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.

To an audience familiar with Jasper Johns's two cast Carlsberg beer cans or Warhol's
exhibition of quasi-identical Brillo boxes, the display of art as a collection of
commodified objects no longer poses a particular challenge. In pop art, the artist's
role is not that of a producer whose tekhne enables the work to come into being as a
unique original, but rather, that of a collector who assembles (commodified) objects
and places them in the context of the art gallery. In the case of Jasper Johns and
Andy Warhol, such transfers challenge the traditional art museum by dismantling its
assumption that the works it exhibits are unique. This is why Warhol, Cesar, or
Arman were particularly attracted by sets or series of identical forms which they
placed inside an environment (a museum, a gallery) that seemed intrinsically hostile
to them. The multiple display of the same object (two cans of beer, twenty Brillo
boxes, fifteen cans arranged in a certain way) represents what in rhetoric is called a
tautology: The collected object presents itself as always already as part of a
collection. Before it can be perceived as a unique object, the Brillo box forms part of
a series of like objects; its repetition inside the series precedes hence in some way
its status as an original. In the vein of Warhol's Brillo installation or John's Carlsberg
cans, Libera presents Lego as a collection of (seven) containers. In Latin, the phrase
lego means, among other things, "I collect", a (performative) statement that
encapsulates the work's conceptual strategy: not only do the seven Lego kits present
themselves as a collection or series of seven boxes that is exhibited inside another
collection (the gallery), the containers themselves, containing the gray plastic bricks
needed to construct the camp, resemble collections or archives.

The artistic practices of pop art and nouveau realisme, as well as other currents
prevalent during the 1960s and 70s, cannot be considered without reference to
Marcel Duchamp, whose "readymades" consisted of industrially produced objects
such as a bottle rack, a urinal, and a bicycle wheel. Duchamp's most famous
readymade, a rotated urinal entitled Fountain (1917), bears a handwritten signature,
R. Mutt, a performative statement suggesting that the unique art object has lost its
game to repetition and reproduction: the signature declares that art is
"schach/matt." But the very same signature (no matter how fictitious) nevertheless
affirms the genius of the player/artist, Marcel Duchamp himself, whose choice it was
to display/sign the urinal, rotate it, and then to apply for its public display at the New
York Armory. If Fountain affirms, on the one hand, the art object as a repetition
without an original, it also, conversely, affirms the unique gesture that rotates that
pissoir for its gallery exhibition. In other words, it affirms the uniqueness of the
signature and the survival of art in its very failure.

Squarely within the tradition of Warhol's reformulations of the Duchampian

readymade, Lego, too, examines the art object as an industrially produced,
"repeated" mass product ("Leg-o"/"Brill-o"). Yet while Lego is connected in important
ways to pop art and the Duchampian readymade, there are also important
differences that set it apart from the nexus readymade-pop art-concept art.
Duchamp's as well as Warhol's questioning of the institution of art depended,
ultimately, on those very institutions that both purported to attack, namely the
archive, the art gallery and the museum. In Duchamp's case, as we saw, the
signature illustrates the notion that art implies the choice of an object for exhibition.
The questioning of art as an institution implicit in Warhol's painted wooden Brillo
boxes, on the other hand, is dependent upon their exhibition in the traditional space
of the art gallery. If one were to place Warhol's boxes on a shelf next to actual Brillo
boxes in a supermarket, their difference from their industrially produced
counterparts would have been immediately apparent. This logic of substitution or
repression is the logic of the fetish, an object whose "excess value" acts as an index
for the way in which it exceeds the missing original, which it replaces. As fetishes,
Warhol's Brillo boxes as well as Duchamp's urinal affirm what Walter Benjamin called
the Ausstellungswert or "exhibition value" of the work of art, the modern counterpart
of the (disappeared) aura.

By contrast, Libera's Lego "readymades" rely less on choice than on a strategy of

simulation that leaves no room for art's heroic failure. Lego is not "chosen", painted,
rotated, or signed, it displays nothing else but the fact that it cannot be distinguished
from its counterparts in the toy stores. Regardless of the context in which the boxes
are placed, it is not possible to distinguish Lego from ordinary "Lego System"
containers. If produced in sufficient quantity, the product could circulate on the
market like any other Lego product, something that is not the case for Duchamp's
(famously dysfunctional) urinal or for Warhol's painted Brillo cubes. Lego exhibits its
own potential (potentially disturbing) use value: it "replaces" nothing and no excess
value attaches to it as a substitute of a missing original. For all intents and purposes,
it is as original as what it replaces. In contradistinction to pop art which is dependent
upon the very institutions of collecting it purports to attack, Libera's work was
produced by means of the same technologies and production techniques that created
the real thing. In order to have his boxes made, Libera persuaded the Lego company
to produce the gray plastic cubes he needed, as well as containers that differ in no
way from their originals. The artist's work was a bureaucratic labor that did not
"create" anything per se, limiting itself to the manipulation of certain contemporary
forms of cooperation between art and capital (sponsorship), and bracing itself for the
legal consequences of such an undertaking. The place where Lego ought to be
exhibited is therefore far less determined than is the case with Warhol and Duchamp.
It is not surprising that while the piece has been shown at galleries in both Europe
and the United States, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington has also
purchased two of the boxes.

Not unlike his colleague Hans Haacke, Libera works with emballages on which he
inscribes or superimposes new messages: Lego visually grafts an "incongruous"
event (a concentration camp) on a commodified object which our habitual perception
associates with an entirely different set of emotions and associations (a toy). For
decades, the colorful Lego blocks have united middle-class children all around the
world in the construction of a colorful plastic-mould world of happy domesticity. This
universalism extended also to formerly Communist Poland where, during the cold
war, Lego was available in special hard-currency stores. Lego's premature sublation
of the East/West divide may not seem surprising. Its plastic bricks are, if we can
believe the company's own pronouncements, the world's most universal building
material, easily assembled and, as Legoland in Denmark illustrates, highly weather
resistant. The association of the horror of a concentration camp with the world of the
toy is designed to produce a shock in the viewer confronted with an alarming set of
such "mixed references" (child/torture; plastic/concentration
camp/consumption/memory). These associations clash violently with the Danish
phrase from which the name "Lego" was derived, "leg godt" (in Danish, the acronym
"leg godt" means "play well"), a turn of phrase that highlights the aura of universal
innocence that Lego has sought to promote for itself. The effect of double coding is
compounded by the momentary shattering of our (mistaken) belief that games are
by definition innocent and that those who play them mean no harm. Libera's
exhibition of his Lego boxes seeks to intervene in Lego's optimistic universalism by
confronting it with its sinister counterpart, the universalism of the concentration
camp. By mapping a history of terror onto Lego, Libera suggests that once we refuse
to be dazzled by the smooth surfaces of its plastic bricks, we will be surprised by the
amount of violent aggression they reveal.

