ANNA BAUMGART (in collaboration with AGNIESZKA KURANT)

Chinese Whispers at lokal_30_warszawa_london

If Spirit goes West…

by Aaron Schuster

A well known passage from Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History describes the angel in Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus,” which was a gift from the painter to the writer and critic. Benjamin imagines this ‘new angel’ gazing upon the ruins of the history even as he is propelled relentlessly into the future.

“Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel would like to heal the disaster, to make the smashed things whole, but he is constantly being thrown ahead by a giant storm, “blowing in from Paradise.” He can only survey the damage that passes too fast for him to repair. It is this double movement,
a melancholy backwards gaze onto the nightmare that is history coupled with an irresistible flight into the future, that Benjamin ironically names “progress.”

How might things look to the angel today, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism, neoliberal triumphalism and its host of supposedly contingent ‘embarrassments’ (endless wars, financial collapse, ecological devastation…), in short: what does the angel of history see at the end of history? The pile of wreckage continues to accumulate at his feet, but how lovely this heap of broken images now appears: there shoots the head of Lenin on a chiseled shot glass, here a beautiful Lissitzky motif makes for an attractive wallpaper design, and in the nightshop next to a three star hotel, neatly stacked on the shelf, is rubble from that famous Wall on sale as souvenirs. The past catastrophe has been miraculously sublated as glittering appearances. Symbolic reminders of revolution are remade as radical decoration, agit prop turned into pop. This recycling is part of the cunning of capitalism, and one wonders whether the angel is more distressed or distracted by these spectacular surfaces that effortlessly glide over jagged ruins.

This brings us to a second question: in which direction is this backwards flying angel traveling? East or West? As we know from Hegel, universal history moves in a straight line from East to West, i.e. from Oriental despotism to Western liberalism, with Europe as its absolute end—although in the last decades many would identify the United States of America as that spiritual endpoint, and Hegel himself speculated that “America is… the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself.” In post-history, however, Spirit moves ‘regressively’ from West to East: it returns to its origins in order to bring the once surpassed lands into the fold of modernity, yet not without the kind of accidents, antagonisms, and strange reversals that make up the stuff of history. Indeed, post-history might be nothing more than this fateful shift in Spirit’s historical trajectory. What better representative of the Weltgeist has there been in recent decades than Jeffrey Sachs and his band of Harvard economists traveling to Russia to transform the defunct command economy into a shining example of the free market? Their shock therapy (a highly advanced and efficient version of Marx’s “primitive accumulation”) helped engender the new form of twenty-first century authoritarian capitalism.

The return of Spirit from West to East has also had a dramatic aesthetic impact. A few years ago the angel stopped by an exhibition opening in Kiev, where he could look at drawings by Paco Rabanne and snack on sushi with smoked salmon and an endless supply of imported Raffaello candies. At the afterparty, there were whispers about a new deal for raw resources with Chinese mining giants; the oligarchs were talking jealously about the good deals they had cut in Africa. The Chinese, it was generally agreed, are managing things well.

Chinese Whispers (the title of the wallpaper piece and the exhibition co-authored by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant), wonderfully called in Polish głuchy telefon, a wordplay combining “deaf telephone” and “dead telephone,” is a children’s game that teaches a profound lesson about the nature of communication. Even seemingly simple acts of listening and repeating involve active interpretation; all communication effectively entails a process of distortion. One begins by whispering “Marx” and by the end of the chain it somehow comes out “Coca-Cola.” In Masculin, Feminin one of the intertitles between the film’s chapters reads “This film could be called The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” But the movie most relevant to our purposes is the following year’s La Chinoise, which radicalizes the theme. There, in 1967, Godard draws on Dostoevsky’s The Possessed in order to tell
a prophetic tale about youth and revolution, uncannily foreshadowing the events of May ’68. Just as in Dostoevsky, so here violence in the service of the revolution goes wrong. Godard’s main focus, however, is on the transfer between Marxist ideology and commodified cool (it’s La Chinoise’s treatment of this political subject that marks a break with Godard’s earlier new wave films), a problem which the film exposes without resolving. The very consumerist society that the young revolutionaries wish to transform thoroughly penetrates their attitudes toward their own revolutionary praxis. Objects like Mao’s Little Red Book become fetishized and treated as stylish fare, piled in towering anti-capitalist heaps; while reading Maoist scripture one of the characters dons a series of joke sunglasses, with the national flags of the USA, USSR, China, France, and Britain filling the frames; a satirical pop song, “Mao-Mao,” provides an exciting theme for the agitated youth.

