Weltschmerz (World Pain) Glares ― Günther Uecker and Japan

According to Günther Uecker’s biography in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition entitled Man’s Inhumanity (Der geschundene Mensch) that was held in Japan in 2004, the Chernobyl incident prompted him to create the Ashes Pictures and Ashes Man of 1986. In 1987, the biography tells us, he and a group of his students visited the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics as well as the Radiation Institute and Environmental Institute in Munich. These facts are particularly poignant to those people in Japan who, in 2011, experienced the Great East Japan Earthquake, its tsunamis, and the ensuing Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

In 2004, Uecker’s works—embracing the disclosure of crises that remain latent in human societies—were presented to the world as a visual representation of crises from an artist’s perspective. This Uecker exhibition, the largest to have been held in Japan to date, was eagerly awaited and highly acclaimed. But how many visitors were able to “hear” the wake-up call in his art that warned of imminent crises?

And so we helplessly found ourselves at that fateful moment: 2:46 pm, March 11, 2011.

The very same Mistreated Men exhibition had opened in Lithuania about a month after 9/11 in the US. Uecker concluded in his opening speech for this exhibition: “My desire is to search for possibilities of dialogue between peoples who stir in us a sense of suspicion and those with different religious backgrounds, and to take on the challenges of overcoming intolerance and establishing peace.” At another exhibition opened in a gallery in Berlin one year later, he said, “The work titled Dialogue shows the words of the messengers of peace referenced from the Bible and the Quran as a pair facing each other.”

Uecker’s attitude to the karma of humans is represented plainly in the title of an exhibition that toured Japan. The original German title Der geschundene Mensch was translated into English as Man’s Inhumanity. Although both Mensch and “man” refer to human beings, the German title takes a passive construction in which the human is being mistreated. In the English title, however, “man” is represented as the agent of inhumanity. The Japanese translation was rendered in a literary style that carries both of these connotations, implying that mistreatment and inhumanity are not the result of an individual human act, whereby the perpetrator and the victim are separate from each other, but that each and every one of us is at the same time perpetrator and victim.

In Japan, after that fateful day on March 11, 2011, Uecker’s message prompted further questions, such as “What is art capable of?” and “What can artists do?” These questions were often heard in art circles, and a number of exhibitions were held that seemed to have been based on these questions. Most of these activities were carried out by young artists who might be described as artist-activists. However, it seems that the majority of their attempts merely revealed their utter helplessness in squarely facing the ramifications of the massive earthquake and failed to achieve artistic refinement. This resulted in a collectively produced string of embarrassments that has invited public derision.

The questions “What is art capable of?” and “What can artists do?” did not originate from the general public, but amongst artists, and were directed at the artists themselves. This indicates that few people in Japan realized that an answer had already been formulated—by Günther Uecker.

Uecker had already cried out a decade prior to September 11, 2001. His title Violation of Humans by Humans is not an expression of something that arose in the 21st century, by which time all semblance of day-to-day security had long crumbled. Sensitive artists had already sensed the pain that would result from passenger planes being hijacked by terrorists and the Fukushima reactor meltdown before these events were thrust before our eyes. Uecker’s cognition of the situation was renderable in works of art because of his use of nails,” a material that is a sensual visualization of the act of both inflicting damage and being inflicted by it; in other words, the nature of passive and active. The nail expresses this dichotomy of meanings: creation and destruction. Nails are ubiquitous in our day-to-day lives, and Uecker makes use of their formative characteristics―thin and long, hard, pointed, and having a dull metallic sheen―as well as their vulnerabilities.

While “Water and safety are free” would have expressed the prevailing mindset of Japanese society until recently, we have now been transformed into a country in which TV, newspapers, and the Internet report on terrorism, abductions, restructuring, bullying, child abuse, kidnapping, and nuclear power plant disasters, which have become part of our daily lives. The sound of Günther Uecker hitting the nails as he laments the arrival of an apocalyptic or latter-day world as expressed in Violation of Humans by Humans is something that we here in Japan must allow to resonate as loudly as we can.

Kazuhiro Yamamoto (*1958) lives and works in Nasu-Plateau and Utsunomiya City and is senior curator at the Tochigi Prefectural Museum of Fine Arts and vice chairperson of standing committee of AICA (International Association of Art Critics) JAPAN.