Living Archives, Grafted Monuments: Memory in the Public Sphere (Libera, Haacke, Wodiczko)

Living Archives, Grafted Monuments: Memory in the Public Sphere (Libera, Haacke, Wodiczko) by Sven Spieker There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments. (Robert Musil) A relative who recently visited Paris told me about the large, gold-painted, stylized flame on a marble base he saw on Place d'Alma, in the wealthy 16th arrondissement, just above the tunnel in which Princess Diana had been killed two years earlier. Since the monument was literally covered with messages of grief that had been left by passersby, my relative assumed that it was erected in honor of the dead princess. As it turned out, though, the gilded flame had been on Place d'Alma already since 1987. A plaque on its round marble base informs the viewer that the Flame of Liberty is an exact replica of the flame held by the Statue of Liberty in New York. It was only after the royal car crash in the Alma Tunnel in 1998 that the monument became a public memorial to the princess; it was then decorated with hundreds of postcards, stuffed animals, paper collages, photos, personal letters, and similar messages. These signs of international sympathy were either glued to the Flame of Liberty or inscribed directly on its surface, inscriptions that have in their turn since been partly removed or defaced by new layers of graffiti, slabs of yellow paint, and new inscriptions ("I love you-we'll meet in heaven"); the whole thing vaguely resembling a work by Jacques Villegle. Even the massive stone railing behind the monument has been covered with hundreds of signatures, as if the visitors who immortalized themselves in this way wanted to make sure that before they followed Diana into the tunnel, never to return, they would at least leave behind their signature ("I cannot believe you are gone, Rat&Radika, Toronto"). Before its transformation into a memorial to the British Princess, the Flame of Liberty connoted, somewhat officiously, freedom and friendship as abstract, universal values. Perhaps for that reason the flame was always known by Parisians as a monument "about nothing." Its setting seems to predispose the Flame of Liberty to this kind of disaffection. Contrary to the assumptions of most tourists who think that "Alma" refers to a woman, the square was named in commemoration of the British/French alliance that had defeated the Russians near Alma on the Crimea in 1854. The recoding of the flame as a memorial to the dead princess not so much erases these original references as it reorganizes them. The abstract, universalizing ideal of freedom the flame was designed to allegorize has, in the eyes of thousands of daily visitors, become personalized, embodied in the struggle for freedom by an independently-minded British princess against an oppressive male establishment. The old flame is now viewed as the very "flame" that consumed the Princess's life, while its official inscription ("Flamme de la Liberte") is read as a tribute to her struggles, a process that could be described, using a term from botanical terminology, as a graft. Grafting is initiated by one or several incisions on an existing surface, not unlike the inscriptions/incisions that affected the Flame of Liberty on Place d'Alma. These incisions alter the existing monument by superimposing themselves on its surface, yet at the same time they do not simply affect the memorial from outside, as an external circumstance. I argue that, on the contrary, the graft, a form of splitting, represents the very prerequisite for the whole (the monument) to which it is applied. As Jacques Derrida has written, every monument is divided from itself, there is no "properness of the [monument, S.S.]" to which the graft "happens" (Derrida 1986, 355). Not only is public memory-including the memory of what we refer to as "Princess Diana"-a volatile construct; even and especially the memorials that undergird such memory are hybrids whose symbolic unity is but the result of a complex interplay of projections. In the following essay I want to examine three "public" artists (Zbigniew Libera, Hans Haacke, and Krzysztof Wodiczko) in whose work the incision, projection, and inscription of public monuments and memorials plays a central role, with the public monument and its environment becoming the focus of complex strategies of appropriation and misappropriation, of defamiliarization and refamiliarization that owe a debt both to the didactic ambitions of Brechtian Verfremdung and to postmodern simulation. Through various architectural and photomechanical interventions, alternations, light projections, and other forms of recontextualization, these strategies establish multiple points of contact between the public monument and its specific social, political, economic, and architectural contexts , thus liberating the monument from the isolation to which it is ordinarily confined. As a result, the monument momentarily loses its status as the purveyor of singular symbolic