Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum Author(s): Charity Scribner Source: Critical Inquiry,
Vol. 29, No. 4 (Summer 2003), pp. 634-649 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/377723 . Accessed: 01/04/2014 03:20
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Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum

Charity Scribner
What I never had is being torn from me. / What I did not live, I will miss forever.1 With these lines from the poem Property (1990) Volker Braun conveys the loss that attended the end of real existing socialism in Germany. Today, more than a decade after the Berlin Wall was reduced to rubble and swept away, there lingers the sense that something was lost with the disintegration of the Soviet Blocsomething more than the Trabant automobiles and Lenin statues, more than employment guarantees or the threat of environmental ruin. As the two Germanys unify into one, the customs and culture of the Western half are eclipsing those of the former GDR. After the postcommunist turn, or Wende, museum curators have begun to sort through the wreckage of East Germanys industrial debris and Marxs wasted ideals. But what do they want to nd? Taking stock of the GDRs fallout, these collectors have organized exhibitions such as Commodities for Daily Use and Eastern Mix. They have founded the Center for the Documentation of Everyday Life, also known as the Open Depot (Oenes Depot). Their showswhich have sparked wide interestenter into a dense mnemonic eld that Braun and other writers and artists had already begun to till much earlier (g. 1). In her 1996 drama Melancholia I, or the Two Sisters Judith Kuckart undertook a diagUnless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 1. Volker Braun, Das Eigentum, in Von einem Land und vom andern: Gedichte zur deutschen Wende, ed. Karl Otto Conrady (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), ll. 89, p. 51. For an analysis of melancholia in Brauns writing, see Wolfgang Emmerich, Status Melancholicus: Zur Transformation der Utopie in der DDR-Literatur, in Literatur in der DDR: Ru ckblicke, ed. HeinzLudwig Arnold and Frauke Meyer-Gosau (Munich, 1991), pp. 23245, and Horst Domdey, Volker Braun und die Sehnsucht nach der Grossen Kommunion: Zum Demokratiekonzept der Reformsozialisten, Deutschland Archiv 11 (Nov. 1990): 177174.
Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003) 2003 by The University of Chicago. 00931896/03/29040006$10.00. All rights reserved.
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nosis of the condition that Braun described in Property. One interlude in the play suggests the defeat and doubt of an aging and apparently unemployed couple (g. 2). Sitting near a new department store in the depressed city of Magdeburg, they wait for a tram. So where are the Russians? the woman asks the man. Didnt there used to be a red ag hanging there? No response. She takes up a new tack: Where did you lose that? Again no response. What thing is that? Soon it appears that the woman herself does not know what she is asking after: She: I would have seen it there when I was leaving. He: What? She: Your thingamajig. He: So what. She: But I didnt see it. He: Where?2 The couples exchange discloses the disorientation that has beset many Germans after the Wende. Freud maintains that the melancholic grasps his condition only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.3 This is the case in both Brauns play and Kuckarts drama and perhaps in ex-GDR visual culture as well. The incoherence that manifests at the moment of depressive collapse can be expressed in these terms: Before knowing what is missing, I know that I am missing I know not what.4 Your thingamajig, the woman from Melancholia I calls it dein Dingsda, in German. Not quite a thing, nor entirely an object, the matter at hand thwarts her attempts to designate, to concretize. In eastern Germany a thousand little thingsproduced by the Volkseigene Betriebe (VEB) or peoples own industrieshave outlasted both the GDRs ocial literary forms and the ideology of Marxism-Leninism,which,
2. Judith Kuckart, Melancholie I, oder Die zwei Schwestern, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin. Dir. Jo rg Aufenanger, 18 Dec. 1996. 3. Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 195374), 14:245. 4. In La Cruaute me lancolique Jacques Hassoun draws upon Freuds description of the melancholics confusion, bringing it to bear on Vladimir Janke le vitch work on le je-ne-saisquoi (Jacques Hassoun, La Cruaute me lancolique [Paris, 1995], p. 64); see Vladimir Janke le vitch, Le Je-ne-sais-quoi et le Presque-rien (Paris, 1980), p. 11.
C h a r i t y S c r i b n e r organized Platforms I and II for Documenta 11 in Vienna, Berlin, and New Delhi. She is an assistant professor of European studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her rst book, Requiem for Communism will appear in 2003, and her current research examines terrorism and militancy in European culture of the 1970s and 1980s.
