Ongoing performative work
What is the price of knowledge? Do we learn from books or from life? Which lessons are more powerful? What we consider to be knowledge?
What can be named as "culture" after Auschwitz?
1.
After the first semester of my study in the Master Program Art in Public Space and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar I have done a tattoo with my matriculation number. The starting point of thinking was Anwesenheitsliste at Boris Buden's theory class: every lesson students had to mark own attendance by filling in list of two columns: name and Immatrikulationsnummer, standard form for marking attendance at German Universities. One of the questions we discussed in one of the classes was what is experience.
When I applied for study visa to Germany as non-EU citizen, I needed to prepare a lot of documents. I came with all of them perfectly prepared on time, however for no obvious reason my visa decision was delayed. So I entered study program with more than a month delay and integration into study process and foreign culture turned to be really difficult experience for me. All welcoming events already had passed and I needed to resolve most of organizational questions (that was sometimes more difficult due to the delay) by myself. Looking back at this difficult and mostly negative experience, I must admit that I also have learned a lot. My expectations failed, existing stereotypes appeared to be wrong. I obtained new skills. Being humiliated and excluded just because of being from outside, I needed to resolve existential questions, like should I proceed doing what I do, when I was treated in a such way? What should I do, how react, to protect myself? Looking back, I realize that negative and traumatizing experience is also education: visa issues and integration into German culture raised for me more difficult questions than discussions in seminar room about art. As long as this experience already have marked my life, I decided to reflect it with a mark on my body, to document experience that gave me new knowledge. Either represent knowledge, I still do not have.
2.
Following the statement of Adorno about poetry being barbaric after Auschwitz [1], and the very idea of after Auschwitz as a point of no-return of Western culture, I ask a question, if a tattoo fashion in a context of a Western culture can be not barbaric after Auschwitz. Tattoo practice in Western culture is not functional; it has exclusively aesthetic, cultural purpose - a mark does not transmit to a stranger biological information that in case of emergency is needed to save life. Taking into account amount of young people in Europe, who currently wear tattoos, as well as average square of body that is covered, it is hard to say that tattoos are marking nonconformists or can be used to to identify a person with any of subcultures, or at least it is no longer so. Fashion boom had turned tattooing into a mass culture, people put easily on their bodies everything from roses to controversial symbols, meaning of which they are not aware off. The problem for me is in the timeline and redefinition of symbols and no longer can be redefined, situation of no-return that has its place in a historical perspective. If in Western culture a tattoo can be a matter of aesthetics or fashion after Auschwitz, it is not a matter of barbarism, despite of what is exactly is being depicted, either whatever is being depicted, it means something different by fact?
[1] Theodor. W. Adorno, Prismen. Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 1955, p. 26.
Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch, und das friẞt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward (wurde), heute Gedichte zu schreiben.
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And it corrodes even the knowledge why it has become impossible to write poetry today.