Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus/Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
Alexander Polzins 'Bruno' in Budapest
A new, six-meter-high bronze sculpture by Alexander Polzin, sculptor and painter from Berlin (born 1973),
has been standing for a short while in Budapest, in front of the entrance to the ten story high student dorm
building of the CEU (Central European University). On the 17th of February 2001, the 401th anniversary of Italian
philosopher Giordano Bruno's death at the stake, the statue was uncovered, in the presence of Yehuda Elkana, rector
of the CEU, who had commissioned it, as well as György Konrád und other Hungarian scientists and intellectuals. The
inscription on the bronze base dedicate the sculpture to the remembrance of the Italian philosopher burned at the
stake (1548-1600), and dedicated to the founder of the CEU George Soros on his 70th birthday.
The memory of Bruno as a homage to one of today's richest men? One could see in this a Byzantinism, even a kind of a later
nobleman's reverence, were it not for the fact, that the struggle against non-freedom and orthodoxy has become a central theme
of Soros' contribution to the renewal of civil society in East-European countries. The sculpture is a gift of the Central
European University to its Founder, kind of self commitment both to the spirit of freedom embodied here and to politically
intervening thought. "Were I to pull a plough, shepherd a herd, tend an orchard or mend clothes, no one would take note of me,
few would watch over me, rarely would I be reprimanded and it would be easy for me to appease everyone", wrote Bruno. "However,
since I demarcate the outlines of Nature's field, care for the nourishment of the soul, and, thinking as an artist, strive to
tend the mind - lo: without ado there is someone grabbing me by the eye and threatening, observing and attacking, catching up
with me and biting, almost gulping me down. Indeed, not only one, not few: Many they are, almost all."
'Bruno' stands in front of the colourful façade of the students' dorms slightly aside, as if in order not to block the way for
those going in and out, an up-side-down figure fallen from the sky, belonging to another order of time. Yet it is by no means
outside all time. In this inconspicuous, grey suburb of Budapest it is a well placed foreign element: A different Icarus at the
moment of the crash.
The original, from which the bronze cast was made, is wooden and is still in Berlin. Polzin had conceived it for the roofed
atrium of the CEU in its beautiful central building in the centre of Budapest. There the object's shocking aspect was to be
countered by aural light effects. Four hanging glass plates in shades of light and dark blue with fairy-tail-like motives of
unicorns were to encircle Bruno protectively, constantly sending out new light effects and thought-impulses at the users of
this building.
For the bronze cast, this casing of light was dropped. Here 'Bruno' presents itself in an un-softened sturdiness. Nevertheless,
the fine wooden grain and sensual allure of the surface remain, as does the sooty-dark colour shade. Weighed against the
original, even some new aesthetic qualities appear. The wooden fragility is translated into the hardened, the more resistant,
the enduring. What else would do in this place which knows no atrium-air? Bruno, with his mass of brain and thought bulging
into or out of the earth are exposed here in an entirely different way. The cast of this Bruno sinking into flames has its
forging behind it - other than the wooden sculpture. One could wander into speculation about the interwoven-ness of destruction
and conservation, of fire and bronze. The stake literally immortalised this historical figure: For all times - cast in bronze
- to be a depiction of an uprising against orthodoxy.
This links with the memory of the 20th-century-Jew burned in the furnace. In its startling thinness, in its rigor mortis and
expressive contortion of its limbs, Bruno calls back to memory the mutilated human bodies as they were transported from the gas
chambers to the ovens. As if through a prism our gaze falls from the 17th century to the extermination sites of the present day.
Consolidated into a puzzle-figure, thoughts and obsessions of the nineteen-nineties have come together here. The subject's
historical distance and the figure's anachronism are exactly what make Bruno a contemporary sculpture. We have learnt from art
historians such as George Didi-Huberman to recognise in art pieces the simultaneousness of different levels of time. The attempt
to fixate ideas of the present does not work without the imaging power of tradition - on the other hand nothing from the past
can be visualized without being restricted the horizon of contemporary experiences. Sigmund Freud’s term symptom invisaged
something similar in a completely different field - This multi-layered sexuality and gesture from 'Bruno'. The forceful
plummeting figure, which traveled through its own ashes in the process of falling, is unmistakeably a woman. Legs and hips could
be those of a dancer and calves and feet have the graceful stretch of a dance-like gesture in the moment of paralysis. The place
where the sex is found, the perspective center of the torso, we find empty. The fearfull or painfull spread fingers in front of
and behind seem to want to protect or hide emptyness - to preserve this last secret. The obviousness of the gender is rejected.
Did the philosopher from Nola perhaps want to boycott this Orthodoxy as well? Or is it not worth it today to protect him from this
similarly inquisition-like question? Beyond the holocaust we also see the burning of witches and suppression of women and
hermaphrodites which came after Bruno's lifetime.
One might think that because of all these allusions and historical reminiscences the figure would stiffen into a pure messenger
of ideas. 'Bruno' surely has an intellectual dimension, as do all Polzin works, which deals with all the great scholarly and
artistic European traditions. Yet it is not a sculpture for art historians. Through the pathos of an injured body which plunges
on its head and sinks into the ground - indeed is pulled like a fallen Icarus, the sculpture is touching in a very direct way.
The expressive gesture of the sculpture provokes the imaginative strengths of the onlooker. The demand my heart makes on the image
and the demolition the image creates in me (Kleist) are brought together. Especially the painfully outreaching arms and the enormous
spread fingers have the quality of speech - even when we don’t yet understand this language. The one hand - confusingly enough -
stretches to reveal six fingers, as if the sixth were the embodiment of the missing genitals or as if Bruno anticipates the hybrid
quality of the human being to come in this age of Biogenetics. Like in "Stone Trader" (1997), the marvelous sculpture Polzin made
in Israel which will be re-installed in Berlin in May, the light falls on the disproportionally large hands (truly Max Beckmann hands)
as well as on the head and on the brain which explodes under the skull. Brunos head seems to be half sunken in the ground or
swallowed by flames though at the same time transfigured into a growing tree. The last disfigurement of this tortured body or
already transformation and reconfiguration into another time dimension? Even this holds the scultpure in a pendulum. Swollen with
meanings of the present, the sculpture turns towards another period in which it can speak the language of that time just as
fluently.