f i g u r e 1. Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Charity Scribner.
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f i g u r e 2. Melancholie I, oder Die zwei Schwestern, Berliner Ensemble, Berlin. Dir. Jo rg Aufenanger, 18 Dec. 1996. Photo: Florian Zeyfang. Source: Nina Lorenz-Herting, Berlin.
in part, brought them into existence.5 From the early fties to the late eighties, authorities mandated the proliferation of light manufacture within the GDR. The plan: to let consumer goods play their small part in building the collective.6 One such item was quick-cooking Tempo Peas, formulated in the sixties for the millions of working mothers in East Germany (g. 3). When the Treuhand Anstalt corporation privatized the VEB Suppina Auerbach Food Processing Plant in the early nineties, Tempo Peas were discontinued. But some packets still lie around, waiting to prompt remembrances of things past. Recently, curator Andreas Ludwig exhibited Tempo Peas in a historical exhibition of the GDR quotidian at the Open Depot. (Andreas Ludwig and the Open Depot have no relationship to the Museum Ludwig or to its founders, Peter and Irene Ludwig.) He installed them into a scenario of a Konsum grocery store, where they share shelf space with other standard merchandise (g. 4). The shop panorama gives viewers the chance
5. A Thousand Little Things (Tausend kleine Dinge), a promotional jingle for the GDRs Konsum shops, featured frequently on East German television from the sixties on. 6. Drawing from the writings of Boris Arvatov, Christina Kiaer has documented the extent to which the Constructivists envisioned a political anity between the consumer good and the human subject. See Boris Arvatov, Everyday Life and the Culture of the Thing (Toward the Formulation of the Question), trans. Christina Kiaer, October, no. 81 (Summer 1997): 11928, and Kiaer, Boris Arvatovs Socialist Objects, October, no. 81 (Summer 1997): 10518. GDR industrial designers were similarly inclined to mobilize consumer goods toward the socialist project. See Neue Gesellschaft fu r Bildende Kunst, Wunderwirtschaft: DDR-Konsumkultur in den 60er Jahren (Cologne, 1996).
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f i g u r e 3. Tempo Erbsen, Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung, Berlin. Source: Sammlung Industrielle Gestaltung, Berlin.
to reect upon daily life in the GDR and to survey the changed marketscape of the new Germany. Yet already in 1980 the packets had been displayed in a dierent context. Joseph Beuys integrated them into his installation Economic Values (Wirtschatswerte)an assemblage that combines VEB products with a small sculpture of Beuyss own design (g. 5). Long before the workers republics of Eastern Europe entered their nal agonies, Beuys registered the odd charge of the communist commodity. As a prominent gure in West Germanys Oppositional scene, Beuys shared the Lefts investment in the notion of a socialist alternative.7 Taking up Tempo Peas, Economic Values did two things. It touched upon the question of the found object as art object, and it anticipated the current race to curate the socialist past. Tempo Peas oer a juncture between current museal and artistic practices, one that exposes the function of the frame in assigning the meaning of objects, on one hand, and things, on the other. Here the curator and the artist pass dierent sentences on a single artifact. Ludwig reads Tempo Peas as an object in the narrative of the GDR; his Open Depot sets apart the packets as relics of that lifeworld. Beuys, meanwhile, incorporates Tempo Peas as a fetish of his proto-Marxist ideals. The things in Economic Values exceed the object of Ludwigs study. They are its decit and its surplus, at once.8
7. For a reection on Beuyss politics, see Heiner Mu ller and Jan Hoet, Insight into the Process of ProductionA Conversation, in Documenta IX, ed. Jan Hoet, 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1991), 1:96. 8. In his work toward a theory of things, Bill Brown posits a dierence between objects and things. If the object is materialized and utilized, the thing exceeds these properties. Imbued with sensuous or metaphysical presence, the thing can be cast with the spell of the fetish or totem.
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f i g u r e 4. Konsum display, Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Charity Scribner.
The Open Depot Ludwigs museum is located near Germanys border with Poland in the industrial town of Eisenhu ttenstadt (formerly Stalinstadt). Developed in the nineteen fties to gird the workaday with freedom, equality, and unity, the concrete arcades of Eisenhu ttenstadt have been abandoned to those who cannot (or do not want to) meet the exigencies of market competition. The Open Depot takes up residence in the defunct nursery unit that was once a vital organ of the city. Here Ludwig displays objects ranging from paper
