WHAT BEAUTY IS, I KNOW NOT

Installation view of WHAT BEAUTY IS, I KNOW NOT at KÖNIG GALERIE. © Image by Roman März

„The initial idea for this piece published in KÖNIG MAGAZINE was that I should interview SUSI POP. We thought to explore the subject of the group exhibition What Beauty Is, I Know Not, starting with Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818 – 1819) and including Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia (1514) as well as writer Peter Weiss’s reflections on these era-defining works; the idea sounded workable. But when we actually put pen to paper, it turned out to be anything but. SUSI POP is a construct, there is no first person; there is no “I” or “we.” So how could we possibly come up with a conversation to be published? One way out of this predicament was to invite Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, who is not only an acknowledged connoisseur of the 1980s (West) Berlin art scene and an early observer of the development of SUSI POP, he also produces emphatic texts that take surprising perspectives on contemporary art and current affairs.“– Kasper König

© Image by Roman März

Living in the End Times
By Oliver Koerner von Gustorf

In 2015, Banksy sprayed his latest version of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa onto the walls of buildings close to the notorious “jungle” refugee camp in Calais. Géricault’s original from 1819 had already been provocative in its time, almost a century earlier: near to five meters high and seven meters across his work was a radical break from the conventions of history painting. Rather than portraying idealized heroic acts of warriors and rulers, it showed a humanitarian disaster, one which had triggered a political scandal just less than three years before the work was made: the sinking of the military frigate Medusa on its way to Senegal, a French colony at the time. Insufficient lifeboat capacity had left survivors to cobble together a raft from the ruins of the ship. 149 people drifted on the high seas—the consequences were only catastrophic. In danger of starving, they turned to cannibalism; they ate each other until just fifteen survived. The French Minister of War was forced to resign, and Géricault became the first artist to monumentalize a newspaper report. His painting was viewed primarily as an allegory for the failure of a political system whose leaders had not anticipated the disaster and had left a generation of disorientated people to their own devices.

Almost two hundred years later, Banksy reversed the signs. En route from Africa to Europe, the refugees on his raft wave desperately at a luxury yacht as it sails by oblivious. The Calais murals were removed some years ago and the area where the camp once was is now fenced in to become a nature reserve. But the refugees are still there. And the image of The Raft of the Medusa remains ingrained in popular culture as a symbol for the collapse of political systems. Géricault’s original is a key attraction of the Louvre in Paris. More recently, it has appeared in the celebrated video APESHIT (2018) by the Carters. Beyoncé, Jay-Z, and a ballet company are seenin the museum at night, dancing and posing in front ofthe Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, and Géricault’s famous painting.

The video camera hones in on an important detail of the painting: above a mound of corpses of Caucasian males, a muscular man of color with back turned is waving a flag as though in statement against slavery and inequality. It’s a detail that aligns with the message of the two emancipated African-American artists who in their video confront European art history, virtually becoming works of art themselves; these superrich individuals have managed to claim the famous museum as their own private space, as their living room. But the video also shows how The Raft of the Medusa can become instrumentalized, commercialized, a mere fetish. The painting is a projection screen for today’s state of inequality: the lifelines of migrants, refugees, minorities, and the poor have been cut, just as those on the lifeboats of the Medusa once were; it also collects all kinds of opinions, from the demand for open borders and an end to racism to an admission of political failure and calls for nationalistic, authoritarian leadership.

Exhibition view: Picasso/Pollock/SUSI POP at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, 2002

In SUSI POP’s screen-printed version, Géricault’s master- 
piece appears weary, almost faded. Composed of 
twenty-eight separate pieces, it is about the size of the original, but in no way is it monumental. Instead, it seems more like an afterimage left under your eyelids from the sun. And yet here and there it also appears painterly, seen in the hazy gray areas and with the dots that seem to merge, which are reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s early Death and Disaster series from 1963 or his meditative Shadows (1978–79). And what a choice of color! Magenta: a component of CMYK used in four-color printing; today’s corporate color of Deutsche Telekom; 
a hue that calls to mind the pink triangle worn by concentration camp prisoners and the dungarees of the late 1970s gay movement; a color that does indeed have a sexual connotation.