truths about the past, while its mundane surroundings acquire a quasi-monumental status. Haacke, Wodiczko, and Libera "make the monument strange" by viewing it as a site of multiple encodings and grafts. By suggesting that every monument has its own genealogies, and by visually grafting fragments of these genealogies on its surface, the artists also reveal the history of the repressions, fissures and gaps that the monument continuously displaces. Not unlike Daniel Buren, Michael Asher, Christian Boltanski, Ilya Kabakov, and others, Libera, Haacke, and Wodiczko share a sense of commitment to the critique of art as an institution, a critique that was begun earlier this century by the various European avant-gardes. Like their predecessors associated with pop art and nouveau realisme, these three artists have abandoned the central ambition of the historical avant-garde, the wholesale destruction of art as an institution and the subsequent merging of art with "life" (an ambition that failed with the realization that the avant-garde had itself become institutionalized). Since the institutions of art proved to be resistant to all efforts to make them wither away, artists such as Haacke, Wodiczko, or Libera have committed themselves to a more circumspect, analytical stance that broadens the scope of artistic inquiry to reach beyond the traditional art museum and the gallery to larger economic and political structures and institutions, and the way in which these structures condition what today we call the institution of art. In contradistinction to pop art and minimalism (the "first" neo-avant-garde), Hal Foster has referred to this contemporary formation of artists as the "second neo-avant- garde": "[T]he so-called failure of both historical and first neo-avant-gardes [i.e., minimalism, pop art, concept art, etc., S.S.] to destroy the institution of art has enabled the deconstructive testing of this institution by the second neo-avant-garde- a testing that is now extended to different institutions and discourses in the ambitious art of the present" (Foster 1994, 122). This postulation of a second neo- avant-guarde, however, takes it for a fact that the "testing" of the institution of art will be carried out by artists who come from, or work in, Western Europe or the United States. It is, however, necessary to acknowledge that the critique of the archive and of the institutions of collection in postwar art of the 1980s and 90s is not limited to Marcel Broodthaers, Daniel Buren, or Christian Boltansky. Artists in or from Central and Eastern Europe, from Zofia Kulik to Ilya Kabakov and Ilya Kopystiansky, have long engaged in a similar critique, albeit within historical and artistic contexts that do not always coincide with those of the West. Plastic Monuments: Zbigniew Libera's "Lego" Zbigniew Libera's Lego. Seven sets of blocks in card boxes (1997) investigates the connections between commodification and public memory in a context that is both universal and specifically Polish. Lego consists of seven cardboard boxes bearing the announcement that they were officially sponsored by the Lego company, which also generously supplied Libera with the gray building blocks inside the boxes. The containers themselves are indistinguishable from other "Lego System" construction kits, except for the notice concerning the company's sponsorship of Libera's work. Lego abruptly withdrew its support after the company learnt of the controversial nature of Libera's project: One of the boxes presents what looks like a medical experiment being performed on a prisoner, while another one shows two gray, elongated barracks surrounded by double rows of barbed wire. Two search towers with armed Lego personnel can also be seen. From the front gates march a file of skeleton inmates led by a uniformed guard. The whole scene is set against a dark blue sky with white clouds suggesting live smoke. Libera's Lego is scandalous not only in the way it presents as a toy what seems to have nothing to do with the idea of children at play, but also in the sense that it suggests the commodification of the monument. Lego is presented as a commodified memorial to the Holocaust that is, or feigns to be, subject to consumption like other commodities. In the summer of 1997, the seven boxes became the subject of a well- publicized scandal surrounding their exhibition in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. The pavilion's curator agreed to include the boxes in the printed catalogue but refused to exhibit them in the pavilion, whereupon Libera cancelled his participation in the show. For reasons that are partially connected with the complexities of postwar public memory in Poland, it was felt that Lego was not a suitable representative of postwar Polish art. In the international press, Libera's set of Lego boxes was instantly identified with Auschwitz , and it was sometimes seen as a frivolous and gratuitous reference to the legacy of the Holocaust.

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