Wolfgang Ernst...Arsenals of Memory...MM 8#1...English
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- Beyond the Museums
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There are stores, storerooms and depots which certainly do not run under
the name `museum', becoming so explicit and amounting to nothing. Nevertheless
and, as is the intention/view of this title -- they fulfil museum-related
functions avant la lettre, forming, so-to-speak, the archi(ve)museum apriority
of the museum's conceivability. Now having become an institution and as such
genealogically at an end, the museum, that classical terminal for parcel post
from the history of art and culture, must now think anew with respect to ageing
storage techniques i.e. it must remove its barriers and become a flow-through
and transformer station if it is not for its part to fall victim to museum-like
crystallisation. Recycling instead of finality: the linearity of product --
consumption -- waste -- deposit/rubbish and/or museum, as expounded by Michael
Thompson, is replaced by the post-historic cycle of product -- use --
separation -- recycling -- secondary product. (Note_1) The questioning of
the function of the museum therefore takes place on the basis of very real
challenges forcing the museum to decode itself anew. Archaeology has up to now
snatched cultural-historical values from the soil and supplied them to the
museum, but nowadays it is carrying out `waste-archaeology' of the present in
real-time. (Note_2) `Tradition' and `conservation', two classical areas of
responsibility for the museum are now also called `long-standing polluters'. At
the same time, in the process of an increased awareness of nature, the same is
threatening to itself become a museum reservation.
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- The real element of the consumption economy stipulates: the length of storage
is becoming increasingly more short-term; the supply system of the clothing
firm of Benetton is trying to virtually programme its storage times to zero by
the supply-demand-relationship aiming at real-time. As James Stirling has
recently shown in a factory building near Kassel, computer-controlled
warehouses are making out of real sheds that which the PC is completing in the
microcosm: memory. Here, too, organisation and service takes place
according to the principle of random access; the museum has been the place of
Read Only Memory for long enough. The anagram says it: I am writing out this
text from ROM, the place of the long-term memory stage-managed by the
imperial or religious side, the memory which was continually being defeated by
forgetting, as the ruins know, that ironic commentary of literal and material
clusters of significants continually saying RAM. History thus has no longer a
canonical place; bequeathels and further dispatches are forever taking a stand.
To the extent to which events are no longer being put into the archives or
being intermediately stored but are becoming direct, we also witness the
expiring of that additional element of museums, that différance,
which indeed legitimises the medium, the `mediator' museum: The museumising
of the world intends to spread the basic thought that everything happens just
as if everything had already happened, as Henri Pierre Jeudy indicates. Yet
the electronic element is not the death sentence of the imaginary memory. It
bases the representation of storage on the flawless use of the stored
information without, however, excluding play. Are these amazing means merely
aimed at storing information? Memory itself is realised by means of
counter-information, disinformation. In the endless manipulation of the
recollected elements, it is interwoven with narratives and images. Accumulation
represents no obstacle at all for all these movements of the
mind. (Note_3) The museum's demand is now pointing the way to mobilising
the accumulation of the depots, making it publicly accessible and also
recycling stored stocks in the exhibition area. The memory, the basis (store)
of the museum is liquefying. The museum's depot is therefore increasingly
reflecting the switching technique of its successor media.
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As the real space of the museum has nowadays lost its privilege of being the
most advanced storage medium in matters of cultural and image memory i.e. a
function as the `mass medium' of the 19th century, it must now reconsider its
role. In such a way it is becoming the place of reflection on its own successor
technologies. (Note_4)
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The museum is transforming from the final storage place to the `interim
store' (Note_5), analogous to the language of nuclear disposal technology.
Norbert Kottmann and Adrian Schoormans also arranged an art exhibition under
this name on 18th May 1990 in Düsseldorf's Hildebrandtstraße: one
room (84 m2), one office (furnished), one shelf (3.15 x 5.6 x 1.1m).
The Container-Museum conveyed the impression of a stopgap (also with the
meaning interim store), just as had been intended by Michael Fehr's early
conception for the Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Museum
of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany) in Bonn, and which was
consciously realised in the Portikus exhibition rooms in Frankfurt.
