Ars Electronica in early September — heavy rain pounding the expanse of sand dumped on the cobblestones of the Pfarrplatz.
A makeshift beach, then, but more to the point an art installation, easily identified as such by its sheer ridiculousness: for in addition to the wet sand, there were dripping sun umbrellas, drenched beach chairs, and frequently malfunctioning electronics — an art gesture born of the main conceit (hardly new) of the Second City exhibition, which was the merging of the physical with the virtual world, demonstrated here by the online replication of the beach in Second Life.
The exhibition, which started in the Pfarrplatz square and ran up two narrow streets adjoining it, was to have Pedestrian projected on the pavement both at the start and the end of this route, and Arrival illuminating a desktop inside a small office near the end of the route. Alas when we’d given permission for these two works to be featured there, I had no premonition either that the context would be so silly and heavy-handed or that the actual installation of the work would be so incompetent. For, in the event, the festival was unable to get either work up in time for opening night, and Pedestrian wasn’t to be seen even by the third night, at which point I quitted the festival in disgust and returned to New York.
But all this didn’t occur before I’d had a chance to explore Linz extensively and even to happen upon a profound and heart-rending art experience nearby. So please read on; things will gradually look up. But not right away.
Science experiments
Three blocks from the Pfarrplatz is The OK Center museum, where this year’s CyberArts prize winners were displayed far more handsomely than were the public artworks outdoors. There the festival showed a decided predelection for biologically inspired art, or at least the idea of it. The main winner in the hybrid category was an Australian “artistic laboratory” called SymbioticA, but I couldn’t tell (either by looking or by reading) whether they had an actual artwork on display (perhaps the test-tubes hanging from the ceiling in one gallery were theirs, but I didn’t think so); that left only the extravagant, academic, inter-disciplinary claims of their website to go by. Fortunately the other winners did have artworks that you could examine, many of which took the form of science experiments framed as art (a few tongue-in-cheek, but the majority very much in earnest).
But while you could indeed see such works, still you largely had to take the artists’ words for what you saw — on faith, really — since these kinds of pieces don’t prove themselves in your perceptual experience of them. For instance, the translucent pock-marked asteroid-like sculpture in a room installation called Biological Habitat: Breeding Spaces Technology, Made in Space was a pleasing piece to the eye, but the artist Zbigniew Oksiuta’s notes on its principles went far beyond what the eye could see:
1. Creation of spatial forms in the state of weightlessness — isopycnic systems. 2. Use of biological polymers as construction material — spatium gelatum. 3. Generation of forms as a pneu-biological containment.
And so on. This I found in the neutral tone of the gallery hand-out, where presumably the curator paraphrased the artist. But above the gallery door there was also a more bombastic text direct from the artist himself, announcing his intention to create radical new lifeforms by propelling DNA into the weightlessness of space. This text took the regrettable form of a single-line video crawl, a most uncongenial way of reading, better for headlines or slogans than for reasoned arguments — which signified to me at least, as I stood there peering up at it, that it wasn’t meant to be read that closely or in its entirety.
(I don’t mean to imply that artworks should remain pure of accompanying texts; indeed, I think the authorship of these really ought to be up to the artist rather than the curator. I remember years ago encountering Robert Smithson’s gallery installations of the Site/Non-site series, and of course my experience of them depended heavily on my having read the amazing essays he’d written, especially “The Monuments of Passaic,” which transformed the way I saw the landscapes flowing past me during long bus rides to and from Manhattan.
In other exhibits, the idea of mapping, so common in digital music and dance, was made biological. A piece entitled Host consisted of an audio lecture on the sex lives of insects, with an accompanying soundtrack derived from “a direct recording of the electrical activity in the aural nerve centre of a Cricket which is listening to the sex lecture.” Unfortunately, like so many other contemporary works, this artwork is consumed in its description: to experience it gives you nothing more than what you’ve just read.
This was not true of White Lives on Speaker, Yoshimasa Kato’s installation, a sort of sculptural form of biofeedback, in which the viewer’s brainwaves are translated into vibrations that bounce a pan of potato-starch mixture, forming very odd gloopy forms in the distressed white surface. When I was there, two Japanese girls were trying to suppress their giggles as their friend’s brain drove this odd spectacle. The connection between the girl’s neural activity and this turbulent white viscidity was undeniable, but then the picture it formed was certainly no picture of her real thoughts. Instead it became a sort of parody, as if it had stripped away the innocence of the girl’s fresh and fashionable appearance to reveal the alien being bubbling inside — like something out of one of those light Murakami novels.
