Absence and Difficult Knowledge in Contemporary Art Museums

Margaret Tali

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138054288
• eBook ISBN: 9781351626347
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

This book analyzes practices of collecting in European art museums from 1989 to the present, arguing that museums actualize absence both consciously and unconsciously, while misrepresentation is an outcome of the absent perspectives and voices of minority community members which are rarely considered in relation to contemporary art. Difficult knowledge is proposed as a way of dealing with absence productively.

Drawing on social art history, museology, postcolonial theory, and memory studies, Margaret Tali analyzes the collections of four modern and contemporary art museums across Europe: the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art in Budapest, the Kiasma Museum in Helsinki, and the Kumu Museum in Tallinn.

1 The Presence of Joseph Beuys and the Struggle Over his Legacy in Berlin

Many of the central questions I come to analyse in this study unfolded when I first visited the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum during the summer of 2009. The major exhibition on view at the time was a retrospective of Joseph Beuys’ oeuvre. I later learned that it was actually the first official retrospective of the artist’s work in Germany since his death in 1986.¹ The exhibition awarded an overwhelming presence to the artist through various displays of video installations, media documentation and voice recordings, which first caught my attention and had an unsettling effect. Beuys’ figure—both literally and figuratively—filled almost half the museum. Why indeed would an exhibition of this scale and ambition be produced? Furthermore, why would one artist be rendered this magnitude of presence? These questions are particularly pertinent when installing the exhibition in a museum dedicated to presenting current artistic phenomena within the context of Berlin, a city that presents an increasing number of artistic voices and creative positions. This seems rather peculiar. The museum had the opportunity to select from a wide variety of artistic practices, especially given the city has now triggered international creative communities for over two decades and rightfully advertises itself as a vibrant centre of the ever-evolving European art world. But what then constitutes representation in museums? What is it about; how is it made; and by whom? With the eminence that Beuys’ figure has acquired in the post-war narrative, it offers a particularly enlightening example that will assist me in exploring these questions on the contested terrain of museum storytelling, based on the legacy of one particular artist.

Beuys surfaced and became known in West Germany’s cultural scene during the late 1960s and early 1970s. From the outset he intentionally turned his life story into a component of his art; exhibiting his roles such as teacher, politician and father. One can argue whether this was a reflection of capitalist individualism or a means for transmitting his messages to a wider audience. Nevertheless, it is the combination of his intellectual heritage and this openly displayed life story in the political context of the reunification of Germany that became his claim to fame.

Born in 1921, Beuys had been raised in a middle-class family in Kleve, a small town along the Rhine River, close to Germany’s border with The Netherlands. Like many other local youths, he served in the Hitler Youth during his teenage years and later joined the Air Force as a volunteer. During the Second World War he participated in the Army of National Socialists from 1941 until 1945. Many years later, he constructed a much disputed mythology explaining his rescue from the chaos of war with a story of a tribe of Tatars finding him after a plane crash in the Crimea. According to the artist, the nomadic tribe cured him by wrapping his body in fat and felt, until he was later taken to the military hospital. According to Hans Peter Riegel, this myth remained unchanged in the three editions of the book Joseph Beuys: Lebenslauf, Werklauf (Riegel 2013, 11). As a combination of his work and this narrative, Beuys came to enact multiple public personas such as a self-proclaimed healer, shaman and political activist, granting him a particular role in the cultural landscape, which he used in order to voice several important social and political concerns. I will return to discuss these concerns in depth later.

The dubious grounds of his story of a mythic rescue, recounted by the artist in numerous interviews and other coverage,² was only confirmed a decade after the artist’s death by German journalists Frank Gieseke and Albert Markert in their biography Flieger, Filz und Vaterland (1996). They investigated Beuys’ life story using various archives and convincingly argued that the British forces had in fact imprisoned Beuys for three months towards the end of the war. Gieseke and Markert complicated Beuys’ romantic narrative of nomadic and rural Tatar tribes in Crimea by contextualising his mythical images and placing them among other minority groups during the war-torn years, which turned Beuys’ account of his life story—ten years after his death—into a shameless myth (Gieseke and Markert 1996, 94–95).

Determined to become an artist, Beuys returned to the Rhine after the war and joined the Düsseldorf Arts Academy. After graduation in 1953 he suffered from a series of depressions, which led him to a rural residence where he continued his artistic practice. He overcame the depression only in the late 1950s. In 1959 he returned to Düsseldorf, where he lived most of his life, and married Eva Wurmbach [later, Eva Beuys], working from 1961 to 1972 as a professor of monumental sculpture at the Düsseldorf Arts Academy. Beuys continued to work actively as an artist and developed a distinct media image, which openly referred to his military past—wearing an army vest, often coupled with a felt hat. Gottfried Boehm later argued that it was through this self-image of the soldier that Beuys was able to address themes of guilt, horror and trauma, which enabled him to use them productively in his work (Boehm 2011, 322).

