists exceeded the number of artists graduating from particular GDR art academies. Hartmut Pätzke, ‘Register ‘Ausgebürgert’, in H. Offner and Klaus Schroeder (eds.), Eingegrenzt-Ausgegrenzt. Bildende Kunst und Parteiherrscha� in der DDR 1961–1989 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000), pp. 557–694. 32. Walter Grasskamp, ‘A historical continuity of disjunctures’, in Irit Rogoff (ed.), The Divided Heritage. Themes and Problems in German Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23. 33. The Cremer Buchenwald monument is also discussed in David E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust memorials and meaning in Europe, Israel, and America (Yale University Press, 1993). Chapter 1: Recuperating the Modern 1. The se�ing of this ‘Zero Hour’ a�er the German surrender is eloquently described by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin 1945–1948 (Berkeley:

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University of California Press, 1998). 2. Kunstkombinat DDR. Daten und State zur Kunst und Kunstpolitik der DDR 1945–1990, Günter Feist and Eckhart Gillen (eds.), (1988; rpt. Berlin: Nishen, 1990), p. 15. 3. Many of these major documents in the formulation of East German Socialist Realism are reprinted in Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser (eds.), Abstraktion im Staatssozialismus: Feindsetzungen und Freiräume im Kunstsystem der DDR (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenscha�en, 2003), pp. 265 ff. 4. N. Orlow, ‘Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst’, Part 1, Tägliche Rundschau (January 20, 1951): n.p. Barbara Barsch Papers, Ge�y Institute. 5. N. Orlow, ‘Wege und Irrwege der modernen Kunst’, Part 2, Tägliche Rundschau (January 21, 1951): n.p. 6. As discussed by Mark W. Clark in Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal A�er World War Two 1945–1955 (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2006), p. 144. 7. Cited in Kunst in der DDR, p. 326. 8. These genres are outlined in several accounts of early GDR painting: Lothar Lang, Malerei und Graphik in der DDR (Leipzig: Verlag Philip Reclam, 1983); Karin Thomas, Zweimal deutsche Kunst nach 1945: 40 Jahre Nahe und Ferne (Cologne: DuMont, 1985), pp. 44–64; 80–94; Uwe M. Schneede, ‘Farbe und Merkwürdiges Vorbild ins Land tragen. Entwicklungen in der Kunst der DDR’, in Art das Kunstmagazin (ed.), Zeitelevisionergleich. Malerei und Grafik aus der DDR (Hamburg: Verlag Gruner + Jahr AG & Co., 1982), pp. 14–29. 9. Thomas, p. 58. 10. Schneede, p. 20. 11. See Milde, ‘Picasso in der DDR’, p. 385. 12. It should be noted that New York MoMA opened its Picasso retrospective in the same year, 1957. 13. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Notizen zur Barlach-Ausstellung’, Sinn und Form, January, 1952, cited in Kunstkombinat, p. 32. The journal Sinn und Form was published by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. 14. Ulrike Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst

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im Sozialismus (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001), p. 79. On the development of the concept of Socialist Realism in the USSR see Leonid Heller, ‘A World of Pre�iness: Socialist Realism and its aesthetic categories’, in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko (eds.), Socialist Realism Without Shores, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 15. Burghard Duhm, ‘Walter Dötsch und die Brigade Mamai: der Bi�erfelder Weg in Bi�erfeld’, in Günter Feist, Eckhart Gillen and Beatrice Vierneisel (eds.), Kunstdokumentationen SBZ/DDR 1945–1990. Aufsätze, Berichte, Materialien (Berlin: DuMont, 1990), pp. 567–568. 16. Thomas, pp. 61–2. 17. Metzkes’ painting was shown in a Berlin exhibition on Unter den Linden that celebrated the tenth anniversary of the founding of the GDR. 18. Kunstkombinat, p. 20. 19. Duhm, p. 568. 20. Several of Kuhirt’s influential lectures and essays are reprinted in Rehberg and Kaiser (see Note 3). 21. Eugen Blume and Roland März, (Eds.), Kunst der DDR. Eine Retrospektive der Nationalgalerie (Berlin: SMPK and G+H Verlag, 2003), p. 326. 22. Ullrich Kuhirt, Entwicklungswege der fortschri�lichen deutschen Kunst in der Periode von 1924 bis 1933 und die Hilfe der Kunstkritik im Zentralorgan der KPD bei der Herausbildung einer proletarisch-revolutionären realistischen Kunst. Dissertation (Berlin, DDR, 1962). Cited by Goeschen, p. 240. 23. Goeschen, p. 83. 24. Cited in Goeschen, pp. 82, 85. 25. Goeschen, p. 83; these remarks were part of Kuhirt’s 1960 Humboldt symposium lecture. 26. Lea Grundig, ‘Zur Frage des “Modernen”’, Bildende Kunst (He� 2, 1957): 129. This essay is reprinted in Rehberg and Kaiser, eds., pp. 333–336. 27. As cited in Peter Nisbet (ed.), Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, 1989), p. 153. 28. Lothar Lang as cited in Schneede, 21.

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29. Kunstkombinat, p. 48. See also Kunst der DDR. Eine Retrospektive der Nationalgalerie, p. 94, n. 9. 30. Ullrich Kuhirt, ‘Expressivität in Realismus’, Bildende Kunst (He� 11, 1964): 563–568; cited by Goeschen, p. 107. 31. It has been suggested that GDR artists and writers took on a far more critical and even aggressive stance toward SED cultural policy around 1963, due in part to a major conference on the work of Franz Ka�a organized by the CSSR Ka�a scholar Eduard Goldstücker at the Liblice castle near Prague. Major GDR writers such as Christa Wolf a�ended this conference, which exposed these intellectuals to the more critical debate on socialist culture that had developed in the CSSR. This is the so-called ‘Prague Spring’, a period of a liberalization of culture, and a move toward a ‘humanist socialism’ in the CSSR, that influenced other Warsaw Pact countries. Schneede, p. 21. 32. Kunstkombinat, pp. 52–3; Thomas, p. 84. 33. This is a dramatic reversal of an earlier SED stance vis a vis German Expressionism. A 1961 Expressionist exhibition of graphic art by Max Beckmann, prepared for the Kupferstichkabine� in Berlin, had been cancelled. 34. Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis, the Lost Centre (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1958), pp. 9–10. 35. Nicholas Berdyaev was published in German translation in 1935 (as cited in Sedlmayr’s text p. 151). I would assume that Berdyaev published in the USSR a�er the Stalinist purges, possibly as a cultural spokesman for the regime; the National Socialists famously also took up this reactionary position against modern art. This may in part explain why Berdyaev was translated and published in German in 1935. 36. Sedlmayr, p. 156. 37. Richard Seewald, ‘Über Malerei und das Schöne’ (On painting and beauty, 1948) and William Hausenstein, Was bedeutet die moderne Kunst? (What does modern art mean, 1949), as cited by Jost Hermand, ‘Modernism Restored: West German painting in the 1950s’, New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984): 26. On West German postwar debates on the modern see also Hermann Glaser, ‘Kunst zwischen “Verlust der Mi�e” und “neuer Unverbindlichkeit”’ in Kulturgeschichte der Bundesrepublik

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Deutschland 1949–1967 (Vienna: Hanser Verlag, 1986), 260–267. 38. Bissier had much of his work from the war years destroyed. See Karin Thomas, Zweimal deutsche Kunst nach 1945 (Cologne: DuMont, 1985), pp. 15–16. 39. Glaser, p. 263. 40. Ha�mann, pp. 228–9. 41. Ha�mann, p. 312. 42. Hermand, p. 30; Hermand indicates Der Monat was financed by the CIA. Karl Hofer, ‘Zur Situation der bildenden Kunst’, Der Monat 77 (1955): 425 ff. Hofer’s reaction could have been prompted by earlier a�acks on his art by Soviet spokesmen within the formalism debate of 1948–9. By the mid-’50s Hofer felt equally dismissed by the promoters of gestural abstraction. Jost Hermand dismisses almost all postwar abstraction; his essay keeps to the most orthodox notion of Socialist Realism shared by the SED and to a notion of the necessary populist appeal of ‘successful’ art. Hermand states, ‘Whether painted, scratched, dripped, sprayed or smeared, whether speckled or linear, whether painterly or graphic—all of it comes down to the same thing in the end: a non-representationalism that was as cryptic as it was meaningless and was consequently o�en labelled with oxymora like “geometric dynamism” or “religious existentialism”’. Hermand, p. 34. A paragraph later Hermand inexplicably cautions his reader, ‘When we speak of an abstract “style”, then, we should be very cautious about generalizations’. Hermand, p. 35. 43. Hofer, p. 429. 44. Hofer, p. 431. Hofer clearly has particular critics in mind here but does not name them. 45. Rudolf Schlichter pamphlet, ‘Das Abenteuer der Kunst’ (The adventure of art, 1949), as cited by Carl Linfert, ‘Mann muss weiter wissen’, Der Monat 79 (April 1955): 69. 46. Ha�mann includes more figurative directions in his survey text. He writes, ‘…the emphasis on abstraction in modern art must not make us forget that this method is only one among others…[T]he visible world will always be with us. Although today its power to generate new ideas and forms seems greatly diminished, it still exists and occasionally provides unexpected

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new impulses. These cannot be ignored in an analysis of the present situation, a situation still characterized by the basic dialectical tension between object and form’. Werner Ha�mann, Painting in the Twentieth Century. An Analysis of the Artists and their Work (New York: Praeger, 1961), pp. 316–17. This book was published in German in 1954. 47. See Ha�mann, pp. 119–120. 48. The New American Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 4. 49. See Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Le� in Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), p. 215. 50. Ha�mann delivered introductory lectures in 1955 and in 1959, and contributed introductions to the exhibition catalogues for both exhibitions. These lectures are included in Ha�mann, Skizzenbuch. Zur Kultur der Gegenwart. Reden und Aufsätze (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1960), pp. 117–134. The introductions can be found in Documenta (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1955), pp. 15–25, and II Documenta ‘59 (Cologne, 1959), pp. 12–19. 51. Werner Ha�mann, ‘Glanz und Gefährdung der abstrakten Malerei’, first published in Die Zeit, January 17, 1952; reprinted in Skizzenbuch, p. 108. 52. Karin Thomas notes a fundamental difference in content between French and German informel in Thomas, Zweimal deutsche Kunst, pp. 64–66. 53. Werner Ha�mann, ‘Masters of gestural abstraction’, in Jean Leymarie, ed., Abstract Art since 1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), pp. 15–16. 54. Ha�mann, ‘Masters’, pp. 15–16. 55. Trier wrote an introduction to the second volume, Skulptur, of the 1959 Documenta catalogue. This was also the first year that sculptures were placed in the gardens surrounding the Orangerie. 56. Both Kurt Winkler and Michael Nungesser point to the 1959 Documenta as evidence of the new hegemonic cultural power of the U.S. See Kurt Winkler, ‘II Documenta ‘59, Kunst nach 1945’ in Stationen der Moderne (Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, 1988), pp. 429–430; and Michael Nungesser, ‘Flammenwerfer

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der Kunst und tanzender Derwisch. David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jackson Pollock, ihre unterschiedliche Rezeption in Deutschland, Ost und West’ in Pollock Siqueiros (Düsseldorf: Städtische Kunsthalle and DuMont, 1995), p. 95. 57. B. Alan Bowness, ‘The American invasion and the British response’ Studio International (London), 173: 890 (June, 1967): 285–293, as cited in Nungesser, note 113. 58. Ha�mann, Painting in the Twentieth Century, p. 12. English-language art histories of this period have not drawn on Ha�mann’s account of the simultaneous international development of abstract art during the 1950s. The American literature focuses almost exclusively on developments around the New York School. In addition to Ha�mann, there are few art histories that consider directions in abstraction developed outside the U.S. in the immediate postwar years. Aldo Pellegrini’s New Tendencies in Art (New York: Crown Publishers, 1966) discusses ‘Informalism in the United States’, using the European stylistic term in lieu of the American ‘abstract expressionism’. Pelligrini therefore relates American abstract painting of the period to contemporaneous developments in Western Europe, Japan, and Argentina. I thank Ellen Landau for bringing this book to my a�ention. Another exception is the anthology Abstract Art Since 1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), featuring essays by Ha�mann, Irving Sandler, Lucy Lippard and Michel Ragon. In this volume the terms ‘informel’ and ‘abstract expressionism’ are kept carefully distinct. 59. Walter Grasskamp lumped the first Documenta together with the Nazi exhibition ‘Degenerate Art’ in that both failed to come to terms with modernism. The nationalistic aspects of modern art, constructed by art institutions and art historians of the early twentieth century, were merely willed away by Ha�mann in his Documenta exhibitions. Documenta under other curators beginning in 1972 did not do much be�er on this count. See Walter Grasskamp, ‘Die unbewältigte Moderne: “Entartete Kunst” und documenta 1. Verfemung und Entschärfung’, in Museum der Gegenwart-Kunst in öffentlichen Sammlungen bis 1937 (Düsseldorf: Kunstsammlung NordrheinWestfalen, 1987), pp. 13–24.