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Museum aesthetics was long since taken hold of by analogous storing
technologies. There is the example of the presentation of antiquity in the
Museo Gregoriano Profano in the Vatican, namely a structural performance
reduced to archaeology. Silence and abstraction in contrast to the continual
(art) historical commentary. L'architettura è presente (...)
tutt'altro che neutra, ma nessun dialogo con le opere (...) as one observer
criticises (Note_6), and another however praises (...) how the
unclassical setting makes visible something of a new relationship to
antiquity. (Note_7) Technology, frame i.e. that which Hegel called
memory in contrast to recollection. No tempting of the glance by the suggestion
of a museographic narrative, no (v)ideology: (...) Elemente mobili modulari
e quindi amorfi, quali tralicci metallici e tubi in ferro, sostengono statue
relievi ed epigrafi de risultano evidenziati nel contrasto con le strutture
portanti. (Note_8) A modern quintessence of the binary conception of
Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity (1764): L'attuale
sistemazione (...) prevede un'articolazione in parte cronologica, in parte
tipologica. (Note_9) In the middle of this museum there is a storeroom,
a mobile metal framework with antique inscriptions fixed according to
systematic criteria. The attachment of these to the grille corresponds to the
modules for antiquity in the exhibition except that here the objects no longer
take a didactic detour via stage-managed rooms but form within a very close
space the pages of a transparent book, a palimpsest (as shown by the
perspective). Pure register, the archives, the index: Le musée comme
banque de donnés (Jean Louis Déotte). History as an
orientation aid for the general public is superfluous when the aesthetics of
the experts' systems of archaeology is taken for granted as information studies
for the museum visitor familiar with the computer.
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In the age of late capitalism, industrial regions are affected by this in a
two-fold manner: in the course of the petering out of their traditional work
base (e.g. coal/steel), they are at present being transformed into their own
industrial museum as a conception of a leisure-time landscape (Note_10) --
an attempt at the aesthetic sublimation of the crisis. The West German Ruhr
area is affected by this: For instance: the coal mine of Zollern in
Dortmund. An industrial museum has emerged here showing what it once meant `to
mine coal'. It should all be as if the mine were still running, only the dirt
is missing and the noise. (Note_11)
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However on the other hand the Ruhr area is suffering in very concrete terms
from the consequences of industrial disposal difficulties i.e. under the burden
of the waste disposal and soil contamination of the last 200 years, and no
museum can dispose of this, it can at best build over it.
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The true tragic archives are the soil, the industrial fallow land. Andrej
Tarkowski's film Stalker shows a corresponding `zone'; in Der
Museumsbesucher (The museum visitor) by his student Lopuschanski (1989), it
has become a museum situated off a waste-covered coast and -- non-accessible as
it is -- it provides the magical solution to the great
questions. (Note_12)
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The citizens of Hattingen experienced mixed feelings towards the sell-out i.e.
the dismantling of their steel furnace, to China and the simultaneous
transformation of the steel works area into an outstanding industrial museum:
as a result of the museumising, the town has evaded the question of soil waste
management. Here the museum figures as a distraction of attention from the
actual industrial legacy i.e. the contaminated soil as a chemical store.
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And yet another distraction: the same Ruhr area which now stores its past
history and identity under the key word `Industrial Museum' has, during the
course of structural transformation under the keyword `Technology Parks',
become the place of totally different stores, namely those of electronic
microchips. These however evade the classical aesthetics of portrayability.
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In 1861 a commentary by the British Museum in London presented its function as
a post-historical deposit, a case analogical to Noah's Ark: following the
disappearance of occidental culture, future visitors from distant lands should
be able to find there a representative collection of their past. The Noah's Ark
of today is however presented by the video archives. (Note_13)
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In the age of the disintegration of the terms of space and time by speed (Paul
Virilio), of the advancing immaterialising of information and its being caught
up by recording systems in real-time, the historical space of the museum
becomes a two-fold nostalgic retroeffect. (Note 14) A completely material
indication of this is the buying policy of present museums: museums not only
commission works of art which no longer take the roundabout route via the
private collector or the room of representation, and every-day objects are
being bought at the present time in which they are still rubbish, before they
fall victim to later museumising i.e. to an increase in value. (Note_15) At
the same time the museum is turning into the reservation of comprehensibility
in the age of fast images. Born of the enlightenment, it will become its final
resting place: that too is called memory. The art-historical and
cultural-historical museum whose exhibition always produced an anachronism in
that it presented the past in the present, is itself becoming an anachronism,
gaining its attractiveness from the deceleration wish of the consumers against
the background of the fast ageing of everything new (Jochen Hörisch) --
the museum as the place (of refuge) of delay, the différance of
perception. Donner le temps (de la traduction) (Note 16) : perhaps
today there is a final function determination of the medium museum in allowing
time, opening up time-spaces in places in which they long ago were lost as a
priori because electronic interception is indifferent to this
differentiation.
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.- Beyond the Muses
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No more metaphors of memory but aesthetic stores. Works of art are no longer
understood as agents of the symbolic but increasingly as forensic bodies, as a
reflex of the dispositions of the real. Storing is in itself becoming worthy of
depiction when it is a matter of remembering.
