Lüneburg. »The horror! The horror!«, mumbles an old man with crazed eyes in a dark hut. This Marlow had crossed the threshold separating civilisation from wilderness, as Joseph Conrad put it in his 1911 novel. Having penetrated into the »Heart of Darkness«, where colonisers had been driven by greed for seemingly inexhaustible resources, Conrad reflected this character in a literary mould. It also served Coppola as a template for the director’s depiction of the crazy Colonel Kurtz in his Vietnam epic »Apocalypse Now«. »In Conrad’s story the river and the thick vegetation lining its banks represent a natural force that challenges the colonial spirit, so that Marlow’s journey – travelling ever onward up the river – comes to epitomise European conquest of the territory beyond Europe’s confines«, writes curator Christian Kravagna in his text accompanying the exhibition »Planetary Consciousness«.
In two darkened rooms at the Lüneburg Kunstraum on the Leuphana Campus, set on the grounds of a former barracks, German artist Christine Meisner embarks on a filmic and photographic journey in the footsteps of the protagonist from Conrad’s novel: the Congo, flowing along peacefully, acquires a threatening and oppressive visual dimension, whilst a voice cites a broad range of sources, all referring to Belgium’s colonial history and to the Congo. In the other room are laconic shots of buildings and interiors redolent of colonisation, such as the Palais de Justice in Brussels, the Colonial Museum in Tervuren/Brussels or the National Archive in Kinshasa. The way in which Meisner soberly establishes a confrontation between these images is unsettling, for the horror of their history does not appear to disrupt the self-evident nature of their institutional functioning. They leave us with a sombre impression, which is opposed to the implicit hero-worship that dominates in responses to the figures of both Marlow and Kurtz despite their inhuman traits.
Columbian artist José Alejandro Restrepo contrasts Hegel’s conjectures as a philosopher with Humboldt’s experiences as a natural scientist on a rather light-hearted note, asserting: » Humboldt’s is not Hegel’s crocodile. « Humboldt corrected Hegel’s philosophical judgement, based on knowledge derived solely from books, that the fauna of America were smaller than in Europe, and revealed Hegel’s Eurocentric view in the process. As visitors move around the gallery, Restrepos’ writing on the wall, framed by two monitors with the eye and tail of a crocodile and set against the backdrop of a crocodile-length ruler, is reflected between the works of Austrian artist Mathias Poledna. In two glass cases, each on a pedestal, he presents record covers from the American Folkway Label. These covers symbolise the universalist collecting ambitions of the label, which from 1948 to 1986 catalogued sounds of the world on over 2,000 records, including highly specific audio documents such as »Bertolt Brecht before the Committee on Un-American Activities«. In this presentation, which portrays individual covers like fetishes on a pedestal with glass casings, Poledna raises the issue of humanist isolation, designation, ordering, cataloguing and presentation of the Other. In the process, the humanist impulse of the notion of the archive and of presentation is investigated even with the aesthetic categorisation of the various cover designs, although the specific selection of the twelve covers does not appear to reflect any particular notion. With this purist gesture, Poledna ponders humanist notions of representation by pushing the form of museum-style presentation to the extreme. However, I would like to raise the question of whether this formalisation of presentation does not run the risk of a synthetic decontextualisation, and thus involving a humourless self-referentiality, as it refrains from making an explicit commentary and relies instead on an art historical explanation.
Three large-format photographs by Austrian photographer Lisl Ponger are on display with the texts »Wild Places«, »Die Beute« (»The Prey«) and »En Couleur« placed below them. The photo closest to the entrance, »Wild Places«, portrays a female tattoo artist at work: She is just »writing« the word »Artist« on a woman’s arm beneath the terms »Missionary«, »Mercenary«, »Ethnologist« and »Tourist«, which have all been crossed out. In referencing the fashion for tattoos, here placed in the context of an artistic rebuttal of the trend, Ponger refers to the historical sequence of activities pursued via colonial travel. In semiotic terms the cult initiation ritual of tattooing, with the idea of scratching signs into the skin, nowadays appears to be a pop culture decoration of the body in the spirit of tourist consumption, as practised a thousand times over, day in and day out, on beaches around the globe as a pastime, particularly in the form of temporary henna tattoos. The photo entitled »Die Beute« portrays a young woman, clad in materials reminiscent of Klimt and Gauguin paintings and surrounded by African and Asian handicrafts. In »En Couleur« Ponger satirizes the photograph »Noire et Blanche« by Man Ray from 1926, which crystallised the Surrealists’ critical attitude towards the colonial presentation of art, as shown subsequently in a major exhibition in Paris (1931). In her photographic mise-en-scène, Ponger formulates a cheerful critique of exoticism with specific pop culture and historical references: she replaces the African mask in Man Ray’s photograph with a copy of »National Geographic« depicting an African woman with exotic make-up. The artistic works shown in the »Planetary Consciousness« exhibition take the discourses of colonialism literally in order to examine their visual and verbal articulations. Whilst for me the title of the exhibition, »Planetary Consciousness«, also initially stirred up blurred memories of 1970s hippy ideology, which aimed to decipher a universal language of nature and invoke the »force of Mother Earth«, Kravagna’s curatorial reference to literary theorist Marie Louise Pratt focuses the artistic positions shown here into a critical revision of virulent contemporary cultural stereotypes, contradicting the newly enacted picturesque exoticisms that arise in the course of ubiquitous cultural Disneyfication of museums.
Translated by Helen Ferguson