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60. Ha�mann, Speech at Documenta ‘59, ‘Von den Inhalten der modernen Kunst’, Skizzenbuch, p. 133. 61. Ossip Zadkine’s bronze Torse de la Ville Détruite (1951–53) was shown in near the Orangerie in the Karlsaue. 62. It appears that Serge Chermayeff in 1945 was one of the first critics to connect Mies’ work with de Stijl (Chermayeff, ‘Mondrian of the perfectionists’, ArtNews 44, No. 3 (March, 1945): 14–16. Max Bill, in his book on the architect (published in Milan by Il Balcone in Italian in 1955), maintained that neoplasticism remained a major source for Mies. Ulrich Conrads repeats this connection in his article ‘Der andere Mies’, Bauwelt 59 (September 16, 1968): 1209–1226. Hilbersheimer also discusses this connection but emphasizes the distinction between Mondrian and Mies in noting the difference between painted pictorial space and architectural space; see Ludwig Hilbersheimer, Mies van der Rohe (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1956), pp. 41–2. 63. Alfred Neumeyer, ‘Berlin’s New National Galerie’, Art Journal Vol. 29, No. 2 (Fall, 1969): 93. Chapter 2: Marking the Postwar City 1. Wolf Vostell and Allan Kaprow, ‘Die Kunst des Happenings’, in Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme. Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek: Rowolt, 1965), p. 407. 2. The term is taken from Benjamin’s review of Franz Hessel, Spazieren in Berlin (1929), in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schri�en III, 194: ‘Die Stadt als mnemotechnischer Behelf des einsam spazierenden, sie ru� mehr herauf als dessen Keinheit und Jugend, mehr als ihre eigene Geschichte. Was sie eröffnet, ist das unabsehbare Schauspiel der Flanerie…’ (my emphasis). Benjamin emphasizes the performative and theatrical elements intrinsic to flaneurie. 3. Alexander Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (London: Tavistock, 1975), and Society without the Father (Tavistock, 1969). 4. René Block, ‘Not a Monument but Rather Food for Thought’, in Eckhart Gillen, (ed.), German Art from Beckmann to Richter (Cologne: DuMont, 1997), p. 215. 5. ‘Part I, December 1970’, in Jörg Schellmann and Bernd

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Klüser (eds.), Joseph Beuys Multiples: catalogue raisonné (New York: New York University Press, 1980), n.p. 6. Robert Graham discusses the cycles of waning hopes for revolutionary possibilities amongst postwar European artists such as CoBrA in his chapter, ‘In search of a revolutionary consciousness: further adventures of the European AvantGarde’, in Varieties of Modernism (New Haven: Yale UP, 2005), pp. 363–398. 7. The term gained currency in 1963 and 1964 when it was used by critics Edward T. Kelly and Barbara Rose to describe artworks by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, in addition to that of a number of other artists including Fluxus. More recently the term was revived in an exhibition by Susan Hapgood, Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958–62 (New York: American Federation of Arts in association with Universe Publishers, 1994), and by Branden Joseph in his book on Rauschenberg, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (MIT Press, 2003). 8. See the definition of the neo-avant-garde forwarded in Benjamin Buchloh, ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: a Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’, October 37 (Summer, 1986). 9. Vostell (West Berlin: Galerie René Block, Edition 17, 1969), p. 403. 10. Vostell, ‘Was ist Dé-collage?’ Rheinischer Merkur Nr. 47: 22 (November 1963), reprinted in dé-collage/Happenings 4 (Cologne n.d.), n.p. 11. This event is transcribed in J. Becker and Vostell (eds.), Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme. Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowolt Verlag, 1965). 12. Vostell (1969), p. 402. 13. Becker, pp. 403-404. 14. Vostell documented this event in a published minuteby-minute transcription of actions and reactions, several photographs, a series of Partitur diagrams, and in a film by Edo Jansen. This transcription was later published in dé-collage/ Happenings 4 (Cologne, n.d.) n.p. 15. Vostell Retrospektive 1958–1974 (Berlin: Neuer Berliner

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Kunstverein and the Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1974), p. 123. 16. David Joselit, ‘Object, General and Specific: Assemblage, Minimalism, Fluxus’, American Art Since 1945 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003), pp. 96–127. 17. Walter Benjamin, ‘Eduard Fuchs, Collector and Historian’ (1937), reprinted in Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 225–253; and ‘Dossier H: the Collector’, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 203–211. 18. Benjamin, ‘Dossier H’, pp. 204–5; 207. 19. Kienholz’s work was not included in a recent exhibition considering the functions of storage and archiving in art, Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art (New York: Prestel, 1998). The curators operated on an archival notion of collecting which did not understand Paik’s early video sculptures as connecting to his activities as a collector of the television apparatus/object. 20. Robert O. Paxton sketches the historiography of fascism; these criteria were presented in the 1950s by Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski. See Paxton, ‘What is Fascism?’ in The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2004), p. 211. 21. These laws are cited in the exhibition catalogue Edward Kienholz: Volksempfängers (West Berlin: Nationalgalerie, 1977), and by Nancy R. Kienholz in the ‘Chronology’ in Kienholz a Retrospective (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1996), p. 260. 22. Nancy R. Kienholz, ‘Chronology’, pp. 259–260. 23. As cited by Roland H. Wiegenstein, ‘Ed Kienholz, the Volksempfängers and the Ring’, in Edward Kienholz: Volksempfängers, p. 16. 24. As recounted by Jörn Merkert, ‘Ed Kienholz and the Language of Objects’, in Edward Kienholz: Volksempfängers, p. 51. 25. Andreas Huyssen argues that technological optimism, recalling that of the 1920s (in Soviet and Eastern European constructivism, and in Futurism) was pervasive during the 1960s, particularly in Germany. See Andreas Huyssen, ‘Mapping

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the Postmodern’, A�er the Great Divide (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 193. 26. René Block (ed.), New York—Downtown Manha�an: SoHo (West Berlin: Akademie der Künste/ Berliner Festwochen, 1976). See especially the chapter by Stephen B. Reichard, ‘Alternative Ausstellungsräume’, pp. 238–251. 27. The success of P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center as a largescale, international venue or ‘alternative space’ in New York influenced the critical West Berlin artists who would form the Büro Berlin, since their first installations in the ‘raw space’ of the Lützowstrasse of 1978 bore the same title—Räume—as P.S. 1’s famed inaugural exhibition Rooms (1976). However the Büro Berlin’s focus on the dynamics of production is unique to divided Berlin. 28. Brian Wallis citing Grant Kester, in Wallis, ‘Public Funding and Alternative Spaces’ in Julie Ault (ed.), Alternative Art New York 1965–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 172. 29. Michael Asher as cited in Anne Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object of Art 1965–1975 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), p. 58. 30. On this installation see my essay ‘Institutionalizing Social Sculpture: Beuys’ Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum Installation, 1972’, in Mesch and Viola Michely, eds., Joseph Beuys, the Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 198–217. 31. As stated by Raimund Kummer in an interview with the author in Berlin on Sept. 11, 2006. 32. Uwe M. Schneede, ‘Fiktion als Praxis: über das Büro Berlin’, and Wolfgang Siano, ‘Ostlandfahrer’, both in Büro Berlin ein Produktionsbegriff (Berlin: Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 1986), pp. 139–143 and 136–138, respectively; Thomas Wulffen on the Büro Berlin (no title) in Artscribe International 62 (March/April 1987): 49–53; and also Wulf Herzogenrath, ‘Künstler verändern die Ausstellungsformen’, in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, Berlin 1990: ein Ausstellungsprojekt in Ost und West (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1990), pp. 26–41. 33. In 2006 I conducted interviews with Katja Ka, Pohl, Möhrke, Kummer, Pitz, Smith, Cragg, and Michael Haerdter,

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founder of the legendary Künstlerhaus Bethanien. In these conversations, the Büro Berlin was produced and constructed. Fritz Rahmann died in August of 2006. The support of a Henry Moore Institute fellowship made this research possible. I am preparing a separate essay that tracks my individual conversations with the artists involved with the Büro Berlin. 34. The Büro Berlin archive/website can be located at www. quobo.de/bb/index.html. The website also contains Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen’s important interview of Fritz Rahmann conducted by as part of the 1987 ‘Emotope’ exhibition, another collaboration with the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. 35. This decentered model of the group is somewhat idealistic, since Raimund Kummer’s striking photographs o�en seem to be foregrounded in representing the group—this is most glaring in Wulffen’s article of 1987, which reproduces only Kummer and Rahmann’s works. The work of women artists is very much marginalized in the 1985 catalogue: Katja Ka’s work is only fleetingly reproduced (she le� the association shortly a�er 1980), as is that of Heidemarie von Wedel; Una Möhrke’s work is missing entirely, as are installations by Marianne Pohl and Eva-Maria Schön. The Büro Berlin marginalized painters, many of which were women. The 2003 installation at the Berlinische Galerie took a step in rectifying this situation, as was the inclusion of Kiki Smith’s later projects. 36. Uwe Schneede has noted the parallels between the Büro Berlin’s organizational structure and the traditional workings of film production, a coordinated and collaborative venture that includes the function of the site scout. It is not coincidental that both Pitz and Kummer had worked in film production. Uwe Schneede, ‘Fiktion als Praxis: Über das Büro Berlin’, in Büro Berlin, p. 140. 37. Büro Berlin, p. 153. 38. Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1961–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October 55 (Winter, 1991): 105–143; and Miwon Kwon, One Place A�er Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 46 ff. In his chronicle of the ‘triumph’ of the practice of installation, Sven Lü�iken re-establishes (like Brian

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O’Doherty before him) Duchamp as originator of installation practice, one that he initiated not only with the readymade but also in his elaborate ‘surrealist’ New York installations of the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, the ‘International Exhibition of Surrealism’ (1938) and the ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ (1942). Lü�iken is concerned with tracking the decline of the term ‘environment’ within art discourse of the 1970s and its ultimate replacement with the term ‘installation,’ the la�er referring to a contextually-bound, art practice (he pointedly avoids using the difficult term ‘medium’). More emphatically than O’Doherty— who also isolates the term in quotation marks and uses it to refer only to a work by Kosuth—Lü�iken defines installation as a self-critical intervention into the spaces of the art institution beyond mere physical arrangement. To his mind this happens for the first time in the ‘70s with not only Kosuth but also with Dan Graham’s Opposing Mirrors and Video Monitors on Time Delay (1974). Lü�iken also points out that as a former gallery director Graham was perhaps the artist most conscious of the presentation of artworks in the gallery space. Sven Lü�iken, ‘Triomf van de Installatie’, De Wi�e Raaf (Belgium) 62 (Juli 1996), translated into German by Hermann Pitz. I thank Hermann Pitz for providing me with his translation. 39. Neither Lü�iken nor Brian O’Doherty’s earlier account show much interest in an alternative origin in Vladimir Tatlin’s Corner Counter-relief of 1915, which is generally thought to predate the ‘publicly exhibited’ readymade. However it is undeniable that the critical, self-reflexive coordination of space that is inherent in Lü�iken’s term ‘installation’ developed only a�er Duchamp’s New York installations or ‘altered rooms’ (O’Doherty). 40. They also realized their productions within museums beginning in 1981. At the Musée d’Art moderne in Paris that year they presented a variety of ways that a museum storage room might be utilized; they also participated in exhibitions in Nice and Fribourg, Switzerland. 41. Brian O’Doherty, ‘Notes on the Gallery Space’, in Inside the White Cube: the Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986), pp. 13–34.

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42. Una Möhrke was known at the time as Helga Möhrke. 43. Möhrke continued her concern with drawing and surface in works throughout the ‘80s, when she began to experiment with the surface of water (arguably a central concern of the early modernists like Monet). These works include the performancebased Water Drawings (1980–1984, at the Neuen See, Berlin Tiergarten); Kein Bla� wie das andere (No sheet like the next, 1984, Herrenhäuer Gardens, Hannover) and …aufs Wasser gezeichnet (Drawn on water, 1984, Münster). These works were completed independently by the artist and she terminated her association with the Büro Berlin a�er 1979. See ‘Narziss oder die Kunst-Liebe’: Helga Möhrke Fotoarbeiten 1980–1987 (Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 1987). 44. An informational sheet about the work is reproduced in Büro Berlin, p. 149. 45. Herbert Molderings explains that the Büro Berlin situations were carefully if not lavishly photographed in a manner that went far beyond the documentary intent of Robert Smithson’s ‘non-site’ photography or that of other conceptual artists. He argues that only technically very fine photographic images could communicate Kummer’s and other Büro Berlin artists” formalist and aesthetic interest in the dynamics of color and form at various urban sites. Perhaps on this count Büro Berlin photographs are closer in spirit to those Stieglitz made of the Fountain than to the traditions of conceptual art. Herbert Molderings, ‘Photography and Contemporary Sculpture: on Raimund Kummer’s Photographs 1980–2004’, in Raimund Kummer On Sculpture (Berlin: Holzwarth Publications, 2005), pp. 149 ff. 46. Büro Berlin, p. 149. 47. Kummer continues to feature this girder in his installations, most recently at the Museum of Photography in Berlin in 2004. 48. On the workings of Serra’s public sculptural works see Douglas Crimp, ‘Serra’s Public Sculpture’, in Richard Serra Sculpture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1986), pp. 40–56. 49. The close relationship established between art and local production conditions in the Büro Berlin is in strong contrast

