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Former Jewish School for Girls, Auguststraße 11-13Courtesy Uwe WalterThe 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

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In “The Theater of Cruelty,” an essay first pub-lished in his book, The Theater and Its Double, French playwright and critic Antonin Artaud made a clarion call: “[It] is certain that we need above all a theater that wakes us up: nerves and heart… whose resonance is deep within us, dominating the instability of the times. The theater must give us ev-erything that is in crime, love, war or madness…” Artaud abolished the theater in favor of so-called found sites, and his theatrical concepts appealed to cruelty and terror as a means of “[attacking] the spectator on all sides” with an onslaught of gut-tural cries, cacophonous sounds, lights, costumes, objects, masks, and accessories inspired by those used in Balinese theater. These elements are cat-alogued in his first manifesto for the Theater of Cruelty, where their uses—both physical and sym-bolic—are prescribed in the tumbling, fiery words that ignited his prose into passionate pleas for a new theater.1 Artaud felt that the general associa-tion of cruelty with bloodshed was too simplistic. Rather, he saw cruelty as a means through which to confront and shock his audiences into a state of metaphysical recognition: “It is consciousness,” he claimed, “that gives to the exercise of every act of life its blood-red color, its cruel nuance, since it is understood that life is always someone’s death.”2

Life and death: each weighed heavily on the global psyche as Artaud developed his concepts in the early 1930s. The second Sino-Japanese war had already broken out as The Theater and Its Double went to print in 1938, and Germany invaded Po-land the following year, igniting the World War II in Europe. Artaud died in 1948, just months after a liver cancer diagnosis and only three years follow-

ing liberation. As his life came to a close, another crop of European playwrights began responding to the sense of spiritual and psychological vertigo induced by the war. From the late 1940s onward, Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, and Arthur Adamov, amongst others, penned a group of works whose circuitous plotlines, senseless dia-logue, and endless non-sequiturs prompted a new genre, the Theater of the Absurd.3

Though the theaters of cruelty and absurdity aren’t one in the same, their creators shared the common desire to break free from conventional use of language and space in order to prompt deep-er engagement with the political present. Curators Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick borrowed freely of these stylistic tropes while organizing the 4th Berlin Biennial for Con-temporary Art (subtitled “Of Mice and Men”), sit-uated within twelve separate venues along a single street, Auguststraße, in Berlin’s Mitte district dur-ing the spring of 2006.4

This essay focuses specifically on the deploy-ment of such symbols throughout one exhibition site: the former Jewish School for Girls. In their (collectively written) catalogue essay, the trio states:

[We] could say that the fundamental conflict, in our culture, is the one be-tween the bestiality and the humanity of humans. The works collected in this book and in this exhibition… share a preoccupation with humanity. Or maybe, more simply, they just compose a small theater of the absurd.”5

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(left to right): Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick in a promotional shot for their exhibition. Courtesy the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

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The authors whose works characterized the the-aters of cruelty and absurdity responded to then-current events, and in their first productions, these performances mirrored the aftermath of war onto an audience experiencing those actual con-ditions. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick did little of the sort. Instead, they shaped the school into a mere approximation of such a theater. In the process of choosing and placing artworks within the space—by curating the exhibition—several particular pieces were reduced to props employed in a parody of its Holocaust past. And if the cura-tors sought to draw some sort of critical meta-phor between one of the most atrocious moments in world history and the “bestiality and human-ity” of the present day, I believe that they failed on that front, too.

Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick do not fear failure. They look it straight in the face, actu-ally: Bring it on. Failure can be positive; it may offer the opportunity for change. Though change doesn’t necessarily yield progress, sadly enough. We don’t always succeed in moving forward, mak-ing amends, or righting wrongs. We do not learn from every mistake made. Or sometimes we simply cannot find an effective course of action to respond with when we do. While considering the temporal relationship between tradition and contemporane-ity in art and poetry, T. S. Eliot famously wrote: “The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is altered by the past.”6 Indeed, then and now are symbiotically indebted to one an-other, as in forgetting history we risk losing sight of the present (and vice-versa). Taking a solid step backward can prove useful though: Forward Re-

treat is the code name for the military maneuver wherein a country selectively withdraws its own troops from a theater of war in order to attack the enemy territory thus left undefended. More simply put, to engage in a Forward Retreat is to lie and wait, to observe tactically—to think before act-ing. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick have proven themselves brilliant strategists. In organizing the Berlin Biennial, however, they took too long a leap. History—the history of Germany between the years 1939–45, to be exact—was launched not as a warning flare, but a smokescreen.

Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick are some of the art world’s most notorious pranksters who have cultivated their own particular brand of icono-clasm though a series of constantly shifting artistic and rhetorical maneuvers.7 Their delivery proves trickiest of all, as the group oscillates between slap-stick comedy routines, cryptic insider jokes, and blatantly sarcastic affronts, with a healthful dose of deadpan thrown in for good measure. Befittingly then, the trio claimed many different influences and frameworks in the litany of duplicitous in-terviews, press releases, and statements published throughout the run of the show. These “circu-itous plotlines, senseless dialogues and endless non-sequiturs” may have approximated those of cruel or absurdist theater. What remained absent from Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick’s curatorial gestures, however, was the visceral urgency that underlined those actual scenes. Rather, the Berlin Biennial became another conduit for the highly developed and quite self-conscious ennui that has rendered their practice difficult to characterize, let alone critique.

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With a single comment made during a March 2006 interview with curator Francesco Bonami, the group paid an unwitting homage to their fore-father, Andy Warhol: “We try our best to look stu-pid all the time to give everyone the thrill of feeling more intelligent than us.”8 In a recent lecture de-livered at the University of California at Berkeley, art historian, queer theorist, and activist Douglas Crimp considered the way in which Andy Warhol established absolute control over his practice by constantly attributing the success of his work to others.9 Warhol’s role became all the more invisible as he relinquished his agency, dropping droll lines in his unmistakably nonchalant manner. Informed by French theorist Michel Foucault’s writings on power and authorship, Crimp’s observations could extend to from an analogy for Cattelan’s, Gioni’s, and Subotnick’s ways. “We are just lazy and we copy,” Subotnick has said of the group.10 Their lackadaisical attitude has served a pointed pur-pose: as with Warhol, the trio’s casual and straight-faced appropriation of images, people, places, and names, allows them to deflect the ownership of their own work—and thus, full responsibility for it—elsewhere. Cattelan’s, Gioni’s, and Subotnick’s rhetorical spin held considerable sway over their project’s reception: Like Andy’s, their clever quips and sound bytes were jumbled and sorted back again into a seemingly endless series of articles published on the Biennial.

Maurizio Cattelan remains the lynchpin of this collaborative enterprise, as he has instigated viewers since the late 1980s by laying siege to the institutional power structures that forge social mores and tow party lines. By drawing on the tra-

ditions of Duchamp, Arte Povera, and plain old postmodern irony in interventions that range from the performative and sculptural to the textual, his practice toys relentlessly with viewers’ ethical sens-es. In doing so, Cattelan interrogates the ways in which those ideals become socially codified in the first place; he challenges the status quo in a way that is at once excruciatingly banal, complex, and at times outright hilarious. By now, his work has also been thoroughly processed (ad nauseum, some might say) within contemporary art discourse. In tracing back to the beginning of his career, one will find a core group of critics, curators, and academ-ics who remain dedicated followers of his work; some never tire of Cattelan, it seems.11

Cattelan has run the gamut throughout the years, though one particularly well-working meth-od bore heavily on the former Jewish School for Girls. Beginning in 1999, Cattelan began com-missioning the fabrication of a series of waxen figures that pose religious and political leaders in compromised states of action. Him (2001) depicts a small boy with Adolf Hitler’s adult-sized face, kneeling with his hands folded in prayer; while in Now (2005) a waxen John F. Kennedy lies in state, his bare feet protruding from beneath a satin funerary blanket. In 2004 Cattelan hung replicas of three young boys from an aged tree in one of Milan’s oldest piazzas at the behest of Gioni, ar-tistic director of the Fondazione Nicola Trussardi. Reactions to the works varied according to their respective audiences and sites; Him drew criticism when first exhibited at Stockholm’s Färgfabriken, for instance, while a local Milanese man liber-ated the children with a ladder and hacksaw on

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the second day of their month-long installation. These brief descriptions illustrate what I consider to be Cattelan’s greatest strength as an artist and cultural critic: he possesses an uncanny ability to zero in on the most provocative historical and so-cial problems of a given site. Cattelan then projects his viewers’ emotional response to the locale before staging the intervention that instigates them into proving him right.

