by Rod Mengham
Meanwhile, closer to the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, in the new Akademie der Künst, the Hans Haacke retrospective is dominated by the equipment needed for the recreation of Haacke’s 1969 installation, ‘Constellation’. This is a vast hydraulic system, laid out on the floor, using hundreds of metres of thin transparent tubing to make visible the kind of capillary action that makes cell-building possible in plants. Unlike its organic equivalent, Haacke’s circulatory system is a closed network. (Plants can breathe.) However many junctions there are creating fission and divergence, there are just as many equivalent junctions ensuring fusion and convergence. The mechanism pumps out waste, but ends up pumping it in again. There is nowhere else to go; and in this, the Haacke installation, surrounded by documentation of less abstract, more overtly politicised interventions in the representation of German history and German identity, offers a powerful counterpoint to Horn’s tension between centre and periphery. The history of the city has revolved around fission and fusion from the start; it was formed initially from the fusion of two townships, Berlin and Koln, and the subsequent centuries of rivalry between the citizenry and its rulers have seen repeated attempts at building walls of unification, and walls of division, that have all been destroyed, and their materials reclaimed or displaced; history is something repeatedly disposed of, but never entirely obliterated – in fact, the higher the mound of rejectamenta, the more it blocks out the view of anything else.
The Fifth Book of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz revolves around the tearing up of the city fabric to make way for the extension of the transport network. Much of the description of this feverish activity in the mid-1920s fits the situation around the Alexanderplatz today. Doblin is particularly fascinated by the mounds of rubble:
A dump-heap lies before us. Dust thou art, to dust returnest. We have built a splendid house, nobody comes in or goes out any longer. Thus Rome, Babylon, Nineveh, Hannibal, Caesar, all went to smash, oh, think of it! In the first place, I must remark they are digging those cities up again, as the illustrations in last Sunday’s edition show, and, in the second place, those cities have fulfilled their purpose, and we can now build new cities. Do you cry about your old trousers when they are mouldy and rotten? No, you simply buy new ones, that keeps the world going.
The historical irony in this politics and aesthetics of replacement, is that a large inscription quoting from Doblin’s fifth book can still be seen on the East German apartment block adjacent to the Alexanderplatz, which has just been face-lifted out of all recognition. There is even talk of removing the inscription. Former East Germans are unnerved with the rapidity with which the material conditions of their own history, their own life-experience, are being summarily disposed of. Doubly ironic is the extent to which the East is being westernised and vice versa. During the 1980s, when I stopped off in the city en route from Poland, I acquired the habit of staying at the Kanthotel. Kantstrasse, once a showcase for West German prosperity, now has more than its fair share of charity shops and vacated premises. The junction with Wilmersdorferstrasse is now an emporium for bargain basement outfitters, while the grade A designer labels have migrated to the East.
Economic and cultural value move backwards and forwards between West and East and centre and periphery, and with each move there is a curious pulse of capillary action, a pushing away that only reinforces movement around the network. History looks like a system of aversions, epitomised in the popularity of the East German allotment system. These are allotments entirely without plants, only neat prefabricated chalets all angled away from each other in an endless series of mutual exclusions. In the floods of pearly light below the smog incised by the East German TV tower, they seem to go on for ever.
Ordungsamt
In the flea-markets of the Ostbahnhof, the Arkonaplatz and the Mauer-Park, you can see the demise of a culture putting into frenzied circulation a hoard of objects held close for decades, now magically obsolete, objects of nostalgia, parody, dislocation: the artefactual evidence of life in the DDR. The markets are well attended; crowds of Berliners make their way silently along the tram routes and the unterbahns, moving nervously from one venue to another. After a while, the habitués are easy to spot, especially the tall, spindly eccentric with his short, stout companion, looking like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, both dressed in olive green military oilskins with field belts and webbing, standing out from the rest of the Cold War-demob wanderers as they pick their way through four different markets in as many hours. They are not buying or selling anything – apart from the occasional beer – but have come to preside over the drowning of a generation, all going down for the third time with their entire lives flashing before their eyes.