There would seem to be an unbridgeable disjunction between what Benjamin spoke of as the unrealized possibilities buried among the ruins of history, the “weak messianic power” of lost causes, and their destination as mere appearances, design emptied of political content. For fans of contradiction and overdetermination, this disjunction was brought to its self-reflective maximum in the line “Révolution n’est pas un diner” (“Revolution is not a party” or “Revolution is not a gala dinner”) sung in festive pop tones by Claude Channes.

Vietnam burns and me I spurn Mao Mao

Johnson giggles and me I wiggle Mao Mao

Napalm runs and me I gun Mao Mao

Cities die and me I cry Mao Mao

Whores cry and me I sigh Mao Mao

The rice is mad and me a cad

It’s the Little Red Book

That makes it all move

Imperialism lays down the law

Revolution is not a party

The A-bomb is a paper tiger

The masses are the real heroes

The Yanks kill and me I read Mao Mao

The jester is king and me I sing Mao Mao

The bombs go off and me I scoff Mao Mao

Girls run and me I follow Mao Mao

The Russians eat and me I dance Mao Mao

I denounce and I renounce Mao Mao

It’s the Little Red Book

That makes it all move

Aaron Schuster – American writer and philosopher living in Brussels. He lectures and publishes extensively on psychoanalysis and contemporary philosophy and art. He writes for art magazines such “Frieze”, “Cabinet”, “Frog” and “Metropolis M.”. Co-author of libretto for Cellar Door: An Opera in Almost One Act (JRP Ringier, 2008). In 2010 his book The Cosmonaut of The Erotic Future: A Brief History of Levitation from St Joseph to Yuri Gargarin will be published.

Project (…) by Anna Baumgart & Agnieszka Kurant installed over the place where a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linked the Large Ghetto with the Small Ghetto in 1942-43 in Warsaw.

Museum of the History of Polish Jews:

Urban Space Project
Place: Chłodna Street, November/ December 2009

Project (…) is a spatial installation project that fits well with the educational mission of the Museum, best described by the idea “open past” and based on a dialogue of multiple narratives on the subject of the joint Polish-Jewish history, cultivating the memory of coexistence of cultures, but also inviting to critical reflection, without evasion of taboo topics. Conceptual work by Anna Baumgart and Agnieszka Kurant, perceived by them as a kind of “linguistic sculpture” which picks up on the theme of “memory work” in Polish modern art, and explores the boundaries of Warsaw”s contemporary identity, a city for which void and absence are the basic categories of description. The Second World War, during which one third of Warsaw”s inhabitants perished, including near entire Jewish population, put an end to the city”s centuries-long multicultural reality. There disappeared for ever from her urban landscape the architecture of synagogues and from her streets the sounds of Yiddish.

(…), an ephemeral sculpture that defies the laws of gravity will be installed in a symbolic place, over Chłodna street, where during the Second World War there stood the “footbridge”, a wooden overpass above the Aryan part of the city linking the Large Ghetto with the Small Ghetto. The taboo subject the authors of (…) wish to bring up is that of awareness of Poles that mass murder of Jews happened before their very eyes; the inexpressible traumatic experience that casts a shadow on relations between Jews and Poles to this day.

(…) can appear wherever there are unsolvable problems and near inexpressible subjects. (…) is a punctuation mark that represents: “skipping over or omission in a text, a broken thought, a missing element”. As conceived by the authors, (…) crosses the boundaries of history; is travelling installation, a sign for hire; empty space that focuses attention on a taboo that actually exists in memory and culture. The shining surfaces of the balloons will reflect back every element or discourse that nears them.