Though nearly ten years old, La Nona Ora (1999) is still remembered as one of Cattelan’s most inflammatory interventions, and one that resurfaces inevitably in discussions about his work. The piece comprises an effigy of Pope John Paul II struggling beneath a gigantic meteor, sur-rounded by broken shards from the glass ceiling that the artist’s celestial gift appears to have crashed through. Here lies an older, frailer Pope, his aged face contorted in agony. His Papal staff remains locked in an arthritic death grip as it flails patheti-cally at his side, shamefully stripped of its symbolic power.12 First shown in “Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,” at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1999, the piece drew a more diluted reaction from a public already primed by the Academy’s highly controversial “Sensation” exhibition staged two years earlier. In Rome, the piece sparked the usual degree of public outcry from the headquarters of the Catholic Church. At Warsaw’s national gallery, Zacheta, it incited a riot whose effects were much longer lasting. A mem-ber of Polish parliament, M. P. Tomczak, rushed into the gallery and attempted to heave the mas-sive boulder from the Pope; a quick flash of his official papers immunized him from prosecution,

and his subsequent letters to the exhibition’s cura-tor sparked yet another wave of anti-Semitism in a country whose ethnic and religious tensions run long and deep into history.13

I believe that Cattelan’s own proclivities should receive a fair degree of credit for the way in which the former Jewish School for Girls “read” as an exhibition space, as his sense of the relation-ship between images and their respective sites has proven most incisive; La Nona Ora proves itself exemplary here. Gioni and Subotnick shouldn’t be overlooked, as they have partnered with Cat-telan on several cunning conversions: In 2002 the three formed the Wrong Gallery, a closet-cum-gal-lery space housed behind a modern glass door on West 20th Street in New York’s Chelsea district. In Berlin, the trio opened “Gagosian,” a guerilla fran-chise that borrowed its title from Larry Gagosian’s legendary Chelsea-based empire. While Gagosian poked fun at the “blue chip” gallery institution, the Wrong Gallery has now become institutionalized; following its stint as and appendage to the 2006 Whitney Biennial, “Day for Night,” its sleek glass door was carted off to the Tate Modern, where it will remain “in residence” until 2009.

While traces of the curators’ own artistic sen-sibilities were visible in the former Jewish School for Girls, these site-sensitive mediations did not function in Berlin as they have in the past, wheth-er in London, Rome, Warsaw, or even New York. Humor and facetiousness have always worked to propel social and political issues to the popu-lar fore: I began this essay with a brief sketch of absurdist theater, after all. Yet the curators’ well-worn practical jokes fell flat inside the school. The

Exterior, the former Jewish School for Girls. Courtesy the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

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Berlin Biennial inhabited twelve separate, privately owned venues along Auguststraße (including a church, graveyard, and series of private apart-ments). Of these sites, the Jewish School for Girls was the most historically loaded by virtue of its name alone. Images collided conspicuously with history there, in a mise-en-scene littered with iconic referents to death and destruction. The site wasn’t altered to conform to the modernist model of the “white cube” gallery space. Instead, art works were deliberately displayed among the ruins of the di-lapidated building.

Though now better known as “gallery mile,” Auguststraße lies at the center of the city’s former Jewish neighborhood, the Scheunenviertel or “shed quarter.” Located at Auguststraße 11-13 and situ-ated directly across from the KW Institute, the for-mer Jewish School for Girls was one of the many buildings returned to the Jewish community fol-lowing the post-wall restitution process. The mod-ern, five-storied red brick monolith emits a sense of shuttered standoffishness, and yet appears some-how anonymous despite its enormity. The school was designed by local architect Alexander Beer at the behest of Berlin’s Jewish community, and built during 1927–28. It stood as a point of great pride for a contingency that valued its progressive ap-proach to women’s education; the school managed to remain in operation as Hitler came to power in the early 1930s and held fast even as the Nazis began deporting Jews to the concentration camps. The former Jewish School for Girls closed its doors for the final time in 1942, but only by force: the Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Con-tinuing Education shut down every Jewish school

in the city during that year. Under the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the school was re-incarnated as the Bertolt-Brecht-Oberschule and eventually closed for lack of enrollment. Following the restitution process, the building was returned to the Jewish community in 1996. It was immedi-ately locked up, and opened again only once, ten years later, for use by the Biennial.14