In the original flea markets, infected garments were bought for reluctant use, but the goods on sale here are all for eye-level shelving, rescued from previously ignorable backgrounds of daily life in order to be thrust into the foreground of an elegiac sense of vanishing waymarks – of the sudden, keenly felt absence of mislaid and abandoned mementoes, once so familiar (contemptibly familiar) but now recalled with a slightly disturbing fondness, the kind of fondness only objects can lay claim to; trusty in a world without trust; they are things that define a home, though they could be found in anyone’s home; household gods in an age of mechanical reproduction; each and every one the banal locus of an indefinable ache.
The tightly packed stalls are a distillation without taxonomy, offering an experience overcrowded with recollections as incongruous as in a dream. The markets are obsessional walkways, corridors between past and future, and have sprung up in close proximity to the former course of the Berlin Wall, which was not only a physical separation but a temporal barrier between alternative pasts and futures. The Checkpoint Charlie museum is now for tourists, but Berliners themselves keep coming back at the weekends to these pop-up frontiers of the memory that call for urgent patrolling, watching and checking for escape attempts, for the furtive manoeuvres of a mindset still at odds with itself, with its own inveterate yearnings: no freedom without order; no cure for the soul without paying, over and over again, to take back something of what was lost, in the blackmail of self that is recent German history.
2007
‘Light’: A Total Installation
The setting for this exhibition is infused not only with the exact ratio of light and shade predominant on any given day, but with more than nine hundred years of thinking about the meaning of light in sacred space. The history of architecture attributes the birth of Gothic to the reconstruction of the east end of the Abbey of Saint-Denis in 1144, when Abbot Suger authorised a design that transformed the relationship between church architecture and light. His innovation was the creation of a ‘crown of chapels, because of which the entire church would brilliantly shine with the remarkable and uninterrupted light of the dazzling windows illuminating the interior beauty’. A century and a half later, William Durandus wrote his Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (1286), the most influential of all medieval treatises on the symbolic meaning of churches and church ornaments. This codifies the importance of light in the Gothic cathedral, and accounts for the symbolic meaning of its physical presence there: ‘the glass windows in a church are Holy Scriptures, which expel the wind and the rain, that is all things hurtful, but transmit the light of the true Sun, that is God, into the hearts of the faithful. These are wider within than without, because the mystical sense is the more ample, and precedes the literal meaning.’ Written in the late thirteenth century, Durandus’s text is effectively a practical manual for churchmen, but it is based on ideas whose most sophisticated philosophical treatment had been given in the text De Luce, written by the Englishman Robert Grosseteste around the time of the rebuilding of Saint-Denis.
We think of light as intangible, without substance, and yet, according to Grosseteste, it is ‘the first corporeal form’, the very means by which matter comes into being and takes on form: ‘for the form cannot desert matter, because it is inseparable fro
m it, and matter itself cannot be deprived of form’. No wonder light features in the history of art as a creative force, associated more with spirit than with matter, seeming to come from a source beyond the world of objects that it reveals. Grosseteste has an explanation for the unique status of light in our perception and understanding of the world: ‘the first corporeal form is […] more exalted and of a nobler and more excellent essence than all the forms that come after it […] It has moreover greater similarity than all bodies to the forms that exist apart from matter, namely, the intelligences.’
