Bodo Morawe
The work of art as a palimpsest.

Would there be a breeze
could I set a sail.
Would there be no sail
would I make one of sticks and tarpaulin.
BRECHT, BUKOW ELEGIES

There are works of art, fascinating at first sight yet without the viewer knowing to say why this is so. They permit to be deciphered, however, once the viewer takes on the challenge posed by them. Both, the fascination of the first sight as well as the initially difficult to decipher but nevertheless existing and intended striking provocation characterises Markus Döhne’s realized aesthetics of contrast which flagrantly turns the artwork into a palimpsest.

The artistic process that Döhne applies as a graphic artist, a printmaker and user of contemporary photographs, as well as a master of spatial staging of his tableaux in the sense of an elaborate inter-media ,crossover‘, lets the Green Screens, Refugee Series. at first sight [prima vista] appear as genuine documents of l’art pour l’art. When looking at the work naively the expression „blessed it seems within himself“ could therefore be the motto of the ,images‘ which posess an aura of abstract paintings, if it was at all allowed to relate the poetic verse of Biedermeier time — a verse by Mörike when talking about a lamp which always has been accessible for aesthetic reflection — to works of art which, as in the exhibition in the tower of Cologne’s Luther Church, are hanging as free-floating formations structuring the empty, if not bleak space and enchant it by their formalistic play of shapes and colors. By projecting effectively alienated fragments of images that have been cut out of contemporary photos, and whose almost physically painful realism has vanished into shadowness, and projecting them onto a yellow polyester gauze coated with a greenish photoemulsion, Döhne gives his Green Screens a luminosity that does not only justify the memory of Mörike’s lamp but at the same time imprints the seal of artistic autonomy onto his Green Screens. Blissfully the images of escape radiate within themselves.

But nevertheless Mörike’s association is misleading. For the luminosity, which gives the hanging gauze panels the aural splendor of autonomous art is not an aesthetic end in itself. While the expressive radiance, the translucency guaranteed by the gauze, characterises the surface of the image, one can not overlook the fact that a second script is hidden behind the beautiful appearance that determines the visual texture, turning the shibboleth of those massive movements of forced migration of today, which characterise this era as one of hunger, misery, oppression, war and barbarism into the provocative subject of aesthetic production and political reflection. This political reflection is engaged thinking, that is — while being challenging — at the same time inherently a consistent declaration of war, a declaration of war to political humiliation, social degradation and economic exploitation, and which combines itself with a contrasting aesthetic procedure, that turns the work of art into a subtly staged ‚oeuvre d’art‘ with a double ground, a palimpsest in an equally modern (avantgardist) and conventional (proven in the past) sense.

What is a palimpsest? The palimpsest is a text, behind which a second, a programmatic and subversive subtext, hides — a text that has an exoteric and esoteric dimension, which is thus being characterized by its special form-content dialectic, and that serves the insubordinate and defiant artist as an effective means of expression in accordance with the circumstances, and above all in times of dependency but also in epochs of omnipotent political and social pressures of conformity. Therefore, in the Green Screens, the polyvalent photographer / graphic artist / sculptor can play with all the important variables of meaning, which are open to him by the ‚screen’ concept. A ‚screen‘ is a shield, an aperture, a filter, a grid, a projection screen, the movie, cinema, masking, concealment and camouflage. It is the essence of these luminous refugee-tableaux, that they are all of those aspects together: a screen, a projection screen as well as a means of masking, of concealment and of camouflage. At the same time, the palimpsest is in an outstanding way suitable to reconcile the memory work — that is oriented at and dialectically related to the petrified collective images (which in the sense of Walter Benjamin’s historical philosophical theories aim at overthrowing the new conformism which threatens to overwhelm the work of memory) — with the playful aesthetic requirements of a fully differentiated sphere of art which is subject to its own laws. As  already suspected by Baudelaire (and then known by Freud) memory is characterized by the overlapping of different layers of memory where always one reminiscence is deformed, displaced, hidden or erased by another. Just as the work of art proves to be a palimpsest by its form, the palimpsest is as a storage a medium of an art-of-memory that is inaugurated by a work of art. It is an art of memory, or an ‚ars memorativa‘ which is dependent upon particles of reality that have been wrested from their time context, cut up and artistically alienated.

Markus Döhne is, as Hans-Peter Riese 1998 emphasized at the opening of the exhibition in the foyer of the Hessian Radio, one of the few contemporary artists that deal with political content instead of surrendering exclusively to formal experimentation. At the same time, speaking with Brecht, he posesses the list of a political citizen which is required in order to not only recognize the truth, but also to spread it. „At all times when truth was suppressed and hidden a list was applied in order to disseminate it …“ remarked the playwright in his literary manifesto On the five difficulties in writing the truth, and then pointed to the example of Confucius, who, by only changing some words in an old reactionary historical calendar, he allowed for ‚a re-evaluation of history‘. Also those changes which Döhne brings about by his fragmentary quotation of contemporary photographic documents are only slight and yet aim at promoting not only a new assessment of history, but also — thereby — at making social conditions dance to a melody which he himself sings to them.

In this subversive business the „elegance“ of style is extremely useful, and a „high“ artistic „level“ serves as a protection. This is one of the key insights that Brecht formulated in his manifesto and which in his translucent refugee images Döhne turns into his principle of form, design and presentation. At last, it is not the dialectical tension (and in a certain sense the non-resolvable contradiction) between the painful beauty of form and the radical integrity of political thought, which prevents the observer to come to rest, which gives the decisive impulse for the critical reading of the image and which determines the aesthetic process that is due to the palimpsest nature of the work. Since, only in the reflective observer who is not satisfied with the role of the passive art consumer and who fails to cancel the inscribed form-content dialectic of the Refugee Series, the Green Screens reveal themselves.

While insisting as Bert Brecht on the engaging mind, he is, like the poet of the Buckow Elegies, committed to the dialectic of an epochal crisis and its artistic criticism. The left melancholy is alien to him. For, he has a clear political and historical consciousness. His Green Screens are — just like the former Petrograd Tubes and the latter Narcotic Nirvana Nightmare — a sure sign for that. As soon as the winds blow, why should the artist hesitate to put an all-weather sail for his contemporaries. Since the political climate — or shall we say bluntly: the era — denies this for the time being, he makes us one of sticks and tarpaulin.
   Paris, End of December 2007
Translated from German by Gisela Pauli Caldas