In traversing the school’s hulking, graffiti-covered doors and the cheerful mosaic of its vesti-bule, I felt as though slipping through a portal to the past while at once facing the present. A com-pulsory and rather thorough security check greeted me and every other visitor, making the crossing one of slight trepidation and an acute reminder of the persistent problem of anti-Semitism in Berlin and beyond. Once inside, I found a maze of pas-sageways and stairwells that zigzagged throughout the building, concentrated collectively around an open elevator shaft mined through its interior. Wide hallways proffered a dizzying array of odd corridors, awkwardly scaled classrooms, and sti-fling closets. Water-logged paper fell gracefully to reveal other patterns beneath, as cracked linoleum grated underfoot. Dingy curtains wafted before grimy windows. Ceilings crumbled. And yet there were signs of life: Colorful, joyfully crude graf-fiti bombarded the hallways. Smaller interventions penciled the walls here and there: “Nazis Töten.” An abandoned assignment clung to a classroom wall, its edges curling for dear life around yellow-ing cellophane tape. The occasional Star of David popped up here and there, stenciled in bright yel-low upon a classroom door or adorning a humble stairwell mural.

Gymnasium, former Jewish School for Girls. Courtesy

the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

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Robert Kúsmirowski, Wagon (2005)Courtesy the author.

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The school received the attention of many members of the Western art media as major maga-zines, websites, and newspapers paid homage to its history. The London Guardian’s Adrian Searle devoted the better of 1,500 words to describe the site and the works it harbored, while the New York Times’ Steven Henry Madoff called the building an “emotional touchstone” with a “history of hope and tragedy.”15 Jennifer Allen, the Berlin corre-spondent for Artforum, cast a more critical eye on the overall exhibition yet she, too, couldn’t help but notice a “nearly palpable sense of the missing in empty classrooms.”16 Writing for art—daskunst-magazine, Ute Thon declared: “[The] secret star of this Biennial is therefore not an artist, but a build-ing. The spellbound rooms of the former Jewish School for Girls… have such a strong aura, that all art seems to pale beside it.”17 The New York Times critic Roberta Smith took these sentiments the fur-thest in claiming the school as a “readymade time-capsule” that “almost [didn’t] need art.”

In her seminal work “One Place After Anoth-er: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity,” art historian Miwon Kwon privileges the art work at the center of a discursive relationship between it, the site, and the external conditions surrounding both, all of which coalesce to form the site-specific intervention.18 This model was reversed in the case of the former Jewish School for Girls, however, as the site took precedence over the works of art. Many artists were exhibited inside of the school—over thirty-five, in fact. I have carefully chosen to focus on two: Robert Kuśmirowski and Tadeusz Kantor. Earlier, I insisted that some art works were rendered into so-called props by their very display

within the school. Kuśmirowski’s work was made to seem as such, while Kantor’s piece is an actual theatrical accoutrement. Each suffered an unfor-tunate shift in context at the hands of Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick. The first exemplifies the problematic manipulation of the space, and while the second is equally lamentable, it held the poten-tial to unleash true absurdity in the school.

Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski’s Wagon is a full-scale model of a midcentury cattle car, plucked specifically from his studio by the curators for in-stallation within the former Jewish School for Girls. All of Kuśmirowski’s works are forged copies of other objects, fashioned into uncanny likeness-es from common materials and thus designed to force viewers to question the role of reality or au-thenticity in the work of art. Kuśmirowski credits his communist childhood with having forced him to develop the ingenuity with which to construct his toys from found materials. In writing about the artist, authors tend to build a critical discussion around the trompe l’oeil quality of his pieces, which proves quite complex and even disorienting in sev-eral of his earlier room-sized installations. When exhibited inside of the school, Wagon provoked wistful nostalgia in some critics while it drew scorn from others. In his October 2006 review for Art in America, Richard Kalina wrote: “[Wagon bore] witness to history in a deeply unsettling way. To some it may have seemed manipulative, even theatrical, but not to me. Its very artlessness, its lack of esthetic fudge and blur, combined with its impeccable craft, gave it a power that was unde-niable.”19 Berlin-based writer Andreas Schlaegel deemed Wagon annoying, and considered it em-

