"There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments." (Robert Musil)
A relative who recently visited Paris told me about the large, gold-painted, stylized flame on a marble base he had seen on Place d'Alma, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, just above the tunnel in which Princess Diana was killed two years earlier. Since the monument was literally covered with messages of grief that had been left by passersby, my friend assumed that it had been erected in honor of the dead princess. As it turned out, the gilded flame had been on Place d'Alma already since 1987. A plaque on its round marble base informs the viewer that the Flame of Liberty is an exact replica of the flame held by the Statue of Liberty in New York. After the royal car crash in the Alma Tunnel in 1998, the monument turned into a public memorial to the princess; it was decorated with hundreds of postcards, stuffed animals, paper collages, photos, personal letters, and similar messages. These signs of international sympathy were either glued to the monument or inscribed directly on its surface. The multiply layered inscriptions have in their turn since been partly removed or defaced by new layers of graffiti, slabs of yellow paint, and new inscriptions ("I love you-we'll meet in heaven"); the whole thing vaguely resembling a painting by Jacques Villegle. Even the massive stone railing behind the monument has been covered with hundreds of signatures, as if the visitors who immortalized themselves in this way wanted to make sure that before they followed Diana into the tunnel (never to return) they would at least leave behind their signature ("I cannot believe you are gone, Rat&Radika, Toronto").
Before its transformation into a memorial to the British Princess, the Flame of Liberty connoted, somewhat officiously, freedom and friendship as abstract, universal values. Perhaps not surprisingly, the flame has always been known by Parisians as a monument "about nothing." The setting seemed to predispose it to this kind of disaffection. Contrary to the assumptions of most tourists who think that "Alma" refers to a woman, the square was named in commemoration of the British/French alliance that had defeated the Russians on the Crimea in 1854. However, it was only at the point where it was "defaced" and covered with graffiti that the Flame of Liberty came to be appropriated as a "memorial" by the population at large. The new "incarnation" of the flame as a (defaced and besmeared) memorial to the dead princess has not so much erased the original references as it has recontextualized them. The abstract ideals the flame was designed to allegorize (freedom and independence) have become em-bodied in the personal struggle for freedom by an independently-minded British princess against an oppressive (male) establishment. The flame has, in other words, turned from being the symbol of a utopian hope against hope into a memorial of excruciating personal sacrifice. Even the flame itself has undergone a symbolic transformation. It is now viewed by thousands of tourists as the flame that consumed the Princess's life, while its official inscription ("Flamme de la Liberté") is read as a tribute to her struggles. This change in the memorial's symbolic code has ramifications for our perception of the origin of the flame, the Statue of Liberty itself. In itself the hardly very feminine incarnation of a set of ideals that applied largely to men, the conflation of Diana's struggle for freedom with the faraway Statue, to a degree, feminizes the latter. It, too, is no longer perceived as an abstract allegory but as-a woman.
As far as the public monument is concerned, its severed fragments precede the whole of which they form a part. The lesson that the Flame of Liberty teaches us is not only that all (public) memory-including, obviously, the memory of what we refer to as "Princess Diana"-is a construct but that even the memorials that undergird such memory are composites whose symbolic and material unity is but the result of our projection. We should not forget that the Statue of Liberty was produced in the Paris workshop of Gustave Eiffel (not far from Paris), only then to be shipped to the New World in large sections that were assembled after their arrival in New York. In the sense that it represents the fragmented statue in the way it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the Flame of Liberty on Place d'Alma is not so much a displaced part of an absent whole as it is a vivid reminder of the original condition of the Statue of Liberty itself: The Flame of Liberty marks the return of a fragment that preceded the whole of which it is a part. Before it can be a symbol of international friendship, then, a monument has to be defaced, covered with inscriptions, divided, and cut to pieces, a process that could be described, using a term from botanical terminology, as graft. A graft implies one or several incisions on an existing surface, not unlike the inscriptions that affected the Flame of Liberty on Place d'Alma. These incisions, physical changes, inscriptions, or decorations alter the existing monument by superimposing themselves on its surface, thus turning the monument into a multi-layered palimpsest. Yet these graftings, I want to argue, do not simply affect the monument like an external circumstance since the latter is nothing beyond the fluctuating series of such incisions and defacements. Taking my cue from Jacques Derrida, I want to argue that there is no "properness of the [monument, S.S.]" to which the graft "happens" (Derrida 1986, 355) because the graft itself represents a prerequisite for the whole to which it is applied.
In the following essay I want to examine the paradoxical logic of the monument-graft by focusing on three artists who have worked extensively with public monuments: Zbigniew Libera, Hans Haacke, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. All three artists have spent part of their lives in Central Europe, an area where, especially after the second word war, the problem of the monument has posed itself with particular insistence. In the projects I want to discuss, the architectural monument and its representations become the focus of a complex strategy of appropriation and misappropriation, of defamiliarization and refamiliarization that owes a debt both to the didactic ambitions of Brechtian Verfremdung and to postmodern simulation. Moralists with a didactic streak in one sense, Haacke, Wodiczko, and Libera must be viewed as magicians in another: they present the trompe-l'oeil, the optical illusion, not as an accident, a momentary delusion or an aberration, but as a fact of (public) memory. Through various architectural and photomechanical interventions, modifications, alternations, light projections, and other forms of recontextualization, they establish multiple points of contact between the public monument and its specific social, political, economic, and architectural contexts. These strategies are designed to liberate the monument from the isolation to which it is ordinarily confined. As a result of their interventions, the monument momentarily loses its status as the purveyor of singular symbolic truths about the past, while its mundane surroundings acquire a quasi-monumental status. Haacke, Wodiczko, and Libera "make the monument strange", they view it as a site of multiple encodings and grafts. By suggesting that every monument has its own genealogies, and by grafting these histories onto it, the artists reveal the fissures and gaps the monument continuously displaces. Public memory, they argue, is not nature-given and self-evident, it is a construct informed by a multitude of discursive strands that are designed to dissimulate the repressions in which they originate.
Like Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Christian Boltanski, Ilya Kabakov, and others, Libera, Haacke, and Wodiczko share a sense of commitment to the critique of art as an institution, a critique that was begun earlier this century by the various European avant-gardes. Like their predecessors associated with pop art and nouveau réalisme, these three artists abandoned the central ambition of the historical avant-garde, the wholesale destruction of art as an institution and the subsequent merging of art with "life" (an ambition that failed with the realization that the avant-garde had itself become institutionalized). Since the institutions of art proved to be resistant to all efforts to make them wither away, these artists have committed themselves to a more circumspect, analytical stance that broadens the scope of artistic inquiry to extend beyond the traditional art museum and the gallery to larger economic and political structures and institutions and the way in which they condition what today we call the institution of art. In contradistinction to pop art and minimalism (the "first" neo-avant-garde), Hal Foster has referred to this contemporary formation of artists as the "second neo-avant-garde": "[T]he so-called failure of both historical and first neo-avant-gardes [i.e., minimalism, pop art, concept art, etc., S.S.] to destroy the institution of art has enabled the deconstructive testing of this institution by the second neo-avant-garde-a testing that is now extended to different institutions and discourses in the ambitious art of the present" (Foster 1994, 122). This postulation of a second neo-avant-gard, however, takes for a fact that the "testing" of the institution of art will be carried out by artists who come from, or work in, Western Europe or the United States. It is by now a truism that much of art historical inquiry in the West assumes as a given the fact that contemporary art is defined, geographically as well as conceptually, by the allegiance of its practitioners to the "West", to the exclusion, that is, of art and artists from the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. It is, however, necessary to acknowledge that the critique of the archive and of the institutions of collection in postwar art of the 1980s and 90s is not limited to Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, Hans Haacke, or Christian Boltansky. Artists in or from Central and Eastern Europe, from Zofia Kulik to Ilya Kabakov and Ilya Kopystiansky, have long engaged in a similar critique, albeit within historical and artistic contexts that do not always coincide with those of the West.
Plastic Monuments: Zbigniew Libera's "Lego"
Zbigniew Libera's Lego. Seven sets of blocks in card boxes (1997) investigate the connections between commodification and public memory in a context that is both universal and specifically Polish. Lego consists of seven cardboard boxes bearing the announcement that they were officially sponsored by the Lego company, which also generously supplied Libera with the gray building blocks inside the boxes. The containers themselves are indistinguishable from other "Lego System" construction kits, except for the notice concerning the company's sponsorship of Libera's work. Lego abruptly withdrew its support after the company learnt of the controversial nature of Libera's project: One of the boxes presents what looks like a medical experiment being performed on a prisoner, while another one shows two gray, elongated barracks surrounded by double rows of barbed wire. Two search towers with armed Lego personnel can also be seen. From the front gates march a file of skeleton inmates led by a uniformed guard. The whole scene is set against a dark blue sky with white clouds suggesting live smoke.
