1-Year Plan
Post 23: 11/5/05
Berlin Exhibitions:
Fraktale IV
Fraktale IV, "Tod–Kein Tod" (Death—No Death), Palast der Republik, Unter den Linden, Mitte. Group exhibition.
Fraktale führt einen unabhängigen, künstlerischen Diskurs zu den Grundelementen menschlicher Existenz. Über die Zeit hinaus geltende Prinzipien, wie Ursache/Wirkung/Zyklus/Evolution werden benannt und aus der Sicht der bildenden Kunst ästhetisch formuliert. Es wird der Versuch unternommen, Vergängliches von Unvergänglichem zu trennen. So entsteht ein Raum, in dem Positionen, parallel zum wissenschaftlich Beweisbaren, entwickelt werden können. Diese Haltung führte zu einem Prozess, der sich in einer stetig wachsenden Gruppe fortsetzt.
Zum Begriff fraktale:An die Stelle eines einheitlichen Ganzen treten heute fraktale Strukturen und Wahrscheinlichkeiten. Die Beschleunigung des Informationsflusses macht ständig wechselnde Werte allgegenwärtig. Neben der daraus entstehende Verunsicherung entsteht auch eine neuartige Form der Freiheit, die die Mannigfaltigkeit der Dinge akzeptiert und sich auf Rhythmus und Struktur begründet. Dies ermöglicht die Wahrnehmung einzelner Fraktale. Fraktale sind Einzelteile, die auf die Information eines Ganzen hinweisen und somit als Bedeutungsträger für Einfaches und Absolutes aufgefasst werden können. Sie provozieren somit einen Diskurs über die grundlegenden Elemente menschlicher Existenz. [Fraktale web site]
Fraktale would conduct an independent artistic examination into the fundamental elements of human existence—into valorized principles, originating in Time, which are called Cause/Effect/Cycle/Evolution and whose perception works of visual art formulate in the aesthetic. It will undertake an attempt to separate the ephemeral from the nonephemeral, thus creating a space in which different perspectives, parallel to scientific evidence, may be developed. This attitude would lead to a process that sets itself forth in a constantly expanding group {of artists/of perspectives}.
On the concept of Fraktale: in lieu of a homogenous totality we witness today the emergence of fractal structures and probabilities. The accelerated flow of information has made permanently changing values ubiquitous. As a result of the insecurity that results, there arises also a newly made form of freedom, which accepts the multiplicity of things and is based on rhythm and structure. This freedom in turn enables the perception of a particular fractal. Fractals are particulars that lead from information to the whole, and consequently can be seen as bearing the meaning of the simple and absolute. They thus provoke an examination into the fundamental elements of human existence. [BW]
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Fraktale IV is the most recent in a series of independent exhibitions staged in prominent public places—in this case, the looming hulk of the Palast der Republik, the GDR's former seat of "representative government" and itself now scheduled for imminent destruction. As a work of architecture, the Palast most frequently is described by Germans as häßlich, "ugly, hideous, repulsive, ill-favored, nasty, odious, loathsome, offensive"—an adjective often used for excrescences of the built world, and often those that have been reconstructed. The history of the Palast is itself nasty and complex; it was built on the site of former Hohenzollern Palast, one of the more oversized and excremental buildings of the Prussian state, begun in 1698 and completed in 1713 except for the addition of a massive dome in 1853. It was eighty percent destroyed by aerial bombardment during the war. The proportions of the Palast were themselves monumentally ungainly and oppressive: its four stories stood a hundred feet high over the street, or twenty-five feet per story, and it contained 1200 rooms—in a city, when it was built, of roughly sixty thousand people. After some debate over whether Berlin should remain "a city of ruins like Rome," the GDR leveled the building in the 1950s for an enormous open area Communist Party leader Walter Ulbricht imagined as a German Red Square but which was used as a parking lot until the 1970s. The East German Palast, "a rectangular box clad in white marble and bronze reflective glass" that emits simultaneous discomfort and acceptance of modernism, combines functionalism, rhetoric of scale, kitsch, and repellant materials to make one truly ungainly building that serves no apparent purpose. After the fall of the regime, it was used to convene the elected assembly that voted to unify with the Federal Republic, but then was condemned for asbestos and sealed. For the last fifteen years, there has been an extended public debate on what should be done with it, with the decision only recently finalized to tear it down and rebuild the simulacral façade of the Hohenzollerns as a matter of national pride. In a final effort, Leftists committed to a refusal to deny Berlin's history and artists inspired by its incommensurability have been arguing to reverse its death sentence.
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The building itself has increasingly become a kind of monumental avant-garde site; in the month I was in Berlin, a production of Wagner's Parcival was staged free to the public in the former assembly hall (stripped to the girders under dripping skylights). The Fraktale exhibition was advertised as the last event to be held in the building, a celebration of its destruction—hence the massive banner with the "Tod—Kein Tod" over the parking lot. Given such a historical setting, with defunct narratives in abundance, the Fraktale exhibition pursued a relentless postmodern incommensurability within the building's empty shell. Ironies of scale, of the elided distinction between construction and destruction, were everywhere; each aesthetic incongruity between individual works, or spatial dislocation within the building, created new logics that led to a compelling horizon of anti-totalization. Where Theodor Adorno had called for a negative dialectics of nonidentity in the aesthetic as the only viable form of politics remaining, the space between the architecture of a defunct state and the perspectivism of the postmodern would seem to have fulfilled his demand. Time, in the sense of Fraktale's manifesto above, is dissociated from the space of history to provide a conceptual framework for untotalizable parts/wholes, specific components that, in the ensemble, add up to a compelling account of the historical present. At the site of an historical devolution, then, is a constructive potential that depends on the degree to which each aesthetic act can comprehend "the simple and absolute" as at once decentered and productive of relationships between differences. The Palast der Republik is thereby transformed to a true space of utopian/dystopian desire in its promise of a negativity yet to come.