Applying Browns logic to Tempo Peas, I would argue that Beuyss thing is temporalized as the before and after of the object (Bill Brown, Thing Theory, Critical Inquiry 28 [Autumn 2001]: 5).
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f i g u r e 5. Joseph Beuys, Wirtschaftswerte, 1980. 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
products to heavy machinery. The lightest collectiblesbooks, food wrappers, and the likeare of materials so fragile, so acidic, that they appear much older than their true fteen or twenty years. In contrast, the leaden, but still functional oce equipment and household appliancesadding machines that weigh ten pounds, blenders, twentyseem built to last an eternity, whether carefully curated in the museum or wantonly abandoned to the rubbish bins of history. With the post-Wende inux of Western consumer goods, many Eisenhu ttenstadters have chosen to upgrade their homes and workplaces. Now, on rubbish collection days, possessions that were cast o to make room for new furnishings and appliances litter the local sidewalks. For some Eisenhu ttenstadters, this gesture of jettisoning the outmoded seems arduous. Supplanting the trusty family radio with a Chinese-made stereo system is a freighted act for them. So, instead of leaving the radio, the face of which bears the names of satellite stations in Bucharest and Minsk, to wait for the sanitation workers, some opt to bequeath these artifacts to the Open Depot (g. 6). In the acquisition process, a group of museum sta, trained by Ludwig in the methods of oral history, interview the donors. They pose questions not only about the provenance of the objects but also about the
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f i g u r e 6. VEB Radio, Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Alan Chin.
owners memories of the way they once lived with them or among them. Although the interview records have not yet been made public, much of the collection is open to view, as are the densely inscribed guest books where visitors can record their responses and reect upon the thoughts of those who have come before them.9 The Open Depot sets memory work into play on a human scale by concentrating on household objects. Amassing and displaying these mundane artifacts, Ludwig creates a space where viewers not only can come together to debate their past and future but where they can also identify and insert their private lives, their own memories of countless detail, into the larger body of German history. The GDR maintained its fair share of museums. Policy makers recognized the imperative to discern a heritage separate from that of West Germany and so directed funds toward memorials that would legitimate the new socialist nation. Exhibitions that highlighted the antifascist resistance movement, the Soviet liberation, and the life of the proletariat lled both museums of ne art and the galleries of historical societies. But since unication much of this has changed, as many institutions of visual culture have been put under Western direction. Years before the Open Depot was established, Westerners had anticipated the impact that an exhibition of Second World material culture would have. In August 1989, West German
9. Guest books were a common sight in GDR museums, as were notebooks for recording comments and complaints for the managers of many institutions, such as schools, hospitals, and shops. Citizens were meant to understand that they played a decisive role in policy making and that administrators would take seriously their public criticism.
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curators had organized SED: Stunning Eastern Design at the Habernoll Gallery near Frankfurt am Main. But this show merely lampooned the pallid universe of de mode East German consumer goods.10 The selection of GDR products depicted in the exhibition cataloguefrom faded packets of vulcanized rubber condoms to cartons of Sprachlos (speechless) cigars appears aimed to conrm the superior tastes of sophisticated Westerners. Later, in the early nineties, the Museum of German History on East Berlins Unter den Linden underwent a massive overhaul that entailed the closeting of displays such as one that juxtaposed Hegels spectacles with the rst television set manufactured in the GDR. In 1996 the Museum of Working-Class Life packed up and relocated from the center of East Berlin to the peripheral district of Marzahn. To this day, most of its collection remains warehoused.