Libera's Lego belongs within a genre that is sometimes described as "colliding

references", a term that hints at an accident, a sudden collision, an instance of
catastrophic false programming that has a distinctly disorienting effect. In the United
States, the technique of colliding references is practiced, for example, by the
Californian artist Kim Dingle. Like Libera, Dingle is interested in explorations of the
uncanny or the "unhomey" (das Unheimliche) that erodes the foundations of
homeliness and reveals the family home to be more like a ghost house. Dingle puts
the normative, commodified world of toys and child's play into reverse gear. In her
installation Priss Room Installation (1994-95), for example, two feisty looking,
bespectacled dolls in white brocade dresses, their fists clenched, appear to have
successfully wrecked the entire inventory of their playroom, other dolls included,
with the help of an electric shredder and other instruments. The fair maidens in
Dingle's installation have devoted themselves to their wrecking project with the
same zeal and enthusiasm that we so love to see in children at play. Priss Room
Installation is a children's paradise in reverse where the pleasure principle and the
death drive inhabit the same site, the children's playroom.
Further, Libera's Lego comments on a type of pedagogy which ever since the early
19th-century has sought to produce normative male subjects through the promotion
of construction toys designed to develop "abstract" or "logical" thinking. In his
semiological study Mythologies, Roland Barthes called attention to the fact that much
of what we refer as "children's toys" represents, in fact, a catalogue of adult myths
whose reenactment by the child serves to prepare the latter for the tasks of the adult
world by reproducing the secondary world of commodities, properties, and brand
names. Barthes associates the toys that perpetuate such imitation with the
achievements of modern chemistry, especially with plastic , lamenting the
disappearance of toys made of wood, a substance that is both "familiar and poetic
[and] leaves the child in contact with the tree, the table, the floor" (55). Whereas
the chemical toy made of plastic is dead and belongs to the world of the archive, the
catalogue, repetition, and imitation, wood, according to Barthes, is alive, sensitive
and organic. Wood, in other words, obeys the pleasure principle, it reduces tension,
establishes an equilibrium between the child and its environment, and allows for the
kind of interest-free playfulness that derives its philosophical authority from Kant
and Schiller, while plastic represents the death drive, suggesting a mode of
subjugation and control whose ultimate agents are aggression and fear.

Even though official company history does not provide any details on this score, the
Lego company's move from wood to plastic after the Second World War was far from
coincidental. Plastic became commercially available after the end of the Second
World War, a development that reflected important technological advances that had
occurred as a result of the scientific efforts made during the war. The rapid
development of synthetics was closely bound up with the armament industries. The
development of plastic was a side effect of the need for synthetic petrol and
synthetic rubber, the predecessor of what today we refer to as plastic. It was in
these two fields that the German chemical industry excelled. These industrial
successes occurred primarily in the occupied part of Poland (the
Generalgouvernement) or, to be more precise, in Buna, a large chemical complex
belonging to the IG Farben conglomerate. This factory was serviced by hundreds of
thousands of slave laborers who were based at Monowitz, one of the satellite camps
of Auschwitz-Birkenau, established in 1941 to satisfy the increasing demands of the
Buna factory. The production of synthetics reached unprecedented heights due to the
dedication of these slave laborers, thousands of whom perished in the process.
Approximately 25.000 labor camp prisoners from Monowitz perished in the
production of synthetic rubber (Frei 1984, 221). Lego reminds us that violence and
aggression may well be the unspoken corollaries of pedagogy. The concentration
camp on one of Libera's containers is less an incongruous violation of an innocent toy
as it is an indexical representation of the historical connection between Auschwitz
and scientific progress. All of a sudden, the happy slogan that adorns Libera's
colorful Lego containers ("play well") seems no longer to recall a plastic-mould
paradise of pure, childlike creativity, but the gates of German concentration camps
and their cynical imperatives. Such is certainly the case with plastic, which
experienced a massive development after the end of the war. Through his grafted
installation, Libera also reminds us of the fact that Lego, like many other companies,
profited from technological advances that are intimately linked to the darkest
chapters of 20th-century history. Unlike Haacke's installations, Lego does not charge
any direct involvement of the company in the crimes committed by the Nazis. He
does, however, seek to intervene in our tendency to treat toys as self-evident
objects of nature, as objects without a history.

Hans Haacke's "Restorations"

Ever since the early 1970s, Hans Haacke has been concerned with the nexus that
connects the institution of bourgeois art to the strategies of global capitalism and its
political and ideological representations. Within this broad context, Haacke's projects
have included a critique of the institutions of collecting, such as museums and
galleries, and their respective agents. One of the more conspicuous techniques
Haacke uses in his installations is that of defamiliarization or the "making strange" of
well-known public monuments by grafting them. The term "defamiliarization" (in
Russian, ostranenie = "making it strange") was one of the key concepts of early
Formalist theory. According to its principal early champion, Viktor Shklovsky,
defamiliarization represents a familiar object in ways that allow us to break through
perceptional habits so that it can once again become subject to (conscious)
apperception. By "making it strange", the object that escapes our attention because
of its excessive familiarity is reappropriated, it is once again "seen" or "heard." The
ultimate goal of Shklovskyian defamiliarization is less the object's ultimate
recuperation as the epiphanous restoration of human perception itself, what
Shklovsky refers to as novoe videnie or "new vision."