The possibilities are endless, but only after you have accepted the opening move of the exhibition—(e.) Twin Gabriel's four-panel photographic series of a German family (the artist couple and their children themselves) as corpses as spontaneously confirming. Where once icons of the state greeted party members over the marble balustrade, we now have an absolute horizon of social, not only individual, destiny—as a relief from the badly totalized and inaccurate approximation the East German state once was. Given this initial shattering of overarching narrative, we are released into a space of new combinations and perspectives in the exhibition's first large area. Here, it is evident that while each work is free to pursue its own private absolute in a specific genre or media, it is in the spatial articulation of the different works where the real argument lies, greater than the sum of its parts. On the night of the vernissage, the installation of several works high over the crowd made the entire an event a memento mori: Stefan Berchtold's mannequin strung from rope that occasionally went off in seizures; Jörg Lange's train-station-like display of portentously unnamed "arrivals" and "departures," which changed abruptly every so often, and Herlinde Koelbl's portrait of two aged corpses. Three other installations used spaces that created a depth apart from the exhibition space, an "other" room where the real event, likely, is going on: John Bock's Astronaut was particularly effective in its use of Schadenfreude, the lust for knowledge revealed in onlookers of car accidents; his installation required that the audience mount a series of steps, which were always crowded, in order to peep into an unfinished area of the Palast where his video was being screened. Weibke Maria Wachmann's installation, oppositely, worked with Heidegger's notion of a Lichtung or "clearing" of Being in making a space filled with a deathly-white-painted surrealist forest and lit by high-intensity lighting that was almost unbearable to look at. Roman Signer's video installation, finally, confronts us with the pleasure we feel watching a small helicopter fly on remote control until it crashes and self-destructs. In each case, the pleasure of looking takes on a sinister overcast when the thing being seen portends one's own destruction.
Fraktale's basic commitment to incommensurate and anti-totalizing logic translated perfectly in the exhibit as the space between genres. While installation and sculpture seemed to predominate at first, large-scale painting and photography took on an object status as well when the thing depicted bordered on the unrepresentable. Jonas Burgert's large scale allegories, for instance, might convey an art-historical self-consciousness and forced nastiness as mere paintings, but as objects then argue at level of what kind of activity they evidence rather than simply what they depict. In Andreas Golder's das Mädchen und der Tod, likewise, painting exceeds its limits in the depravity to make a unique work that insists on its unpleasantness, just as Christian Hahn's series of Day-Glo tableaux of paintball warriors, straight out of the iconography of the early digital movie Tron, impress for their robotic insistence. More lyrical incommensurates were enacted in Sid Gastl's banda silencio series of horizontal paintings of dream architecture, as also in Ruprecht v. Kaufmann's dark narrative paintings, which include images of zebras and wolves to evoke an uncanny finality. Boris Nieslony's installation of necrology photographs of morgue subjects, some of them really disturbing, and Herlinde Knoebl's imags from a slaughterhouse, however, worked to create a violent disruption between the viewer's experience and the depicted content. If paintings tended to become installations due to their excessive content in this exhibition, it was installation art itself that defined its central argument: in Benjamin Bergmann's death-evoking roller coaster as a narrative; Rudolf Reiber's multi-screen installation of a quail hunt, where all is expectation of an impending moment of violence; Stefan Berchtold's 15-meter high video installation of multiple bodies falling through space; Alexandra Ranner's lyric sequence of a floating, severed head singing opera in a quitely flowing stream; and Oliver van den Berg's canvas-shrouded fighter plan all enacted deathwardness as a spatial figure. With the exception of Ingolf Keiner's Matthew Barney-esque (i.e., pretentiously symbolic and pseudonarrative) installation, the remaining installation work by Birgit Dieker, Harald Fuchs, Jörg Herold, Stephan Huber, John Isaacs, and Tobias Regensburger all operate at a level of compelling and nonidentical spectacle. Incommensurability is a spatial figure for what the work unveils.
The lessons of this exhibition for the arts in Detroit may now be spelled out. To begin with, the organizers of Fraktale are making the best use of their independence as curators, working with available public spaces and thus not continually in the debt of institutions whose own survival needs are paramount. Being (relatively) free to make the kinds of exhibition they want, they are also capable of an actual public intervention, in this case in favor of the preserving the Palast der Republik as a site for just the kind of noninstitutional art they represent. I can see, very clearly, how the Palast could have a well-defined role as an alternative space located in the center of an otherwise overly described landscape of Berlin's cultural center—something between Paris's Beaubourg and San Francisco's Fort Mason and Fort Berry projects, where decommissioned military buildings were turned over to artists, theaters, and public advocates. The Palast could become a hive of such activity. Also important is the recontextualization of the building itself as way of overcoming Berlin's history, a bad one at that. For Detroit, a similar move would mean exiting the logic of destruction as the only alternative to historical change, no matter how drastic it has been. It was precisely such an urge to take down the monuments of the uncomfortable past that led the GDR to make the original parking lot (which still survives) on the site of the first Palast. The decision to tear down the second would only compound the mistake—leading to an albatross no one knows what to do with, and the loss of an opportunity to redefine and make use, rather than to cover up and deny. The lesson for Detroit would be thus to find a way past its logic of denial, no matter what kind of difficult encounter it demands.
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[To come.]
[Text and photographs copyright © Barrett Watten 2005. Not to be reprinted without permission, except in short excerpts in electronic media.]