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to Serra, who carefully kept these levels of production separate. Serra realized at least one series, the Skullcracker Series, in an actual steelyard in southern California, where the works were also destroyed, but only a�er they had been photographed (a documenting process that Kummer and others also made use of). In the later Tilted Arc, the labour process of construction in erecting the work is kept behind the scenes and is distinct from the sculptural object itself. Only the widely-disseminated photographs of this work being dismantled reveal the production process that was necessary to its realization. 50. See www.ingoldairlines.com. 51. See Fritz Rahmann’s comments on Res Ingold’s product in ‘Conversation with Fritz Rahmann/Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, March 15, 1988’ (under ‘Chronology, 1988’) at www.quobo.de/ bb/index.html. 52. Alexei Gan, ‘Constructivism’, (1921), translated and reprinted in John E. Bowlt (ed.), Russian Art of the Avant-Garde, Theory and Criticism (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991), p. 225. Two concise discussions of the terms constructivism and productivism are presented by Christina Lodder, ‘Soviet Constructivism’, in Steve Edwards and Paul Woods, (eds.), Art of the Avant-Gardes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 360–386; and Briony Fer, ‘Russian Constructivism’, in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 96–138. 53. His two essays of relevance are ‘The Role of the Engineer in Production’ and ‘The Artist in Production’. Both are cited in Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 100–101 and note 145, p. 283. 54. Hal Foster, ‘The Crux of Minimalism’ (1986), reprinted in The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 35–70. 55. Maurice Blanchot, ‘Berlin’, (1964), republished in MLN, 109 (1994): 352. 56. See Anne Rorimer, ‘Medium as Message/Message as Medium’, in New Art in the 60s and 70s. Redefining Reality (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001). 57. Brouwn’s performances for the René Block Gallery in 1964 are described in Kynaston MacShine (ed.), BerlinArt 1961–1987

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(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), p. 68. 58. Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Rethinking Womens” Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory’, (1985), reprinted in Technologies of Gender, Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 128. 59. de Lauretis, p. 130; Laura Mulvey, ‘Film, Feminism and the Avant-Garde’, (1978), in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 115. 60. ‘Journeys’, pp. 142; 148. 61. ‘Journeys’, p. 153. 62. ‘Journeys’, p. 165. 63. See Kristin Wesemann, Ulrike Meinhof. Kommunistin, Journalistin, Terroristin: eine politische Biografie (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlag, 2007). 64. See Brian Ladd, ‘Local Responses in Berlin to Urban Decay and the Demise of the German Democratic Republic’, in John J. Czaplicka and Blair A. Ruble (eds.), Composing Urban History and the Constitution of Civic Identities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp. 263–284. 65. Lothar Lang, Berliner Montmartre: Künstler vom Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin: Rü�en & Loening, 1991). 66. Butzmann’s poster Ein Platz für Bäume was named ‘best poster’ of 1979. 67. Lothar Lang, manuscript for Kunst in Berlin Seit 1945, Special Collections, Ge�y Institute. Both Hermann Raum (edition ost, 2000) and Lothar Lang’s (Faber & Faber, 2002) postreunification publications on East German art have sections devoted to Butzmann’s print production. 68. Go�hard Brandler, ‘Manfred Butzmann’, Sonntag (October 8, 1978), as cited by Lang, Kunst in Berlin manuscript. 69. VIII Kunstausstellung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Dresden 1977/78 (Dresden: Ministerium für Kultur, Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, 1978), p. 110. 70. Manfred Butzmann, handwri�en le�er to H. Raum dated 2/7/78. In his le�er Butzmann appears to contest the art historian Raum’s published assertion that the Eindrücke portfolio had been a state commission; in actuality he was really writing to to tell him of his misfortune in Dresden. Most likely this kind

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of tangental le�er was a GDR writing style designed to outwit Stasi agents who read the mail. Raum’s reply indicates that he received one of Butzmann’s photo-based posters, perhaps the one that was rejected by the same jury in 1977. Hermann Raum papers, Box 211, Ge�y Institute. 71. Hermann Raum, Bildende Kunst in der DDR: die andere Moderne (Berlin: Edition Ost, 2000), pp. 170–171. 72. See Andreas Krase, ‘Passage Fotografie + FotoGrafik’, in Blume and März (eds.), Kunst in der DDR, p. 73. 73. Designated galleries could produce editions for artists and sell artworks in auctions overseen by the state to GDR museums and private collectors and possibly also the Soviet Bloc. See Manfred Butzmann 1978 (Berlin: Galerie Arkade, 1978). 74. Ulrich Rudolph, ‘Wahrheit in Foto’, Bildende Kunst (He� 11, 1982): 555. 75. Eugen Blume, ‘In freier Lu�: die Künstlergruppe Clara Mosch und ihre Pleinairs’, in Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, 740. In 1989 Butzmann produced similar images as a book, with photographs by Joachim Thurn, and without any text; he could not have not done so any earlier. See Butzmann, 19 Schaufenster in Pankow (unpaginated, 1989); Ge�y Special Collections. 76. Ladd, p. 266. 77. Ladd, pp. 269 ff. ‘Studie Thälmann Park’, dated 1978, Hans Krause Papers, Ge�y Institute. On the complex history of this park and its role in GDR history, see Thomas Flierl, ‘”Thälmann vor allen”: ein Nationaldenkmal für die Hauptstadt der DDR, Berlin’, in Kunstdokumentation SBZ/DDR, pp. 358–385. See also Brian Ladd, ‘East Berlin Political Monuments in the Late German Democratic Republic: Finding a Place for Marx and Engels’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1. (Jan., 2002): 96 ff. 78. For a manuscript of this address see Thomas Flierl, ‘Gegen den Abriss eines Baudenkmals’, Kritische Berichte 3 (1992): 53–57. 79. Eugen Blume, essay in Heimatskunde (Berlin: Privatdruck, 1992), p. 64, as cited by Lothar Lang, Malerei und Graphik in Ostdeutschland (Leipzig: Faber & Faber, 2002), 190. A�er reunification Butzmann proposed the construction of an ‘ironic sculpture park’ at the Thälmann Park, which features a labyrinth

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of paths and a phalanx of poplar trees planted directly around the Kerbel sculpture such that in accordance with certain times of year, alternating views are offered of it or completely obscure it. See Flierl, ‘“Thälmann”’, p. 385. Chapter 3: Bonjour Monsieur Courbet 1. On this term see Hans Belting, ‘German German Art’, in The Germans and Their Art: a Troublesome Relationship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998; German, 1993), p. 96. 2. Kynaston McShine, Berlinart (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), p. 14–15. 3. Final address of the 4th VBK congress in 1959, as cited in Feist and Gillen (eds.), Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 41. The German Artists Union was titled ‘VBKD’ (Verband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands) until 1970, when it renamed itself ‘VBK-DDR’ (Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR). To avoid confusion I will refer to the union as the ‘VBK’ throughout. 4. On the debate see the essays in Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 1980; reprint 2007). 5. Alfred Kurella, Bericht über die Lage der Malerei in der DDR, addressed to W. Ulbricht, dated November 27, 1959, reprinted in Goeschen, Vom sozialistischen Realismus zur Kunst im Sozialismus, pp. 378–393. 6. For example, newspaper ‘exposés’ regarding Raum’s 1964 address ran in Neues Deutschland for one week, beginning April 5, 1964, in the local Rostock newspaper. Raum still insisted in 1993 that his address had been reviewed and approved by functionaries before it was delivered in Berlin. Hermann Raum Papers, Box 217, DDR Collections, Ge�y Institute Special Collections. 7. Several in-studio reports, including those with Si�e and Heisig, can be found in the Waltraut Mai and Ingrid Beyer Papers, DDR Collections, Ge�y Institute. 8. Paul Kaiser, ‘Von der Kunst der Einübung ins Einverständnis’, in Im Spannungsfeld der Moderne, Zehn Mahler aus Halle (Halle: Sti�ung Moritzburg, 2004), p. 157. 9. As cited in Durchblick. Ludwig-Institut für Kunst der DDR Oberhausen (Oberhausen, 1984), p. 41. This quotation comes

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from Hü�’s Bildende Kunst articles of 1957. 10. As cited by Goeschen, pp. 105–6. In a 1957 Bildende Kunst article Hü� argued that ASSO artists like Kollwitz and Grosz marked the origin of German Socialist Realism. Goeschen, p. 69. 11. Alfred Kurella, ‘Die sowjetische Kunst wegweisend’, in Neues Deutschland, May 17, 1958 (insert), cited in Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 37. 12. Published in Freiheit in February, 1958, cited in Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 36. 13. Eberhard Bartke, ‘Hauptstrasse der Künste’, Junge Kunst He� 6 (1959), cited in Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 39. 14. Walter Ulbricht, 11th Plenum, Central Commi�ee of the SED, reprinted in Neues Deutschland, Nov. 28, 1961, as cited in Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 45. 15. SED party secretary Bernhard Koenen in Neues Deutschland (December 19, 1962); Kunstkombinat, p. 49. 16. See the account by Eckhart Gillen in Das Kunstkombinat DDR: Zäsuren einer gescheiterten Kunstpolitik (Köln: DuMont, 2005), pp. 103–108. 17. These leaflets can be found in the Hermann Raum papers, Ge�y Institute. 18. André Breton and the Surrealists’ understanding of the term ‘the marvellous’ is very complex. Usually scholars trace the term to Breton’s ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’ of 1924 but it was explored in numerous other texts. Generally it refers to a concern that animated poetry and literature: a related notion of beauty and the irrational as both were plumbed in the realm of dreams or of the unconscious. Breton believed the impulse of the marvellous could be found throughout history and could be revived. See ‘Manifesto of Surrealism’, in André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 1–48. The scholarly literature on this term is vast. 19. Eduard Beaucamp, ‘Werner Tübke, Reminiscences of J.D. Schultze III’, in Eckhart Gillen, (ed.), German Art from Beckmann to Richter (Köln: DuMont, 1997), p. 172. 20. Le�er from Alfred Kurella to Hermann Raum, March 24, 1970; Hermann Raum Papers, Ge�y Institute.

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21. Although he rejected Brecht’s radicalism, Ma�heuer spoke of his importance amongst GDR artists. Heisig illustrated the Brecht plays Dreigroschenoper and Mu�er Courage in a series of lithographs of 1963–5, and he returns to the motifs of these narratives in several of his later paintings. See Ma�heuer’s interview with Ju�a Held in Wolfgang Ma�heuer: Retrospektive (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann Verlag, 2002). 22. Peter H. Feist, ‘Muss unsere Kunst intelligenzintensiv sein?’ Bildende Kunst (August, 1966), as cited by Lothar Lang in Malerei und Graphik in der DDR (Leipzig, 1983), p. 143. 23. Dieter Gleisberg ‘Das Gleichnis des Kain’, in the Leipziger Volkszeitung, Oct. 23, 1965; further article in Azet, October 9, 1965. 24. Ma�heuer interview with Peter Ideen, Wolfgang Ma�heuer, pp. 81–2. 25. I discuss the ‘Bi�erfelder Weg’ or policy in Chapter 1. 26. Albert Camus, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’ (1942) in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1991; first published in English 1955), pp. 119–123. 27. Ma�heuer was by his own account involved in the ‘quiet revolution’ of 1989 from its beginnings around the Nikolai Church in Leipzig. 28. Gillen, Das Kunstkombinat DDR (2005), pp. 103–108. 29. Terminology taken from correspondence to Hermann Raum from the Central Commi�ee of the SED Berlin, dated May 28, 1964; Hermann Raum Papers, Box 217, Ge�y Institute. 30. Anonymous author, ‘Probleme und Diskussionen’, Bildende Kunst, February, 1966; cited in Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR (1990), p. 63. 31. Harald Olbricht, ‘Asthetische Subjektivität oder Subjektivismus?’ Bildende Kunst, May, 1966; cited in Gillen, Kunstkombinat DDR (1990), p. 64. 32. See Heisig’s comments a�er his re-emergence under the Honecker regime at the 8th VBK Congress, 1978, translated into English in Peter Nisbet, Ed., Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Harvard University and BuschReisinger Museum, 1989), p. 76. 33. Rosalind Krauss discusses the role of mass media in

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memory in her essay on Rauschenberg, ‘Robert Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image’, Artforum XIII: 4 (December 1974), 36–43. See also the collection Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, Lisa Saltzman and Eric Rosenberg (eds.), (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2006). 34. Kuhirt’s statement from 1974, as cited in Durchblick, p. 47. 35. Heisig examines the role of religion in modern warfare in his series of Christ paintings: Christus verweigert den Gehorsam II (1986–88); Der Ölberg, 1987–89; and Go� Mit Uns, 1989–90. 36. As recounted for example by Johannes Gachnang, ‘Immendorff Times Penck, X Penck Times Immendorff’, German Art from Beckmann, p. 187. 37. See also Haacke’s essay, ‘Broadness and Diversity of the Ludwig Brigade’, October Vol. 30 (Autumn, 1984): 9-16. 38. On the ‘Leben mit Pop’ performance/installation see Susanne Küper, ‘Leben mit Pop, eine Demonstration für den kapitalistischen Realismus’, in Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch Vol. LIII (Cologne, 1991): 289–306; see also her account ‘Gerhard Richter: Capitalist Realism and his Painting from Photographs 1962– 1966’, in German Art from Beckmann, pp. 233–236. 39. An extensive ‘report’ documents ‘Leben mit Pop’ and can be found in René Block, Grafik des Kapitalistischen Realismus (Berlin: Edition René Block, 1971), pp. 31–35; it is translated in Hans-Ulrich Obrist (ed.), Gerhard Richter, the Daily Practice of Painting, Writings and Interviews 1962–1993 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 18–21. 40. ‘Report’, Daily Practice, p. 20. 41. Gerhard Richter, ‘Le�er to a newsreel company, April 29, 1963’, in Daily Practice, p. 15–6. 42. Richter, p. 16. 43. Küper, German Art, p. 234. 44. ‘Report’, Daily Practice, p. 20. 45. ‘Notes 1964–5’, Daily Practice, p. 34. 46. As discussed by Christopher Phillips, ‘Arena, the Chaos of the Unnamed’, in Lynne Cooke (ed.), Arena, Where would I have got if I had been intelligent! (New York: Dia Foundation, 1994), p. 55. 47. Block, p. 30.