Commenting on their work, the authors said: The project for us is a catalyst of different, often mutually exclusive meanings. For us art, as opposed to didacticism and politics, is not a mouthpiece or a speaking tube, a presentation of hand-me-down views. We would like to see this art instigate new and unpredictable social situations and touch the things long relegated to collective subconscious in Warsaw”s urban space, so saturated with the traumatic past and so taboo-ridden.
The project is complemented by a cycle of open public debates taking which will be devoted to such topics as: the strategy of absence of memory in Warsaw, the glamour aesthetics as a vehicle for taboo content, the conceptual art, history and irony.

The urban project (…) is also addressed to the local community, the present inhabitants of Chłodna street for whom this may be the first collective experience and an encounter with their street”s Jewish past, hopefully an impulse to building neighbourly relations based on recognition of their street”s history and identity.

Project authors: Anna Baumgart, Agnieszka Kurant

Project curator: Ewa Toniaka Kurant
Projekt coordinator: Karolina Sakowicz

The Uncanny and the Hypothetical in the Work of Anna Baumgart

In a career that has embraced sculpture, video and performance art, the Polish artist Anna Baumgart (Wroclaw, 1966) has demonstrated an extraordinary versatility in terms of artistic expression. She graduated from department of sculpture of the Academy of Fine Arts, Gdansk, in 1994 (Prize for the best diploma) and became active in Polish avant-garde circles and established a series of performance spaces and “artistic cafes” in Gdansk including the “Delicatessen Avant-garde Gallery,” and the Forum of Contemporary Art at the “Gazownia Gallery,” and various multimedia and improvisational music workshops. The most important, Cafe Baumgart at the CCA “Zamek Ujazdowski,” became a meeting place for diverse artists in Warsaw to intersect and interact across a variety of disciplines.

With her earliest works such as Let Unrestrained Anger Be Eliminated (1996), she incorporated electrical and optic devices and various liquids that merged representations of the body with the implements of technology in a staged battle between “the female” and “the male.” Later videos, Who Speaks? (1998), Mother (1999), Condoms, Money, Lady - No problem! (1999), and True? (2001), continue her strategies of feminist representation and the questioning of societal roles and emotional relationships. In the latter video series, Baumgart inserted herself into contemporary Polish films such as (Leca Zurawie / The Crains Are Flying by Michail Kalatozow and Mis / Bear by Stanislaw Bareja) in order to critique media images of women in society.

Baumgart’s concern with the status of women in society and the (self-)representation of women is a major feature of Ecstatics, Hysterics and Other Saintly Ladies, (2004), a video that was presented as part of a body of work, A Collection of Shameful Gestures, in collaboration with Birgit Brenner at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw She examines issues of  female auto-aggression and hysteria, and notes in an interview that she was “tempted by the possibility of redefining the notion of ‘hysteria’: of transforming it from a verbal insult into a verbal compliment. The hysteric seems interesting to me, suggesting a creative approach by women to the world, a defiant and even revolutionary attitude. What feminism has already uncovered and investigated on the basis of 19th century hysteria – that it is a kind of auto-art – has never found acceptance in our collective thinking”. (Kolekcja wstydliwych gestów…, in: Czas Kultury, no. 1, 2004, www.culture.pl).

This inquiry has led directly into some of her most vibrant works, notably Weronika A.P. (2006) and Natascha (2006). Baummgart uses media images of women as the basis for these sculptures. Weronika takes as its subject an image of a woman, her face bandaged and in shock after the terrorist attacks in the London transportation system. The photograph became one of the main images that were fixed in the public mind as the true face of the horror of the attacks. The title of this sculpture, Weronika, takes its name from Saint Veronica who is said to have offered Jesus a cloth to wipe the sweat and tears off his face en route to his crucifixion. The cloth was miraculously imprinted with his image and thus became „the true image,” or „Vera Eikon.” Baumgart’s sculpture features an exaggerated bandage on her face, clothed, and painted to resemble the newspaper photo. However, Baumgart has painted only the frontal side of the woman and left white the sides of the woman not captured in the two-dimensional image seen by millions of viewers. Through this act of subversion, Baumgart alerts us to the fact that there is more going on „behind the scene” and that there is a backstory that must remain unknown to us. Thus, there is no „Vera Eikon” and we can never know what really happened.

