For the exhibition NON-STOP. A project on the ambivalence of war and peace, at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg from May 17 to September 25, 2005.
Sixty years after the end of the war, artists are taking a stand in an exhibition at the Kunstverein Wolfsburg. On the reality and fiction of our war-torn present and future.
Nearly any other German city is as much a result of the Second World War as Wolfsburg in Lower Saxony. This applies to the conception, construction, destruction and ultimately the triumphant resurgence of this place, which was initially called the "City of the KdF Car" and was christened with its current name by the British Allies in 1945. Ideology and reality were in a highly irreconcilable relationship, especially at the beginning.
Initially, according to Nazi propaganda, the KdF car, which would go on to have a global career as the VW Beetle after the war, was to be built here. Instead, however, the factories on the Mittelland Canal commanded by Ferdinand Porsche were almost entirely devoted to war production: instead of the civilian three-seater in the service of the people's joy, masses of Kübelwagen and components of the V1 rocket rolled off the production line here. Little was left of the town after the war. VW, however, continued to exist and embarked on a triumphant entrepreneurial march from Wolfsburg, which could still be saved into the age of post-industrialism.
Science, culture, consumption
Today, the company can afford the "Autostadt", a lavishly designed site for marketing Volkswagen and its subsidiaries, while the city boasts a range of facilities that do not necessarily have VW written on them, even if the company's money is in them. For example, a huge new art museum, measured by the size of the city, in which top-class exhibitions - currently Cecil Beaton and James Rosenquist - can be seen, while renowned architects such as Hans Scharoun and Alvar Aalto immortalized themselves in the cityscape back in the 1960s. And anyone leaving the Wolfsburg station building can catch a glimpse of the gigantic "Phaeno" science center by star architect Zaha Hadid, which is still under construction these days.
Science, culture and consumption seem to have converged here in a theme park, the economic basis of which is obviously due to the omnipresent main sponsor. If one is interested in an independent reflection of history and the freedom of art - in other words, an escape from the fractured and at the same time continuous history of the place - it is necessary to visit a place that is rather inconspicuous by Wolfsburg standards. The Kunstverein, whose director Justin Hoffmann has to draw money for exhibitions and events from sources other than the usual local sources, is located in the building of the old castle, a structure that already predates the city's recent history.
Sculptures made from scrap weapons
The idea of organizing a project on the "Ambivalence of War and Peace" right here - and on the occasion of the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the war - is convincing at first glance for these reasons. The "Non Stop" exhibition, flanked by a program of films and lectures, is intended, as Hoffmann said at the opening last Thursday, to take account of the fact that Wolfsburg was once primarily an armaments location. At the same time, however, it is intended to move away from this starting point and take a very fundamental look at wars, their political motivations and command structures. With the question of how young men are turned into soldierly machines and the virtual manifestations through which wars and violence are constantly present, even in a state of media latency.
As broadly as the conceptual field is defined, the works on display at Wolfsburg Castle until September 25 are just as diverse: Video and media installations, sculpture, painting and collage as well as a historical newspaper archive on the end of the Second World War. The Munich-based artist Christian Schnurer places his sculptures, which are welded together from found weapons from the Second World War and other industrial scrap, in a historical context that also refers to current realities of war and power.
Nuclear idyll
His work "Neue Welt" (New World) presents a black torpedo in a transport crate made of plywood under an unrolled map for geography lessons of the then still Greater German Reich. It dates from 1944, shows the North and South American continents and is entitled "The New World". As if German educators had secretly faced up to the bitter truth before the end of the war that the USA had not only won the submarine war against Japan but had long since become the hegemon of a new world order.
Viennese artist Ellen Semen is represented with a series of small-format collages in which war and killing by no means appear as ugly events. Camouflaged by floral ornaments, Semen's miniature soldiers and weapons appear less dangerous, although they are clearly by no means relieved of their purpose. The picture "Wenn eh die Bombe" shows how a masked warrior in a shiny black robe fires her futuristic-looking firearms at a figure whose flying coattails seem to have been copied from the Dada imagery of the 1920s.
Both figures are acting in a field of defoliated trees, as a spectacle takes place on the horizon which, in its aesthetic and moral ambivalence, has become a symbol of the past century: the flash of a detonating atomic bomb creates an artificial sunset.
Iran in California
The deceptive beauty of a grandiose landscape also defines the work of Munich-based media artist Tamiko Thiel. Using a joystick, the viewer can move through an artificial space projected onto a screen. Like in a first-person shooter game, paths can be followed, doors opened and rooms entered. The setting of the work is a plateau in the Californian mountain desert of Manzanar, with a snow-covered mountain panorama in the background.
A sublime alpine image that is nevertheless not without precedent in the world. Similar landscapes can be found in Iran, and this recognition effect also structures the political background of Thiel's work, which she developed together with the Iranian-American writer Zara Houshmand.
Gardens of paradise
The simulation entitled "Beyond Manzanar" is ostensibly located in a huge Californian internment camp where over 10,000 US-Japanese were interned during the Second World War, while the naval war against Hirohito's imperial army raged in the Pacific. Although hardly anyone in American government circles at the time seriously believed that American citizens of Japanese descent posed a threat to domestic security, this internment action reflected all the racially motivated and politically instrumentalized hatred that had swept the country since the traumatic attack on Pearl Harbor.
Tamiko Thiel, who conceived her work in 2000, at a time when there was no talk of Guantanamo, builds a bridge from the anti-Asian racism of the 1940s to the hostility to which American citizens of Iranian origin were subjected during the hostage crisis between 1979 and 1980. Using a joystick, the viewer can move through the prison barracks, in which the photographs of interned Americans of Japanese descent are dimly visible, but also through Japanese and Iranian gardens of paradise.
Doors slam by themselves
Poems written by camp inmates in Japanese, Farsi and English force their way into the picture, while elsewhere the viewer can move through a forest of immigration documents. Photographs of Japanese-American and Iranian-American family scenes hang in interiors reminiscent of museums and living rooms alike: Group photos of weddings and other celebrations, snapshots of the peaceful coexistence of citizens who all have at least their American passports in common.
Only at the beginning does the interactive viewer of "Beyond Mazamar" seem to have control over his movements in the virtual space with the joystick. As soon as they enter a room, doors slam shut behind them and, like the internees, they are forced to stay in certain rooms and follow predetermined paths.
There is only one way out of Manzanar: it leads into the air and straight into a small war game, where everything is suddenly taken out of the first-person shooter's hands. It trundles through the air completely without control, no matter how hard the exhibition visitor tugs at his joystick. Once you start a war, says Tamiko Thiel, whatever you may have imagined and whatever you may have simulated, you relinquish all control.
Perhaps this is the idea that most closely unites the works assembled in Wolfsburg: war as an ultimately uncontrollable and contingent force of destruction that eludes all control precisely where it appears to have already been thought through, planned and simulated to the end. And Justin Hoffmann also points this out: As the events in the Gulf, Chechnya or Sri Lanka show, a war can still earn its name regardless of whether it is officially deemed to be over. Clearly identifiable agents and clear fronts no longer exist - not to mention good and evil. The war of the third millennium in particular is full of first-person shooters without joysticks.