October journal No.48 Spring (1989)

Art I Theory I Criticism I Politics

OCTOB

Thierry de Duve Gertrud Koch Andreas Huyssen Eric Rentschler Hans Haacke Werner Fenz Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

$7.50/Spring 1989

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light Contribution to Points of Reference 38/88 The Monument is Invisible, the Sign Visible A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

Published by the MIT Press

OCTOBER

editors Joan Copjec Douglas Crimp Rosalind Krauss Annette Michelson managing editor Terri L. Cafaro

advisory board Leo Bersani Yve-Alain Bois Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Rosalyn Deutsche Denis Hollier Fredric Jameson Laura Mulvey Allan Sekula

OCTOBER (ISSN 0162-2870) (ISBN 0-262-75198-4) is published quarterly (Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring) by the MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142, and London, England. Subscriptions: individuals $25.00; institutions $55.00; students and retired $20.00. Foreign subscriptions outside USA and Canada add $9.00 for surface mail or $17.00 for air mail. Prices subject to change without notice. Address subscriptions to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. Manuscripts, in duplicate and accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelope, should be sent to OCTOBER, 19 Union Square West, New York, NY 10003. No responsibility is assumed for loss or injury. Second class postage paid at Boston, MA and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: send address changes to OCTOBER, MIT Press Journals, 55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. OCTOBER is distributed in the USA by B. Deboer, Inc., 113 East Centre Street, Nutley, New'Jersey 07110. Copyright ? 1989 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and October Magazine, Ltd. The editors of OCTOBER are wholly responsible for its contents.

48

Thierry de Duve Gertrud Koch

Andreas Huyssen Eric Rentschler Douglas Crimp and Rosalyn Deutsche Werner Fenz

Hans Haacke Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light Hans Haacke's Contribution to Points of Reference 38/88 Protocols of the Exhibition Points of Reference 38/88 The Monument is Invisible, the Sign Visible Und ihr habt doch gesiegt, 1988 A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977 Correction to OCTOBER 45

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BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH is a critic and Assistant Professor of the history of art in the Department of History, Theory, and Criticism in the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. THIERRY DE DUVE teaches art history and theory at the University of Ottawa and is the author of Nominalisme pictural: Marcel Duchamp, la peinture et la modernite (Editions Minuit, 1984, soon to be published in English translation by the University of Minnesota Press) and Essais dates 1974-86 (Editions de la Differance, 1987). WERNER FENZ is curator of the Neue Galerie in Graz and was responsible for the organization of the visual arts component of this past year's Styrian Autumn festival. HANS HAACKE is Professor of Art at Cooper Union, New York, and is the subject of a monographic study published by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and MIT Press entitled Hans Haacke: Business as Usual, 1986. A major exhibition of his work of the past decade opens this spring at the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris. ANDREAS HUYSSEN is Professor of German at Columbia University, an editor of New German Critique, and the author of books on romantic poetics and the Sturm und Drang. His latest book is After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism(Indiana University Press, 1987). GERTRUD KOCH teaches at the University of Frankfurt and the Berlin Film Academy. She is coeditor of the feminist film journal Frauen und Film and of Babylon, a journal devoted to contemporary Jewish issues. Her book "Was ich erbeute sind Bilder": Zum Diskurs der Geschlechterim Film has just been published in Frankfurt.

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

THIERRY

DE DUVE

translated by ROSALIND KRAUSS

In the art of the past twenty years, only Joseph Beuys equals Andy Warhol in legend-value - that is, media-value - and the shadows of both of them hover equally over the art of the younger generation. But Beuys is a hero and Warhol a star. For Beuys, capitalism remained the cultural horizon to leave behind; for Warhol, it was simply nature. Like Marx a bourgeois German, Beuys wanted to incarnate the proletarian.' Warhol, an American immigrant of working-class origins, wanted to be a machine. At the nexus of these oppositions are several related facts: that Beuys based art on will and thus on a principle of production, and Warhol on desire and thus on a principle of consumption; that Beuys believed in creativity and Warhol did not; and that for Beuys art was labor while for Warhol it was commerce. The difference, however, is that Warhol stated baldly what Beuys, as a true romantic, forces us to decipher. In order to translate the bohemian into the proletarian, as is appropriate for Beuys, it is necessary to pass through Marx. But Warhol translated this himself. He called his bohemia the Factory. But that's precisely his bohemia. It is a simulacrum of bohemia, having nothing any longer to do with the place of literary myth whose historical meaning and necessity was tied to giving a voice to proletarian hopes and despair. In his factory there were no proletarians, any more than the '60s underground was peopled by masses of workers locked into the netherworld of Metropolis. In the Factory one led the bohemian life, played at it, but never submitted to it as a destiny. Drugs aind sex, eccentricities and gestures of the accursed inflicted those who assumed them and wreaked more than their share of personal tragedies. But that was the price of a life-style that was beautiful only in its coherence, that wasn't a life, and was in no way the life of the species-being (Gattungswesen) in which Marx locates the 1. See Thierry de Duve, "Joseph Beuys, or The Last of the Proletarians," October, no. 45 (Summer 1988), pp. 47-62. The present essay is the second of a four-part study exploring, in both its theoretical and ethical dimensions, the modern phenomenon I have characterized as "the overlapping of aesthetics and political economy." The two further essays place Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp within this analytical field.

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essence of the proletarian and which, through labor-power, links the individual to the destiny of the species. The inhabitants of the Factory were mere individuals, not social types. There were no acrobats or ragpickers in Warhol's bohemia, but, rather, proper names: Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Ron Tavel, Brigid Polk, Candy Darling, Viva, Ondine, Billy Name . . . , each with his or her "look," quirks, neurosis, sexual speciality, and idiom. This world of "freaks" gravitated around a central figure who had himself called the "boss" but who made it a point of honor never to seem to have the slightest individuality, never to be anything but the mirror of his entourage, the xerox of what his courtiers wanted him to be. He didn't manage the Factory like a boss but like a madame, if he managed it at all. Joseph Beuys incarnated the whole list of social types that filled bohemiafor two: the worker and the dandy, peddler, medical student, poet-except whore. The worker, or rather the proletarian, supplies the key to a reading of this list, causing it to reverberate for one last time in all the modern utopias that sought to liberate creativity in order to fulfill human needs and to give art its use-value. Warhol, who perhaps believed in divine providence but surely not in need, was content to base his art on the universal law of exchange by making himself the go-between for the least avowable desires of his contemporaries. Beuys's equation "creativity = capital" was something Warhol interpreted in reverse; as had Marx, when he assumed the capitalist point-of-view and wrote in the 1844 manuscripts: "Through its mediating role, money is the true creative force." Warhol never made a mystery of his ambitions, nor hid the fact that he loved to swim in the "icy waters of egotistic calculation." Not for him either utopia or the promise of liberation. His philosophy (From A to B and Back Again) turns on the sentence: "I started out as a commercial artist and I want to end up as a business artist." Which is what he did, yet not without having slipped in, between his career in the '50s as an advertising designer and his career in the '70s as a go-between in the culture industry, a dazzling and prolific career as artist. But career is a truly bad word, suggesting that the fame Warhol sought and attained also explains and justifies the great artist he was, at least between 1961 and 1968. Not only does fame explain nothing of the kind, but coming from the man who prophesied that "in the future everyone will be world famous for fifteen minutes," the desire to become famous has something suspicious about it. the glory of the hero but the glamour of the star-with To desire fame-not the intensity and awareness Warhol did, is to desire to be nothing, nothing of the human, the interior, the profound. It is to want to be nothing but image, surface, a bit of light on a screen, a mirror for the fantasies and a magnet for the desires of others - a thing of absolute narcissism. And to desire to outlive these desires there as a thing not to be consumed. In 1968 Warhol survived the violent desire of Valerie Solanis, who fired several gunshots into him. His work would not recover from this, but, unlike Beuys's oeuvre, which (aside from his most formal objects, his drawings and watercolors) seems by no means certain to age Factory photo by Billy Name.

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very well, Warhol's art of the '60s improves with time. This is all the more astonishing in that it is practically nothing but the ceaselessly repeated accumulation of ordinary consumer goods: cans of Campbell's Soup and boxes of Brillo, in short, with little desirability bottles of Coca-Cola, images of stars-objects, unless viewed through the eyes of the son of Czech immigrants who grew up in poverty and for whom the egalitarianism of consumption was the very stuff of the American dream. ("The President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and, can you imagine, you can drink Coke, too.") The American dream is a weak utopia in comparison with that of emancipation. It simply denies that capitalism does anyone a wrong, for it places everyone, workers and bosses, on the side of the divide where everything is already exchange-value, where to be someone is reckoned in belongings, where it is fair and normal that labor be treated as commodity. This is the cynicism of capital interiorized even by those it causes to suffer; this is the pleasure of the prostitute. The naivete with which Warhol embraced the American dream finds its equal only in Beuys's economic paradise. But just as this meant that Beuys had to incarnate the proletarian, Warhol had to embody this cynical utopia. His blatant opportunism hides a destiny that is no less tragic, not because the American where it produces as dream failed, but because it succeeds everywhere -even much misery as wealth. And in this success is to be found the end of what all have is, religious, artisanal, and aristocratic-civilizations premodern-that called art, as well as the absorption of all works of art into commodities, of all aesthetic values into exchange-value. When Warhol's work is convincing, it does what Beuys's does: it promises nothing; it testifies. The American dream can of course do without promises, it only needs to be real for those who know how to get ahead. It might seem that Warhol's work is content to expose it and to strip its cynicism bare. The yuppies who collect it obviously understand it this way and take pleasure in it accordingly. That criticism from the Left which castigates it precisely for not promising anything beyond the level of commodity understands it the same way. But to testify is neither to promise nor simply to expose; it is to attest to reality as it is, in the past or present. It is also to reopen the possibilities of interpreting it and forcing a retranslation; it is, in Warhol's case, to test the possibility of an art condition "below" the level of commodity. The field where this unfolds is, as with Beuys, that of political economy, and the text that we must retranslate- not into the myth of liberation but into its antithesis, the American dream -is, as always, Marx's. What, then, are commodities for Marx? They are both artifacts-manmade products-and possessed by a man. As artifacts they are goods-wares the fruit of someone's labor, as goods they allow someone (else) the enjoyment of this materialized labor. Under these two aspects wares possess use-value; the use (wear and tear) of the labor-power spent for their production; the use (employment and enjoyment) of this same labor-power in their consumption. But it is the

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

7

entry of artifacts and goods into the circuit of exchange that makes commodities of them. Anything whatever becomes a commodity once the use of the laborpower invested in it is postponed in order that it be traded against another thing into which an equal amount of labor-power has been invested, money serving as general means of equivalency. It is in this way that commodities acquire their mystical character, full of the "metaphysical and theological capers" that Marx associated with fetishism. If one moves between the texts of the young, "romantic" Marx and those of the mature, "scientific" Marx, it is easy to see that in the theory of commodity fetishism (which appears in Book I of Capital) the wrong caused to the producers (to the proletarians) by means of alienation reappears as the wrong caused to consumers by means of reification. The concept of reification (Verdinglichung), given pride of place by a Hegelianizing Marxism (Lukacs's, in particular), dominates most of the interpretations of the passage on commodity-fetishism, even though it doesn't occur there. It belongs to the same family as the Hegelian concept of alienation. Now, in Capital, the concept of alienation is gone, its meaning in fact returning through that of use-value, thus surreptitiously rehabilitating the concrete and identitary meaning that the concept of alienation carried: the sense of the same that must be postulated in order that a becoming-other be tied to it. In Marx's early writings, use-value has not yet appeared. (Even in the Grundrisse, Marx still simply speaks of "product" and attributes no "value" to it.) Between the Parisian manuscripts and Capital, the Critique of Political Economyis a pivot, for it is there that Marx vigorously introduces the two aspects under which all commodities present themselves - the couple use-value/exchange-value - though he still has recourse to alienation to explain what will later become the theory of fetishism. But this time it is from Steuart and not from Hegel that he takes the concept of alienation (as well as use-value, moreover), which loses its dialectical import of negation of the same in order to signify, on the contrary, the universal equivalence that the commodity-form imprints on the products of concrete labor of individual workers. If, for the young Marx, alienation severs man from nature and his fellow men, it is because the worker alienates himself in an act of production that from the outset belongs to another, with the consequence that the product that incorporates his labor faces him as a strange and lifeless object in which he cannot recognize himself. For the later Marx, this is because the commodity-form valorizes in every product its exchangeability, measured by the labor-time it incorporates, no matter what the nature of this labor. For the early Marx, commodity was "objectified labor" (vergegenstandlichteArbeit), which remains no less for that the particular labor of a particular man, even though in an alienated condition. For the late Marx, commodity appears as the reified relations of production (verdinglichte Produktionsbeziehungen),that is, as social relations between things. Vergegenstandlichungaffects the producer, having to sell himself on the labor-market; Verdinglichung similarly affects the consumer, buying for his use (his pleasure) the usage (wear and tear) of another man's labor-

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power, as if it were in the nature of things that the most diverse labors should be commensurate, when it is only the nature of the market economy that renders them commensurate through exchange. The mysterious fetishism of the commodity, its hieroglyphic character (as Marx calls it), depends on the truth that the commodity reveals in the very act of hiding it, and which it hides precisely because it reveals it: the nature of the relations of production of the market economy is indeed in the nature of things, literally, since it is these very relations of production that the commodity "thingifies," reifies. That is the truth, but it is not fair. A wrong is done to the consumers because the pleasure in what they consume is never gained from the service the product renders, but from the service that has been rendered to the product from the fact that its use-value has been postponed with a view toward exchange. The capitalist who decides to produce a given commodity doesn't do so in relation to its direct utility, but in relation to its expected demand on the market, and, thus, in relation to the exchange-value of a potential use about which he cares neither whether it is fulfilled nor whether it responds to a real need. In the last analysis the consumer never consumes; he contributes to the turnover of the exchange-value, but never realizes the use-value. Not only is money the perfected form of the commodity, but in a completely developed market economy -what one paradoxically terms a consumer society - all commodities act like money. (Hence the well-known fact of consumer society: that all the pleasure resides in the act of buying.) The wrong is there, and a wrong as essential to Marxist thought as that which the proletarian suffers (at any rate, it is the same one, seen from the consumer's angle), which must be righted. Yet, once the Hegelian concept of alienation is abandoned, it can be righted only if resting on the postulate of use-value. If Marx did not postulate the existence of needs, if he did not hold that use-value always contains a natural substratum or that the labor creating the use-value is independent of all social forms, in short, if he had not held above all that utility is a value, even the true value, the only one that humanizes economic production, then the horizon of a communist societywhere things will manifest social relations worthy of the name between men, rather than men, all dealing in exchange, manifesting social relations between horizon would vanish. things-this Much of modern art demanded that the wrong done to consumers be righted. That presupposed that the public for art (not only its buyers) be understood, consciously or not, as a public of consumers and that aesthetic pleasure be perceived as an act of consumption. Now, on the one hand, only use-value is consumed, and on the other, in a capitalist system, utility is nothing but an advance taken on exchange. Exchange-value is the only value, as Marx was forced to recognize in more than one place, from which derive the three paths modern artists have explored in order to resist the domination of exchangevalue: First, there is the attempt to put their practice in the service of to tie their fate to utilitarianism-whether social, economic, or political-and

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

9

the perspective of an overcoming of capitalism. This is the case of Russian productivism and of functionalism, as at the Bauhaus, for example. Industrial design, agit-prop, realism, all hold that aesthetic values are use-values. Second, based on the fact that the art market is only imperfectly a market and in many respects the carry-over of precapitalist relations of production, there is the attempt to push the old aesthetic of contemplation to its most extreme consequences (abstraction, suprematism, the monochrome as a form of the sublime, etc.), and to retain from use-value nothing but value (wealth, as economists before Marx called it), entirely denying its utility. Aesthetic contemplation is disinterested and consumes nothing. Finally, there is the attempt to do the opposite and retain from use-value the use and not the value. The work of art manifests its wear, or the artistic act its destruction, as pure loss. An aesthetic of ostentatious consumption exempts the public from consuming and calls on an economy of expenditure (depense) (or of gift and counter-gift), which neither the liberal nor the Marxist economy had foreseen. Bataille made a theory of this in La part maudite, and Dubuffet, the affichistes,Tinguely, Vostell, and happenings, provide some examples. Warhol belongs to none of these three traditions. He does not demand that a wrong be righted nor does he fight against the metamorphosis of art lovers into consumers. On the contrary, he positions them as such, as explicitly as possible. In confronting them with rows of Campbell's Soup cans, he registers what in any case they have already become. They are consumers, and the painting is a commodity. Yet Warhol testifies to this situation, he is not content with registering it in as cynical a mirror as the reflection it returns. If it is the case that, in art, the whole of modernity tied its hopes to the myths of creativity, dis-alienation, who de-reification, then Warhol is not modern. But was Matisse modern?-he wanted his painting to be an armchair for the tired businessman. Are aesthetic values sustained by the power of the myths that nourished them, myths that have failed? They are not values -there is the answer Warhol implies, one of whose famous sayings was "I want to be Matisse," and another, no less famous "I want to be a machine." Two desires whose conjunction, though surprising, ought to be taken seriously. The first shows the ambition concealed behind the quip about the "businessman artist," and the second is not a quip. Fair or unfair, it is a fact that the art market, to the precise degree that it is a market, treats works of art as commodities and absorbs aesthetic values into the sole value of exchange. But that is only true if the aesthetic field is totally mapped onto the field of political economy (this mapping that the later Beuys embodied), in other words, if aesthetics has to do with values. It is not true if works of art incorporate no value, no exchange-value. One doesn't leave the field of political the contrary. Like Beuys, but even more explicitly, Warhol economy-quite maps it totally onto that of the aesthetic field, like the Borgesian map that is congruent with the territory it represents. But Warhol seems to hold out a fourth possibility, one apparently unexplored by the modernists, in order to make art

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signify that the judgment which names it as such has no more to do with value than it had to do with piety in those days when the aesthetic field was entirely mapped onto the religious field. This path gives up emancipation and has no faith in creativity; it does not claim to right a wrong, since it perceives none; it overlooks use-value and only recognizes value; it instantiates art not in will but in desire, and a very singular one: to be a machine. Machines, according to good political economy, Marxist or not, are constant capital. They don't work, they don't produce value. The only source of value is human labor and its only measure, labor-time. It is as though Warhol also had his own brand of utopia, a weak utopia, projected by the American dream, the dream of a society that would rid itself of the working class by automation, and where everyone would be a consumer, no one a producer. In the Factory, even if Warhol had himself called the boss, he still wasn't Vasarely. He did not buy machines to increase his productivity and flood the world with silk-screens; he was the machine or, at least, said he wanted to be one. Sure, it was wishful thinking, a mere desire. Psychologically speaking this certainly meant to Warhol the desire to be without desire, to be insentient, to be beyond suffering or the fear of death. And all his work shows, often in a moving fashion, that this desire was merely a desire. But economically speaking, to want to be a machine means to maintain that artists don't work. Not that Warhol worked less than anyone else. Simply, the labor-time that an artist puts into his work is not relevant, because it is not of the same order as the average, socially necessary labor-time (as Marx calls it) that constitutes the substance of exchange-value. All artists are machines in this sense. And just as Beuys was not the first artist to want to incarnate the proletarian, Warhol was not the first to wish to be a machine. Ever since Delaroche, Champfleury, or Baudelaire expressed the fear, inspired in them by photography, of seeing the painter replaced by a machine, modern painters -the great ones, those who deserve to be called avant-garde have responded with a manifestation of their desire to be one. Courbet, who professed that "nothing that imprints itself on the retina is outside the domain of painting," was the first to give a strictly photographic definition for it. Manet, who simplified chiaroscuro and succeeded in seizing the blank amazement of his models as if struck by a magnesium flash, made the canvas thrill with a passion that only had its equal in the passivity of the automatic image. Monet, as if he were outracing photography's speed, recorded in his Rouen Cathedrals and his haystacks the light of the instant as it hit and imprinted the canvas. Seurat, in a development contemporary with the invention of the autochrome by the Lumiere brothers, digitized the palette and mechanized the hand. Cezanne, who admired Monet for being "nothing but an eye" and Courbet for not knowing what he painted even though he produced the most exact likeness of it, also spelled out, literally, what the driving desire of all painting since realism and impressionism had been, by upholding that "the free brain of the artist should be like a photographic plate, a simple recording device, when he is working."