Libera's Lego is scandalous not only in the way it presents as a toy what seems to have nothing to do with the idea of children at play, but also in the sense that it suggests the commodification of the monument. Lego is presented as a commodified memorial to the Holocaust that is, or feigns to be, subject to consumption like other commodities. In the summer of 1997, the seven boxes became the subject of a well-publicized scandal surrounding their exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The pavilion's curator agreed to include the boxes in the printed catalogue but refused to exhibit them in the pavilion, whereupon Libera cancelled his participation in the show. For reasons that are partially connected with the complexities of postwar public memory in Poland, it was felt that Lego was not a suitable representative of postwar Polish art. In the international press, Libera's set of Lego boxes was instantly identified with Auschwitz , and it was sometimes seen as a frivolous and gratuitous reference to the legacy of the Holocaust.
To an audience familiar with Jasper Johns's two cast Carlsberg beer cans or Warhol's exhibition of quasi-identical Brillo boxes, the display of art as a collection of commodified objects no longer poses a particular challenge. In pop art, the artist's role is not that of a producer whose tekhne enables the work to come into being as a unique original, but rather, that of a collector who assembles (commodified) objects and places them in the context of the art gallery. In the case of Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, such transfers challenge the traditional art museum by dismantling its assumption that the works it exhibits are unique. This is why Warhol, César, or Arman were particularly attracted by sets or series of identical forms which they placed inside an environment (a museum, a gallery) that seemed intrinsically hostile to them. The multiple display of the same object (two cans of beer, twenty Brillo boxes, fifteen cans arranged in a certain way) represents what in rhetoric is called a tautology: The collected object presents itself as always already as part of a collection. Before it can be perceived as a unique object, the Brillo box forms part of a collection of like objects; its repetition hence precedes its status as an original. In the vein of Warhol's Brillo installation or John's Carlsberg cans, Libera presents Lego as a collection of (seven) containers. In Latin, the phrase lego means, among other things, "I collect", a (performative) statement that encapsulates the work's conceptual strategy: not only do the seven Lego kits present themselves as a collection or series of seven boxes that is exhibited inside another collection (the gallery), the containers themselves, containing the gray plastic bricks needed to construct the camp, resemble collections or archives.
The artistic practices of pop art and nouveau réalisme, as well as other currents prevalent during the 1960s and 70s, cannot be considered without reference to Marcel Duchamp, whose "readymades" consisted of industrially produced objects such as a bottle rack, a urinal, and a bicycle wheel. Duchamp's most famous readymade, a rotated urinal entitled Fountain (1917), bears a handwritten signature, R. Mutt, a performative statement suggesting that the unique art object has lost its game to repetition and reproduction: the signature declares that art is "schach/matt." But the very same signature (no matter how fictitious) nevertheless affirms the genius of the player/artist, Marcel Duchamp himself, whose choice it was to display/sign the urinal, rotate it, and then to apply for its public display at the New York Armory. If Fountain affirms, on the one hand, the art object as a repetition without an original, it also, conversely, affirms the unique gesture that rotates that pissoir for its gallery exhibition. In other words, it affirms the uniqueness of the signature and the survival of art in its very failure.
Squarely within the tradition of Warhol's reformulations of the Duchampian readymade, Lego, too, examines the art object as an industrially produced, "repeated" mass product ("Leg-o"/"Brill-o"). Yet while Lego is connected in important ways to pop art and the Duchampian readymade, there are also important differences that set it apart from the nexus readymade-pop art-concept art. Duchamp's as well as Warhol's questioning of the institution of art depended, ultimately, on those very institutions that both purported to attack, namely the archive, the art gallery and the museum. In Duchamp's case, as we saw, the signature illustrates the notion that art implies the choice of an object for exhibition. The questioning of art as an institution implicit in Warhol's painted wooden Brillo boxes, on the other hand, is dependent upon their exhibition in the traditional space of the art gallery. If one were to have placed Warhol's boxes on a shelf next to actual Brillo boxes in a supermarket, their difference from their industrially produced counterparts would have been immediately apparent. This logic of substitution or repression is ultimately the logic of the fetish, an object whose "excess value" (Freud) acts as an index for the way in which it exceeds the missing original, which it replaces. As fetishes, Warhol's Brillo boxes as well as Duchamp's urinal affirm what Walter Benjamin called the Ausstellungswert or "exhibition value" of the work of art, the modern counterpart of the (disappeared) aura.
By contrast, Libera's Lego "readymades" rely less on choice than on a strategy of simulation that leaves no room for art's heroic failure. Lego is not "chosen", painted, rotated, or signed, it displays nothing else but the fact that it cannot be distinguished from its counterparts in the toy stores. Regardless of the context in which the boxes are placed, it is not possible to distinguish Lego from ordinary "Lego System" containers. If produced in sufficient quantity, the product could circulate on the market like any other Lego product, something that is not the case for Duchamp's (famously dysfunctional) urinal or for Warhol's painted Brillo cubes. Lego exhibits its own potential (potentially disturbing) use value: it "replaces" nothing and no excess value attaches to it as a substitute of a missing original. For all intents and purposes, it is as original as what it replaces. In contradistinction to pop art which is dependent upon the very institutions of collecting it purports to attack, Libera's work was produced by means of the same technologies and production techniques that created the real thing. In order to have his boxes made, Libera persuaded the Lego company to produce the gray plastic cubes he needed, as well as containers that differ in no way from their originals. The artist's work was a bureaucratic labor that did not "create" anything per se, limiting itself to the manipulation of certain contemporary forms of cooperation between art and capital (sponsorship), and bracing itself for the legal consequences of such an undertaking. The place where Lego ought to be exhibited is therefore far less determined than is the case with Warhol and Duchamp. It is not surprising that while the piece has been shown at galleries in both Europe and the United States, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has also purchased two of the boxes.
Not unlike Haacke, Libera works with emballages on which he inscribes or superimposes new messages: Lego visually grafts an "incongruous" event (a concentration camp) on a commodified object which our habitual perception associates with an entirely different set of emotions and associations. For decades, the colorful Lego blocks have united middle-class children all around the world in the construction of a colorful plastic-mould world of happy domesticity. This universalism extended also to formerly Communist Poland where, during the cold war, Lego was available in special hard-currency stores. Lego's premature sublation of the East/West divide may not seem surprising. Its plastic bricks are, if we can believe the company's own pronouncements, the world's most universal building material, easily assembled and, as Legoland in Denmark illustrates, highly weather resistant. The association of the horror of a concentration camp with the world of the toy is designed to produce a shock in the viewer confronted with an alarming set of such "mixed references" (child/torture; plastic/concentration camp; consumption/memory). These associations clash violently with the Danish phrase from which the name "Lego" was derived ("leg godt" in Danish means "play well"), a turn of phrase that highlights the aura of universal innocence that Lego has sought to promote for itself. The effect of double coding is compounded by the momentary shattering of our (mistaken) belief that games are by definition innocent and that those who play them mean no harm. Libera's exhibition of his Lego boxes seeks to intervene in Lego's optimistic universalism by confronting it with its sinister counterpart, the universalism of the concentration camp. By mapping a history of terror onto Lego, Libera suggests that once we refuse to be dazzled by the smooth surfaces of its plastic bricks, we will be surprised by the amount of violent aggression they reveal.
Libera's Lego belongs within a genre that is sometimes described as "colliding references", a term that hints at an accident, a sudden collision, an instance of catastrophic false programming that has a distinctly disorienting effect. In the United States, the technique of colliding references is practised, for example, by the Californian artist Kim Dingle. Like Libera, Dingle is interested in explorations of the uncanny or the "unhomey" (das Unheimliche) that erodes the foundations of homeyness and reveals the family home to be more like a ghost house. Dingle puts the normative, commodified world of toys and child's play into reverse gear. In her installation Priss Room Installation (1994-95), for example, two feisty looking, bespectacled dolls in white brocade dresses, their fists clenched, appear to have successfully wrecked the entire inventory of their playroom, other dolls included, with the help of an electric shredder and other electrical instruments. Priss Room Installation is a children's paradise in reverse where the pleasure principle and the death drive inhabit the same site, the children's playroom. The fair maidens in Dingle's installation have devoted themselves to their wrecking project with the same zeal and enthusiasm that we so love to see in children at play.
