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 in<strong>format</strong>ion. This ideology is also sustained by Poul 116
scena Alice Creischer Mach doch heute Lobby, 1998–2007, exhibition view, © Alice Creischer, photo: Jens Ziehe, documenta GmbH Sonia Abián Rose Sketch for Annunciation in Block 11, Auschwitz, 2007, © Sonia Abián Rose, Das Konzentrationslager der Liebe 117
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w artæ + societate / arts + societ
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+ (Debord) 129 Spectacolul ca iluzi
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arhiva Nostalgia Antichitæflii øi
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galerie 35
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Am aflat povestea aceasta în vara
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o întrevedere cu mine. Ulterior, d
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Din pæcate, n-am avut øansa unei
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Nu e nicio problemæ ca ruøii sæ
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O prezentare vizualæ spectaculoas
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galerie Nedko Solakov Discussion (P
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scena Detail, photo: Studio Protoko
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Orice s-ar fi întîmplat în cei
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doar de niøte idealizæri. Aøadar
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uia oare sæ pæstræm monarhia abs
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Asta ar fi poate adeværat dacæ gu
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programul revolufliei burghez-liber
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susflii pe tot parcursul textului t
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Drumurile s-au despærflit Încæ u
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ca în sistemele premoderne. Preflu
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Acest fenomen e atît de pregnant a
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sugrumase ultimele mari revolte ale
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vorbesc „verzi øi uscate“. Ace
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400117 RO Cluj Str. Dorobanflilor,
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15 September 2007 Opening of the pr
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