Fascinating "Underworlds": Two Exhibitions in Dialogue
A conversation about the exhibitions "Beneath the Earth" and "Über Unterwelten" (On Underworlds)
When each of became aware of the other's exhibition project, both instantly became curious: Kathrin Beßen, curator of "Beneath the Earth: From Kafka to Kippenberger" at the K21, and her colleague Dr. Eckhard Schinkel, who was responsible for the "Über Unterwelten. Zeichen und Zauber des anderen Raums" (On Underworlds: Symbols and Magic of a Different Space) at the LWL-Industriemuseum (Museum of Industry) in the Zeche Zollern in Dortmund: the two have known one another since February of 2012.
Initially, there were informal contacts, then plans for a possible collaboration. The result was a highly stimulating exchange on the question of how one might exhibit the "subterranean." After the exhibition "Beneath the Earth: From Kafka to Kippenberger" closed at the K21, the two colleagues from Düsseldorf and Dortmund met again in order to review their experiences for #32.
Kathrin Beßen: Let's begin by speaking concretely about our exchange. Has your project changed since our first meeting?
Dr. Eckhard Schinkel: Back then, our concepts were for the most part finalized, as we learned from one another. Had we developed our ideas jointly from the beginning, our exhibitions would certainly have been interlinked with one another more substantially. One piece from our show could even be regarded as a historic stimulus in this direction: the project for a "Rhenish-Westphalian Express Train" (1924), designed to link Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Dortmund with subterranean stations. One day, perhaps, this Metrorapid will become a reality, making it easier for visitors to explore locations that are remote from one another.
Beßen: For the LWL Museum of Industry, was there a concrete historical background that led to your devoting an exhibition to this theme? Can you tell us about your objectives?
Schinkel: Yes, in the year 2018, coal mining will come to an end in Germany. We need to respond to this, just as we need to respond to the fundamental challenges facing museum work today: generational shifts, participation, globalization, to mention just a few buzzwords, and not even mentioning numerous institutional factors. Museum work today operates within a complex framework, and incidentally, personal contacts that are based on trust are more important than ever. In the context of the project "On Underworlds," we wanted to experiment with the potentialities and boundaries of the museum.
To a certain extent, we wanted to allow the conventional exhibition space, along with the boundaries between academic disciplines and museum types, to become permeable. One consideration was the question: What happens when cultural history and contemporary art encounter one another? In our exhibition, this is achieved through artistic interventions. Erupting in the midst of technical information on the topic of "urban drainage systems" is Hans Schabus's video "Western" (2002), his boat ride through Vienna's subterranean sewer tunnels. In her floor installation "Selbstlos im Lavabad" (Selfless in the Bath of Lava; a/v installation 1994), Pipilotti Rist opposes the thesis of the demystification of the lower depths through science beginning in early modern times. I was fascinated by the way in which the unexpected was taken up, radicalized, and expanded spatially in your exhibition "Beneath the Earth."
Beßen: In late 2012, for example, during our search for subterranean locations for new artistic works, we hit upon the idea of tackling the city map of subterranean Düsseldorf as a print product. One result of this was the computer game "Stadt unter! Ein Mapping Game der Kunstsammlung" (City Below! A Mapping Game of the Kunstsammlung). The decision about how to deal with literature in the exhibition space – namely to absorb it into the audio guide – was clarified later as well. Fortunately, we received permission for the two works by Max Ernst in summer of 2013, which was a great relief. The final major step concerning loaned works was the acquisition of Bruce Nauman's "Circle."
Schinkel: Once we began to engage with this new perspective from below, with the image and symbol complex of the "underworld," a vast, an extraordinarily vast – even unsurveyable – field opened itself up to us. The underworld is one of the fundamental metaphors of human existence. It leaves no one unmoved. This was the source of an essential motivation, not just to reflect on participative structures in our project, but to make some of them fruitful for the exhibition as well. Preserved in collective memory, or better: in the cultural archive, are the most diverse symbols and associations, notions and metaphors. These can be documented and collected, but you need to make a selection and develop an exhibition design. In the exhibition, such underworld images become enthralling in the best sense when they are confronted with examples from present-day memory, or when, even after leaving the museum, they open up the viewer's eyes – as in your computer game "Stadt unter!" – to the surroundings, to the everyday lifeworld.
In the context of a "historic depth drilling," we took up the theme of the "bunker" and of "shelter." This information acquired a proximity to life, became highly moving, when it resurfaced in the recollections of contemporary witnesses. This was preceded by an interview project carried out by my colleague Andreas Immenkamp. Excerpts from the results were incorporated into the exhibition. The accompanying event, an open discussion with contemporary witnesses, elicited marked interest. Here as well, there is an artistic intervention. The photographer Cornelia Suhan asked young people: "What would you take along if you had to retreat into such a shelter?" We show her portrait photographs together with the objects, and juxtapose them with the contents of an emergency bag of the kind that was often kept on hand during World War II.
Beßen: In my experience, the underground has been a theme visitors have reflected upon in especially exciting ways. Guided tours and encounters around the exhibition have been great fun, and very productive. During preparations for your exhibition, you announced a photo competition which encountered an incredible response. You received 16,000 hits during the process of voting for the best 50 submissions. On the one hand, this testifies to enthusiasm for the topic, on the other, for the exceptional activation of the public in relation to the exhibition. Have you arrived at an explanation of why the subterranean is such a fascinating topic for so many people?