Lego comments on a type of pedagogy which ever since the early 19th-century has sought to produce normative male subjects through the promotion of construction toys designed to develop "abstract" or "logical" thinking. In his semiological study Mythologies, Roland Barthes called attention to the fact that much of what we refer as "children's toys" represents, in fact, a catalogue of adult myths whose reenactment by the child serves to prepare the latter for the tasks of the adult world by reproducing the secondary world of commodities, properties, and brand names. Barthes associates the toys that perpetuate such imitation and deadening repetition first and foremost with the achievements of modern chemistry, especially with plastic: "Plastic material has an appearance that is both rough and hygienic, it deadens all pleasure, all softness, the humaneness of the touch" (Barthes 1992, 54). Barthes laments the disappearance of toys made of wood, a substance that is both "familiar and poetic [and] leaves the child in contact with the tree, the table, the floor" (55). Whereas the chemical toy made of plastic is dead and belongs to the world of the archive, the catalogue, repetition, and imitation, wood, according to Barthes, is alive, sensitive and organic. Wood, in other words, obeys the pleasure principle, it reduces tension, establishes an equilibrium between the child and its environment, and allows for the kind of interest-free playfulness that derives its philosophical authority from Kant and Schiller, while plastic represents the death drive, suggesting a mode of subjugation and control whose ultimate agents are aggression and fear.
Even though official company history does not provide any details on this score, the Lego company's move from wood to plastic after the Second World War was far from coincidental. Plastic became commercially available after the end of the Second World War, a development that reflected important technological advances that had occurred as a result of the scientific efforts made during the war. The rapid development of synthetics was closely bound up with the armament industries. The development of plastic was a side effect of the need for synthetic petrol and synthetic rubber, the predecessor of what today we refer to as plastic. It was in these two fields that the German chemical industry excelled. Even more important for Libera's installation, however, is the fact that these industrial successes occurred primarily in the occupied part of Poland (the Generalgouvernement) or, to be more precise, in Buna, a large chemical complex belonging to the IG Farben conglomerate. This factory was serviced by hundreds of thousands of slave laborers who were based at Monowitz, one of the satellite camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, established in 1941 to satisfy the increasing demands of the Buna factory. The production of synthetics reached unprecedented heights due to the dedication of these slave laborers, thousands of whom perished in the process. Approximately 25.000 labor camp prisoners from Monowitz perished in the production of synthetic rubber (Frei 1984, 221).
Libera's Lego seems to suggest, then, that violence and aggression are the unspoken corollaries of all pedagogy. The installation intervenes in the ahistorical universalism that characterises Lego as much as its preferred material, plastic. The concentration camp on one of Libera's containers is less an incongruous violation of an innocent toy as it is an indexical representation of the historical connection between Auschwitz and scientific progress. Itself made of plastic, Libera's concentration camp reminds us of the economic and industrial successes of the Nazi camps as well as of the fact that these successes became in many ways the basis for postwar prosperity, at least in the West. Such is certainly the case with plastic, which experienced a massive development after the end of the war. All of a sudden, the happy slogan that adorns Libera's colorful Lego containers ("play well") seems no longer to recall a plastic-mould paradise of pure, childlike creativity, but the gates of German concentration camps and their cynical imperatives. Through his "grafted" installation, Libera points out that Lego, like many other companies, profited from technological advances that are intimately linked to the darkest chapters of 20th-century history. Unlike Haacke's installations, Lego does not charge any direct involvement of the company in the crimes committed by the Nazis. He does, however, seek to intervene in our tendency to treat commodities as self-evident objects of nature, as objects without a history.
Hans Haacke's "Restorations"
Ever since the early 1970s, Hans Haacke has been concerned with the nexus that connects the institution of bourgeois art to the strategies of global capitalism and its political and ideological representations. Within this broad context, Haacke's projects have included a critique of the institutions of collecting, such as museums and galleries, and their respective agents. One of the more conspicuous techniques Haacke uses in his installations is that of defamiliarization or the "making strange" of well-known public monuments by grafting them. The term "defamiliarization" (in Russian, ostranenie = "making it strange") was one of the key concepts of early Formalist theory. According to its principal early champion, Viktor Shklovsky, defamiliarization represents a familiar object in ways that allow us to break through perceptional habits so that it can once again become subject to (conscious) apperception. By "making it strange", the object that escapes our attention because of its excessive familiarity is reappropriated, it his once again "seen" or "heard." The ultimate goal of Shklovskyian defamiliarization is less the recuperation of the object than the epiphanous restoration of human perception itself, what Shklovsky refers to as novoe videnie or "new vision."
Haacke has frequently used the technique of defamiliarization, especially in his work on the politics of art sponsorship, both in Europe and in the United States. A good example particularly close to Libera, is Haacke's exhibition of an oversized box of Marlboro cigarettes that is (re-) designed to "advertise" the questionable politics of one of the most influential members of the US political establishment, the conservative senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina (Helmsboro County, 1990). On the one hand, Haacke's "inflation" of the familiar object, its presentation as a commodified "monstrosity", resembles Libera's grafting of a Lego kit onto a concentration camp. Both are obviously indebted to certain strategies of pop art. For example, Helmsboro County may be compared to Claes Oldenburg's investigations of the relationship between certain materials (plastic, vinyl), desire, and visual perception during the 1960s. Yet Haacke broadens the scope of Oldenburg's defamiliarizations to point out that visual perception is frequently constructed through the manipulative language of political propaganda and advertising. This is why the alterations Haacke has applied to his box of cigarettes are not limited to its scale. Not only has the artist replaced the "Marlboro" logo with "Helmsboro", the sides of the box (where one would expect to find the health warnings) contain, in a way that exactly reproduces the lettering to be found on ordinary Marlboro boxes, pronouncements by Jesse Helms and an executive of one of the great US tobacco companies concerning public funding for the arts.
For Haacke, there is an intimate relationship between (public) memory and repression, and it is the dialectical relationship between both that his works investigate. Haacke's ambition is to expose the gap that separates the public monument from its own displaced past, a goal he seeks to achieve by visually confronting and presenting, in one continuous space, symbols and imagery from different historical periods and seemingly incompatible contexts. Haacke exposes the incongruity of these grafted elements and calls into question our belief that visualizing a monument is to see everything that it represents. This is particularly the case in those of Haacke's works where the artist uncovers the cooperation between well-known German industrial firms, such as car manufacturers or ironworks, and the Nazis during the second world war. These works have been especially controversial where they (as they usually do) concern companies that are still in existence (Thyssen, Daimler, MAN, etc.), or where Haacke has extended his charges to include the companies' supply of arms or military equipment to contemporary repressive regimes such as Iraq.
Haacke aims at the deaestheticization of the various discourses of power that manifest themselves in the symbols of political propaganda and advertising. A good example of this strategy is the installation "Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsort-aus der Portokasse" (Freedom is now simply sponsored-from the petty cash). This work is an exemplary case of Haacke's practice of grafting monuments. The installation was put in place in 1990, shortly after the reunification of Germany. It was located on the former Todesstreifen or "death strip" that separated West Berlin from the German Democratic Republic. Haacke had mounted on top of an abandoned GDR watchtower the oversized, revolving symbol of the Daimler Benz company, a neon-lit inverted "Y" surrounded by a circle. The star echoed the Daimler symbol that tops the multistoried Europa Center on Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin's consumerist hub. On two sides, Haacke adorned the tower with quotations (in large metal letters) from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and William Shakespeare, respectively: "Kunst bleibt Kunst" ("Art remains art", Goethe), and "Bereit sein ist alles" ("To be prepared is everything", Shakespeare). Both of these quotations were simultaneously being used by the Daimler Benz company in a large advertising campaign. (By extension, that campaign became a part of Haacke's installation.) Haacke further replaced the windows of the former watchtower with mirror glass reminiscent of the former GDR's most expensive hotel, the nearby Palasthotel, while the metal grids protecting the tower's windows were reminiscent of the protective grids on the front windows of the Daimler Benz vehicles that were commonly used by the West Berlin police to control street demonstrations. Especially during the 1970s and early 1980s, such demonstrations frequently involved "autonomous groups" (autonome Gruppen) who took possession of the many desolate open spaces that dotted the West Berlin cityscape, especially in the areas bordering the Wall. Haacke's tower-which was itself located in a Niemandsland (no man's land)-may be read as a twisted homage to these groups and their repossession of spaces that were "marginal" in more than one sense of that word. By "decorating" and repossessing the abandoned watchtower on the former Todesstreifen, Haacke defamiliarizes and reactivates this former symbol of political repression, making it unrecognizable and "strange": the death strip has become an art strip. The watchtower, Haacke seems to argue, has lost none of its power to symbolize political and economic repression, even though the ideological context in which it is situated has changed dramatically. Technically speaking, the power of Haacke's installation derives from the way it grafts a multitude of seemingly heterogeneous objects and materials (the Daimler star, the mirror glass windows, quotations from Goethe and Shakespeare, the metal grids on the windows) onto an existing structure, a process that results in an incongruous and hybrid new monument that is hopelessly overdetermined. A reminder of the repressiveness of the East German regime, it also refuses to affirm the relative certainties of the cold war. (The effect of "hybridity" is strengthened by the post-1989 graffiti that adorns the base of the concrete tower, and which Haacke left untouched.) By having his installation "squat" on the former Todesstreifen, Haacke points out that in the "new Europe", the symbolic terrain on which public memory constitutes itself is quickly being reformatted.