Natascha, similarly, uses the media image of Natascha Kampusch, an Austrian girl imprisoned for more than eight years by a man, Wolfgang Priklopil, who committed suicide after learning of her escape. The half-painted Natascha is seen with a blanket over her head being led away by two police officers who shield her face from curious onlookers and the paparazzi. Kampusch’s story fascinated the media for months as she attempted to describe the nature of her relationship with her kidnapper. The emotional bond she described has been likened to that of the situation between hostages siezed by terrorists at a bank in Sweden during the late 1970s that gave name to the „Stockholm Syndrome.” However, Kampusch’s true thoughts can never be known, nor can that of her kidnapper. Ironically, Kampusch has become a television talk show host and is living in a new flood of images as well as (re-)creating her own.

Baumgart’s latest work takes her critique of media imagery further. The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (2008) takes  as its point of departure a famous image of East Berliners escaping from houses not yet sealed off by the construction of the Berlin Wal in August 1961. Using her now established technique, Baumgart extracts the figures, seen climbing through windows or walking away towards the photographer carring their belongings, re-creates them as sculptures and half paints-them. This effect produced by this group is somewhat uncanny because some figures are seen only from the waist up as they hang out windows. Baumgart herself suspends those scuptures from the ceiling. The back leg of a woman is further stencilled „Reuters/Forum” representing the photo agency credit in the original photograph from 18 August 1961 reproduced in a contemporary Polish newspaper.

With her title, The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting, Baumgart adds further dimensions and uncertainties to the original story. The title originates as the title of a movie based on ideas of art criticism by novelist Pierre Klossowski. Filmed by Raoul Ruiz in 1979, it was a highbrow cult film of French cinema and involves a story about a series of paintings owned by a collector. The collector shows off his paintings to another collector, yet, as he does so, the characters depicted in the paintings come to life as Tableaux Vivants and begin to mock the ideas and pretensions of the collector. One painting is missing from the collection without which the series of seven is incomplete. An unexplained scandal lurks behind its disappearance, and even the name of the artist is revealed to be false. As the characters in the tableaux vivants come to life, the fixed narrative of the painted image as well as the understanding of the collector become uncertain.
Baumgart extends this metaphorically in her work, noting that “[a] character caught in one picture steps out of the photograph like from a movie screen and ‘takes a walk’ in another image. This ‘visit’ of one visual and mental tale within another is also a duel between two gazes, two lenses.” She adds, “What could hypothetically happen if two stolen looks met and started its own new life without control of the authors of the original pictures, creating a new hybrid narrative between reality and fiction. This new narrative does not yet have its picture and thus becomes a hypothesis of a [nonexistent] image.” This is the root of Baumgart’s manipulations and the reasons for the games she has already initiated with Weronika and Natascha.

By extracting the human figures from various images, the familiar is mystified and made uncanny. The viewer, even when cued by the artist’s texts, is still free to form her own narratives about what might or might not be going on: who are these people, are they real? What happened to them, what will happen to them? We write these “hypothetical” stories in our heads out of the whole cloth of the appropriated images that were once seemingly clear in their meaning. Indeed, just as Baumgart re-incorporates her subjects into new contexts, the viewer automatically re-inscribes Baumgart’s figures into their own imagination based on her own personal contexts. Interpretation becomes autobiography.

The Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting marks a radical point of departure for Anna Baumgart. It marks and multiplies the uncertainties implied in her earlier works and further frees the viewer to become more involved in searching for meanings in the work that may even have nothing to do with Baumgart’s original intent in creating the works in the first place. To re-iterate what she says, “This new narrative does not yet have its picture and thus becomes a hypothesis of a [nonexistent] image.” Meanings are suspended, here literally, and the viewer is always left guessing. That is the power of Anna Baumgart’s uncanny new work.

Bill Kouwenhoven
London, 17 October 2008

artist