Beuys’ involvement in politics since the 1970s was often considered controversial. He joined the Green party and used various public occasions for spreading his ideas about the interconnectedness of life and art. His expulsion from the Düsseldorf Arts Academy caused an uproar, in which Beuys advocated everyone’s right to be able to participate in his lectures, denying the bureaucratic admission policies imposed by the education system. His artistic creations include an array of installations, performances, action art and political activism.

While his public persona was well known to German audiences during these decades, the first-hand memories of his life have gradually faded from public consciousness. His persona is actively shaped anew by museums, especially for younger generations and audiences from migrant backgrounds. With his objects turning into the main vessels for the transference of his artistic activity and narrating its impacts, new agencies are added to his narrative, which I discuss in detail through the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition.

This chapter unfolds in three parts. I begin with an analysis of the exhibition of Beuys’ work in the Hamburger Bahnhof’s permanent collection (as presented during the summer of 2010). Secondly, I examine his installation “Tramstop. A Monument to the Future” (1976) as an example through which I further open commodification trajectories of his work and explore the importance of an active public reception. He created this artwork especially for the Venice Biennale of the same year. Its reception in West Germany assists me in further contextualising the posthumous narrations of Beuys. Thirdly, I analyse the retrospective exhibition entitled Joseph Beuys: Die Revolution sind wir (2008–09), also presented in the Hamburger Bahnhof, which inspired my questions about museum narratives at the beginning of this study. I compare it with another recent retrospective, Joseph Beuys: Parallel Processes (2010), presented in Düsseldorf’s Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. While the Hamburger Bahnhof remains the focus of my analysis, the comparison with Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen supports me in outlining the crucial aspects of canonising the artist in Berlin. I argue that these two attempts at Beuys’ canonisation act as competitors, and trace the crucial reasons behind this phenomenon.

Reanimating Beuys in the Hamburger Bahnhof

Contextualising Beuys’ work within the Hamburger Bahnhof means to situate it within one of the largest contemporary art museums in Europe. When approaching the museum from the Central Station during the summer of 2013, one still had to make one’s way through a series of construction sites. The building had been trapped during the Cold War years in the zone between East and West Berlin that marked the division of divided Germany. During the past decade this area has seen a building boom, which includes the erection of an impressive parliament complex and the Berlin Central Station, Haubtbahnhof (2006). The Hamburger Bahnhof was opened in 1996 as the newest branch of the Berlin National Gallery, after this former train station was renovated to function as a museum. Its location in Berlin Mitte (Centre) not only gives a sense of the reconfiguration of the city under neoliberal capitalism, but also reminds us about its recent history. This context is important in order to understand the narrations of Beuys’ art and their attached meanings.

The history of the collection of the Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart (Museum for Contemporary Art)—is equally complex. I will analyse it through different lenses during the course of the following three chapters. The museum was founded by the City of Berlin with the private collection of the real estate businessman Erich Marx (1921) acting as its founding basis. The museum opened its doors to the public in 1996, with a mission to introduce and collect art practices from the 1960s onwards. Joseph Beuys’ heritage was considered to play a crucial role in the new museum from the outset. The director of the National Gallery at the time, Dieter Honisch wrote two years before the museum’s opening that: “The West Wing will be dedicated entirely to Joseph Beuys. […] His extended concept of art will define the overall presentation [of the art in the museum]” (Honisch 1994, 48). Much criticism targeted the central role that Marx’s private collection acquired in the new museum. For instance, in his article Das Marx-Mausoleum the art critic Marius Babias expressed his disappointment about the withdrawal of the plan to include different Berlin-based private collections. He saw the reasons for Marx’s success in his far-reaching networks and those of his art adviser Heiner Bastian.³

Beuys’ work is displayed in a separate wing of the museum. When entering this wing, called the West wing and found by walking through the museum’s bookstore, I first found myself (in 2010) within the dark-red environment that displayed works by members of the Fluxus movement and Viennese Actionism. These two movements functioned here as a technique to introduce Beuys in at least in two ways. Firstly, they established the context of his international Western contemporaries from the 1960s and 1970s; secondly, they equipped the viewer with a visual apparatus for approaching Beuys’ work in the following spaces.

In the space entitled Happening & Fluxus: Art as space, space as environment, environment as happening, happening as art, viewers encounter installations and various action relics of the Fluxus movement along with posters and invitations. This presentation features several collective artworks by members of the two movements, including works by Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Dieter Roth, Otto Mühl and Günther Brus. Two works by Paik, Robot K 456 (1964) and TV Bra For Living Sculpture (1965), are present here physically as well as virtually, with performance documentation screened on small televisions.