Cloaca
From the festival brochure:
Wim Delvoye’s Cloaca is a complex installation that simulates the human digestive process. The machine is fed with everyday foodstuffs. The mechanically produced end product is—even under scientific examination—impossible to differentiate from human excrement.
Scheiß! — the perfect installation for a Germanic museum, given the scatological obsession associated with these lands. This artwork also consumed itself in its description (a very good thing, under the circumstances).
Inspecting this gallery brought back memories from years ago, when MASS MoCA had first taken over the mill factory in North Adams, Massachusetts, to make a huge new museum there. We had Ghostcatching there; another gallery in the opening show was devoted to large brown sculptures by Joseph Beuys, part of his installation Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. As the townspeople rushed in to see how their mill had been transformed by art, they encountered the Beuys, which looked to them like nothing other than pieces of shit — a reaction their astonished remarks did nothing to hide. For they found themselves confronted by these turd-like forms, modeled in bronze, positioned on the floor or hanging from the ceiling. They of course were unacquainted with the dubious personal mythology of Joseph Beuys, which begins with the story of his service in the Wehrmacht, his crash landing in the steppes, and his survival supposedly owed entirely to the Tatars who on discovering his scorched body, wrapped it in multiple restorative layers of fat and brown felt. Without such stories, not to mention the legendarily charismatic man who told them, these works don’t work.
(In other words, you have to be in the know to get them. A bad thing? That depends. For a very few works, like Duchamp’s Large Glass, such demands are worth it.)
Culture Capital
The Linz city map, free for the taking at the tourist office, had a plug on its flipside for Linz 2009: Application for European Capital of Culture — “capital” to be understood in both senses of the word, for the aim of such cultural renewals is to bring cash infusions in the form of rebuilding, expanded tourism, etc (Bilbao is perhaps the most successful example of this). It’s the same strategy I’d seen with MASS MoCa’s state-sponsored attempt to resuscitate a moribund mill town, and in fact I was also already familiar with the EU policy of designating cultural capitals. Bruges was one such capital; the city wanted to balance its storied medieval past with a vision of an active electronic future, which led its arts council to project Pedestrian on the cobblestones of the main market square.
So Linz is now making the same kind of pitch, but this has an unfortunately ominous echo to it. For Hitler, too, intended to make his home town the pre-eminent city on the Danube — the cultural capital of the Greater Third Reich, the empire he proclaimed after the 1938 Anschluss brought him to the cheering Austrian crowds of Linz, a triumphal homecoming.
Factories
The plane from Frankfurt to Linz puts the peaks of the Tyrol in tantalizing view before it dips down over the city. The curves of the Danube come into view, as does the enormous steel factory on its southern bank, which sends up plumes of smoke. This plant was originally the Hermann-Göring-Werke, named by Hitler after his Luftwaffe commander and right-hand man: an emblem of the industrial renewal that continued to endear Hitler to the citizens of Linz well into the disastrous war.
About a half-hour bus ride east of the city lies another gigantic factory, this one not only dead but sealed off unobtrusively underground — the Mauthausen-Gusen slave labor camp, where in the dying days of the war the Nazis rushed the production of Messerschmidt fighter planes, boasting the first jet engines the world had seen.
By far the best artwork I encountered at Ars Electronica was the lowest tech. This was Christoph Mayer’s The Invisible Camp: Audiowalk Gusen, which consisted only of an IPod and headphones.
On a dismal afternoon of rain and wind, there were only two of us taking the tour. The bus had dropped us off at the small town that was built after the war on the site of the camp, which as a result is little known for its past horrors. The woman’s voice on my headphones started me walking along what used to be the perimeter of the Gusen I site, now lined by neat houses with green grass and nice gardens.
I had worried that the English version of the tour would provide a diminished experience, but it was perfectly done: I could still hear the particularity of the voices underneath giving testimony. These began with the survivors, one of whom remembered the SS telling him that his only way out was as smoke through the chimney. I timed my steps to the ones in my headphone, and so I was at the right intersection when the woman’s voice told me to turn. I headed down a small street, bounded on either side by what had once been a brothel for the guards, an infirmary, and so on — but after just thirty steps or so, I was brought up short by a new No Entry sign: Privat. This, the woman’s voice informed me, had been erected recently by local citizens, blocking the original audiotour route. A telling dead-end, however, for it matched precisely the experience I was having — of the impassable barrier between mundane present and unimaginable past.