In its entangled hybridity, Haacke's tower presents a counterpoint to another 20th-century tower, Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1924). Spiraling upwards and encompassing several stories, Tatlin's construction (which was never built) was designed to be the largest structure in the world. Like Haacke's tower, Tatlin's monument was to be erected on a large piece of desolate land, the site of a former cathedral, in the immediate proximity of the Moscow Kremlin. Yet unlike Tatlin's tower which aimed to embody a set of coherent ideological principles in an equally coherent symbolic form, Haacke's Wachturm is the hybrid result of grafting and superimposition, a construct that seems to reject any claim to material or conceptual coherence. If the gigantic statue of Lenin that was to be placed on top of Tatlin's tower paid symbolic homage to the infinite utopian possibilities of the newly created Soviet state, the Daimler star (which, like Tatlin's tower, slowly revolves) on top of Haacke's Wachturm symbolizes the transition from the universalism of (communist) ideology to the global expansionism of multinational companies. It is worthwhile pointing out that a few months before the installation was put in place, Daimler had bought up, under dubious circumstances that prompted the intervention of the European authorities, a sizeable piece of land on the area of the former Potsdamer Platz. The watchtower functions as a monument to the repression of memory that formed part and parcel of the history of Daimler Benz during the comfortable certainties of the cold war: as the artist points out in a written commentary on his work, not only had Daimler Benz supplied Hitler with engines for his tanks (engines that were assembled by thousands of forced laborers), it had also massively sold military hardware to the repressive regimes in South Africa and in Iraq. At the same time, Daimler Benz was one of the most generous sponsors of art in the former West Germany, a fact to which the quotation "art remains art" seems to testify. Daimler Benz (which is now called Daimler Chrysler) has only very recently agreed to reimburse surviving former slave laborers for the work they were forced to perform during the war.
Haacke began to develop his technique of grafting public monuments well before the watchtower project. Two years earlier, in 1988, the artist recreated a monument erected by the Nazis after Hitler had conferred upon the Austrian city of Graz the title of "City of the People's Insurrection" (1938). For the festivities, the Nazis created a memorial that was itself grafted: they surrounded the Mariensäule (St. Mary's Column), a 17th-century column topped by a Virgin with Child that has decorated Graz's central square for centuries, with a temporary (wooden) obelisk that covered the entire column. That obelisk bore the inscription "Und ihr habt doch gesiegt" ("And yet you have prevailed"), an allusion to the failed Nazi coup d'état of 1923 during which several of Hitler's followers lost their lives. The symbolic gesture implicit in the grafting of the Mariensäule is obvious enough: the victory of the Nazis in Austria after the country's Anschluß ("connection") coincides with the symbolic repossession of Christian monuments by the new masters. Such is the symbolic price Catholic Austria had to pay for its entry into the fold of the Reich. When Haacke recreated this monument-graft by rebuilding the obelisk surrounding the Mariensäule, he was faithful to his "original" in every detail, except for the representation of the swastika under the Nazi eagle which he stylized by omitting some elements (as is the case in Germany, the public display of swastikas is forbidden by law in Austria), and for an inscription the artist added at the base of the obelisk: "The Vanquished of Styria: 300 Gypsies killed; 2500 Jews killed; 8000 political prisoners killed or died in detention; 9000 civilians killed in the war; 12000 missing; 279000 soldiers killed."
In some sense, Haacke's (re-)wrapping of the Mariensäule is a play with emballages that recalls Libera's Lego boxes or, perhaps more pertinently, Christo's wrappings of architectural monuments or geographic formations. Yet And Yet You Have Prevailed has nothing of the poetic amorphousness of Christo's projects. Haacke shows that to hide or to cover a monument is always a politically and socially constructed act. No emballage, he seems to say, is neutral or unscripted. Haacke's installation does not seek to bracket or cancel the monument, it does not seek to create a "negative monument." By adding the numbers of the victims to the black Nazi obelisk Haacke grafts a monument that had itself already been a graft, a mechanism that suggests that grafts do not simply "happen to" an existing memorial because they represent the very conditions in which the monument exists. And Yet You Have Prevailed constitutes a monument to the victims of Nazism in the guise of a monument created by the Nazis themselves, thus reminding us that the manipulation of public memory was one of the more important tasks the Nazi propaganda machine set for itself. More importantly, however, there cannot be, Haacke seems to argue, a monument to the victims of Nazism that would not at the same time be a commemoration of the monuments erected by those who killed them in order to commemorate themselves. A memorial, in other words, recalls not so much the past as an unscripted truth, as-another monument.
The logic of the memorial seems to be that every effort to commemorate the victims implies the commemoration of those who tortured them. By restoring the Nazi obelisk, Haacke attempts to appropriate this logic for himself, presenting an antidote to the abstractions that represent the staple diet of Holocaust memorials in Central Europe. These abstractions evoke the hope that a non-figurative monument will be able to concentrate fully on the memory of the victims, to the exclusion of all else. The Mariensäule project, on the other hand, presents itself as a hybrid monument-graft that relies as much on familiarity and recognition as it does on surprise and shock. Thus the words and numbers Haacke has added to the base of his obelisk subvert the phrase "Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt": a monument by the Nazis is turned into a monument against them. Monuments, it seems, cannot be made to disappear, since they return with the force of the repressed. This return, as Freud knew, has always something to do with repetition, the uncanny compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang). Haacke's installation marks this very compulsion to repeat as a public performance: the monument reappears as a token of the repressed Nazi past. The compulsion to repeat has another serious implication in this context: the return of Neo-Nazism. For the stylized swastika Haacke used on his obelisk was also a clear reference to the organized white supremacist groups in South Africa and elsewhere who had adopted this "defamiliarized" swastika as their symbol. Haacke's efforts paid off handsomely: a month before the end of the exhibition, the installation was firebombed by a well-known Austrian Nazi.
The return of the repressed in the guise of a public monument has preoccupied Hans Haacke in a number of projects, notably in his refitting of the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1990. Here, Haacke grafted the large reproduction of a Deutschmark onto the very hook that had supported the Nazi eagle during the 1930s, while a photograph at the entrance reminded the visitor of Hitler's and Mussolini's visit to the pavilion in 1934. A similar recoding of an existing architectural monument through grafting is at stake in the installation "Die Fahne hoch!" ("Raise the Flag!", 1991) on Königsplatz, in the center of Munich. As an architectural ensemble, Königsplatz presents itself a good example of an (architectural) graft. The square came into being under Ludwig I of Bavaria who decorated it with three neo-classical buildings: the museum of copies of Roman and Greek statues (the Glyptothek); an arch commemorating Ludwig's son, Otto I; and the museum of applied Greek and Roman art. During the 1930s, Hitler's architect Paul Ludwig added two buildings to the existing facades: the dictator's Munich headquarters and the central party offices. (Today one of them houses the Department of Art History of Munich University.) Paul Ludwig's buildings also served as the backdrop for two bombastic "temples" designed to honor those who perished during the attempted Nazi coup d'état in Bavaria in 1923, both of which were mined by American troops after the end of the war and can no longer be seen.
As was already the case with the Mariensäule project, with "Raise the Flag!" Haacke once again chose to "revive" a disappeared, defunct memorial by allowing it to return: from 1933 onward, Königsplatz was used by the Nazis for their annual mass rallies commemorating the failed Nazi coup d'état. Haacke r/d-ecorated the square in the spirit of these rallies by adorning the neo-classical façade of the Glyptothek with a black flag carrying a skull and two equally black elongated banners on either side of it. (The skull was the one used, for example, by Hitler's SS Totenkopf division, while the black color that serves as its background echoes the black uniforms of the marching Nazi units.) Yet once again Haacke introduced additional grafted elements that intervene to cancel all sense that the artist might, in the spirit of Komar and Melamid's restorations of totalitarian myths, simply reaestheticize the ritualized Nazi rallies. Thus the large flag on the Glyptothek carryied not only a white skull but also a large inscription in white Gothic letters: "Zum Appell: Deutsche Industrie im Irak" ("March Ahead: German Industry in Iraq"), while the banners on either side listed the names of German companies who had sold weapons and other technology to the Iraqi regime during the 1980s and 90s.
