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‘The
Migrating Monument’, Tom Vandeputte
in conversation with Anthony
Auerbach, in Supplement
Material, edited by Caspar Frenken and
Tom Vandeputte, Rotterdam/London:
Perhaps (Perhaps), 2010. A discussion on architecture,
anxiety and monumentality after
Aerial Reconnaissance
Berlin.
TVDP: Aerial
Reconnaissance Berlin documents
series of ‘low altitude aerial surveys’ you
did as part of the International
Necronautical Society (INS) ‘Inspectorate’.
Where does the preoccupation with this aerial
surveys come from?
AA: That would be very
low altitude aerial
surveys. My first expedition
of this type was an aerial survey
of the carpet in my studio, done
from a height of about 90 centimetres.
I’d
worked for years in that studio
on drawings. They had gradually
become more and more intense,
complicated, and, in the end
unmanageable, partly as a result
of what you might call centrifugal
tendencies — an
interest in architecture, landscape
and cartography, that eventually
drove me out of the studio — and
partly as a result of allowing
the space of drawing to be infiltrated
by other spaces — like
that of games, maps and so on.
There was one piece that got
quite out of hand, so I resorted
to subdividing a grid that was
already part of the structure
of the drawing and notating it,
making a map of the drawing in
81 parts, encoding the ‘topography’ of
the drawing like a map encodes
a landscape. That way I hoped
I’d be able
to discard the original drawing.
The aerial survey came about
from the wish to turn the practice
of drawing ninety degrees. So
instead of recording something
in some system of marks and traces
in the vertical plane — a
picture, I turned my attention
to recording the marks and traces
that might remain of the practice
of drawing — on
my carpet. An aerial survey is
series of overlapping vertical
photographs that covers the whole
terrain. I realised that an aerial
survey, examining a surface,
moving rhythmically back and
forth across it, implies a notion
of reading. That idea of reading,
reading material, was what I
brought to the Berlin project.
TVDP: The locations you surveyed in Berlin
are described as ‘sites of erasure’.
What do you mean by that?
AA: Whereas the sites I surveyed in the context
of my own practice were more or less accidental
or biographical, the INS’s ‘central
concerns’ suggested criteria for the selection
of sites for inspection that could be formulated
precisely: ‘locations where no trace can
be found of incidents or persons of interest
to the INS; where there is evidence of attempts
to cover or erase the traces of incidents or
persons; where there is evidence of attempts
to conceal the erasure.’
That sounds like a contradiction of a method — aerial
photography — that’s supposed to
be all about registering traces. But why not
record erasure, or whatever is written over
erasure? It’s often said of cities, Berlin
included, that they are like palimpsests. To
me, this always seemed a rather sentimental
notion, presupposing that the text, once erased
and overwritten, could be recovered: made legible
again if one only could inspect it closely enough,
or, presupposing at least that the obscure remnants
of erasure and inscription — the present
state of the surface — will stand in for
this promise of legibility. I’m all for
letting a look — inspection — arouse
such desires, but the point in Berlin was to
examine surfaces where there really is no trace
of any ‘original’ mark or inscription,
and to let the material complicate the method.
Finding such sites in Berlin is not difficult
if one considers the places of the most intense,
most intentional and ruthless erasure tend to
be those sites that have been memorialised or
monumentalised in various ways. Berlin, the
city the INS has designated the World Capital
of Death, exhibits an unusual abundance of such
places.
That line of investigations has led me to think
quite a lot about monuments — and monumentality,
so I was interested in your approach. How do
you identify a monument?
TVDP: In our project we talked a lot about
the notion of monumentality as distinct from
monuments. The term monumentality seems to suggests
the effect, disconnected from the object. For
example, scale is a property that seems to stick
stubbornly to whatever we conceive of as monumental.
AA: Do you mean size? Monumental means big.
