With the bleak epigraph “from The Flowers, corpses grow,” the enigmatically named author / artist New Juche [hereinafter simply ‘NJ’] submits one of the more singular literary and photographic documents of recent years. Like much else that follows in its wake, it is a bold counter-intuitive proclamation - at least for a Western culture otherwise suffused with the reassuring light of poetry like In Flanders Fields, with its gentle elegiac imagery of red poppies growing over fallen soldiers’ graves. Yet if one wants to take this parable of death and rebirth or palingenesis to its logical conclusion, the aforementioned opening salvo does have to be considered as well. This is true not only in light of current geopolitical events (e.g. the recent humiliation of the U.S. in the decades-long Afghan conflict, in which many returning soldiers confessed their “real” mission was to guard fields of opium poppies), but also when considering the flower’s use as an object of aesthetic contemplation and therefore a stand-in for creativity as a whole.
In his new project The Worm, a sort of exhibition catalog for a highly unofficial and clandestine exhibition, NJ extends the above poetic metaphor by occupying a mostly disused and decaying housing complex in an undisclosed location in Southeast Asia, which is itself named The Flowers. The rooms of this complex, alternately invaded by foliage, strewn with debris ranging from piles of shoes to blankets of CDs and DVDs, and peppered with quotidian text in Thai or Burmese, have been suddenly and mysteriously abandoned by previous tenants, and are described by the author as being akin to some sort of ghost ship (in the author’s own more eloquent phrasing, “an unpeopled galleon drifting at sea, a coded sepulchre, a skulking enigma.”) Within this eerie proscenium, NJ has constructed an arcane but nonetheless compelling text-image meditation upon what initially seems like an incongruous subject for this environment: the cultural legacy of Adolf Hitler. His unmistakable visage is pasted to the walls seemingly hundreds of times and seems luridly real and alive in this environment. Curiously, the photos selected – mostly from an infamous photo session by Heinrich Hoffmann, showing Hitler rehearsing numerous of his possessed poses in near-total darkness – are devoid of stock Third Reich iconography and the easy conduit to heightened emotions that such imagery provides. The Great Dictator is instead reduced, or perhaps heightened, to a sort of “physiognomic condition” and thus becomes much more easily transferable to this strange new exhibition environment or, indeed, to a strange new century still suffering the aftershocks of his nearly achieved aspirations. Most of the images are photographed already in a sun-blasted, decaying, generally vulnerable state rather than after being freshly posted to the concrete walls of the unofficial exhibition space, and this, too, has the paradoxical effect of heightening the images’ uncomfortable feeling of currency.
Again, this is an odd juxtaposition of images to encounter whether in Chiang Mai or New York, given the “all-inclusive” trajectory of global “street art”. Yet there are still other levels of juxtaposition or ideological interplay nested within, resulting in a total visual effect similar to another piece that posits a complicity of culture creators and their audiences in the bloodiness of history - Mike Kelley’s 1988 “Pay For Your Pleasure” – with its chorus of murderous quotes accompanying portraits of renowned artists (Rimbaud, Breton, Genet, etc.) and capped off by a self-portrait painted by actual murderer John Wayne Gacy. NJ’s archetypal images of imposition are often accompanied by graffiti-scrawled song lyrics of Morrissey (“We’ll Let You Know”) or Antony (“Deeper Than Love,” “Crying Light”) – in fact, the likely source of the “corpses grow” statement is an inversion of another Antony lyric, rather than an attempt to be a direct riposte to the sentiment of In Flanders Fields. The serialized portraits of a possessed Hitler are complemented by those of his cultural compatriot Richard Wagner, and posters of numerous other thinkers and artists making commentary on der Fuehrer that ranges from forensic / critical to outright laudatory (e.g. David Bowie’s comments about Hitler’s proto-“rock star” status, which eventually fed into the nascent Rock Against Racism movement). The pictorial section of the book, which would usually be a source of relief for the graphophobic, is brimful of aesthetic / philosophical proclamations that will likely require some researching legwork on most readers’ behalf. The prominent inclusion of Wagner in this hectic polyphony does, in this context, seem like a nod to an observation made about his own art and the Romantic movement that it essentially came to epitomize, namely that it “need[ed] a guide to the music and a commentary on the philosophy […] the first performances of the Wagnerian preludes meant absolutely nothing to those who heard them”[1].