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Warhol's desire has been explicit ever since, as has been the fact that it is not just any machine that painters wished to be, but exactly the one that put their craft and their economic survival in jeopardy. From Mondrian to Ryman, passing through Moholy-Nagy and many others, the contempt for facture, the desire to give the surface as standardized a texture as possible, the pleasure drawn from repetition, have all displayed the surprising wish that the body of the artist at work be segmented, Taylorized, mechanized, like that of the worker of Modern Times, but in order to be the machine and not its slave. Nor, for that matter, its master. The recourse to automatism in Pollock or Borduas transfers this wish to the unconscious; the motif of the reproduction in Johns, Rauschenberg, or Lichtenstein consciously refers it to the culture of the museum without walls (musee imaginaire). Gerhard Richter's declaration to the effect that he does not use photography as a medium for painting, but painting as a medium for photography, succeeds in giving the desire of the best painters throughout modernity its retrospective meaning: they reacted to the challenge of industrialization with paradoxical resistance. They could have become photographers and suffered the consequences of a new social and technical division of labor (and that's what many did, not without multiplying the contradictions tied to their ambition as artists). They could have ignored the new division of labor and painted as if the commodity-form did not affect their craft (and that is what the academic painters did, not without succumbing ever more surely to the merchandising of their work). Instead they became, in desire and in practice, not the photographer but his instrument, and even more precisely, less the camera (since for a long time it had been the instrument of painters) than the photosensitive plate, the film that records light and captures glances. "If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it." Between the producer and his production, no difference. All are commodities, fetish surfaces, and what surface has been more fetishized than photography's! Its invention threatened painters more directly than other machines threatened other artists. Technically, it supplanted them. Economically, it threw them into an absurd race with productivity where they were beaten in advance. The existed before, increasing extent of autonomy of the painting market-which but as part of a larger market where a social demand for images was registered, to which etchers, draughtsmen, and other artisans could also respond--was the painters' and their dealers' economic response to this threat. First the market for painting separated from that of images at large, then the market of the avantgarde, then of a particular avant-garde, and of a particular artist. Each name is a little monopoly. In a monopoly situation, the price of a commodity is not determined by its exchange-value; only supply and demand operate (which is why the market for living art is often assimilated to that of precious objects and antiques). But that doesn't stop painting from being a commodity, with its fatal consequence the fetishization of the "handmade." It is this fetishization that the best

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modern painters challenged, they who acted (and it is here that one finds the sign of their cultural ambition) as if they were in fact in competition with photographers on the same general market for images, and left in their work the marks of a desire, necessarily ungratified, to behave as if their hand, their eye, their whole body were a machine for the recording and duplicating of images. Thus there are two reasons rendering the average labor-time socially necesfor the production of painting-by-hand irrelevant: either because in its sary particular market, painting has a price but no value; or because the hand that paints behaves as though it were a sentient machine, and since machines don't labor, the picture is not a commodity. The first option defines academic painting: it adjusts supply to demand, accepts that touch be fetishized, and attaches a quoted value to a name. The second characterizes the avant-garde: it starts from supply and ignores demand, challenging the fetishism of the "handmade" by asking that the object be read in terms of the social relations of production that it indeed "reifies" (in this case the division of labor between painters and photographers as a cultural question rather than an economic fact), and attaching a price only to aesthetic quality. As a commercial artist, Warhol worked and drew for the advertising industry. In this industry where social demand is motivated only by the prospect of exchange-value, where return on investment dominates, and where photography is used because it increases productivity, he practiced a craft full of outmoded charm, recognized by the profession for its very personal qualities but sold at its exchange-value. For I. Miller Shoes he drew footwear whose fetishistic connotations (in the Freudian sense now) escaped no one and whose "handmade" quality was underscored. Then he became aware, in total opportunism, that there was more money to be made in the painting market than in advertising. It was during the palmy days of abstract-expressionism, when the "handmade" was particularly prized. He was surprised that despite his many attempts no art gallery wanted his work. It had value but no price. He showed this by changing his work while he shifted to another market and by taking, in total realism, exchange-value as his subject matter. He thus proffered images of commodities, reduplicated ordinary consumer goods, made of his signature a brand name, and success came. Warhol is the machine perfected. Not that his wish to be as numb as a machine was fulfilled. However he might have tried to appear as one, he was no less human than anyone else. Not that his work showed any less than Manet's the marks of a desire that, in order to make itself visible as desire, had to remain unsatisfied. He knew how to exploit the imperfections of the photo-silkscreen, the blurs, the variations of inking, the "surface incidents" (as he himself said), and the more he repeated identical images, the more their accumulation made differences between them apparent and underscored their individuality. What Warhol fulfilled is the historical necessity for the painter to want to be a machine. He terminated it, as Beuys terminated the historical necessity to want to incarnate the proletarian. One century after Manet, but like him as like Matisse,

Andy Warhol, or The Machine Perfected

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Warhol followed the fourth path, the one that never feared the market, the one that left it to the Don Quixotes of utopia to get upset about the transformation of art lovers into consumers or to fight against exchange-value in the name of use-value. With a flippancy that could shock only those who still hope that the future of the avant-gardes will be the abolition of capitalism, he did not even consider that such a struggle had a meaning. He made the fetishism of commodities his philosophy in From Andy to Baudelaire and Back Again: from the shoes he drew with consummate charm when he was a commercial artist, to the Dollar Signs which he complacently supplied to Leo Castelli to satisfy demand after having become "businessman artist." With the greatest apparent cynicism he printed paper money, the commodity of all commodities, the absolute fetish. And while it was mere Monopoly money on the currency markets (he even made two-dollar bills), it was gold on the art market. He knew the price of that which had no value. He knew not only how to behave as a painting machine, but also as a filming machine, a printing machine, a recording machine, and as the cash register of the art market. He perfected the modern desire to be a machine in displaying its retrospective meaning and in making explicit that the perfect mapping of the aesthetic field onto the field of political economy coincides with monopoly capitalism. The art market is a market of monopolies, far less because it is a holdover from another age, as is the market for precious objects, than because it is the specialized outlet of a culture industry that looks for monopolies anywhere it can. From then on, and all utopias aside (since neither Manet nor Matisse nor Monet nor Seurat nor Cezanne indulged in utopian dreams), there is no difference between the avant-garde and academicism. It's just a matter of dividing up the markets, and since monopolies never last, a simple matter of speed. Whether the name of a painter is the fetishized signature of his hand or a silk-screened brand name, as with fashion designers the label is what warrants the exchange-value. Fifteen minutes of world fame, then disappearance into obsolescence and death. He was asked if he wanted to be a great artist, and he replied, "No, I'd rather be famous." Could it be that wanting to be famous, wanting to be a machine, wanting to be Matisse, are one and the same thing? What is most astonishing is that Warhol's work, the best of his work at least, that which dates from the first Factory, and before the assassination attempt of Valerie Solanis, is here to last. Perhaps it's because he incarnated the American dream to nightmare pitch, and made visible its terrible death drive-the repetition of which is the ceaseless return of commodities. One doesn't take on the exisfigured by tence of a thing of absolute narcissism without drawing pleasure out of that which drove Marilyn to suicide. Warhol didn't evolve in the plastic world of stars, but in the demimonde of vamps. His cinema plays out the bland dreams of 1950s Hollywood only to materialize the terror that the Hollywood of the '20s still knew how to signal. One doesn't take on the existence of the perfected machine, one doesn't turn into a camera or a tape recorder, without also taking on the

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existence of all machines and above all those that kill: the electric chair and the graves-on-wheels of the car crashes. One doesn't take on the making of one's self-portrait as a can of Campbell's Soup without also putting oneself in the tins of contaminated tuna of Tuna Fish Disaster. Perhaps in order for the work to last, the man had to die. According to the noncausal logic of "surface incidents," he had to survive Valerie Solanis's pistol shots becausethat very day the front page of all the newspapers was taken up by Robert Kennedy's assassination. And the same logic decreed that he die on February 22, 1987, almost by accident, like a commodity whose defect had been detected too late.

The Aesthetic Transformation of the Image of the Unimaginable: Notes on Claude Lanzmann's Shoah

GERTRUD

KOCH

translated by JAMIE OWEN DANIEL and MIRIAM HANSEN For instance, if the image of a dead loved one appears to me suddenly, I have no need of a "reduction" to feel the ache in my heart: it is a part of the image, it is the direct consequenceof thefact that the image presents its object as not existing. -Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychologyof Imagination If we recall the debates that have revolved for several decades, with greater or lesser intensity, around the question of an aesthetics after Auschwitz, we find that they divide along the lines of a moral and a material question. The moral question would be whether, after all hope for the stability of the human foundation of civilization had been destroyed, the utopia of the beautiful illusion of art had not finally dissolved into false metaphysics -whether, generally, art is still possible at all. The second, material question concerns whether and how Auschwitz can and has been inscribed in aesthetic representation and the imagination. In his "Meditations on Metaphysics," which conclude his Negative Dialectics, Theodor W. Adorno provides a succinct response to those who tried to construct a normative moral taboo upon his earlier apercu that, after Auschwitz, poetry could no longer be written. "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems."' But, Adorno continues, the question that arises after Auschwitz is not only that of the survival of art, but also the survival of those marked by the guilt of having survived: "[Their] mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle 1.

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, New York, Seabury, 1973, p. 362.

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of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared."2 The moral question cannot be isolated as an aesthetic one, but we can determine where aesthetics degenerates into bad metaphysics: wherever the aesthetic imagination extorts metaphysical meaning from the mass annihilations. This tendency manifests itself early on, in the first literary testimonies dealing with mass annihilation, in theological or metaphysically oriented, existentialist interpretations. Even independently of the concrete aesthetic structure of individual works, the metaphysical anchor is cast wherever mass annihilations become a subject. The fact that the majority of these early literary works were written by authors who had themselves escaped or evaded the machinery of annihilation appears to be of central importance here. Thus, the "screams of the tortured" are indeed expressed in their works, but so in fact are the feelings of "the drastic guilt of the survivor[s]." This entails a manic search for "innocence" and transfiguration, whether in a theological or a moral sense. These manic attempts to find confirmation of the moral substance of the human in the very hell organized by human beings, as if the perspective of survival could thereby be brought into a meaningful context free of the universal feeling of guilt, have not diminished. Thus Sami Nair, in his essay on Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah in Les Temps Modernes, can still allow himself to get carried away by metaphysical tropes when he writes that Lanzmann "rehabilitates the survivors from the Jewish work commandos who assisted the Nazis in murdering their [Jewish] brothers and sisters . . . and transfigures them here into saints by revealing their inner innocence. .. ."3 What makes Nair's argument so unfortunate is its implied assumption of an inner margin of moral choice within the framework of which someone could become guilty or remain innocent. To be sure, the moral dimension of human action is based on the capacity to decide and on the decision to do what one considers right. Yet, where the possibility of making a decision is destroyed to the extreme degree that it is within the terroristic confines of a concentration camp, the celebration of minimalized processes of consciousness can only appear as metaphysical. Even if one considers this "inner" margin as a relevant factor, as Bruno Bettelheim does, it still does not offer a sufficient standard by which one could morally rehabilitate or, by the same token, discredit the victims of the concentration camps. This is not to deny that there were actual differences in behavior; but the individual's "inner" potential for resistance cannot be used to infer that everyone conducts him- or herself morally in situations which eliminate every human measure of freedom. No doubt Nair owes this implicit idea of an intact "inner" freedom to the premises of a one-sided, dogmatically construed

2. Ibid., p. 363. 3. Sami Nair, "Shoah, une leeon d'humanite," Les Temps Modernes, no. 470 (September 1985), p. 436.

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existentialism, which has its foundations in Sartre's fatal paradigm that freedom of choice exists even under torture-a paradigm that accompanied the above mentioned debates. In the aesthetic realm this paradigm, which was influential in the debates of the 1950s, has led to an affirmative transfiguration even of terror. As Adorno notes in a rejection of Sartre's concept of engaged literature -a rejection that is not always fair to its object-this transfiguration implies, whether intentionally or not, that even in so-called extreme situations, indeed, precisely in these situations, humanity flourishes. Sometimes this develops into a dismal metaphysics which does its best to pare down atrocities into "limit situations," which it then affirms to the extent that they reveal human authenticity.4 At this point I would like to suggest that Nair's comments may apply to the general tone of the 1950s and to the topos of the limit situation in particular, but not to the aesthetic construction of Lanzmann's film. The film takes up neither the constricted situational context nor the theological variation of those literary treatments of the death camps which attribute affirmative meaning to them, a meaning that - even at the highest aesthetic level - still permeates the poetry of Nelly Sachs. Besides, the various patterns of meaning inscribed in the representations of the death camps cannot be distinguished according to literary forms or genres. Just as purely autobiographical, documentary literature is not free of the compulsion to search for meaning, aesthetically wrought works like Paul Celan's do not necessarily lapse into affirmative idealization because of their aesthetic stylization. In his discriminating study, Versions of Survival, which includes literary as well as documentary and psychological testimony pertaining to the mass annihilations, Lawrence L. Langer concludes, We need to measure the various versions of survival by their fidelity to the ethical (and physical) complexities of the death camp experience, not by their success in repairing the ruptured connection between human will and human fate until it is restored to its pre-Auschwitz condition. If our age of atrocity has taught us anything, it has taught us that the certainty of that connection will never be as firm.5 Authenticity as a criterion indeed encompasses many forms and genres. Yet it unmistakably opts for a modernist aesthetic which aims at expression rather than communication. If the affirmative aspects of the metaphysical and/or theological imputation of patterns of meaning to mass annihilation can be linked to a premodern aesthetic, there are, on the other side of the scale, the unresolved 4. Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," trans. Frances McDonagh, in Ronald Taylor, ed., Aesthetics & Politics, London, Verso, 1977, p. 189 (translation modified). 5. Lawrence L. Langer, Versions of Survival, New York, 1982, p. 216.

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Claude Lanzmann. Shoah. 1985. Dr. Franz Grassier, Nazi commissioner of the Warsaw ghetto.

aporias of autonomous art. The latter obtains its power from the theory of the imagination, the notion of art as idea or image (Vorstellung)rather than representation (Darstellung), expression rather than illustration. The imagination claims its own autonomy; it can project, annihilate social existence, transcend it to become radically other, while allowing the speechless, hidden substratum of nature in the mute body to reappear. At first glance, the autonomous freedom of the imagination, which does not allow itself to be confined by any concept of meaning, seems far less burdened with the tendency to suffocate, through affirmation, the claims to expression made by the oppressed and tormented. The autonomy of art, however, is itself not unlimited. In a certain sense it finds its limits in the capacity of the human imagination. It is therefore appropriate that Langer places a quotation from Samuel Beckett at the beginning of the first chapter of his book: "I use words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others. Or let me be silent."6 The increasing silence, the hermetic character of modern art is itself already a reflection on this limit. The following passage from Adorno's "Meditations on Metaphysics I: After Auschwitz," cited earlier, also touches on this aesthetic nerve of the imagination: "The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz, 6.

Ibid., p. 1.

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19

ClaudeLanzmann.Shoah. 1985. Filip Muller, survivorof Auschwitz. and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distills a real [reale] hell from human evil."7 The limits of the imagination of a human evil are those of society, which allows what can still be conceived of by the imagination as human evil to become a real hell. This accounts for the difficult and tenacious struggle for "inner innocence," the desire to push the outer limits of the imagination back within. Alas, in the face of this historical dimension of an insurmountable difference between what can be humanly imagined and what has been proven to be socially possible, even the attempt to posit evil as an absolute category, at least within aesthetics, as Karl Heinz Bohrer has recently attempted to do, seems almost touchingly antiquated. The satanic evil of the imagination is just as incapable as the Beelzebub of theology or the negative absolute of metaphysics of surpassing real hell through aesthetic illusion. In order to be able to maintain his theory, Bohrer must conjure up the "disquieting step into the namelessness of an unlimited power of imagination which can no longer be controlled by any familiar discourse,"8 whereas historically the limits of imaginative power have long since 7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 361 (translation modified). 8. Karl Heinz Bohrer, "Das B0se-eine asthetitische Kategorie?" Merkur, vol. 39, no. 6 (une 1985), p. 472.

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been delineated, and not in terms that are defined by aesthetic content, but rather socially. But the argument-itself not entirely free of false pathos-that the atto the annihilation tempt imagine aesthetically should therefore be discontinued altogether is even more misguided, directed as it is against legitimate claims to expression. The desire to establish a normative aesthetics of content from an above all-we objective social limit is an authoritarian longing; rather-and should investigate how this limit is reflected and re-marked in art itself. What nonetheless constitutes the skandalon, as the irreducible condition of the aesthetic, is the pleasure contained even in the most resistant work of art-a pleasure culled from the transformation into the imaginary that enables distance, the coldness of contemplation. In the following I would like to show how a radical aesthetic transformation of this problematic is achieved in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah. The debate about this film, especially in West Germany, has in most cases refrained from aesthetic criticism and instead presented the film as a "stirring document" from which we can extract various historical, political, and moral dynamics. The fact that it is also a work of art is acknowledged only in passing and almost with embarrassment. Purists of the documentary form came closest to acknowledging the problem, since they were struck by the fact that long stretches of the film are not "documentary" at all. Lanzmann himself has left no doubt that his conception of the film extends far beyond the portrayal of eyewitnesses. He would argue that the people in his film are acting; they are playing out what they have lived through, le vecu. But, this implies something other than "remembering." To remember can mean, "Oh, yes, I remember, it was a hot day, I found myself in such and such a situation," etc. Such a statement of memory need not contain anything of how I experience this situation. For this reason Lanzmann must insist that the people in his film do not narrate memories but rather reexperience situations. What this entails can be illustrated by a crass example. In a long sequence of the film, the exiled Polish politician Jan Karski says that he has never spoken about his experience of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a memory this is questionable -historians know that Karski reported on his visit to the ghetto immediately afterward, that he even published such a report. But what is expressed in his formulation is the feeling of being able to speak only with difficulty about what he had experienced - the shock he felt in the ghetto that rendered him speechless when he saw what was to be seen there. It is crucial to Lanzmann's strategy that he encourage a certain margin for play. He allows entire scenarios to be played out in a borrowed railroad car, challenging his protagonists to reenact particular gestures and actions. This strategy is no doubt indebted to the concept, central to Sartrean existential psychoanalysis, that there is a physical materiality even prior to the symbolizing process of language -an impudent laugh, the barely repressed sadistic glee over

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a threatening gesture. Such materiality breaks through only when gestures, physical movements, are repeated. In playing these everyone again becomes who he is--that is Shoah's criterion for authenticity, that is the immense visual power of this film, which so clearly sets it apart from other "interview" films. The smiling mask that covers the petrified inner world of the former Mussulman, who could only survive in the concentration camp by adopting an expression that anticipated rigor mortis, is no less an authentic expression than a dramatic breakdown. It is precisely this transformation into play which determines the seriousness of the representation (Darstellung). Indeed, Lanzmann seduces, lures, and cajoles the protagonists into doing and saying things which would otherwise have remained silenced and hidden. This strategy has made Lanzmann the target of a moral criticism which reveals much of the old resentment against everything aesthetic, that the stolen image entrapped the soul of whatever it portrayed. To some extent, every aesthetic image contains the spoils wrested from social existence, but it is therefore no less legitimate. This is in no sense an example of aesthetic coquetry or the vain presumption of a director who does not want to give up control over his production. What Lanzmann is aiming at here is precisely the problem of the imagination- whenever something is narrated, an image (Vorstellung) is presented, the image of something which is absent. The image, the imaginary - and here Lanzmann is a loyal Sartrean -is the presence of an absence which is located outside the spatiotemporal continuum of the image. Lanzmann remains strictly within the limits of what can be imagined: for that which cannot be imagined, the concrete industrial slaughter of millions, he suspends the concrete pictorial representation. There are no images of the annihilation itself; its representability is never once suggested by using the existing documentary photographs that haunt every other film on this subject. In this elision, Lanzmann marks the boundary between what is aesthetically and humanly imaginable and the unimaginable dimension of the annihilation. Thus the film itself creates a dialectical constellation: in the elision, it offers an image of the unimaginable. But the film also approaches the problem from another angle: it begins quite literally with the aesthetic transformation of the statement that the annihilation "took place," in that it projects this statement into spatial visibility. It travels to the locations of the annihilation. The spatialization occurs in the present; what remains absent is what is temporally removed, the annihilation itself. The latter is narrated (often from off-screen) only fragmentarily from the imaginations of the protagonists. The length of the film may have obscured, for many viewers, its complex montage structure, which plays on multiple levels with real and filmic time. The juxtapositions, on the same temporal plane, of real events separated by very distant locations -such as, for example, the voice of the narrator from Israel on the soundtrack and a walk through the forested terrain of a death camp-are designed to irritate our realistic sense of spatiotemporal

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certainty: the presence of an absence in the imagination of the past is bound up with the concreteness of images of present-day locations. Past and present intertwine; the past is made present, and the present is drawn into the spell of the past. The long pans that realize the real time of the gaze remain trapped in historical space. What many of these shots convey is a sense of not being able to run away, of being closed in. Whenever the camera does not assume the subjective gaze, it may, for instance, move in such a way that, as in one particularly extreme longshot, a group of people approaching us from a distant edge of the woods are never really able to come closer, but are again and again kept at a distance in the field by the camera. The camera's movement is aesthetically autonomous; it is not used in a documentary fashion, but imaginatively. This method is at its most radical when Lanzmann uses camera movement for fictive scenarios of reenactment into which he manipulates not only the protagonists, but himself and the viewers as well. As the railroad car enters Treblinka, it does so in a subjective shot. The viewer is driven along with the train: this is also an insidious seduction. First Lanzmann has the former engineer of the train reenact his run once again, then it is Lanzmann himself who is doing so, and, after a delayed second of horror, the viewer finally realizes that he or she, too, is sitting in the train that unremittingly follows the tracks into the enclosure of the death camp. Yet the subjective camera never exceeds the limit; it takes us just far enough to allow us to sense, on the edge of the imagination, the reality of the annihilation, the frictionless matter-of-factness of its

Claude Lanzmann. Shoah. 1985. Henrik Gawkowski, Polish locomotiveengineer.