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blematic of the “helpless of artistic and curatorial strategies encountering the overpowering symbolic weight of the site,” while Artforum’s Berlin cor-respondent Jennifer Allen called it a “historical ghost ride,” and a “movie prop.”20 Writing on the postwar legacy of the German train system, histo-rian James Young considers the modern German railways as “ineradicably stigmatized…[not only because] the image of cattle cars on their way to (and from) death camps remains so pervasive in the iconography of the Holocaust. Yet when riding these trains in Germany after the war, many young Jewish travelers can’t escape the sense of “having been there before.”21

While Wagon lacks the machinated produc-tion value of Cattelan’s meteor-stricken Pope or kneeling childhood Hitler, it delivered its mes-sage in a similar, singular punch. Pope John Paul II and Adolf Hitler were a religious leader and military dictator, respectively. A boxcar—a static sculpture—is an inanimate object that can’t speak or act on its own accord. The train might conjure memories of a childhood fascination with model building; it could symbolize a commute to work or a lovers’ journey spent stowed away in a private car. A wagon didn’t independently intern mil-lions of Jews and other so-called deviants in death camps throughout Central and Eastern Europe: Conductors drove those trains. Their human cargo was poked and prodded into obedience by Nazi S.S. guards operating under the auspices of the Third Reich.

Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick should not be misconstrued with railway operators or Nazi of-ficers. They are, however, the human agents who

decided what to do with the lifeless stuff of their exhibition. They, too, functioned behind the ideo-logical guises of the curator, institution, and larger art world. Situating Wagon as such was to render it incapable of invoking little else other than Holo-caust history; it was to knowingly employ the “in-eradicable stigmatization” of the railways of which Young writes. Inscribing meaning onto otherwise autonomous art works by pitting them against one another in a heavily loaded space, Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick conjured the very “aura” that Ute Thon described in her review. They provided the fodder with which those who hadn’t experienced the effects of World War II might at least construct a superficial relationship to it or reify the one al-ready embedded in their imagination. In the for-mer Jewish School for Girls, everyone could feel as though he or she had “been there before.”

Cattelan’s interventions once agitated audi-ences to the point of riot. Yet in Berlin this and other gestures drew little protest from a country exhausted by hearing a single narrative of its his-tory replayed on an incessant audiovisual loop. It may appear that Cattelan, Subotnick, and Gioni miscalculated their site then—for the first time, perhaps. Actually they quite did the opposite. No publication I’ve read has any of the curators uttering the word Holocaust. In Berlin no one launched Molotov cocktails along Auguststraße. As intimated throughout this essay, the Western art press could barely move beyond the making of facile connections between signifier and signified: Wagon equals Holocaust. Here the curators aren’t entirely to blame, as the Biennial’s reviews pointed also to the oft-discussed and seemingly unsolvable

Tadeusz KantorBench from “The Dead Class” (1984)Courtesy the heiresses of Tadeuxz Kantor: Maria Stangret and Dorota Krakowska; Cricoteka, KrakowThe 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

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crisis in contemporary art criticism. Nevertheless, Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick are known for having their way with the media, and their collec-tive “cultural capital” gives weight to their actions, and to the words that they delivered directly to the press corps.22 The Berlin Biennial was de-installed in June 2006, and its documentation—the photo-graphs, reviews, and catalogue essays—are the rel-ics that serve as its reminders. How will those left to work with these materials reconstruct the exhi-bition in their minds or moreover, with words?

One must be careful when considering relics from the past, as their intended meanings can so easily be lost during the temporal shift alone. Ta-deusz Kantor’s Bench from “The Dead Class” suffered such a loss inside of the former Jewish School for Girls where it was situated inside of an enormous classroom painted an eye-popping industrial green. A mannequin of a single schoolboy was seated at a small wooden desk, his hands stretched catatoni-cally before him while staring blankly ahead as if unaware of his own surroundings. This particular object is a performance relic from Kantor’s best-known work, a 1975 play by the same name—The Dead Class—and while the school attributed new meaning to Kuśmirowski’s Wagon, Kantor’s bench was completely de-activated as such.