Also notably present here is Hitler: A Film from Germany director Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, whose critical comments are among the only ones to be “responded” to by the artist in corresponding weather-faded and dog-eared posters (and whose controversial statements on the subject of his film led Der Spiegel to denounce him as a “failed artist” following a path parallel to Hitler’s, marked by resentment towards bourgeoise society and a subsequent ideological hardening). Syberberg’s numerous observations throughout The Worm, whether in the photographic evidence or the supplemental texts assembled by the author, do provide a sort of theoretical mooring or “key” for the whole project, right down to the four-part structure of the book also shared with Hitler… and the Wagnerian Ring cycle from which Syberberg’s 7-hour magnum opus derives some structural similarities. I submit that the following from Syberberg cuts the closest to the heart of this project’s aims:
I am still concerned with the question of how Auschwitz could happen in a society like that of Germany. My answer is that it could only have happened with cultural effort [italics mine]. Hitler never saw the Final Solution as the pure project of politics. It was a cultural project.
And again:
Injustice, cruelty, blood: these have never been a hindrance for the arts. Actually, there should have been great art under Hitler. Why there wasn’t, that is the question. I think the reason is that Hitler himself wanted to elevate his nation to the level of a work of art.
Syberberg did go to some lengths to illustrate exactly this in Hitler…, to the point where the titular character is shown rising from a grave marked with Wagner’s initials. From this sepulchral backdrop he delivers a characteristically intense monologue in which he asks “what would I be without my music and architecture…without my Rienzi, the source of everything,” and relates familiar historical episodes like his resolution to become a politician only after being temporarily blinded in combat and treated in Pasewalk. What this defining scene shows is that Syberberg’s assertions are not ideas newly minted by him, and if those ideas are seen as offensive to producers of the arts, then direct verifying quotes from Hitler also need to be taken into consideration. The latter essentially asserted, in so many words (and with another metaphor of efflorescence), that his unprecedented campaign of mechanized imperialism was not the goal in and of itself, but the means of clearing the stage for cultural revolution:
If somebody else had one day been found to accomplish the work to which I’ve devoted myself, I would never have entered on the path of politics. I’d have chosen the arts or philosophy. The care I feel for the existence of the German people compelled me to this activity. It’s only when the conditions for living are assured that culture can blossom.[2]
Everywhere, then, there are potent and luminous reminders of artwork becoming more lethally all-consuming the more it is perfected: the “nation-as-artwork, ” though it preceded and perhaps indirectly inspired Joseph Beuys’ utopian conception of “social sculpture,” becomes more malignant in direction proportion to its becoming more clearly organized and executed. Yet this picture is not complete without recognition of such perfectionist impulses as equivalent to a “death drive” or an establishment of the conditions for future oblivion.
The acceptance of tragedy and decline, and indeed their intrinsic value to any honest cultural undertaking, is particularly interesting when considering this: lesser known than Hitler’s monolithic ambitions was his interest in a “law of the ruins,” relayed in The Worm via an exchange between Hitler and would-be designer of the triumphal world capital Germania, Albert Speer. In submitting some drafts to Hitler for review, which showed the effects of natural decay processes upon the infamous “reviewing stand” for Nazi military pageants, the former’s entourage apparently denounced such a vision, thinking it “blasphemous […] that I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years.” Yet Hitler himself is supposed to have praised this vision as “logical and illuminating,” to the point of officially ordering future such designs to take the “law of the ruins” into consideration. The Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk [‘total artwork’], named as such because of its integration of all sensory impressions into a single cohesive form, was therefore re-interpreted as also integrating all phases of organic life from birth through flourishing, decay, and death. Once the Speer legend is also absorbed into NJ’s vision, the raw concrete staging ground of The Flowers loses much of its arbitrariness and becomes a direct reference to other historical monuments to decay, namely the Speer-designed Schwerbelastungskörper. This non-descript, load-bearing concrete cylinder, intended to test ground for the erection of a massive Nazi victory arch, is perhaps the only remaining testament to Speer’s artistic legacy aside from the reviewing stand mentioned above.
