Regarding Terror
Emma Pearse
courtesy of the artist
One image dominates "Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition" at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, which documents over 30 years (1968 until now) of media and art inspired by the Marxist-Moaist terrorist group the Red Army Faction of Germany. The image is a significantly wide, round face that meets in an accented curve at the chin. The face has an eerily fair complexion and is inset with big, dark eyes that might be pretty if their gaze was not so far away. This is the face, rather the head, of Ulrike Meinhof–the Meinhof of Germany’s most notorious terrorist group, the Baader-Meinhof gang, which was closely affiliated with the RAF. During Germany’s "Decade of Terror" (1968-77), these groups conducted kidnappings, assassinations, arson and bombings in an attempt to destabilize the West German government and spark revolution.
"Regarding Terror" was supposed to open in November 2003, but was delayed when the press discovered the exhibition proposal the previous summer; the proposal incited outrage over "legitimizing" and "aestheticizing" terrorism. To free themselves from the constraints and responsibilities that come with state funding, the exhibition organizers decided to return almost half their initial grant and instead raise money from private donations and from eBay auction of donated work from famous artists.
The iconic image of Meinhof, a twenty-something journalist-cum-terrorist, complete with the intellectual layered hairstyle–brunette with square, slightly mussed bangs–appears mostly in the pages of tabloid magazines and newspapers on display at the KW, but also in sculptures, photographs, and digitally manipulated images by such artists as Wolf Vostell and Johannes Kahrs. The face, in all its progressions–from indomitable new recruit in sharp, square glasses to steadfast but sallow and wild after weeks of a hunger strike in jail–embodies all that was powerful and warped about the time in German history when the Baader-Meinhof gang were most active. (Critics have noted, the discussion and exhibition of Baader-Meinhof-inspired art conjure other times in German history as well.) The ubiquity of this face in the exhibition signifies the salacious and enduring tangle between the media and politics, art and the media, and art and politics, especially when said politics involve young, hip men and women forming violent armies in the name of all forms of love.
The salaciousness of these complex relationships is most striking in the plethora of media that introduces the exhibition–an introduction that surpasses the art exhibited in the four floors of the rest of the show in both historical interest and aesthetic expression. The tabloid magazine Stern (The Star) covered the murders and kidnappings of the RAF with zeal, whilst peppering their pages with bikini-clad women partying in Mallorca or young girls in dripping wet T-shirts. In the pages of Stern, Meinhof and her recruiter Gudrun Ensslin, the founder of the RAF, along with the love of her life, Andreas Baader appear as tough yet elegant matriarchal figures. (It was the press that penned the name "Baader-Meinhof Gang" due to the public’s familiarity with Meinhof as a journalist). Ensslin is the real beauty of the group, with her slim-hipped model’s figure, her straight, golden hair, and peach-round cheekbones. In the pages of Der Spiegel, still Germany’s most important news and culture journal, Meinhof and Ensslin, along with a handful of their female cohorts, appear with the frequency of pop stars. But Spiegel took care to use shadowy images in which the women appear less matriarchal and more possessed by the evils of the world, aka, at that time, Andreas Baader.
The love between Baader and Ensslin is central to the theme of the exhibition. It is generally believed that Baader was the mastermind–he has been compared to Charles Manson–and that Ensslin and Meinhof were wooed by a charismatic figure voicing words they believed in, but added a new level of conviction. Namely, violence. While many of the art pieces directly address Baader-Meinhof–the center piece is Joseph Beuys’ Dürer, ich führe persönlich Baader + Meinhof durch die Dokumenta V, (Durer, I will personally guide Baader + Meinhof through Dokumenta V"), a piece consisting of two tall sticks, shoed by tatty slippers and straw–many of them explore the kind of love that makes talented, privileged kids enter politicians’ homes at night with the intent of and the tools for murder. American conceptual artist Erin Cosgrove’s A Heart Lies Beneath is the highlight of these pieces. It’s an animated adaptation of her romance novel The Baader-Meinhof Affair (Printed Matter, 2003), in which the cute young Mara, specializing in serial-killer studies at a claustrophobic East-coast college, falls head over heels for Holden Rife, a Marxist-inspired junior who heads an ambitious group dedicated to the causes of the late RAF. The video is narrated by Fabio, who poses the question: "what has the strongest grip: violent love or a love of violence?"
Sue de Beer’s Hans & Grete continues the theme of pathological romance. It’s an installation of a dirty, sweet bedroom in which audiences sit on a gigantic gorilla to watch a bizarrely tacky video of a lonely teen girl making love, becoming a goth, learning the electric guitar. It was perhaps a fear of the general nature of such pieces that had the political and literary elite in fairly fierce combat over the exhibition in the first place. The curators, Felix Ensslin (son of Ensslin), Ellen Blumenstein, and Klaus Biesenbach had to convince people that their intent was not to glamorize or romanticize but to document and explore the reality and the effects of the RAF. But discussions about the slippery legacy of Germany’s Decade of Terror were already underway shortly following September 11 and (incidentally?) when Terror Chic was dominating the runways and the streets–Berlin stores were stocking slinky women’s underwear reading "Prada-Meinhof."
Ulrike Meinhof died on Mother’s Day in 1976, found hanging in her cell. Baader, Meinhof, and Jan Karl-Raspe (another instrumental RAF figure) were found dead in their respective cells on the morning of October 18, 1977. All of their deaths were labeled suicides, but hundreds of fans, who remained loyal until the official disbanding of the RAF in 1998, suspected foul play by the authorities. It’s a sentiment that highlights the juicy, complicated nature of an art exhibition equal parts history and everyday drama.
" Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition" opened January 25 at the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and will be on display through May 16, 2005.
