“Are you boring to yourself after a while?”: Renata Stih and Freider Schnock talk the Past and the Public

by Willy Dintenfass

While working on their 1994 project Bus Stop, German artists Renata Stih and Freider Schnock learned an interesting piece of information about their nation’s history. While doing research for the project—a social sculpture that took the shape of multiple bus stops put up across Berlin for fictional busses that went to different Holocaust sites—Stih and Schnock discovered that the forests in Weimar where Goethe would famously take walks were also the site of the concentration camp Buchenwald. This location, which physically connects events separated by time, events from opposing ends of the spectrum of Germany’s contributions to civilization, is an apt and powerful representation of the ideas Stih and Schnock pursue in their art.

Stih and Schnock delivered the keynote address at the Midwest Graduate Interdisciplinary Conference put on by the Center with a lecture entitled “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.” Stih and Schnock are primarily concerned with memory as a social function, the calling forth of the past into the present, specifically in terms of public spaces. Several of their projects, such as Places of Remembrance, involve the physical overlaying of a map from a city’s past onto a map from the present, but a similar conceptual overlaying is at the heart of all their work. Stih and Schnock are interested in excavating the social and cultural sedimentary layers of a given location, reformulating these layers into sculpture, and installing them, in the present, in that location.

Functionality is also key to their work, as evidenced by their critique of Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial in Berlin (of which Stih said, “I have my doubts as to whether something abstract can touch people,” and perhaps more on target, “You can’t just look at the Holocaust in a formal manner.”) Stih and Schnock conceive of a range of functions for their work and are very conscious of who their audience is for each project, using whatever techniques and media are necessary to get their message across. They aim to educate, raise awareness, provoke remembrance, and force negotiations with the past, specifically related to the Holocaust. They also clearly delight in the pleasure of making connections within and about their work, and are definitely down for a little rabble rousing.

A brief question and answer session revealed an intense belief in their work, alongside a slight defensiveness towards perceived criticisms of their projects. This led to a few lively exchanges. My favorite exchange took place at the end, when an audience member asked if the artists worried that their sculptures might become routine and begin to go unnoticed after awhile, just as we fail to notice spaces we’re in often after some time. “Are you boring to yourself after a while?” Stih responded. Clearly, Stih and Schnock believe their work is part of a larger project of connection-making, that we live large parts of our lives in public spaces, and connecting these spaces with the past and making memory a visible entity situates our experiences within a history and a context that help reveal not only where we are, but who we are as well.

For more info, check out their website.

Sign, Sign, Everywhere a Sign

by Moriya Vanderhoef

This week’s event was the keynote to the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference. The speakers Stih & Schnock, a team of artists and historians based in Berlin, spoke on a theme which runs  through their work, “Memory, Art and Social Sculpture.”

The journey they took us on was visually interesting, thought-provoking, and heart-wrenching. Their major projects center on the treatment of Jewish people when the Nazis were in power and memorializing those lost during that horrific time in Germany’s history.

The memorial artwork they began with originally struck me as cold and flippant; it consisted of signs with brightly colored, simplistic pictures on one side and Nazi laws pretaining to the Jewish population on the other.  After much thought on their project, however, I’ve come to feel quite differently; I now feel that the signs signify the slow change through law in the treatment of a whole group of people and that they are deeply important to have in a public space.  Perhaps, through constant reminder, an atrocity such as the Holocaust will never happen again.

Many of Stih and Schnock’s works have this same, slow, sinking effect.

For more thought-provoking speakers and lectures, please see the Center’s Calendar of Events.

A Rosy Lotus for Antinoos: Hadrian, Egypt, and Roman Religions

by Moriya Vanderhoef

The Center’s lecture last Friday caught my eye on the schedule of events. Who isn’t fascinated by ancient Egypt and Rome? The presenter, Roberta Mazza from the University of California-Santa Barbara, caught my attention right away with the question, “How can we make sense of the ancient past when we filter it through the modern influence of books, movies, video games, and blogs?”

While Professor Mazza’s lecture was difficult to understand at times, where she truly shined was in the question and answer period afterwards. Her off-the-cuff answers were clear, concise, and showed a high degree of knowledge in her field. With the talk papers left on the lectern, she truly engaged my attention to the details of her presentation for the first time. I learned more in the fifteen-minute question and answer session then I had in the presentation leading up to it. What I learned was fascinating.