Haacke has frequently used the technique of defamiliarization, especially in his work
on the politics of art sponsorship, both in Europe and in the United States. A good
example, and one that is particularly close to Libera, is Haacke's exhibition of an
oversized box of Marlboro cigarettes designed to "advertise" the questionable politics
of one of the most influential members of the US political establishment, the
conservative senator Jesse Helms from North Carolina (Helmsboro County, 1990).
Haacke's "inflation" of the familiar object, its presentation as a commodified
monstrosity recalls Claes Oldenburg's "estrangeing" inquiries into the nexus between
synthetic materials (plastic, vinyl), desire, and visual perception. Yet Haacke
broadens the scope of pop art's defamiliarizations to a detailed investigation into the
interrelationship between visualization, commodification, and politics. The alterations
Haacke applies to his box of cigarettes are not limited to scale. Not only has the
artist replaced the "Marlboro" logo with "Helmsboro", the sides of the box (where
one would expect to find the health warnings) contain, in a way that exactly
reproduces the lettering to be found on ordinary Marlboro boxes, pronouncements by
Senator Jesse Helms and an executive of one of the great US tobacco companies
concerning public funding for the arts. Haacke's installations frequently follow logic of
the blind spot, which is to say that they omit an element that is, in fact, crucially
important for the reconstruction of its metanarrative. In the given example, the
allusion to cowboy culture implicit in Marlborough advertising also serves to link
Haacke's installation to former US president Ronald Reagan whose disdain for all
(public) funding for the arts was notorious.

For Haacke, there is an intimate relationship between (public) memory and

repression, and it is the dialectical relationship between both that his works
investigate. Haacke's ambition is to expose the gap that separates the public
monument from its own displaced past, a goal he seeks to achieve by visually
confronting and presenting, in one continuous space, symbols and imagery from
different historical periods and seemingly incompatible contexts. This is particularly
the case in those of Haacke's works where the artist uncovers the cooperation
between well-known German industrial firms, such as car manufacturers or
ironworks, and the Nazis during the second world war. These works have been
especially controversial where (as they usually do) they concern companies that are
still in existence (Thyssen, Daimler, MAN, etc.), or where Haacke has extended his
charges to include the companies' supply of arms or military equipment to
contemporary repressive regimes.
Haacke aims at the deaestheticization of the various discourses of power that
manifest themselves in the symbols of political propaganda and advertising. A good
example of this strategy is the installation "Die Freiheit wird jetzt einfach gesponsort-
aus der Portokasse" (Freedom is now simply sponsored-from the petty cash), an
exemplary case of Haacke's practice of grafting monuments. The installation was put
in place in 1990 as part of a show involving eleven artists who had been invited to
put up temporary installations on either side of the wall that still separated the
Eastern part of Berlin from the West. Haacke's installation was located on the former
Todesstreifen or "death strip" that separated West Berlin from the German
Democratic Republic. The artist had mounted on top of an abandoned GDR
watchtower the oversized, revolving symbol of the Daimler Benz company, a neon-lit
inverted "Y" surrounded by a circle. The star echoed the Daimler symbol that tops
the multistoried Europa Center on Kurfurstendamm, West Berlin's consumerist hub.
On two sides, Haacke adorned the tower with quotations (in large metal letters) from
Johann Wolfgang Goethe and William Shakespeare, respectively: "Kunst bleibt
Kunst" ("Art remains art", Goethe), and "Bereit sein ist alles" ("To be prepared is
everything", Shakespeare). Haacke replaced the windows of the former watchtower
with mirror glass reminiscent of the former GDR's most expensive hotel, the nearby
Palasthotel, while the metal grids protecting the tower's windows were reminiscent of
the protective grids on the front windows of the Daimler Benz vehicles that were
commonly used by the West Berlin police to control street demonstrations. Especially
during the 1970s and early 1980s, such demonstrations frequently involved
"autonomous groups" (autonome Gruppen) who took possession of the many
desolate open spaces that dotted the West Berlin cityscape, especially in the areas
bordering the Wall. Haacke's tower-which was itself located in a Niemandsland (no
man's land)-may be read as a twisted homage to these groups and their
repossession of spaces that were "marginal" in more than one sense of that word. By
decorating and repossessing the abandoned watchtower on the former Todesstreifen,
Haacke defamiliarizes and reactivates this former symbol of political repression,
making it unrecognizable and "strange": the death strip has become an art strip, but
the art strip is also caught in the politics of re-possession that began to consume
Berlin at the time (a few months before the exhibition, Daimler Benz had famously
acquired, under dubious circumstances and with the help of city officials, a large
chunk of Berlin's then-vacant former center, the Potsdamer Platz area). The
watchtower, Haacke seems to argue, has lost none of its power to symbolize political
and economic control, even though the ideological context in which it is situated has
changed dramatically. Technically speaking, the power of Haacke's installation
derives from the way it grafts a multitude of heterogeneous inscriptions-the Daimler
star, the mirror glass windows, quotations from Goethe and Shakespeare, the metal
grids on the windows-onto an existing surface structure, a process that results in a
hybrid new monument that is strongly overdetermined. The effect of hybridity is
strengthened by the post-1989 graffiti that adorns the base of the concrete tower,
and which Haacke left untouched. By having situating his installation on the former
Todesstreifen, Haacke points out that in the "new Europe", the symbolic terrain on
which public memory constitutes itself is quickly being reformatted in ways that defy
the old certainties of the cold war era.

In its entangled hybridity, Haacke's tower presents a counterpoint to another 20th-

century tower, Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International (1924).
Spiraling upwards and encompassing several stories, Tatlin's construction (which was
never built) was designed to be the largest structure in the world. Like Haacke's
tower, Tatlin's monument was not simply the symbolic incarnation of a set of
abstracting concepts or ideas but the functional, tactile realization of such ideas. And
like Haacke's tower, Tatlin's was to have been erected on a large piece of desolate
land, the site of a former cathedral, in the immediate proximity of the Moscow
Cremlin. However, if the gigantic statue of Lenin that was to be placed on top of
Tatlin's tower paid symbolic homage to the infinite utopian possibilities of the newly
created Soviet state, the Daimler star (which, like the levels of Tatlin's tower, slowly
revolves) on top of Haacke's Wachturm suggests the transition from the universalism
of communist ideology to the global expansionism of multinational companies.
Haacke's watchtower functions, furthermore, as a monument to the repression of
memory that formed part and parcel of the history of Daimler Benz during the
comfortable certainties of the cold war: as the artist points out in a written
commentary on his work, not only had Daimler Benz supplied Hitler with engines for
his tanks (engines that were assembled by thousands of forced laborers), it also
massively sold military hardware to the repressive regimes in South Africa and in
Irak. At the same time, of course, Daimler Benz was one of the most generous
sponsors of art in the former West Germany, a fact to which the quotation "art
remains art" seems to testify. Daimler Benz (which is now called Daimler Chrysler)
has only very recently agreed to reimburse surviving former slave laborers for the
work they were forced to perform during the second world war.