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48. ‘Notes 1964–5’, Daily Practice, p. 39. 49. On this tradition and its treatment in nineteenthcentury France by Gustave Caillebo�e, see Paula Lee, ‘Sexual Consumption in the Meat Marketplace: Gustave Caillebo�e’s Veau a l’etal’, forthcoming in Visions of the Industrial Age, Minsoo Kang and Amy Woodson-Bolton, eds. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press). 50. Georg Baselitz and Eugen Schönebeck, ‘Pandemonium 2’, in Baselitz Paintings 1960–83 (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1983), p. 25. 51. Tom Holert, ‘Bei sich, über allem. Der symptomatische Baselitz’, Texte zur Kunst (March 1993). Many sources also cite Baselitz’s interest in anamorphosis. 52. Johann Heinrich Müller, ‘Art and Politics’, translated by S. Hood, in Berlin: a Critical View/Ugly Realism (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1978), p. 262. 53. Johannes Grützke, artist statement, in Peter Sager, Neue Formen des Realismus (Köln: DuMont, 1977), p. 230. 54. Hermann Raum, Die bildende Kunst der BRD and Westberlins (Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1977). 55. ‘Prologue’, in Jörg Immendorff: Lidl 1966–1970 (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven, 1981), n.p. 56. Griselda Pollock has discussed the significance of Brechtian strategies for a political, feminist art in her essay ‘Screening the seventies’, in Vision and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1988). 57. See his interview with Robert Storr, ‘Of Politics and Painting’, Art in America (June/July 2005): 134 ff. 58. This is following Immendorff’s recounting of this event as related to Robert Storr. ‘Of Politics’, p. 139. 59. As cited by Dieter Koepplin, ‘A.R. Penck’, in A.R. Penck, exhibition catalogue (Bern: Kunsthalle Bern, 1976), Note 4, n.p. 60. Koepplin, ‘A.R. Penck’, n.p. 61. Penck, Ich Standart Literatur (Paris: Agentzia, n.d.); Standart 1971–1973 (Berlin: Rainer, 1985); Was ist Standart (New York and Cologne: Gebr. Koenig, 1970). A portion of these essays was translated and published by the Michael Werner Gallery, and is reprinted in A.R. Penck (New York: Abrams, 1993), pp. 117–118.

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62. A.R. Penck, ‘Standart’, in A.R. Penck (New York, 1993), p. 117. Some of these concepts draw on those of early cybernetics, for example, by William Ross Ashby: the law of requisite variety and the principle of self-organization, as outlined in his An Introduction to Cybernetics (1956), which Penck read. 63. Dieter Koepplin, ‘Zeichnungen von A.R. Penck’, in a.r. Penck Y (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1978), p. 9. 64. I am not claiming that modernist abstraction did not exist in the GDR or in the Soviet Bloc, but that it was practiced far less widely there than figurative modes. Abstraction generally did not lead to comparable points of cultural contact between East and West. I’ve pointed to Hermann Glöckner as one exception, as were other East German abstract painters like Günter Hornig (who I discuss in Ch. 4), Hanns Schimansky or Harald Toppl. On the subject of abstraction in the GDR see Eugen Blume, ‘Eine Landkarte des inneren Raumes’, in Konturen: Werke seit 1949 geborener Künstler der DDR, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, 1989), pp. 28–35; and Karl-Siegbert Rehberg and Paul Kaiser, (eds.), Abstraktion im Staatssozialismus (Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenscha�en, 2003). Chapter 4: Performance West and East 1. Ilya Kabakov, ‘Zwei Erinnerungen an die Angst’, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit Berlin 1990, pp. 120–123. 2. The sudden state funding of alternative space ventures in New York has similarly been tied to the Cold War objectives of the Nixon administration, as I discuss in Chapter 2. 3. ‘Interview with Emme� Williams’, Umbrella (March, 1998): h�p://colophon.com/umbrella/emmet.html. 4. Cage’s first performances in Germany date to 1954 when he first travelled there with David Tudor and lectured at Darmstadt. 5. Nam June Paik (1976), quoted in intermedial kontrovers experimentell. Das Atelier Mary Bauermeister in Köln 1960–62 (Köln: Emons Verlag, 1993), p. 50. 6. Cage, quoted in Elizabeth Jappe, Performance, Ritual, Process (München: Prestel Verlag, 1993), p. 18.

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7. Quoted from an interview in the film Cage/Cunningham, directed by Elliot Caplan (1991), in intermedial kontrovers, p. 50. 8. Paik (1960), quoted in intermedial Kontrovers, p. 51. 9. Paik in a le�er dated 1959, cited in intermedial kontrovers, p. 30. 10. Paik’s use of objects within performance resonated with a wider field of cultural activity in Cologne. In Cologne in 1961, Mary Bauermeister organized the private exhibition ‘The Spirit of the Time in Painting and Sculpture’ at the home of the architect Peter Neufert. One might say that this exhibition recapitulated a direction of abstract art already well established in Europe. Only two artists featured in Bauermeister’s exhibition, Max Bill and Karl Gerstner, had previously aligned themselves with the aesthetic direction of ‘Konkrete Kunst’, a direction in abstraction loosely linked to de Stijl traditions of geometric abstraction in the work and writing of sometime Bauhaus lecturer Theo von Doesburg, who first defined the term in an article in 1930. Bill remained the primary articulator of the art historical direction of concrete art in postwar Europe. 11. Much of this work (by E. Gomringer, H. C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Jirí Kolár, Öyvind Fahlström, Emme� Williams, Dick Higgins, and, later, the work of Diter Rot and André Thomkins) refused referentiality by focusing on the isolated word or even the individual le�er; this work shared Cage’s concern with the role of the visual in its development of the imagistic within poetry. By 1958, the ‘Darmstadt Circle’, a group of poets organized by Daniel Spoerri, had established itself in proximity to the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik there. It included Emme� Williams and Claus Bremer, and it published its own journal, Material. Cited by Wilfried Dörstel in ‘“Knollengewächs” und “Rangierstelle”. Europäische Konkrete Kunst und Amerikanischer Konkretismus im Atelier Bauermeister’, in intermedial kontrovers, p. 141. 12. Wilfried Dörstel, ‘The Bauermeister Studio: ProtoFluxus in Cologne 1960–1962’, in Fluxus Virus (Köln: Galerie Schuppenhauer, 1992), p. 61. 13. George Maciunas, ‘Neo-Dada in Music, Theatre, Poetry, Art’, (1962), reprinted in Clive Phillpot and Jon Hendricks,

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Fluxus. Selections from the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), p. 25. 14. Simon Anderson in ‘Fluxus Publicus’, in Elizabeth Armstrong and Joan Rothfuss (eds.), In the Spirit of Fluxus, (Minneapolis: Walker Art Centre, 1993), pp. 42–3, states that ‘Fluxus was planned as a magazine’ around 1961 in New York. 15. Maciunas le�er to Schmit cited in Götz Adriani, et.al., Joseph Beuys. Life and Work, translated by Patricia Lech (New York: Barrons, 1979), p. 84. 16. Owen Smith, ‘Fluxus: a Brief History and Other Fictions’, in In the Spirit of Fluxus, p. 27–8. 17. Maciunas le�er to T. Schmit, January 1962, reprinted in Adriani, pp. 82–4. 18. Maciunas, ‘Fluxamusement’ manifesto, reprinted in Phillpot and Hendricks, Fluxus, pp. 14. 19. Schmit le�er, reprinted in Adriani, p. 82. 20. Maciunas, ‘Neo-Dada in Music’, p. 27. 21. Mitscherlich seemed to retreat from the serious charge he levelled at Fluxus in retitling the essay ‘Happeningsorganizierter Unfug?’ published in Neue Rundschau 77, He� 1 (1966): 106ff. The radio address typescript, ‘Sind Happenings Gefährlich? Gedanken zur unbewältigten Gegenwart in der Kunst’, from the Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt a.M., indicates that the lecture was broadcast on December 15, 1965. Wolf Vostell Archive, Malpartida de Cáceres, Spain. 22. Beuys, cited by Mitscherlich, ‘Sind Happenings Gefährlich?’, p. 2, citing Jürgen Becker and Wolf Vostell (eds.), Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme. Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowolt Verlag, 1965), p. 327; my translation. 23. Mitscherlich, ‘Sind Happenings’, pp. 11–12. 24. Mitscherlich, ‘Happenings—organisierter Unfug?’ p. 114. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’ (1959), reprinted in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 117. 26. I discuss Vostell’s early dé-collage performances in ‘‘Vostell’s Ruins: Dé-collage and the Mnemotechnic Space of the

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Postwar City’, Art History Vol. 23 No.1 (March 2000): 88–115. 27. René Block, ‘Fluxus and Fluxism in Berlin 1964–1976’, in Berlinart 1961–1987 (Munich and the Museum of Modern Art, New York: Prestel, 1987), p. 65. 28. Block, ‘Fluxus’, p. 68. 29. This event is transcribed in J. Becker and W. Vostell (eds.), Happenings: Fluxus, Pop Art, Nouveau Realisme. Eine Dokumentation. 30. There is some discrepancy between the two major sources for Fluxus activities in West Berlin: ‘1964–1979 Chronology’, from Aus Berlin: neues vom Kojoten (Berlin: Block, Frölich & Kaufmann, 1981, first edition 1979), and Wiesbaden Fluxus 1962– 1982: eine kleine Geschichte von Fluxus in drei Teilen (Wiesbaden: Harlekin Art, 1983). 31. Photographs document the interaction of police with Kaprow during Sweet Wall and are included in Block’s catalogue for this activity, Sweet Wall/Testimonials (1976). 32. 1970 is a key year for feminist art in West Germany, since Rebecca Horn’s body extension pieces and films originated in that year as well. This may not point to Schneemann’s influence but rather a historical convergence of feminist concerns. 33. Kathy O’Dell, ‘Fluxus Feminus’, The Drama Review Vol. 41 No. 1 (Spring 1997): 43–60. 34. See the photos in Wiesbaden Fluxus 1962-1982, p. 47. 35. See Schneemann’s description of the performance in ‘Schlaget auf’, in More Than Meat Joy, Bruce McPherson ed. (New Paltz, NY: Documentest, 1979), pp. 208 ff. 36. Schneemann’s overarching concern with painting is described by Kristine Stiles in ‘Schlaget Auf: the Problem with Carolee Schneemann’s Painting’, in Carolee Schneemann Up to and including her Limits (New York: New Museum, 1997), pp. 15–25. 37. ‘istory’ is Schneemann’s critical reconfiguring of the male-dominated discourse of art history. 38. See O’Dell, p. 47. 39. Schneemann, More than Meat Joy, pp. 208–209. 40. A copy of the film can be located in the Allan Kaprow Papers at the Ge�y Library; many of the photographs were taken by Dick Higgins and can presumably be found in the

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Archiv Galerie Block. The photographs can be found in the 1976 catalogue but have also been published elsewhere. 41. Allan Kaprow, Sweet Wall/Testimonials (Berlin: Edition Rene Block, and DAAD Artists Program, 1976), n.p. 42. On the Kaprowian activity see James T. Hindman, ‘SelfPerformance: Allan Kaprow’s Activities’, The Drama Review: TDR, Vol. 23, No. 1 (March, 1979): 95–102. 43. Hindman, p. 97. 44. Hindman, p. 100. 45. The performance and its ‘do over’—a restaging and completion of the original performance for a be�er-mannered audience at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach the following month—are described in Uwe Schneede, Joseph Beuys die Aktionen (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), pp. 224– 227; 232–235. 46. Protocol, Deutsche Studenten Partei, dated June 22, 1967; reprinted in Interfunktionen 3 (1969): 125 ff. Johannes Stü�gen, a Beuys student and collaborator, established the so-called Deutsche Studenten Partei in this protocol document. 47. Beuys’ allegiance to Fluxus is discussed in Claudia Mesch and Viola Michely, ‘Introduction’, in Mesch and Michely (eds.), Joseph Beuys: the Reader (London: I.B.Tauris and MIT Press, 2007), pp. 19–20. 48. ‘Für Beuys bedeutete “Fluxus” sicherlich nie Erlichterung von der sogenannten hohen Kunst…sondern eine erste, gezielte Erweiterung seines Kunstbegriffs. “Fluxus” meinte für ihn keine Abschaffung, sondern eine radikale Ausweitung von Kunst’. Kellein, ‘Fluxus-Begriff’, in Fluxus (Basel: Kunsthalle Basel, 1994), p. 139. 49. Karlheinz Nowald, ‘Realität/Beuys/Realität’, in Realität/ Realismus/Realität (Mannheim: Kunstmuseum Mannheim, 1976). 50. Cladders as cited by Schneede, p. 232. 51. Beuys, cited in Kunsthaus Zürich, Joseph Beuys (Zürich: Pro Li�eris, 1993), p. 166. 52. Schneede notes that in a later interview with Achille Bonito Oliva Beuys made reference to the title of the West Berlin performance in speaking about the views of Jesus Christ. Beuys