From 117AD to 138, Rome had a restless Emperor, Hadrian. He was the first Emperor in Rome’s history who spent more time traveling than at home in the capitol. He had a young, attractive, male lover, Antinous (the Latin version was used during the lecture, while the Greek version of his name, Antinoos, was used to title the lecture), who was the “James Dean” of his day. While in Egypt, the two ran into a lion, which Antinous killed. During the ensuing celebration, Antinous sacrificed himself in the Nile. At the time it was believed that if you drowned in the Nile, you were deified. A religious cult soon grew and spread around Antinous, fueled by Hadrian in an attempt to control the ‘multifaceted religious faces of the Roman Empire’. Hadrian’s desire for religious control was soon able to bring everyone in the Empire under his thumb, except the Jewish people. His thirst for control may have been a contributing factor to the emergence and rise of Christianity within the Roman Empire.

See what you can learn in fifteen minutes? I highly recommend sticking around for the question-and-answer sessions after presentations; I doubt you’ll regret it!

Bill Weege: Since 1968

by Vince Tripi, III

Bill Weege, one of the featured artists in the Center’s Since 1968 exhibition in Mitchell Hall, has quite the venerable past both as an artist and activist. At first, I must admit, he came off as a bit too much of an artist; he spoke of his art as if there were infinite ways to interpret his work.

However, his art was based much more in the process with less emphasis placed on the deliberateness of the content. “Big was the thing. I threw everything into it, including the kitchen sink.” That was the call of the times, of course–agitation, finding meaning where there was chaos and random, terrifying Technicolor.

Weege related that his MFA studies focused on the process of printmaking (screen printing, off-set lithography, wood cut printing), and the politics of the day. Others, Weege said, had rebuked his art’s political tenacity, asking, “Why do this? It will have no bearing later.” The haphazardness of the individual images would probably be hard to comprehend, and I think hard to defend in front of a tenure-track committee in the time it was created because too often we take the present for granted as the inevitable outcome of the narrative of history. Weege’s juxtaposed images do a good job of mixing it up so that one no longer has the luxury of viewing history in such narrow terms.

He used photographs (he couldn’t draw), book pages (never mind the copyright law), and a city planning grid as the main attractions. The use of grids and numbers were a nod back to his city planning occupation: “I would count things. There were grids everywhere.” Lyrics from pop culture also help to create the piece’s own space in time. And the saucy images of naughty ladies? There to attract your attention. On his mental process Weege commented that “[Long Live Life] was all laid out. I had to think ahead—which was so unlike me. It turned out the way it was meant to, too, which was so unlike me.”

Toward the end of his talk he noted that he had been accused of stealing from Vasarely, whom he had never heard of, but still he could not deny the possibility: “Maybe I had seen something. But you see something, interpret it, put it down, and you reinterpret it.” That’s exactly how his pieces work.

Since 1968: William Weege’s Long Live Life

by Vince Tripi, III

The Center is hosting an art exhibition bringing together selections from the UWM Art Collection with the UW-Whitewater Crossman Gallery that will run until February 12 in historic Mitchell Hall, room 154.

These pieces, complex and intricate works on paper and paintings, are a summary of “the aftermath of 1968,” which, among other things, meant expansive social reform movements. Almost as influential to these pieces is an experimental, abstract, and juxtaposed look at what is art, speech, what is good, true; they also ask something larger, who are “we,” as a people, as a nation, as a political entity, as human beings. The following poem was written in response to William Weege’s “Long Live Life,” which is shown in the exhibition.

LBJ being sworn in on Air Force 1, Lady Bird Johnson cropped into the photo, Jackie Kennedy cropped out.

A Charlie Chaplin Hitler surveying a floor-mounted globe, as if about to dance with it.

Motion capture of a sprinting cat.

A nuclear blast as seen from the air several miles off.

A ventriloquist’s dummy.

Six colors flipped horizontally, flipped vertically.

DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

“Sitting on a sofa On a Sunday afternoon Going to the Candid…”

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY WAR IS PEACE IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

Rows of scores of soldiers.

LONG LIVE LIFE 1984

And number 12 from a baseball team.

Dissections of human heads and pelvises and noses.

Jet planes.

Radar screens.

Porn stars bending and lounging and spread-eagling across the entire 16 panes.

 

some panes are numbered

some panes have dates

how advanced are we from this asymmetrical sprawl of colored panes

how powerful we are–despite our ignorance of colored panes

how enlightened we are to have so few wars

 

Bright pink cogs and engines behind a nicely centered penis

This is our iconic modern history: porn and war

Ben Franklin would be so proud