The audiotour had me retrace my steps towards another route into the town. The testimonies started to shift from survivors to townspeople, both those alive during the war and those born afterwards. By now the wind had torn my umbrella to shreds and I was soaked. At one point I fumbled for my phone camera and took this meager snapshot of the pavement:
I could see that in finer weather children did play on these streets, as well as in the backyard playgrounds behind many of the fences — and what did they know of those who staggered to their deaths here long before them? What responsibility could they possibly bear? A young man remembered his childhood swims in the nearby quarry, fantastic times cut short when a tour of somber foreign dignitaries came upon these Austrian kids romping in the water — a carefree pleasure thereafter forbidden them. How were they to have known it was an act of sacrilege and desecration?
An old woman recalled her girlhood there — her flirtations with the charming young SS soldiers who were so polite and so engaging. And then of her suddenly encountering one of the horrors they perpetrated: young children tied into burlap sacks and hurled against a brick wall, and she having to step around the blood pooling on the pavement.
I was peering through this orderly village to make out the dim outlines of what had stood there before, my eyes attempting a kind of x-ray time travel. At the back of my mind, I wondered what my gaze felt like to the present-day occupants whom I imagined looking back at me from behind gauze curtains. I stumbled along the route distractedly, but was it only my imagination that the occasional passing car didn’t slow down in the slightest as it overtook me? Maybe even accelerated a bit as it sped past me in the narrow lane?
Another citizen spoke up defiantly over the headphones (a nice place to live, my hometown…). And then started to come the voices of the perpetrators themselves, the old men who were once the young guards there. One the voice of a kind of automaton, saying that he had no guilt, had merely done his duty, followed his orders, had lived a “schizophrenic” existence, now long gone and scarcely remembered.
I crossed a small bridge, which I learned as I crossed it had been built by slave labor. On the other side had been a railroad spur, now just a slightly elevated ridge overgrown with trees, a little muddy path leading into it.
As directed, I made my way along the little ridge, where I was soon enveloped by trees. I came upon a little wooden tower to my left, erected so that deer hunters can train their rifles over the field beyond. In the pouring rain, there was no one there now, and feeling myself finally alone and out of sight, I started crying, overcome by a feeling of utter abandonment.
But the tour continued and took me further. I found myself at the edge of the vast underground factory, where a row of new townhouses had been erected on a little rise. The woman’s voice told me that this was the only part of the former factory that had been filled in, for no sooner had the townhouses been built than they had started to sink and faced the danger of caving in.
The voice of another old SS veteran now took over, unrepentant. His words were to the effect that we could not understand his experience at all, and said that he had tried many times to do so himself so that I am always a step ahead of you, okay? This brought us to the end, where the artwork executes a vivid doubling. As the SS man spoke of a door to memory that we can’t go through together, our footsteps had taken us to the locked gate which is the only remaining sign of the underground factory lying dormant under the green countryside.
Pope’s SMS
Planted in the grass near the entrance of Gusen I’d seen a large poster bearing the face of the German pope, Benedict XVI. It was raining too hard then for me to dare take out my camera phone, and back in Linz the closest I could find was this:
Benedict was conducting a three-day tour of Austria, trying to rally the mostly lapsed Catholic state back to the church. The poster I spotted at Gusen was part of his marketing campaign: it urged people to get the pope’s word directly via their cellphones.
The placement of the pope’s image in the grassy field by the concentration camp was no doubt accidental, but its presence chilled me nonetheless, given the impassivity of his predecessor Pius XII in the face of the Holocaust. A day later I read that Benedict had just commemorated the Holocaust victims in the old Jewish quarter of Vienna; but then again, there’d also been reports a month or so earlier of Benedict’s having granted a private audience to the Polish priest Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose rabble-rousing radio network fans the seemingly inexhaustible flames of anti-semitism in his homeland.
Stadtwanderwege
From the airplane over first Germany and then Austria I’d remarked once again on the European landscape, where you find forests so often adjacent to cities. This I could see was true of Linz as well, for it was surrounded by green hills which I quickly determined to explore.
And so there were pleasanter walks for me than the harrowing one I took in Gusen. The first day I headed off for a hilltop beckoning to me in the distance, twin church steeples on its top. After a game of pedestrian snakes and ladders, in which I was continually brought short by unexpected dead-ends and curving detours, I happened upon a stadtwanderweg sign — “wanderweg” (literally, wander way) a term I remembered fondly from Switzerland, where my wife and I had spent part of our pre-honeymoon traipsing through the network of public trails crisscrossing the nation. Now, in Linz, I could find similar escapes, and the best parts of my days there found me amid trees and the sound of water streaming down the hillsides towards the Danube.