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Martha Rosler
Backyard with Bunker at Heilhaus, Kassel, 2007, digital print, © Martha Rosler, courtesy: the artist,
Galerie Christian Nagel Cologne/Berlin, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
Martha Rosler
Karlsaue near the War Memorial, Kassel, 2007, digital print, © Martha Rosler, courtesy: the artist,
Galerie Christian Nagel Cologne/Berlin, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
(that is to say, entirely up to whims of the curators, as everything
in this exhibition). Perhaps at some point this might be the case for
the Rosler piece as well, yet when I returned to Kassel one month
after the press opening in order to double-check there was still no
explanatory note to be found there. And this is not the only problem,
as in the catalogue commentary German history tends to be re-written:
there, the curator Ruth Noack, after having ruminated on the
history of gardens as images of paradise, refers us, in her explanation
of the photographs, to “the Allied forces that flattened the
town“ and high levels of unemployment as a possible cause for local
traumatization. Part of Germany’s normalization consists precisely in
this discourse very common in Germany nowadays: “let’s talk about
the crimes of the Allies and about our own traumatization“, and thus
leave aside the question of who started the war in first place and
committed a genocide unseen before in history. So are Rosler’s photographs
really all about the “trauma“ of the German perpetrators,
as Noack wants us to believe, rather than about their victims? Since
one of the titles of the photographs in fact points at the very opposite
direction of slave labour, at least some of these photographs do
not centre on the “traumatization“ of bombed Germans, but on
German crimes. But once again, the visitors are left in the dark and
these matters are up to speculation, as Buergel did not allow for
a textual framing of the photographs. What remains there as object
for “immediate experience“ and contemplation are rather nice photographs
of local gardens fitting very well to the official documenta
posters of slightly blurred flowers. This is why documenta 12 has to
be called the documenta of normalization. In the post-Schröder universe
the line between perpetrators and victims becomes blurred
and overgrown by the beautiful.
The epitome of all this can be found in Sonia Abián Rose’s scandalous
beautification of Auschwitz in her piece The Concentration
Camp of Love. It brings together Buergel’s Agambenesque fixation
on the ubiquity of camps with his fixation on the beautiful – the
result being the aestheticization of Auschwitz. The artist engages
with an aspect which in historical research has recently received
increasing attention: the fact, namely, that brothels were instituted
by the Nazis in concentration camps. Yet she does so not only in
an absurdly superficial pseudo-feminist way (where concentration
camps seem to be the effect of patriarchy), but also by pasting
Christian art historical motives onto the documentary water colours
of a death-camp survivor. The catalogue presents us, for instance,
with a sketch entitled Annunciation in Block 11, Auschwitz.
One can also find “erotic hunt“-motives, painted by the old masters,
next to scenes from the concentration camp. Yet has it become necessary
again to underline the simply fact that Auschwitz was not
Dante’s inferno, as painted by the old masters? Auschwitz is part of
Germany’s history and reality – a reality which now has been surrealized
in Buergel’s show into pure kitsch.
4. Back to Eso: The documenta of Mandalas
Terror and beauty – this is what Buergel’s return of the beautiful
adds up to in contemporary Germany: the beautification of extermination
camps. Yet by way of ending, let us return to a less depressing
case of Buergelian beautification. It is true, with its open
discourse on the aestheticization of the political, documenta 12
continuously oscillates between the scandalous and the ridiculous.
But I assume that behind all this nonsensical talk about form and
beauty there is some sort of “master discourse“ organizing these signifiers.
And it appears to me that in documenta 12 we are not so
much confronted with a return of the beautiful as we are confronted
with a return of the esoteric lurking behind the beautiful.
It is the thoroughly esoteric Hippie-ideology of “immediate experience“
which informs Buergel’s notion of education (“Ästhetische
Bildung“) as a process of delivering the visitors to their very own
immediate impressions by simultaneously withholding from them
all context and information. This ideology is also sustained by Poul
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