Economic Values Beuyss Economic Values locates itself between the Eisenhu ttenstadt and Habernoll exhibitions. Like Stunning Eastern Design, Economic Values claims an exoticizing purchase on the wares it displays. But Beuys also enables the later, more earnest projects like the Open Depot, as he measures the exhibition value of ordinary artifacts. After Germanys postwar economic miracle (Wirtschaftswunder), after glasnost, Economic Values seems to activate a dialectic between these two strands of visual culturehigh camp and sober documentary. The Belgian curator Jan Hoet strongly favored Economic Values and acquired the assemblage for the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, which he directs. When Hoet was artistic director of the FRGs Documenta IX in 1992, he used Economic Values to catalyze the international exhibition. This was the rst Documenta to be held after German unication. Hoet organized the event around the theme Collective Memory and ran it as a kind of conceptual lost-and-founddepartment for the remainders of socialism. A set of slightly askew metal shelves dene the shape and dimensions of Economic Values. Stocked on each shelf are items of basic necessitysimple tools and staple foods. Although Beuys enjoyed a reputation as a defender of social justice and an insider of Left-oriented political movements such as the Green Party and other socialist initiatives, he spent little time in the Eastern Bloc and so relied on colleagues to ferry Tempo Peas and other GDR products to his studio. From a massive collection of donated wares, Beuys selected only those that looked the most superannuated.11 He passed over
10. See SED: Scho nes Einheits Design, ed. Georg C. Bertsch, Ernst Hedler, and Matthias Dietz (exhibition catalog, Habernoll Gallery, Dreieich, 27 Aug. 1989). 11. For a description of Beuyss selection process, see Joseph Beuys: Das Wirtschaftswertprinzip, ed. Klaus Staeck and Gerhard Steidl (Heidelberg, 1990), p. 7.
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wares that evidenced the traces of sophisticated Western marketing strategies in favor of those packed in coarse, unbleached paper, printed with a single color, or perhaps two. Scant ornamentation illustrates the labels. In some cases all that is written is the name of the goodMillet or Honey (g. 7). In an interview, Beuys characterized the design of the products he displayed as that of Behelfsverpackungthe provisional or makeshift packaging used in situations of duress, such as those produced for military and relief operations. (Well before conceiving Economic Values, Beuys had created works that spoke of the need to heal Germanys wounded postwar civilization, but none of these had identied Eastern Europe as the agent or accomplice of such a recovery. Consider Stuhl mit Fett [Fat Chair (1964)] and Das Rudel [The Pack (1969)]).12 In Economic Values his selection process rendered the wares as poor things, that is, as examples of die Reste or remains that many saw as integral to East Germany during the cold war.13 To such minds the letters DDR did not signify the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, but rather der dumme Rest: the meager remainder of Germanys division. Economic Values sets the accent squarely on the Easternness of the found objects Beuys selects.14 To Western eyes (to date, the piece has been exhibited only in Western Europe), the assemblage oers a glimpse of what Beuys considered the quaint material culture of the other Europe. Perhaps Beuys was aware of the ethnographic risk undertaken in Economic Values, for he signals his foreignness to the state socialist world. Into the installation Beuys inserted a piece of his own sculpture, a blocklike plaster cast he had
12. For an inected reading of Beuyss career that has informed this essay, see Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Reconsidering Beuys, Once Again and Beuys, the Twilight of the Idol, in Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, ed. Gene Ray (New York, 2001), pp. 7589, 199211. Bettina Funcke has recently made a series of compelling arguments that counter aspects of the Buchlovian take, shall we say, of Beuys. Drawing on Kierkegaards Entweder-Oder and Boris Groyss Unter Verdacht, Funcke demonstrates that Beuyss self-idealization as artist, as hero, was a consciously ironic strategy of his work. Beuys pitched his project to performatively destabilize two notions of postwar subjectivitythat any German could remain under the sway of a Fu hrer, Hitler or some other, and that any member of the art world could stay under the spell of abstract expressionism and its elected genius, Jackson Pollock. See Bettina Funcke, Scharlatanerie als Strategie, unpublished manuscript, 2003. 13. In interviews Beuys emphasizes that the apparent simplicity of the goods assembled on his shelves betrays an inner richness and complexity. He links the installation to the aesthetics of arte povera, but still it is clear that Beuys imagines Economic Values as a bridge to Germanys lost other. See Ulrich Dietzel, Gespra ch mit Heiner Mu ller, in Joseph Beuys: Das Wirtschaftwertsprinzip, pp. 2728. A longer version of this interview was rst published as Was gebraucht wird: Mehr Utopie, mehr Phantasie und mehr Freira ume fu r Phantasie. Ein Gespra ch mit Ulrich Dietzel, Sinn und Form 4 (1985): 1193217. 14. Although a few of the packages included in Economic Values were produced in the Federal Republic of Germany, packets from the GDR, Poland, and the Soviet Union form the bulk of the goods amassed on the shelves and make the greatest visual impact.