Haacke began to develop his technique of grafting public monuments well before the
watchtower project. Two years earlier, in 1988, the artist recreated a monument
erected by the Nazis after Hitler had conferred upon the Austrian city of Graz the title
of "City of the People's Insurrection" (1938). For the festivities, the Nazis created a
memorial that was itself grafted: they surrounded the Mariensaule, a 17th-century
column topped by a Virgin with Child that has decorated Graz's central square for
centuries, with a temporary (wooden) obelisk that covered the entire column. That
obelisk bore the inscription "Und ihr habt doch gesiegt" ("And yet you have
prevailed"), an allusion to the failed Nazi coup d'etat of 1923 during which several of
Hitler's followers lost their lives. The symbolic gesture implicit in the grafting of the
Mariensaule is obvious enough: the victory of the Nazis in Austria after the country's
Anschlu? ("connection") coincides with the symbolic repossession of Christian
monuments by the new masters. Such is the symbolic price Catholic Austria had to
pay for its entry into the fold of the Reich. When Haacke recreated this monument-
graft by rebuilding the obelisk surrounding the Mariensaule, he was faithful to his
"original" in every detail, except for the representation of the swastika under the
Nazi eagle which he stylized by omitting some elements (as is the case in Germany,
the public display of swastikas is forbidden by law in Austria), and for an inscription
the artist added at the base of the obelisk: "The Vanquished of Styria: 300 Gypsies
killed; 2500 Jews killed; 8000 political prisoners killed or died in detention; 9000
civilians killed in the war; 12000 missing; 279000 soldiers killed."

Haacke's re-decoration of Mariensaule is a play with emballages that recalls Christo's

wrappings of architectural monuments or geographic formations. Still, And Yet You
Have Prevailed has nothing of the poetic amorphousness of Christo's projects. No
emballage, Haacke seems to say, is neutral or unscripted. Haacke's installation does
not seek to bracket or temporarily "cancel" the monument, nor does it seek to create
a negative monument. By adding the numbers of the Nazi victims to the bottom of
the redecorated obelisk, Haacke adds a graft to a monument that is itself a graft.
And Yet You Have Prevailed, then, represents a monument to the victims of Nazism
in the guise of a monument created by the Nazis themselves. There cannot be,
Haacke seems to argue, a monument to the victims that would not at the same time
be a commemoration of the perpetrators who appropriated memorials in order to
commemorate themselves. A memorial, in other words, recalls not so much the past
as an unscripted truth, as-another monument. By restoring the Nazi obelisk, Haacke
attempts to appropriate this logic for himself, presenting in the process an antidote
to the abstractions that represent the staple diet of Holocaust memorials in Central
Europe. These abstractions evoke the hope that a non-figurative monument will
concentrate exclusively on the memory of the victims, to the exclusion of all else.
Haacke's Mariensaule project, on the other hand, presents itself as a hybrid
monument-graft that relies as much on familiarity and recognition as it relies on
surprise and shock. Thus the words and numbers Haacke has added to the base of
his obelisk subvert the phrase "Und Ihr habt doch gesiegt": a monument by the
Nazis is turned into a monument against them. Monuments, it appears, cannot be
made to disappear, since they return with the force of the repressed. This return, as
Freud knew, has always something to do with an uncanny compulsion to repeat
(Wiederholungszwang). Haacke's installation marks this very compulsion to repeat as
a public performance: the monument reappears as a token of the repressed Nazi
past. The compulsion to repeat has another serious implication in this context: the
return of Neo-Nazism. For the stylized swastika Haacke used on his obelisk was also
a clear reference to the organized white supremacist groups in South Africa and
elsewhere who had adopted the "defamiliarized" swastika as their symbol. Haacke's
efforts paid off handsomely: a month before the end of the exhibition, the
installation was firebombed by a well-known Austrian Nazi.

The return of the repressed in the guise of a public monument has preoccupied Hans
Haacke in a number of projects, notably in his refitting of the German pavilion at the
Venice Biennale in 1990. Here, Haacke grafted the large reproduction of a
Deutschmark onto the very hook that had supported the Nazi eagle during the
1930s, while a photograph at the entrance reminded the visitor of Hitler's and
Mussolini's visit to the pavilion in 1934. A similar recoding of an existing architectural
monument through grafting is at stake in the installation "Die Fahne hoch!" ("Raise
the Flag!", 1991) on Konigsplatz, in the center of Munich. As an architectural
ensemble, Konigsplatz presents itself a good example of an (architectural) graft. The
square came into being under Ludwig I of Bavaria who decorated it with three neo-
classical buildings: the museum of copies of Roman and Greek statues (the
Glyptothek); an arch commemorating Ludwig's son, Otto I; and the museum of
applied Greek and Roman art. During the 1930s, Hitler's architect Paul Ludwig added
two buildings to the existing facades: the dictator's Munich headquarters and the
central party offices. (Today one of them houses the Department of Art History of
Munich University.) Paul Ludwig's buildings also served as the backdrop for two
bombastic "temples" designed to honor those who perished during the attempted
Nazi coup d'etat in Bavaria in 1923, both of which were mined by American troops
after the end of the war and can no longer be seen.

As was already the case with the Mariensaule project, with "Raise the Flag!" Haacke
once again chose to "revive" a disappeared, defunct memorial by allowing it to
return: from 1933 onward, Konigsplatz was used by the Nazis for their annual mass
rallies commemorating the failed Nazi coup d'etat. Haacke re-ecorated the square in
the spirit of these rallies by adorning the neo-classical facade of the Glyptothek with
a black flag carrying a skull and two equally black elongated banners on either side
of it. (The skull was the one used, for example, by Hitler's SS Totenkopf division,
while the black color that serves as its background echoes the black uniforms of the
marching SS units.) Yet once again Haacke introduces additional grafted elements
that intervene to cancel all sense that the artist might, in the spirit of Komar and
Melamid's restaurations of totalitarian myths, simply reaestheticize the ritualized
Nazi rallies. Thus the large flag on the Glyptothek carryied not only a white skull but
also a large inscription in white Gothic letters: "Zum Appell: Deutsche Industrie im
Irak" ("March Ahead: German Industry in Irak"), while the banners on either side
listed the names of German companies who had sold weapons and other technology
to the Irakien regime during the 1980s and 90s.