According to many critics, "Raise the Flag!" is designed, primarily, to draw attention to the activities of the German military-industrial complex during the Nazi era, and the way in which the same complex has continued to cooperate with repressive regimes all over the world. However, if such summary statements capture a crucial element of Haacke's work, they tend to neglect the many gaps and fissures that variously fracture it. For "Die Fahne hoch!" does not present a coherent visual narrative (a normative argument) that would establish a precise situational matrix for its various points of reference. Instead we are left with a disquieting conundrum, a complex web of references and allusions where everything seems to be linked to everything else-from a 19th-century museum of Greek sculpture to arms sales to Iraq. Haacke's art is performative, not analytical (and, as such, a far cry from Brechtian theatre which is often invoked as its direct predecessor). It is, in fact, as propagandistic or plakativ as the kind of propaganda to which it alludes. "Die Fahne hoch!" does not expose, overcome, or otherwise sublate this propaganda, yet it also does not aim at its reaestheticization in the spirit of Komar and Melamid. Haacke does not expose, cancel or otherwise demask the Nazi's "abuse" of the historical ensemble of Königsplatz, nor does he defamiliarize that ensemble in order to master the discursive framework in which it exists. He merely appropriates that framework for his own ends. For Haacke, it appears, there is no getting beyond the language of political propaganda, there is only a subversive use of that propaganda (its regrouping, reinscription, allusion, etc.) that allows it, at times, to be turned against itself. Haacke rejects any approach to the monument that views the latter as an archeological artifact whose different historical layers would allow us to reconstruct its history or that of its surroundings.
If for Haacke the monument represents an instance of repression, this does not imply that this repression is reversible or that it is preceded by something that is not repression (such as an original mnemonic inscription that precedes its repression). Just as for Freud there is no memory without a repression that precedes it, there is, for Haacke, no historical truth to the monument, and hence it cannot be turned into a material witness of such a truth. For Haacke, the monument has always been the product of what has been grafted onto it by shifting political, economic, or ideological contexts, by the matrix of historical and social formations which preceded this monument rather than being simply its effect. The artist's strategy, in working with the monument, is hence to continue this process of grafting rather than trying to interrupt it. This is why Haacke's decoration of the Glyptothek with flags that remind us of the involvement of German companies in Iraq seems so incongruous. It is, in fact, as incongruous and bizarre as the Nazi's own use of the same building as a backdrop for their theatrical mass rallies. The German expression "die Fahne hochziehen" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it signifies the "raising of the flag" in order to celebrate someone or something officially. Yet it also means to warn someone, to call attention to something looming in the background. It seems to me that Haacke's installation makes us aware of the fact that the second, less performative ("propagandistic") use of the phrase, like his own warning concerning the German military-industrial complex, cannot proceed without the first, that in order to warn someone we always have to "raise a flag", and that such flag-raising always runs a risk of being in collusion with the very thing of which it wants to warn us.
The bizarre series that "Raise the Flag!" establishes, from a 19th-century museum to Nazi mass rallies, to arms sales by German companies to Iraq, does not in fact represent a teleological sequence. Haacke's work is not, or not primarily, archeological if by that term we mean the uncovering of an origin (an arkhe) that is genetically linked to the events that succeed it. Haacke's understanding of history is based less on continuity, sequence, and teleology than on rupture and discontinuity. The artist's installations establish visual, hence immediate (horizontal) relationships between historical periods that appear to have nothing or little to do with each other. At the same time, Haacke's work is dialectical in that it seeks to prompt the viewer to search for a hidden "third term" that would allow for the sublation of these disparate elements. By superimposing upon the historical Glyptothek the (defamiliarized) symbols of the Nazi-era, Haacke alludes not only to the rallies the Nazis held on Königsplatz during the 1930s, he also points out that ever since Ludwig I, the square has in fact never existed outside of the discourse of (state) power. As I mentioned above, King Ludwig had the "Royal Square" constructed in order to honor his son Otto I who had been King of Greece ever since he was a child. Yet for Haacke the connection between the initial, neo-classical Königsplatz and its Nazi successor is less historical (in a teleological sense) or architectural than rhetorical: it is provided by the homonymy between the name Ludwig, King of Bavaria (the first urban planner of Königsplatz), on the one hand, and Hitler's architect (Paul) Ludwig, on the other. This homonomy establishes an affinity between the two epochs that have shaped Königsplatz on the same (linguistic) level as Haacke's allusion to the questionable arms sales by German industrial firms. What I want to argue is that Haacke's visual installation prompts us to actualize this (linguistic and rhetorical) connection before it invites us to ponder the questionable activities of German companies in the Middle East and elsewhere. Only in this way will we be able to grasp what the museum, the Nazi-style banners, and German arms sales to Iraq might have in common.
As it turns out, Haacke's redecoration of Königsplatz in the spirit of the annual Nazi memorial rallies implied a hidden "third term", a kind of synthesis allowing for additional linkages between its seemingly random reference points. The juxtaposition of "Ludwig" and "Ludwig" is sublated by a third "Ludwig", one that is not in fact made explicit in the installation, yet one that will seem obvious to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with Hans Haacke's work. I have in mind Peter Ludwig, the well-known Cologne industrialist and sponsor of the arts who was, among other things, the first Western industrialist to collect art from Eastern Europe during the cold war. Like much of Haacke's work since the cancellation of his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971, "Raise the Flag!" implies a critique of the institutions of art and collecting. In fact, the artist has criticized Ludwig's collecting practice on numerous occasions, most famously in an installation in which he used a portrait of Ludwig and his wife in the style of Socialist realism, together with an original advertising poster for Ludwig's chocolate brand "Trumpf" ("Weite und Vielfalt der Brigade Ludwig", "The Breadth and Diversity of the Ludwig Brigade", 1984).
The "third Ludwig" (Peter) allows us to see the institution of the museum as an intricate part of Haacke's installation. Suddenly the flag and the banners outside the Glyptothek are disorienting not only because they invoke the Nazi rallies held on Königsplatz during the 1930s, but also because they are reminiscent of similarly shaped flags and banners used, to the present day, by museums around the world to announce special exhibitions. By way of the homonymy between the three Ludwigs, Haacke's institutional critique maintains a continuous link between seemingly disparate historical, ideological, and institional complexes: political power, totalitarian ideology, 19th-century absolutism, late capitalism, industrial sponsorship for the arts, and the institutions of art. One of the photographs in the volume documenting Haacke's installation at the Venice Biennale features Peter Ludwig and his wife showing Arno Breker their own sculptures. The Glyptothek inspired many of Hitler's favorite artists, among them Arno Breker, with the notion that German sculpture, rather than copying Greek statues for purely academic purposes, should view itself as a reincarnation of that art, with Germany as a kind of Greece of the North. The banners Haacke installed outside the Glyptothek merely extend the nexus between totalitarian politics, the museum, and sponsorship for the arts to the present. In 1993, one of the largest companies listed on the banners, the Ruhrgas gas company, sponsored an exhibition of the collections of the two Russian 19th-century art collectors, Morozov and Shshukin, at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. As is well known, Peter Ludwig, too, also became famous as a collector of Eastern European and Russian art.
