above: excerpt from Reading Goethe - Plucie, 2009, high definition video, sound composition (to hear the sound press the sound icon located in the lower right corner of the moving image)

Reading Goethe - Plucie

2008

installation: single-channel video on a monitor, sound composition for earphones, black platform/shelf, open book (Faust II by Goethe published in Germany in 1942), ink stain on the book pages

high definition video and sound composition, duration: 2 minutes 1 second, limited edition 3 + 2 AP

the piece premiered as part of the exhibition Wa(H)re Kunst at ConcentArt, Berlin, 2008, curated by Georgi Begun

Credits

image, movement, and sound directed, filmed, choreographed, composed and edited by Monika Weiss

movement performer: Monika Weiss

voice performers: Kristina Hahn and Maja Linke

text: passages from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil in fünf Akten, 1832

Artist Statement

In Reading Goethe - Plucie, 2009, my head lies on top of the open volume of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil in fünf Akten, which was first published in Germany in 1832, the year of Goethe’s death. The copy under my head was published in 1945. I hold in my mouth black fluid that resembles ink. From to time I release the ink onto the open pages of the book, permanently staining their surface. My mouth connotes speech, yet I am silent. Instead of speaking the words, I am marking them. Those stains on the pages of Goethe’s writings, symbolize traces of historical trauma that cannot be erased. Goethe’s voice, and by extension the voice of culture, is not clean, it can no longer exist without this other voice or trace, of the people who were damaged by their abrupt encounter with power. The stains are either hand-drawn charcoal and graphite marks or traces of fluid which I spitted onto the pages. I composed the sound by recording German speakers reading passages from Goethe. I later reversed and truncated the recordings, to create a sonic field that no longer conveys any clear meaning, rather, it offers an unsettling record of what once used to be the high German language of the Romantic period. This piece belongs to an ongoing body of works that I began in 2005. This group of works continues my poetic investigation of European modernity, which is forever stained by the unspeakable events of the genocide. I often incorporate ink and charcoal stains as well as sonic layering and reversing of speech, which alter the writings of German Romantics who were beloved and honored by the Nazi regime as the highest of European culture.

- Monika Weiss

Exhibitions

Wa(H)re Kunst, ConcentArt, Berlin, 2008, curated by Georgi Begun

Conversation-The Beginning, with Roland Schefferski, Galeria El, Elbląg, 2009, curated by Jarosław Denisiuk