5th Anniversary of my MFA

In acknowledgement of the fifth anniversary of receiving my MFA, I’ve decided to post my thesis – typos and all.
While some of my feelings have changed since I wrote it, mostly I find that am still coming up against the same questions in my work as I did then. I am not sure if this points to a lack of progress or that I have stumbled onto some central theme for my work.

In the end, the project that was the basis for my thesis was quite pivotal for how Das Fundbuero developed in Leipzig. That, along with the distance in time from the whole master’s experience lets me view the work somewhat more objectively and reevaluate its relative success and failures. I feel much better about this project than I did in 2009, and I’ve realized that “building community” in the traditional sense – a certain harmony between project participants – is not one of my goals; I am more interested in how we deal with those people whom we do not like or do not agree with – how do we continue to work productively in spite of such conflict? As usual, I don’t have a clear or concise answer for this yet, but I’m working at it from a few angles and hope to address it in written form sometimes soon.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the thesis.

M_Sheets_Thesis

Between Exit and Action

Just before leaving Germany in December, I visited the exhibition “Zwischen Aussteig und Aktion” (Between Exit and Action) in the Kunsthalle Erfurt, and I was struck again by this sense of familiarity that I often feel when it comes to the late GDR.

The show is an encyclopedic look at the underground art scene in Erfurt. There was work from the 60s and 70s, but much of it focused on the mid to late 1980s. I’ve seen some of this work before, but never so much in one place. The artworks were also accompanied by private photos and ephemera (posters, flyers, etc.), giving a fuller picture of activities at the time.

Looking at all of these things, I was struck by a sense of identification – this is work that I could have been making, events that my friends could have been organizing, practically at the very same time. I am, though, probably about 5-10 years younger than most of the artists in the Erfurt exhibition, so it may be better to say that these were things that I knew were happening in Toledo, of which I was on the fringes.

From approximately 1987-1991, I was part of the punk scene, which overlapped with a scene associated with the Collingwood Arts Center, a low-cost work/live space for artists. When a writer from the GDR talks about how he and his friends wore Italian army uniforms as a provocation against the militarized society of the GDR, I think of my friends wearing West and East German army coats and combat boots as a provocation of their own. When I see a short, quasi mystical video of women on a rooftop in Erfurt, I think about dressing in a bird mask and running through the snow in Forest Cemetery for my friend Bev’s film. But it’s not only the style of the people or the style of the work that resonates with me, it is also this sense of isolation – only half knowing what is going on beyond your region (GDR artists were likely much better informed than we were) – and the sense of knowing you were, in a way, stuck there: you had to do something where you were because there was no getting out.

This sense of identification breaks down, though, when confronted with the third floor of the exhibition, where a large installation by Gabi Stötzer looks at the surveillance and documentation of the Erfurt scene by the internal security forces of the GDR. No one ever paid that much attention to the goings-on of the underground scene in Toledo. Sure, an all-ages show might be busted occasionally for violating a city code, and an individual might be arrested for underage drinking or drug possession, but the content of what we were doing was never scrutinized, never truly deemed threatening. When my best friend and I danced and pantomimed sex on top of a Betsy Ross American flag while our friends’ band played a song about war for oil, no one was taking photographs that would go into a file. In fact, as far as I know, there was no one taking photographs at all.

It’s hard not to romanticize the danger that artists in the GDR lived under. I want to think that art can be dangerous to the status quo, that it can change the world. But it’s also hard to imagine what form of artistic production couldn’t be quickly assimilated and neutralized by the society in which I live. And I think that even if we couldn’t articulate it at the time, my friends and I felt this already in the 80s in Toledo. It added to our nihilism; just one more thing we did that didn’t really matter.

