RIGAS LAIKS (march 2005)
With the back to the future
Angel's look of the German artist Alexander Polzin
"Walter Benjamin bought an aquarelle of Paul Klee Angelus Novus in 1921. Up until 1940, when he fled to Paris,
the aquarelle was always in his work premises. In his last article n the Concept of History (1940) he was
positioning Klee's work as a retrospect on history" Among many other words, this fragment of text is heard
by the angel Kasil(1), who listens to what the readers of the library are reading for themselves in Wim
Wenders' movie Heaven over Berlin. Humans don't see angels, but angels both see humans and read their minds,
at least in the movie. Just as Venice is a city of lions, Berlin is a city of angels; if one can see anything
in Berlin, then with a special look; just as with many destroyed cities, Berlin's charm is mostly in its
history, which one can see only, if one can say so, with the eyes of the spirit, reading something and thinking.
Uldis Tirons
I was directed to the German artist Alexander Polzin from a certain source, and I could still reconsider why and
how this notice originated, but it is already too late, since these thoughts were interrupted by the meeting with
Polzin himself and his works. Now I have the opportunity to do something with the latter, which are in front of
me, and I don't want to kill it with general considerations on art: there is always some professional arbitrariness
and non-mandatoriness in these works.
In front of me are reproductions of Polzin's works, a record of conversation with him, a number of articles about
him, Heiner Miller's book Rotwelsch(2) and a photocopy of Water Benjamin's article On the Concept of History. Starting
at the end and returning to start, angels are one of Polzin's objects of interest, and he points to the source of
inspiration, Heiner Miller's(3) text Unfortunate Angel. Here is the text:
"Behind him washes the past, pours stones on wings and on shoulders, which rumble like buried drums, but in front of
him is the stuck future, pushing inwards his eyes, blowing up the eyeballs like stars, turning a word into sounding
pawl, choking him with his own breath. For some time one can still see his wings' strokes, in the sough one can hear
the beating of stones in front of him, over him, behind him, it becomes louder when stronger grows the hopeless attempt
to break out and rarer when the angel's movement settles. Then a moment comes over him, the unfortunate angel freezes
in the quickly buried field, waiting for the history with the breath of the flight and in the petrifaction of the look.
Until the strokes of the strong wings widen again in the waves of stone, announcing his flight."(4)
Heiner Miller has composed the "angel's text", referring to a fragment of Walter Benjamin's article On the Concept of
History. Here's the fragment: "Klee is a picture, which is called Angelus Novus. Depicted in it is an angel, who, it
seems, will just fly away from something what he sees in front of him. His eyes are dilated, his mouth - open and his
wings are up. This is how an angel of history should look like. He has turned away from the past. Where a sequence of
events appears in front of us, he sees only catastrophe, which constantly loads ruins on ruins near his legs. He could
stay a while, to resurrect the dead and to unite the broken. But a breeze is arising from the paradise to here, and it
catches in his wings, and it is so strong that the angel can't close the wings anymore. This breeze wants to bring him
in the direction of the future, to which he has turned his back, while the pile of ruins in front of him grows all the
way up to heaven. This breeze is what we call progress."
Both texts are well known for the German critics, but not to us. But even not knowing the circumstances and tradition,
in which these texts were read, it is impossible not to understand what they are about, namely: they are about the past
as a freezer of the past, as a not-understood burden. Alexander Polzin is only one of many whose topic it is to dig in
the debris of the past.
Justly not trusting my knowledge of the language, I was looking in vein for the word Freigraber in dictionaries, since
that is exactly how a group of Polzin's sculptures is called. It turned out later that the word is made up, arbitrarily
composing it from frei (free) and Graber (digger), in Latvian it gets closest to "free-digger". Sounds peculiar, but the
idea is about somebody who frees something while digging, in a way something like archaeologist, who uncovers layer after
layer of the foregone life's traces in the digging spot. That is exactly how the pictures of Alexander Polzin look – the
image in them is "complicated" in many layers, which shine through one another, allowing the viewer to "excavate" that
which obtains its shape only in such a "free-digging", not in a usual look. Polzin also called his rough angels "free-diggers",
exhibited among the white, meta-historic antique sculptures. "They have a very rough surface", said Polzin, "because they
have so much behind them."