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implementation -without lapsing into the embarrassments of gruesome shock effects. In the montage of space and time described above, Lanzmann aesthetically organizes the experience of the most extreme discrepancy between what there is to see and the imagination (Vorstellung) triggered by that seen. It is the experience of the discrepancy between the indifference of the first and the horrors of the second. Thus Lanzmann resumes representational strategies which appear early on in literary treatments of the annihilation. I am reminded here above all of the stories of Tadeusz Borowski, in particular the following passage from a story entitled "This Way to the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen": A small square; ruins surrounded by the green of tall trees. In former times, this was a tiny little train station somewhere in the provinces. Somewhat off to the side, close to the road, there is a tumble-down shack, smaller and uglier than the smallest, ugliest shack I've ever seen. A little farther on, behind the wooden shack, entire hillsides of railroad ties are piling up, mountains of tracks, enormous piles of splintered boards, bricks, stones, and well rings. This is the loading dock for everything destined for Birkenau. Materials for building the camp and human material for the gas ovens. It was a working day like any other: trucks drive by and load up with boards, cement, and people.9 If we substitute "today" for "former times" and read what follows in the past tense, Lanzmann's scenario emerges. This effect is even more pronounced in other passages of the same story: We pass by all the sections of Camp II B, the uninhabited Section C, the Czech camp, the quarantine, and then we plunge into the green of the apple and pear trees that surround the troop infirmary. This green, which has burst forth in these few hot days, seems to us like an unfamiliar landscape on the moon.'0 And even the church, to which Lanzmann cuts from the Jewish cemetery, is present in Borowski: Idle and indifferent, their eyes followed the majestic figures in the green uniforms, drifting to the near and yet unattainable green of the trees, to the church steeple, from which a late Angelus rang out.1 Tadeusz Borowski, "Die Herrschaften werden zum Gas gebeten," in Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 9. ed., 16 polnische Erzahler, Reinbek, 1964, p. 111. (An English translation appeared in the collection This Wayfor the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen,trans. Barbara Vedder, New York, Penguin Books, 1967; since this English translation deviates radically from the German version quoted in this article, however, the translations here and following are our own. -Translators.) 10. Ibid., pp. 110-111. 11. Ibid., p. 113.

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This is not to say that Lanzmann has filmed Borowski's story. Rather, the comparison is meant to emphasize that there is an aesthetic transformation of the experience of the annihilation that does not permit itself to become ensnared in the pitfalls of the usual indictments and paradigms. Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, I would argue, is part of this tradition of the aesthetic transformation of the image of the unimaginable. Without question, the film also contributes significant material to the necessary political and historical debates. But the fascination it exerts, its melancholy beauty, is an aesthetic quality that we cannot afford to suppress or displace onto subliminal resentment against the character of its author.

Anselm Kiefer: The Terror of History, the Temptation of Myth

ANDREAS

HUYSSEN

More than any other recent painter's work, Anselm Kiefer's painterly postpainterly project has called forth ruminations about national identity. American critics in particular have gone to great length in praising his Germanness, the authentic ways in which he deals in his painting with the ghosts of the fatherland, especially with the terror of recent German history. The use of profound allegory, the multiple references to Germanic myth, the play with the archetypalall of this is held to be typically German, and yet, by the power of art, it is said somehow to transcend its origins and give expression to the spiritual plight of humanity in the late twentieth century.' The temptation is great to dismiss such stereotype-driven appreciations of national essence as a marketing strategy of the Reagan age. Pride in national identity is in. Even the Germans benefit from it since Ronald Reagan's visit to the Bitburg cemetery gave its blessing to Helmut Kohl's political agenda of forgetting the fascist past and renewing national pride in the name of "normalization." In an international art market in which the boundaries between national cultures become increasingly irrelevant, the appeal of the national functions like a sign of recognition, a trademark. What has been characteristic of the movie industry for a long time (witness the successions of the French cinema, the Italian cinema, the new German cinema, the Australian cinema, etc.) now seems to be catching up with the art world as well: the new German painting. Let me quote, perhaps unfairly, a brief passage from a 1983 article that addresses the Germanness in question: Kiefer's use of paint is like the use of fire to cremate the bodies of dead, however dubious, heroes, in the expectation of their phoenixlike resurrection in another form. The new German painters perform an extraordinary service for the German people. They lay to rest the German style, as only the monstrous can be-of ghosts-profound See the foreword to the catalogue for Anselm Kiefer's American retrospective. Mark 1. Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer, Chicago and Philadelphia, Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987.

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culture, and history, so that the people can be authentically new. . . . They can be freed of a past identity by artistically reliving it.2

Remembering that it was in fact the Nazis who promised authentic national renewal, resurrection of the German Volkfrom the ashes of defeat, remembering also that it was the Nazis who practiced mass cremation not for resurrection, but for total elimination of their victims, memory and all, this kind of rhetoric simply makes my hair stand on end. To me, a German of Kiefer's generation, the reference to laying to rest the ghosts of the past reads like a Bitburg of art criticism, if not worse, and I would claim that it fundamentally misrepresents the problematic of national identity in Kiefer's work. Kiefer's painting- in its forms, its materials, and its subject matter-is emphatically about memory, not about forgetting, and if flight is one of its organizing pictorial metaphors, it is not the flight of the phoenix, but the doomed flight of Icarus and the melancholy flight of the mutilated and murderously vengeful Wayland, the master smith of the classic book of Norse myth, the Edda. Kiefer's wings, after all, are made of lead. The purpose of this essay, then, will be to free our understanding of Kiefer's complex and captivating work from the stereotypes of Germanness and from the cliche that names him Anselm Angst and worships his flight into the transcendence of art and the universally human. I propose to place Kiefer's aesthetic project in its specific cultural and political context, the context of German culture after Auschwitz out of which it grew and to which it gives aesthetic form, which energized it during long years of little recognition, and to which, I would argue against facile claims of transcendence and universality, it its strengths, in its weaknesses, and most of all in ultimately remains bound-in its ambiguities. Even a first and casual look at Kiefer's work will tell us that it is obsessively concerned with images of myth and of history. Immersed in the exploration (and exploitation) of the power of mythic images, this work has given rise to the mystification that somehow myth transcends history, that it can redeem us from history, and that art, especially painting, is the high road toward redemption. Indeed, Kiefer himself--to the extent that we hear his voice through the paraphrases of art criticism (including Mark Rosenthal's problematic attempts at ventriloquism in the catalogue of the recent American exhibition of Kiefer's work)--is not innocent in provoking such responses. But ultimately his work is also informed by a gesture of self-questioning, by an awareness of the questionable nature of his undertaking, and by a pictorial self-consciousness that belies such mystifications. I take his work -and this will be one of my basic arguments Donald B. Kuspit, "Flak from the 'Radicals': The American Case Against German Painting," 2. in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, p. 141.

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-to be about the ultimate inseparability of myth and history. Rather than merely illustrating myth or history, Kiefer's work can be read as a sustained reflection on how mythic images function in history, how myth can never escape history, and how history in turn has to rely on mythic images. While much of Kiefer's mythic painting seems energized by a longing to transcend the terrors of recent German history, the point, driven home relentlessly by subject matter and aesthetic execution, is that this longing will not, cannot be fulfilled. One way to discuss context (Kiefer's and our own) is to relate Kiefer to three West German cultural phenomena that have captured the attention of American audiences in recent years. First there was the international success of the new German cinema with the work of Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders, Schloendorff, Kluge, Sanders-Brahms, von Trotta, Ottinger and many others. Much of that work was driven by questions of German identity -personal, political, cultural, sexual. All of this work was ultimately rooted in the acknowledgment that the fascist past and the postwar democratic present are inescapably chained together (examples are Fassbinder's films about the 1950s, Kluge's films from YesterdayGirl to The Patriot, and the various films on German terrorism and its relationship to the Nazi past). There are especially striking parallels between Kiefer's treatment of fascist imagery and Syberberg's major films, and it is no accident that both artists have been accused of sympathizing with fascism. Then there was the rise to instant stardom of a group of painters, many of them from Berlin, who had been painting for almost twenty years-during the of late and artabstraction, minimalism, heyday conceptualism, performance but who were recognized and marketed as a group only in the early 1980s: die neuen Wilden, the neoexpressionists, as they were most commonly called because of their return to the pictorial strategies of that pivotal movement of German modernism. Just as German expressionism had given rise to one of the most far-ranging debates about the aesthetics and politics of modernism in the 1930s,3 neoexpressionism immediately sparked a debate about the legitimacy of a return to figuration after abstraction, minimalism, and concept art.4 Thirdly and most recently, there was the so-called Historikerstreitin Germany, the historians' debate over the German responsibility for the holocaust, the alleged need to "historicize" the fascist past, and the problem of a German national identity. Indeed, as philosopher Jiirgen Habermas observed, the historians' debate about the German past was in truth a debate about the selfunderstanding of the Federal Republic today. In that debate of 1986, a number of right-wing historians took it upon themselves to "normalize" German history, 3. Documented in Ernst Bloch, et al., Aestheticsand Politics: Debates betweenBloch, Lukdcs, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno, London, Verso, 1980. 4. See especially Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression," in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, New York, New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984, pp. 107-136.

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and one of them went so far as to put the blame for the holocaust, by some perverted logic of the priority of the Soviet Gulag, on the Bolsheviks.5 The Historikerstreit,outrageous as it was in this latter aspect, did make the pages of the New YorkTimes. What did not become clear from the reporting, however, is the fact that underlying the whole debate was the conservative turn in German politics since the early 1980s, the Bitburg syndrome, the public debate about proposals to erect national monuments and national history museums in Bonn and in Berlin. All of this happened in a cultural and political climate in which issues of national identity had resurfaced for the first time since the war. The various factions of German conservatism are in search of a "usable past." Their aim is to "normalize" German history and to free German nationalism from the shadows of fascism -a kind of laundering of the German past for the benefit of the conservative ideological agenda. All three phenomena-the new German cinema, neoexpressionist paintin different ways how West German ing, and the historian's debate-show culture remains haunted by the past. It is haunted by images which in turn cinema as well as in painting. Anselm Kiefer, produce haunting images-in despite his seclusion in a remote village of the Odenwald, is very much a part of that culture.

Within West Germany, critics have been much more skeptical of the idea that Kiefer succeeds in dealing with and exorcising the ghosts of the German past in his painting. Criticism first emerged publicly on a broad scale when Kiefer and Baselitz represented the Federal Republic at the 1980 Venice Biennale, and Kiefer was accused in the feuilletons of flaunting his Germanness with his embarrassingly nationalist motifs. Some American commentators have dismissed such criticisms as bizarre, crudely censorious, and cognitively inferior.6 I believe that this is a serious mistake born of an ignorance of Kiefer's context that ultimately disables the reading of the paintings themselves. The nationalism/fascism problematic in Kiefer's work deserves serious attention, and Kiefer himself would be the first to insist on that. The American desire finally to have another major contemporary painter, after Picasso and Jackson Pollock, may indeed be overwhelming, but we don't give Kiefer the recognition he deserves by avoiding the problematically German aspects of his work and by making him into an "art pathfinder for the 21st century," as one recent headline had it.7 Certainly, I do not want to see Kiefer identified with a by now international postmodern triumphalism which has at least some of the critics in ecstatic rapture. Consider the 5. For comprehensive analysis and documentation see the special issue on the Historikerstreitin New German Critique, no. 44 (Spring/Summer 1988). 6. For example, Peter Schjeldahl, "Our Kiefer," Art in America, no. 3 (March 1988), p. 124. 7. Christian Science Monitor, March 21, 1988, p. 23.

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following preposterous statement by Rudi Fuchs, Dutch art historian and museum director and organizer of the 1982 postmodern art bonanza at Kassel, Documenta 7: "Painting is salvation. It presents freedom of thought of which it is the triumphant expression. . . . The painter is a guardian-angel carrying the palette in blessing over the world. Maybe the painter is the darling of the gods."8 This is art theology, not art criticism. Kiefer has to be defended against such regressive and mystifying appropriations. He is not in the business of salvation triumphant nor in the cultural trafficking in guardian angels that has become the recent Wenders/Handke film increasingly popular in the 1980s-witness is Kiefer into Neither Desire. simply resurrecting the German past, as Wings of some of his German critics complain. But, in a country like West Germany, where definitions of national and cultural identity all too often have led to the temptation of relegitimizing the Third Reich, any attempt by an artist to deal with the major icons of fascism will understandably cause public worries. Fortunately so. What is it, then, that has Kiefer's countrymen up in arms? With what seems to be an incredible naivete and insouciance, Kiefer is drawn time and again to those icons, motifs, themes of the German cultural and political tradition which, a generation earlier, had energized the fascist cultural synthesis that resulted in the worst disaster of German history. Kiefer provocatively reenacts the Hitler salute in one of his earliest photo works; he turns to the myth of the Nibelungen, which in its medieval and Wagnerian versions has always functioned as a cultural prop of German militarism; he revives the tree and forest mythology so dear to the heart of German nationalism; he indulges in reverential gestures toward Hitler's ultimate culture hero, Richard Wagner; and he suggests a pantheon of German luminaries in philosophy, art, literature, and the military, including Fichte, Klopstock, Clausewitz, and Heidegger, most of whom have been tainted with the sins of German nationalism and certainly put to good use by the Nazi propaganda machine; he reenacts the Nazi book burnings; he paints Albert Speer's megalomaniac architectural structures as ruins and allegories of power; he conjures up historical spaces loaded with the history of German-Prussian nationalism and fascist chauvinism such as Nuremberg, the Markische Heide, or the Teuteburg forest, and he creates allegories of some of Hitler's major military ventures. Of course, one has to point out here that some of these icons are treated with subtle irony and multi-layered ambiguity, occasionally even with satirical bite (e.g., OperationSeelion), but clearly there are as many others that are not. At any rate, the issue is not whether Kiefer intentionally identifies with or glorifies the fascist iconography he chooses for his paintings. I think it is clear that he does not. But that does not let him off the hook. The problem is in the very usage of those icons, in the fact that Kiefer's images violate a taboo, transgress a boundary that had been carefully guarded, and not for bad reasons, 8.

R. H. Fuchs, Anselm Kiefer, Venice, Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, 1980, p. 62.

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by the postwar cultural consensus in West Germany: abstention from the imageworld of fascism, condemnation of any cultural iconography even remotely reminiscent of those barbaric years. This self-imposed abstention, after all, was at the heart of Germany's postwar reemergence as a relatively stable democratic culture in a Western mode. Why, then, does Kiefer insist on working with such a controversial body of icons? At stake in Kiefer's paintings is not just the opening of wounds, as one often hears, as if they had ever been healed. Nor is it the confrontation between the artist, whose painting conjures up uncomfortable truths, and his countrymen, who want to forget the fascist past. The Bitburg Germans will forget it. They are or no Kiefer. They want to normalize; Kiefer determined to forget-Kiefer does not. The issue, in other words, is not whether to forget or to remember, but rather how to remember and how to handle representations of the remembered past at a time when most of us, over forty years after the war, only know that past through images, films, photographs, representations. It is in the working through of this problem, aesthetically and politically, that I see Kiefer's strength, a strength that simultaneously and unavoidably must make him controversial and deeply problematic. To say it in yet another way, Kiefer's haunted images, burnt and violated as they are, do not challenge the repressions of those who refuse to face the terror of the past; rather they challenge the repressions of those who do remember and who do accept the burden of fascism on German national identity. not only the fascism and One of the reasons why Kiefer's work-and the work from the that focuses on alchemy, also mid-1980s but history paintings, biblical and Jewish themes, and a variety of non-German myths--is so ambiguous and difficult to read is that it seems to lack any moorings in contemporary reality. Despite this ostensible lack of direct reference to the present in his work, Kiefer's beginnings are firmly embedded in the German protest culture of the 1960s. He was simply wrong, forgetful, or disingenuous when he recently said, "In '69, when I began, no one dared talk about these things."9 He might have been right had he said "no one painted these things." But talk about fascism, German history, guilt, and the holocaust was the order of the day at a time when of the extra-parliamentary opposition and the a whole social movement-that New Left inside and outside the academy-had swept the country with its agenda of Vergangenheitsbewiltigung, the coping or coming-to-terms with the past. Large-scale generational conflict erupted precisely on the issue of what parents had done or not done between 1933 and 1945 and whether former members of the Nazi party were acceptable as high-level political leaders. The German theaters performed scores of documentary plays about fascism and the 9. By account of Steven Henry Madoff, "Anselm Kiefer: A Call to Memory," ARTnews, vol. 86 (October 1987), p. 127.

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holocaust (Rolf Hochhuth's Deputy [1963] and Peter Weiss's Investigation [1965] being the best-known), and scores of television programs addressed the question of fascism. After all, 1969 was the year in which Willy Brandt, a refugee from the Nazis and an active member of the Norwegian underground during the war, became chancellor and initiated a policy of detente with the East which was based on the public acknowledgment of "those things." And yet, in a certain sense Kiefer is not entirely wrong. His approach to understanding and representing the past differed significantly from what I would call, in shorthand, the liberal and social-democratic antifascist consensus of those years. Let us take one of Kiefer's early works, the series of photographs entitled Besetzungen (Occupations) from 1969, as an example to discuss a central issue which governs much of his painting throughout the 1970s. The work consists of a series of photographs taken at various locations all over Europe historical spaces, landscapes-all of which feature the artist himself performing, citing, embodying the Sieg Heil gesture. As the catalogue suggests, the artist seems to have assumed the identity of the conquering National Socialist who occupies Europe.'0 The first reaction to this kind of work must be shock and dismay, and the work anticipates that. A taboo has been violated. But when one looks again, multiple ironies begin to appear. In almost all of the photos the Sieg Heil figure is miniscule, dwarfed by the surroundings; the shots are taken from afar. In one of the photos the figure stands in a bathtub and is seen against a backlit window. There are no jubilant masses, marching soldiers, nor any other emblems of power and imperialism that we know from historical footage from the Nazi era. The artist does not identify with the gesture of Nazi occupation, he ridicules it, satirizes it. He is properly critical. But even this consideration does not lay to rest our fundamental uneasiness. Are irony and satire really the appropriate mode for dealing with fascist terror? Doesn't this series of photographs belittle the very real terror which the Sieg Heil gesture conjures up for a historically informed memory? There just seems no way out of the deeply problematic nature of Kiefer's "occupations," this one as well as those that were to follow in the 1970s, paintings that occupied the equally shunned icons and spaces of German national history and myth. There is another dimension, however, to this work, a dimension of selfconscious mise-en-scene that is at its conceptual core. Rather than seeing this series of photos only as representing the artist occupying Europe with the fascist gesture of conquest, we may, in another register, see the artist occupying various framed image-spaces: landscapes, historical buildings, interiors, precisely the image-spaces of most of Kiefer's later paintings. But why then the Sieg Heil gesture? I would suggest that it be read as a conceptual gesture reminding us that indeed Nazi culture had most effectively occupied, exploited, and abused the 10.

Rosenthal, p. 7.

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power of the visual, especially the power of massive monumentalism and of a confining, even disciplining, central-point perspective. Fascism had furthermore perverted, abused, and sucked up whole territories of a German image-world, turning national iconic and literary traditions into mere ornaments of power and thereby leaving post-1945 culture with a tabula rasa that was bound to cause a smoldering crisis of identity. After twelve years of an image orgy without precedent in the modern world, which included everything from torch marches to political mass spectacles, from the mammoth staging of the 1936 Olympics to the ceaseless productions of the Nazi film industry deep into the war years, from Albert Speer's floodlight operas in the night sky to the fireworks of antiaircraft flak over burning cities, the country's need for images seemed exhausted. Apart from imported American films and the cult of foreign royalty in illustrated magazines, postwar Germany was a country without images, a landscape of rubble and ruins that quickly and efficiently turned itself into the gray of concrete reconstruction, lightened up only by the iconography of commercial advertising and the fake imagery of the Heimatfilm.The country that had produced the Weimar cinema and a wealth of avant-garde art in the 1920s and that would produce the new German cinema beginning in the late 1960s was by and large image-dead for about twenty years: hardly any new departures in film, no painting worth talking about, a kind of enforced minimalism, ground zero of a visual amnesia. I am reminded here of something Werner Herzog once stated in a somewhat different context. In an interview about his films he said, "We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and, if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs. It's as simple as that!"ll The absence of adequate images in postwar Germany and the need to invent, to create images to go on living also seems to propel Kiefer's project. He insists that the burden of fascism on images has to be reflected and worked through by any postwar German artist worth his or her salt. From that perspective indeed most postwar German art had to be seen as so much evasion. During the 1950s, it mainly offered derivations from abstract expressionism, tachism, informel, and other internationally sanctioned movements. As opposed to literature and film, media in which the confrontation with the fascist past had become an overriding concern during the 1960s, the '60s art scene in West Germany was dominated by the light experiments of the Gruppe Zero, the situationist-related fluxus movement, and a number of experiments with figuration in the work of Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. The focus of most of these artists, whether or not they wanted their art to be socially critical, was the present: consumer capitalism in the age of America and television. In this context Kiefer's occupations of the fascist image11. Images at the Horizon, Workshop with Werner Herzog conducted by Roger Ebert, Chicago, Facets Multimedia, 1979, p. 21.