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Public exhibition rooms as aesthetic places stand in the shadow of
locating/hoarding, of those dispositions of political or economic power serving
control monitoring. Stores are not the space of art but of the administration
of this real element. Jacques Derrida drew attention to the Depôt
légal in Paris which receives the compulsory copies of every French
publication. (Note_17) All discursive knowledge is thus in league with its
non-discursive double. The military archives in Freiburg have set up a micro
film store in the galleries of coal-mines with photocopies of all relevant
administrative and cultural-historical documents of the Federal Republic of
Germany. Wolfgang Heinke has, as an artist, responded to this in the form of
his Central microfilm-archives, once exhibited in the Museum of
Photocopying (Mühlheim a.d. Ruhr). The origin of the stores is the memory
of the war, the reserve.
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A succession of artists have developed a special sensorium for the real, which
has always been directed at them through the concept of ars memoriae -- namely
the pure construction of spaces of recollection. Anselm Kiefer's painting
Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germany's spiritual heroes) (1973) is not
only a store -- like all art -- but also shows it, and Sigrid Sigurdsson's
installation Vor der Stille (Before the silence) aims at the museum as a
place of forgetting -- a shelf, the archives, the pure depot. What else was
that museion in Alexandria which Luciano Canfora had traced back as
Die verschwundene Bibliothek (The lost library) down to the burial
chamber of Ramses II? All art is testamentary. As Sigurdsson says: every museum
observer has his own archives and those of the others. (Note_18)
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Media determine the situation (Friedrich A. Kittler) and long ago expropriated
the autonomous view (what else is the Critical Theory). Every video camera
opens up latent photo archives, and does the camera indeed ever forget
what it has exposed? The true image of the past flashes past wrote
Walter Benjamin in his essay Über den Begriff der Geschichte (On
the concept of history). The past, according to Benjamin, can only be
recorded as an image which simply flashes through one's mind at the moment of
its discernibility never to be seen again. The fleetingness of the past
(passer/passé) is caught up by video aesthetics; as a consequence of
this aesthetics, historical exhibitions present their material no longer in a
monumental but in a fleeting manner. (Note_19) Electronic points of light on
the screen: the fleetingness of these images deregulates the stability of any
interpretation for which the museum provided monumental guarantee.
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In view of the inability of classical art to think in terms of the presence of
the past in the present other than as `memory', the qualities of the media
become involved, that which it alone sees (video): the `blind' spot of all
historical visions, its technical disposition. For history (histoires) are that
which distracts from the practice of storing. The real, however, exercises a
rhythmic veto even towards narration. For a store (storing) is that of which my
text processing programme is continually reminding me. If the art project store
is an attempt at the depictability of history/histoires, it is taking place at this point.
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L'archive naît du désordre (Arlette Farge). That disorder
of images which once characterised the sales rooms, artists' studios and depots
of old galleries makes a new sense of the perspective of the chaos-theory. The
concept of entropy as the second law of thermodynamics has found its way into
physics, as the title of a novella by Thomas Pynchon it finds its way into
post-modern literature -- it revolves around the dis/information which can be
read from New York's waste. Under the roof of a deserted warehouse on the Quai
de la Seine, the studio of the Parisian photo-caster Pascal Kern represented an
interim step up to the blaze -- forming the transition between art and
archives. In the words of the art critic Bernard Mercardé on Kern's
Fictions colorées: Il règne comme un désordre
dans les images que nous donne à voir Pascal Kern, un désordre
d'objets, de matières, de références, à l'image de
l'environnement dans lequel ce dernier vit et travaille (...). Son atelier, en
effet, conserve dans la moindre de ses détails le souvenir d'errances,
de dérives dans ces lieux de déréliction que sont les
terrains vagues, les maisons et les fabriques abandonnées (...).
Très vite, cependant, on sâpercoit que ce désordre est
très organisé, comme est organisée l'encyclopédie
citée par Borges (...) Le monde de Pascal Kern, de la mème
façon, constitue une curieuse taxonomie (...) selon une logique qui
n'avait rien d'aristotélicien: le bureau, l'atelier, les catalogues
typographiques, les films de voyages, la bibliothèque, les livres de
compte, les réclames (...) (Note_20)
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The depot, the store, the archives were up to now architectonically
stipulated; its objects understood the tradition of the past in the room. The
archi(ve)texture of electronic space (fictions colorées, in fact) now
cope with the difficulties of conventional (i.e. handed down) images by means
of restructuring. It is not only the place where new images are invented but
the emporium, the transformer station of that which has been found. The other
side of inventio -- that which ancient rhetoric technology knew about: pure
finding. The déja-vu element is at stake; Christian Boltanski once
installed it as Réserves, another time as Les Suisses
morts, as was recently the case in Lausanne.
