Sixth Werkleitz Biennial

For its sixth instalment the Werkleitz Biennial moved out of the eponymous village in the German countryside and into the city of Halle. Staged as a five-day festival, the biennial included an art exhibition and a programme of films and events, housed in the Volkspark, a town hall and dance venue that opened in 1907 and later functioned as a cultural centre in the days of the German Democratic Republic. Now in a sorry state, and a melancholy monument to the systematic dismantling of the infrastructure of the East after German reunification, the Volkspark managed, however, to regain some of its former glory through the excitement generated by the festival. In the late summer sunshine participants and visitors thronged its gardens. The buzz of animated discussion was tangible, with workshop groups organized before the festival putting the finishing touches to their presentations in the shade of the trees while media activist group Platoniq broadcast music from their mobile pirate radio transmitter.
The theme that the team of nine curators settled on was ‘Common Property’. Its focus was the current struggle over copyright control in the culture industry and parallel debates in the field of genetic engineering, as well as the broader question of the idea of the common good in an era of privatization and erosion of the welfare state. In a spirit of collaborative participation visitors were handed yellow tape bearing the words ‘Allgemeingut/Common Property’ and asked to use it to reclaim items and buildings in the city as public property. Under the heading ‘Property of the People of Halle’, the city’s museums and gardens, some of which are facing closure owing to economic difficulties, were asked to display items from their collection at the Volkspark. The inclusion of a dismantled East German monument, a figure of a little trumpeter boy, caused frenzy in the tabloids, highlighting the complete inability of the German media to come to terms with the collective memory of socialism in the GDR.
The attempt to channel the theme of the biennial directly into artistic production resulted in many works with an over-literal approach to their theme, a problem familiar from the previous Berlin biennial. The installation Biotechcitylimits (all works 2004), for instance, by Hybrid Video Tracks, mapped the spread of biotechnology companies by sticking signs bearing the names of their products into an array of flowerpots. Compiled by a collective organized by co-curator Peter Spillmann, Insert 1–4 was a series of makeshift reconstructions of projects from the tradition of socialist visionary architecture, from Russian Constructivism to postwar alternative movements. The buildings also served as display support for documentary texts and pictures. I’m all for the idea of exhibitions as sites for the production of knowledge, but art should be more than a vehicle for comment on the specific issues of the day. This sort of ‘content-literalist’ art misses the opportunity to transform thinking in unexpected ways – with their monistic approach to discourse, the Inserts failed to allow for room for other, more disruptive, voices that might have spoken differently about the legacy of the socialist dream, which Western intellectuals (including myself) are so keen on when it manifests itself in the attractive guise of Constructivism.
There were, however, two thought-provoking contributions that used the Modernist imagination as a way to re-imagine the idea of collectivism. In Found Portrait (2004) Florian Zeyfang reconstructed the mural Portrait of America, a group portrait of the founders of American Marxism painted by Diego Rivera at the New Workers School in New York in 1933 and later destroyed. From documentary records Zeyfang took photos of individual faces in the mural and placed them on the wall of the Volkspark, replicating their position in the original painting. The fragments summoned up the ghost of the lost image of collectivity. In her vast Wandbild Halle (Halle Mural, 2004), meanwhile, Michaela Melián sketched the outlines of various functionalist apartment blocks in the notorious satellite towns of Halle Neustadt and Munich Neuperlach. Towering over the buildings was the portrait of Tamara Bunke, an East German heroine who fought and died alongside Che Guevara. Melián thus not only showed the histories of the East and West as connected but also redefined the gendered subject of the socialist project by casting a woman as its central figure.
Both works played on the ambivalence between mourning a lost past and the projection of a new collective to come, and both asked what sort of community one could imagine assembled in front of these particular murals. With political art this evocative power makes all the difference.