Christel Wester
Overexposures

It may be a coincidence that Markus Döhne’s series of works entitled Arbeitsspeicher is held in shades of green. Perhaps a detail of a novel crept in here which was important for the artist and without its reading this series of work would not have been created at all: In the first half-volume of Peter Weiss’s  The Aesthetics of Resistance the reader accompanies one of the two friends of the I-narrator to his home. There, at the kitchen table, „under the umbrella of the green porcelain ceiling lamp,“ he sees his mother sitting, „a dull green flowing from the walls“ into the room. And, „the wet footprints on the dark green linoleum showed the way, which Coppi’s mother had walked in order to empty the bowl over the sink“.

The dull green light and the dark green linoleum are certain marginal details in Peter Weiss’s opus magnum and probably Markus Döhne does not think of them today any more, some twenty years after having read the book. But Weiss was not only a writer but also a painter and filmmaker who knew how to use his palette of colour and light atmospherically. Often it is precisely such atmospheric undercurrents that dig deep into those layers of our memory, which we call the unconscious. From there, our capacity of association is fed which any form of art is dependent upon.

It is also a variety of associations that are released by  Markus Döhne’s Arbeitsspeicher. Since, at first glance, one can not immediately recognize what is emerging from these green surfaces. A view into a flight of a street, in twilight, where skyscrapers pile up? High-rise buildings that do not look inviting, but which peak out like black skeletons. A box-like architecture that seems deserted. Shells, which rot even before being completed, because the investor ran out of money? Cored buildings waiting to be reconstructed? A street, which was devastated by a major fire? Letting our gaze wander from panel to panel, we can see that they vary the same motif over and over again. The structure of the picture gets even more confusing, the eye tries holding on to the screening, which, however, does not remain static, but begins to whir. The two-dimensional surface grows into the room, the black structures set into motion. In fact, they are drawers, looming there, some open, others closed, and some seem very consistent, most of them, however, seem transparent and almost imaginary.

Since 1987 Markus Döhne works exclusively with found photographic material. In the case of Arbeitsspeicher, it is a picture of Peter Weiss, which shows him in his Stockholm studio reading newspaper while standing in front of his filing cabinet — a giant card catalog, in which Weiss not only kept his own notes, but also newspaper articles, photographs and other documentary material, which he then processed in his work. As such one could say they represent Peter Weiss's ,storage of memory‘. The photo used by Döhne has now itself turned into documentary material and landed in another ,storage of memory‘ [Arbeitsspeicher] — namely that of Markus Döhne, who fragmented, edited, and reproduced the material in multiple ways. It is a tribute to Peter Weiss, with whose novel The Aesthetics of Resistance Döhne has appropriated art history. At the same time Döhne’s series is also a visualization of his own way of working, which seems to have parallels to the assembly technology of Peter Weiss. Just as the writer always used documentary material from the past, from contemporary history or art and adapted, reworked and formed it into poetic work, Markus Döhne’s starting point is found and archived material. And, this material always refers to events of political significance. Döhne chooses to work with photographs — the medium of documentation par excellence. Even today a picture still serves as providing evidence, which is actually surprising taking into consideration that photographs have been manipulated and exploited for propaganda purposes since their invention. Yet, photography manages to create something like a collective visual memory, which can be found in photo albums, collections, archives and libraries, on billboards, in newspapers and magazines, but also in motion pictures. Doing this, Markus Döhne embarks onto a researching trip as if being a documentarist. Though, he does not use his trouvailles for conventional documentary purposes, rather, he deconstructs them until they only contain distinctive though distorted particles of reality. Those we recognize again and again and by that construct a new context of meaning. Doing this, Markus Döhne, makes visible the mechanisms by which our visual memory is constituted.

