The Art of

151
Wolf Vostell, Wir waren so eine Art Museumsstück, 1964, silkscreen print and paint on canvas, 120 x 450 cm
13
KATHRIN
HOFFMANN-CURTIUS
Bilder zum Judenmord:
Eine kommentierte
Sichtung der Malerei
und Zeichenkunst in
Deutschland von 1945
bis zum
Auschwitz-Prozess,
Marburg: Jonas Verlag,
2014, 250. The quotation
by Ruth Klüger is
taken from the book
Von hoher und niedriger
Literatur, Göttingen:
Wallstein Verlag,
1996, p. 35.
Wir waren so eine Art Museumsstück and another work produced in 1964,
Eine Autofahrt Köln-Frankfurt auf überfüllter Autobahn kostet mehr Nerven
als eine Woche lang angestrengt arbeiten (A drive from Cologne to
Frankfurt on the packed autobahn is more nerve-racking than a week of laborious
work), include the reception of the Holocaust in a broader reflection
on the media presentation of political events. The two silkscreen prints
sprayed with paint set the memory of Auschwitz alongside contemporary
events and thus draw the viewer‘s attention to the fact that media reporting
reduces singular historical events to one level.
In contrast to Vostell‘s media-critical approach, only a little later the Atlas
project by Gerhard Richter closely examined the iconography of the photos
from the liberated camps themselves. The “photos from books” that Richer
assembled on sheets 15 to 18 stem from the influential book, above all in
visual terms, Der gelbe Stern. Sheets 19 and 20, however, document the
artist‘s own attempts to approach the iconic photographs—be it in his distinct
blurred-looking painting technique, be it through diagonal cutting or
subsequent coloration.
The fact that Gerhard Richter definitely considered exhibiting these photos
alongside pornographic images from magazines is indicated by the subsequent
sheets 21 to 23. The artist himself later spoke about this unrealized
exhibition, 12 but he did not comment on the conceptual affinity between
the Atlas project and Boris Lurie‘s collages. Kathrin Hoffmann-Curtius interprets
this affinity as an echo of the beginning mass-media reception of the
Holocaust: “Richter[’s] ... selection of photographs of the genocide of the
Jews and the subsequent pornographic images open up comparison to extremely
obscene attacks on the female body, a composition that primarily
criticizes the voyeurism of the viewers. The concept that was not actually
realized in the gallery but is shown in the Atlas thus documents a period
about which Ruth Klüger said: ‘And there was also something of pornographic
lust attached to that period‘s interest in the Holocaust, which
was not yet called by that name.’” 13
The media reception of the events in Europe between 1933 and 1945
From Display to Lust
12
Cf.
GERHARD RICHTER
“MOMA-Interview mit
Robert Storr 2002,” in:
id., Text 1961 bis 2007:
Schriften, Interviews,
Briefe, Dietmar Elger/
Hans Ulrich Obrist ed.,
Cologne: Verlag der
Buchhandung Walter
König, 2008,
p. 416.