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space and of other nationalist iconography were as much a new departure for German art as they were a political provocation, except, of course, that this provocation was not widely recognized during the 1970s. In that decade, Kiefer's work on myth, especially German myth and the national tradition, could still be seen as an art of individual mythology, as it was called at Documenta V in 1972. It was only during the conservative 1980s, when the issue of national identity had become a major obsession in West Germany, that Kiefer's choice of medium and the political content of his painting got the critics buzzing. Anselm Kiefer -painter of the new Right! But it would be a mistake to collapse Kiefer's development as an artist with the political turn toward conservatism in the 1980s. After all, the whole issue of national identity first emerged in the 1970s on the intellectual Left and within the orbit of the ecology and peace movements before it became grist for the mills of the new Right. Kiefer's focus on Germanic iconography in the 1970s still had a critical edge, attempting to articulate what the liberal and social democratic cultural consensus had sealed behind a cordon sanitaire of proper coping with the past. And his choice of medium, his experimentations on the threshold between painting, photography, and the sculptural, also had a critical edge in the refusal to bow to the pieties of a teleologically constructed modernism that saw even remotely representational painting only as a form of regression. Representation in Kiefer is, after all, not just a facile return to a premodernist tradition. It is rather the attempt to make certain traditions (high-horizon landscape painting, romantic painting) productive for a kind of painting that represents, without, however, being grounded in the ideology of representation, a kind of painting that places itself quite self-consciously after conceptualism and minimalism. The often-heard reproach against Kiefer's being figurative and representational misses his extraordinary sensitivity to materials such as straw, sand, lead, ashes, burnt logs, ferns, and copper wire, all of which are incorporated imaginatively into his canvases and more often than not work against the grain of figuration and representation. While Kiefer's material and aesthetic employment of figuration does not me give ideological headaches, I think it is legitimate to ask whether Kiefer indulges the contemporary fascination with fascism, with terror, and with death. Fascinating fascism, as Susan Sontag called it in her discussion of Leni Riefenstahl, has been part of the international cultural landscape since the 1970s. In his book Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (1984), the historian Saul Friedlander has analyzed it in scores of cinematic and literary works from the 1970s, ranging from Syberberg's Our Hitler to Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Fassbinder's Lili Marleen, from Alain Tournier's The Ogre to George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A H. In addition, we have witnessed the rediscovery, often celebratory, of right-wing modernist writers such as Celine and Ernst Jiinger. How does Kiefer fit into this phenomenon, which is by no means only German? To what extent might it explain his success

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Anselm Kiefer. To the Unknown Painter. 1980.

outside his native Germany? Such questions are all the more urgent because, I would argue, Kiefer's own treatment of fascist icons seems to go from satire and irony in the 1970s to melancholy devoid of irony in the early 1980s. Central for a discussion of fascinating fascism in Kiefer are three series of paintings from the early 1980s: the paintings of fascist architecture; the March Heath works, which hover between landscape painting, history painting, and an allegorization of art and artist in German history; and the Margarete/Shulamite series, which contains Kiefer's highly abstract and mediated treatment of the holocaust. Together with the Meistersinger/Nuremberg series, this trilogy of works best embodies those aspects of his art that I am addressing in this essay.

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AnselmKiefer.Interior. 1981. Let me first turn to the watercolors and oil paintings of fascist architectural structures: the two watercolors entitled To the UnknownPainter (1980, 1982) and the two large oil paintings of fascist architectural structures entitled The Stairs (1982-83) and Interior (1981). These works exude an overwhelming statism, a monumental melancholy, and an intense aesthetic appeal of color, texture, and layering of painterly materials that can induce a deeply meditative, if not paralyzing state in the viewer. I would like to describe my own very conflicting reactions to them, with the caveat that what I will sketch as a sequence of three stages of response and reflection was much more blurred in my mind when I first saw the Kiefer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

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Stage one was fascination - fascination with the visual pleasure Kiefer brings to the subject matter of fascist architecture. If seen in photographs, such buildings will most likely provoke only the Pavlovian reaction of condemnation: everybody knows what fascist architecture is and what it represents. Being confronted with Kiefer's rendering of the interior of Albert Speer's Reichschancellery was therefore like seeing it for the first time, precisely because "it" was neither Speer's famous building nor a "realistic" representation of it. And what I saw was ruins, images of ruins, the ruins of fascism in the mode of allegory that seemed to hold the promise of a beyond, to suggest an as yet absent reconciliation. True, there is the almost overbearing monumentalism of size and subject matter of these paintings, with central point perspective driven to its most insidious extreme. But then this monumentalism of central perspective itself seems to be undermined by the claims the multiply layered surfaces make on the viewer, by the fragility and transitoriness of the materials Kiefer uses in his compositions, by the eerie effects he achieves in his use of photography overlaid by thick oil paint, emulsion, shellac, and straw. Dark and somber as they are, these paintings assume a ghostlike luminosity and immateriality that belies their monumentality. They appear like dream images, architectural structures that seem intact, but are intriguingly made to appear as ruins: the resurrected ruin of fascism as simulacrum, as the painterly realization of a contemporary state of mind. At this point I became skeptical of my own first reaction. Stage two was a pervasive feeling of having been had, having been lured into that fascinating fascism, having fallen for an aestheticization of fascism which today complements fascism's own strategies, so eloquently analyzed by Walter Benjamin some fifty years ago, of turning politics into aesthetic spectacle. I remembered the romantic appeal of ruins and the inherent ambivalence of the ruin as celebration of the past, of nostalgia and feelings of loss. And I recalled the real ruins left by fascism, the ruins of bombed-out cities and the destruction left in the wake of fascist invasion and retreat. Where, I asked myself, do these paintings reflect on this historical reality? Even as images of fascist ruins, they are still monuments to the demagogic representation of power, and they affirm, in their overwhelming monumentalism and relentless use of central-point perspective, the power of representation that modernism has done so much to question and to reflect critically. The question became: Is this fascist painting at one remove? And if it is, how do I save myself from being sucked into these gigantic spacial voids, from being paralyzed by melancholy, from becoming complicit in a vision that seems to prevent mourning and stifle political reflection? Finally, my initial thoughts about Kiefer's "occupations" asserted themselves again. What if Kiefer, here too, intended to confront us with our own repressions of the fascist image-sphere? Perhaps his project was precisely to counter the by now often hallow litany about the fascist aestheticization of politics, to counter the merely rational explanations of fascist terror by recreat-

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ing the aesthetic lure of fascism for the present and thus forcing us to confront the possibility that we ourselves are not immune to what we so rationally condemn and dismiss. Steeped in a melancholy fascination with the past, Kiefer's work makes visible a psychic disposition dominant in postwar Germany that has been described as the inability to mourn. If mourning implies an active working through of a loss, then melancholy is characterized by an inability to overcome that loss and in some instances even a continuing identification with the lost object of love. This is the cultural context in which Kiefer's reworking of a regressive, even reactionary painterly vocabulary assumes its politically and aesthetically meaningful dimension. How else but through obsessive quotation could he conjure up the lure of what once enthralled Germany and has not been acknowledged, let alone properly worked through? How else but through painterly melancholy and nightmarish evocation could he confront the blockages in the contemporary German psyche? At the same time, the risk of confronting contemporary German culture with representations of a collective lost object of love is equally evident: it may strengthen the static and melancholy disposition toward fascism rather than overcome it. Here, then, is the dilemma: whether to read these paintings as a melancholy fixation on the dreamlike ruins of fascism that locks the viewer into complicity, or, instead, as a critique of the spectator, who is caught up in a complex web of melancholy, fascination, and repression. Even the two elements common to several of the paintings and watercolors in this series-the inscription "to the unknown painter" and the dead center will not help us out of this dilemma. positioning of a palette on a black pole as a double reference to unknown the soldier and to art, these linguistic Surely, and conceptual inscriptions in the midst of these fascist architectural monuments tend to break the spell of the image as pure and unmediated and to produce an estrangement effect. Here as elsewhere Kiefer relies on linguistic inscription and encoding as methods of undermining the false immediacy of visual representation. His images have to be both seen and read. But how estranging are these inscriptions ultimately? If one remembers the classical topos of paralleling the heroism of the warrior with the heroism of the genial artist, then Kiefer's recourse to the trivial romantic motif of the monument to the unknown soldier could be read as a slightly displaced critique of the myth of artistic genius.12 Such a reading, however, seems a bit forced. After all, the notions of the unknown soldier and of the unknown, unrecognized genius are themselves integral to the myths of warrior heroism and aesthetic genius that have been major props of middle-class culture since romanticism. A potentially critical strategy of breaking visual immediacy through linguistic markers and

Thus Jurgen Harten in the catalogue of the 1984 Kiefer exhibition in Disseldorf, Paris, and 12. Jerusalem, Anselm Kiefer, Diisseldorf, Stadtische Kunsthalle, 1984, pp. 41ff.

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conceptually estranging signs on the work's surface ultimately serves only to reinforce the myth it ostensibly undermines. Furthermore, the undocumented heroism of the unknown soldier is displaced here into the heroism of that very well-known painter Anselm K., who may himself have fallen for the lure he had set out to combat. Much the same, by the way, can be said of Kiefer's earlier attempts to construct German genealogies in paintings such as Germany'sSpiritual Heroes (1973), Icarus (1976), and Ways of Worldly Wisdom (1976-77). Kiefer's need to position himself effectively at the end of a genealogy of German art and thought gets in the way of whatever critical intentions he might have had. To be sure, in To the UnknownPainter Kiefer does not celebrate the link between aesthetics and war as the Italian futurists or the right-wing modernists of the Weimar Republic did. Instead of an aesthetics of terror, one might say, we get melancholy and narcissism, the narcissism of a postfascist German painter whose frozen gaze is directed at two imaginary lost objects: the ruins of fascism (buildings, landscapes, mindscapes) and the ruins, as it were, of the house of painting itself. These two sets of ruins are pictorially equated. Kiefer ends up collapsing the difference between the myth of the end of painting and the defeat of fascism. This is a conceit that seems to draw in highly problematic ways on the phantasmagoria that fascism itself is the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, requiring a worldhistorical G6tterdammerung at its end: Berlin 1945 as the last act of Hitler's infatuation with Richard Wagner and Kiefer's work as a memorial to that fatal linkage between art and violence. Nero Paints-indeed. But such a negative reading of the architecture paintings is contradicted by the Margarete/Shulamite series, a series of paintings based on Paul Celan's famous "Death Fugue," a poem that captures the horror of Auschwitz in a sequence of highly structured mythic images. In these paintings, where Kiefer turns to the victims of fascism, the melancholy gaze at the past, dominant in the architecture paintings, is transformed into a genuine sense of mourning. And Kiefer's seemingly self-indulgent and narcissistic obsession with the fate of painting reveals itself here in its broader historical and political dimension. In the German context, Kiefer's turning to Paul Celan, the Jewish poet who survived a Nazi concentration camp, has deep resonance. In the 1950s, Theodor Adorno had claimed that after Auschwitz lyric poetry was no longer possible. The unimaginable horrors of the holocaust had irretrievably pushed poetic language, especially that written in German, to the edges of silence. But Celan demonstrated that this ultimate crisis of poetic language could still be articulated within language itself when he confronted the ultimate challenge of writing a poem about the very event that seemed to have made all language incommensurate.13 I would suggest that in the Margarete/Shulamite series, especially with Your Golden Hair, Margarete (1981) and Shulamite (1983), Kiefer succeeds in doing for painting what Celan did for poetry more than thirty years ago. In this context, 13.

The poem's full text is given in Rosenthal, pp. 95ff.

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Kiefer's equation of fascism with the end of painting takes on a different connotation. For him, too, as for Celan and Adorno, it is indeed fascism that has brought about the ultimate crisis of art in this century. Fascism has not only revealed the extent to which poetry and painting can never be commensurate to the world of historical violence. It has also demonstrated how politics can ruthlessly exploit the aesthetic dimension and harness it in the service of violence and destruction. The Margarete/Shulamite paintings, which draw on the refrain of Celan's poem "your golden hair Margarete, your ashen hair Shulamith [Shulamite]," avoid figuration or any other direct representation of fascist violence. In conceptualist fashion, Your Golden Hair, Margarete conjures up the curvature of the German woman's hair with a bow of straw imposed on the center of a barren, high-horizon landscape. A painted black curve echoing the shape of Margarete's hair evokes Shulamite, and the title of the painting is inscribed in black above both. In this painting, the black of Shulamite's hair becomes one with the black

AnselmKiefer.Your Golden Hair, Margarete.1981.

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Wilhelm Kreis. Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers, in the Hall of Soldiers. c. 1939.

markings of the land -again an indication that Kiefer's dark ground colors refer primarily to death in history rather than to mythic renewal, as is so often claimed. And the combination of real straw with black paint furthermore points to the Nuremberg and Meistersinger paintings from the early 1980s, paintings that use the same colors and materials in order to evoke the conjunction of Nuremberg as site of Wagner's Meistersinger and of the spectacular Nazi party conventions filmed by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will. But perhaps the most powerful painting in the series inspired by Paul Celan is the one entitled Shulamite, in which Kiefer transforms Wilhelm Kreis's fascist design for the Funeral Hall for the Great German Soldiers in the Berlin Hall of Soldiers (c. 1939) into a haunting memorial to the victims of the holocaust. The cavernous space, blackened by the fires of cremation, clearly reminds us of a gigantic brick oven, threatening in its very proportions, which are exacerbated by Kiefer's use of an extremely low-level perspective. No crude representation of gassing or cremation, only the residues of human suffering are shown. Almost

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AnselmKiefer.Shulamite. 1983.

hidden in the depth of this huge empty space we see the seven tiny flames of a memorial candelabra dwarfed by the horror of this murderous space. Kiefer succeeds here in avoiding all the ambiguity that haunted his other paintings of fascist architecture. And he is successful because he evokes the terror perpetrated by Germans on their victims, thus opening a space for mourning, a dimension that is absent from the paintings I discussed earlier. By transforming a fascist architectural space, dedicated to the death cult of the Nazis, into a memorial for Nazism's victims, he creates an effect of genuine critical Umfunktionierung, as Brecht would have called it, an effect that reveals fascism's genocidal telos in its own celebratory memorial spaces. Let me conclude these reflections on Kiefer by coming back to my theme of myth, painting, and history as it is articulated in one of Kiefer's most powerful works, the painting entitled Icarus -March Sand (1981). This painting expresses paradigmatically how Kiefer's best work derives its strength from the at times unbearable tension between the terror of German history and the intense long-

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AnselmKiefer.Icarus-March Sand. 1981. ing to get beyond it with the help of myth. Icarus -March Sand combines Greek myth with the image of a Prussian, now East German, landscape that, to a West German, is as legendary and mythic as the story of Icarus's fall. The painting does not articulate a passionate scream of horror and suffering that we might associate with expressionism. Instead we get the voiceless crashing of the two charred wings of Icarus in the mythic landscape of the Brandenburger Heide, the March Heath, site of so many battles in Prussian military history. Kiefer's Icarus is not the Icarus of classical antiquity, son of an engineer whose hubris was chastized by the gods when the sun melted his wings as he soared upward. Kiefer's Icarus is the modern painter, the palette with its thumbhole replacing the head. Icarus has become an allegory of painting, another version of Kiefer's many flying palettes, and he crashes not because of the sun's heat above, but because of the fires burning beneath him in the Prussian landscape. Only a distantly luminous glow on the high plane of the painting suggests the presence of the sun. It is a setting sun, and nightfall seems imminent. Icarus is not soaring

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toward the infinite; he is, as it were, being pulled down to the ground. It is history, German history, that stunts the painterly flight toward transcendence. Painting crashes, redemption through painting is no longer possible, mythic vision itself is fundamentally contaminated, polluted, violated by history. The stronger the stranglehold of history, the more intense the impossible desire to escape into myth. But then myth reveals itself as chained to history rather than as history's transcendent other. The desire for renewal, rebirth, and reconciliation that speaks to us from these paintings may be overwhelming. But Kiefer's work also knows that this desire will not be fulfilled, is beyond human grasp. The potential for rebirth and renewal that fire, mythic fire, may hold for the earth does not extend to human life. Kiefer's fires are the fires of history, and they light a vision that is indeed apocalyptic, but one that raises the hope of redemption only to foreclose it.

Fatal Attractions: Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light*

ERIC RENTSCHLER

What the world supplies to mythis a historical reality, defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way in which men have produced or used it; and what mythgives in return is a natural image of this reality. -Roland

Barthes, Mythologies

It's ironic; all Leni Riefenstahl ever wanted was to tell fairy tales. -Frank Deford, "The Ghost of Berlin," Sports Illustrated, August 4, 1986

Problematic Continuities The effective history of Nazi film begins before 1933 and continues well after 1945. Perhaps no other example illustrates this insight as strikingly as Leni Riefenstahl's The Blue Light (Das blaue Licht), a film premiered in 1932, reprised in 1938, re-released in 1952, a work spanning three epochs in German film history. The National Verleih press booklet for the latter version heralds it as "a standard work in German film history," "a film of lasting quality . . . that must be numbered among the most unforgettable titles."' This formulation offers a paradoxical orientation: the film stands, at once, firmly inside of history as "a standard work," and yet beyond the passage of time as well, "a film of lasting * This essay is a part of a lengthier book-in-progress, Nazi Feature Films: Fantasy Production in the Third Reich, to be published by Harvard University Press. 1. The information file on Das blaue Licht in the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek (West Berlin) contains, among other documents, an invitation to the premiere screening of 1932, the program brochure for the 1938 release, as well as the press booklet for the 1952 remake. Leni Riefenstahl. The Blue Light. 1932. Junta.

>

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quality." The rhetoric evokes memory only to revoke the past, lifting the film above any temporal inscription and placing it in the rarified reaches of the canonical. The narrative seems simple and straightforward: Junta, a strange woman living in the Alpine peaks above a Tyrolean village, has privileged access to a crystal mountain cave, which on full-moon nights lures fascinated boys from the valley to seek out the source of a radiant blue light, a beam emanating from the secret grotto. The quest invariably ends in death and causes the townspeople to curse and persecute Junta. A painter from Vienna, Vigo, befriends the outcast woman, becomes her protector, and falls in love with her, although she does not return his advances. Ultimately he follows her one night to the cave and subsequently draws a map admitting safe passage to the grotto filled with valuable minerals, which he shows to the villagers. Armed with tools, they mine the cavern and rejoice in their fortune. Meanwhile, Junta, finding her private sanctuary ravaged, despairs and falls to her death. Among all of Leni Riefenstahl's films which have confronted virulent political challenges as documents of National Socialism,2 The Blue Light alone remains relatively uncontested. It would seem to be the pristine debut of an intuitive artist, a romantic effusion beyond party lines and ideology. To this day it functions as crucial evidence in any apologia for Riefenstahl. The director herself identifies strongly with the protagonist of her first film.3 The cruel fate Junta suffers at the hands of a brutal order would become Riefenstahl's own drama, a scenario in which innocence shipwrecks on a ruthless world. A double impulse seems to inform the director's retrospective reading of her initial effort: a wish to sanctify the realm of the elemental and its enchanting powers as a space beyond all special interests, and, likewise, the resolve to hallow herself as an artistic force who claims this ethereal space as her true home, avowing she enjoys an intimacy with the world of nature and beauty every bit as unmediated as that of her fictional extension, Junta. Riefenstahl has held onto this self-styled image for over half a century now,

Most recently, the West German journalist and filmmaker Nina Gladitz engaged in a vigorous 2. campaign against Riefenstahl, claiming the director willingly exploited gypsy inmates from a concentration camp during her wartime work on Tiefland, promising them help if they cooperated, but leaving them in the end to perdition, allegations denied passionately by the filmmaker in an ensuing court battle, a further occasion where Riefenstahl argued that she was an artist, nothing more. See, for instance, Wolfgang Rumpf, "Infame Ltlgen," Tip, December 14, 1984, pp. 56-57; and Ulrich Enzensberger, "KZ-Zigeuner tanz' mit mir," Konkret, February 1985, pp. 12-17. See also Gladitz's film about Riefenstahl and Tiefland, the WDR-production that prompted the legal proceedings, Time of Stillness and Darkness (Zeit des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit). Regarding the outcome of the trial after an appeal, a decision confirming Gladitz's claims that the director had selected gypsies from a concentration camp and forced them to act in her film without pay, see Hanno Kiihnert, "Wenn Juristen Vergangenheit klaren," Die Zeit, March 27, 1987. 3. Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler, curiously speaks of Junta "as a sort of gypsy girl" (p. 258), although she speaks Italian.

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despite continuing challenges from critics who claim her visionary powers were hardly innocent ones, that these powers were compromised in the service of National Socialism, that she enjoyed an exceptional position under Hitler that allowed her to produce the definitive Nazi party document, Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens), the ultimate hagiographical portrait of the Fuhrer and transfiguration of the new order, hardly the work of an apolitical filmmaker.4 The Blue Light, however, eludes any easy alignment with National Socialism. Its director had not read Mein Kampf and not yet met Hitler; its scriptwriter, Bela Balazs, a highly prominent leftist, likewise played a crucial role in the production.5 Film historians by and large have accepted Riefenstahl's recounting, viewing Junta as an embodiment of her creator, someone who, in the words of an American scholar, "had her own intuitive feelings about nature and was destroyed by her naive disregard of the real world around her, the world she set out to avoid."6 Riefenstahl, in her own mind and in the representations of critics, becomes a romantic poet-priestess whose vision transcends the time-bound and The Blue Light allows us to read her the political, someone whose films-and more controversial output in the correct light7- reflect a fascination with beauty, strength, and harmony. The main limitation of this sympathetic reading remains its static and uncritical quality, how it fixes the text outside history and blindly submits to and champions an artist's volition. Critics underestimate the director's indebtedness to a host of legacies, choosing instead to celebrate her immediacy, ingenuity, and intuition. More seriously, commentators overlook the changing shape of The Blue Light, the manner in which it has metamorphosed in the course of three release The secondary literature on Riefenstahl's career and films is massive. A useful, although 4. outdated, initial guide is Sandra Bernstein and Michael MacMillan, "Leni Riefenstahl: A Selected Bibliography," The Quarterly Review of Film Studies, no. 2 (November 1977), pp. 439-457. Recent career studies include David B. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl, Metuchen, New Jersey/London, Scarecrow, 1978; Charles Ford, Leni Riefenstahl, Paris, La Table Ronde, 1978; Renata BergPan, Leni Riefenstahl, Boston, Twayne, 1980; and Leonardo Quaresima, Leni Riefenstahl, Florence, La Nuova Italia, 1984. The most complete account of the director's early films as actress and director is Peggy Ann Wallace, "An Historical Study of the Career of Leni Riefenstahl from 1923 to 1933," Diss. University of Southern California, 1975. For studies of Triumph of the Will, see Richard Meran Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will, Bloomington/London, Indiana University Press, 1975; Peter Nowotny, Leni Riefenstahl "Triumph des Willens." Zur Kritik dokumentarischerFilmarbeit im NS-Faschismus, Dortmund, Nowotny, 1981; and Martin Loiperdinger, Rituale der Mobilmachung:Der Parteitagsfilm "Triumph des Willens" von Leni Riefenstahl, Opladen, Leske + Budrich, 1987. For a close study of Olympia, see Cooper C. Graham, Leni Riefenstahl and Olympia, Metuchen, New Jersey, Scarecrow, 1986. For a sympathetic account of Balazs's work on The Blue Light, which insists that he played a 5. major role in the conceptualization and production of the film, see Joseph Zsuffa, Bdla Baldzs: The Man and the Artist, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1987, pp. 216-230. See also John Ralmon, "Bela Balazs in German Exile," Film Quarterly, no. 30 (Spring 1977), pp. 12-19. 6. Barsam, Filmguide to Triumph of the Will, p. 9. 7. See David Gunston, "Leni Riefenstahl," Film Quarterly, no. 14 (1960), p. 12. The Blue Light is "the one film above all others that was to settle her fate as a director."