"There are writers who look the way they write", Polzin points to his Heiner Miller's drawings, but immediately, of course,
refers to Samuel Becket as well. What he said I would like to continue with Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, Ezra Pound - try to
recall faces of all of them - if only one couldn't say that simply all of them are very wrinkly, each in his own way. It
would be difficult to try to prod these wrinkles in their poetry or prose - however, there is a physiognomic observation
that wrinkly is a person who has thought a lot. Most likely this is hoax. But from the moment one can associate a piece of
literature, art or a philosophy with a specific person, one always wants to see his face, immediately associating it with
the world of its owner's thoughts. A German critic Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus writes that Polzin is attached to "the look of a
thinking human, maybe one must even say the look of a thinking man. It has two characteristics - the sexiness of his wild
lips and the darkness of his hopeless eyes. If one doesn't speak about the writings, then one can observe the ice jam of
thinking externally only in the mouth and eyes, look and voice."(5)
I can't deny that the look of a thinking man interests me very much, although in the image of myself I can't see any of
his characteristics. It is true, however, that the writing of Reinhard Meyer-Kalkus is romanticized and adjusted mostly
to one man - Heiner Miller. But Polzin has also been creating Socrates (every one of us can imagine his canonical image)
covering his mouth with the neck of a swan. As is known, Socrates always interrogated the Athenians, trying to clarify
how it is in reality, but Polzin tries to look what would Socrates turn into if he didn't speak, if he instead turned
to himself. (In reality, the swan in the sculpture actually is Plato, whom Socrates saw in a dream as a swan sitting in
his lap and then taking off with a beautiful song; and exactly thanks to Plato we know what Socrates "told".) If Socrates
didn't speak, we would not be able to refer that he told one thing or another, and it would turn out that the things told
by Socrates can actually be our own. Personality, if one shakes off the dislike to this word, possibly is not constructed
at all by the features of the human observed, even the most significant, but instead something that is always in the
readiness of thinking or in some other involvement. When Polzin also paints Maria Callas without a mouth, what remains
is heaven, earth, water, the marble gates of Naxos, her face, necklace and, I'd like to say, our readiness to hear
Callas, which in a way is even more than her voice, although she doesn't exist without it. (In the conversation, Polzin
reminded me that after Onasis left Callas, she lost her voice.) In the sculpture of Giordano Bruno Polzin has removed
the face altogether - Bruno's head is screwed into the earth; by the way, no image of Giordano Bruno has survived, but
even without it we can pretty well imagine how he looked - proud and uncompromising in front of the dark inquisition,
just about ready to step into the pyre. Only recently the Vatican opened the archives, from which one can read that Bruno
was actually ready to recall his opinions, but for some unknown reasons the church did not let him do so - and once again
we might be interested in knowing what he actually looked like.
A rough angel of a man for Polzin has also turned out to be the poet Paul Celan - a man stretched out in back-bend in front
of a woman tied up at stake. "It was very difficult with his head", says Polzin. "I didn't know what to do with this
hidden power that is behind the ästheticized, calculated poems of Celan. And in any case the idea is of something
existential, as if somebody would be trying to grasp the horror of the past century with pincers. It was very difficult
to depict this in the face of Celan, since he looks a bit like an accountant."
In summers in the seaside of Mersrags (a Latvian town) from time to time one can hear joyful melodies from Radio 2, but when
the nature-lovers arrive, they sound even in the nights. But once, several years ago, our Austrian friend Erich had brought
a CD presented to him in Chernovci (Celan's town of birth), in which the poet reads his poems. That time from the recorder
on the porch, across all the silent neighbourhood, sounded: "We drink the black milk of the earliness we drink it in
evenings we drink it in mornings and nights we drink and drink" a man lives in a house who plays with the snakes who writes
who writes when it is getting dark death is the master from Germany" your golden hair, Margaret, your ashy hair, Sulamit..."(6)
Of course, in this instance I like exactly the inadequacy between the extremely hyped up poem of the German poet and the calm
of Latvian country-side, to which, as it for some reason seems, suit Latvian schlagers. As if from the sea and the pines it
would automatically flow "whose life is at sea", but from the hills and rifts - "wer reitet durch Nacht und Wind"(7). As strange
as it would be in this situation, I see something similar to the widely "chewed" assertion of Adorno, that after Auschwitz
one cannot write poetry anymore. - As if one could do it before Auschwitz. And what can one do "after Auschwitz"? Polzin
reminded me that Paul Celan committed a suicide, drowning himself in Seine. But he couldn't have done it, since he was a
very good swimmer. And still did it.
Our past is not that linear history, from which, as is accepted to think, we follow; into the pile of ruins of the past,
which threatens to bury us and about which so highly speak Benjamin and Miller, turn the uninterrupted events, which we
didn't manage to, and most likely will not manage to think through, because we have been carried away by the "wind of the
future", and those, to whom these events were intended, are not around since long. That is why thinking is a man with the
back to the future, who tries in solitude to unite that which exists now only as debris. To be man here means more a
quality. Although the back turned to the future also makes one think about the fear from the non-existent, which Alexander
Polzin tries to overcome in his art.
Anmerkungen
1. Another reader at the library reads a book, which explains the name of the angel standing behind him: "Kasil, Kascil,
Kafcil - angel of sorrow and solitude, who "shows to the unity of the kingdom of eternity". Kasil is one of the rulers
of the planet Saturn, also a ruling prince in the seventh heaven, and one of the sarims in the order of forces.
Sometimes he appears also as an angel of abstinence."
2. "Rotwelsch" in German means the same as "fenja" in Russian, i.e., jargon of the thieves
3. Heiner Miller (1929-1995) - German writer
4. Thanks to Silvija Brice for the friendly help in the translation of Heiner Miller
5. The reading of Paul Celan's poems can be found on the Internet, too, for instance, in Celan's homepage
6. Reproduction from German by Uldis Tirons
7. A line from Goethe's poem King of the Wood: "Who gallops there through night and storm..."