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is purported to have quoted that Christ said ‘Ich werde dich frei machen’ (I will free you). Christiansen had first proposed the title Ich versuche dich freizulassen (I a�empt to release you) that Beuys then amended to coincide with the biblical quotation he later cited. This points to the theological level of emancipation that Beuys consistently referenced in his art and which he made use of in the 1969 West Berlin performance. 53. I discuss this aspect of social sculpture in my dissertation, Problems of Remembrance in Postwar German Performance Art. 54. Michael Scharang, ‘Thesen zur kulturellen Revolution’, in Zur Emancipation der Kunst: Essays (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971). 55. Peter Schneider, ‘Zerhackte Klaviere und andere Sachen: eine Abrechnung mit Happenings, Fluxus, Pop Art’, in Atempause (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977), pp. 87–100; originally published in Die Zeit 13 (March 25, 1966): 7. 56. SDS Gruppe Kultur und Revolution, ‘Kunst als Ware der Bewusstseinsindustrie’, Die Zeit 48 (December 3, 1968): 12, as cited by Andreas Huyssen and von Dirke. A wave of critics including the artist Bazon Brock rejected this simplifying line of argument in a series of le�ers to the newspaper. 57. Peter Schneider, ‘Die Phantasie im Spätkapitalismus und die Kulturrevolution’, Atempause, 127–161; originally published in Kursbuch 16 (1969): 1–37. See also Andreas Huyssen, ‘The Cultural Politics of Pop’, A�er the Great Divide (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986), especially pp. 150–152. 58. Schneider, p. 156. 59. Schneider, p. 153. 60. For a discussion of Beuys’ activities within the Green Party see ‘Überblick Series on the Parliamentary Election’, in Joseph Beuys: the Reader, pp. 218–232; in the same volume see also my essay on his activist organizations of the 1970s, ‘Institutionalizing Social Sculpture: Beuys’ Office for Direct Democracy through Referendum Installation, 1972’, pp. 198–217. 61. The literature on East German performance art consists mainly of three major exhibitions: first the path-breaking Boheme und Diktatur in der DDR exhibition at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in 1997, and two exhibitions bearing the same title,

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Klopfzeichen: Kunst und Kultur der 80er Jahre in Deutschland and two separate subtitles, Mauersprünge and Wahnzimmer, held in Leipzig and Dresden in 2002–2003. These exhibitions expanded the scope of Aktionskunst or performance that had earlier been offered by an exhibition and two catalogues at the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Bemerke den Unterschied and Autoperforationsartistik (both 1991). 62. While it was produced for his New York gallery in 1977 it is imaginable that the small Block catalogue on the Viennese actionists, The Spirit of Vienna (New York), had made its way to Dresden by 1985. I am grateful to Christoph Tannert for introducing me to much of this literature. 63. Clara Mosch as a gallery and artists group is detailed in Paul Kaiser and Claudia Petzold, ‘Metamorphosen der Fün�racht’, in Boheme und Diktatur in der DDR, Gruppen, Konflikte, Quartiere 1970–1989 (Berlin: Fannei & Walz Verlag, 1997), pp. 320–329; and Eugen Blume, ‘In freier Lu� – die Künstlergruppe Clara Mosch und ihre Pleinairs’, in Kunstdokumentation SBZ/ DDR, pp. 728–741; and Clara Mosch, 1977–1982: Werke und Dokumente (Berlin and Chemnitz: Galerie Gunar Barthel and Galerie Oben, 1997). 64. As mentioned by Michael Morgner and cited by Kaiser and Petzold, p. 326. 65. The key work is Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of François Rabelais, Rabelais and his World (1965). Published in Russian, it would be most interesting to research its reception in East Germany; for example, the art historian Peter Feist modeled his liberalizing notion of the ‘dialogic picture’ on Bakhtin (as I discuss in Ch. 3). 66. Werner’s 1978 statement, included in the multiple, is reproduced in Clara Mosch, 1977–1982, p. 99. The Ge�y’s version of the multiple also contains a later undated and unsigned statement most likely by Wasse, perhaps a report to the Stasi on the object. He details how many multiples were produced and who acquired them in the GDR. Wasse notes that the event had official recognition by the Staatliches Kunsthandel and that the object led to major confrontations at the 9th VBK congress. 67. Some of these Stasi files and numerous reports are

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reproduced in Clara Mosch, 1977–1982. 68. Eugen Blume, ‘Raum r-g, Sredzkistrasse 64’, in Klopfzeichen: Kunst und Kultur der 80er Jahre in Deutschland (Leipzig: Verlag Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 54–55. 69. Gabriela Ivan, ‘Sensibilisierung der eigenen Person’, Bildende Kunst He� 10 (1981): 516–517. 70. Blume, ‘Das Ergebnis ist ein Prozess’, Bildende Kunst He� 4 (1982): 202. 71. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, ‘Verkörperungs-Konkurrenzen. Aktionskunst in der DDR zwischen Revolte und “Kristallisation”’, in Christian Janecke (ed.), Performance und Bild, Performance als Bild (Berlin: Philo & Philo Fine Arts, 2004), p. 117. 72. A catalogue produced for this festival included its own reception in the GDR press: Permanente Kunstkonferenz: Installation, Performance, Performance Art (Berlin: Galerie Weisser Elefant, 1990). 73. Joseph Beuys cited by Caroline Tisdall, ‘Permanent Conference’, in Joseph Beuys (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1979), p. 268. 74. Rehberg, p. 148. 75. Lewandowsky claimed that his work was a negation of ‘disgusting Dresden expressionism’. Claudia Banz, ‘AutoPerforations-Artistik: Else Gabriel, Micha Brendel, Rainer Görss, Via Lewandowsky’, in Klopfzeichen, p. 188. 76. Banz, p. 188. 77. Autoperforationsartistik (Nürnberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 1991), p. 8. 78. Banz, p. 190. 79. Banz, p. 191. 80. Autoperforationsartistik, p. 11. 81. Simon Taylor, ‘The Phobic Object: abjection in contemporary art’, in Abject Art: Repulsion and Desire in American Art, Selections from the Permanent Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1993). 82. The artists may have known of Gina Pane’s early injury pieces. She had performed at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in West Berlin in1982, although by that date she no longer pursued her injury performances. This points to the fact that a discussion

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of her current work as well as her earlier performances of the ’60s and ’70s had taken place in West Berlin. The Dresden circle may have know about the West Berlin discussion around Pane as well as around the Viennese actionists, although Rehberg insists they did not. 83. This was a central theme of the 1999 exhibition Body and the East: from the 1960s to the Present, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana (Slovenia). Chapter 5: Art on Television 1. As cited in the two-volume study of the ‘art broadcasting’ of West German television, undertaken by the Universität Siegen research group ‘Bildschirmmedien der Uni-GH Siegen’: Gundolf Winter, Martina Dobbe, and Gerd Steinmüller (eds.), Die Kunstsendung im Fernsehen der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1953– 1985: Vol. I, Geschichte, Typologie, Ästhetik; Vol. II, Chronologisches Verzeichnis und Register (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg GmbH, 2000), 2000. 2. Claudia Di�mar, ‘GDR Television in Competition with West German Programming’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television Vol. 24, No. 3 (2004): 327–328. 3. There have been several studies published on the topic of art on television: John A. Walker’s Arts TV, a History of Arts Television in Britain (London: John Libbey, 1993) develops a sophisticated taxonomy and language for the different British genres of arts programming. A 2004 special issue of Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (Vol. 24, No. 3), edited by Reinhold Viehoff and Rüdiger Steinmetz, is devoted to GDR television, but does not address art broadcasting. On West German art television see the study Die Kunstsendung as cited in note 1, which also offers an excellent German-language bibliography on the topic; and the Düsseldorf exhibition catalogue Ready to Shoot: Fernsehgalerie Gerry Schum, videogalerie schum (Gent: Snoeck and Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2003). A critical study of art broadcasting in divided Germany must necessarily also take up West German filmmaker Alexander Kluge’s purchase of a controlling interest in the station RTL, and his brilliant ‘anti-television’ interventions in the programs

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‘10 vor 11’, ‘News & Stories’ and ‘Prime Time – Spätausgabe’. On Kluge’s television work see Christian Schulte and Winfried Siebers (eds.), Kluges Fernsehen: Alexander Kluges Kulturmagazine, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2002). 4. Die Kunstsendung, p. 9; see also their charts indicating that by 1970 to 1977, almost 50 hours of FRG art broadcasting focused on contemporary art; the number shrank considerably by 1984 when art broadcasting peaked. Die Kunstsendung, p. 187. 5. Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, Partisan Review (Fall, 1939), reprinted in Francis Frascina (ed.), Pollock and A�er (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 51. 6. Greenberg, p. 55. 7. David Joselit’s recent study Feedback: Television Against Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007) seems to continue art history’s general disinterest in the history of the dissemination of art and art history on network television; the book hardly mentions network television programs on art. 8. Gerhard Eckert, Die Kunst des Fernsehens (Emsde�en, 1953). 9. See Monika Elsner, Thomas Müller and Peter M. Spangenberg, ‘The Early History of German Television: the slow development of a fast medium’, in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, (eds.), Materialities of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), especially pp. 127– 130. 10. Theodor Adorno, ‘Prolog zum Fernsehen’, in Rolf Tiedemann, (ed.), Gesammelte Schri�en, Vol. 10/2 (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main, 1996), p. 507, as translated by Dieter Daniels in ‘Art and Television, Adversaries or Partners’ in Rudolf Frieling and Daniels (eds.), MedienKunstAktion. Die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland (Vienna: Springer, 1998), p. 68. 11. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘The Film of Fact’, in Theory of Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 195–201. 12. The term is taken from Elsner et.al., where it constitutes a distinctive aspect of the perception of television as opposed to the more public reception situation of cinema or of art in a museum, building, or in public space. 13. An indication of the new respect granted to art on

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television more generally and to Berger’s series in particular is the Tate Britain’s recently installed gallery devoted to the 1972 series ‘Ways of Seeing’ (also the title of the gallery). Thus art on television in the U.K. has gone full circle, as it has now been (re)absorbed by the museum institution. 14. Until recently these British series were almost the only art broadcasting to be found on American television (through the public broadcasting channel PBS). 15. The program ‘Haltestelle Künstlerhaus’ (Artists’ House Bus Stop, broadcast April, 1974), based on a book by Lang, focused on an artists’ collective that lived together in an old house in Dresden. The program ‘Combative Passion: Willi Si�e’s Picture World’ (‘Streitbare Leidenscha�: die Bilderwelt Willi Si�es’, broadcast November, 1978 and April, 1981) was based on a book by Raum, who also wrote the adaptation. Raum was one of the stricter art history ideologues of the GDR. The videotape of this program as well as all other GDR programming discussed in this chapter is available on deposit at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv in Babelsberg. 16. Martina Dobbe, ‘Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll. Konzepte und Kategorien der kunstreproduzierender Photographie’, in Die Kunstsendung, pp. 29–70. 17. Kracauer, p. 196. 18. Peter Hoff, ‘Stie�ind Kulturpolitik’, in Protokoll eines Laborversuchs. Kommentar zur ersten ProgrammSchri� des DDRFernsehens 1955 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2002), p. 116. 19. See Marie Luise Rohde, ‘Bildende Kunst im Fernsehen’, Bildende Kunst, He� 10 (1977): 512. 20. Rohde, p. 512. 21. For example in 1977–78 over one million visitors a�ended the seventh Dresden exhibition, while 355,000 visited Documenta that year. Paul Kaiser, ‘“Leistungsschau” und Ideenverkörperung: die zentralen Kunstaustellungen der DDR’, in Kunst der DDR, p. 93, n. 2. 22. ‘Schri�stellergespräch in einer Pause der Bi�erfelder Konferenz’, broadcast on April 26, 1964; Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv.

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23. ‘Aktuelle Kamera: Junge bildende Künstler in Neubrandenburg’, broadcast January 20, 1978; DRA. 24. Kurella, ‘Alle Karten auf den Tisch—die besten ins Spiel’, Neues Deutschland Feb. 26, 1967, cited in Feist and Gillen (eds.), Kunstkombinat DDR, p. 68. 25. Gerry Schum, le�er to Gene Youngblood dated June 29, 1969, in Ready to Shoot, p. 121; also in Wulf Herzogenrath (ed.), Videokunst in Deutschland 1963–1982 (Stu�gart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1982), p. 64. 26. Dobbe, ‘Wissensvermi�lung und Experiment. Zur Geschichte der Kunstsendung im Fernsehen der 60er Jahre’, Die Kunstsendung, p. 108. 27. Inga Lemke, Documenta-Documentationen (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1995), p. 190–196. 28. Dieter Daniels discusses these works and early media art in ‘Art and Television, Adversaries or Partners?’ in Rudolf Frieling and Dieter Daniels (eds.), Medien Kunst Aktion. Die 60er und 70er Jahre in Deutschland (New York and Vienna: Springer 1997), p. 68–75. 29. This film and others were screened at the Uecker exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin in 2005, ‘Günther Uecker: Zwanzig Kapitel’, March-June, 2005. 30. Daniels, p. 71. 31. Wibke von Bonin, ‘Video und Fernsehen: wer braucht wen?’ in Videokunst in Deutschland, 134; English translation in Medien Kunst Aktion, pp. 111–114. 32. Ready to Shoot (See note 3). 33. Dorine Mignon, ‘Gerry Schum, die Idee der Fernsehgalerie’, in Videokunst in Deutschland, p. 67. Heizer was allegedly dissatisfied that Schum had not included any human figures in shots of his piece in California to establish scale of his drawings in the landscape. 34. Schum le�er to Youngblood, p. 119. 35. Schum, ‘Einführung in der Sendung LAND ART der Fernsehgalerie Berlin Gerry Schum’, Ready to Shoot, p. 70. 36. Dobbe provides another instance of collaboration in her close reading of Oppenheim’s Timetrack piece. Dobbe, p. 124. 37. Schum, ‘Einführung in die Sendung LAND ART’, in

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Ready to Shoot, p. 70–71. 38. Ready to Shoot, p. 70–71. 39. Gerry Schum, ‘Introduction to TV Exhibition II: Identifications’ (sic)(1969), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds.), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 439. 40. Charles Harrison, ‘Gute Gründe: die Arbeit von Gerry Schum’, in Ready to Shoot, p. 54–55. 41. Schum le�er to Youngblood, p. 121. 42. In 1978 the British conceptual group Art & Language, of which Harrison was a core member, launched a full critical assault on the television art series Ways of Seeing (1972) by John Berger. ‘Ways of Seeing’, Art-Language IV: 3 (October, 1978). In his recent essay on Schum, Harrison has deviated from the view that modern art cannot exist on television or on video, as has been argued by Richard Serra and Rosalind Krauss. 43. Rosenbach discusses this work as feminist in ‘On feminism and art, interview with Amine Haase’, in Medien Kunst Aktion, p. 198. 44. Adam Oellers, ‘Fluxus at the Border: Aachen, July 20, 1064’, in German Art from Beckmann to Richter, p. 201; this essay is poorly translated. It draws from Oellers’ earlier catalogue with Spiegel, Wollt ihr das totale Leben? Fluxus und Agit-Pop der 60er Jahre in Aachen (Aachen: Neuer Aachener Kunstverein, 1995). Oellers has reworked original film clips and sound recordings into a reconstruction of the concert for the 1997 exhibition. The film is in the collections of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. See also Schneede, p. 50. 45. Oellers, p. 201. 46. Oellers, 202–203, note 13. Oellers cites an article in the Frankfurter Allegemeine, and Götz Adriani reprints a report from the local paper Aachener Prisma which explicitly faulted the artists for the pandemonium, claiming that the students mounted ‘resistance’ to the ‘fascistic’ performers’ ‘absurdities’. Götz Adriani, Winfried Konnertz, and Karin Thomas, Joseph Beuys Life and Works (New York: Barron’s, 1979), pp. 112–114. 47. Oellers, p. 200. 48. Oellers, p. 202.