Kantor remains one of Poland’s most lauded thespians and playwrights. He died in 1990, and his experimental performances continue to inspire a young generation of artists that includes many rising names in contemporary art.23 First staged in 1975, The Dead Class is his most widely performed work in which cadaverous actors sit stiffly on a row of wooden benches while holding a classroom sé-

ance with their childhood selves. Kantor acts as the schoolmaster-cum-soothsayer, and his gestures prompt the wailing groans, twitters, and garbled incantations delivered by the players. Suddenly he commands them to leave the stage, and mo-ments later all stumble back upon the stage while performing a strange waltz with kid-sized man-nequins, some on their backs like rucksacks, and others pushed along on bicycles or shaken about wildly. These dolls represent their own murdered childhoods and the millions of dead Polish Jews and soldiers lost to many wars. The performance is at once disturbingly violent and deeply sorrowful.

The Dead Class is considered part of Kantor’s “Theater of Death” movement, a series of plays during which he negotiated with the physical and psychological spaces between reality, memory, and the theater. In his practice, the performance object served as a conduit between these interstitial sites and as a manifestation of “the anger of a human being trapped by other human beasts.” In the post-war period, Kantor began staging his productions covertly in bombed-out rooms, warehouses, gyms, and galleries, as the Nazis prohibited any form of cultural production in Poland. Like Artaud, Kan-tor sought to open the space of the theater into outside or perceived real space, thus “[transgress-ing] all physical and mental boundaries and [ex-pressing] the most intimate thought processes that occur in the artist’s private space and his or her imagination, or in the theatre exploring the spatial dimensions of memory/history.”24

Bench from “The Dead Class” can be recog-nized as more than a memorial piece for memory’s own sake: it employs recollection as a therapeutic

Still from a performance of The Dead Class in the old fairgrounds, Nuremberg, March 1977. Photograph by Günter Kühnel, Fürth,

courtesy Cricoteka.

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tool. Without prior knowledge of his work, how-ever—an understanding that shouldn’t be taken for granted given its roots in a country economically, politically, and socially suppressed by Commu-nism—viewers confronting the mannequins had little means to identify its physical or conceptual origins. Kantor obviously had no involvement in its placement and the Biennial didn’t produce or screen footage of the play, a common practice in those exhibitions showing performance-based ob-jects.25 Nor did the Biennial provide onsite texts, which might have served this particular work by replacing dreaded pedantic instruction with a simple line or two about the project’s practical his-tory.26 In removing Kantor’s bench so far from its original context while, ironically enough, position-ing it within a site that could have easily served as one of his sets, this boy in short pants appeared as little more than another dead student. As spaces and objects were primary to Kantor’s shamanistic approach to theater and performance, this casual use of both undermined his very philosophical po-sition while, in essence, castrating its performative power—the precise power that could, in fact, have invoked true absurdity. One need only secure and watch several minutes of Kantor’s performance footage to imagine what such chaos might have looked like or, more importantly, felt like.

In positing works within the former Jewish School for Girls, Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick shone too bright a spotlight on some and down-played the complexity of others. In doing so, un-fortunately, they molded the school into a vague and simplistic throwback to a ready-made history while, in effect, sidestepping the urgency of the

very human condition it sought to mirror. Artaud accosted his audiences unyieldingly, forcing them to confront themselves and one another within the given moment. For him, that present was one in which Hitler took power; Beckett and his cohort spoke of the aftermath. The 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art was produced in 2006. Its “present moment” is now, not then.

In 1985, Kantor produced Let the Artists Die, a play whose title, though slightly mangled in its translation from Polish, was nevertheless meant to raise doubts regarding the artists’ true role in soci-ety. “Artists should live and create, that goes with-out saying,” Kantor insisted, when asked about his provocative title.27 Artists should live and create: historian and social critic Howard Zinn echoes this sentiment in “Artists in Times of War,” his 2003 chapbook written in response to the ongoing war in Iraq. Yet Zinn calls for collective responsibility in that creative action. No one moral so-called ex-pert is better qualified over another in confronting war: We are all qualified.28

Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick describe the “endless army of individuals” seen throughout the exhibition as having a sense of isolation that “mir-rors our sense of diffuse insecurity.” “It’s time to retreat and hide inside,” they write. “This doesn’t mean giving up one’s position in the world or renouncing one’s own responsibilities and rights. Even isolation and retreat can communicate a polit-ical statement.”29 Retreat can be strategic, but only if followed by a decisive course of action. Kantor staged his first works secretly under threat of Nazi force, and yet his subsequent oeuvre grappled with the after-effects of war and Communism head-on

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and without mistake. In the former Jewish School for Girls, Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick vaguely alluded to the present by summoning the ghosts of atrocities past. Punch and Judy upstaged shock and awe: there was no jolt to the physical senses, no return to consciousness, and no clear position on the perpetual cycles of war and genocide that are so easy to hide from—and to hide behind.