NJ’s personal choice to sequester himself within the derelict, haunted, and potentially dangerous Flowers complex is an act that shares an apparent kinship with the “vow art” of the most feted body- and performance artists. For example, during his prolonged stay the artist creates such endurance tests for himself as stripping naked and then depositing his clothes in a successively distant series of rooms, until a hard limit for this separation of man and his covering is reached. Plastering selected rooms of The Flowers with floor-to-ceiling reproductions of Hitler portraits might also seem like an additional invitation to a hostile reaction upon their discovery, although this specifically is called into question by a “doctoral thesis” featured later in the book, which claims that Hitler is viewed locally “as a nationalist strongman rather than a genocidal demagogue.” Now, more interestingly than this continuation of the “vow art” tradition is the way in which NJ deploys his slogans and iconography to remind of that tradition’s indebtedness to a deeper current, namely the Wagnerian / romanticist “need for salvation through some form or other of self-destruction.”[3] One could easily say that a project like The Worm is insufficiently “epic” when compared to the works it takes inspiration from; Syberberg’s 244-minute long Hitler… or the several days’ worth of Ring performances at Bayreuth. Yet even if we play along with the stereotypical idea that the scale of a project is the main criterion for “epic”-ness, couldn’t the comparative “modesty” and clandestinity of NJ’s work more effectively convey the point that “epic” art is the product of a certain attitude than just a matter of scale combined with historical / geographical point of origin? After all, few serious critics now find it unusual that the most representative of Wagnerian art itself was put to use in, say, the work of Japan’s pre-eminent twentieth century author.
The four distinct text phases of the Worm book come together in a way that is as initially bewildering as any other aspect of the project, but they gradually coalesce, if only on a subconscious level. There is an opening catalog of impressions from unnamed individuals speaking alternately on the unique and universal symbolism of Hitler’s appearance. There is a biographical section dealing with the author’s time in Scotland, along with a kind of panegyric for the art of Antony, whose “Hitler in my Heart” is a dramatic continuation of the very similar sentiment running through in Syberberg’s film opus (i.e. “it’s about the Hitler within us.”) For the final text section titled “The Adolphan Seed” – the Götterdämmerung of this book’s text cycle, as it were – we are presented with an anonymous doctoral thesis on Southeast Asian mediumship or “spirit wives.” Some clues emerge that this thesis’ composer might be a sock puppet fabrication of the Worm author himself, but whatever its provenance, it does provide a fascinating and feverish capstone to this project. Upon realizing that “conventional qualifications” for spirit mediums in this region include a “blurred sexual or gender identity,” NJ neatly resolves previously posed riddles about the “Hitler” in Antony’s heart or the more sweeping issue of the genocidal tyrant inhabiting the same body and mind as the effeminate artist. The main sustenance of this thesis is, after all, an interview supposedly recorded between its author and a medium that conjures the ghost of Hitler and proceeds to speak in the breathless, urgent style for which Hitler was famous, relaying a level of biographical detail otherwise only known to modern scholars of the subject. Without spoiling the fierce and jarring denouement, hints emerge in the layout of the text that the interrogator and the interrogated in this dialogue were never in fact distinct entities. Alternately, they may be in the process of being taken over and synthesized into a third force, whose confessional conclusion places an indelible stamp upon this work’s mission to portray ruin as an ingrained reality of grand cultural projects.
In the preface to what may be the definitive document of Hitler’s thought as he actually wanted it to be recorded - Hitler’s Table Talk – H.R. Trevor-Roper proposes the following:
Others have seen [Hitler] as a charlatan profiteering by a series of accidents, a consummate actor, a sly, cheating peasant, or a hypnotist who seduced the wits of men by a sorceror’s charms […] And yet, we may object, could a mere adventurer, a shifty scatter-brained charlatan, have done what Hitler did, who, starting from nothing, a solitary plebeian in a great cosmopolitan city, survived and commanded all the dark forces he had mobilized and, by commanding them, nearly conquered the whole world? So we ask, but seldom receive an answer: the historians have turned away, and like antique heroes we only know that we have been talking with the immortals from the fact that they are no longer there.[4]
If in fact the historians have abandoned their posts as Trevor-Roper claims, then the task of forensic analysis might be better left to the artists. Syberberg certainly seems to have understood this fact, as does New Juche: perhaps only those immersed in their own cultural projects can fully fathom the Hitlerian daemonia, itself coming in the guise of a cultural project that irrevocably altered the face of human relations.
(all quotes and imagery, unless noted otherwise, taken from the title under review).
[1] Barzun, J. (1981). Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage. Chicago / London: University of Chicago Press.
[2] Trevor-Roper, H.R. (2008). Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944L His Private Conversations. Trans. Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens. New York: Enigma Books.
[3] Barzun (1981).
[4] Trevor-Roper (2008).