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versions, for instance in its attribution of authorship. In 1932, the credits read: "The Blue Light, A Mountain Legend from the Dolomites, rendered in images by Leni Riefenstahl, Bela Balacz [sic], Hans Schneeberger." Six years later, we read: "The Blue Light, a mountain legend told and shaped into images by Leni Riefenstahl." In 1952, The Blue Light becomes simply "a mountain legend by Leni Riefenstahl." These changes reflect the director's increasing ascription to herself of all creative powers. What begins as the rendering of a local legend by a collective team, involving a director, scriptwriter, and cameraman,8 is, in time, transformed into the creation of a single individual, an artist responsible for the legend, the dialogue, the images, in short, the decisive formative power behind the film. This process is not an innocent one. It involves a complex dynamics of recycling, revising, and erasing, emanations of The Blue Light which have produced different shades of meaning at different historical moments. Mining the Past embodies-a The Blue Light tells a story, a legend that reflects-and peculiar process of adaptation. The narrative dramatizes the plundering of nature and the undoing of a woman, stylizing the double violation in the form of a village chronicle. Interestingly, Riefenstahl's debut, a film that mines the romantic legacy with the tools of modernity, provides a curious merging of antimodernism and instrumental will, a blend of romanticism and enlightenment, a pronounced double talk at once conscious of the appeal of the past and equally wise to the ways of the present. For this reason, The Blue Light is a highly instructive and quite complex film, indeed a meta-film, a text deserving close attention due to its singular processing of materials-at many levels. None of the three versions lists the literary source Riefenstahl drew on for The Blue Light, the unmentioned novel by Gustav Renker, Bergkristall.9 In early accounts, she would claim that she had adapted a peasant legend of the Alps;

The names of Riefenstahl, Balaizs, and Schneeberger appear on the same line in the credits. 8. Ironically, Riefenstahl would continue to speak of the film as a collective effort in 1938, even though the titles left out the names of significant coworkers. See "Gesprach mit Leni Riefenstahl: 'So entstand Das blaue Licht,"' Film-Kurier, September 24, 1938. For official Nazi policy governing the names to be enumerated in title sequences, see "Noch einmal: Wer darf im Vorspann genannt werden?" Film-Kurier,July 18, 1935. The 1952 release version does mention Balazs as a coworker on the script, although Riefenstahl takes the main credit for the scenario, direction, and cinematography ("Buch, Regie, Bildgestaltung"). See Wallace, "Leni Riefenstahl from 1923 to 1933," pp. 284-286. See also Zsuffa, p. 454: 9. "Arnold Fanck was familiar with Renker's novels; in fact, he used the title, with a slight change, of one of Renker's novels, Heilige Berge (Holy Mountains), for the first film in which Riefenstahl acted. . . . Thus, it is most likely that Riefenstahl became acquainted with Renker's works at the very beginning of her film career." For a detailed account of the film's inception and production background, see Peggy A. Wallace, "'The Most Important Factor Was the Spirit': Leni Riefenstahl During the Filming of The Blue Light," Image, no. 17 (March 1974), pp. 17-29.

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later she would insist that the narrative was her own idea. This generous notion of authorship grants to the creator a direct access to the source ("everything that happened came from my head"),0? which in fact has reached her in a mediated fashion. The first version of the film would list Balazs, the Jewish scriptwriter and theorist, as a coauthor; subsequent ones would not. From its very first signs, already in the title credits, and over the years increasingly so, The Blue Light appears as a product of unacknowledged authors and sources, the result of rewriting and recasting. The title, of course, suggests Novalis's blue flower, the quintessential symbol of the romantic quest for the divine and ineffable." Quite dramatically, the film commingles the iconography of nineteenth-century German landscape painting with the narrative idiosyncracies of the Novelle, building likewise on the melodramatic constellations of the mountain film (Bergfilm)as well as the genre's predilection for natural settings and imposing elements. Beyond that, its evocation of mysterious primal forces in the exterior world reflects a further debt to a darker side of German romanticism explored by another of Riefenstahl's models, the director F.W. Murnau. A student of art history before she went on to become a dancer and an actress, Riefenstahl evidences considerable familiarity with nineteenth-century German painting, above all with the work of Caspar David Friedrich.12 The Blue Light abounds with images reminiscent of the artist, sweeping unpeopled mountainscapes, in general, or compositions that consciously appear to quote Friedrich, for instance the shot where Vigo stands over the village from the mountaintop in the manner of Traveler Looking over a Sea of Fog or the morning walk in the mist during the final sequence, whose iconography recalls a host of works by the painter. The Blue Light infuses nature with an arousing power; like Friedrich, Riefenstahl transforms landscapes into emotional spaces, granting to exterior nature an interior resonance.13 She underlines her debt to her predecessor by introducing a romantic landscape painter into her narrative, an artist,

Quoted in Wallace's dissertation, p. 285. Cf. the director's similar claim regarding Triumph of 10. the Will in a letter to the editor of Film Library Quarterly, Summer 1972, p. 5: "Since, right down to the premiere of the film no one from the party, neither Hitler nor Goebbels nor others, got to see as much as one meter of the film, nothing can be said, consequently, of the intention or interference of the political leaders. Just as the film is still to be seen today, it came into being from out of my imagination alone." One of Riefenstahl's early dance routines bore the title "Die blaue Blume." 11. Riefenstahl speaks of her work in terms reminiscent of Friedrich's claim that art is "the 12. language of our feeling, or disposition, indeed, even our devotion and our prayers" (quoted in William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1980, p. 74). 13. Consistently we encounter a Friedrich-influenced use of silhouetting, where figures shaded in dark contours pose against a luminescent and vague backdrop, a strategy often to be found in Fanck's Bergfilme. Elsewhere we glimpse, as in Friedrich, figures who stand with their backs to the viewer, staring into the distance, small dots against a vast expanse, characters who embody yearning, persons wishing to merge with the grandeur before them.

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Leni Riefenstahl.The Blue Light. 1932. Vigo.

though, whose creations will also include the map that will bring perdition to Junta.14

If the images and the artistic impetus go back to Friedrich's brand of evocative landscape painting, the narrative proper comes equally as a legacy of the nineteenth century. The earliest versions of the film, the 1932 and 1938 releases, couch the story in a form often found in German Novellen, in a frame story (Rahmenerzdhlung),a legend told to visitors in a modern age of automobiles and tourism.15 Confronted with trinkets bearing Junta's picture when they drive into Santa Maria, a dapper honeymooning couple from the city enter their hotel 14. Vigo was played by Mathias Wieman, a central figure in the Nazi film industry, one of the first to be distinguished by Hitler as a State Actor ("Staatsschauspieler") in 1937. The release version currently in distribution in the United States is the 1952 one, although 15. there do exist silent (I) copies of the original release containing the initial framing passage without the final sequence.

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Casper David Friedrich. Traveler Looking over a Sea of Fog. c. 1818.

room to find a religious painting with the same female image.16 "Who really is this Junta?" asks the young bride. The hotel proprietor, as if awaiting the question, sends for a leather-bound volume with Junta's legend, a tome whose cover bears the mountain girl's countenance. The film then dissolves from the image on the book to a shot of a mist-covered crystal, opening up to a wider view of Junta clasping the rock. The embedded narrative, moving from a contemporary setting to 1866, will explain just who thisJunta really is and how her image is linked to the crystals. Interestingly, the narrative functions in the same way as the onscreen enunciator, the image- and mapmaker Vigo, for both provide solutions to seeming enigmas, offering routes of access to terrains deemed dangerous and demonic.

16. The visit of the couple parallels the entry of another traveler from the outside world in the subsequent story, namely Vigo's.

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The film's images may speak the overwhelming language of nature worship and the sublime, but the narrative in which they are couched stems from an intelligence eager to mine nature's secrets, to fathom its mysteries, to transform superstition into knowledge. This endeavor, as we know from German literary history, inheres in the Novelle, a genre often featuring frame stories whose apparently supernatural foundations give way to the more tangible loci of human agency, causality, and rationality, shifting from a naive world view to a sentimental one.17 The narrative trajectory of The Blue Light involves the answer to the question stated in the prologue, "Who really is this Junta?" During the course of the tale, Junta evolves from a witch and a public disturbance, an agent of the uncanny, into a martyr and popular icon. The film's romantic images hallow nature and impart to the elemental a resonance beyond words; the narrative, on the other hand, casts the marginal and seemingly inexplicable in terms both pragmatic and transparent. The disjuncture between striking images sanctifying the irrational and a narrative framework emanating from a decidedly enlightened intelligence is, as we shall see, only an apparent one. A further crucial generic legacy for Riefenstahl was the mountain films of the 1920s, a popular vein in which she received her start as an actress.18 These Alpine dramas, filmed on location amidst majestic peaks, feature athletic spirits confronting untamed environs. Bound by a hearty code, the mountainmen stand above the pedestrian world of restriction and cultivation, viewing themselves as souls in touch with a mightier destiny, the call of the mountains. Sporting visual effects caught in glaciers, rocky peaks, and snowscapes, Arnold Fanck, the master of this form, built his Bergfilmearound romantic melodramas, triangles involving two climbers, usually close companions, and a mutually shared love interest, a woman who disturbs the male bond. Kracauer appropriately dubbed these films "a mixture of sparkling ice-axes and inflated sentiments," indicting the Bergfilme for their immature male protagonists, without, however, commenting on the conspicuous role played by women in these narratives.19 17. See Martin Swales, The German Novelle, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1977, p. 28: "I would argue that the mainspring of much novelle writing is the contact between an ordered and reliably interpreted human universe on the one hand and an experience or set of experiences that would appear to conflict utterly with any notion of order or manageable interpretation on the other. Hence, the novelle derives its peculiar and insistent energy from what one can best describe as a hermeneutic gamble, as a shock confrontation with marginal events. Implicitly, the attempt to make an ordered statement of that which by definition resists the ordering intention is one of the central undertakings within the narrative universe of the novelle." 18. See Leni Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, Leipzig, Hesse & Becker, 1933, for her recollections of The Holy Mountain, The Great Leap (Der grosse Sprung, 1927), The White Hell of Piz Palii (Die weisse Holle von Piz Pali, 1929), Storms over the Montblanc (Stiirme iiber dem Montblanc, 1930), The White Frenzy (Der weisse Rausch, 1931), The Blue Light, and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). For a useful collection of materials on the mountain film as a genre, see Klaus Kreimeier, ed., Fanck-TrenkerRiefenstahl: Der deutscheBergfilm und seine Folgen, Berlin, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek, 1972. 19. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 111.

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The Blue Light echoes in certain ways Fanck's The Sacred Mountain (Der heilige Berg, 1926), the film in which Riefenstahl made her debut as the dancer Diotima. The prologue to the "story without time and place" presents Riefenstahl initially in a close-up with her eyes shut, an image redolent of a death mask. The dancer then comes to life in a performance by the sea. The editing captures her movements so that the fluid choreography of gestures and leaps seems at one with the force that causes the waves to break, flux captured in slow motion, nature rendered by an apparatus. A woman arrested as still and moving image reappears then as a face on a publicity poster, announcing the dancer's evening offering in a resort hotel. Robert, the mountain climber, gazes briefly at the picture and finds himself perplexed, so troubled that he must storm into the Alpine peaks, as the intertitles put it, "to master the overpowering impression" exercised by this image of a woman. In the Bergfilm, men seek to master mountains and women - with mixed success. In the final sequence, Diotima's two lovers having perished in the obligatory climbing accident caused by their rivalry for her, she returns to the sea, reduced once again to stasis, a person who knows no present, only her sad memories. Woman stands as a site of projection: either as an image of male fascination or as a mental screen whose sole content is male presence. In either case, Diotima becomes someone without a life of her own, a potentially disruptive source of energy and eros harnessed as the image of male fantasy or a woman colonized by her own fantasies about males. She is at once inhibited and inhabited.20 Various critics have also drawn attention to another decisive influence on The Blue Light, namely F.W. Murnau's silent classic, Nosferatu. Many have observed how much similarity the approach of the painter to the mountain village bears to Jonathan Harker's entry into the realm of the vampire in the 1921 film.21 In addition, commentators note how Riefenstahl, like her predecessor, sought to grant natural settings an eerie and ethereal aura, something she, like Murnau, accomplished through special effects, in her case technical ploys involving time-lapse photography, various filters, smoke machines, and manipulation of the lighting. Still, critics have not really established anything more than apparent

The mountain films represent poignant examples of male fantasy work, indications of a crisis 20. in patriarchy during the Weimar era. They render nature as a site of projection, a space that reflects human potential to the point of narcissism: the exterior world becomes an extension of inner life. The attempted mastery of mountains corresponds to a desired control over women; both are seen as unpredictable, fascinating, and potentially fatal. The first sequence of Fanck and G.W. Pabst's The WhiteHell of Piz Palii provides a graphic essentialization of this logic. The explorations of mountain peaks and snowscapes give way to a woman (Maria, played by Riefenstahl) lying prone, with a man's shadow covering her body. This demonstrates a wishful thinking whose aim is containment: one captures the mighty elements and shapes them with a camera eye just as one visually commands and defines female presence. 21. See, for instance, Frieda Grafe, "Leni Riefenstahl: Falsche Bauern, falsche Soldaten und was fur ein Volk," in BeschriebenerFilm 1974-1985, special issue of Die Republik, nos. 72-75 (January 25, 1985), p. 41.

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Leni Riefenstahl.The Blue Light. 1932. Vigo.

borrowings, points of similarity without further significance. The Blue Light exudes at times the "chilly draft from doomsday" atmosphere of Nosferatu.22 Riefenstahl's closeness to Murnau, however, transcends matters of atmospherics and special effects. In significant ways, The Blue Light reflects and builds on certain features of Nosferatu. Both films demonstrate a double perspective linked to images that speak stronger than words and a narrative intelligence seeking to render the inexplicable and unsettling in terms of human generality. In Nosferatu the visual track remains more conclusive than the verbal one, for Murnau's images show us The phrase is from Balazs's review of the film, which appeared in Der Tag on March 9, 1923, 22. and was included in his collection of notices and essays, Der sichtbare Mensch; reprinted in Schriften zum Film, Helmut H. Diederichs, Wolfgang Gersch, and Magda Nagy, eds., Munich, Hanser, 1982, vol. I, pp. 175-176; rendered as quoted in Wallace, "'The Most Important Factor Was the Spirit,"' p. 26.

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Leni Riefenstah.The Blue Light. 1932. Junta.

things that the narrator only partially comprehends and in some cases simply overlooks.23 In The Blue Light, this favoring of the visual coding over the narrative one seems apparent, but will demand further scrutiny. Likewise, the painter Vigo may arrive from the city in the manner of Jonathan Harker, with a door closing mysteriously behind him and a coachman riding away without heeding the traveler's words; nonetheless, he will act as the intruder and become something of a vampire. He will gaze at Junta greedily and lustfully, bending over her sleeping body, enraptured by the sight of her exposed breasts. And in the end, his look will virtually suck all vitality from her in the early morning light. Finally, and most importantly, we encounter the heroines in both texts from the start as framed images: the close-up of Nina Harker at the window, the picture of Junta on the cover of the village chronicle. Nina will become the agent of civilization in Cf. Robin Wood's reading of Nosferatu, "F.W. Murnau," Film Comment,no. 12 (May-June, 23. 1976), pp. 7-8.

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its battle against the demonic side of nature it feels compelled to repress, the forces embodied by the vampire.24 Her sacrifice will bring rescue to the plagueridden city, a sacrifice she willingly takes upon herself after reading The Book of the Vampires. She knows the terms involved and makes a conscious choice. The final question posed by the film is: civilization at what price? Nina assumes the role of a Christian martyr, denying worldly aspirations to save her husband and a community. The Blue Light also casts woman in the role of a martyr. In this case, though, the terms are different. Junta does not understand Vigo's words as he seeks to explain the advantages of mining her secret grotto and thus has no choice in the matter. If the price of civilization in Nosferatu is the sublimation of nature's underworld and the exorcism of its darker side, the price of civilization in The Blue Light similarly involves the vitiation of the elemental and the arrest of potential threat. And in this process a woman is cast in a fateful image as the unwitting agent of culture at large.

Dead Women,Living Legends Junta's tragedy involves a passion play of sullied innocence -a tale mirrorown destiny, claim numerous critics: "There is more than just a Riefenstahl's ing isolated similarity between Riefenstahl's life and the character and expepassing, rience of the intuitive mountain girl. They both live for one ideal. For Junta, it is her beautiful crystalline retreat; for Riefenstahl, it is her art."25 This line of reading stands at odds with critical discussions of the film and Riefenstahl's canon by her two most influential adversaries, Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag. Both writers castigate the mountain films as escapist fare with dangerous implications, works whose high altitudes and lofty attitudes prefigure dispositions that would come to rise in National Socialism: a spirit of self-sacrifice and antirationalism infused with blind enthusiasm and overwrought pathos. The worship of the clouds and mountain peaks leads directly to the sanctification of the Fuhrer.26 "One is tempted toward a straight psychoanalytical interpretation: Nosferatu is the symbol of 24. neurosis resulting from the repressed sexuality (repressed nature); when the neurosis is revealed to the light of day it is exorcised, but the process of its emergence and recognition has been so terrible that positive life (Nina) is destroyed with it" (Wood, p. 8). 25. Wallace, "Leni Riefenstahl from 1923 to 1933," p. 300. See also Renata Berg-Pan, p. 79: "'The story of the girl and that village,' Riefenstahl confessed to another reviewer, 'is nearly the story of my life, but I didn't know that until later."' 26. Sontag's article, "Fascinating Fascism," occasioned spirited debate in West Germany after its appearance in Die Zeit over two weeks, on March 2 and 9, 1975. See Hans Egon Holthusen, "Leni Riefenstahl in Amerika: Zum Problem einer 'faschistischen Asthetik,'" Merkur, no. 29 (July 1975), pp. 569-578; also, a special issue of Frauen und Film devoted to the "Riefenstahl Renaissance," no. 14 (December 1977). For a key statement of auteurist reservations about both Sontag's and Kracauer's approaches to Riefenstahl, see Andrew Sarris, "Notes on the Fascination of Fascism," Village Voice,January 30, 1978, p. 33. Sontag, claims Sarris, "quotes from the very few film historians who support her position, and ignores or insults the rest. Siegfried Kracauer's very questionable From

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In essence, then, The Blue Light recodes Christian symbols in its secular religion of sacrifice, abandon, and death. Early on, Vigo stumbles across figures etched onto a rocky mountainside, a martyr surrounded by mourners, a structure lingered over by the camera, a creation merging elemental nature and human sacrifice in an aesthetic construction. As he passes the faces carved in stone, Vigo asks, "What are those figures?" The question echoes the bride's query about Junta; the connection is not fortuitous. Sontag, likewise, points to Nazi art's celebration of death, its desire to contain the physical and stifle female volition, insights with a bearing on The Blue Light as well.27 Like other Bergfilme, a

woman's potential threat and erotic attraction undergo transformation. At first a public disturbance the object of lustful stares and angry emotions -hence and a figure associated with wild animals, Junta, after her demise, becomes a figure of worship, a source of local reverence. Her metamorphosis mirrors quite poignantly the "kitsch of death" that Saul Friedlander attributes to Nazi aesthetics.28 As Junta expires, we see her face freeze into a crystal-studded image while the frame dissolves into the portrait adorning the book with her story. The same image will serve as a kitsch object offered by children to newly arrived visitors, the picture of someone whose afterlife as a legend, fetish, and commodity has much bearing on the Alpine community's spiritual -and material welfare. Without a doubt, the citizens of Santa Maria act as consummate recyclers of native tradition, hawking crystal images of local heroes and attracting tourists with their gripping village tales. The "Historia della Junta" presented in The Blue Light functions as part of an ideological machinery. It may be true, as Kracauer argues, that Junta "conforms to a political regime which relies on intuition, worships nature and cultivates myths."29 The film, however, does more than simply presage blood-and-soil fustian. Quite literally, The Blue Light provides an allegorical figuration of Nazi cultural politics, involving a peculiar manner of processing reality, a dynamics at once thematized in the film narrative, demonstrated in the various recyclings of Caligari to Hitler is trotted out as if it were holy writ, its mandate for 20- 20 hindsight renewed. Still, the problem with either a prosecution or a defense of Riefenstahl is that so much of the evidence has disappeared in the rubble of the Third Reich that we can never be quite sure whether Leni was Little Eva (as she claims) or Lucretia Borgia (as Sontag suggests) or (more likely) an opportunistic artist who has been both immortalized and imprisoned by the horror of history." 27. Sontag stresses that Nazi art blends eroticism and sublimation. See "Fascinating Fascism," p. 93: "The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a 'spiritual' force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, woman) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse." Saul Friedlander, Reflections of Nazism, p. 29: "The juxtaposition of these two contradictory 28. elements represents the foundation of a certain religious aesthetic, and, in my opinion, the bedrock of Nazi aesthetics as well as the new evocation of Nazism." Junta's face will become an image sold as a souvenir to tourists, a form of the past marketed as pseudo-eternity. See in this light Ludwig Giesz, "Der 'Kitsch-Mensch' als Tourist," in Gillo Dorfies, ed., Der Kitsch, trans. Birgid Mayr, Tiibingen, Wasmuth, 1969, p. 170. 29. Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, p. 259.