According to many critics, "Raise the Flag!" is designed to draw attention to the
activities of the German military-industrial complex during the Nazi era, and the way
in which the same complex has continued to cooperate with repressive regimes all
over the world. However, if such summary statements capture a crucial element of
Haacke's work, they tend to neglect the many gaps and fissures that variously
fracture it. For "Die Fahne hoch!" does not present a coherent visual narrative (a
normative argument) that would establish a precise situational matrix for its various
points of reference. Instead we are left, as is so often the case in Haackes work, with
a disquieting conundrum, a complex web of references and allusions where
everything seems to be linked to everything else-from a 19th-century museum of
Greek sculpture to arms sales to Irak. Haacke's art is performative, not analytical
(and, as such, a far cry from Brechtian theatre which is often invoked as its direct
predecessor). It is, furthermore, every bit as propagandistic as the propaganda to
which it alludes. "Die Fahne hoch!" does not expose, overcome, or otherwise sublate
the visual language of propaganda, nor does it aim at its reaestheticization in the
spirit of Komar and Melamid. Furthermore, Haacke does not expose, cancel or simply
demask the Nazi's "abuse" of the historical ensemble of Konigsplatz, nor does he
defamiliarize that ensemble in order to master the discursive framework in which it
exists. For Haacke, it appears, there is no getting beyond the language of political
propaganda, there is only a subversive use of it (its regrouping, reinscription,
allusion, etc.) that allows it, at least at times, to be turned against itself.

For Haacke, the public monument has nothing in common with an original mnemonic
inscription. Just as for Freud all memory presupposes a moment of effacement
whereby new mnemonic inscriptions become possible to the extent that they render
existing ones illegible , for Haacke, the public monument bears, invisibly, the grafted
scripts and projections of its shifting political, economic, and ideological fields. To the
extent that the monument-palimpsest is founded on repression and erasure, the
uncovering of its various layers can never take the form of an archeological
excavation. And so, Haacke's installations rely on a strategy of performance whose
center-piece is a process of "re-veiling" rather than "revealing", a strategy grounded
in the conviction that as far as the historical monument is concerned, we cannot
interrupt the process of grafting, only continue it. This is why Haacke's decoration of
the Glyptothek with flags that remind us of the involvement of German companies in
Irak seems so incongruous. It is, in fact, as incongruous as the Nazi's own decoration
of the same building as a backdrop for their theatrical mass rallies. The German
expression "die Fahne hochziehen" has a double meaning. On the one hand, it
signifies the "raising of the flag" in order to celebrate someone or something
officially. Yet it also means to warn someone, to call attention to something looming
in the background. It seems to me that Haacke's installation makes us aware of the
fact that the second, "propagandistic" use of the phrase, like his own warning
concerning the German military-industrial complex, cannot proceed without the first,
that in order to warn someone we always have to "raise a flag", and that such flag-
raising always runs a risk of being in collusion with the very thing of which it wants
to warn us.

The bizarre series that "Raise the Flag!" establishes, from a 19th-century museum to
Nazi mass rallies, to arms sales by German companies to Irak, does not in fact
represent a teleological sequence. As I mentioned, Haacke's work is not, or not
primarily, archeological if by that term we mean the uncovering of an origin (an
arkhe) that is genetically linked to the events that succeed it. Haacke's
understanding of history is based less on continuity, sequence, and teleology than on
rupture and discontinuity. The artist's installations establish visual, hence immediate
(horizontal) relationships between historical periods that appear to have nothing or
little to do with each other. At the same time, Haacke's work is dialectical in that it
seeks to prompt the viewer to search for a hidden "third term" that would allow for
the sublation of these disparate elements. By superimposing upon the historical
Glyptothek the (defamiliarized) symbols of the Nazi-era, Haacke alludes not only to
the rallies the Nazis held on Konigsplatz during the 1930s, he also points out that
ever since Ludwig I, the square has in fact never existed outside of the discourse of
(state) power. As I mentioned above, King Ludwig had the "Royal Square"
constructed in order to honor his son Otto I who had been King of Greece ever since
he was a child. Yet for Haacke the connection between the initial, neo-classical
Konigsplatz and its Nazi successor is less historical (in a teleological sense) or
architectural than rhetorical: it is provided by the homonymy between the name
Ludwig, King of Bavaria (the first urban planner of Konigsplatz), on the one hand,
and Hitler's architect (Paul) Ludwig, on the other. Haacke's visual installation
prompts us to actualize this (linguistic and rhetorical) connection before it invites us
to ponder the questionable activities of German companies in the Middle East and
elsewhere. Only in this way will we be able to grasp what the museum, the Nazi-
style banners, and German arms sales to Irak might have in common.

As it turns out, Haacke's redecoration of Konigsplatz in the spirit of the annual Nazi
memorial rallies implied a hidden "third term", a kind of synthesis allowing for
additional linkages between its seemingly random reference points. The juxtaposition
of "Ludwig" and "Ludwig" is sublated by a third "Ludwig", one that is not in fact
made explicit in the installation, yet one that will seem obvious to anyone familiar
with Haacke's work. The third Ludwig is Peter Ludwig, the well-known Cologne
industrialist and sponsor of the arts who was, among other things, the first Western
industrialist to collect art from Eastern Europe during the cold war. Like much of
Haacke's work since the cancellation of his retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum
in 1971, "Raise the Flag!", then, is part of the artist's ongoing critique of the
institutions of art and collecting. In fact, the artist has criticized Ludwig's collecting
practice on numerous occasions, most famously in an installation in which he used a
portrait of Ludwig and his wife in the style of Socialist realism, together with an
original advertising poster for Ludwig's chocolate brand "Trumpf" ("Weite und Vielfalt
der Brigade Ludwig", "The Breadth and Diversity of the Ludwig Brigade", 1984).

The "third Ludwig" (Peter) allows us to see the institution of art collecting/the
museum as an intricate part of Haacke's installation. Suddenly the flag and the
banners outside the Glyptothek are disorienting not only because they invoke the
Nazi rallies held on Konigsplatz during the 1930s, but also because they are
reminiscent of similarly shaped flags and banners used, to the present day, by
museums around the world to announce special exhibitions. By way of the
homonymy between the three Ludwigs, Haacke's institutional critique maintains a
continuous link between seemingly disparate historical, ideological, and institional
complexes: political power, totalitarian ideology, 19th-century absolutism, late
capitalism, industrial sponsorship for the arts, and the institutions of art. One of the
photographs in the volume documenting Haacke's installation at the Venice Biennale
features Peter Ludwig and his wife showing Arno Breker their own sculptures. The
Glyptothek inspired many of Hitler's favorite artists, among them Arno Breker, with
the notion that German sculpture, rather than copying Greek statues for purely
academic purposes, should view itself as a reincarnation of that art, with Germany as
a kind of Greece of the North. The banners Haacke installed outside the Glyptothek
extend the nexus between totalitarian politics, the museum, and sponsorship for the
arts to the present. In 1993, one of the largest companies listed on the banners, the
Ruhrgas gas company, sponsored an exhibition of the collections of the two Russian
19th-century art collectors, Morozov and Shshukin, at the Folkwang Museum in
Essen. As is well known, Peter Ludwig, too, also became famous as a collector of
Eastern European and Russian art.