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NOTES

1. Artaud Antonin, “The Theater and Cruelty,” The Theater and Its Double. (New York, Grove Press, 1958), 84–85.

2. Ibid., 103. 3. Martin Esslin coined the term “Theater of the Ab-

surd” in a 1962 book by the same title. The genre is also known as “New Theater” or “Anti-Theater.”

4. Recognizing that some readers may not be familiar with the characters listed on the playbill, allow me to further introduce them here: Ali Subotnick be-gan her career as a receptionist in the offices of Art-forum before working in the editorial department at Art News. Most recently, she also served as the editor and manager of special projects for Parkett. Massimiliano Gioni also hails from the publishing world. He is the former U.S. editor of Flash Art and serves as the artistic director of the Fondazioni Nichola Trussardi. Each has published widely on contemporary art. Following the Berlin Biennial, Subotnick resumed a position as adjunct curator at the University of California at Los Angeles Ham-mer Museum, while Gioni is now Curator at The New Museum in New York. Cattelan has returned to an artistic practice that has spanned nearly two decades and placed him at the forefront of the con-temporary art world.

5. Maurizio Cattelan, Massmiliano Gioni, and Ali Sub-otnick. Of Mice and Men: 4th Berlin Biennial for Con-temporary Art. (Berlin: KW Institute, 2005), 83.

6. T. S. Eliot. “Tradition and Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1960), 3–22.

7. In “Boundary Issues: The Art World Under the Sign of Globalization,” an article published in the November, 2003 issue of Artforum International, art historian Pamela M. Lee gives a pithy definition of the “contemporary art world” I refer to through

out this essay: “In common parlance, the ‘art world’ signifies a society of individuals and institutions—a social, cultural, and economic world organized around museums, galleries and the press and the legions of artists, critics, collectors, curators, and audiences who have truck with such sites.”

8. Francesco Bonami, “The Wrong Way.” Modern Painters (March 2006), 90.

9. Douglas Crimp, “Coming Together to Stay Apart: Ronald Tavel’s Screenplays for Andy Warhol’s Films,” Lecture delivered at the University of Cali-fornia at Berkeley, Department of Art History on 9 March, 2007.

10. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick, 55.11. Curators Francesco Bonami, Nancy Spector, Jens

Hoffman, and Laura Hoptman have worked with Cattelan since the earlier days of his career; all have written books, articles, and other primary critical texts on his practice. Cattelan has also been fea-tured in Parkett—Issue #59 (September, 2000) with essays by Allison Gingeras, Nicholas Bour-riaud, and Bonami, to be precise—and has also published his own magazine, Permanent Food, along with Charley, a similar collaboration with Gioni and Subotnick. The above comprises only a superficial outline of writings on Cattelan; count-less other authors and publications have considered his work as well.

12. La Nona Ora translates to The Ninth Hour, other-wise known as the biblical moment in Mark 13:33-35 wherein a crucified Christ cried out: “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?”

13. For a more in-depth account of this incident and its larger significance within contemporary Polish society, see “New Europe, Old Monsters,” an essay Tomasz Kitlinski wrote and published in 2005 in Issue #73 of Bad Subjects: Political Education and

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Everyday Life, an online journal founded in 1992 at the University of California at Berkeley with the ex-press mission of “[revitalizing] progressive politics in retreat.” http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2005/73/kitlinski.html.

14. The ten-year gap between the building’s closure and its reopening as an exhibition space for the 4th Berlin Biennial prompted me to question why it had been closed for so long. In an email exchange dated March 22, 2007, Renate Wagner of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art informed me that the Jewish community owns many buildings in the area, and that often they are rented for vari-ous social and cultural events. The building’s use by the Berlin Biennial was mutually beneficial, she claimed, as the building was in an advanced state of disrepair. In order to make it inhabitable for a public audience, the KW Institute had to perform significant renovations to the plumbing and electri-cal systems, thus returning the building to its own-ers in a more functional condition.