f i g u r e 7. Joseph Beuys, Wirtschaftswerte, detail, 1980. 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
f i g u r e 8. Joseph Beuys, Wirtschaftswerte, detail, 1980. 2002 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
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produced in the sixties (g. 8). Several steps were necessary to integrate the cast with the other elements. Beuys daubed the blocks chipped edges with butter in a deliberately futile attempt to repair them. (If anything, the butter would accelerate the sculptures decomposition because its lipids would macerate the plaster.) He also marked each element of the assemblage with his own signature and the note Economic Value 1, thereby elevating each element of the work into a readymade and integrating all the parts into a whole. But these interventions undermine themselves; Beuyss inscriptions partially erase the dierent histories of the elements. His sculpture, meanwhile, was resurrected from his own warehouse, an archival limbo that he himself had created. By eliding the origins of the various things collected, Beuys suggests that both his plaster cast and the (still extant) socialist material world have been disinterred from deep storage. Soon after completing Economic Values the contents of Beuyss packages began to decay. As a measure of conservation, Beuys replaced the contents with more durable mixtures of sand and chalk that preserved the impression of weight and volume within the wrappers. Forestalling sedimentation, Economic Values holds its objects deep in its heart where they seem to both live and die, just beyond the edge of time. The dust gathering below the packet of peas takes on a life of its own, making the work paradoxically immortal in its own death, emanating like a halo of decay. Like a mourners relic, Beuyss things, in themselves, are only trivial remainders, almost absurd. Yet they are not relics. Beheld by a mourner, a proper relic takes on a specic meaning. It is instilled with the power to signify the death of the loved one and, moreover, to ward o his return. An authentic relic, Pierre Fe dida speculates, cannot be thrown away. Because it can no longer circulate in an exchange economy, it also cannot be substituted by some other object (as is the case in Beuyss work). Depleted of use-value, the relic reminds the mourner of his power over the dead.15 It fends o anxieties of death and the ne plus (no longer) that awaits mortals, Fe dida argues, keeping at bay any haunting visions of rot. This reliquary logic denes and legitimates the bequest of possessions from generation to generation; because the mourner can only appropriate the property of the mourned if he really is dead and gone, the relics delivery marks the passing of time. Economic Values has little to do with the task of laying something to rest, however. Because Beuyss knowledge of these artifacts is secondhand, his installation does not preserve them as relics but rather confects them as false souvenirs.
15. See Pierre Fe dida, La Relique et le travail du deuil, Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse 2 (Fall 1970): 24954, esp. p. 249.
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Key for Beuys was the purported biological purity of the Eastern goods as well as the principles of recycling that he presumed to motivate the manufacturers.16 But if these were the only messages he wanted to convey, Beuys need not have procured packages of Eastern provenance. Economic Values is not an ecological reection on the transience of nature. It is about the spoils of state socialismthe idealized Marxist alternative that many, Beuys included, imagined to inhere in the East. Despite Beuyss attempt to critique the FRGs postwar economy, in the end Economic Values merely presents another gamut of commodity fetishes.17 A problem arises with Beuyss handling of the GDR object world. You never know what you have until you lose itthis seems to be the thinking of the work. Fixating on loss, Beuys loses his grip on real history and so loses perspective on what real existing socialism really was. Against this, the Open Depot oers an object lesson on the course of GDR history. Ludwig relates