Light in Transit: Krzysztof Wodiczko's Projections

Hans Haacke's work with public monuments during the 1980s and early 90s has a
counterpart in the grafted monuments produced, during the same period, by
Krzysztof Wodiczko under the title of "Memorial Projections." These involved the
temporary projection of large-scale photographic images onto historical monuments,
museums, banks, parliament buildings, embassies, and statues in, among other
places, Stuttgart (1983), Dayton (1983), New York (1984, etc.), Montreal (1985),
Bern (1985), Warsaw (1986), London (1985), Venice (1986), Boston (1986-87),
Kassel (1987), San Diego (1988), Washington, D.C. (1988), Vienna (1988),
Newcastle (1990), Jerusalem (1990), East Berlin (1990), and Madrid (1991). Like
graffiti, the other form of public art that engages the surfaces of urban architecture,
Wodiczko's projections were all but ubiquitous during the 1980s: travelling around
the world with his arsenal of slide projectors, Wodiczko transformed public spaces
into something that fell somewhere between an outdoor cinema and a public slide
show. Yet the memorial projections are grafts not only in the sense that they
superimpose an "alien" image onto an architectural structure, they also attempt to
establish relations between different historical frameworks, symbolic contexts, and
social and political configurations. Like the desiring machines championed by Felix
Guattari and Gilles Deleuze during the 1970s and early 80s, Wodiczko's projections
exist in and across a whole range of different contextual formations, suggesting a
form of public imagery that is as close to the practices of political propaganda as to
the billboards of advertising that adorn the facades of urban architectures (Wodiczko
began his series of projections not long after emigrating to Canada from his native
Poland). Like Haacke (whose 1971 solo exhibit was cancelled because he had
proposed to present an investigation of questionable real estate practices in
Manhattan ), Wodiczko has variously explored the nexus between public monuments,
city planning, urban "renovation", and the real estate market. This was the case
especially in his work on the Astor Building/The New Museum of Contemporary Art
(New York, 1984), and in what has come to be called The Homeless Projection: A
Proposal for Union Square (1986). When the upper stories of the Astor building in
downtown Manhattan were being turned into luxury apartments in order to support
the New Museum of Contemporary Art, Wodiczko projected onto its facade, as well
as on the facade of the building adjacent to it, a gigantic metal chain and lock. The
point was to highlight the fact that the presence of the prestigious new museum
cannot be seen in isolation from the concurrent conversion of the entire
neighborhood into an upscale environment, complete with "art galleries and other
art-related institutions and businesses" (Wodiczko 1986, 43). Similarly, the
Homeless Projection Project was designed to expose the increasing gentrification of
New York's Union Square and the implications of this process of urban "revitalization"
for the socially disenfranchised, especially the homeless. This projection (which was
never realized) involved the superimposition of transient images on the four newly
refurbished neo-classical monuments that decorate the square: Abraham Lincoln,
General Lafayette, George Washington and the Mother and Child Fountain. Wodiczko
proposed to project onto these monuments the material attributes and costumes of
Union Square's homeless population, from a shopping cart to a wheelchair, from
bandages and a can of Windex to a wooden crutch. As the simulation of the
Homeless Projection at the 49th Parallel Gallery in New York City showed, Wodiczko's
projections were aimed at the symbolic repossession of the monuments by those
who were marginalized by the area's increasingly profitable gentrification. Even
where he is not concerned with the real estate market in New York City, Wodiczko's
projections reveal many parallels with Haacke's projects. At the VIII Documenta in
Kassel (1987), for example, Wodiczko presented Count Friedrich II of Hesse-Kassel
in the guise of a manager of the Daimler Benz company. Friedrich II founded the
current venue of the Documenta shows, the Fridericianum, as one of the first public
museums in Europe. The funds for this undertaking were provided by
Soldatenhandel, the trading of Hess soldiers to the British, who used them in the war
with their North American colonies. In a strikingly Haackian mode, Wodiczko adorned
the base of the monument with references to the commercial activities of Daimler
Benz in the Republic of South Africa. Like Haacke, Wodiczko's projections seek to
initiate a critique of the institutions of collecting that includes their interaction with
the economic and ideological context in which they exist.

Like graffiti, Wodiczko's projections remind us of the layered nature of all

monuments, the fact that additional signs can always be inscribed on them,
suggesting the possibility of overdetermination and dubbing. For Wodizko, the
monument's ability to reference symbolically the historical past is a result of
continuous critical intervention: "Today, more than ever before, the meaning of our
monuments depends on our active role in turning them into sites of memory and
critical evaluation of history as well as places of public discourse and action."
(Wodiczko 1999, p. 62) Wodiczko's projections demonstrate what Rosalyn Deutsche
has called "the mutability of their symbolic language and the changing uses to which
they are put as they are continually recast in varying historical circumstances and
social frameworks" (Deutsche 1986a, 66). The memorial projections, then, present
the monument as an urban palimpsest that can be compared to Freud's description
of the Wunderblock (the "magic writing pad"), a children's toy comprising of a waxen
block covered by two protective sheets that allow for the erasure of whatever is
written on the surface, while at the same time preserving it, invisibly, on the waxen
block underneath. What fascinated Freud about this toy was the way in which it
combined an infinite ability to accommodate new inscriptions with an equally infinite
capacity for storage. What is visibly inscribed on the surface layer of the magic
writing pad (what is subject to perception) is placed on top of an infinite number of
invisible previous inscriptions. It is, in other words, the possibility of its erasure that
allows for the mnemonic sign to be stored and preserved within the archival systems
of the psychic apparatus. Only after it has been thus repressed and archivized can
the inscription become subject to recollection. Wodiczko's projections, too, add a
new layer of significations to the surface of the monuments they target, yet at the
same time they preserve the previous layers in a state of latency. The projection is a
form of memorial writing, the inscription of new signs on an existing, albeit
unreadable, text.