Light is undoubtedly a part of the physical world and yet it seems to enter the world through divine or angelic agency. This is one reason why the medieval builders sought to use light as an element of architecture in the great cathedrals. At Winchester, the cathedral encompasses both Romanesque and Gothic building styles and exemplifies the architectural importance of light in the design of its arcades, galleries and clerestories and in its use of stained glass. Light is a malleable medium that can be channelled, relayed, absorbed, reflected and refracted. Pilar Beltran Lahoz’s ‘Container’ provides perhaps the purest expression of the architectural manipulation of light. It has the geometrical simplicity and the scale of the kind of rectangular box we normally identify with industrial containers, and its fabric is imprinted faintly with the details of just such a container, and yet it is designed to contain nothing; or rather, it contains nothing but light and air. To be strictly accurate, it both does and does not contain light, since its use of silkscreen materials transforms light into denser and more obscure forms, while its visual permeability does not stop light in its tracks – does not prevent it from travelling into and out of the space delineated by its aluminum frames. The architectural use of silk – the least substantial and most gossamer-like of materials – invites the imagination to regard the work of art as both a visual and a tactile experience, since silk is normally worn on the body, close to the skin. It uses our knowledge of silk to convey the delicacy and unresisting quality of the threshold between greater and lesser degrees of clarity and obscurity, a relationship that is usually negotiated in medieval cathedrals through the medium of stained glass. The chiaroscuro effect dramatises the relationship that light always seems to evoke, between the material and immaterial, between the spirit and its fleshly envelope.
The same fragility in the separation of these conditions, that are conventionally regarded as opposite, but which light seems to blend, is clearly at the centre of Marc Quinn’s remarkable ‘Angel’. Based on the cast of a foetal skeleton, Quinn’s tiny figure is a reminder of the basic liminality of the human condition. Without doubt already a part of the material world, the foetus is often regarded in the modern secular imagination as only uncertainly and indeterminately a part of humanity. At the same time, the traditional religious attitude has consigned the stillborn child to limbo, as if it does not qualify somehow in spiritual terms. Quinn’s conception seems to run counter to both these habits of thought. The extraordinary delicacy of the foetal organism involves a material condition so refined as to be almost spiritualised. Quinn’s sculpture embodies an almost Wordsworthian attitude towards the child – that the less developed it is, the closer it is to God: that it comes to life ‘trailing clouds of glory’ (a phrase that you can only visualise in terms of chiaroscuro). The nineteenth-century framework for this attitude was provided by the moment of birth, but Quinn pushes back the margin as far as it will go, to the moment of conception. His title makes a claim for the idea that an embryonic condition is the most likely of all to be spiritual in nature. Resistance to this hypothesis could be strengthened by an assumption that the foetus lives in darkness, enclosed and withdrawn from the light of creation; but we now know that this is not true; that the walls of the womb and the human body act as a medium for the absorption and transmission of light and for its separation into different colours. The accession of light suggests powerfully that drawing a line between different states of being is something that humanity does subjectively, and even arbitrarily. The fact that Quinn’s ‘Angel’ is praying in a westerly direction suggests a more urgent need to intercede with humanity than with God.
Both Lahoz and Quinn are concerned with the tenuousness of the barrier between presence and absence, almost discounting the difference between visibility and invisibility. Rachel Whiteread’s untitled pair of works appears to provide a counterweight to this approach, emphasising boundedness and solidity. The architectural role of these reciprocal objects depends on the parallels and modifications they offer to the genre of the funerary monument, examples of which are found in every part of the cathedral. Their extreme plainness, their economy of signification, is echoed most fully and straightforwardly in the funerary slab of Bishop de Lucy, which occupies an equivalent position at the other end of the cathedral, at the east end of the retrochoir. This symmetry is an extension of the principles of organisation that govern all of Whiteread’s most characteristic works, involving the production of casts of both solids and voids, presences and absences. Although the work in ‘Light’ is divided into two closely similar elements whose simplicity raises them almost to the level of abstraction, they are in fact representations of a solid object and of the vacancy above it, manifestations both of the material and of the immaterial, one convex and the other concave. Both are given equal value and placed in corresponding positions by the west door, like the twin bastions of an ancient propylaeon. One is the cast of a mortuary slab, effectively the plinth for a cadaver, while the other can be thought of as another kind of container for light, capturing the space from which human remains have been removed, or spirited away – representations, then of mortality and of what mortality defines itself against.