I was discussing this exhibition and my thoughts about it with a friend, and he brought up the relationship between activism and repression. His example was that queer activists don’t march in Berlin anymore, they go to Budapest. And one can argue that they are more needed in Budapest, but are they not needed in Berlin as well? In places that view themselves as “open societies”, we claim to value and respect diversity and difference, but this often seems to be expressed more through the acknowledgement created by niche-marketing than real political agency.

In the US we don’t have the benefit of regime change to create “critical distance” for examining past governmental policies. If systematic sexual and physical abuse of kids in juvenile detention in the 70s and 80s is revealed, it is explained as isolated cases, or as not knowing better at the time, and not seen as an inevitable outcome of our justice system. If we believe that our system is just, then these kids were there for just reasons, and we somehow see them as less victimized than the teenagers in a GDR Jugendhof. To do otherwise would implicate ourselves, would ask for some sort of action on our part, and what we should or could do about it isn’t very clear.

So perhaps what drives the activists to Budapest and the romanticization of artists in repressive societies is related: what we perceive as the relative clarity of the situation. The “enemy” is clearly defined, and we can say definitively that it is not us. With this comes a clear audience to whom your actions can be addressed – you know who is watching in both the positive and negative sense.

But a closer look, as always, complicates the situation: members of the Erfurt art underground could be both artist and informant, part of the opposition and part of the collaboration. We tend to look at those who collaborated as craven individuals and those who refused to collaborate as heroic, but how can we really understand what forced that decision? It is, perhaps, a disservice to assume that the choice was so clear, a half nostalgic, half self-righteous form of patronization from our privileged perspective.

I try to turn that perspective on myself now, to bring some sort of clarity to a world that seems to swim with nuance. Is there a clear moral choice that I am failing to make? So far there has been nothing to force my decision, and this situation seems unlikely to change. Revelations of NSA spying notwithstanding, I still feel as if no one is watching. If I continue to live as I have, I must also live with the realization that there will likely be no decisive moment, and that I will never have to be either a hero or a villain. I will always be both collaborator and dissident.

New Project in Leipzig’s Völkerschlachtdenkmal

From October 16th through October 20th I am presenting a sound installation in the Ruhmeshalle of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig.
2013 is the 200th anniversary of the Völkerschlacht, when Napoleon’s forces were defeated in Germany, and the 100th anniversary of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, the monument to this battle. The monument was designed to support an origin myth of the Germany, to unify disparate regions with different and perhaps competing goals and desires. But the monument presents an image created before both World Wars and the following separation of Germany. In 2013 we see the monument with an additional 100 years of history and a new perspective.

Tapferkeit_smIn the Ruhmeshalle (Hall of Fame) are four 9.5 meter high figures representing the “virtues of the German people”: bravery in battle (Tapferkeit), willingness to sacrifice (Opferbereitschaft), unwavering faith (Glaubensstärke) and ethnic strength (Volkskraft). The audio installation takes the form of a conversation between these four colossal figures. What do these symbols of Germany have to say about their 100 years of existence? How do they see their own relevance today? The conversation was developed from interviews and an online survey with German citizens about “German Identity”. The content may seem familiar, but acquires new meaning in the context of the hall.

The conversation will play once per hour in the hall during opening hours, excepting times for scheduled tours and events. If you can’t see it is Leipzig, check the projects section of this site for documentation in the coming month.

Stimmen der Ruhmeshalle is part of the project “fireworks and smokebombs”, a critical look at the memorial culture surrounding this anniversary. The project includes specially commissioned artworks as well as conferences and academic presentations. More about the whole project (in German) here.

Das Fundbuero in the Press

I have beentaz_2013_26_09_fundbuero_sm wanting to start posting actual news and updates for some time, so this seems like a good thing to start with.

In today’s taz in Germany, there is an interview with me about Das Fundbuero and the Leipziger Zentrale. Some national press coverage of the project is certainly a nice parting gift for me, and it will hopefully give the project a little boost as Peggy Freund continues to lead it after my departure.

The article is available online here. Click on the image for a PDF of the print version.