To the extent that Wodiczko's projections cannot be collected nor preserved except
by being rephotographed, they also represent, in an obliquely Haackian mode,
investigations of the problem of repetition and seriality, and a challenge to the
institutions of collecting. It is this latter aspect on which I want to briefly dwell. In
their presentation of immaterial, hence non-collectable images, the memorial
projections continue a critique of the archive that harks back to Wodiczko's Polish
years. In the early 1970s, a group of artists around Andrzej Turowski and Wieslaw
Borowski initiated a critique of the art collection that coincided with the opening of
the Foksal Gallery in Warsaw and that culminated in the publication of a manifesto
entitled "Living Archives." The Foksal Gallery viewed itself as a counter-gallery, a
"gallery against the gallery" (in fact, Turowski wrote a text under this very title) and
sought to protect art from the traditional exhibition and even from its own reception
by an audience. Foksal advocated, paradoxically, the transformation of galleries into
archives that would prevent artworks from all circulation in order to ensure that they
could not be manipulated: "Once a letter is in the mailbox, it is no longer subject to
manipulation until it arrives at its destination. Its objectless, shapeless, impersonal,
and necessary authenticity is equivalent to the length of the mail route. The time of
transmission is the only ground of an artistic work. […] Artistic facts call for an
establishing of the Living Archives as a way of apprehending this transmission"
(Turowski 1986, 61). According to the authors of the manifesto, the artistic object,
like a letter, is apprehended in its authenticity to the extent that it is "in transit"
between two points, to the extent that its transmission is in flux and has not yet
settled upon an image, and to the extent that it has not (yet) reached its destination.
The paradox of the "living archives" is that of a collection in a state of constant
transmission/emission, a collection that highlights not so much objects but gaps,
spacings, and hence relationships.

Wodiczko's projections may be viewed as extensions of the "Living Archives"

conceived by the Foksal collective. The idea of "being in transit" is central to the
memorial projections: not only is it implicit in the artist's constant travelling from
one projection site to the next, it is also present in the fact that Wodiczko's
performances are transmissions of images rather than being objects in themselves.
Not unlike the letter mentioned in the Foksal manifesto , they establish a relation
between two separate points in space and time by allowing a light beam to be,
literally, in transit. The projection is thus equivalent to the mail service: it is "writing
in light" (photo-graphy) that keeps the letter suspended, in transit between the
projector and the monument. It is not so much the projected image or what it
represents that is highlighted by Wodiczko's projections, nor is it only the monument
that serves as its temporary screen. What is foregrounded, rather, is the distance
that separates the two, the light beam's trajectory, the distance covered by the
image before it reaches "its" screen. Wodiczko's projections participate in a critique
of the museum and the collection that focuses not so much on the collected objects
themselves as on the space that separates them. Like Haacke, Wodiczko is
interested in the gaps and lacuna between one object and the next, and in the
rhyzomatic relationships that can be established between them. Contrary to common
belief, the memorial projections frequently did not focus on one single monument but
instead on ensembles of buildings, sets, and constellations. For example, when the
artist received the authorization to project an eye onto the center of the tympan of
the Swiss parliament building, the official assumption was, naturally, that the eye
would be stationary. Instead, Wodizcko had it change the direction of its gaze,
looking, in this order, at the national bank, the canton bank, the city bank of Bern,
and then down to the ground of Bundesplatz, under which is the national vault
containing the Swiss gold. It is less the projected image itself (the eye) that is at
stake in this projection but, rather, the (often ironic) relations, linkages, and
connections for which the moving eye allows. Similarly, the New Museum of
Contemporary Art/Astor Building Projection included the building next to the
museum, while the Homeless Projection established relations between all four
statues adorning the square.

Wodiczko has frequently likened his projections to various forms of (urban) warfare,
thus highlighting the link between projection and aggression that was all but a truism
for Sigmund Freud: "The strategy of the memorial projection is to attack the
memorial by surprise, using slide warfare, or to take part in and infiltrate the official
cultural programs taking place on its site." (Wodiczko 1986, 22) The memorial
projections recall the large air defense light canons that were in use over European
cities during the Second World War in order to detect enemy aircraft and provide
targets for the anti-aircraft batteries to which they were attached. The
projectionist's/artist's work consists of the skillful positioning of the projecting
equipment in such a way that the projected image (the light beam) will "fit" the
targeted historical monument, or vice versa. Wodiczko's frequent projections of
intercontinental missiles, daggers, revolvers and other weapons hence suggest not
only the political and economic reality of the cold war, they also suggest, in a more
performative mode, the projection itself as a form of "aiming", with Wodiczko himself
as a kind of urban partisan. In a text entitled "The Public Projection" (1983),
Wodiczko wrote about his method that "the attack must be unexpected and frontal.
It must occur at night, when the building sleeps […]" (Wodiczko 1995, 115). A good
example of Wodiczko's urban warfare is his projection of the Nelson Column in
London's Trafalgar Square in 1985. A short while into the pojection, Wodiczko
suddenly (and without official authorization) turned one of his massive 400mm
xenon arc slide projectors away from the Column to the South African embassy
across the square. The turn resulted in the appearance of a swastika on the
structure's neo-classical pediment, above a relief that showed a boat and an
inscription saying "Good Hope". The projection remained in place until the arrival of
the police two hours later.

By and large, critics have insisted on the representational properties of Wodiczko's

projections, their capacity to shock, intervene in local politics, and politicize the
viewers' consciousness by defamiliarizing well-known architectural monuments. Such
interpretations tend to privilege the representational aspects of the projections, their
appeal to rationality and reason, and they display great faith in interventionist
politics. In the following discussion I want to focus on an aspect of the memorial
projections that is generally neglected: Wodiczko's instrumentalization of his viewers'
unconscious, of their mechanical reflexes, habits, and fixations. Within the expanded
field of cross-links and connections established by the memorial projections, perhaps
the central one is the link between architecture and film. Since architecture, like the
traditional tableau, invites a mode of reception that is based upon contemplation, its
juxtaposition with painting would appear to make more sense. However, Walter
Benjamin, for one, considered that architecture was in fact much closer to projection
(to film) than to the traditional tableau. At the end of his essay The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Technical Reproduction, Benjamin uses the examples of architecture
and film in order to explicate what he perceives as the historical evolution of visual
perception in the 20th century. Both architecture and film invite, to use Benjamin's
formula, a paradoxical "Rezeption in der Zerstreuung" ("reception as distraction"):
Buildings have accompanied humanity ever since the beginning of time. Many other
art forms have come and gone […]. Only the human being's need for shelter does
not change over time. […] Buildings are subject to two kinds of reception, i.e., their
use and their visual perception. The one kind of reception is tactile, the other optical.
One cannot come to a proper understanding of this reception if one views it along
the lines of the kind of contemplation [Sammlung] travellers display in front of
famous buildings. The reason is that there is, no tactile equivalent for visual
contemplation. Tactile reception proceeds not so much by means of attention
[Aufmerksamkeit] as it proceeds through habit. In fact, in the case of architecture,
habit even determines to a large degree the visual perception. (Benjamin 1980, 504)