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49. Beuys had used pianos in his performances Siberian Symphony, First Part at the Festum Fluxorum Fluxus, Düsseldorf, February 2–3, 1963, and in ‘The Piano Aktion’, part of the ‘Exposition of Music—Electronic Television’ at the Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal on March 11, 1963. 50. Beuys’ account is in Caroline Tisdall, Joseph Beuys (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1979), pp. 91–92. Uwe Schneede’s exhaustive account of the performance cites witnesses at the trial who stated that a spilled vial of acid that Beuys wanted to use as part of his action was removed from a toolbox, opened, and spilled onto the stage as the crowd milled about. Beuys’ a�acker allegedly had his suit damaged by the spilled acid, leading him (!) to a�ack Beuys. Schneede, p. 48. 51. Happening Kunst Protest 1968, directed by Helmut Herbst and Friedrich Heubach (1981). 52. The program is included in Herbst’s film and in Vostell 1958–1974 (West Berlin: Neuer Berliner Kunstelevisionerein, 1974), p. 318. 53. Eurasienstab was performed and filmed in 1967 at the Antwerp gallery Wide White Space and televised in 1970. Celtic was performed in Edinburgh in 1970, and broadcast in 1972. See Dobbe, et.al., Vol. 2. 54. Die Kunstsendung, p. 109. 55. Thomas Beutelschmidt, ‘Kunst und elektronische Medien in der DDR: Alternative Versuch mit Video und Computergrafik am Rande des Kulturbetriebes’, Ästhetik & Kommunikation 98/1997: 113–121. Epilogue 1. Susan Sontag, The Very Comical Lament of Pyramus and Thisbe (an Interlude), in Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, pp. 14–15. 2. On the details of the exhibition see Petra Kipphoff, ‘Die Mauer, ein Phantomschmerz. Gemischte Gefühle beim Anblick der West-Kunst in der Ost-Realität’, Die Zeit Nr. 37 (September 7, 1990), p. 67. 3. Claudia Mesch, ‘Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run,’ M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), h�p:// journal.media-culture.org.au/0006/berlin.php.

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307

4. For an excellent overview and early discussion of the relation of Christo’s decades-long project in Berlin to globalisation see Beatrice Hanssen, ‘Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag: Globalized Art in a National Context’, The Germanic Review (2001): pp. 351–367. 5. Jack Burnham, ‘Systems Aesthetics’, first published in 1968, reprinted in Burnham, Great Western Salt Works. Essays on the Meaning of Postformalist Art (New York, 1973), pp. 15–25. 6. A description and overview of the T+T (Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter) interactive three-dimensional installation Virtuelle Mauer at the Museum for Communication Berlin is available at h�p://www.virtuelle-mauer-berlin.de. The project is on view there in August and September, 2008; it will travel to the Boston Cyberarts Festival in April, 2009, among other U.S. venues. 7. Via Lewandowsky, ‘Zur Lage des Hauptes’, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, p. 160. 8. Durs Grünbein, ‘Ilya Kabakov in Berlin’, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, p. 131. 9. Ilya Kabakov, ‘Zwei Erinnerungen’, Russian/English translation Roy Wilson, Die Endlichkeit der Freiheit, p. 129. 10. Sophie Calle, The Detachment (Die Entfernung)(Berlin: G+B Arts International, 1996), p. 7 (English). 11. Calle, ‘Library (Bebelsplatz)’, The Detachment, p. 16. 12. Calle, “Street-Sign (Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse)’, The Detachment, p. 41. 13. Calle, ‘New Guard-House (Neue Wache)’, The Detachment, p. 30. 14. Calle, p. 32. 15. Joachim Schlör, ‘The Controversy’, in Denkmal für die ermorderten Juden Europas, Berlin (Munich: Prestel, 2005), pp. 33–34. Several books contain documentation of the debate around the Berlin memorial: Michael S. Cullen (ed.), Das Holocaust-Mahnmal. Dokumentation einer Deba�e, (Zurich, 1999); and Ute Heimrod, Günter Schlusche, Horst Seferens (eds.), Der Denkmalstreit—das Denkmal? Die Deba�e um “Das Denkmal für die ermorderten Juden Europas”. Eine Dokumentation, (Berlin, 1999). 16. See Nikolas Ourousoff, ‘A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the

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Unimaginable’, New York Times (May 5, 2005); Arthur Danto, ‘Mute Point’, The Nation (October 17, 2005): 40–44; Juli Carson, ‘On Atrocity and Empathy: Reading Virilio Through Eisenman’, artUS (October/November 2005): 48–51. The memorial is also touched upon in Bre� Ashley Kaplan, Unwanted Beauty: Aesthetic Pleasure in Holocaust Representation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), and Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). The important project of compiling the German reception of the completed memorial still remains. 17. Peter Eisenman, Building Germany’s Holocaust Memorial, directed by Michael Blackwood (2006). 18. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Richard Serra, a Translation’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), p. 267.

INDEX

A abject, the, 140, 143, 192, 203, 204 abstract expressionism, 32, 34, 106 abstraction, 4, 8, 12, 37–45, 82, 106, 140, 147, 158, 161, 265 Academy of Graphic and Book Art, Leipzig, 111 Acconci, Vito, 91 AChRR (Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia), 32 action lecture, 56, 179 activity, the, 185, 244 Adorno, Theodor W., 14, 51, 176, 190, 208, 209 agit-prop, 29, 109, 152, 223 Akademie der Künste, East Berlin, 3, 155 Akademie der Künste, West Berlin, 67, 160, 179, 185 Aktionskunst (performance), 227 Algerian War, 122 Altenbourg, Gerhard, 111, 194, 218

Althusser, Louis, 88 Alvermann, Hans Peter, 52 Andersen, Eric, 239–240 anti-fascism, 32, 34, 39, 223, 224 anti-modernism, 3, 23, 115 ARD (FRG television), 228 Arman, 60 Arp, Hans (Jean), 3 Artaud, Antonin, 140 Asher, Michael, 69 Aspekt, 147 assemblage, 4, 17, 49–66 ASSO (Assoziation Revolutionärer Bildender Künstler Deutschlands, Association of German Revolutionary Visual Artists), 23, 31, 32, 34, 36, 106, 127, 149 Auschwitz Trials, 50 Auto-Perforationists, 19, 165, 193-205, 253 avant-garde, 1, 3, 7, 8, 11, 22-25,

310

I����

avant-garde, continued, 32, 36, 42-43, 55, 60, 70, 81, 82, 87, 105, 110, 162, 165, 180, 190, 191, 210, 226, 229, 246, 247 B Baack, Anne�e, 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 195 Balabanoff, Angelica, 91 Balzac, Honoré de, 108 Barlach, Ernst, 3, 22-23, 26, 121 Bartke, Eberhard, 114 Baselitz, Georg, 18, 104-109, 105, 130, 132, 140–147, 142, 158, 160, 161 Bauermeister, Mary, 167–170 Bauhaus, 24, 29, 31, 60 Baumeister, Willi, 2, 22, 38, 39 beauté convulsive, 141 Beckmann, Max, 2, 22, 125 Belting, Hans, 16, 208 Benjamin, Walter, 14, 16, 50, 60–66, 74, 173, 189 Berdina, Sofia, 91 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 37 Bergander, Rudolf, 25 Berger, John, 210 Berkman, Alexander, 91 Berlin National Gallery, 1 Berlin Wall, 9, 110, 131, 138, 184, 251 Berliner Schloss (castle), 2 Berman, Wallace, 60 Be�s, Paul, 12 Beuys, Joseph, 18, 19, 47–54, 53 70, 134, 164, 166, 173–187, 288, 289, 291, 292, 299, 200, 201, 205, 222, 226, 227, 230, 233,

238–245 Beyer, Ingrid, 221 Biermann, Wolf, 102, 160 Bissier, Julius, 39 Bi�erfeld, 16, 28–35, 95, 115, 123, 125, 199, 219, 220 Bi�erfeld Conference, 29, 125, 219 Bi�erfeld Policy (Bi�erfelder Weg), 16, 28, 29, 30, 95 Blaue Reiter, Der, 2, 31, 42 Block, René, 51–54, 67, 135, 138–139, 177–186, 242 Blume, Eugen, 12, 19, 99, 102, 192, 193, 198–201 Bluth, Manfred, 147 Bochner, Mel, 69 Boezem, Marinus, 231 Bosch, Hieronymous, 119, 190 Bö�cher, Jürgen, 160 Bradke, Volker, 138 Brancusi, Constantin, 212 Brecht, Bertolt, 26, 66, 108, 109, 125, 145, 152, 153, 160, 161, 190 Brecht, George, 170 Brehmer, K.P., 17, 50, 52, 83–87, 85, 102, 179 Brendel, Micha, 202 Brezhnev, Leonid, 215 Brigade Mamai, 28–29 Brigade Obersteiner, 199 Brik, Osip, 81 Brock, Bazon, 230, 239 Brouwn, Stanley, 18, 86, 87, 163, 164, 177–179, 239 Brown, Carolyn, 167 Brühl, Georg, 193 Buchenwald, 16, 35 Buchloh, Benjamin, 74

I���� Buck-Morss, Susan, 13 Burg Giebichenstein, 114 Burnham, Jack, 250 Büro Berlin, 17, 49, 66–75, 67, 79, 80–82 Butzmann, Manfred, 17, 50, 95–102, 101 C Cage, John, 18, 163–181, 188, 205, 238 Calle, Sophie, 252, 255–257, 258 Camus, Albert, 122–123 ‘Capitalist Realism’, 133–139, 147 Carson, Juli, 264 Castillo, Greg, 12 Chagall, Marc, 2, 23 Checkpoint Charlie, 198, 254 Christ, 173, 249, 251 Christiansen, Henning, 185–187, 239, 240 Cladders, Johannes, 189 Claire Copley Gallery, Los Angeles, 69 Clara Mosch, 8, 17, 19, 50, 98, 165, 193–205, 195 Clark, T.J., 10–11, 107, 211 classical modernism, 1–4, 26, 38 Claus, Carlfriedrich, 111 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 209 Cockcro�, Eva, 43 Cold War, 3–22, 44, 68–70, 75, 83, 86, 94, 104, 106, 109, 117, 119, 130–131, 138, 140, 145, 157, 161–162, 185, 206, 208–209, 244, 259, 261–265 Cologne, 18, 56, 72, 80, 130, 141, 150, 151, 157, 160, 163, 167, 176,

311

177, 229, 230 Cominform, 6 Comintern, 6 common interest, 4, 49, 75, 254 conceptual art, 69–74, 83, 86, 150, 158, 163, 232, 234, 250, 252, 256 Concrete Art, 18, 45–46, 164–181, 205 Concretism, 165, 170, 172 Conner, Bruce, 61 Constructivism, 60 Corinth, Lovis, 107 Courbet, Gustave, 17, 104–107, 146 Cragg, Tony, 71 Cremer, Fritz, 15, 16, 35, 108, 115, 125 Cricket Theatre, New York, 56, 57, 179 Critical Realist, 106, 148 Critical Realists, 148 Crodel, Karl, 24 Cultural Alliance for the Democratic Renewal of Germany, 21 Cunningham, Merce, 167 D Dachau, 16 Dada, 3, 31, 43–44, 55, 60, 170, 199 Dammbeck, Lutz, 194 Damus, Martin, 8 Darmstadt, 38–39, 165 Darmstadt Talks, 38 Dausset Gallery, Paris, 44 David, Jacques-Louis, 10, 61, 69 Davis, Angela, 116

