In 2003 the German Parliament (finally) approved the motion to build a monument in Berlin to memorialize the homosexual victims of the Third Reich; Michael Elmgreen and Imgar Dragset won the design competition which was unveiled May 27. Their design lifts an element from the vast, solemn, monumental Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe created by Peter Eisenmann. It is one massive block (there are 2,711 in the larger memorial) and made specific by the inclusion of a video loop showing two men kissing.
[Because there were complaints that homosexual victims of the Nazi era included more than just men, the video (directed by Thomas Vinterberg) will alternate on odd years with films of other queer intimate encounters.]
I'm sort of reeling from the idea of the video monitor set into the concrete block.
There's something so ... crass about it. In your face. Posturing. Political statement. Wait, isn't that what this is -?
... no ... this is a memorial.
I know Elmgreen & Dragset for their Powerless Structures, a series of replica galleries set sinking into the ground or cut in half or floating suspended from large inflated balloons. These white cubes questioned the mechanism that makes institutionalized, white-washed, art containers work. What does the whiteness of the space say? Who controls what is visible in the cube? Is it objective space? etc. In 2005 E&G created a (circa 1980s vintage) subway platform downstairs at the Bohen Foundation, NYC complete with tracks, tilework, graffiti, and Tab cans; and a Prada store free-standing in the desert in Marfa, TX. Most of the time their work is site-specific: the subway unearthed the history of the neighborhood; Prada points to high-end consumption on the art-tour-trail.
Talking about the subway piece in an interview with greg.org E & D say:
Well, like a lot of our previous projects this installation is also about public space and how public space is laid out and in what ways we as citizens interact with it - how its design reflects certain power structures which influence our behavioral patterns. We don't do the same things in public as we do in private - or at least most of us don't.
We were once taking the subway towards downtown and got rather surprised (as the uptight Northern Europeans we are) by a female passenger suddenly starting to cut her toe nails inside the train car - something you would never experience in a German U-bahn.
Their internalized conventions were jangled by the "private" act in the "public" car. This made me think about kissing, and the uptight constraints in "polite" society against public displays of affection. PDAs are upsetting for some—especially when it's boys kissing boys. So we march in the street, hold hands in public, wear our skirts up high—whatever to break the rules—We're Here, We're Queer, Get Over It!
But... on a memorial?
In an article about the unveiling in Der Spiegel I read that just building a monument was controversial all along. The Nazi laws prosecuting homosexuality weren't taken off the German books until 1969. German queer acceptance has a long way to go.
Dragset and Elmgreen told Zitty that Neumann, the federal commissioner for culture, refused to allow an image from the video of the two men kissing to be put on the official invitation to the monument's opening. "(The decision) not to print the kiss shows that we still have a problem," Dragset said. "As long as people feel repulsed when they see homosexuals kissing, then something is missing," added Elmgreen, who called the kiss "the basis of the monument."
Gay PDAs are still dangerous, can land you in jail in some parts of the world. Something is still missing from human conscience.
But... this is a memorial.
It is a great art piece. It is provocative. Makes the private public. Addresses the issue. Reflects off other works. etc. etc. But what about the 50,000 tagged—the men and women and transgendered who wore the pink triangle? What about the 15,000 gassed?
This piece says, Never again. Turning away=silence=death. Never again. Not then, not now.
But there is something missing. There is somehow, with the inclusion of animated, live, contemporary persons kissing a loss of the presence of the lost ones, the dead ones, the murdered and de-famed ones.
Well, it is a small complaint. Better an imperfect memorial than nothing. Berlin is a city of memorials, some more effective than others. At the unveiling, commissioner Neumann said, "The experience of war and Holocaust, state terror and tyranny, puts on us Germans a special responsibility to protect freedom and human rights.
"We stand stunned before the brutality with which the Nazis threatened, persecuted and destroyed all those who did not correspond to their inhuman ideology."
Stunned.
Silent.
*E&D installation photos courtesy of Nicolai Wallner Gallery.
E&D memorial photos courtesy of Der Spiegel.
The not-so-great pics of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are mine.