Monuments are supposed to look like they are
not going to move, therefore should be very
heavy, and to look heavy, they should be big,
shouldn’t they. I would put the emphasis
on seeming immobile — though in fact monuments
often migrate. A thing called the ‘Schwerbelastungskörper’ [heavy
burden body] in Berlin could be embodiment of
monumentality in its pure form. It’s a
large concrete cylinder built for no other reason
than to be very heavy, and it has no other inscription
than ‘Denkmal’ [monument] since
it is a protected building and has recently
been restored. Although it’s indestructible,
it became dilapidated. The object was originally
built to test the foundation system for the
colossal architecture of the ‘Welthauptstadt’ [world
capital] that Hitler and Speer imagined; it
is a monument to a failed utopia, albeit a Nazi
utopia.
TVDP: We like to think of it in terms of scale,
because it seems possible to understand this
traditional aspect of monumentality in terms
other than its physical dimensions. Attention
seems to be a concept which allows us to re-conceptualise
this aspect of monumentality: eventually, monuments
need to attract attention in one way or the
other.
AA: One way or another. Recently, I came across
an advertising agency whose specialty is what
they call ‘monument veiling’. If
a monument is being restored or redeveloped,
they will dress the scaffolding with monumental
advertising posters. They offer brand-owners
building-sized advertising opportunities in
prominent locations, and monument-owners revenues
to support redevelopment. If the client monument
doesn’t need the money, or the agency
can’t sell the space, they make replica
façades — a simulation, an idealisation,
one might say, of the monument that is for the
moment hidden by this very simulation. In Berlin,
they also provide replica façades for
monuments that don’t exist anymore, or,
as the sponsors of the such façades would
wish: don’t yet exist again. In any case,
it looks as if monumentality and advertising
are engaged on the same territory in the battle
for eyeballs.
TVDP: Debord considered monuments as part of
the society of spectacle. There is an interesting
part in his technical notes to the films he
made in the late 1950s. Some of these films
document the situationists’ ‘dérives’ through
Paris. In the notes on ‘On the Passage
of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity
of Time’ Debord remarks that, whenever
the camera would risk filming a monument, they
would shoot the scene from the opposite direction:
that is, from the point of view of the monument.
In our project, we have appropriated this idea
and extended it: we have made a photographic
documentation of the city of Rotterdam, shot
through the eyes of monumental statues: Erasmus,
Pim Fortuyn, Hugo de Groot, Monsieur Jacques
... The view of each statue produces a double
image: it consists of two photographs, documenting
the statues' perspective through both of their
eyes, together forming a stereographic image.
We liked how it appears as a necessarily futile
attempt to revive these figures of the past;
to engage with the issue of personification;
and of course to work with the idea of the collection
of monuments as a representation of a city's
historical conscience.
AA: The thing you really pick up on in your
project isn’t so much the ‘spectacle’ and
Debord’s aim, somehow to suppress it by
not picturing monuments — I imagine that
would only make their presence
only more palpable, and would
set up quite a complicated protocol for a dérive
in a place like Paris ... what you pick up on
is a connection between monumentality and surveillance.
Debord’s
prohibition on the spectacular
aspect of monuments brings him
to inhabit their gaze. You do that literally,
in order to view the city through the eyes of
a monument. I suppose the question that arises
then is: What kind of subjectivity a monument
would have — and
how that subjectivity is mediated
by a look. Clearly, a monument that presumes
to admonish the public in the name of the dead,
like a system of surveillance, a monument stands
in for a super-ego (like you say, the conscience)
that should somehow moderate the behaviour of
the people affected by it.
TVDP: I am interested in the persistent fantasy
that we are being watched by monuments. Recently,
I did some research on the pavilions that Nicholas
Hawksmoor designed for the gardens of Castle
Howard. The pavilions are predominantly replicas
of ancient funereal monuments; most are placed
on the upper points of the slightly sloping
terrain. In the first monograph on the architect,
the layout of the gardens was described as evoking
a sense of constantly being watched. Similarly,
the steeples of the churches he built in London
are replicas of funereal monuments that are
raised above London’s rooftops, appearing
to watch over and admonish its inhabitants.
In the case of his church in Bloomsbury, the
steeple is a miniature replica of the Halicarnassus
mausoleum – or actually, of a reconstruction
of the mausoleum, which appears to be literally
placed on top. In contrast to this collection
of ancient funereal monuments, it is not at
all clear what the incoherent collection of
statues accumulated over the years in a city
like Rotterdam is to remind us of and how it
relates to the city's contemporary condition.