312

I����

de Chirico, Giorgio, 119 de Lauretis, Teresa, 88 de Maria, Walter, 231 de Stijl, 41, 46 Debord, Guy, 83, 209 dé-collage, 49, 55–60, 176 defector dialectic, the, 109, 111, 115, 120 Degot, Ekaterina, 12 Deutsches Hygiene Museum, 133 Deutsches Rundfunk Archiv Babelsberg, 211, 216, 225 Dialectic of Enlightenment, 14 Dibbets, Jan, 231 Diehl, Hans Jürgen, 147 Dine, Jim, 56 Di�mar, Claudia, 206 Dix, O�o, 3, 22, 26, 31, 34, 125, 128, 129, 143 Dobbe, Martina, 212, 229 Documenta exhibition, 3, 7, 41–46, 117, 128, 129, 132, 214, 238, 239, 235, 244, 248 Dörstel, Wilfried, 169 Dötsch, Walter, 29 Dresden, 2, 18, 19, 22–25, 32, 95, 96, 109, 114, 132, 154, 155, 160, 165, 192, 193, 197, 198, 200–207, 213–222, 246 Drouin, René, 40, 44 Dubuffet, Jean, 41, 140 Duchamp, Marcel, 3, 43, 44, 74, 79, 138, 145, 146 Durus, Alfred, 32 Düsseldorf, 2–3, 131–138, 151, 161, 177, 186, 188, 191, 200, 229, 234, 244 Dutschke, Rudi, 90, 191

Dymschitz, Alexander, 23, 36 E Eckert, Gerhard, 208 Eigen + Art, 201 Eisenman, Peter, 255, 260, 261 Eisenman, Stephen, 107 Eisenstein, Sergei, 223, 224, 226 Electrochemical Collective Bi�erfeld, 30 Emshwiller, Ed, 229 Ensslin, Gudrun, 87 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 15, 66 Erfahrung (experience), 14 Erjavec, Ales, 12 Ernst, Max, 3, 175, 203 F fantasy, 5, 7, 151, 174, 249, 253 fascism, 11, 14, 34, 37, 38, 40, 53, 59, 63–65, 114, 129, 143, 175, 189, 204, 239, 245, 259 Fautrier, Jean, 41, 140 Feist, Peter, 121 feminism, 87, 88, 116, 162, 177, 180, 182, 205, 236, 238 figuration, 4, 8, 39–42, 106, 147, 158, 161 Filiou, Robert, 179 Flanagan, Barry, 231 flaneurie, 83 Fluxus, 18, 60, 83, 138, 154, 155, 169–181, 185–192, 217, 227, 229, 237, 238–245, 247 Forgacs, Eva, 12 Formalism Debate, 6, 21–22, 27, 36

I���� Förster, Wieland, 222 Foster, Norman, 249 found object, 17, 48–55, 61, 62, 66, 190 Frank, Alfred, 32 Frankfurt School, 13, 15, 66 Free German Trade Union (Freies Deutsches Gewerkscha�sbund), 22 Freed, Hermine, 236 Frick, Henry Clay, 91 Fridericianum, Kassel, 46 Friedrich, C.D., 47, 123, 167 Fromm, Erich, 51, 257 Fuchs, Eduard, 61 G Galerie am Moritzplatz, 67 Galerie Arkade, Berlin, 98, 194, 197–199 Galerie Fahnemann, 72 Galerie Fischer, Lucerne, 2, 267 Galerie Henning, Halle, 3 Galerie Oben, 193–194, 197 Galerie Parnass, 60, 170, 238, 243 Galerie Poll, 106 Galerie René Block, 17, 18, 163, 177, 242 Galerie van der Heyde, 2 Gallén, Axel, 141 Gauguin, Paul, 47 Gecelli, Johannes, 187 German Academic Exchange Service (D.A.A.D.), 89 ‘German Art Exhibition’ (Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstausstellung), 2, 22–23, 25, 32, 96, 214, 217

313

German expressionism, 22, 24, 26, 31, 32, 68, 106, 108, 147 German expressionists, 1, 23 German modernism, 1–3, 7, 13, 22–24, 30, 36, 41, 47, 48 Gillen, Eckhart, 55, 127 Girnus, Wilhelm, 24 Glaser, Hermann, 39 Gleisberg, Dieter, 122 Glöckner, Hermann, 219 Goeschen, Ulrike, 27, 31, 32 Goldman, Emma, 91 Goldschmidt, Ernest, 45 Gosewitz, Ludwig, 179, 239 Grasskamp, Walter, 15 Greenberg, Clement, 37, 42, 208, 209 Grohmann, Will, 40, 45, 160 Grossgörschen 23, 67, 106, 147 Grosz, George, 22, 31 Grotewohl, O�o, 25, 112, 252 Groys, Boris, 12 Grünbein, Durs, 254 Grundig, Hans, 23, 32, 127 Grundig, Lea, 22, 32, 36, 215, 221 Grundigs, 23, 24, 32 Grützke, Johannes, 147, 148 Guernica, 36, 38, 46, 51, 112, 113 Guilbaut, Serge, 9, 10 Gu�uso, Renato, 26 H Haacke, Hans, 131 Ha�mann, Werner, 6, 39–46, 132 Hagen, Nina, 163 Hall, Ter, 71 Hampel, Angela, 222 Hansen, Al, 179

314

I����

Hanssen, Beatrice, 259 Happenings, 45, 56, 163, 177, 179, 182–185, 192, 205, 238, 240–242, 244 Hartung, Hans, 39, 42 Hausenstein, Wilhelm, 38 Hausmann, Raoul, 55 Heartfield, John, 3, 23, 26, 27, 31, 32, 34, 97 Heibel, Yule, 6, 13 Heisig, Bernhard, 18, 35, 108, 110–111, 115, 117, 120, 125–129, 127, 161, 215, 217, 218 Heizer, Michael, 231 Herbst, Helmut, 242 Herf, Jeffrey, 6 Hermann, Peter, 160 Herms, George, 61 Herzogenrath, Wulf, 235, 245, 248 Heydrich, Reinhard, 51 Higgins, Dick, 184 Hilbersheimer, Ludwig, 46 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 264 Hödicke, K.H., 67, 184 Hofer, Karl, 21, 39, 40 Hoffmann, Ernst, 24 Holocaust, 4, 6, 15–17, 35, 38, 48, 51, 55, 59, 62, 119, 129, 245, 255, 260, 262–265 Honecker, Erich, 215, 257 Horkheimer, Max, 14, 66 Horn, Rebecca, 18, 204, 236, 248 Hornig, Günther, 198, 202 Hughes, Robert, 211 Humboldt Universität, 31 Hü�, Wolfgang, 112, 221

I Immendorff, Jörg, 18, 52, 109, 129–133, 149–154, 153, 159–161, 191 ‘informal colleague’ (IM, Stasi), 197 Informel, 42 Ingold, Res, 80 INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture), 81 inner emigration, 39, 111 Institut für Gesellscha�swissens cha�en, DDR, 30–34 International Council, Museum of Modern Art, 43 Iron Curtain, 5, 10, 20, 109, 206 Isaev, Andrei, 94 Istanbul Museum of Modern Art (Istanbul Modern Sanat Müzesi), 266 Ivan, Gabriela, 199 J Janda, Annegret, 12 Joselit, David, 61 Justi, Ludwig, 1, 3, 26 K Ka, Katja, 75, 76 Kabakov, Ilya, 162, 163, 251 Kaiser, Paul, 110 Kandinsky, Vassily, 37, 38, 42, 47 Kaprow, Allan, 18, 56, 163, 179, 183, 184, 205, 244, 245 Karl-Marx-Stadt (Chemnitz), 19, 30, 98, 165, 192–194, 201, 205 Kassel, 3, 44, 228 Kayser, Stefan, 198

I���� Kerbel, Lev, 102 Kern, Georg, 104, 158 Kester, Grant, 68 Kiefer, Anselm, 15, 129, 147 Kienholz, Ed, 17, 49, 55, 60–66, 64, 253 Kienholz, Nancy Reddin, 60 Kiez (neighborhood), 95, 100, 103 Kippenberger, Martin, 163 Klee, Paul, 2, 22, 31, 38 Knizak, Milan, 177 Knoebel, Wolf (Imi), 18 Koberling, Bernd, 67 Koepplin, Dieter, 159 Kohl, Helmut, 251, 259 Kollwitz, Käthe, 2, 22–24, 26, 31, 121, 259 König, Kasper, 130 Køpke, Addi, 180, 239 Korea, 4, 6, 169 Körner, Frank, 197 Kounnellis, Jannis, 248 KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands), 23, 31, 32, 35, 94, 151, 245 Kracauer, Siegfried, 208–209 Krauss, Rosalind, 263 Kreuzberg, 49, 67, 73–80, 93 Kristeva, Julia, 204 Kronprinzenpalais, Berlin National Gallery, 1 Kuhirt, Ullrich, 30–32, 34, 36, 129 Kulturecken, 29 Kummer, Raimund, 49, 71, 73, 78, 79 Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 71–72 Kunstverein, Düsseldorf, 43 Küper, Susanne, 134

315

Kupsch, Felix, 90 Kurella, Alfred, 28–29, 36, 107, 112, 117, 118, 120, 222 Kushner, Boris, 81 Kwon, Miwon, 74 L labour brigades, 28–29, 114 Ladd, Brian, 95 Lamelas, David, 69 Lang, Lothar, 97, 112, 129, 211 Last Judgment, 119 Léger, Fernand, 31, 106, 112, 114 Leipzig Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, 111 Leipzig School, The, 110, 117–118, 121, 129 Leonhardi Museum, 202 Lethen, Helmut, 15 Leuna, 133, 220, 221 Lewandowsky, Via, 202, 251 LeWi�, Sol, 262 Libeskind, Daniel, 255 Lidice, 17, 51–54, 112–113 Lidl, 150, 152 Liebermann, Max, 107 Liebknecht, Karl, 31 Linfert, Carl, 40 Lingner, Max, 252 Lissitzsky, El, 10 Loewig, Roger, 15 Long, Richard, 231 Lücke frequentor, 160 Ludwig, Peter, 108, 121, 125, 130–131 Lueg, Konrad, 131 Lukács, Georg, 107 Lupertz, Markus, 67

316

I����

Lützowstrasse, 72, 73, 77 Luxemburg, Rosa, 91 M Maciunas, George, 169–181, 187, 188, 205 magic encyclopaedias, 66 Makulis, Peter, 222 Malevich, Kasimir, 1, 10, 37, 46 Mamai, Nikolai Jakovlevisch, 28 Maoism, 152 Maoists, 153 Marcuse, Herbert, 14, 16, 189–191 Mariannenplatz (Kreuzberg), 93 Martin, Kurt, 45 Marxism, 10 materialist critique, 80 materialist history, 66 Mathieu, Georges, 44 Ma�heuer, Wolfgang, 108, 124 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 145, 190 McCray, Porter A., 45 Meinhof, Ulrike, 87, 94 Meissner, Günter, 122 Meister Eckhart, 38 Meistermann, Georg, 34 memory, 6, 13–20, 50, 60, 62, 73, 77, 100, 128–129, 166–169, 125, 188, 191, 249–252, 255, 256, 260 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 263 Metzel, Olaf, 72 Metzkes, Harald, 29–30 Mey, Kerstin, 12 Michalski, Sergiusz, 12 Michaux, Henri, 44 Michelson, Anne�e, 90 minimalism, 262–263

Mitscherlich, Alexander, 51, 164, 172 mnemotechnic device, 50 mobile Büro (Lastzug), 72 modernism, 3–16, 22–24, 31, 32, 35, 36, 38, 42, 45, 61, 76, 106–117, 121, 130–132, 140, 208, 221, 222, 259, 264 Mohr, Arno, 24, 218 Möhrke, Una, 77 Monden, Erhard, 19, 164, 192, 197–205, 198, 223, 226, 227 Mondrian, Piet, 1, 37, 38, 41, 46 Moorman, Charlo�e, 179, 180, 236 Morgner, Michael, 193, 196 Mucchi, Gabriel, 26 Mühl, O�o, 182 Müller, Heiner, 248 Mulvey, Laura, 88 Muñoz, Juan, 71 Munsky, Maina-Miriam, 147 mural, the, 76–77, 132, 156 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 3, 43, 45, 113 N Nagel, O�o, 26, 31 National Commi�ee for a Free Germany (Nationalkommi�ee Freies Deutschland), 224 National Socialist, 1, 3, 6–9, 16, 17, 23, 37, 39, 40, 42, 49–51, 59, 63, 66, 112, 117, 126, 127, 128, 129, 239, 252, 260, 265, 267 Nationalgalerie, East Berlin, 34 nationalism, 11, 13, 15, 16, 45

I���� Nay, Ernst Wilhelm, 39 Nerlinger, Oskar, 31, 32, 34 Neue Sachlichkeit, 31, 106 Neue Wache, 251, 256–259 Neue Wilden, 68, 108 Neumeyer, Alfred, 47 New Economic System (GDR), 70 New German Cinema, 89 New National Gallery, Berlin, vi, 41, 44, 46, 47, 64, 118, 137, 162 Nipkow, Paul, 209 Nitsch, Hermann, 242 Nolde, Emil, 2 Nungesser, Michael, 45 O O’Doherty, Brian, 68 Occupied Zones, 2 October, 22, 32, 52, 133, 134, 167, 177, 178, 244 O’Dell, Kathy, 180 Oellers, Adam, 239 Oelze, Richard, 39 Ohnesorg, Benno, 186 Oldenburg, Claes, 56, 134 Oppenheim, Dennis, 231 Oradour-sur-Glace, 51 Orlow, N., 24 O�inger, Ulrike, 89, 162, 244 P Pachnicke, Peter, 199 Paik, Nam June, 166, 167, 189, 229, 230 Palermo, Blinky, 52 Pankow, East Berlin, 50, 96, 98, 99, 103 Paret, Peter, 1, 267