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For stores also mean the delaying of death. When Boltanski piles up metal
boxes with photos of the deceased to which loudspeakers murmur the names of the
dead, we have gone from the space of the narrative directly into that of
counting, of computation. (Note_21) That which occurs as an analogy is
decided upon digitally i.e. in that space escaping from figurative depiction.
The consideration of depictability of which Sigmund Freud spoke for the humane
psyche is that which inhibits us in thinking in terms of store.
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Perhaps there is indeed a place which ruthlessly confronts us with it: Yad
Vashem near Jerusalem. Here, to the accompaniment of the no less
narrating(counting) rhythm of the naming of names through loudspeakers in the
memorial of the children's holocaust, even the clarity of the photos of the
dead recedes as a result of the pure candlelight, reflected thousand-fold. It
is indeed hardly possible for history/histoires to deal with the National
Socialist crime of having reduced human life to numbers in concentration camps
until nothing was left of them but numbers, if not on its part by means of
narration/counting: the hall of names stores in alphabetical order
commemorative sheets with data on the dead, three million up to now. The
monstrous project of the National Socialists to extinguish the memory of
European Jewism is annulled in that field which is typical: that of
administration. The hall of names consists of archives and is also presented as
a store. (Note_22) Yad Vashem means nothing else: Even unto them will I
give in my house and within my walls a place and name (Isaiah, chapter 56,
verse 5). On the 15th August 1953 this name became law by the unanimous
resolution of the Israelian Knesset, law 5713. Yet another number,
storable.
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translation ANN THURSFIELD
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This article was previously published in the exhibition catalogue Speicher,
Versuche zur Darstellbarkeit von Geschichte/n edited by MONIKA
SCHWÄRZLER e.a., Linz 1993.
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Note_1 See the catalogue of the Frankfurt Werkbund exhibition Ex und hopp.
Das Prinzip Wegwerf. Eine Bilanz mit Verlusten (The principle of
throw-away. A balance with losses), published by Ot Hoffmann, 1989. Accordingly
also the request for entries to the design competition Küche 2000 --
die intelligente Rohstoffquelle (Kitchen 2000 -- the intelligent source of
raw material) by the Gesellschaft für Kunst und Gestaltung (Society for
Art and Design), Bonn (1989), 5 .Go Back Again
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Note_2 Italo Calvino describes this scenario in Unsichtbare Städte
(Invisible Cities)..Go Back Again
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Note_3 `Die Musealisierung der Welt oder Die Erinnerung des Gegenwärtigen' (The
museumising of the world or the memory of the present) in Ästhetik und
Kommunikation, issue 67/68, year 18 (1987), topic `Kulturgesellschaft',
30..Go Back Again
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Note_4 As the museum director of the Karl-Ernst-Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Michael
Fehr has not only developed this thought but also put it into practice within
the framework of his exhibition and book series Museum der Museen
(Museum of the museums)..Go Back Again
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Note_5 Thomas A. Seboek put the question about the store as a semiotic challenge:
How can a nuclear depot be described as such for readers who are no longer
familiar with our alphanumerical code? `Pandora's Box: How and Why to
Communicate 10.000 Years into the Future', in: Marshall Blonsky (publisher),
On signs, Baltimore 1985, 448-466..Go Back Again
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Note_6 The architecture is present (...) is anything but neutral, but without any
dialogue with the works (...) Marco Fano and Clementina Panella, `Note sul
nuovo assetto dei Musei Lateranensi al Vaticano', in Dialoghi die
Archeologia, 7 (1973), 422-439. Here according to: F. Mancinelle and F.
