2018
Ottjörg A.C. is an artist and collector of surface markings. Touring innumerable cities around the world, his projects Deskxistence and Existentmale register anonymous traces of existence. These can be the marks of hip-hop culture that become inscriptions on subways and trains, or simple traces, left on house facades.
In O Poder da Multiplicação [The Power of Multiplication], an exhibition shown 2018 in Porto Alegre, the artist engaged in urban interventions. As part of the work Marca Urbana, monotypes from his series Marca Rural were inserted into public monuments. In reversion of the natural order of progress, here it is the rural order that takes over the city. Ever since Romanticism, one of the assignments of art was to reflect the differences between nature and culture. In Ottjörg’s work it is nature, represented by animal blood, bovine testicles and horsehair, that reclassifies urban symbols.
The monuments in our public squares are legacies of a bellicose and nationalistic approach to history. Erected in the 19th century, they have turned into the contrary of memorials, since we can hardly identify with these national heroes. Where the text plaques have been removed from the monuments of Porto Alegre’s city centre, Ottjörg inserted resin tablets that include animal matter in the same dimensions of the void in the pedestal. Originally, the plaques were there to remind passers-by of the monument’s significance. Their absence symbolizes the loss of meaning and importance of marks of Nationalism and the pride therein. Public squares become cultural graveyards, transformed by the inability to identify with the violence represented by these generals and political leaders. A symptom of amnesia, but also a sign of healing.
By inserting his biological monotypes into the empty spaces, Ottjörg unveils an unexpected perspective upon this graveyard. Monuments that were conceived to commemorate people and events, to admonish and remember (monere)1 – are forgotten and have become invisible, however large they may be.
They were testimonies of a perception of history that Nietzsche called monumental history, used by the powerful to justify and validate their actions. In his essay Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben [The Use and Abuse of History for Life], the second part of his Untimely Meditations, he wrote: “That the great moments in the struggles of individuals form links in one single chain; that they combine to form a mountain range of humankind through the millennia; that for me the highest point of such a long-since-past-moment is still alive, bright and great – this is the fundamental thought in the belief in humanity that expresses itself in the demand for a monumental history. Precisely this demand that what is great be eternal sparks the most terrible struggle, however. For every other living thing cries out: ‘No. The monumental shall not come into being.’ – this is the watchword of those who oppose it.”
Nietzsche‘s words, written in 1874, resonated deeply with Walter Benjamin. In 1939 the latter wrote his theses Über den Begriff der Geschichte [On the Concept of History] among the deafening and fateful sounds of the Second World War: “Those who currently rule are […] the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time. This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage which he cannot contemplate without horror.“
This horror that the critical materialist observer perceives to emanate from any cultural heritage is what leads Ottjörg to carry out his interventions in public space, and on its grand monuments in particular. And it is the same horror that reverberates in the violent subordination of not only people but also animals, in order that civilisation may triumph.
Let us have a closer look at the materials used by the artist. Ottjörg collects organic substances from horses and cattle: animals that have been kept as livestock and served humanity for millennia. A natural history of violence is inscribed in the historic relationship between our species and those animals. Testicles appear symptomatically in Ottjörg’s work: as one of the organic materials of this magma of natural history, they constitute the fabric of the monotype. Given its performative anti-monumentalisation, Ottjörg’s artwork is an avowed counter-witness to the monuments’ testimony of great men’s merit and heroism. Adding memorial plaques to their pedestals, the artist opens our eyes to what has been forgotten: to history as a history of violence and genocide of cattle and of the horses that carried those men. Significantly, these counter-testimonies display testicles as their argument. The word testicle is derived from Latin testis, meaning both testimony and testicle. Interestingly enough, this relationship between attestation and masculinity prevails in the German language. The term Zeugen, testimony to a fact, should henceforth unite its patriarchal meanings. The 19th century Adelung‘s dictionary reads: „To bear witness, to confirm the truth of a matter by one's experience. A woman cannot procreate [zeugen], cannot give witness [Zeugen]. Witness for, against someone.“ Bearing witness is exclusively masculine, just as in monuments there are only men sitting on horses. It is in the Adelung‘s dictionary as well that we can find a definition of zeugen specifically as procreation, in the masculine sense of fertilisation, formulated in a no less misogynistic way:
“To bring forth a thing of its kind from itself, or by direct communication of its essence. 1. Actually, since it is used only by rational beings, at first only by the father. He has only begotten [gezeuget] one son. Begetting [zeugen] children with his wife.“
The author of the dictionary himself attests to the contamination of the Germanic term zeugen with Greco-Latin testis/testiculus: “It is remarkable that testify [zeugen], generare, the following zeugen, testari, zeihen, zeigen, and ziehen, in their meanings and derivations very often merge into one another, which among other things also appears in the derivations Zucht [breeding] and bezüchtigen [to chastise]. It seems to be clear from this that all three terms formerly came together in a third, more general meaning, and may have been only one and the same word. Thus, in Lat. testis, as much a witness as a part of the reproductive apparatus, diminut. testiculus."
There are innumerable documents that likewise associate testimony and masculinity – the Bible is one of them. If Nietzsche criticized a monumentalist perspective on history and historiography, it is only fair to criticize a monumentalist bequest of the testimony. In this tradition, the testimony is reduced to a positivistic notion of proof.
After all, testis derives from the Greek terstis, meaning a third, a neutral entity capable of objectively narrating reality. With his series Marca Rural, Ottjörg deconstructs both historic monumentalism and phallocentric, positivistic testimony (which in traditionalist societies even excludes women from courtrooms).
Blood, horsehair and animal testicles create a potent basis for the aesthetic tension found in Ottjörg’s work. As Benjamin argues, art is no longer a nostalgic description of the encounter with nature, but signals the potential violence on the flip side of culture. The artist creates mnemonic devices that inscribe violence where it has been hidden. By bringing the monuments back to visibility, Ottjörg points out their latent violence. The ironic passage in Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] could be read as an epigraph to this theatre of memory. It concisely notes: “Für Männer: überzeugen ist unfruchtbar.” (“For Men: To convince is to conquer without conception.”)
Note:
1 Whereas the English verb to moan derives from mānan, a variant of mænan “complain, moan”, also “tell, intend, signify”, Latin monere translates to advise or warn – introducing a sense of foreboding. Understanding it this way gives memory a capacity of prevention.
Márcio Seligmann-Silva holds a PhD from the Free University of Berlin, was a visiting scholar at Yale and at the Zentrum für Literaturforschung (Berlin). Since 2000 he is professor of Literary Theory at Unicamp, Brazil. His publications include several books and essays in journals in Latin America, USA and Europe.