AA: I’m not sure if it’s safe to
generalise from a case that might be the extreme,
but certainly, examining a system of monuments
like Berlin’s brings to light aspects
of monumentality that are not so obvious in
other cities.
The notion of the super-ego I
mentioned already in connection
with the surveillance comes out of psychoanalysis.
It that context, it is the component of the
personality that extends beyond individual subjectivity
and indeed is often regarded as the internalising
of collective figures of repressive authority.
Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin suggests the Freudian
concept of neurosis could be applicable to a
city. At any rate, I’m prepared to treat
Berlin as a ‘case’.
On the face of it, the symptoms
are abundant.
One could say that monumentality
is the architectural form of
anxiety. As such it is associated
on the one hand with death, and
on the other hand, with neurosis — to
align it with vaguely familiar
Lacanian terms: on the one hand,
the real, and on the other hand,
the imaginary. The monument is architecture
pitched too far, for too much is demanded of
it: to protect us from the dead, to preserve
us till the resurrection, to give meaning to
death. Architecture’s
hyperbole becomes its horizon:
the aspiration that can never be attained, the
ideal that is written into the language of architecture.
To the extent that monuments provide the repertoire
of forms that make up architecture’s self-image,
to be self-consciously a work
of architecture, any building
has to display monumental qualities. That’s
what I mean by the migration of monuments. Partly — there
are also several examples in
Berlin of monuments literally moving from one
place to another, being banished, buried, melted
down, renovated, resurfaced etc.
Architecture, like monumentality,
incorporates the image of its
own ruination, because the image
of the ruin preserves the ideal
that was never attained while
recouping that failure as the pathos of tragedy.
The true hero has to be a broken statue. Ruination
can also make a monument out of a city, as I
discovered in a draft plan for the devastation
of Berlin from the air. [note
1] Most of the ruins of Berlin were
later levelled, but some are
preserved as monuments. Monumentalisation fixes
the desired image for a moment, but at the same
time precipitates the further anxiety that the
ruin will decay, just as much as if it were
an ideal. On the other hand, the decay of monuments
arouses the anxious desire to restore them,
and thus, often, to repress the only thing that
was arousing about them.
An archaeologist will
tell you that the best way to
preserve a find is not to dig
up in the first place, or if
it’s
exposed, to bury it. But that
wouldn’t
satisfy the spectacular demands
of monumentality. In Berlin,
the iconography of the ruin tends
to predominate because the trend, under various
regimes, seems to have been against figurative
monuments: Bismarck was moved from his place
in front of the Reichstag to somewhere in the
woods, the Kaiser Wilhelm Denkmal was demolished,
the statue of Karl Liebknecht was never erected
on the pedestal put up for it,
Lenin was buried in a sand pit on the outskirts
of Berlin. Since 1990, the norm for new monuments
and revisions of old ones has been what I call
sentimental minimalism — a kind of empty
solemnity, that, at its most
bombastic refuses inscriptions.
For instance, the so-called ‘Holocaust’ memorial
(officially, the central memorial
to the ‘Murdered
Jews of Europe’) bears no inscription
except the visitor rules which
state: ‘Alle
Anweisungen des ausgewiesenen
Sicherheitspersonals sind zu
befolgen’ which
should be translated: ‘All
instructions of authorised security
personnel are to be followed.’ Which may
as well replace the whole monument.
The point is, the super-ego function
of monumental sculpture — how
it incorporates repressive authority — can
also be fulfilled by a blind
design-style.
But I wanted to
give just one example of the
fascination and anxiety of ruins.
The Topography of Terror, is an institution
which now occupies the block
near the centre of Berlin formerly
occupied by the headquarters
of various branches of the Nazi security apparatus:
SS, Gestapo etc., buildings previously occupied
by various other institutions — an
art school, a museum of prehistory,
for instance — and
aristocratic mansions. The buildings
were severely damaged during
the war and were later flattened, but the site
was not redeveloped. In the mid-1980s buried
parts of the demolished buildings were excavated
and became the setting for a didactic exhibition
on the Nazi state security institutions and
their victims. The present building and landscape
design is in fact the third attempt to formally
recover the site as a monument. Nothing came
of the first architectural competition. The
prize-winning design of the second was half
built then demolished again. In the present
complex, the exposed remains of the cellars
are displayed for contemplation, while the didactic
exhibition has been moved into a new pavilion
built in an ultra-orthodox minimalist style.
