Dresden. What is to be done when, during the first inspection of a new workplace, it turns out that the cellar and attic are full of documents from an epoch we have learnt to refer to as »the former GDR«? Throwing them away would be irreverent and undiplomatic – so, then: do we leave them where they are, lock them up, ignore them? Christiane Mennicke, who since April 2003 has been the artistic director of the Kunsthaus in Dresden, has instead decided to make this dilemma a productive one. For, not only in the storeroom of the Kunsthaus – which in 1981 and 1988 was the venue for the »Great Art Exhibition of the GDR« - but also in the urban space of this Saxon baroque metropolis, the decision about what should be done with the aesthetic legacy of socialism seems to be temporarily on hold. While the big wall frieze by Walter Womack at the »Haus des Lehrers« in Berlin is now newly resplendent after being restored at great expense after the building complex was sold, the wall painting »Der Weg der roten Fahne« (»The Way of the Red Flag«), executed in 1969 by Gerhard Bondzin together with students from the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, which at the time was one of the most prominent examples of architecture-related art in East Germany, has, since the start of the nineties, been coyly covered by construction netting.
The exhibition bypasses the difficult terrain of German-German art history by means of two curatorial decisions: the examination of the socialist pictorial universe takes place solely from the point of view of the present day, and is internationalized. The title itself already indicates this: »Unknown sister, unknown brother, you are not alone« were the words of a popular song of the young Pioneers that invoked the worldwide solidarity of socialist countries. In its abbreviated form, however, the title also suggests the inevitable distance that characterizes the relationship even of the next generation - to which Mennicke herself belongs - of artists and curators socialized on Western lines to the realities faced by artists from the former Eastern bloc countries. This distance can be overcome neither by »tabula rasa« rhetoric nor by any uncritical celebration of socialist aesthetics as pop. What is needed instead is a subtly differentiated and impartial revision of this ideological imagic language; a revision that does not shrink back even from asking to what extent this language could still be relevant for a present-day political practice.

This exhibition succeeds here in many different ways. Many of the invited artists engage with individual examples of this scorned »propaganda art«: for example, Olaf Nicolai, with a formal deconstruction of the monument »Die Flamme der Revolution« (»The Flame of the Revolution«), designed by Siegbert Fliegel and executed in 1967 in Halle an der Saale. A different tack was taken by Kerstin Chill-Noack and Ynez Neumann, both from Dresden, who asked a group of six to sixteen-year-old pupils from a Montessori school to paint pictures based on individual elements from Bondzin’s wall painting and articulate their own interpretations. Apart from the subtle irony of one pedagogical programme’s being employed here to uncover the blind spots of another, the children produced illuminating misunderstandings: for example, the gesture of linking arms to show aggressive solidarity is read as an arrest scene.

The confrontation between works that are formally close to one another but opposite in content is fascinating. This occurs in the case of the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie and the Indonesian collective Taring Padi. Both show linocuts or woodcuts; one sees pathetic poses, happy groups and machine-guns in the hands of women. McKenzie’s group of works »Global Joy« takes figurative elements from Womacka’s wall frieze at Alexanderplatz, but completely turns them around ideologically: here, it is not a matter of socialist ideals, but of the free use of a historically discredited store of images by a global youth culture vaguely showing itself to be subversive. The small prints are supplemented by a collection of record covers from eastern European re-releases, which McKenzie bought at Polish flea markets: the cover of the Beatles record »Help« is a primitive collage, while that of the double LP »Daydream Nation« by Sonic Youth has the photo of a burning candle instead of the picture by Gerhard Richter. Taring Padi is featured in an exhibition of contemporary art outside of Indonesia for the first time. The works displayed show the collective’s clear commitment to a politically effective artistic practice: as well as the finely chased woodcuts with captions like »Weapons cannot solve problems« or »United work force – build up solidarity between workers and the repressed people«, a large banner on the plight of the civilian population under the military dictatorship of General Suharto can be seen as well as some larger than life Wayang dolls, which were used during the mass protests against the regime in 1998. Far removed from being genuine »art of the people«, Taring Padi’s works instead refer back to a visual language, influenced by the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the sixties, that aims to educate and agitate, and that was very popular before Suharto seized power (when Indonesia had the biggest organized communist party outside of China). One of the exhibition’s strengths is the way it allows such widely differing approaches to be presented side by side without attempting to reconcile them, thus underscoring the dissimultaneity of social developments in an era when the homogenization of cultures under Western dominion seems to be a matter of common consent.

The examination of political wall painting forms its own segment. The Serbian artist Goranka Matic has photographed the remains of frescoes by the painter Krsto Hegedusic that, painted directly onto the cliffs at the historical location, commemorate the battle of Sutjeska fought between Serb partisans and German occupying forces in 1943. This founding myth of the multiracial state Yugoslavia under Tito was undermined by the wars of the nineties, as the bullet holes in the surface of the rock clearly show. Matic contrasts details of the weathered, bullet-riddled and graffiti-covered frescoes with idyllic photographs of nature in the Sutjeska Gorge. Florian Zeyfang’s contribution, »Found Portrait of America (work in progress)« reconstructs the wall painting »Portrait of America« by Diego Rivera, designed in 1933 for the auditorium of the New Workers School in New York and painted on wooden panels; in the course of the years, this work gradually broke up owing to its being moved, damaged by fire, and being partially sold. Margit Czenki travelled to Mexico City to do research on how the legacy of Alfaro Siqueiros is being managed. Siqueiros, who, in contrast to Rivera, was seen as a Stalinist hardliner and spent several years in prison, developed a much more dynamic and abstract painting language for his interior designs, which Czenki has adapted on a large scale in the Kunsthaus. Czenki visited the house where the painter once lived, which Siqueiros opened to the public in 1969 as a venue for political discussions; it now houses a museum. There, she met three young women curators who, with passion and intellectual acuity, contrast Siqueiros artistic and political approach with contemporary art. In Mexico, international solidarity comes full circle: Czenki found postcards sent to the imprisoned painter by school pupils in Dresden on behalf of the state. As a reciprocal gesture, following his release in 1970, Siqueiros visited the East German city, where, warmed by a Russian fur hat, he posed for a photograph in front of the »Weg der roten Fahne« together with a delegation of senior East German functionaries.

Kunsthaus Dresden
23 November 2003 to 28 February 2004

 

 

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