What gives architecture its exemplary role for Benjamin is the fact that unlike
painting or other historical artforms it answers a basic social and economic human
need (shelter), which is why, unlike the other arts, we perceived it habitually
(unconsciously) rather than contemplating it consciously. Being perceived by way of
a habit based on daily practice, buildings exclude attention and mnemonic inscription
(the German word Aufmerksamkeit is derived from merken = "notice", "bear in
mind"): we notice architecture without paying attention to it. Nothing therefore could
be closer to our way of interacting with our architectural environments than-film. In
the dark cinema hall, the projection technology of film simulates the habitual
perception that has accompanied architecture since the beginning of time. It does
this by way a strategy which Benjamin calls "distraction", a term whose German
equivalent ("Zerstreuung") is the same that is used in physics to describe the
diffraction of light ("Streuung"). When he declares that traditional contemplation is
no longer commensurate with the challenges of modernity, Benjamin formulates a
typical avant-garde position: "The challenges posed by periods of historical change
for the human perceptional apparatus cannot in any way be met through […]
contemplation alone" (Benjamin 1980, 505). In the cinema, distraction and habit
merge dialectically, for "even the distracted person can form a habit" (Benjamin
1980, 505). If we can notice a building habitually without paying attention to it, the
same is true for the cinema: we notice its "shocking" effects but these do not invite
(in fact, they exclude) all contemplation.

In their combination of architecture and image projection, Wodiczko's performances

expand upon Benjamin's idea of "reception through distraction." Wodiczko's
assessment of the perception of architectural space closely resembles Benjamin's:
"Circulating around and between the buildings, we cannot stop moving. We are
unable to concentrate and focus on their bodies. This establishes an absent-minded
relation to the building, an unconscious contact [...]" (Wodiczko 1999, p. 46). As
does the cinema in Benjamin's analysis, the memorial projections dialectically
dissolve the tension between habitual perception (of the public monument) and
(social, political) attention in the sense that they invite the same reaction formation
that Benjamin claimed for the cinema, a.k.a., "distracted attention" or zerstreute
Aufmerksamkeit. If, on the one hand, Wodiczko's projections keep the old monument
(and with it the habitual perceptional mode that results in our "forgetting" the
monument's very existence) intact, on the other hand, they also distract us like a
film. Wodiczko surprises his audience with the technical precision and accuracy of his
projections: witness the way in which the projected missiles "fit" exactly the neo-
classical columns onto which they are projected as if they were made for them, or
the way in which the eye is precisely centered on the tympan of the Suiss parliament
building. It is not by coincidence that when he was still in his native Poland,
Wodiczko, a graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, worked as an industrial designer
in the design office of Polish Optical Works in Warsaw, a factory producing precision
optical instruments. Yet such optical effects do not, or not necessarily, disrupt the
habitual attitude locals take to the monuments in question, which is precisely why
the monuments are in not made to disappear behind the image that is projected
onto them.

By keeping both the screen and the image projected on it latently visible, Wodiczko
also thematizes the gap that separates the politicization of art from the
aestheticization of politics. Recalling for a moment the artist's evocation of the
fireworks in the background of his monumental Grand Army Plaza projection, one
has a sense that Wodiczko is well aware of the possibility that the sense of awe
inspired by the technical precision of his projections can easily and at any moment
interchange with a sense of awe inspired by the technology of destruction it displays,
just like the original monument remains continuoisly visible through the projected
image. In other words, while it is taken for granted that the audience will read the
display of two intercontinental missiles on the Grand Army monument as an
indictment of the arms race (the politicization of art), another reading is also
possible, implying the festive aestheticization/monumentalization of politics, an
aestheticization for which there are certainly many precedents (one might recall the
monumental Lichtdome or "cathedrals of light" that formed part of the propaganda
mass spectacles in pre-war Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia.) Such a reading
suggests a certain continuity and compatibility between the symbolic coding of the
monument and the projection that it comes to bear. And so, the repressions to which
the public monument is subject, Wodiczko argues, cannot simply be undone, they
can only be continued by expanding their context. Which is to say, once again, that
the "Memorial Projections" target the unconscious habits, desires, and reflexes of its
audience as much as its rational, critical faculties. Only in this way can the projection
become what Wodiczko desires it to be:
a double intervention: against the imaginary life of the memorial itself, and against
the idea of social-life-with-memorial as uncritical reflection. In this case, where the
monumental character of the projection is bureaucratically desired, the aim of the
memorial projection is to pervert this desire monumentally. (Wodiczko 1986, 22;
emphasis mine, S.S.)

Like Hans Haacke or Zbigniew Libera, Wodiczko does not simply continue the politics
of Brechtian aesthetics with its unfettered faith in the powers of Verfremdung. Like
Benjamin (and unlike Brecht or even Adorno), Wodiczko is interested in the
instrumentalization of habit and distraction rather than their simple destruction. The
memorial projections do not attempt to cancel the monumentalism of the buildings
or monuments they target. Instead, the overwhelming, monumental precision of his
performances produces an effect akin to the Zerstreuung, or distraction, of which
Benjamin writes. In Benjamin's view, the modern film audience "examines"
("untersucht") without paying attention to what it examines. By combining
architecture and light projections, Wodiczko aims at a similar disruption of the
"specialist" gaze that characterizes contemplation in a museum environment.

Sven Spieker, Santa Barbara

Sven Spieker is Associate Professor at the Dept. of German, Slavic, Semitic Studies & History of Art and
Architecture at University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the Editor of ARTMargins - Contemporary
East-Central European Visual Culture, http://www.artmargins.com/.