For more recent articles, check out www.coretext.net |
The story is a familiar one. I think you know it well. How Hitler and key cohorts of the Nazi regime took works of art from public and private collections throughout Europe, by any means possible, including theft and forced sale. The best of these were destined for the proposed Museum in Linz, and stored for that purpose in the nearby salt mines at Alt Aussee.And perhaps you remember as well, how Eigruber, the Nazi functionary in charge of the Linz area, gave the order that bombs be placed inside the mines, to be set off before the Allies could enter; how the miners (and eventually so many others) took credit for sabotaging this plan and saving the art; how among the first officials who arrived during the liberation of Europe, sometimes preceding all others, were the art experts, how it was their task to find the secret hiding places, recover and restore and document the artworks, and begin the process of returning them to their rightful owners.
Though the salt mines were not in the end bombed from within as planned, it was difficult in the confusion to determine what had been the actual contents of the storage chambers.
-from Body Missing
Reportedly, tens of thousands of works from all over the world were acquired by the Nazis by any means possible, from forced sale to theft, beginning around 1939, stolen by Hitler in his attempt to acquire the world's most valuable art for his proposed personal "Fuhrermuseum". In the 50 years following World War II, various efforts from international political bodies attempted to return all of the recovered works to their rightful owners, making it illegal for anyone otherwise to steal or sell the works before their rightful owners had recovered them.
But some works were never found. Today, an underground market for the pieces flourishes still, and some works remain exhibited in the small living rooms of the townsfolk who quietly acquired the works after the liberation of Europe, never to reported them to authorities. All in all, hundreds of still lost works, ranging from the check names of pieces still missing.
Enter Vera Frenkel, Canadian multimedia artist who, in 1992 when exhibiting her video installation ...from the Transit Bar at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz, Germany -- coincidenatlly also the proposed location for Hitler's personal museum -- was to create an environment that would become the starting point for a small but important new component to finding the lost art works of World War II.
"When the Transit Bar was installed at the Offenes Kulturhaus in Linz and became a hang-out for the artists who exhibited upstairs, the conversations turned sometimes to the unanswered questions surrounding the missing art. Slowly, regulars at the bar began to appear with lists, photograph, reports, discovered by one means or another, often contradictory, and tried to do what their counterparts 50 years earlier had already attempted: to determine which were the works first stored at Alt Aussee for the Fuhrermuseum, and which had somehow disappeared."
The Transit Bar, first shown at documenta IX in Kassel, Germany in 1992, is a six-channel videodisk installation and functional piano bar, with narrative voice overs in Polish, Yiddish, and subtitled in alternating English, French, and German. Currently exhibiting at The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa untill September 2nd, the piece addresses "questions of displacement and the benefits of uncertainty" via the presence of 14 on-camera storytellers who immerse visitors in a transient of space and time, documentary and fictional realities, the present and the historical past, art and life, meet and sometimes change places. In the initimate presence of the bar -- where real drinks are served and becomes a true social space for both visitors and artists -- the characters, strangers to us, are moved to tell each other something of their lives.
Artists who were regulars at the Transit Bar in Linz often found themselves discussing the possible whereabouts of particular lost pieces.
It's easy for talk to drift towards particular works, whether destined for Linz or not, and for somebody to say, "I've always been curious about the missing Canalettos." Or for someone else to shake her head, and regret the disappearance of a certain Courbet known by name only, no one remembering ever having seen the image itself. One woman feels she can almost see the lost preparatory drawing for a Tintoretto painting that has survived only in photographs. Someone new to the table stresses the generic nature of loss and has no special longing for the recovery of this painting or that. "It's all crazy," he says, "It was then, and it is now."
Yet, one by one the artists find themselves drawn to certain works and as if by itself a plan evolves to reconstruct these. These would be no ordinary imitative reconstructions, however. No, that would be of no interest at all. The plan that emerged was to realize personal visual links between present studio practice and particular lost works; a gesture.
By the time Frenkel's installation was to come to Toronto in 1994 for an exhibition at The Power Plant, the idea of a virtual Transit Bar on the World Wide Web started to make sense as a way of furthering the efforts of other artists interested in investigating the possible whereabouts of the lost art. "It began with an invitation from the Special Projects Programme of ISEA'95 in Montreal to make a work, and it was indeed around the time that the Toronto version of the Transit Bar was to close, maybe a couple of weeks earlier," says Frenkel. "People were already talking about how much they would miss it, and that was one of the things that may have entered into my decision."
So began Body Missing, the Internet extension of The Transit Bar aimed at the investigation into the events surrounding the planned Hitlermuseum and the effort to find the lost works of art.
As Frenkel describes, the Web was the perfect medium for the idea of Body Missing. "The nature of the project itself, its theme, the international range of its participants, and the intertextuality that interests me in all my work, seemed to call for another approach suggesting that the Web was the most suitable medium," she says. "It's odd to describe now, but it really felt as if the Web had been invented just to suit my way of thinking and seeing and working, allowing me the level of complexity and the mix of knowns and unknowns that the project required."