317

Paulus, Ernst, 90 peace dove, 119 Pechstein, Max, 22 Penck, A.R. (Ralf Winkler), 18, 109, 130, 132, 154–161, 157, 197 Peredwishniki (The Wanderers), 25 Peters, Hermann, 199 Petrick, Wolfgang, 147 Petzold, Fredericke, 236 Picasso, Pablo, 1–3, 6, 10, 23, 26, 35–38, 42, 43, 46, 47, 106, 112, 113, 116, 119, 209, 211, 218, 222, 257 Piene, O�o, 230, 245 Pissarro, Camille, 10 Pitz, Hermann, 49, 71–73, 79 pleinairs, 193–195, 198 Pohl, Marianne, 72 ‘Polemik’ program, GDR television, 220, 222 Polke, Sigmar, 130 Pollock, Jackson, 3, 10, 42, 44, 140 post-nationalism, 16, 47 post-socialism, 9 Potsdamer Platz, 254, 255 Preiss, Achim, 9 Prenzlauer Berg, 95, 99 Proletkult, 29, 32 psychoanalysis, 14, 88, 92–93 R Radziwill, Franz, 39 Rahmann, Fritz, 49, 71, 73 Rainer, Yvonne, 17, 50, 87–94, 202 Ran�, Thomas, 193, 196 Rathke, Ewald, 43 Raum, Hermann, 35, 108, 115,

318

I����

Raum, Hermann, continued, 120, 125, 149, 199, 211, 219 Rauschenberg, Robert, 56, 60, 167 Realism, 6, 11, 25, 32–36, 47, 106–112, 120, 139, 161, 221, 222 Rehberg, Karl-Siebert, 130 Rehfeldt, Robert, 199 Reichstag, 126, 249, 252–253, 256 reification, 14, 15 Reinecke, Chris, 52, 150 Repin, Ilya, 25 Reuter, Teresa, 251 Rheinsberg, Raffael, 72 Richter, Gerhard, 27, 18, 47, 109, 130–139, 137, 145–147, 161 Riopelle, Jean-Paul, 44 Rivière, Joan, 162 Rodchenko, Alexander, 81 Rogoff, Irit, 6, 13 Roh, Franz, 40 Rohde, Marie-Luise, 211 Rose, Jacqueline, 5, 10 Rosenbach, Ulrike, 236 Rosso, Mendardo, 212 Rühm, Gerhard, 179 ‘Russian, the’, 75 S Sager, Peter, 106 Sandberg, Herbert, 23 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 151 Schade, Gregor Torsten, 193, 196 Scharang, Michael, 15, 66 Scheumann, Gerhard, 223 Schinkel, K.F., 257 Schlichter, Rudolf, 31, 40 Schlöndorff, Volker, 88 Schloss Augustusburg, Brühl, 3

Schmalenbach,Werner, 45 Schmela, Alfred, 138 Schmidt-Ro�luff, Karl, 21, 23 Schmit, Tomas, 179, 239 Schneckenburger, Manfred, 129 Schneemann, Carolee, 18, 163, 177–182, 205, 238 Schneider, Peter, 186, 189 Schön, Eva-Maria, 71 Schönebeck, Eugen, 18, 104–109, 132, 140–147, 144, 161 School of the New Magnificence (Schule der neuen Prächtigkeit), 147 Schultze, Fritz, 32 Schum, Gerry, 228, 231, 245 Schweinebraden, Jürgen, 160 Schwi�ers, Kurt, 55 SDS (Socialist German Student Association), 186–191 Seawright, James, 230 SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, GDR), 8, 15, 16, 19, 23, 24, 26, 28, 29, 30, 35, 36, 94, 95, 98, 102, 107, 110–112, 114, 115, 120, 121, 122, 133, 160, 197, 216, 220, 221, 222, 224, 245, 256, 257 Sedlmayr, Hans, 37-39 Seewald, Richard, 38 Seibert, Heinz, 223 Seitz, William, 55, 66 Selbsthilfegalerie, 67 self-critique, 115, 125, 126 Serra, Richard, 260, 263 SFB (FRG television), 231, 243, 244

I���� Sieglaub, Seth, 69 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 145 Sisyphus, 121, 123–124 site-specific, the, 17, 50, 79 Si�e, Willi, 15, 18, 35, 108–117, 113, 145, 161, 197, 215–226, 224 Situationist International, 83 Smith, Kiki, 71 Smith, Owen, 170 Smithson, Robert, 231 socialist body, 203 Socialist Realism, 4, 11, 18, 23, 25, 27, 28–36, 97, 98, 105–115, 122, 133, 139, 191, 203, 211, 246, 252 SoHo, 67 Sontag, Susan, 248 Sorge, Peter, 147 Soviet Bloc, 4, 8, 12, 15, 20, 95, 130, 131, 177, 202, 204, 246, 249, 251 Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), 22 Soviet Productivists, 70 Spála Gallery, Prague, 52 Speer, Albert, 252 Städtische Galerie, Frankfurt, 1 Staeck, Klaus, 98 Stalin, Joseph, 23 Stalinallee, 26 Standart, 109, 157–161 Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry for State Security, GDR), 15, 165, 193, 196, 202 State Tretyakov Gallery, 72 Strack, Heinrich, 252 Strempel, Horst, 24 Ströher, Karl, 47

319

Studio Face�i, 41 Stünke, Heinrich, 45 Surrealism, 60, 108, 109, 143, 146, 165, 190 T tableau vivant, 61, 223 Tambellini, Aldo, 230, 245 Tannert, Christoph, 192, 197, 201 Tapié, Michel, 41 Tate Gallery, 43 Taubin, Amy, 91 Technical Academy, Aachen, 238 Television Gallery Gerry Schum, 231 Thälmann, Ernst, 100, 145, 220, 259 Thiel, Tamiko, 251 Third Reich, 37, 129, 174, 225, 240, 242 Torsten, Gregor, 193 Treblinka, 55, 58, 59 Trier, Eduard, 45 Trier, Han, 140 Tübke, Werner, 15, 18, 35, 108, 111, 112, 117–120, 118, 161, 218, 222 Tykwer, Tom, 249 U U.S.S.R. (Soviet Union), 6, 12, 225, 246 Uecker, Günter, 229 Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen), 18 Ulbricht, Walter, 28, 29, 115, 121, 215 Universität Siegen research group, 207

320

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Ury, Lesser, 107 V van der Rohe, Ludwig Mies, 7, 41, 46, 101 Vautier, Ben, 71 Verein der Bildenden Künstler der DDR (German Artists Union), 23, 31, 32, 35, 36, 96, 98, 107, 112, 115, 117, 121, 125, 128, 133, 155, 193–197, 201, 219, 222 Verlust der Mi�e, 37 Victory Column, Berlin, 83–84, 252 Video Galerie Gerry Schum, 231 Videowerksta�, 246 Viennese Actionists, 163 Vietnam, 9, 70, 115, 150, 186, 242 Visual Arts Program, NEA, 68 Vogeler, Heinrich, 32 Vogelgesang, Klaus, 147 Voice of America Forum Lectures, 43 Voigt, Peter, 223 Voisky, Jürgen, 221 Volksverbundenheit (tie to the people), 217, 220 von Arnim, Be�ina, 147 von Bonin, Wibke, 230 von Bu�lar, Herbert Freiherr, 45 von Werner, Anton, 252 Vostell, Wolf, 17, 18, 43, 49, 52, 55–60, 58, 66, 83, 87, 102, 163, 166, 172–180, 205, 229, 238–247

W Walker, John, 207 Wallis, Brian, 68 Walter, Heynowski, 223 ‘Wandering Jew, the’, 104 Warhol, Andy, 83, 145, 146 Wasse, Ralf-Rainer, 193, 195 WDR (FRG television), 230, 231, 239, 241 Weber, Max, 5, 10 Weh, Renate, 180 Weidener, Klaus, 199 Weidner, Klaus, 34 Weimar Republic, 7, 14, 32, 35, 106, 149 Wende (‘The Change’), 200, 250, 255 Werner & Katz Galerie, 131 Werner, Klaus, 194, 196, 197 Werner, Michael, 105, 142, 153, 154, 157, 160 Werwerka, Stephan, 52 Western Marxism, 14 WGBH (Boston), 229, 230, 235 Wiens, Paul, 219 Wiesbaden, 18, 163, 177, 238 Williams, Emme�, 164, 179, 239 Winkler, Kurt, 45 Winkler, Ralf, vii, 109, 155, 157 Winnico�, D.W., 94 Winter, Fritz, 39, 44 Wintersberger, L.M., 67 Wirtscha�swunder, 29, 229 WNET (New York), 229, 235 Wolf, Christa, 219 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 212 Wols (Alfred O�o Wolfgang Schulze), 39, 41, 44

I���� Womacka, Walter, 33, 34, 131 Wuppertal, 60, 170, 171, 176, 177, 238, 243 Y Y. Ralf (A.R. Penck), 155 Young, James E., 255, 260 Z Zadkine, Ossip, 46 Zasulich, Vera, 91 ZDF (FRG television), 228, 230

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Continued from front flap

Claudia Mesch is Associate Professor of Art History at the School of Art at Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona. She is the editor, with Viola Michely, of Joseph Beuys: The Reader (I.B.Tauris, 2007) and is founding editor of the e-journal Surrealism and the Americas. She writes on diverse topics in twentieth-century and contemporary art, especially postwar modernism, its ties to surrealism, and European intellectual history, and is working on a study of European intellectuals’ and surrealism’s preoccupation with Native American culture. She is a frequent contributor of art and film criticism to Sculpture, caa.reviews and The Art Book.

Front cover image: A R Penck (Ralf Winkler) (1939–) © Copyright. Untitled from the portfolio Ur End Standart (1972). One from a portfolio of fifteen screenprints, composition (irreg.): 24 13/16 x 24 1/8" (63 x 61.3 cm); sheet: 273/16 x 273/16" (69 x 69cm). Publisher: Fred Jahn, Munich and Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne. Printer: H-G Schulz and U Streifeneder, Munich. Edition: 75. Mrs Gilbert W Chapman Fund (1089.1979.6). Location: The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY. Back cover image: K P Brehmer, Walkings: Nr. 1 Sieg (1969–70). © 2008 Estate of K P Brehmer and Common Film Produktion GmbH, Berlin

Berlin Wall aw.indd 1

‘I was very impressed by Claudia Mesch’s fresh and unconventional views on the art of the Cold War period in Germany. This book offers many new perspectives… especially the connections between local phenomena and the international art context. I appreciate the way she challenges the West German canon of modern art, which excluded the art of East Germany, in her emphasis on realism as the artistic language of memory and of global socialism.’ Dr. Eckhart J. Gillen, Kulturprojekte Berlin, author of German Art from Beckman to Richter: Images of a Divided Country

tauris academic studies an imprint of I.B.Tauris Publishers London | New York www.ibtauris.com

modern art at the berlin wall claudia mesch

Modern Art at the Berlin Wall presents a new chapter in the history of modern art in considering the cultural struggles of artists as they coped with the wide-scale trauma of World War II and the global ideological divide of the Cold War era. It challenges the perception that an absolute cultural separation existed between the capitalist West and the communist Soviet Bloc. With penetrating insights into the cultural coordination of new national identities and modernism’s many legacies, this book is indispensable for all those interested in art history, modernism, the Cold War and the cultural history of the twentieth century.

‘Claudia Mesch’s reconsideration of the antagonistic ideologies of modernity in the Eastern and the Western cultures of the postwar period moves beyond the widely debated narrative of a culture clash that divided the competing superpowers US and USSR. Mesch argues that artists’ practices in West and East Germany transgressed overriding ideological paradigms in multiple ways, and formed a subtle… opposition against the official politics of demarcation. The research perspective is unique and exciting in that Mesch proves experimentation and avant-garde practices took place in both West and East Germany… counter to the still strongly defended assumption of a strict Cold War cultural division into Socialist Realism versus abstract Modernism. Mesch also reveals that the cultural politics of the Cold War are by no means a matter of the past. In analyzing the aftereffects of certain decisions – such as the introduction of art to television – the book sheds light on the similar propagandistic use, on both sides, of media tools and broadcasting to reach audiences across borders. This use of media continues in recent cultural and religious conflict.’ Professor Yvonne Spielmann, Chair of New Media, University of the West of Scotland

tauris academic studies

The proximity and shared history of East and West Germany has made Berlin an endlessly fascinating site of the Cold War. Here Claudia Mesch uncovers the dynamic history of art produced in divided Germany, and presents a new picture of the Cold War border between East and West as a flourishing and international cultural space. At the end of World War II, both Germanys faced the common problem of recovering and redefining modern art – museum buildings lay in ruins and Nazi confiscations and plunder had decimated every major public collection of modern art. A wide group of artists, American, Jewish and German, struggled to take visual art beyond the crude separations of the ‘Iron Curtain’, and to transcend the first global cultural divide of the twentieth century. The group included Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, Gerhard Richter, Carolee Schneemann, Ed Kienholz, Yvonne Rainer, Jörg Immendorff and Nam June Paik. Their artwork, far less known than official memorials and ‘counter-memorials’ to World War II, engaged critically with imposed national and global identities, and with issues of memory and trauma. Mesch analyzes artworks across a number of different mediums including performance, painting and film, and also looks at how some of these artworks were disseminated on television. Artists refashioned West Berlin as a center for avant-garde art that was constantly renewed by a stream of Eastern defectors and Western visitors. They forcefully contested the absolute demarcation of socialist and capitalist ideology forwarded by each state’s art institutions, yet both seemed struck by amnesia about the profound trauma of World War II and the Holocaust. Mesch tracks major East and West German debates around modernism, and uncovers for the first time the existence of a critical socialist modernism in the former Soviet Bloc, practiced in East Germany by artists such as Manfred Butzmann, Wolfgang Mattheuer, A.R. Penck, and the artists’ group Clara Mosch. An epilogue considers the recurring issues of cultural division and memory as they have been addressed in major artworks created in the united Berlin during the 1990s, including Peter Eisenman’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Continued on reverse flap

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