to his work as an engaged participant trying to come to terms with his own past. Beuys acts at one remove from actual lived experience. His touch sends the GDR hurtling toward a place outside of history. Eectively, Beuys transfers time onto a spatial plane where the past is another country, another Germany. Ludwigs mournful regard for Tempo Peas and other leftovers of the GDR becomes apparent when Beuyss handling of the identical materials is brought into the same scope. Whereas Ludwig seeks to place Tempo Peas in a specic moment on a real historical time line, Beuys betrays his romantic investment. He arrests his collection within an eternal present. Economic Values disavows the failure (then in progress) of the regime that produced its accumulated wares and languishes in the leftist melancholia that plagued many of Beuyss ilk. A study of loss, Economic Values remains a sullen stockroom, bereft of a compelling historical narrative.
Niche culture Although Ludwig may rightfully mourn the GDRs passing, a number of temporal discontinuities nevertheless punctuate his account of German
16. In an interview with playwright Heiner Mu ller, Dietzel refers to a conversation he once had with Beuys. The artist explained that his attraction to the products of state socialist industry lay in the voluptuous creativity that they embodied. Mu ller agrees with this characterization and describes GDR material culture as a sort of treasure trove (Fundgrube) in which Beuys could explore and indulge his material sensitivities (Dietzel, Gespra ch mit Heiner Mu ller, pp. 27 28). 17. Psychoanalysis links the concept of disavowal closely to that of fetishism. The fetish embodies a disavowal. Without entering into the complex relationship between Marxist and Freudian notions of fetishism, one should nonetheless remark how the leap from concrete social analysis to the critique of instrumental reason impacts upon the status of commodity fetishism. See, for example, Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Kritik der Warena sthetik (Frankfurt, 1971).
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cultural memory. The Open Depot concentrates on the private and the domestic, the realm of what East Germans called niche culture. Ludwig arms the private lives that were led within communism. But, signicantly, his emphasis on niche culture comes over and against the documentation of larger, state sanctioned practices. Ludwig does not illuminate the patterns of identication that connected the private to the monumental, the personal to the political in the GDR past. Indeed, his exhibition seems to provide refuge from the more dicult issues informing the Germans collective heritage. What linked the rst unication of German states in the nineteenth century, the legacy of National Socialism, and Soviet-style communism? What was the genealogy of Eastern Bloc intelligence agencies such as the Stasi and the KGB? Ludwig does not address these questions. Despite the central role of the Stasi in GDR life, no vestiges of this bureau gure in the Open Depot. After the armed forces, the Stasi was East Germanys largest employer; its archives documented information on more than a quarter of its citizens. It cast an air of suspicion over relationsbetween coworkers and neighbors and even, at times, between family members. The key to its archivesa master repertoire containing a single index card for each Stasi sta member, informer, and object of surveillanceextends for more than a mile. Following government directives, Stasi collaborators compiled classied reports, which recorded in minute detail the lives of millions of individuals whose daily actions were considered to bear upon matters of national security interest: 22.31 Telephone rings. No answer. The object continues to read. 22.40 The object converses briey with spouse. 23.02 Objects spouse draws curtains in north-facing windows. 23.10 Lamps extinguished. In the Open Depot Ludwig trains the viewers attention away from Stasi operations as well as the ocial cultural events and customs that once engaged GDR citizens as a mass. He also employs dierent installation strategies for artifacts associated with private life and those associated with bureaucratic institutions. Whereas some rooms of the Open Depot contain case after case of barely distinguishable appliances, stacked catacombs of the GDRs industrial history, elsewhere Ludwig has staged the artifacts in panoramas of life as it was lived in the recent, but rapidly receding past. All things considered, the Open Depot merits credit; its activation of collective memory challenges the strictures of archival history. If Ludwig merely conserved and catalogued objects manufactured by the VEB, his museum would serve as a tomba xture on the order of Lenins and Stalins refrigerated mausolea. Thus, Ludwig does not directly confront the Stasi legacy, but the Open Depot does initiate a more critical curatorial practice in Eastern Germany (g. 9). (To wit, the Stasi headquarters on Berlins Nor-