SUSI POP, who originates from the Berlin art scene of the 1980s, leads a kind of double life. On the one hand, she is a conceptual artist influenced by the Pictures 
Generation and appropriation art, who describes herself as a “brand” and her works as “products”: for example, she appropriates media images of the Nazis invading Paris, X-ray images of trucks hiding Mexican migrants,
the digital images of cloned stem cells, as well as repor- tage of 9/11. On the other hand, she is sociological SUSI POP, who made pink neogeo paintings from share price charts, diagrams, and statistics long before the great financial crash of ‘87. And last but not least, she is the creator of renditions of famous artworks relevant to the zeitgeist, like Géricault’s.

In any case, SUSI POP approaches the original images she appropriates not only as a conceptual artist, art 
historian, or activist, but in the way a gay man might out cruising, touting his desires unashamedly. Her method represents a break from what art historian W. J. T. Mitchell
describes in his 2005 book What Do Pictures Want? 
The Lives and Loves of Images: “the default feminization of the picture, which is treated as something that must awaken desire in the beholder while not disclosing any signs of desire or even awareness that it is being beheld, 
as if the beholder were a voyeur at a keyhole.” SUSI POP 
instead “hits on” the picture as though she has been caught in the act, like a construction worker gazing slight- ly too long. As with Géricault, her reduced, almost crude use of pink and Pop may imply homoerotic sensibilities: the light and dark of its dotted reproduction emphasizes the physicality of the scene.

SUSI POP, PAPIER, 1990, paper roll, fastening, 30 x 83 x 20 cm

But there is also another reason the master of the heroic depicts starving castaways as though they were 
Michelangelo sculptures or even pinups: Géricault is eroti- cizing and heroizing romantic failure. During the Bourbon Restoration, failure was considered in educated circles to be a victory over the mundane. Géricault, a pioneer of romanticism, died in tragic circumstances at just thirty- three. He experienced only one great breakthrough in his lifetime despite his burning ambitions: The Raft of 
the Medusa. Yet he was celebrated as one of the first martyrs of the increasingly important cult of the artistic genius.

With her pink Arte Povera version of Géricault’s painting, SUSI POP returns the image to the everyday, bringing a human aspect to the artist’s desires and also his failure.
She could be said to “dis-ennoble” painting, as she did 
with Gerhard Richter’s RAF cycle, for instance. Her revising approach may remind us of Sherrie Levine, who reproduced icons of male-dominated modernism, such as photographs by Walker Evans, but rescaled and removed their aura of heroism. SUSI POP, however, does 
so from the sidelines as it were, without an obvious agenda and in a seemingly naive way—if her name is anything 
to go by. Let’s make it pink! But make no mistake, just because it’s pink it is not necessarily ironic. She takes a surprisingly sober view of history replete with its violences and failures of representation, commercial and ideological systems, geometry and plans. She imposes journalistic images onto the aura of painting, drawing our attention to their axes, composition, and points 
of view. Yet at the same time, she closely examines the 
political role of art: the work of Jackson Pollock, for example, whose abstract drip paintings were propagated by the CIA as an expression of the “free” Western world during the Cold War; or Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which avoids the actual atrocities of the Nazis like an “exquisite shroud,” veiling them from sight.

When SUSI POP creates a collage by transposing the Prussian King Frederick II from Adolph von Menzel’s Flute Concert (1850–52) with the chandelier of the same artist’s The Iron Rolling Mill (1872­–75), she collides the culturally engaged ruler with the precarious working 
conditions of early industrialization. It’s a scene that evokes the superrich, global corporate culture of today, and is similar in effect to the diagrams of social inequality, weapon exports, and stock prices SUSI POP created decades ago. Her work is more often closer to that of Hans Haacke than Warhol. The fact that she can afford 
to make work so undogmatic is due to her humility, to the
simplicity of her tools. Painters have often deemed her inadequate. Theorists and critics have misjudged her as being too ironic or superficial; her art has been disparaged off the record as being too “gay” or “kitsch.” And 
yet, SUSI POP is one of the sharpest minds of her generation. She represents the world through rose-colored spectacles, but in a way that shows its true horror before our very eyes.