Heaf world, interspersed with violence, was the FRG of the 1970s: a look at the multimedia exhibition
Photo: Julian Blum/Jonas Höschl
Half a ton weighs the fire, blood, workers’ fight-red motorcycle of the traditional Japanese company Suzuki, model GS 750, at the entrance of Jonas Höschl’s exhibition “Point of No Return”. It is located in the gallery of Anton Janizewski on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, where the Volksbühne’s large robber wheel once stood; Tourists pass, snap the horny part, you can hear rapidly from the Torstrasse.
Höschls Suzuki is not a retro-gone for motorsport fans, but a precise replica of the vehicles, in which two members of the Red Army faction drove in 1977 and and from which the Attorney General Siegfried Buback and his two bodyguards Wolfgang Göbel and Georg Wuster shot in the car. To date, it is unclear who was turning, they called themselves “Command Ulrike Meinhof”. The chrome, the leather seat, the red paint – if you have the story in the back of the head, becomes a strange creature from this. A civilian vehicle, a mass product of the Japanese economy that brought death.
On the back of the also red exhibition display made of wood, a video work is positioned, in which images from catalogs, instructions for happy motorcycle owners of the economically splendid west of the 70s are assembled with the abstract charm of technical drawings and photos by the weapon, with which Buback was shot, and newspaper clippings. Two weeks after the crime, the magazine “Motorrad” appeared an advertisement in which Suzuki campaigned for his “sports cannon of the snipers”.
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Memories pass from advertising, the daily press and the repair manual for the motorcycle. Fast cuts, many image formats and you are unconsciously stirred: heal world, historical violence, everyday consumer life of the previous generation. Added to this are the lyrics of the song “Point of No Return” by Gene Daniels, taken from Kenneth Anger’s film “Scorpio Rising” from 1963. This is about gay men in leather jackets (compare: Andreas Baader’s clothing) and the eroticism of the motorcycle.
Höschl’s exhibition is based on a thorough research. The photographer and concept artist, born in Regensburg in 1995, who published a book about the “Politics of Media Images” in 2022, was on the road for this exhibition in Stuttgart, where the RAF’s first generation in the Stammheim jail found death. He has made a frottage of the tombstone of Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin-Jan-Carl Raspe is left out-in which the names Andreas and Gudrun can be read in tire traces like a scratched proof of love on a tree or a ghostly omen.
A daylight projector throws a “leaflet” on the wall on which precautionary measures and rules of conduct are listed, which the Federal Criminal Police Office issued to persons to whom they trust, RAF detour victims. A life after a protocol from terrorist protection. The medium of microfilm known from archives and libraries is similarly antiquated. Höschl found one who shows the inauguration of the monument for Buback and his bodyguards: funeral ritual of the family and impersonal state act on mini-pictures, shearpes in black and red and gold on stone in Karlsruhe, where the men were shot.
There is a work on the wall that potentially potentiates the feeling of uncanny homeliness, privacy and loneliness: the record “Desire” by Bob Dylan, which Ulrike Meinhof probably heard on the night of her alleged suicide in May 1976, printed on the glass, a picture of Dylan and one of the black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, the dylan on this album a song Dedicated after he had been subject to murder for racist reasons. And then under the glass, a side from a prisoner magazine to the paper pilot is also bent – think of the aircraft slide. Höschl calls this ensemble »18. October 1977 «.
The glorification of the RAF members as action heroes, their demonization as a self-righteous murderer, all ideological attractions bypasses Jonas Höschl in his subtle and stirring exhibition. History buzzes as a sequence of violence, mourning and repression, acquiring goods and reporting question by the Galerie Anton Janizewski. If you consider that Daniela Klette is in prison as a member of the last RAF generation after investigative journalists have found them with a facial recognition program in a Capoeira studio, which was probably rather exciting for the journalists than morally necessary, the connection between media all-round and search for search must be considered. Individual terrorism does not start any movement. 1977 and the consequences become a morbid living room. Jonas Höschl is a stimulating discussion of the media war, against, for the RAF.
Jonas Höschl: “Point of No Return”. Gallery Anton Janizewski, Weydingerstraße 10, Berlin, until April 19th
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