Parts of the foundations of other buildings
have been newly exposed — and
hence are rapidly disintegrating.
Signs indicate where the previous tenants had
set up shop between 1933 and 1945, but nothing
marks the place where the previous, failed attempt
to monumentalise the site was
erased. Whereas in the makeshift Topography
of Terror exhibition of 1987, the quasi-archaeological
remains served to authenticate the didactic
exhibition, now they are preserved as a relict
of the exhibition and serve to authenticate
the institution. Stripped of their annotations,
the remains would be trivial — after
all, this isn’t Rome! — if it weren’t
for their function as ruins in
the monumental landscape design.
The excavations suggest the anxiety of conflicting
desires: to get to the bottom of things — literally,
by exposing the foundations of
Nazi institutions — and
to re-present the recent past
as pre-history — for
which purpose the landscape design
exploits an established repertoire
of architectural readymades — literally,
stuff that’s already there.
TVDP: Is there
something similar going on with
your aerial survey The
State of New York? You
talk about a survey of a map
that’s
turning back into a landscape.
AA:
I’d have to say you are right about
that, although I do something
different with it. There is an
obsessive quality to recording the state of
decay of the terrazzo map in two and half thousand
vertical photographs, and certainly I play with
everything that’s
arousing about ruins and everything
that’s
dizzying about looking down.
The survey I did is also something like what
you expect an archaeologist to
do. The day after I finished
my survey, a team of architectural
conservators started work on the map. They are
actually more used to dealing with ancient
mosaics than terrazzos from the
1960s, but it seems they thought
the New York State Pavilion would
be good practice for their students.
Curiously, the first thing they did was sweep
away everything that my survey recorded, in
order to create their own status
quo ante, which they duly photographed.
Although they claimed to be sensitive
to the ‘philosophical
issues’ of their profession, their idea
of conservation was repairing
the terrazzo panels as if they
really were ancient mosaics,
thus restoring them to the banality that had
inspired their earlier neglect. You can’t
blame a conservator for having a professional
interest in ruins, but the episode
highlights the particular attraction
of this building. The pavilion designed by Philip
Johnson, and advertised at the time as the ‘The
Tent of Tomorrow’ should
have been demolished like the
rest of the World’s
Fair pavilions. It was donated
to the City of New York because
the sponsors wanted to avoid
the demolition costs, but since no permanent
use could be found for the building, it gradually
fell into disrepair, the roof started falling
in and so on, until it really was a ruin. Apparently,
the architect was utterly delighted that his
building had achieved that status. The building’s
accidental prestige and the pathos
of its ruination prompted calls
for its restoration. It’s
probably only in Berlin that
a ruin would proposed as a permanent
use for a derelict building — although,
even there, they probably wouldn’t put
it quite like that.
This is not
the first time that the aspirations
of modernist architecture have
been affirmed by their ruination. Architecture,
as long as it’s architecture, seems bound
to build monuments to a future
that is already lost.
Images
Anthony Auerbach: Planet,
aerial survey, 442 photographs, assembled and
mounted in 4 sections, each 1565 x 1525 mm,
2001 [back
to image]
Berlin:
Schwerbelastungskörper,
1941–42 (photo: Dieter Brügmann,
2005) [back
to image]
Anthony
Auerbach: Troy from Untitled (Cities
and Empires), vertical projection,
aerial survey images, place names,
2008 (installation: Queens Museum
of Art, 2008) [back
to image]
Notes
- Attack on the German Government Machine, draft plan, 15 August 1944 (National Archives), cited in Aerial Reconnaissance Berlin 5.2.(5–6).1[n17]
 ...
return: urban matters
 Statement
to the INS Inspectorate Committee 2009
INS
Inspectorate Berlin: Surveillance Report 2010
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