Light in Transit: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Projections
I want to place Hans Haacke's installations alongside the more ephemeral grafted monuments which Krzysztof Wodiczko created during the 1980s under the title of "Memorial Projections." These involved the temporary projection of large-scale photographic images onto historical monuments, museums, banks, parliament buildings, embassies, and statues in, among other places, Stuttgart (1983), Dayton (1983), New York (1984, etc.), Montreal (1985), Bern (1985), Warsaw (1986), London (1985), Venice (1986), Boston (1986-87), Kassel (1987), San Diego (1988), Washington, D.C. (1988), Vienna (1988), Newcastle (1990), Jerusalem (1990), East Berlin (1990), and Madrid (1991). Like graffiti, the other form of public art that engages the surfaces of urban architecture, Wodiczko's projections were all but ubiquitous during the 1980s: travelling around the world with his arsenal of slide projectors, Wodiczko transformed public spaces into something that fell somewhere between an outdoor cinema and a public slide show. Yet the memorial projections are grafts not only in the sense that they superimpose an "alien" image onto an architectural structure, they also attempt to establish relations between different historical frameworks, symbolic contexts, and social and political configurations. Like the desiring machines championed by Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze during the 1970s and early 80s, Wodiczko's projections exist in and across a whole range of different contextual formations, suggesting a form of public imagery that is as close to the practices of political propaganda as to the billboards of advertising that adorn the facades of urban architectures (Wodiczko began his series of projections not long after emigrating to Canada from his native Poland). Like Haacke (whose 1971 solo exhibit was cancelled because he had proposed to present an investigation of questionable real estate practices in Manhattan ), Wodiczko has variously explored the nexus between public monuments, city planning, urban "renovation", and the real estate market. This was the case especially in his work on the Astor Building/The New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York, 1984), and in what has come to be called The Homeless Projection: A Proposal for Union Square (1986). When the upper stories of the Astor building in downtown Manhattan were being turned into luxury apartments in order to support the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Wodiczko projected onto its façade, as well as on the façade of the building adjacent to it, a gigantic metal chain and lock. The point was to highlight the fact that the presence of the prestigious new museum cannot be seen in isolation from the concurrent conversion of its entire neighborhood into an upscale environment, complete with "art galleries and other art-related institutions and businesses" (Wodiczko 1986, 43). Similarly, the Homeless Projection Project was designed to expose the increasing gentrification of New York's Union Square and the implications of this process of urban "revitalization" for the socially disenfranchised, especially the homeless. This projection (which was never realized) involved the superimposition of transient images on the four newly refurbished neo-classical monuments that decorate the square: Abraham Lincoln, General Lafayette, George Washington and the Mother and Child Fountain. Wodiczko proposed to project onto these monuments the material attributes and costumes of Union Square's homeless population, from a shopping cart to a wheelchair, from bandages and a can of Windex to a wooden crutch. As the simulation of the Homeless Projection at the 49th Parallel Gallery in New York City showed, Wodiczko's projections were aimed at the symbolic repossession of the monuments by those who were marginalized by their increasingly profitable gentrification. Even where he is not concerned with the real estate market in New York City, Wodiczko's projections reveal many parallels with Haacke's projects. At the VIII Documenta in Kassel (1987), for example, Wodiczko presented Count Friedrich II of Hesse-Kassel in the guise of a manager of the Daimler Benz company. Friedrich II founded the current venue of the Documenta shows, the Fridericianum, as one of the first public museums in Europe. The funds for this undertaking were provided by Soldatenhandel, the trading of Hess soldiers to the British, who used them in the war with their North American colonies. In a strikingly Haackian mode, Wodiczko adorned the base of the monument with references to the commercial activities of Daimler Benz in the Republic of South Africa. Like Haacke, Wodiczko's projections seek to initiate a critique of the institutions of collecting that includes their interaction with the economic and ideological context in which they exist.
Like graffiti, Wodiczko's projections remind us of the layered nature of all monuments, the fact that additional signs can always be inscribed on them, suggesting the possibility of overdetermination and dubbing. The projections perform the suspension of the monuments' symbolic integrity, what Rosalyn Deutsche has called "the mutability of their symbolic language and the changing uses to which they are put as they are continually recast in varying historical circumstances and social frameworks" (Deutsche 1986, 66). The memorial projections present the monument as an urban palimpsest that can be compared to Freud's description of the Wunderblock (the "magic writing pad"), a children's toy comprising of a waxen block covered by two protective sheets that allow for the erasure of whatever is written on the surface, while at the same time preserving it, invisibly, on the waxen block underneath. What fascinated Freud about this toy was the way in which it combined an infinite ability to accommodate new inscriptions with an equally infinite capacity for storage. What is visibly inscribed on the surface layer of the magic writing pad (what is subject to perception, consciousness, etc.) is placed on top of an infinite number of invisible (unconscious) previous inscriptions that have been committed to the archive of our unconscious. Every new inscription hence implies the repression of the previous one, which it replaces. It is, in other words, the possibility of its erasure that allows for the mnemonic sign to be stored and preserved within the archival systems of the psychic apparatus. Only after it has been thus repressed and archived can the inscription become subject to recollection. Wodiczko's projections, too, add a new layer of significations to the surface of the monuments they target, yet at the same time they preserve the previous layers in a state of latency. The projection is a form memorial writing, the inscription of new signs on an existing text.
To the extent that Wodiczko's projections cannot be collected nor preserved except by being rephotographed, they also represent investigations of the problem of repetition and seriality, and a challenge to the institutions of collecting. It is this latter aspect on which I want to briefly dwell. In their presentation of immaterial, hence non-collectable images, the memorial projections continue a critique of the archive that harks back to Wodiczko's Polish years. In the early 1970s, a group of artists around Andrzej Turowski and Wieslaw Borowski initiated a critique of the art collection that coincided with the opening of the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw and that culminated in the publication of a manifesto entitled "Living Archives." The Foksal Gallery viewed itself as a counter-gallery, a "gallery against the gallery" (in fact, Turowski wrote a text under this very title) and sought to protect art from the traditional exhibition and even from its own reception by an audience. Foksal advocated, paradoxically, the transformation of galleries into archives that would prevent artworks from all circulation in order to ensure that they could not be manipulated: "Once a letter is in the mailbox, it is no longer subject to manipulation until it arrives at its destination. Its objectless, shapeless, impersonal, and necessary authenticity is equivalent to the length of the mail route. The time of transmission is the only ground of an artistic work. [] Artistic facts call for an establishing of the Living Archives as a way of apprehending this transmission" (Turowski 1986, 61). According to the authors of the quoted manifesto, the artistic object, like a letter, is apprehended in its authenticity to the extent that it is "in transit" between two points, to the extent that its transmission is in flux and has not yet settled upon an image, and to the extent that it has not (yet) reached its destination. The paradox of the "living archives" is that of a collection in a state of constant transmission/emission, a collection that highlights not so much objects but gaps, spacings, and relationships.
Wodiczko's projections may be viewed as extensions of the Living Archives conceived by the Foksal collective. The idea of "being in transit" is central to the memorial projections: not only is it implicit in the artist's constant travelling from one projection site to the next, it is also present in the fact that the projections problematize the notion of the artistic object. Wodiczko's performances are transmissions of images rather than being objects in themselves. Not unlike the letter mentioned in the Foksal manifesto , they establish a relation between two separate points in space and time by allowing a light beam to be "in transit." The projection is thus equivalent to the mail service: it is "writing in light" (photo-graphy) that keeps the letter suspended, in transit between the projector and the monument. It is not so much the projected image or what it represents that is highlighted by Wodiczko's projections, nor is it only the monument that serves as its temporary screen. What is foregrounded, rather, is the distance that separates the two, the light beam's trajectory, the distance covered by the image before it reaches "its" screen. Wodiczko's projections participate in a critique of the museum and the collection that focuses not so much on the collected objects themselves as on the space that separates them. Wodiczko is interested in the gaps and lacuna between one object and the next, and in the rhizomatic relationships that can be established between them. Contrary to common belief, the memorial projections frequently did not focus on one single monument but instead on ensembles of buildings, sets, and constellations. For example, when the artist received the authorization to project an eye onto the center of the tympan of the Swiss parliament building, the official assumption was, naturally, that the eye would be stationary. Instead, Wodizcko had it change the direction of its gaze, looking, in this order, at the national bank, the canton bank, the city bank of Bern, and then down to the ground of Bundesplatz, under which is the national vault containing the Swiss gold. It is less the projected image itself (the eye) that is at stake in this projection but, rather, the (often ironic) relations, linkages, and connections for which the moving eye allows. Similarly, the New Museum of Contemporary Art/Astor Building projection included the building next to the museum, while the Homeless Projection established relations between the four statues adorning the square.