The main concepts that frame these practices are play and happening, both of which extend the borders of thinking about art from the 1960s onwards. Both Fluxus and Viennese Actionism aimed at transgressing the boundaries of modernist art and recycling ephemera as their object. These movements turned experience and interaction with the public into the heart of their practice. Most of the works on display originate from private collections, indicating that despite their active attempts to call attention to the processuality of their practice, their pieces had become an object of commodification.

As the visitor passes through dark-red painted halls and continues further into the museum wing she glimpses from afar Beuys’ work in different formats within the confines of the white walls of the West wing. One of the first works presented is the video-performance Soziale Plastik (1963), which depicts a black-and-white close-up of Beuys’ face with his deep penetrating gaze pointed directly at the viewer. Like Soziale Plastik, many of the displayed works in this wing present Beuys’ practice as well as his figure, communicating a certain representation of Beuys himself.

While walking around this wing the viewer constantly finds herself in the midst of Beuys’ work as well as spatially surrounded by his image. At the end of this long space one hears Beuys’ voice in a sound performance Ja ja ja ja ja, Ne ne ne ne ne (1968), which echoes throughout half of the wing. Mediated and using different formats of the voice and image recordings, monumental works by the artist provide a supplementary bodily experience that facilitates engagement with Beuys’ oeuvre.

Most of the thirty-five artworks displayed in this “wing of Beuys”, as the museum staff informally call this space, originate from two sources—the private collection of Erich Marx and the Joseph Beuys Media Archive. The latter is a source of documents, audio and video recordings of the artist’s public speeches and performances. Beuys Media Archive was started by Eugen Blume in 1993, with the aims of searching for new ways of articulating Beuys’ work in public and “bringing Beuys’ voice and figure back into the exhibition space”.⁴ The Marx collection acts, according to Blume, as the schwerpunkt of the museum’s display, or its gravitational point (Blume 2007a, 135). I unpack the reasons behind Beuys spatial dominance in this wing through focusing on three monumental installations.

The first is The End of the 20th Century (1983), which constitutes a series of relics from Beuys’ action 7,000 Oaks realised during Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. The installation consists of 21 large basalt-stone blocks. Beuys drilled holes in all of them, covered them with felt and clay and placed a smaller rock of the same shape onto the hole. According to his idea, the stones would be set next to oak trees planted in the city, an action that would be realised as a long-term collective venture that would eventually lead to the planting of 7,000 trees in the city. Although oak trees were planted, the basalt stones were later sold in four versions to different museums.⁵ The version that consists of 31 blocks is displayed in the Hamburger Bahnhof.

Since the second installation Tramstop. A Monument to the Future and its history will be the object of the next section, I now discuss the third work. Tallow. The sculpture that will not become cold (1977) consists of six massive pieces of animal fat. Fat had been a symbolic material for Beuys that he used in many of his works. These bulky fat-blocks were produced for an exhibition, Skulptur in Münster, which took place in that North German city. Moulded in the form of an abandoned tunnel, according to the artist, the fat would help “heal the wounded space” by filling it with life and new meaning. The fat cubes on display sustain a temperature that is higher than that of the museum and this turns them literally into living objects that generate warmth through their mere existence.

These three large-scale works are positioned in the museum space in such a way that the viewer can see them from different angles and perspectives. The museum wall-texts communicate the symbolic dimensions of Beuys’ installations and explain parts of his actions. When walking further along the West wing one cannot help but notice the singular artistic position rendered to Beuys, despite the collective nature of several of his works, including the three aforementioned installations. I suggest that this absence is meaningful and that we are not shown the process of their making, since it would threaten to destroy this singular image of Beuys aimed at by the curators. Although TV-recordings, performances and exhibition posters are displayed, they originate from Beuys’ solo exhibitions or other performative ventures featuring the artist as the principal character.

This difference becomes particularly evident when we compare the narration of Beuys to the displays of Fluxus and Vienna Actionism that introduced us to the West wing. While the latter two were narrated through the collective nature of artistic practices, Beuys’ individual position was propelled to the epicentre of the following narrative. Similar to the installations that I discussed above, his action art has been well documented by means of photographs and videos. Curiously, neither is presented together with photo-documentations of their making. I suggest that showing the collective process behi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Presence of Joseph Beuys and the Struggle Over his Legacy in Berlin
• 2. Absencing and Presencing in Exhibition Narratives
• 3. Collectors’ Space and the Agents of Narration
• 4. The Ludwig Collection in Budapest and the Absent Eastern Europe
• 5. Interrogating the Archival Logic
• 6. Archival Absence
• Afterword: Turning Absence into Difficult Knowledge
• Bibliography
• Conversations
• Index