The smooth, polished whiteness of Whiteread’s composition could not be further removed from the distressed complexity of the surface of John Gibbons’s aptly named ‘Presence’. Virtually every part of this highly concentrated work has been milled and abraded to produce a swirling, rippling pattern that entangles and confuses light. Even slight movement on the part of the viewer circling round this sculpture will trigger a release of visual energy. But energy does not merely skid across its surface; it has been recruited in a tremendous effort of containment. The welds and patches that hold this work together seem to have enclosed a source of power that presses against its confinement in a way characteristic of many of Gibbons’s works. The elevation and dimensions of the work evoke the origins of monumental sculpture in many traditions, particularly the Egyptian and Greek, and the tension between abstraction and figuration recalls the compactness of expression of the Cycladic bronze age. This amalgamation of the archaic and the contemporary seems to place the work in a modernist tradition of the kind sponsored by Wilhelm Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy (1908), a text that relegated sentimental Romanticism in favour of the austere impersonality of ancient devotional art. If nineteenth-century sculpture was an art of empathy, of identification with aspects of the human condition, with impermanence and frailty, its twentieth-century successor was to focus on what exceeded individual human experience, on the kind of unknowability traditionally associated with the divine. If Gibbons’s brooding stela invites any form of identification, it is of the kind associated with totemic objects that give a visual form to an unseen presence, a spirit that forms the basis simultaneously of a belief system and a social system, as if the two could not be thought of separately.
Darren Almond’s ‘Geisterbahn’ [‘Ghost Train’] is a video installation in the crypt. Ghost trains are a product of the leisure industry, and yet they have a cathartic, almost ritual function for those who ride them, suggesting a debased form of religious experience that taps into primitive anxieties and superstitions. This particular amalgam of the modern and the archaic was made possible by the Victorian technology that developed the underground train from the 1860s onwards. David L. Pike’s study Subterranean Cities (2005) has shown how the early attempts at establishing subterranean rail networks gave
birth to a cultural history that identified them with entry into an infernal realm. The Underground acquired associations with the Land of the Dead. The simultaneous projection of a modern metropolis overground and of a lair of dark spirits beneath it was contemporaneous with the development of theories of the unconscious, which allowed for the realisation that modern civilisation retains an intimate psychological relationship with primitive desires and phobias. The joining together of the technological and the pathological was characteristic of a rich vein in early cinema, particularly in German Expressionism, which Almond’s film recalls in its iconography, technique and title. ‘Geisterbahn’ is essentially a black and white silent film with added music. Its absence of colour accentuates the basis of the film medium, which is a projection of patterns of light and shade. The obscurity of some of the images is the calculated effect of an emphasis on strong contrasts, corresponding visually to the many thematic dualities of the work.
David Batchelor’s assemblage, ‘Waldella 6’, uses light equally as medium and as subject matter, although this is not the daylight referred to by medieval builders and theorists, but the artificial light produced in an economy that thinks of it as a resource rather than as a natural phenomenon. If Grosseteste emphasises the exalted status of light, Batchelor channels it through the least regarded of materials, the recycled bottles used previously to contain domestic cleaning substances. The siting of these mass-produced vessels, in a vertical festoon slanted downwards on one of the great piers of the south aisle, invites immediate comparison with the pattern of colours often visible on the adjacent pier. The visual array created by light percolating through stained glass is both complemented and subverted by Batchelor’s spectacle in dyed plastic. The reuse of disposable materials is an ethical choice that requires adjustment of an assumed hierarchy of values. At the same time, the reference to cleaning, maintenance and economic imperatives is a reminder of the dual existence of the church as both a symbolic structure and a physical edifice implanted within a social and commercial reality. The primary colours with which the bottles have been stained draw attention to the physical basis of light in a spectrum of colours, no less than the artist requires the viewer to contemplate the meaning of sacred space in relation to a range of constituents.