Wodiczko has frequently likened his projections to various forms of (urban) warfare, thus highlighting the link between projection and aggression that was all but a truism for Sigmund Freud. For example, during his projection of two missiles onto the supporting columns of the massive memorial arch in Grand Army Plaza (Brooklyn/New York), Wodiczko was delighted by the fact that his performance coincided with the traditional New Year's Eve fireworks: "Halfway through the projection, behind and above the arch, there was another audiovisual experience for eight minutes that gave the projection a new, enhanced context. The fireworks-detonations, explosions, aerial illuminations-this display would have had a double meaning for anyone who had experienced the bombings of cities or who [] had seen films of these bombings" (Wodiczko, 1986, 27). In fact, the memorial projections recall the large air defense light canons that were in use over European cities during the Second World War in order to detect enemy aircraft and provide targets for the anti-aircraft missile batteries to which they were attached. The projectionist's/artist's work consists of the skillful positioning of the projecting equipment in such a way that the projected image (the light beam) will "fit" the targeted historical monument, or vice versa. Wodiczko's frequent projections of intercontinental missiles, daggers, revolvers and other weapons hence suggest not only the political and economic reality of the cold war, they also suggest, in a more performative mode, the projection itself as a form of "aiming", with Wodiczko himself as a kind of urban partisan. In a text entitled "The Public Projection" (1983), Wodiczko wrote about his method that "the attack must be unexpected and frontal. It must occur at night, when the building sleeps []" (Wodiczko 1995, 115). The strategy behind this kind of warfare is based on the surprise attack. For example, when in 1985 Wodiczko projected a swastika on the pediment of the South African embassy on London's Trafalgar Square (above a relief that showed a boat and an inscription saying "Good Hope"), the provocation was realized by the (sudden and unauthorized) 90-degree-turn of one of the 400mm xenon arc slide projectors away from Nelson's Column. Wodiczko had permission to perform a projection only on this latter monument. Yet even in this case, the artist violated his agreement with the authorities: instead of projecting nothing but two large hands, he showed a huge intercontinental ballistic missile wrapped in barbed wire, with tank treads underneath the massive lions at the base of the column. The swastika projection lasted for two hours before it was interrupted by the arrival of the police.
By and large, critics have insisted on the representational properties of Wodiczko's projections, their capacity to shock, intervene in local politics, and politicize the viewers' consciousness by defamiliarizing well-known architectural monuments. Such interpretations tend to privilege the representational aspects of the projections, their appeal to rationality and reason, and they display great faith in interventionist politics. In the following discussion I want to focus on an aspect of the memorial projections that is generally neglected: Wodiczko's instrumentalization of his viewers' unconscious, of their reflexes, habits, and fixations. Among the many linkages and connections the memorial projections establish, the central one (and, at the same time, perhaps the most surprising) is that between architecture, on the one hand, and the (projected) image, on the other. Since architecture, like the traditional tableau, seems to invite a mode of reception that is based upon contemplation, its juxtaposition with painting would appear to make more sense. However, Walter Benjamin, for one, considered that architecture was in fact much closer to projection (to film) than to the traditional tableau. At the end of his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproduction, Benjamin uses the examples of architecture and film in order to explicate what he perceives as the historical evolution of visual perception in the 20th century. Both architecture and film invite, to use Benjamin's formula, a paradoxical "Rezeption in der Zerstreuung" ("reception as distraction"):
Buildings have accompanied humanity ever since the beginning of time. Many other art forms have come and gone []. Only the human being's need for shelter does not change over time. [] Buildings are subject to two kinds of reception, i.e., their use and their visual perception. The one kind of reception is tactile, the other optical. One cannot come to a proper understanding of this reception if one views it along the lines of the kind of contemplation [Sammlung] travellers display in front of famous buildings. The reason is that there is, no tactile equivalent for visual contemplation. Tactile reception proceeds not so much by means of attention [Aufmerksamkeit] as it proceeds through habit. In fact, in the case of architecture, habit even determines to a large degree the visual perception. (Benjamin 1980, 504)
What gives architecture its exemplary role for Benjamin is the fact that unlike painting or other historical artforms it answers a basic social and economic human need (shelter) and is therefore perceived unconsciously and habitually. The kind of contemplation we associate with painting hence describes only insufficiently our interaction with architecture, especially in the kind of industrial urban environment Benjamin has in mind. Since they are perceived through (habitual) tactile interaction, buildings exclude the kind of attention and mnemonic inscription (the German word Aufmerksamkeit is derived from merken = "notice" and "keep in mind") that we tend to associate with the contemplation of traditional art. We notice architecture, yet we do not pay attention to it. In this regard, nothing could be closer to our way of interacting with our architectural environments than-film. In the dark cinema hall, the projection technology of film simulates the habitual perception that has accompanied architecture since the beginning of time. The name Benjamin gives to this process is "distraction", a term whose German equivalent ("Zerstreuung") is the same that is used in physics to describe the diffraction of light ("Streuung"). When he declares that traditional contemplation is no longer commensurate with the challenges of modernity, Benjamin formulates a typical avant-garde position: "The challenges posed by periods of historical change for the human perceptional apparatus cannot in any way be met through [] contemplation alone" (Benjamin 1980, 505). Benjamin instrumentalizes habit ("Gewöhnung"), with its appeal to the unconscious reflexes, as the counterpoint to distraction, a dialectic that is well illustrated by film, for "even the distracted person can form a habit" (Benjamin 1980, 505). If we can notice a building habitually without paying attention to it, the same is true for the cinema: we notice its "shocking" effects but these do not invite (in fact, they exclude) all contemplation. The cinema simulates the tactile (habitual) use we make of architecture through special effects that distract the viewer. In the same essay, Benjamin compares the rapid succession of different scenes that is typical of film to the way a bullet hits its target (Benjamin 1980, 502).
In their combination of architecture and image projection, Krzysztof Wodiczko's performances represent a curious embodiment of Benjamin's ruminations regarding "reception through distraction." If it is true that during individual projections the slides did not generally change, it is possible to view the entire sequence of the memorial projections as a sequence of film stills. As is the case in the cinema where special effects "distract" the viewer, Wodiczko surprises his audience with the technical precision and accuracy of his projections: witness the way in which the projected missiles "fit" exactly the neo-classical columns onto which they are projected as if they were made for them, or the way in which the eye is precisely centered on the tympan of the Swiss parliament building. It is not by coincidence that when he was still in his native Poland, Wodiczko, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, worked as an industrial designer in the design office of Polish Optical Works in Warsaw, a factory producing precision optical instruments. Yet such optical effects do not, or not necessarily, disrupt the habitual attitude locals take to the monuments in question, which is precisely why these monuments remain constantly visible; they are in no case made to disappear by the image that is projected onto them. In this sense, they are not ordinary screens, if by that we mean a surface that "disappears" during the period of the projection. Wodiczko arrives at the same impasse that characterizes the end of Benjamin's essay on the work of art: the impasse that separates the politicization of art from the aestheticization of politics. If we recall for a moment Wodiczko's evocation of the fireworks in the background of his monumental projection on Grand Army Plaza, the sense of awe inspired by the technical precision of the projections may suddenly become contiguous with the awe inspired by the technology of destruction it displays. In other words, while it is taken for granted that the audience will read the display of two intercontinental missiles on the Grand Army monument as an indictment of the arms race (the politicization of art), another reading is also possible, implying the festive aestheticization/monumentalization of politics, an aestheticization for which there are certainly many precedents (one might recall the monumental Lichtdome or "cathedrals of light" that formed part of the propaganda mass spectacles in pre-war Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.) Such a reading suggests less the juxtaposition of the projection with the monument onto which it appears, than their continuity and compatibility: the projection continues the heroism and the monumentalism of the massive arch on Grand Army Plaza rather than trying to disrupt it through an appeal to the rational faculties. What I am arguing is not that this is the only strategy, or even the overwhelming strategy, of this or any other of the artist's projections. What is at stake, rather, is the way they allow for different constellations between the projected image and the monument, constellations that target the unconscious habits, desires, and reflexes of its audience as much as its rational, critical faculties. Wodiczko has himself hinted at this possibility:
The aim of the memorial projection is not to "bring life" or "enliven" the memorial nor to support the happy, uncritical, bureaucratic "socialization" of its site, but to reveal and expose to the public the contemporary deadly life of the memorial. The strategy of the memorial projection is to attack the memorial by surprise, using slide warfare, or to take part in and infiltrate the official cultural programs taking place on its site. In the latter instance, the memorial projection will become a double intervention: against the imaginary life of the memorial itself, and against the idea of social-life-with-memorial as uncritical reflection. In this case, where the monumental character of the projection is bureaucratically desired, the aim of the memorial projection is to pervert this desire monumentally. (Wodiczko 1986, 22)
What I want to argue is that, like Haacke, Wodiczko is not simply continuing the politics of Brechtian aesthetics with its unfettered faith in the powers of Verfremdung. Like Benjamin (and unlike Brecht or Adorno), Wodiczko is interested in the instrumentalization of habit and distraction, not in their simple destruction. The memorial projections do not simply attempt to cancel the monumentalism of the buildings or monuments they target, they recontextualize it. The overwhelming, monumental precision of his performances produces an effect akin to the Zerstreuung, or distraction, of which Benjamin writes. In Benjamin's view, the modern film audience "examines" ("untersucht") without paying attention to what it examines. By combining architecture and light projections, Wodiczko aims at a similar disruption of the "specialist" gaze that characterizes contemplation in a museum environment.