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Leni Riefenstahl. The Blue Light. 1932. Villagers.

the text, and underscored by Riefenstahl's obsessive remining of the source after World War II. The film, from the start, champions the mountain community and presents its inhabitants as a hardy culture in touch with archaic impulses, a healthy Gemeinschaft. One may sense, as Kracauer points out, a certain sorrow and nostalgia after Junta's demise, for with her dies innocence and enchantment. Kracauer's acute formulation, however, touches on another voice present in the film's conclusion: "To be sure, at the end the village rejoices in its fortune and the myth seems defeated, but this rational solution is treated in such a summary way that it enhances rather than reduces Junta's significance."30 The film pictures the celebration after the exploitation of the mine as an ecstatic moment not without disquieting overtones, especially in the shot of spilled wine glasses, whose traces on the table suggest bloodletting. 30.

Ibid.

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Oddly enough, though, the title introducing the film heralds the townsfolk of the present as a people untouched by modern malaise. The opening words of the first version bespeak an intact folk: We, the people of the Dolomites, far from the strife and turmoil of the outside world, dwell primitively in the rugged wilderness and magnificence of the Italian Tyrol. We are a simple peasant folk, and strange legends have come down to us through the centuries casting shadows on the peace of our lives. Above all do we cherish the legend of Junta, the Mountain Girl, whose story we have reverently engraved for future generations.31 Oskar Kalbus, the premier film historian in the Third Reich, praised the racial hardiness of their physiognomies, the features of people who had descended from the Visigoths, faces captured in loving close-up by Schneeberger's camera.52 Even if the story of Junta contains an acknowledgment of the town's injustice to her, it is hardly an innocent document. Clearly, the inscribed text a perspective both close to nature and as well as the film as a whole-reflects attuned to modernity. The town markets a legend purchased at a bloody price, a price involving, as Kracauer puts it, a "rational solution" that rids the villagers of someone whom they deem a threat and a nuisance. At the same time they become the heirs to a considerable material legacy, something not all too dissimilar to another solution enacted on individuals viewed by the state as outsiders during the Third Reich. A constellation abides in The Blue Light which functions as a central dynamics in Nazi fantasy production, a triad involving the elemental, the ornamental, and the instrumental. One takes recourse to a world of nature and primacy, reshaping it in new structures. This process, however, is informed by larger designs, indeed an overriding instrumental rationality. It is precisely this third term, though, that becomes elided and to a great degree invisible. National Socialism, as we know from Ernst Bloch, recognized the mighty appeal of nonsynchronous sensibilities, thoughts out of keeping with modern realities, especially a romantic anticapitalism fueled by a discontent with contemporary civilization. One turned to an evocative past of peasants, open countrysides, and idyllic

The 1952 version begins with a voice-over spoken by Vigo (recorded after the war by Mathias 31. Wieman): "Locked in the pathless valleys of Santa Maria, the legend of Junta lives on. On quiet evenings the taciturn peasant tells the wanderer the story of the 'Blue Light.' It is long since extinguished, but on silvery moonlit nights, the secret of beautiful Junta entices the lonely mountaineer to Monte Cristallo's rocky walls." Oskar Kalbus, Vom Werden deutscher Filmkunst, Altona-Bahrenfeld, Cigaretten Bilderdienst, 32. 1935, vol. II, p. 66. Cf. the ironic comments of the Vienna correspondent for Close Up, Trude Weiss, in her short review in the June 1932 issue, p. 121: "I have never seen so many wrinkled faces in my life. ..." The high regard for the power of the human physiognomy is, of course, a central element in Balazs's theory of film.

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communities, utilizing "gothic dreams against proletarian realities,"33 "needs and elements from past ages"34 of decisive value in the state's coordinated effort to capture the imaginations of its citizenry and to control their fantasy life. For all its romantic ideals and images of a transfigured past, German fascism was decidedly involved in the material domination over nature through a vast technology that stretched from the rationalized way in which an entire country was organized to an elaborate bureaucratic mechanism to a military machine, a world war, and ultimately the death camps, vast factories that recycled human bodies, pressing out of them every possible material gain before disposing of them. No doubt, the film industry played a central role in this machinery. At face value, The Blue Light seems marked by romantic sentimentality and virulent antimodernism. When we look more closely, however, we find a striking self-legitimating brand of instrumental rationality, an elaborate ideological construction in the form of a legend that authorizes and accompanies the exploitation of nature, a woman, the past. Despite the lip service paid to the village's regret for its mistreatment of Junta, the text does not provide a single image of for the pained faces of parents and relatives whose sons have mourning -except in search of the blue light. The townspeople of Santa to deaths their plunged Maria have mined the elemental and a woman, placed them in a pleasing ornamental design, all the while seeking to disavow traces of their own instrumental will. The terms of Junta's transformation into an icon deserve another look. Junta, we recall, falls from the mountain to her death, a victim of despair. Vigo stands over the deceased in a translucent morning light. In a subjective shot that aligns the camera's gaze with that of the onscreen artist, we see how the male look virtually metamorphoses Junta's countenance. Vigo's gaze transposes her image, changing the dead woman in front of him into the living presence of legend, a face framed by crystals, which adorns the cover of the village narrative. The look and its transformative powers duplicate the workings of the cinematic apparatus as it dissolves from the dead body to the living legend. Junta is denuded of life, rendered as ornament so that she might enjoy further existence, a transformation that eradicates any threat or independent life and shapes what once was a continual disruption into a more manageable form.35

33. Ernst Bloch, "Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics," trans. Mark Ritter, New German Critique, no. 11 (Spring 1977), p. 27. 34. Ibid., p. 30. 35. Cf. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, trans. Stephen Conway et al., Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 215, where Theweleit discusses fascist "language of occupation: it acts imperialistically against any form of independently moving life."

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Emanations of the Blue Light The initial version of The Blue Light ended with a coda, a return to the framing episode. The couple from the city had driven into town in what appeared to be aviator suits, garbed in a way that masked sexual difference, the woman taking the driver's seat of the car as well. This would appear to be an indication of a decadent modern world where patriarchy has lost its grip. The telling of the tale will provide a needed corrective, edifying the pair and restoring order. For, as we come back to the contemporary setting, we now find the couple united, standing at the window, looking out onto a mountain shrouded in mist. The site of the blue light appears no worse for the wear, retaining its evocative powers despite the incursions of the villagers. The legend of Junta involves the harnessing of nature and the taming of eros, object lessons with precise ideological and commercial benefits. The Blue Light entails, though, a double legend, that of Junta and that of Leni Riefenstahl. As such, it allows us to study the processes behind the making and marketing of legends. If the film presages any future course of events, it intimates the way in which Nazi ideology appropriated various texts, ranging from an idealized past to romantic legacies to the female body, draining them of content, stripping away history, casting these objects in different forms meant to legitimate the present designs of a misogynistic state controlled by a massive machinery. Riefenstahl has talked about her work frequently and consistently, over the years resolutely averring that if she served any cause, it was that of beauty and harmony, not National Socialism. Her major fault, she claims, was her innocence, something she shares with the heroine of her first film: Das blaue Licht in hindsight becomes the director's Mein Kampf. Riefenstahl has endeavored to uphold the popular myth of herself as an instinctive and direct filmmaker rather than the calculating and resourceful figure documented by historical fact. She is a resilient soul, if anything a survivor, every bit as skillful in recycling others' work as she is her own. Her memoirs, published in 1987, tell another story as well, that of an ambitious individual who knew what she wanted and single-mindedly pursued her ends, tracking down Arnold Fanck, gaining access to his crew and expertise, raising money for her own production, fighting battles, mastering crises, and boxing her way through impossible situations.36 The descriptions of her relationship to the mountain peasants, how she entered the village and worked to win their trust, parallels almost exactly the way in which Vigo gains the confidence of Junta.37 If Riefenstahl bears a striking resemblance to anyone in the film, it is to the

See her lengthy discussion of The Blue Light in her Memoiren, Munich/Hamburg, Knaus, 1987, 36. pp. 137-152. 37. Riefenstahl, Kampf in Schnee und Eis, pp. 70ff.

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romantic artist from the big city who expropriates landscapes and physiognomies with a marked regard for the power and commerce value of these raw materials. The Blue Light displays the violation of a woman and her womblike retreat, the sacrifice of a female body that we dare not forget is the function of a woman filmmaker's destruction of her idealized self-image. Leni Riefenstahl stood in front of and behind the camera, at once victim and victimizer, masochist and sadist, the actor in a fantasy in which she acts upon herself through a male surrogate, an extension of the cinematic apparatus she controls. The film duplicates a recurring situation in Riefenstahl's autobiography where she, an unwary soul, confronts male aggression, unwanted sexual advances. In her other feature film, Tiefland, she also assumed the female lead, focusing on herself as the unwitting and hapless object of erotic desire and rape. Her oeuvre, in other words, abounds in moments where she makes a spectacle out of her own suffering with exhibitionistic relish, a predilection that raises crucial questions about Riefenstahl's investment in these demonstrations. The scene of Junta's death in Leni Riefenstahl.The Blue Light. 1932. Vigoand Junta.

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the morning sun amounts to a curious suicide, the relinquishing of an idealized self-image and the simultaneous identification with the filmic apparatus that recasts her death mask as a votive image. When talking about Junta, Riefenstahl typically places the mountain girl beyond all desire. She is sexually innocent, possessing no ultimate volition beyond her preverbal allegiance to nature.38 She lives in the wild among animals in a state of presymbolic bliss, sharing a primitive hut with a near feral child. At the same time, the camera (like Vigo) constantly stalks her, exposing her figure, fetishizing her face and body with filters, softfocus lighting, and striking compositions. The innocence of Riefenstahl's Junta contrasts with the less than innocent strategies of Riefenstahl's camera, its presentation of the mountain girl as an erotic presence and a seductive force, a woman who disrupts the domestic economy of an entire village. The film renders Junta as a source of disturbance and then proceeds to capture, contain, and exorcise her, subsuming a body and an image into the symbolic, enclosing her in a frame, a text, a story. Junta dies, and her tale becomes a founding myth, for the village in the film, for the director of the film. The Blue Light would endear Riefenstahl to Hitler.59 She would become, as B. Ruby Rich puts it, "a sort of Amazon.among the Nazis, the token exceptional woman who was granted 'permission' by the patriarchy to be privileged in its power in exchange for adopting its values."40 The same film that provided a ticket of admission to the new order would also serve, after the war, as a useful identity card absolving Riefenstahl from ideological collusion. The reception history of The Blue Light is a curious one. The film found mixed reviews and lackluster box office returns upon its initial run in 1932. Riefenstahl blamed Jewish film critics for the failure, railing against their inability to understand things German.4' She felt vindicated by foreign responses to 38. In an interview with Michel Delahaye of Cahiers du Cinima, which appeared in the September 1965 number, Riefenstahl spoke of Junta as an embodiment of purity, "a young girl, intact and innocent, whom fear made retract at any contact with reality, with matter, with sex," similar in this regard to the character of Martha in Tiefland; reprinted in Andrew Sarris, ed., Interviews with Film Directors, New York, Avon, 1969, p. 456. 39. Riefenstahl describes her "fateful meeting" with Hitler at length in her Memoiren, pp. 152160. She claims they met in 1932, Hitler having been impressed by The Blue Light, above all by the young woman's ability to assert herself against the dominant film industry and its conventions (p. 158). It was on this occasion that Hitler reputedly asked the director to "make my films when I come to power." 40. B. Ruby Rich, "Leni Riefenstahl: The Deceptive Myth," in Patricia Erens, ed., Sexual Stratagems: The World of Womenin Myth, New York, Horizon, 1979, p. 208. Rich's essay remains the most eloquent expression of feminist hesitation to adopt Riefenstahl as a model. 41. See Wallace's dissertation, p. 394. Cf. the notice by Hermann Sinsheimer, "Zwei Legenden: Das blaue Licht in Palast am Zoo," Film-Kurier, March 26, 1932. Despite its impressive images, the film lacks substance; it is "internally sick" and beyond all hope, "an aborted effort." In the same notice, Sinsheimer compares the film unfavorably to Chaplin's Gold Rush. The Varietycorrespondent in Berlin, likewise, came to a negative conclusion in his review of April 19, 1932: "The picture could have been a worldwide hit but story appeal was ignored. The story does not grip and it is the photography, beautiful in the extreme, and fine production that carry the subject."

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the film, especially by the silver medal awarded her at the Venice Biennale in 1932. (The film would also receive gold medals at the Paris World Fair in 1937 and again in Venice in 1959 as a classic film.)42The Blue Light resurfaced in 1938, released on September 27 by Degeto Kulturfilm, in the wake of the public success of Olympia. The reviewer in the Film-Kurier spoke disdainfully of the film's mixed fortune upon its premiere, attributing this to "non-Aryan sectors," quoting the director's wish that it might now enjoy the enthusiastic response in Germany "denied it earlier because of ill-will and incomprehension."43 This version expunged the names of Jewish coworkers, including the producer H. R. Sokal, the scriptwriter Carl Mayer,"4 and the coauthor Bela Balazs. Riefenstahl, in fact, denied the latter payment for his considerable work on the film, responding to Balazs's inquiry with a terse phrase signed in her hand on Kaiserhof (a favorite gathering place for Nazi luminaries) stationary: "I grant to Herr Gauleiter Julius Streicher of Nuremberg-publisher of Der Stiirmerpower of attorney in matters of the claims of the Jew Bela Balazs on me."45 In 1951, Riefenstahl reassembled outtakes of the film, the original negative having been lost, added a new score, redubbed the voices, and later re-released The Blue Light, now shorn of the framing passages. This dramatic reshaping of the narrative accords to the director's revision of her own history. For without the prologue and coda, there remains no tension between the premodern and the contemporary world, merely a melancholy tale addressed to a timeless present. If any flashback now conditions how we see The Blue Light, it is the filmmaker's retrospective reading of the film as a personal sort of paradise lost, a paradise Riefenstahl would seek to regain in subsequent years in projected recastings of the source as a ballet and a new film version, neither of which would ultimately take shape.46 The Blue Light would endure nonetheless as a masterpiece, a hallSee Wallace's dissertation, pp. 392ff., for more specifics on the reception history of The Blue 42. Light. See note 8. An additional notice appeared in Film-Kurier on September 28 by Gunther 43. Schroark, "Das blaue Licht/Kurbel": "The film, whose artistic merit will remain unforgettable, had a very strong resonance." The January 1939 issue of Der Deutsche Film ran an editorial pondering whether there is such a thing as a German camera style ("Gibt es einen deutschen Kamerastil?" pp. 176-177). The Blue Light is singled out as an example of such a national cinematography. 44. Mayer apparently assisted Balazs in the writing of the script as well as participating in the editing, conflicting violently with Fanck, who also played a key role in the cutting of the film. See Zsuffa, p. 219. Zsuffa's reconstruction of the production and the actual division of labor provides a more dynamic sense of the collaboration, cooperation, and conflict that marked the film. His carefully documented discussion draws on private correspondence, archival materials, and contemporary reviews, making it much more credible than Riefenstahl's recollections. In the "Riefenstahl File," Berlin Document Center; quoted in Zsuffa, p. 230. Cf. Riefenstahl's 45. description of her reaction to correspondence from Balizs of mid-1933 in her Memoiren, p. 194: Balazs, a friend and a Communist, had fled to Moscow and spoke of his desire to return to his Hungarian homeland. "With tears in my eyes I held the letters in my hand." 46. Negotiations regarding the ballet version ended in a contract signed on October 27, 1938, in which Riefenstahl granted rights for the dance adaptation that would premiere in Paris and tour Europe. For reasons unknown to Riefenstahl, the ballet never came about. The film remake was to

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mark of German cinema, an important title in a celebrated career, consequences of Riefenstahl's reevaluation by auteurists in the '60s and '70s, first in America, Great Britain, and France, then later in Germany.47 The Hitler-wave in West Germany of the mid- and late '70s also led to renewed fascination with Riefenstahl in the public sphere, on television, and in the media in general. In the current climate of historical revisionism, in the attempts to normalize the twelve years between 1933 and 1945 and to make them an integral part of the German past, Riefenstahl's memoirs assume a quite timely and exemplary status.48 If we are to read The Blue Light as a master text, we need not defer to the director and her advocates. The Blue Light shows how a woman and a mountain grotto are sacrificed for the sake of a village, a community that mines both as raw material, taking advantage of their considerable use-value. Leni Riefenstahl likewise mined a natural setting and a romanticized past in making this film, repeatedly avowing she was guided by intuition and vision rather than any sociopolitical calling. These appropriations reflect the manner in which National Socialism would work over nature, woman, and history. Perhaps Riefenstahl

have been made in England, directed by Riefenstahl, with Pier Angeli playing Junta, and Lawrence Harvey, Vigo. According to Wallace, public controversy in England, including unfavorable articles in the Daily Expressand other newspapers, led to the cancellation of the project ("Leni Riefenstahl from 1923 to 1933," pp. 401-403.) 47. See, among other essays and articles, the special issue of Film Comment,Winter 1965, "1965 Comeback for Leni Riefenstahl." The lead piece by Gordon Hitchens, "Interview with a Legend," contains a declaration of the writer's imaginary relationship to the director: "One doesn't interview Riefenstahl. One listens. And watches. No question-she's a remarkable woman" (p. 6). The number as a whole gave rise to a lively exchange of opinion, albeit mainly pro-Riefenstahl, in the Summer 1965 issue of Film Comment, pp. 82-87. A passionate defense of the director ensued in Kevin Brownlow, "Leni Riefenstahl," Film (London), Winter 1966-67, pp. 14-19: "Art transcends the artist . . . politics and art must never be confused . . . these old adages are forgotten instantly as the name of Riefenstahl is raised. And it is our fault. We have ourselves been the victims of insidious propaganda" (p. 15). See also Jeffrey Richards, "Leni Riefenstahl: Style and Structure," The Silent Picture, no. 8 (Autumn 1970), pp. 17-19. Gordon Hitchens played a key role in another American homage to Riefenstahl, a special issue of Film Culture devoted to the director, no. 56-57 (Spring 1973). WCBS "Camera Three" in New York aired a two-part program on Riefenstahl in mid-1973. See Amos Vogel's critical commentary, "Can We Now Forget the Evil That She Did?" New York Times, May 13, 1973: "The program was created with the active participation of Miss Riefenstahl, whose charisma has already previously inspired other impressionable men to smooth her attempt to transform herself into an innocent, apolitical artist." The international wave of enthusiasm eventually resulted in a celebratory special issue on the director in Germany, the August 1972 number of Filmkritik,replete with a sympathetic interview, notes from the filmmaker's Penthesileaproject, an admiring portrait of Riefenstahl, and a comprehensive filmography. The issue prompted much discussion in West Germany. See, for instance, Rudolph Ganz, "Leni Riefenstahls fragwirdige Renaissance," Frankfurter Rundschau, August 25, 1972; Klaus Kreimeier, "Zum Riefenstahl-Heft der 'Filmkritik,"' epd Kirche und Film, September 1972; and Gerd Albrecht, "Nochmals: Der Fall Riefenstahl. Gedanken iiber die Propaganda und ihre Bewunderer," epd Kirche und Film, November 1972, pp. 18-19. 48. The memoirs were released in August 1987 to coincide with the director's 85th birthday. For a particularly derisive reaction to the book, see Fritz J. Raddatz, "Hitler lobte Helenes Apfelstrudel. Leni Riefenstahls Memoiren: Dumme Plaudereien einer Hofschranze," Die Zeit, October 9, 1987.

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functioned, in Hitler's estimation, as the era's "perfect German woman"49 precisely because she so profoundly put her person and her image at the disposal of the male order. Her debut film becomes in this way an act of submission, the demonstrated willingness to sacrifice oneself and one's preferred image for the sake of a people's destiny. Indeed, Riefenstahl would serve as a most devoted subject. Nazi cinema practiced-and exemplified-a reactionary mode of modthe cultural an instrumentalism ernism, blending system of the romantic past with the rationality of modern technology.50 Riefenstahl's debut remains both instructive and provocative for us today as a film made during the Weimar era which prefigures Nazi fantasy production, as a text shrouded in the jargon of authenticity which in fact dramatically bears out the dialectic of enlightenment. The Blue Light emanates a fatal beam: it anticipates and embodies the abuse of the machine cinema under National Socialism; moreover, it illustrates the continuing attraction of that machine and its central movers up to the very present.

Quoted in Gilston: 13. Cf. Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family, 49. and Nazi Politics, New York, St. Martin's, 1987, p. 6: "The separation between masculine and feminine spheres, which followed logically and psychologically from Nazi leaders' misogyny, relebeneath and beyond the dominant world of men." gated women to their own space-both See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and 50. the Third Reich, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Hans Haacke's Contribution to Points of Reference38/88

Styrian Autumn billboard announcing firebombingof Hans Haacke's Und ihr habt doch gesiegt: On the night of November9, 1938, all synagogues in Austria were looted, destroyed,and set on fire. And during the night of November2, 1988, this memorial was destroyedby a firebomb. (Photo: Angelika Gradwohl.)