Body Missing now exists as an ever-expanding virtual focal point for the efforts of those artists in their own investigations. Working with web site designers James Allan in Montreal, and Steev Morgan in Toronto, with advice from York University Webmaster Rod Potter, a prototype was eventually churned out in time for ISEA '95 in September. Other key programmers include Guenther Gessaert in Linz, Austria, and Laura Padgett in Weimar, Germany. Frenkel asserts the task wasn't always easy. "I think people imagined it'd be a quick and simple translation of an existing concept. Instead, I allowed it to develop its own inner imperatives and found myself following clues and suggestions that arose from the working process itself. I never bothered with a storyboard. I started drawing a series of linked pages at one point, and it was fun, but the mind is so much richer than pieces of paper. I wanted the project to develop its own climate rather than being just a translation of existing pages, and I just plunged in. It was wonderful to be able to say to a gifted programmer, 'Let's do this...' or 'Let's try that ...', and [then] explore together."
Although one of the main purposes of Body Missing is firmly rooted in the very real search for the lost art works, the site is also designed to blur the distinction between fact and fiction. At times, wandering through this very intricate web site feels like playing a game of Myst -- occasionally you stumble over a newpaper clipping or a note from an artist as to their most recent finding.
This was very intentional, says Frenkel, who notes that she wanted each person to invent his or her own path, and experience whatever highs and lows might be associated with the very real road to discovering a true story. "One thing was clear to me and that was that I wanted to work with the relation of so-called fact and so-called fiction so that the visitor's perception would oscillate between the two. I prefer this way of working to the kind of closure that characterizes 'the documentary.' The uncertainty regarding who is telling you what keeps the questioning -- and therefore the issues -- alive. It really is a climate rather than a series of train tracks."
With the original concept of the site up for almost a year now, it has grown considerably. Artists who are involved with their own investigations, living primarily in Canada and Europe, update their pages as they find out more information, or refine the ways in which their contributions are made. "For artists participating in the project, the work of research, commemoration and reinvention is highly personal. Each contribution is very different from all the others," she asserts. "What we are able to do, as art must do, is to raise awareness of the madness that is involved with the so-called cultural booty of war, the accompanying acquisitiveness and collecting fever, the lies and dissimulations that perhaps characterize almost every museum collection in Europe and a number in North America as well." Much progress has also been made in completing the French and German versions of the site -- linked to the primary homepage -- as a way of greatly expanding the audience for Body Missing, as well as the progress for the search for the missing art.
So what, after all this, does Vera Frenkel think of the Web as an artistic medium? "Most [of] what I've seen isn't art. Information isn't art. Information isn't even meaning unless you know how to contextualize and receive it," she responds. "I see lots of amplifications of existing cultural neuroses, from power-hunger to narcissism, and that's to be expected, but I'd really like to see works of art of all kinds that connect with the time, space, and multidisciplinarity implications of the Net. It's an omni-dimensional distorting mirror, if you like, as well as on the micro-level a research tool, a sop for loneliness, a merchandising potential and the rest." She adds that the thing that makes her most impatient when on the Net is not only the problem of corporate design, where so many sites look like they come from an annual report, but the insistence of their designers on patronizing and over-instructing the viewer.
In the meantime, this celebrated Canadian artist is busy. After it's exhibit in Ottawa is finished, The Transit Bar and Body Missing are headed to the C.I.A.C. (Centre International d'Art Contemporain) in Montreal, the Gesellschaft fuer Aktuelle Kunst in Bremen in the context of an international symposium of the whole issue of stolen or appropriated artworks, to Stockholm, and finally to the Rijkutstallningar (a Swedish Travelling Exhibition), where they will be joined by the Transit Bar coming from the Centre of Contemporary Art in Warsaw for the first stop on a Scandinavian tour.
And how much of the missing artwork of World War II has been recovered? Says Frenkel, "It's a very grey area and far more politically sensitive even today than I realized when I began the project in Linz in 1994. Since then there have been two major exhibitions of captured war trophies in Russia, and one at the Muse d'Orsay in Paris, of works now belonging to the state because their rightful owners never returned. The Austrian Government has been embarrassed into finally acknowledging all the stolen works in its possession and has very recently handed a body of work over for public auction assisted by the Jewish Community in Vienna, with proceeds to go to charity.
"Looking at the many lists I was able to find made it clear that nothing fit, or matched, or could be traced reliably. There is still, apparently, an active traffic in contraband or stolen artworks, and Toronto seems to have been a centre of this activity for many years. The Web site includes excerpts from documents by representatives of the U.S. Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Branch, whose task it was to re-distribute the stolen artworks after the end of the war. Published for the first time, they include eyewitness acounts of thefts and curious negotations, and the first reference I've ever seen to 'Internal Looting' which means theft by those commissioned to safeguard the works."
For Frenkel, the construction of Body Missing has given her a personal insight into the ways of people and their obsessions. "Making this work has given me a sobering portrait of certain aspects of the human psyche," she says, adding that "...the story's far from over."