I would like to thank Abigail Solomon-Godeau for her valuable ideas and suggestions regarding this paper.
1 Where reference is being made to Libera's work, I will italicize the name Lego. In all other cases, the name will not appear in italics.
2 In fact, the origin of Lego's plastic bricks is itself linked to violent trauma. According to Lego company history, some time in the fifties a fire destroyed the company's building, forcing it to discontinue all product lines except for the newly developed plastic bricks. The fire was apparently set by the son of the company's boss, Kirk Kristiansen, who was playing in the playroom next to the factory and set the entire building on fire, much like Kim Dingle's wrecker babies or Libera's unknown Lego engineer who transformed an innocent toy into a ghastly reminder of past atrocities. The Lego company's own consistent effort to portray itself as a family-run business is continuously obliged to repress the trauma in which its product originated.
3 The number "seven" (seven boxes) suggests that Libera is in fact alluding to the Sho'ah.
4 After Libera had withdrawn his participation from the show, the work was exhibited by galleries in Copenhagen and New York.
5 One could argue that the fact that Brillo is painted is evidence of a similar heroism in pop art.
6 Both belong to a whole lineage of containers, boxes, cans and other archival objects that are being exhibited by the neo-avant-garde during the 1960s.
7 As is well known to anyone whose childhood was, like mine, blessed by a large box full of them, one can indeed build virtually everything with Lego. In a window display in a large German toystore, I recently saw a large Lego reproduction of St. Basil's cathedral next to a model of the Empire State Building and the Eiffel Tower.
8 One of the earliest practitioners of "colliding references" was Hieronymus Bosch (1450-1516) whose Children's Games (Kinderspiele) dispose once and for all of the myth that the games children play are innocent.
9 It is perhaps not by coincidence that in another essay in the same volume, the one devoted to plastic, Barthes describes the material as unheimlich, uncanny: "Despite its names of a Greek shepherd (polystyrene, phenoplaste, polyvinyl, polyethylen), plastic [] is basically a magic substance" (Barthes 1992, 77). Barthes here describes an exhibition of objects made of plastic during the 1950s (the time, incidentally, when Lego began its fabrication of the famous plastic building blocks!). The uncanny of plastic consists in the fact that it is able to turn what has no value whatever into something valuable-nothing in itself, it is able to transform rubbish into gold, the way in which the ancient alchemists sought to transform excrement into gold: "The conversion of matter [...]. On one side raw, earthy matter, and on the other the perfect, human object; and between these two extremes there is nothing" (Barthes 1992, 79). The sublimatory powers of plastic worry Barthes primarily because they seem to spell the end of all dialectics. Not unlike the Freudian death drive, plastic is, for Barthes, literally nothing in itself, it is pure negativity: "[P]lastic almost does not exist as a substance. Its constitution is negative: It is neither hard nor deep, it has to content itself with a substantial essence that is neutral despite of its utilitarian advantages: resistance, a state of affairs that presupposes the simple suspension of neglect" (Barthes 1992, 86).
10 Before turning to plastic, the Lego company produced wooden cubes, or Bauklötze. The earliest theorist of these wooden cubes was the early 19th-century German pedagogue Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852). Froebel is best known as the inventor of the "universal German kindergarten" ("allgemeiner deutscher Kindergarten"), an institution whose founding principles were so suspect to the Prussian authorities that they prohibited it between 1851 and 1860.
11 Like Zbigniew Libera, Haacke has frequently had to contend with the legal consequences of his projects, consequences which as a result became themselves intricate parts of his projects.
12 The allusion to cowboy culture also serves to link the installation to former US president Ronald Reagan whose disdain for public funding for the arts was notorious. Haacke's installations frequently follow logic of the "blind spot." That is to say, they omit an element that is, in fact, crucially important for the reconstruction of its metanarrative.
13 The term Europa Center, incidentally, was very unusual at the time of its construction in the early 1970s, since the English word "Center" (spelt here the American way) was then rarely used for buildings. The ideological significance of this name, however, is substantial in that the Europa Center signified the assumption by West German politicians that, despite its insular position, West Berlin constituted the center of the free part of Europe, whose independence was guaranteed by the presence of American troops.
14 See also Grasskamp 1993, 44.
15 Haacke's installation represents an interesting pendant to Ilya Kabakov's installation at the Russian pavilion at the 1993 Biennale, The Red Pavilion.
16 Even before this point, Haacke investigated the context and the conditions of collecting. Cf. his "Klimaaufzeichnung in einer Kunstausstellung" ("Climate recording at an art exhibit", 1969) which was devoted to the statistical analysis of the visitors at an exhibition. Similarly, "Geburts- und Wohnprofil von Galleriebesuchern" ("Birth and living profile of gallery visitors", 1969) was a statistical/sociological study of museum visitors. Both projects served Haacke in the development of his "Realzeitsysteme" (real time systems), marking the beginning of the artist's critique of the institutions of art.
17 Ruhrgas AG also took legal steps against Haacke over his allegation that it sold arms to Iraq. As it turned out, the sales were carried out by a subsidiary company that was, however, owned by Ruhrgas.
18 Its title was: "Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate. A Social Real Time System."
19 In Dissemination (1969), Jacques Derrida describes a similar process: "The act of reading is thus analogous to those X rays that uncover, concealed beneath the epidermis of one painting, a second painting: painted by the same painter or by another, it makes little difference, who would himself, for lack of materials or in search of some new effect, have used the substance of an old canvas or preserved the fragment of a first sketch. And beneath that, etc." (Derrida 1981, 357).
20 A number of the memorial projections involve museums or art galleries. In 1982, for example, Wodiczko projected large images of a clenched fist onto the neo-classical facade of the Art Gallery in Sydney, Australia. Wodiczko frequently addressed the interconnection of politics and art sponsorship. In 1984, for example, he showed the hand and wrist of former US president Ronald Reagan on the AT&T Tower in Manhatten.
21 The quoted passage is often taken to be a reference to the omnipresence of censorship during the early 1970s. In this situation, so the argument goes, artists shrewdly abandoned the object for more ephemeral and dynamic definitions of art. While this argument goes some way to explain the conceptual tendencies in Polish art of the 1960s and early 70s, it hardly does justice to their more complex manifestations.
22 In the sense that they suggest the mutual exlusiveness of the memory function and the storage function, the "Living Archives" resemble the Freudian conception of remembering.
23In the Homeless Projection Project, "being in transit" became Wodiczko's principal topical concern. The homeless, too, are constantly in transit within different urban spaces.
24 The term "photography" implies the Greek graphein=to write (photography="writing in light").
25 Wodiczko had gone through a lengthy process of administrative and legal consultation and certification before putting his project into practice.
26 Wodiczko offers the following commentary on why he came to settle on an eye: "It was a question of what would be acceptable, and then, when accepted, what would make a point. I figured no one would object to the image of an eye, and at the same time they wouldn't have to know that the eye would change the direction of its gaze [...]" (Wodiczko 1986, 51)
27 During the week preceding the presidential elections of 1988, Wodiczko projected a microphone framed by two hands holding a revolver and a candle, respectively, onto the façade of the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The installation was intended to point to the contradictory politics of one of the presidential contenders, George Bush.
28 Wodiczko's rhetoric of war and attack takes its cue from the attacks the Italian Futurists launched, early this century, against the urban "passéisme" of cities such as Venice. Yet the artist's frequent references to weapons (missiles, daggers, tanks, etc.) also connect the memorial projections to ancient mnemotechnics which relied, like the projections themselves, on the (mental) projection of images onto architectural monuments. As a technique, mnemotechnics was intensely visual, relying on striking images as substitutes for the things to be remembered. These images were in their turn deposited in architectural ensembles such as palaces or temples. In remembering his speech, the orator revisited, in a preconceived order, the places at which he had deposited the images, which allowed him to remember the things for which they acted as substitutes. Among the images that were deemed most suitable for the development of memory by the ancient rhetoricians, weapons figured prominently, probably because they fulfilled like few other objects the condition of being "striking." Another condition that is frequently stressed by the ancient theoreticians of mnemotechnics is that the images should be deposited in places that are "well lit." As "depositions" of (very) well-lit images, Wodiczko's memorial projections transform the urban environment into a memory theater.
29 Wodiczko apparently conceived of this action as an act of solidarity with a group of anti-apartheid protesters who were camping out in front of the embassy.
30 Benjamin advocated film as an art form that was not only commensurate with the historical changes human perception had undergone during the 20th century, but that had in certain way brought these changes about.
31 One should not forget that many of these spectators were passers-by who happened to be in place when the projections took place.
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