On November 2, 1988, Hans Haacke's contribution to the Styrian Autumn Festival's public art exhibition was firebombed at the instigation of a well-known Nazi. The works in the exhibition, entitled Points of Reference 38/88, were all commissioned for designated sites that had served, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, as offices and propaganda centers for the Third Reich. In a period of increasing attention both to public art and to cultural representations of the Nazi past, we felt that this incident merited a documentary presentation. In contrast to many recent, highly acclaimed public art events-which testify to the growth of a new public art industry-Points of Reference insisted upon specificity with regard to context. Far from restricting the possibilities of public art, this concern for specificity demonstrates a crucial understanding of problems in contemporary cultural practice. It is, in fact, the abstraction of geography, aesthetics, and history endemic to much public art that reduces it to the process of myth-making, thereby neutralizing and spectacularizing it. Our hope is that this documentation will initiate further discussion of the critical issues raised by Points of Referenceand the work not only of Haacke but of all the participating artists.* -Douglas Crimp and Rosalyn Deutsche * The participantsincluded: Dennis Adams, Peter Baren, Jacques Charlier, Walter Daems, Braco Dimitrijevic,Fedo Ertl, Bill Fontana,Jochen Gerz, Hans Haacke,Eric Hattan,Werner Hofmeister, Gruppe Irwin, Kogler+Scheffknecht, Beate Passow, Norbert Radermacher,Heribert Sturm.

Decorationsfor a Nazi rally in Graz on July 25, 1938. (Photo courtesyLandesmuseumJoanneum, Graz.)

Hans Haacke. Und ihr habt doch gesiegt. 1988.

Protocols of the Exhibition Points of Reference 381/88

WERNER

FENZ

translated by MARIA-REGINA KECHT Protocol 1: The Plan of the Project Points of Referenceaims to challenge artists to confront history, politics, and society, and thus to regain intellectual territory which has been surrendered to everyday indifference in a tactical retreat, a retreat that has been continual, unconscious, and manipulated. Thus, a vital forum for effective artistic argumentation has been lost. Points of Reference considers history as a catalyst for the present, not as a systematic coming-to-terms with the past, but as a look back from the perspective of modern consciousness, because "history does not repeat itself." Therefore, interest in the subject matter determines the work's form. Aesthetic qualities are not set beforehand, but result from intellectual abilities which emerge in a very specific context. Points of Referencewould like to avoid spectacular, artistic decorations of the city; it considers public space not as a museum without walls but as an intellectual space of action, so that technocratic-normative control can be resisted, at least temporarily. There are neither restrictions nor prescriptions with regard to the media that the artists should use. The task is to find, independent of movements and fashions, contemporary signs whose effectiveness and impact are to be tested in their direct confrontation with an urban public. The starting point is the specific (historical, intellectual, spatial) situation. The work of art results from confronting this environment. The choice of places, which were points of reference for the Nazi regime -and are in some cases now marked as such, but in others only now being brought back to memoryrepresents the historical dimension. (Thus, the "logical" places for art in the city were not chosen.) The creative use made of these places constitutes the artistic contribution. Points of Reference is the concerted attempt of art to make up for the aesthetic failure of innocently decorating life.

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Protocol 2: The Aim of the Project as It Concerns the Artists The main project of the visual arts for this year's Styrian Autumn is entitled Points of Reference 38/88. Fourteen artists from Europe and the US will present their works in fourteen locations in the city of Graz. Thematically, the project has been designed so that history becomes the starting point for reflection on the present and the future. The artistic possibilities of the visual arts are to be manifested in all contextually meaningful ways. There is certainly no intent to illustrate history, but, in the spirit of the Styrian Autumn, these works of art should be contemporary manifestations of the Zeitgeist. The historical points of reference were chosen for two specific reasons: 1) to avoid a more or less harmless, unengaged exhibition in the city; and 2) to encourage artists to make contemporary statements using contemporary languages of art in places of historical significance. This project excludes neither a connection with the past nor a projection into the future, nor a confrontation with the present. What is important, in my estimation, is that form also functions as an aspect of thematic considerations. Graz was given the honorary title Stadt der Volkserhebung("City of the People's Insurrection") by the Nazis. It received this distinction because the idea of the "movement" spread earlier and faster in Graz than elsewhere. The selected Schaltstellen ("points of control") were identical with those in other cities of occupied Austria and the Altreich ("the Reich proper"). letter of invitation to approxiThis was-in an abridged version-the mately thirty artists from Austria and abroad. The selection was determined neither according to age nor to narrow criteria of trend-setting style. There were two factors in the decision: The serious interest in working with public space and a subjective judgment of overall quality. Eighteen locations were presented to the artists; the functions of the places in the past and in the present were specified and documented by photographs. Naturally, the artists' reactions varied. A small number, including Christian Boltanski, Ian Hamilton Finlay, and Zvi Goldstein, declined because of previous engagements. Edward and Nancy Kienholz did not want to work in public space. Guillaume Bijl, Hanna Frenzel, Dani Karavan, and Raimund Kummer apparently did not receive the letter of invitation. Despite intensive efforts, no Italian artist could be identified whose work would have shown a necessary congruity between his or her own position and the topic of the project. Several of the invited artists responded with preliminary sketches by return mail; others expressed very great interest in the goal of the project; still others

Protocols of the Exhibition, Points of Reference 38/88

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made their participation contingent on their visit to Graz and the selected locations. Since such an on-site visit was to be an integral part of the structure of the exhibition, and was therefore necessary, more than twenty artists came to Graz. Ultimately, their encounter with the intellectual climate and the appearance of the city was, as planned, crucial for their decision to participate in the project, and if so, in what form. Thus, in most cases, a rather specific concept of the work was developed in Graz, but sketches and plans were later modified and sharpened. Approaches to the project varied: Some artists did research for nearly two weeks; others made spontaneous proposals, with space, size, and color determined on the spot. The artists were entirely free in their choice of location. Originally the number was limited to fourteen (stations of the cross), but because some additional proposals were so good, the number was increased to sixteen. The main square is the only location used twice. From the options provided, only Simmering-Graz-Pauker, a railroad car factory in the Eggenberger Allee, a house located at Merangasse 36, and the Annenhoff movie theater on Annenstrasse were not chosen. This was not due to lack of attractiveness, but resulted from artistic and technical considerations. Protocol 3: The Artists, the Aim of the Project, and Its Execution Surprisingly, although the budget for the project was something less than ideal, neither any artist's participation nor the realization of his or her plans suffered for financial reasons. Of course, in order to achieve this success the organizers had to demonstrate a good deal of flexibility and talent in their request for material help, and the artists had to be quite disciplined. But once won over to the project of the exhibition, nobody saw in the tight budget an excuse not to start the work or, even worse, not to complete the work once begun. It cannot be denied, however, that in a number of cases small modifications were necessary in order to make ends meet. These were modifications that, in retrospect, actually benefited the works affected, since the reduction of the installation or its relocation permitted a more pointed signification. The exhibition was still only on paper. In order to use public space one must work diligently to get permission and authorization from each institution that administers the space often from each institution separately, as painful experience taught us. Living space is becoming more and more crowded with things from the billboard to the chestnut stand, from information systems (superfluous or poorly designed) to institutionalized festive decorations. In the best case, bad conscience manifests itself in the form of a commissioned public work of art. "But, please, a bit outside the city center." Out where the grayness of our cities is omnipresent. Admittedly, there was one advantage-this use of at the same time, two disadvantages-it is of space is only temporary-but,

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current relevance and thus potentially controversial, and also, of course, tied to history. "The past, yes, but this particular one (still? yet again?)." And what's worse, these works of art are in prominent locations where everybody has to pass, look, and listen. Once the authorities had expressed their willingness in principle to make this this exhibition possible, we had to follow through with the details-and process led to the most explosive situation ever faced by the Styrian Autumn. Even a one-day sound test of Sonic Projectionsfrom Schlossberg by Bill Fontana provoked complaints of disturbance of the peace. Among the particularly controversial locations were, as it turned out, the clocktower on top of the Schlossberg, which is a landmark for the city, and the Column of the Virgin Mary, which is a historical, religious, and urban monument. But the municipal government was cooperative. It cooperated with proclamations like those, for instance, of the Property Administration, one of the principal partners in the attainment of our goals, which would have been acceptable to any clique of engaged artists. Threatened delays could be avoided through personal conversations in which objections could be overcome. A few objections, however, had to be accepted. Most aggravating was the refusal of the Austrian railroad to let Peter Baren paint the huge glass in the hall of the station. This is the only project which had to be left unrealized. The artists were very flexible in their response to the justified concerns of the owners of plazas, parks, and buildings, so that any modifications, worked out together with the technical team, did not affect the intended overall concept of the project. That is how Points of Reference 38/88 was possible.

The Monument is Invisible, the Sign Visible

WERNER

FENZ

translated by MARIA-REGINA KECHT Robert Musil's remark that a monument is immune to public attention, thus "invisible," is an old and hackneyed phrase.' But as it bears on the issue of art in public space, the remark gets to the core of the matter, even when taken out of its historical context. His remark is even more apt when the issue is considered within the broader framework of visual cultural production in general of the past two decades. Recent "open air exhibitions," such as portions of Documenta 8, Skulptur Projekte in Miinster (1987), Century 87 in Amsterdam, or the two Viennese events Freizone Dorotheergasseand Querfeld I, have brought art for public spaces back to the center of attention. Until recently the tradition of permanent or temporary sculpture parks, from Middelheim and Basel to Geneva (to mention only European examples), has been overshadowed by the hectic activities in galleries and major exhibition spaces. Even events such as the Risch Art Prize for art in public places, which has been awarded regularly since 1983, have received hardly any attention from journals or the general public. In Austria itself, the interest in "public art" has been kept alive, at least in some places (even if limited to small groups of cognoscenti, some of whom have even raised the issue of our conception of democracy). There are various examples of such "art-on-site" projects; one of the most controversial and provocative was the design of the Vienna conference center, and, of course, there was the media debate about the antifascist monument by Alfred Hrdlicka. The discussions about artistic intervention in an already visually polluted urban space are, in fact, political. They are political, intensely so, because suddenly an area of creative potential that has traditionally belonged to museums and galleries now escapes their control and establishes itself in places where different norms have been in effect for a long time: namely, in the world of urban renovation and restoration, of the postmodern, functional architecture of banks, insurance companies, and government 1. Robert Musil, "Denkmale," in Gesammelte Werke (appearing in volumes classified by prose, dramas, and letters), Hamburg, 1957, pp. 480-483. Quoted in Hans-Ernst Mittig, "Das Denkmal," in Eine Geschichteder Kunst im Wandel ihrer Funktionen, vol. II, Munich, Funkkolleg Kunst series, 1987, p. 532.

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buildings -government buildings are a bit more ornate and not entirely avantgarde, because the vanguard has long been building abroad. And there is also, of of it quite ugly. course, the proudly presented municipal decoration -most After all, the city simply needs garages, busstops, systems of ordering and directing people, advertising spaces. Whoever would dare to raise a voice against these objects would expose him- or herself to the accusation of undermining the "system" through disorder, uncertainty, and confusion. The city is an organism supposedly functioning for the benefit of us all. At best, the aesthetic quality of these things is at the level of ordinary contemporary visual culture, endlessly repeated. It is only the eternal skeptics who are not interested in confirming what is claimed to have grown up organically, and who question the basic necessity of such conventional constructions and/or their specific forms. This happens, however, on the level of so-called public space, with all its conflicts, and not in the arena of artistic expression itself. On both sides of the conflict, it is ultimately a series of misunderstandings and contradictions which contribute to the reactions. On the one hand, there is the repeatedly and intentionally maintained fiction of a public space, which, in fact, has already long been occupied by private interests, so that "the public" supports something that it lost long ago. As Peter Weibel, building on a similar premise, has put it, The space left to the individual by the relentless terror of public signs of state and industry has become so constricted that, without any question, formal [formal?] doubts are appropriate regarding the extent to which the invasion of corporate signs and trademarks is compatible with the fundamental rights of a democracy. . . . The overt logo-terror and the covert state terror call for the individual to take over public space in order to reassert the claim to the basic democratic rights which the state denies.2 On the other hand, there is the artist's frequently unsuccessful attempt to occupy public space with designs that originate in the orbit of museums and that adhere to conventions of art per se, conventions not necessarily transferrable to public space. As an example, let me refer to a project in Kassel: In 1985 Eberhard Fiebig created an abstract sculpture of steel plates welded together and mounted on a concrete base in front of the new gymnasium of the Martin Luther King school. The twelve identical plates form the framework for an imaginary octahedron and are invisibly screwed to the base in such a way that a viewer gets the impression that they are floating in the air. The stereometric sculp-

Peter Weibel, "Spezifische Situationen. Zeichen im 6ffentlichen Raum. Situationistische 2. Skulpturen," in Freizone Dorotheergasse(exhibition catalogue), Vienna, 1988.

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ture constitutes a carefully designed unity with the base and harmonizes well with the background of the gym roof, provided that the angle for a photograph is chosen correctly. If one looks at the sculpture from the school yard, its signifying function is about zero because, in that case, the well designed trash cans and lighting fixtures dominate. The symbolic message of the sculpture does not come across; it merely refers to itself-as a modern museum piece.3 As this example suggests, there is a difference only in appearance and degree between the seahorse fountain and the abstract sculpture, if one bears in mind the function of a "public work of art," and this (mis)proportion is also to be found in entire exhibitions in open spaces, particularly in urban space. It cannot be a matter of using art to make up for some aspect of the urban environment or as a counterpoint; nor can it be a matter of assigning art some public quality by merely placing it - without roof or walls - in front of or next to some building, or by forcing it into the remaining free space, which, in fact, has been cluttered by the urban "furniture" mentioned above. And it can surely be even less the purpose of such presentations to turn the perceptual realm of art inside out, which, even when opened, is ultimately hermetically closed. Art that is presented in a clearly defined public space must be related to that space. It must derive its form and its contents, its appearance and its stance from this new forum of action, must be made accountable there, which is to say that it must confront different perceptual and evaluative criteria. This does not mean that art must adapt itself in the sense of superficial sensationalism, but rather at the level of concrete social relations. Only when art confronts the public space as such can it become effective within it. To act effectively means, however, to be partisan, to make and justify decisions concerning the intended sphere of action, which can certainly be seen as educating but not necessarily as didactic. We can talk about art in public space only when the work of art is committed to something that corresponds to its function at that specific location, whether it is there temporarily or permanently: namely, to manifest a means of understanding nature, history, and society.4 Points of Referencehas committed itself both in artistic aim and in execution to this sort of interpretation of public art. The occasion -the annexation of Austria by Hitler fifty years ago-and the locations-important offices and the artists with specific places of propaganda of the Nazi regime -presented contexts in which to define their own field of endeavor. Thus, they were to

3. Veit Loers, "Auch eine Geschichteder modernen Skulptur,"in SkulpturProjekte(exhibition catalogue),Muinster,1987, p. 316. 4. My view of this problem corresponds with the general considerationsWerner Busch has

articulated in his essay "Kunst und Funktion," in Kunst und Funktion-Zur Fragestellung, Munich, FunkkollegKunstseries, 1987, p. 1.

Einfuhrung in die

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assume responsibility toward history and society. Whoever interprets such responsibility merely as a constraint considers art as a closed system of rules outside of social relations. Whoever randomly attributes the overused term of engaged art to this project thereby restricts art's communicative function to the four walls of a gallery. Whoever sees the freedom of art jeopardized by this project thereby banishes art to spaces free from society, which is to alienate it from society, for free spaces are empty spaces. Points of Referenceaims, however, precisely to fill this empty space, filling it not through thoughtless acceptance of the battle cry "art into the streets," which caused some confusion even back in the '60s, but rather through creating a new web of relations between art and urban structures, without trying to smooth out potential contradictions. The specific reference to "Nazi locations" entails, however, more than exclusively historical dimensions. It was precisely the use of art in public spaces that, under the Nazis, was subject to a finely worked-out system of strict ideological rules. However, not only the ideological but also the aesthetic levels of this use constitute historical, as much as art-historical, facts. The monuments of that time, whether they still exist or are reconstructed, are certainly not invisible, especially because our historical consciousness no longer allows complacency concerning the Nazi era. From this point of view, the contribution of Points of Referencewill, through the provoked and provocative dialogue with space and time-present, past, and visible as signs. future-become

Und ihr habt doch gesiegt, 1988

HANS

HAACKE

Every fall since 1968, a cultural festival known as the Styrian Autumn has been held in Graz, the capital of the Austrian province of Styria. The festival presents concerts, theater, and opera productions, film showings, symposia by writers, and art exhibitions. Although constituted as an independent organization, its director is chosen by a board on which representatives of the provincial and the city government play an important role. In 1988, the board was chaired by Professor Kurt Jungwirth, the deputy governor of Styria and a prominent member of the conservative party (OVP). Graz was represented by its social democratic mayor, Alfred Stingl (SPO), and its commissioner of culture Helmut Strobl (OVP). The festival is funded by the province, the city of Graz, and the Austrian government. Dr. Peter Vujica, the director of the Styrian Autumn in 1988, chose for the twentieth anniversary of the festival the motto "Guilt and Innocence of Art" and suggested that reference be made to Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938. The Anschluss was the theme of a number of public events in Austria in the year of its fiftieth anniversary. Inevitably, the enthusiastic welcome Hitler received when his troops marched into Austria became the subject of agitated public debate. That debate was further fuelled by the controversy surrounding the role the recently elected Austrian president, Kurt Waldheim, had played as a Wehrmacht officer in the Balkans during World War II. Dr. Vujica commissioned Dr. Werner Fenz, the curator of the city's Neue Galerie, to organize the visual arts section for 1988. Dr. Fenz invited artists from various countries to produce works for temporary installation in selected public places in Graz. He chose as Points of Reference38/88 locations that had played a significant role during the Nazi regime, such as the police/Gestapo headquarters, city hall, squares where Nazi rallies had been held, the Hitler Youth headquarters, the bishop's palace, and so forth. One of the city's older monuments, the Mariensdule (Column of the Virgin Mary), rises in a square at the south end of Herrengasse, the most prominent street of Graz. A fluted column on a massive base, crowned by a gilded statue of the Virgin on a crescent moon, it was erected late in the seventeenth century to

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Columnof the VirginMary. commemorate the victory over the Turks. It has been a popular landmark ever since.

When Hitler conferred on Graz the honorary title Stadt der Volkserhebung ("City of the People's Insurrection"), the ceremony onJuly 25, 1938, was held at the foot of the Mariensiule. Graz had earned this title as an early and vital Nazi stronghold in Austria. Weeks before the Anschluss, 15,000 Nazis had paraded down Herrengasse in a torchlight parade, the swastika flag had been hoisted from the balcony of city hall, and Jewish shop windows had been smashed.

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For the 1938 celebration, the Mariensaiule had been hidden under an enormous obelisk, draped in red fabric, and emblazoned with the Nazi insignia and the inscription UND IHR HABT DOCH GESIEGT ("And You Were Victorious after All"). This claim of ultimate triumph referred to the failed putsch in Vienna on July 25, 1934, four years earlier, during which the Austro-fascist chancellor, Dr. Engelbert Dollfuss, had been murdered by Nazis. The obelisk was topped by a fire bowl.

Column of the Virgin Mary,July 25, 1938. (Photo courtesyLandesmuseumJoanneum, Graz.)

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Fenz designated the Mariensiule and its surroundings as one of the sixteen "points of reference." According to photographs of its transformation into a Nazi victory column, I had its appearance of July 25, 1938, reconstructed for the Styrian Autumn. The only difference from the original was an addition around the base. Listed, white on black ground in the fractura typeface preferred by the Nazis, were "The Vanquished of Styria: 300 gypsies killed, 2,500 Jews killed, 8,000 political prisoners killed or died in detention, 9,000 civilians killed in the war, 12,000 missing, 27,900 soldiers killed." Facing the obelisk, on a spot where, in 1938, a wall of large swastika flags served as a backdrop for the Nazi dignitaries addressing their uniformed audience, I had a billboard erected to hold sixteen posters. With a swastika in the center of each, the posters carried, in white fractura on a red ground, the inscription "Graz-City of The People's Insurrection." Pasted into the middle of the swastikas were facsimile reproductions of documents from 1938. Among them were several classified advertisements from the local newspapers announcing the Aryan ownership or recent "Aryanization" of local shops and the fact that Nazi paraphernalia was in stock. In others, "Aryans" were looking for jobs or marriage partners. One warned the public that he would have anybody prosecuted who spread rumors he might not be "Aryan." Also included were the university law school's catalogue page with the listing of courses on the new race laws and Germanic legal doctrine, as well as the congratulatory telegram the university president had sent to Hitler. There were, as well, reproductions of the prayer with which the city's pastor welcomed the new Nazi era and ads by employees publicly thanking their employers for having granted them a bonus on the occasion of the Anschluss. Also represented was the local newspaper's jubilant report of the burning of the synagogue: "For Graz the problem of the provocative presence of a Jewish temple has now been unequivocally solved by the will of the people." And there was a facsimile of the Gestapo list of motor vehicles confiscated from local Jews. When asked to provide a statement to accompany the proposal for my piece, Und ihr habt doch gesiegt, in the catalogue of Points of Reference 38188, I wrote: "'And you were victorious after all,' the Nazis proclaimed, full of pride, on the red fabric with their eagle and the swastika, which decorated the Mariensdule in Graz on July 25, 1938. They were referring to themselves. Fifty years later, I hope we can make sure that their cheering will turn out to have been premature." As soon as the obelisk was covered with the red drapery carrying the inscriptions and the Nazi eagle and it became clear why the statue of the Virgin had been encased, there was commotion at the site. Throngs of people gathered and engaged in heated debate over whether, after fifty years, one should stir up the Nazi past again. Some of the opposition was clearly motivated by anti-Semitic sentiments. While most people of retirement age were incensed, the local TV also showed several passionate supporters of the idea that they must confront and Hans Haacke.Und ihr habt doch gesiegt. 1988.

