phlegethon - milczenie — Monika Weiss

Phlegethon - Milczenie

2005 -

installation: German high literature books and musical scores published in Germany before 1945, artist drawings on book pages, charcoal, graphite, video projection, sound composition

series of performance-based photographs, dimensions variable, limited edition, 3 + 2AP

performance: the artist lies on the installation of books and musical scores drawing around her body with charcoal and graphite sticks, with her eyes closed

collections:

Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami

private collections, New York

sound composition

duration 14 minutes 35 seconds

available as sound installation for space or for earphones

Monika Weiss · Monika Weiss Phlegethon 2006

below: excerpt from the documentation of live performance of Phlegethon-Milczenie at Altmark Square, Dresden, Germany, 2018, part of WOD Initiative weltoffenes Dresden, a series of public projects in containers, commemorating liberation/destruction of Dresden in 1945, curated by Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz, Kunsthaus Dresden

Credits

composed, recorded, directed, filmed, performed and edited by Monika Weiss

countertenor: Anthony Roth Costanzo

voices: Ragna Berlin, Hermann Feldhaus, Henriette Huldish, Michael Schumacher, Monika Weiss

sound mastered by Paul Geluso, Harvestworks Digital Media Art Center, New York

Artist Statement

When, in 2005, I was invited to create my first project in Germany, I had a dream about books being burned, which inspired an ongoing series of works, Phlegehton- Milczenie. Phlegethon is the ancient Greek mythological River of Fire. Milczenie in Polish means “silence” and “inability to speak.” I began the project by recording sound and video of the burning of a first edition of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus. I created an installation on the floor, composed of hundreds of open books published in Germany before 1945, including books revered by the Nazis as superior German culture and books that were burned by them. I lay down and drew around my body, leaving abstract marks on the pages of the books, while filming the performance from a camera suspended from above the installation. The 3-part video and sound composition includes sounds of book burning, whispering, speaking and singing voices, including in the third part, the voice of countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo.

- Monika Weiss

Essay Excerpts

For Weiss, drawing is related to post-language. She does not subscribe to the notion that it is a primal, immediate, prelingual scrawling, and as a result her drawing is a rich infusion of thought, language, ritual, culture, fantasy and emotion. There exists a relationship of drawing and speech and sound that bypasses the written word in Weiss's work. The video Phlegethon-Milczenie (2005) opens with the loud, unmistakable sound of burning--rasping, hollow and tormented. In strong contrast, the image that introduces the scene is a quiet light white ground that upon examination is a neat arrangement of open books seen from the air. Gradually Weiss appears, lying down on what now looks like a bed of books. They are an arena for action and inhabitation. Her calm rhythmic movement of drawing has no beginning or end. A separate image of paper curling as it burns recalls Weiss's body as she gathers her limbs into her center, dragging crinkling pages along with her like an inhalation of breath. Throughout the video the meandering voices of a man and woman reading in German and Polish can be heard. Again, hands gently infiltrate the frame, moving across the boundary of the arrangement of books to touch, and we imagine to glimpse, the titles, drawings and words. Weiss's focus on the materiality and tactility of the books calls to mind the method of dialectical materialism practiced by the Frankfurt School and the mysticism of Walter Benjamin in particular to combat fascist ideology. In their thinking, the bodily, sensory response to material and form was an effective counter to the Enlightenment's total embracing of thought, reason and mind over body.

- Katherine Carl in Monika Weiss-Limen II, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, New York, 2006

In Phlegethon-Milczenie II (2005), an installation incorporating sculpture, video, and sound, Monika Weiss restores historical memory to post-Third Reich Germany. Milczenie, the Polish word for “silence” is here joined to Phlegethon, Virgil’s river o fire, whose fire burns but does not consume. Intented also as the ground for a performance-in which Weiss lies surrounded by books drawing solitary human figures in pencil, crayon and charcoal-the installation’s mournful, elegiac quality is a reminder of loss on an unimaginable scale.

- Cecilia Fajardo-Hill in Forms of Classification: Alternative Knowledge and Contemporary Art,, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, CIFO, Miami, 2006

In the Milczenie performance, which the artist repeated several times during the duration of the exhibition [at Inter-Galerie], she moved slowly and silently across the books with her eyes closed, in a meditative state, making marks with graphite and charcoal sticks around her body. Some of the books, by mostly German writers, philosophers, and composers, contained works that were either revered or destroyed by the Nazis. Their destruction depended on whether the regime deemed the authors degenerate or racially stained, and therefore not worthy contributors to high Germanic culture.

- Julia P. Herzberg, Monika Weiss's Language of Lament: History, Memory, and the Body, in RECALL: Roland Schfferski & Monika Weiss, Galeria BWA Zielona Góra and Muzeum Ziemi Lubuskiej, 2014

Exhibitions

Monika Weiss: Phlegethon-Milczenie, Inter-Galerie, Potsdam, Germany, 2005, curated by Erik Bruinenberg

Omniart, in conjunction with Miami Basel International Art Fair, Miami, 2005, curated by Julia P. Herzberg

Monika Weiss-Five Rivers, Lehman College Art Gallery, City University of New York, 2005-2006, curated by Susan Hoeltzel

Forms of Classification: Contemporary Art and Alternative Knowledge, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, 2006, curated by Cecilia Fahardo-Hill

Codes of Culture: Video Art from 7 Continents, arrteBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2006, curated by Nina Colosi

Polyphony of Images: Cutting Edge Contemporary Art From Poland, Consulate General of Poland, New York, 2006, curated by Monika Fabijańska

On the Absence of the Camps, Kunsthaus Dresden, Germany, 2006, curated by Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz

The Prisoner Dilemma, Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami, 2008-2009, curated by Leanne Mella

Remembering & Forgetting, series of concurrent public projects, #WOD Weltoffenes Dresden, Germany, 2018, curated by Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz, Kunsthaus Dresden