Roncalli, `Il Trasferimento delle Raccolte Lateranensi al Vaticano', in:
Bolletino dei Monumenti e Musei Pontifici 1.1, 1977, 19 - 32 (=
Rendiconti della Pont. Acc. Rom. d'Arch. 48, 1975/76, 401- 415), here:
415..Go Back Again
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Note_7 Karl Schefold, `Das neue Museum im Vatikan' (The new museum in the Vatican),
in: Antike Kunst, supplement 9 (On Greek art), Basel 1973, 85 - 93..Go Back Again
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Note_8 (...) Mobile modular elements accordingly shapeless such as metal grille
works and iron pipes support statues, reliefs and epigraphs which are set off
against the weight-bearing structure. See above, Note 6, 415..Go Back Again
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Note_9 (1764): The present arrangement (...) allows for a partly chronological and
partly typological articulation. Paolo Liverani, `Musei Gregoriano Profano e
Pio Cristiano', in: AAVV, Condotte nei Restauri, Rome 1992, 189 - 192,
here: 189..Go Back Again
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Note_10 See Hermann Glaser, `Was heißt und zu welchem Ende studiert and
präsentiert man Industriekultur?' (What is industrial culture and to what
end is it studied and presented?), in Museumskunde 49, issue 3
(1984)..Go Back Again
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Note_11 As was expressed in Anja Kempe's radio-feature on 22nd April 1990 in WDR 3:
Der Himmel ist blau, der Eintritt frei. Eine Region wird zum Museum. Eine
Führung durch das Ruhrgebiet (The sky is blue, entry free. A region
becomes a museum. A guided tour through the Ruhr area)..Go Back Again
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Note_12 Film review in: Film und Fernsehen 1/1990, 26..Go Back Again
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Note_13 See W.E., `ArchiVideo', in: Querspur. Zwischen Intimität und
radikaler Entblößung (Between intimacy and radical exposure),
catalogue on the video festival of the same name in Linz, May 1990, 25ff..Go Back Again
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Note_14 Captivated on video, the memory of history also becomes shorter: see Albert
d'Haenens, `Eine neue Kultur begründen! Gefahren und Chancen an der
Schwelle des elektronalischen Zeitalters' (Found a new culture!
Dangers and chances on the threshold of the electronic age), in: Jörn
Rüsen and others (publishers), Geschichte sehen. Beiträge
zur Ästhetik historischer Museen (Contributions to the aesthetics of
historical museums), Pfaffenweiler (Centaurus) 1988, 65 - 67..Go Back Again
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Note_15 Michael Fehr, `Müllhalde oder Museum: Endstationen in der
Industriegesellschaft '(Rubbish dump or museum: ends of the line in industrial
society), in: the same/Stefan Grohé (publisher), Geschichte -- Bild
-- Museum: zur Darstellung von Geschichte im Museum, Cologne 1989,
182-198..Go Back Again
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Note_16 Title of the contribution by Jacques Derrida in: G. Christoph Tholen/Michael
O. Scholl (publisher), Zeit-Zeichen, Aufschübe und Interferenzen
zwischen Endzeit und Echtzeit (Signs of the time, delays and interferences
between the last days and real-time), Weinheim 1990..Go Back Again
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Note_17 Jacques Derrida, `Titel (noch zu bestimmen)' (Title (still to be
determined)), in: Friedrich A. Kittler, Austreibung des Geistes aus den
Geisteswissenschaften. Programme des Post-Strukturalismus,
Paderborn/Vienna/
Munich 1975, 37, Note 8..Go Back Again
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Note_18 According to Michael Fehr, `Sigrid Sigurdssons Vor der Stille -- Kunst als
`Bewußtsein' von Geschichte' (Sigrid Sigurdsson's Vor der Stille -- art
as the `conscience' of history), in the exhibition catalogue of the same name,
Karl-Ernst-
Osthaus Museum Hagen (1989)..Go Back Again
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Note_19 For example, in the exhibition Die ersten 100 Jahre. Österreichische
Sozialdemokratie 1888-1988 (The first 100 years. Austrian social democracy
1888-1988) in Vienna's Gasometer (Simmering). See in particular the catalogue
contribution by Helene Maimann Das wahre Bild der Vergangenheit (The
true picture of the past)..Go Back Again
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Note_20 Something like disorder prevails in the images which Pascal Kern shows us, a
confusion of objects, matter, references equal to the surroundings in which he
lives and works (...). His studio does, indeed, retain down to the final detail
the recollection of roaming around, drifting away to places of desolateness
such as empty grounds, deserted houses or factories (...). However one notices
very quickly that this disorder is based on order just as the encyclopaedia of
which Borges speaks is ordered (...) In the same way Pascal Kern's world
depicts a strange taxonomy (...) according to a logic which has nothing to do
with anything Aristotelian: the desk, the studio, the typographic catalogues,
the travel films, the libraries, the accounts, the advertising (...). Catalogue
for the exhibition Fictions Colorées Galerie Zabriskie, Paris,
September 1985..Go Back Again
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Note_21 See exhibition review `Gestapelter Tod'(Piled up death) in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper of 29. March 1993, 33 (Sigle
`E.N.')..Go Back Again
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Note_22 At this point I should like to thank the `Deutsch-
Israelische Stiftung für wissenschaftliche Forschung und Entwicklung'
(German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development) which,
within the framework of the research project Nationalism and the molding of
sacred space and time, made possible the autopsy of this situation..Go Back Again
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