Schinkel: Yes, it's true. Rarely, during guided tours, have I encountered such a readiness to share stories. Singular stories are related as well by the photographs that were entered into our "My Underworlds" photo competition. It was announced in spring of 2013, and judged through user voting. The 50 works that received the most votes are on view today at the entrance to the exhibition – before the ticket counter, incidentally. This public gallery is more than a marketing event. It is an extremely important pillar of our exhibition, within which past and present confront one another continually. Here, we were inspired by Aleida Assmann. The competition contributions represent the communicative aspect – in contradistinction to cultural memory. In an exemplary fashion, the competition documents the sources that energize underworld imagery today, and the degree to which religion (to mention this topic only in passing) has retreated into the background. At this point, I must also mention the underworld archive, which by now is as comprehensive as it is multifarious. In the context of an educational partnership with the museum, it was assembled in an interdisciplinary way by the Hittorf Gymnasium in Recklinghausen in collaboration with my colleague Anja Hoffmann. These examples of exuberant fantasy, creativity, and reflection would be well worth pursuing beyond the confines of the exhibition itself.
Beßen: When communicating about our exhibitions, we use very similar vocabularies to verbalize the resonating ambivalence we encounter concerning subterranean spaces. You speak of "frisson and desire," we speak of "withdrawal and danger zones." Not just the language we use demonstrates that atmospherically, our projects complement one another quite well. In your presentation, one receives the fundamentals in the form of images and objects of the contents that artists have aestheticized in our show. I certainly found your introduction in terms of cultural and religious history to be quite impressive.
Schinkel: In fact, this ambivalence is irreducible. You can't get around it, or as Manfred Sack asked: "Where else would you find reality and myth, banality and mystery, shelter and threat in such close proximity to one another than below the earth?" Let's take the theme of religion. We live in a migration society, and one aspect of this is the presence of the most various religions, which people have brought with them. But what do we know about them? We show underworld images from Christendom, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, and elucidate them. In addition, we have been able to recruit representatives of the various religions to speak to our visitors about underworlds from their perspectives. In their efforts to explain something quite personal, in their seriousness and intensity, these are quite wonderful contributions, and are genuinely captivating. Moreover, the entries in our visitors' book show that these contributions on the underworlds constitute a bridge connecting people from various faith communities – something our museum has never experienced before.
Beßen: The objects you have assembled in the mining department for the thematic block on religion, or for the presentation of subterranean infrastructure, or quite concretely, for example, the rescue capsule used during the mining accident in Lengede for the section on mining: all of these share a powerful immediacy.
Schinkel: Certainly. The display objects play a role that can hardly be overestimated. It seems to me that in many discussions about the future of the museum – which are indispensable, and must be carried out – the objects become somewhat marginalized. They are simultaneously resources, as well as objects for exemplary presentations. Collections are and remain the backbone of any museum. One of the favorite objects among young people in this exhibition is the mummy. The question: Is it real? shows us that the object reaches a deeper level of consciousness than an image of a mummy could. And something similar happened with the reconstruction of the rescue capsule from Lengede, which people are allowed to touch, and into which you can insert your head. The original, a loan from the Deutsches Bergbaumuseum (German Mining Museum) in Bochum, hangs above it. Since this object evokes familiar events, my colleague Dagmar Kift exploited the possibility of considering mining and mining culture, which are so decisive for the das Ruhr Region, from a new perspective. And when, in the exhibition department, my colleague Maja Lange uses hundreds of cell phones to lead past the "Future of Energy" to a display case containing rare earth metals, it creates a bridge into the underworld of mining on various continents, and our dependency on them.
Beßen: Personally, I find it worrisome that so few engineers, architects, and urban planners are aware of our exhibition, although we are presenting concrete locations, the topography of the subterranean – albeit in a figurative sense. For the present, apparently, we need to accept the fact that we are regarded primarily as an institute of fine arts, and that our public is correspondingly limited. You have reported, for example, that engineers come to view specific exhibition chapters, that you are hopeful they will have a look at others as well. How do you deal with this situation?
Schinkel: Discussions about target groups are conducted right at the beginning of a project's development, and accompany it right to the finish. Marketing strategies and public relations activities, from education to communication, build on these. In these contexts, visitors, but also various groups, are handled as ideal types. In exhibition practice, such a concentration on individual interests and needs can be clarifying, but may also lead to conflicts. With an exhibition that deals with cultural history, we are of course negotiating highly diverse horizons of interest, but it hardly seems possible to satisfy all demands evenhandedly. In my view, the readiness to embrace plurality and compromise in concrete projects is one of the greatest challenges facing future exhibition planning.
Beßen: Is there one piece that has emerged as a favorite object, one capable of uniting all of your visitors? For "Beneath the Earth," it would have to be Roni Horn's "Ant Farm" or Thomas Demand's "Grotto."
Schinkel: Absolutely. One object in "On Underworlds" has proven inescapable. Based on a late-18th century model, the English artist Robert Poulter, together with our workshops, built a "Eidophusikon," a small 'movie' theater from the time before pictures learned to move. Shown is a piece without words, but with dramatic music, entitled "Als die Hölle auf die Erde kam" (When Hell Came to Earth). In order to operate the scenery, we were able to recruit two teams of volunteers, who give performances at fixed times. Just moments after the curtain is raised, all of the bystanders, small and large, young and old, media-friendly or not, look as though transfixed at the events on the stage. For just a few moments, everything around them is forgotten. Everyone gets caught up in it.
Accompanying exhibitions on the theme of "Underworlds" are on view at seven locations of the LWL Industriemuseum. www.lwl-industriemuseum.de
Fans of the underworld still have a bit of time to discover the wide-ranging exhibition in Dortmund. It runs until November 2, 2014.