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f i g u r e 9. Forschungs- und Gedenksta tte Normannenstrae, Berlin. Photo: Charity Scribner.
mannenstrae were recently converted into a museum.) Ludwigs strategies of coupling objects with memory samples and using guest books both break from the archival drive of the Stasi les and make the museal space more public. Where the Stasi sought to control the space of the GDR, the Open Depot exposes the alterity of history. Given that the Stasi was foundational to every aspect of GDR lifenot only the public sphere but also that of the domesticits archives continue to inform the collective memory that is unfolding after the Wende in both the provincial museum and the mega-exhibition. For a crucial distinction separates the archives from the ocial histories disseminated in the GDR. Whereas academics, curators, and administrators of other state institutions presented armative accounts of the building of socialism, secret police les stored the largest records of actual politics and society. Despite the brute ideological censorship of Stasi data, this archive was (and remains) an accurate source of information about the times when things went out of order or auer Betrieb. Such failures and factory secondsstrikes, missed production goals, and moments of general discontentwere kept secret from the public. The Stasi held tight rein over its information, allowing access only to the highest ranks of the nomenklatura. The Stasis existence was common knowledge, but its archives seemed to withhold mysteries. The les belonged neither to the patently public domain of ocial history nor to the exclusively private sphere. Rather, the Stasi reports functioned as a
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covert supplement to state-mandated discourse. These chronicles were recorded in an alienated, impersonal mode, yet they penetrated into the intimate recesses of private life. Since 1989, much of the archive has been opened to the public. As more details surface, many people struggle to gure these reports into their own memories of life in a divided Germany. The interest in the Open Depot and other GDR shows is a product of this struggle. So was Hoets return to Economic Values in the 1992 Documenta. The collaborative role of Tempo Peas in the project of realizing socialism registers in both displays. The Open Depot eectively preserves and exhibits the thousands of little things that gave weight and substance to everyday life in East Germany. And Economic Values also attends to a microhistory that was a critical element of European modernity. But Ludwig and Beuys leave other stories untold. For consumption also worked to distract Germans; it kept them from criticizing the tragic realities of state socialism. What of the millions of bodiesGerman, Russian, Ukranianburied in the mass graves of Soviet prison camps? a cynic might ask. This terrible truth subtended every aspect of state socialist practice, but the museums of this history are only just now being founded. One could read niche culture as both the GDRs enabling ction and founding disavowal. From this perspective the Open Depot and Economic Values would merely extend the states authoritarian legacyplying VEB wares and diverting our gaze from the gulag, state socialisms most genuine artifact. The archeology of these deeper veins of material culture has only just begun. Although we cannot yet calculate the worth of these sites, at least we know their names. Kolyma, Vorkuta, Norilsk. The list goes on.

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Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum Author(s): Charity Scribner Source: Critical Inquiry,

Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing: Joseph Beuys and the Museum

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

f i g u r e 1. Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Charity Scribner.

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

Charity Scribner / Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

f i g u r e 4. Konsum display, Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Charity Scribner.

Charity Scribner / Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

f i g u r e 6. VEB Radio, Oenes Depot, Eisenhu ttenstadt. Photo: Alan Chin.

Charity Scribner / Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

Charity Scribner / Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

Charity Scribner / Object, Relic, Fetish, Thing

f i g u r e 9. Forschungs- und Gedenksta tte Normannenstrae, Berlin. Photo: Charity Scribner.

Critical Inquiry / Summer 2003

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