To achieve this he applies very traditional reproduction and printing techniques onto unusual carrier materials: paraffin, gauze or metal as in the Arbeitsspeicher. Much of his work transcends the scope of two-dimensionality. Thus, in his wax works that he has made since 1988, Markus Döhne applied excerpts from historical photos by way of screen printing onto molded paraffin blocks which he then coated with wax. In this way he has incorporated the two-dimensional photograph as pigment into a three-dimensional body. In his Green Screens, Refugee Series. Döhne dealt with refugee movements from 1997. He used gauze tableaus as carriers of the images, which he hung freely into space and by that integrated the latter into his work.

In the case of Arbeitsspeicher Döhne achieved an enormous sculptural effect by the principle of layering, which he uses in multiple ways. First, on the image carrier itself, i.e. the metal plate to which he applies up to seven layers of the two monochromatic shades of green. In the places where the different colored areas impinge onto each other, you can see real edges. The other stratification process is accomplished in the photographic reproduction. Through countless copying processes Döhne generated new footage from the initial photograph, which he finally applies by way of screen printing to pretreated metal panels. Döhne has furthermore transferred this procedure to the offset printing of this book. So this book is not only a documentation of his work Arbeitsspeicher, but also an independent entity to complete the series. Originally, the experiment with the photo of Peter Weiss was only meant as a small digression, but then it proliferated further: 45 boards in two different size groups have been created – a series of works that play a key role in Markus Döhne’s work.

The Arbeitsspeicher are more abstract than other series of works which still include narrative components and thus have a certain eventfulness. The topic of the paraffin blocks could be described by the rise and fall of socialism. Döhne here used images from the history of the European left in the first half of the 20th Century. He also touched events that are not directly connected to political events such as the suicide of Vladimir Mayakovsky or the funeral of Kasimir Malevich. As well as that icons from the film world appear such as stills from Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1928). Covered by layers of wax these famous images seem frozen, strangely distant and yet present. This way Döhne consistently misleads our associations. For example, he cuts out the bouquets of flowers from funeral scene clips and reduces the image in the graphic reproduction to its bare structural elements. Thus, in this abstracted image the viewer suddenly associates the carnation flower as arranged on the coffin with revolutionary events. When Markus Döhne created his first paraffin blocks in 1988 the implosion of the socialist empire was still unclear. At their first public exhibition in Turin in 1990, they gained unexpected relevance.

Meanwhile, in the Green Screens, Refugee Series. Markus Döhne combined photographic material from the archives of the German federal border control with historic photographs of the Spanish Civil War. The first exhibition of this work coincided with the start of the Kosovo War. Thus, visitors believed the exhibited series to represent a political commentary on the current situation in Europe. However, the exhibition was developed before and already in the title of this series of works Döhne pointed to the ambiguity of his artistic process.

Green Screens reminds us of the monochrome colored backgrounds serving to insert foreign images into existing displays in electronic media, and here especially in television. When filming in the studio landscapes can be transported by this way to the set: suddenly an evening sky appears in a living room window that until then was only backlit with green or blue. Not only Markus Döhne’s Green Screens function like that but all his work. However, — contrasting with the described process in electonic media — in his work it is the human associative activity that creates the images. What interests the artist here is the iconography of the way our inner ‚image generation machine‘ works. And that is characterized by the medial flow of images with which we are constantly exposed to, from which, however, only the very distinctive particles get stuck to our visual memory. To find out what these particles are Markus Döhne constantly examines the deposits of our visual world: the archives. But his Arbeitsspeicher are not only an apt metaphor for this process. For, on the one hand, in the layering and overlapping of the image structure the working process of the artist is manifested. On the other hand Döhne makes the viewer aware of his own associative activity, which is fed by the viewer’s own internal ,working memory‘. The title of the series of works, in turn, is borrowed from the computer language and refers to the near future, when card boxes and metal archives are to be replaced by digital data stores. Apart from all the aspects mentioned above this historic upheaval is also alluded to by Markus Döhne’s Arbeitsspeicher.
Translated from German by Gisela Pauli Caldas