15. Adrian Searle, “Memory Lane,” The Guardian, March 28, 2006. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/

features/story/0,,1741062,00.html. Steven Henry Madoff, “At Berlin Biennial, Art

Fits Anywhere,” New York Times, April 11, 2006. http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/04/11/arts/design/11bien.html?n=Top%2FFeatures%2FTravel%2FDestinations%2FEurope%2FGermany%2FBerlin.

16. Jennifer Allen, “The Fourth Berlin Biennial” Art-forum International, volume XLIV No. 9 (May 2006), 281.

17. Ute Thon, Art—Das Kunstmagazin, (May, 2006) Excerpted from the Biennial’s final press release.

18. Miwon Kwon. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. (Cambridge, Michigan

Institute of Technology Press: 2004), 25.19. Richard Kalina, “Report from Berlin: Street Life,”

Art News, (October 2006), 61.20. Andreas Schlagel, 4th Berlin Biennial “Of Mice and

Men,” Flash Art, Vol. XXXIX (May–June2006), 78. Jennifer Allen, “The Fourth Berlin Biennial” Artforum International, volume XLIV No. 9 (May 2006), 281.

21. James Young, “Sites Unseen: Shimon Attie’s Acts of Remembrance, 1991–1996.” At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 73.

22. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Aristocracy of Culture.” Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press): 54. As French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has written, those with such high degree of impunity “[have already been] assigned roles… which they will play despite themselves in the eyes of those who know how to stay within the bounds of the intel-lectual illusion and who cannot see them any other way.” Everyone stayed close to their assignments: Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick played their own powerful selves, and most critics “stayed within the bounds” as a result.

23. Though Kuśmirowski never met Kantor, he is part of an increasingly recognized generation of younger Polish artists whose performative works are deeply influenced by Kantor. These include Kataryzna Ko-zyra, Arthur Zmjewski, and Pawel Althamer. Al-thamer is perhaps the most visible of the group at this juncture, and he developed a project for the Bi-ennial in which he collected visitors’ signatures in a bid to win residency for a Turkish national residing illegally in Berlin. Althamer’s projects in particular demonstrate a keen sensitivity to humanity,

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and often involve altruistic acts toward others. 24. Michael Kobialka, “Spatial Representation: Tadeusz

Kantor’s Theatre of Found Reality.) Theatre Journal, Vol. 44, No. 3 (October, 1992) 329–356.25.

25. As Kantor acted at the catalytic figure in his plays, the re-staging of his work could be seen as problem-atic. It has been done though. In the year following Kantor’s death, 1991, his theater company, Cricot 2, performed “The Dead Class” at La Mama E.T.C. (Experimental Theater Club) in New York City in association with the New York International Festi-val of the Arts. In the exhibition “The Impossible Theater: Performativity in the Works of Pawel Al-thamer, Tadeusz Kantor, Katarzyna Kozyra, Robert Kusmirowski, and Artur Zmijewski” first opened at the Kunsthalle Wien in 2005, Kantor’s works were screened in the gallery in order to contextual-ize his own objects and drawings, along with those of others’ works inspired by his practice.

26. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick have insisted that their refusal to reveal their sources from which they appropriate concepts and images functions as a means of allowing visitors to come to their own conclusions. In actuality, however, this practice ex-ercises a more insidious yet perhaps greater form of power over their audience, and one that actually mimics the dogmatic models of exhibition making that they have rallied against. Providing little infor-mation on the work—or even way-finding signage along Auguststraße, for that mater—appeared to be an act of defiance toward modernist fixed nar-ratives. Yet that decision also helped to limit one’s ability to envision other possibilities for the work and in the case of Kantor, to imagine the true pur-pose of the object.

27. Michael Kobialka, “Let the Artists Die? Interview with Tadeusz Kantor.” The Drama Review: TDR,

Vol. 30, No. 3. (Autumn, 1986), 177–183.28. Zinn, Howard, “Artists in Times of War.” (New

York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), 7–37. Zinn ex-presses these and other sentiments in “Artists in Times of War,” the edited version of a talk given at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, Massachu-setts on October 10, 2001.

29. Cattelan, Gioni, and Subotnick, 85.