Montages of Exile. Photographic Techniques and Spatial Dimensions in the Artwork of Grete Stern
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Jewish Culture and History ISSN: 1462-169X (Print) 2167-9428 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjch20 Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern Christina Wieder To cite this article: Christina Wieder (2020) Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern, Jewish Culture and History, 21:1, 42-65, DOI: 10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846 © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 09 Dec 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 308 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjch20 JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 2020, VOL. 21, NO. 1, 42–65 https://doi.org/10.1080/1462169X.2020.1701846 Montages of exile. Photographic techniques and spatial dimensions in the artwork of Grete Stern Christina Wieder Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This article examines the significance of contact zones and hetero- Received 14 February 2018 topias in the artwork of the German-born photographer Grete Stern, Accepted 13 November 2019 fl who was forced to ee Germany during National Socialism and went KEYWORDS into exile to Argentina. After leaving Germany Grete Stern not only Photography; exile; contact played an essential role in the modernization of photography in zones; heterotopia; Argentina but also became a central figure in the migrant community intervisuality in Buenos Aires. I will argue that Stern’s portraits and photomontages themselves can be understood as contact zones that practiced a form of visual multilingualism and operated as cultural translations but also hold a heterotopic potential inside them. It was in 1951, when Grete Stern took her famous portrait of Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most prestigious Argentinian writers to date. Just the same year she finished her almost four-year long photographic work for the popular women’s magazine Idilio and it was one year later, in 1952, when Borges published his essay collection Otras Inqusiciones. This essay collection contains a short text called ‘The Analytic Language of John Wilkins’,in which the author cites a paragraph from a Chinese encyclopedia and, in so doing, presents a rather perplexing taxonomy of animals.1 It was this short paragraph, which, while reading it, made Michel Foucault laugh and became later probably the most famous example of a Foucauldian heterotopia, as it appears in the introduction of his remarkable The Order of the Things. It is also there where Foucault writes: Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax whichcauseswordsandthings(nexttoandalso opposite one another) to ‘hold together’.Thisiswhyutopiaspermitfablesanddiscourses:they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.2 Following Foucault’s concept of heterotopias as real but disturbing counter spaces that hold the potential to reflect, transform or even deconstruct social norms inside them3, I will argue in this article that such spaces can often be found in the artistic work of the German- CONTACT Christina Wieder [email protected] Institute of Contemporary History, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any med- ium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY 43 born photographer Grete Stern. When Stern arrived in Buenos Aires in 1935 she became close friends with Jorge Luis Borges, who not only joined the same artistic circles as Stern, but probably shared as well her understanding of how certain artistic techniques, e.g. the juxtaposing of things that apparently do not belong together, are able to create spaces of resistance. But where exactly can the rebellious and heterotopic potential in Stern’s pictures be found, what audiences did she address, which political developments did she criticize and what strategies of visualization did she use to reflect or deconstruct social norms? Before answering these questions and examining the heterotopic power of Stern’s photography by focusing on her photomontage series Sueños (Dreams), which she pro- duced for Idilio between 1948 and 1951, I will provide in the following an insight to her former work and education in Germany, her surroundings in Argentina and especially her workspace – her house in Ramos Mejía. As I will argue, both her house and the actual art production taking place there became important contact zones4 where cultural encounters between the different migrant communities and the local art scene in Buenos Aires could take place. This means that these were spaces where power relations were negotiated, but at the same time visual relations between an Argentinian, Jewish, and exilic visual culture were established.5 These cultural encounters will serve then as a starting point to discuss Foucault’s concept of heterotopia and its importance for Grete Stern’s artwork in exile. As Foucault writes in his central text on heterotopias, ‘Of other spaces’, ‘[w]e are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposing, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.’6 Therefore, in my following analysis, I will too pursue an approach that highlights networks and intersections in exile, visual relations between different migrant communities and cultural experiences. This approach also follows the claim of the art historian Burcu Dogramaci, who has already called for a rethink of the current research of exile studies and who proposed focusing on network theories to reveal new aspects of exile experiences.7 Also Ofer Ashkenazi, by discussing photographic strategies of exiles in Palestine, pointed out that traditional interpretations of exile that focus more on a nostalgia about the past ‘situate the exile and her works outside the cultural discourse of both “home” and “aboard”’ and thus ignore many intersections and the possibility of a vis-á-vis of the past and the present.8 Following Ashkenazi and in order to underline Dogramaci’srequest,Iwillaim todemonstrateinthistextthatculturalencountersasmuchasvisualnetworksareessentialto understand Stern’s oeuvre and her use of heterotopic techniques as visual techniques of emancipation. To elaborate this argument and to answer my research questions, I want to suggest intervisuality9 as a method that considers network theories not only in the sense of personal relations, organizations, or institutions, but also in the form of a visual network: a network of pictures shaped by an exile experience, that establishes relations between different visual culture traditions and creates processes of communication inside the whole visual corpus. The theoretical approach of intervisuality originated from the field of Visual Studies and offers innovative ways to operate with visual sources. Due to intervisuality’s understanding of the visual as a whole, constantly connected, and interacting complex, it allows the visual corpus to be structured and systematized without being tied to limiting categorizations, such as moving or static images, film or photography, etc. Rather, it suggests an understanding of images that crosses genre borders and goes back to visual culture 44 C. WIEDER theories such as those of W.J.T. Mitchell or Gottfried Boehm, who, in the early 1990s, pro- claimed the iconic and the pictorial turn.10 From Bauhaus to Buenos Aires11 Grete Stern (born in 1904 in Elberfeld, Germany) grew up in a Jewish middle-class family and studied at the University of Applied Arts in Stuttgart before moving to Berlin in 1927. Arriving in Berlin, Stern aspired to learn more about photography and therefore started to take private lessons with Walter Peterhans, one of the most important Weimar photo- graphers of that time. In 1929, when Stern had been studying with him for two years, Peterhans was appointed Professor of Photography at the Bauhaus University in Dessau. As Stern was already advanced in her photographic education and well-connected in Berlin’s art scene, she decided that it was now time to step out from her student status and start her own project. Together with her close friend Ellen Rosenberg (later Auerbach12) a young photographer and another of Peterhans’ students, she founded a photo studio in Berlin called ringl+pit. The studio`s name was inspired by their nick- names as children because, as the two later commented ironically, ‘Auerbach and Stern’ would have sounded more like the name of a ‘Jewish rose manufactory’.13 This quote perfectly captures ringl+pit’s need to distance themselves from their rather conservative family backgrounds and their desire to be acknowledged as ambitious and unconventional new artists. By adapting new artistic strategies and techniques, Stern and Auerbach also intended to question the existing gender norms and the ideas of femininity of their time.