animal farm
march 1 - april 1, 2007
opening thursday, march 1, 6-9
gallery hours: tuesday – sunday 11-6
Near the beginning of Alain Robbe-Grillet Repetition, secret agent Henri Rubin is given a simple mission: to look down on the square where Frederick the Great's cavalry was once stabled, and jot down an accurate record of the murder that will take place there. While he waits for this event to take place, Rubin weaves an elaborate fantasy around a massive pedestal that sits empty in the middle of the square. (The novel is set in 1949 and Germany is still in ruins.) He imagines a bronze chariot pulled by two speeding steeds, King Frederick in a Toga unleashing his whip, two archers by his side, and a bare-breasted adolescent between them. Rubin can't quite determine who she is. Maybe part of the booty from one of their conquests, maybe a spoiled child being entertained by her father, maybe the living idol of the temple. For a brief moment, Repetition becomes a meditation on Berlin and its monuments—on the way that they mark a historical event as much as on the way that they themselves are marked by historical events. Of course, after this short episode, the novel becomes a mirror house of doublings, duplicities, half-truths and concealed identities.
Swetlana Heger has been thinking of Berlin's monuments, as well. And of how history leaves its mark on them. She has been taking photographs of bronze animal statuettes that are scattered in parks, zoos, and defunct kindergartens throughout the eastern part of the city. There's a peacock with its plumage replaced by intricate metal lacework, a pair of baby giraffes, a fierce goat, a cuddly bear, a trio of plump chickens. Innocent as all the beasts seem, they guard a secret: they've been made from Stalin's remains.
The ruined streets that provide the scenery and atmosphere for Robe-Grillet's novel were eventually cleaned and rebuilt. In the 1950s, a period of intense reconstruction began throughout Germany. Among of the most ambitious projects of the era was a massive 300 foot wide boulevard in Berlin, lined with tall buildings designed in the socialist neo-classical style that was the rage at the time. It not only held apartments for the workers (supposedly), but it was lined with restaurants, business, The International—a legendary theater that is still functional today. The spectacular boulevard was supposed to showcase to the world the glories of socialism, teleporting the future right into the middle of East Berlin. Such an ambitious project had to be christened with a name that carried all the symbolic power that was attributed to the street. And so, in 1949 the Stalinallee became the main drag in the socialist half of the city. A giant bronze statue of the benevolent leader was eventually erected to crown and commemorate the achievement.
It was only proper that like the history of socialism in general, the Stalinallee should participate in a logic of doublings and erasures, of concealment and renaming. Upon Stalin's death in 1961, it was urgent that a new be found for the boulevard. This time, however, party officials waged on a name that was perhaps beyond opprobrium. They went with the much safer choice of Karl-Marx-Allee. A choice so safe, a name so beyond reproach, that it still stands today.
But even after finding the perfect name for the street, there was still the matter of that bronze monument. It stood like a bad reminder of Stalin's intolerance, of the magnitude of his crimes, surely, but also of the quiet complacency of all those who had to pass by it everyday on their way to grim jobs and scripted university lectures. The statue itself needed to be eradicated. And so it was brought down. One imagines it's demolition as some prophetic moment, signaling all the statues that would fall 30 years later, a harbinger of those images that would endlessly roll through our TVs as the triumphant visual correlatives to a discourse of Evil Empires and Star Wars satellite weapons systems.
Unlike the images that censors and revisionists simply made go away whenever someone refused to toe the Party line, there was the matter of the actual physical substance that made up the Stalin statue. The bronze was melted and redistributed into all the animal figurines that Heger has been hunting down and documenting throughout Berlin. These insignificant animals, tucked away in insignificant parks, quietly carry not only a bit of the historical narratives of the last century but literally some of the material through which these narratives found physical form in the world. These innocent and abandoned animals, like a big joke on History, have become its depository. It's like alchemy, but in reverse. These are the cuddly forms where the narratives that we banked on with such hope go to die, adding, as they say, insult to injury
Although in the past Heger has concentrated much of her efforts on considering just how it is that an artists functions under the conditions of global capitalism, at the intersection of aesthetic production and commercial interest, these new photographs seem like a departure only at first glance. Instead of turning the camera on herself and the system under which she must construct her identity, Heger is obviously now training it on a series of found statuettes, allowing a kind of urban historiography to become a significant component of her production. But there is an important parallel between these new photographs and the previous work—a kind of devolving of narratives; a movement from the grand and stable to the contingent and meaningless. Where once historical narratives found their form in major monuments, it is equal true that once artists, for a brief moment, could bank on narratives of autonomy, whereby their agency as historical players seemed so solidly grounded and useful that they found it necessary to line themselves up with progressive forces. But just as the “meat” of the Stalin monument now fleshes out a flock of meaningless animals, ensconced in meaningless locations, so the position of the artist as a kind of force has dwindled to where it is now a lifestyle identity, a way to prance through the world, climbing the social ladder, chasing the big sale, and gracing the fashion magazine.
- Text by Gean Moreno