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I

Hans Haacke. Und ihr habt doch gesiegt. 1988. Detail.

come to terms with their ugly past. Among them was an old woman commenting, while the camera was rolling, "I wonder why these people are so upset. They must feel guilty." The reaction of those who, due to their age, could not have been implicated in the Nazi period, was very mixed, ranging from hostility, indifference, and incomprehension to enthusiastic approval of the Styrian Autumn's project. In their opening address, both the mayor of Graz and the deputy governor stressed the need for more education about recent history, particularly for the young. And they also stressed that any exhibition of art in public places inevitably has political connotations. No art dealers or critics from outside the region attended the opening. Local media coverage was generous and for the most part decidedly favorable. The sixteen posters with documents from 1938 were torn down frequently and had to be replaced. But they also attracted attentive readers, including an occasional class of schoolchildren under the guidance of their teacher. Other works in the exhibition were vandalized, too, probably more out of aggression

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Hans Haacke.Und ihr habt doch gesiegt. 1988. Posterwall. against what the vandals perceived as offensive to their notions of art or as a prank than for political reasons. An audio piece by the Californian Bill Fontana, in which powerful loudspeakers boomed the sounds of Hamburg foghorns and the mating calls of exotic animals, particularly incurred the population's ire, and it was eventually turned off. From the beginning, a guard was posted at the obelisk every night. Out of the view of the guard, about a week before the closing of the exhibition, on the night of November 2, my memorial to the victims of the Nazis in Styria was firebombed. Although the fire department was able to extinguish the flames soon, much of the fabric and the top of the obelisk were burned, and the statue of the Virgin was severely damaged when the soldered joints of the copper sculpture melted. The local, the national, and also the West German press reported the firebombing, some relating it to the hostile reactions to the Burgtheater's premiere of Der Heldenplatz by the Austrian playwright Thomas Bernhard. Many

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headlines now referred to the ruin of the Mahnmal ("memorial") as Schandmal ("monument of shame"), strongly condemning the arson and the suspected political motivation behind it. An exception was the Neue Kronen Zeitung, the largest and most conservative Austrian daily tabloid, which had been the strongest supporter of Kurt Waldheim. The Graz editor used the occasion to accuse the leaders of the Catholic Church for having permitted the encasement of the Mariensdule and the politicians for having squandered tax money for such a "shameful" purpose. Following the arson, Richard Kriesche, an artist from Graz, called for a fifteen minute demonstration of silence at the ruin to take place at noon on the next Saturday. About 100 people from the local art community joined him and discussed the meaning of the event with the crowd of Saturday shoppers that had gathered around. For days afterwards, inspired by the Katholische Aktion (Lay Apostolate), leftist political groups, and students, people demonstrated, deposited flowers, and, at night, lit candles at the foot of the burned obelisk. Kriesche, the mayor, and some local newspapers and others proposed to leave the ruin in place, as a memorial, beyond the time of the exhibition, until Christmas. But the conservative party (OVP) and pressure from Graz merchants eventually defeated this plan. In commemoration of Kristallnacht, the Styrian Autumn covered the billboard of sixteen posters with the inscription: "During the night of November 9, 1938, all synagogues in Austria were looted, destroyed, and set on fire. And during the night of November 2, 1988, this memorial was destroyed by a firebomb." With the help of a police sketch and descriptions from two people who had seen him from afar, the arsonist was arrested out of the crowd lining the streets of Graz during the silent march commemorating Kristallnacht. He was identified as an unemployed thirty-six-year-old man who had been traveling in neo-Nazi circles. The instigator of the firebombing was also arrested. He is a well-known sixty-seven-year-old Nazi. Reports from Graz suggest that the events surrounding Points of Reference 38 / 88 may have served as a catalyst for a critical examination of the local political culture. Stefan Karner, a professor for contemporary social and economic history at the University of Graz and author of a book entitled Styria during the Third Reich, 1938-1945, wrote about his observations: I can assure you that many people in Graz have been deeply affected, particularly by the damage done to the artwork. And they suddenly realized how important it is to deal with this period, including in artistic terms, and how problematic this subject still seems to be in Graz. I believe many of the reactions give reason to take heart and to be optimistic. Hans Haacke.Und ihr habt doch gesiegt after firebombingon November2, 1988. (Photo:Angelika Gradwohl.)

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

BENJAMIN

H. D. BUCHLOH

Even amnesia suffersfrom the compulsion of being unable to forget; that is what we call repression. -Jurgen Habermas, "Keine Normalisierung der Vergangenheit" The group of paintings entitled October 18, 1977 that Gerhard Richter completed in the late fall of 1988 immediately confronts its viewers with the question of the very possibility of representing history, both in contemporary painting and in modernism in general. Despite their apparent continuity with Richter's early photopaintings,' these paintings in fact constitute the first attempt in Richter's oeuvre to address historically specific public experience. The two earlier series of paintings that one could most easily identify as the precedent for the new series would be the Eight Student Nurses (1966) and the 48 Portraits (1971-72). As depictions of recent murder victims,2 on the one hand, and as presentations of figures of public history, on the other, however, a comparison with these two groups instantly clarifies their distance and their difference from the paintings October 18, 1977. Richter's recent decision to represent current public history, that is, simultaneously to violate the prohibition against representing historical subjects in modern painting and to break the taboo against rememactivities of the bering this particular episode of recent German history-the Baader-Meinhof Group and the murder of its members in Stammheim Prisondistinguish these paintings from all earlier works by Richter. That this group of paintings was first exhibited in a building by Mies van in his oeuvre since 1. Photopainting is the term Richter uses for that type of painting-appearing on the projection of found photographs. 1962-based 2. Eight Student Nurses is a group of portraits based on newspaper images of the victims of the Chicago mass murderer Richard Speck.

Gerhard Richter. Prison Cell. 1988.

Gerhard Richter. Line-Up (1). 1988.

Line-Up (2). 1988.

Line-Up (3). 1988.

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

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der Rohe seems an appropriate historical accident,3 for Mies is the architect who constructed the only German contribution to public monumental sculpture in the twentieth century, devoting it to the memory of the philosopher Rosa Luxemburg and the revolutionary Karl Liebknecht, both of whom had been murdered by the Berlin police. This coincidence establishes a continuity between a bourgeois architect in the Weimar state of the 1920s and a bourgeois painter in the West Germany of the 1980s. And indeed both artists differ from most of their contemporaries in their ability to tolerate, in public view, challenges to the very political and economic system with which they identify as artists. Moreover, through their acts of aesthetic commemoration, they resist the constantly renewed collective prosecution of those victims in the form of their eradication from current memory, thereby dignifying the victims of a state whose opponents they had become because of their public challenge. The first temptation is to respond to the shock these paintings generate with an art-historical reflex, deflecting their impact by an excursion into the history of history painting. This is especially true because two works within October 18, 1977 (Funeral and Dead Woman) seem explicitly to establish a reference to two of the central images from the complex prehistory of the destruction of history painting in the nineteenth century.4 But the history of history painting is itself a history of the withdrawal of a subject from painting's ability to represent, a withdrawal that ultimately generated the modernist notion of aesthetic autonomy. In this development, forms of traditional representation were divided into, on the one hand, a referential function based on resemblance (a function that photography would increasingly and more convincingly assume beginning in the mid-nineteenth century) and, on the other, the complementary formation, that of a liberation of painterly means, whose lasting and only triumph was to become the systematic negation of the functions of representation. In their refusal either to give up painting for photography tout court or to accept the supposed lucidity of photography's focused gaze, Richter's photopaintings have consistently opposed the universal presence of that gaze and its ubiquitous instrumentalization of the look. This has particular importance within the group October 18, 1977 in relation to a gaze that, in the police-commissioned press photographs that served Richter as a point of departure, seems ritualistically to assure itself of the final liquidation of the enemies of the state. But at the same time this group resists the modernist restriction of painting to a mediation of historical experience exclusively in the discursive

3. Oktober 18, 1977 was first shown at the Museum Haus Esters, Krefeld; see the catalogue Gerhard Richter/18. Oktober 1977, Cologne, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 1988, in which the present text originally appeared together with essays by Stefan Germer and Gerhard Storck. 4. The former has inevitable associations with Courbet's Burial at Ornans (1849-50), the latter with Manet's Dead Toreador (1864).

Gerhard Richter. Dead Woman (1). 1988.

Dead Woman (2). 1988.

Dead Woman (3). 1988.

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

97

reflection on the evolution, the materials, and the procedures of the pictorial medium itself. It is in the construction of this dilemma, marked by both the conflict in medium-painting/photography-and the conflict in ideas about -the representability painting's self-referenciality/photography's "transparRichter's work testifies to the contemporary difficulties ency" to the event-that in the production of historical representation in painting. The inability of painting to represent contemporary history resulted first of all from the transformation of historical experience into an experience of collective catastrophe. It therefore seemed that only photography, in its putative access to facticity and objectivity, could qualify as an instrument of historical representation. Secondly, insofar as catastrophe democratizes historical experience, it also destroys the artistic claim to a privileged mode of seeing and of historical interpretation. This has become most evident in the work of Andy Warhol, in which the long and complicated process of the democratic experience of catastrophe and the mechanical representation of death are integrated. In his work, heroes and victims are equally the objects of photographic representation; their only difference lies in the distinction between "famous deaths and anonymous deaths." The nearly unbearable cruelty of the photographic detail in Warhol's paintings (Warhol selected archival photos of accidents which had even been rejected as unpublishable by the tabloids), goes hand in hand with the laconic and affectless execution of the representation. The de-differentiation of the artistic process corresponds to the arbitrary fatality and the utter desublimation of the experience of death. Since the mid-1960s Richter has been engaged in a dialogue with Warhol's painting, a dialogue in which the differences have been occasionally obscured by an emphasis on the parallels between their points of departure. The construction of an "iconography of death" by art historians concerned with this period-an "iconography" that supposedly links the work of the two artists has especially failed to clarify how Richter's 48 Portraits should be distinguished from Warhol's 13 Most-WantedMen (1964). Nor is this construction able to address the manner in which the new series, October18, 1977, redeems this dialogue with the 1960s, especially the implied annihilation in Warhol's work of the last possibility of constructing historical memory through the means of painting. In distinct contrast to Warhol's work, the victims in Richter's recent paintings are not the victims of anonymous accidents, but are agents within a historically specific moment. In further contrast to Warhol's, Richter's paintings do not affirm collective amnesia of the experience of death; rather they attempt to construct a pictorial representation of the act of recalling and understanding personal experience in its relation to history. In this respect Richter's paintings constitute a European inversion of Warhol's position of anomy with regard to history. Inasmuch as they emphasize the individual's capacity to act (both that of the individuals depicted and that of the individual depicting, the painter), they insist on this capacity as a necessary condition of contemporary artistic

Gerhard Richter. Man, Shot (1). 1988.

Man, Shot (2). 1988.

100

OCTOBER

production. In that respect October 18, 1977 resembles the representation of Stephen Biko, the South African revolutionary, in Hans Haacke's work Voici Alcan (1983), a relationship which Richter's painting generally would not have called to mind. If Richter's October 18, 1977 works reflect the difficulties of painting to engage now in the representation of contemporary history, their very unexpected commitment to historical subject matter also comments implicitly on other contemporary practices of history painting in Germany. Clearly Richter's struggle with the issue of historical representation begins in his assumption that the historical dimension of painting is primarily the discursive history of the medium. By contrast, recent German history painting, the type of "polit-kitsch" produced by a new generation of German artists, has no such struggle to contend with, since it appears to insist that the negation of historical representation in twentieth-century painting was at best a brief interlude, a failure that has to be redressed - as though such artists as Mondrian and Newman had voluntarily deprived themselves of the capacity to represent the "historical."5

"It seems that the one attitude starts from the assumption that the work of distanciation and 5. comprehension opens up a space for commemoration and the autonomous confrontation with ambivalent historical legacies, while the other attitude would like to employ a revisionist history in order to revamp its concept of traditional identity for the sake of reconstituting a national history" (Jurgen Habermas, "Apologetische Tendenzen," in Eine Art Schadensabwicklung,Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1987, p. 133). Anselm Kiefer is only the most prominent of the German artists who have modeled themselves on concepts that Habermas has defined as "traditional identity." In the course of their restoration of these concepts, these artists have produced a type of work-now widely can best be disseminated and producing its own kind of fall-out in North America as well-that identified as polit-kitsch. Its attraction seems not only to be its reconstitution of traditional identity for the generation of West Germans who wish to abandon the long and difficult process of reflection upon a post-traditional identity. The attraction of polit-kitsch also appears to be-and herein lies its international appeal-its reconstitution of the artistic privilege associated with the traditional identity, i.e., the claim to have privileged access to "seeing" and "representing" history. largest and most During the planning stages of the recent Anselm Kiefer retrospective-the important commitment, ever, to a postwar European artist by the four major American museums involved-one of the curators gave me an unforgettable answer to a naive question. Having asked whether, as an art historian, he did not first feel the need to exhibit the work of a major artist of the artist such as Gerhard Richter before according such an enormous retrospec'60s generation-an tive to a relatively young artist of the current generation, he said briskly, "Kiefer is sexier than Richter." The quip has stayed with me for several reasons. First, it constituted my initial encounter with the language of the new managerial type of curator, a type that has increasingly replaced the traditional curator, who perceived him- or herself essentially as a scholar in the service of an institution of the public sphere. Condensed as this casual remark may have been, it nevertheless indicated that the managerial curator would conceive exhibitions on the model of the advertising campaign and seasonally determined product innovation. Second, the quip suggested to me that expectations for and responses to certain contemporary art production exceeded even the most pessimistic predictions for the future of high culture by, for example, the situationists. The particular fusion (and confusion) of separate modes of experience that the curatorial quip performed proved that the social tendency that forces the work of art to function as a mere fetish of sign exchange-value had already been fully accepted as a commonplace.

Gerhard Richter. Woman, Hanged. 1988.

Gerhard Richter. Record Player. 1988.

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

103

Richter has articulated his explicit resistance to this type of historical graverobbery, especially in the last six years, by recuperating historically inaccessible pictorial types such as the still-life-as-mementomori, to which his Skulls and Candle paintings refer. This recuperation, however, acts explicitly as a resistance to false immediacy and to the claim that the irreversible loss of these categories of painterly commemoration could be redeemed. What is convincing in Richter's Skulls and Candle paintings is their character as grotesques: they brilliantly perform the purely technical availability of these pictorial types while at the same time they publicly invalidate any actual experience once conveyed by this genre. But since the paintings October 18,1977 are as different from this mode of the grotesque as they are from the early photopaintings to which at first glance they seem to return, it seems all the more difficult to clarify their attitude toward the historical subject. Unlike most contemporary German painting, which simply ignores the fact that the prohibition of representation itself has become an irreversible historical reality that can only be ignored at the price of mythicizing painting, Richter's nonetheless insists on transcending that irreversible historical fact with the very means of painting. But if painting's own recent history raises barriers to the accessibility of a language with which to represent historical and political fact, the historical field itself is riddled with instances of amnesia about specific events, making it clear that history's own accessibility to itself is at issue. "Polit-kitsch" painting is as unconcerned with this second issue as it is with the first, having settled into the comfort of a repetitively enacted, gratuitous ritual of engaging with history without even addressing the concrete instances of actual recent repression. Richter's shift from the current fashion within German painting-the fashion for pointing to the history of fascism- to an attempt to recall the seemingly inaccessible moment of extra-parliamentary opposition and its terrorist consequences in the history of the Baader-Meinhof Group and the Red Army Faction thereby also implies a criticism of the irresponsible dabbling in the history of German fascism with the meagre means of generally incompetent painting. At the same time, it is also an attempt to reflect upon the actual power of contemporary repression and, through Richter's own pictorial means, to transform this power of repression into the question of its very representability. The extent to which the Baader-Meinhof Group has in fact become the object of collective repression (or the object of internalized state censorship) is reflected in the fact that only rarely-as in the case of Joseph Beuys's spontaneous declamation "Diirer, I will personally guide Baader and Meinhof through Documenta V" (1972) and Alexander Kluge's cooperative film project Germany in Autumn (1977-78)-has an artistic project addressed this particular subject. The film Introduction to Arnold Schonberg's Accompanimentto a Cinemaographic Scene (1972), by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, was banned from German television because it was dedicated to the memory of Holger Meins, a young film director who had participated in the activities of the Baader-Meinhof Group

Gerhard Richter. Youth Portrait. 1988.

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

105

and became one of the victims of the events at Stammheim Prison (events surrounding the deaths of the five members of the group, which were presented as a collective suicide, but were suspected of having been, instead, a state-ordered police assassination). In order to recall the collective inability of West Germans to reflect upon the history of the most radical challenge to their postwar economic and political order, we should compare it to the way the Italian government succeeded in treating an incomparably larger, more efficiently organized anarchistic opposition movement at the same time. The astonishment of the German reader at this comparison (perhaps also that reader's secret shudder at the contemplation of Italian liberality in the treatment of the enemies of the state) becomes apparent in a recently published essay by the German historian Arulf Baring: One consequence was the enormous movement of left-wing terrorism haunting Italy in the 1970s. . . . One almost spoke of an armed party. The number of arrests surpassed several thousands. State-ofemergency laws were introduced, and one of the most important politicians of Italy, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered. It is all the more remarkable to see to what extent the Italian state remained willing to communicate and negotiate: after only a few years the conflict that had approached civil war was successfully defused and finally resolved. -According to Bolaffi it was the intervention of the Catholic church in particular that allowed for a reconciliation within a brief period of time. The sentences of those convicted were reduced, their living conditions in the prisons were improved, and many of them were granted early release. In comparison it seems that throughout the 1970s the German state was unable to afford such a degree of tolerance. Even at the end of the 1980s its citizens seem to have difficulty developing even the mnemonic basis for reconciliation. The intended effect of the elimination of this group, however, was clearly accomplished: not only has their history become the object of collective repression, but, at the same time, the project of an extra-parliamentary opposition and the active presence of a radical, interventionist critique of the social order (euphemistically called the society of consumption) has been eradicated. Richter's October18, 1977 attempts to initiate a reflective commemoration of these individuals, whose supposed crimes remained to a large degree unproven (despite years of pretrial investigation, which never even resulted in an indictment), as was that crime (never even investigated) whose victims they became. These paintings contradict the present historical moment, which prohibits reflection on the activities of one of the most important left-wing journalists and pacifists of postwar Germany, Ulrike Meinhof, a young literary historian, Gudrun Ensslin, and a young film director, Holger Meins.

Gerhard Richter. Arrest (1). 1988.

Arrest (2). 1988.

Gerhard Richter. Funeral. 1988.

A Note on Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977

109

In their engagement with a historical subject the new paintings are no more desperate than are Richter's abstract paintings in their engagement with the very possibility of painting. Since, therefore, both series are focused on the crisis of contemporary painting, that crisis is reflected upon along its various axes: production no less than reception. In his explicit refusal to break the group of paintings October18, 1977 into individual objects or to have them enter into the usual channels of market distribution, Richter contests, even if in a singular construction of an exceptional situation, the current modes of consumption as the exclusive form of responding to artistic practice.

CORRECTIONS

The following text was erroneously replaced by the second paragraph on page 121 of Ann Reynolds's essay, "Reproducing Nature: The Museum of Natural History as Nonsite," October,no. 45 (Summer 1988): Smithson set the white bins containing the slag in a row parallel to the two long walls of the narrow gallery space; the five sets of documentary material hung along one of these walls, mirroring the arrangement of the bins. The bins are of graduated heights and widths; as they increase in height toward the rear of the gallery, they decrease in width, as if each is a compressed and stretched version of its predecessor. They are all open at the top and have slated vents on both of their long sides. The slag chunks are loosely piled up within the steel bins, and their irregular edges erratically poke out of the side slat openings and the top. This description of Robert Smithson's Nonsite (Ruhr-District), 1968, depends on the only known photograph of the original installation at the Konrad Fischer Gallery, reproduced below left. The other photograph is of a later installation of the work.

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Writtenby some of the leading theoristsof our time, Post-PopArt is a timelyretrospectivecollection about the complex originsand manifestationsof American,British, and ContinentalPopArt.A Flash ArtBook. $14.95originalin paper

IMPRESARIO Malcolm McLarenand the British New Wave edited by Paul Taylor Preface by MarciaTuckerand WilliamOlander Fourprovocativeessays evaluate McLaren'sinfamouscareerand examinethe crossoverpossibilities between popularcultureand High Art.DistributedforThe New Museumof ContemporaryArt, New York. 30 blackand white illus., 10 duotones, 8 pp. gatefoldcoverwith 12 color illus. $14.95originalin paper

MODERNDREAMS The Rise and Falland Rise of Pop edited by Brian Wallis, Tom Finkelpearl, Patricia Phillips, Glenn Weiss, and Thomas Lawson An excitingcollection of essays exploringthe distinctionbetween the pop artcultureof Londonin the fiftiesand the conceptuallyrelated workof New Yorkin the eighties. Distributedfor the P.S.1 Museum. 170illus., 16 in color $25.00original in paper($40.00cloth)

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The editors of OCTOBER wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Pinewood Foundation;the National Endowmentfor the Arts, a federal agency; and the New York State Council on the Arts. Patron Subscribers: Phoebe Cohen Sam Francis Roy and Dorothy Lichtenstein Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen Richard Serra and Clara Weyergraf Robert Shapazian Mr. and Mrs. Walter Thayer Councilman Joel Wachs Bagley and Virginia Wright

OCTOBER 49 & 50 Joan Copjec

The OrthopsychicSubject:Film Theoryand the Reception of Lacan

Jonathan Crary

Reflections on the Spectacle

Thierry de Duve

YvesKline, or The Dead Merchant

Denis Hollier

French Customs,Literary Frontiers

Jacques Lacan

Kant with Sade

Eric Michaud

Van Gogh, or The Insufficiencyof Sacrifice

D. A. Miller

Susan Sontag's AIDS and Its Metaphors

Tania Modleski

Some Functions of Feminist Criticism, or The Scandal of the Mute Body

Allen S. Weiss

A New History of the Passions