“GERMANY IS YOUR AMERICA”

In 2004, in the midst of writing a book about Roxy Music, the British writer Michael Bracewell had a portentous dream featuring a Gabriel-like visit from Brian Eno. In the dream, Eno delivered a prophecy both mordant and somewhat enigmatic: “Germany is your America.” Bracewell took this pronouncement seriously and developed a series of essays for the BBC exploring the mutual fascination between Germans and Americans in the twentieth century. Seven years later, Bracewell’s hallucination has grown into an exhibition at Broadway 1602 that attempts to trace what he calls the “modern cosmology of German Romanticism,” mapping eighty years of Anglo-American Germanophilia alongside its inverse, the Teutonic obsession with America. The show includes modernist oldies by George Grosz and Xanti Schawinsky, midcentury goodies by Jerzy Lewczyński and Joseph Beuys, and contemporary updates by Nick Mauss, Katharina Wulff, and Dexter Dalwood.

The notion of artistic pilgrimage is the show’s organizing principle. An accompanying wall text describes an art party the poet Stephen Spender attended in Hamburg in 1929 where a film was projected depicting the same party from the previous week—in Bracewell’s words, “the same guests, watching film of themselves embracing, in the same room, participating in a kind of bored yet nervous ritual of repetition.” Andy Warhol repeated the procedure thirty-five years later, Bracewell notes; it’s been reprised any number of times since then, often under the umbrella of one or another brand of institutional critique.

Watching last night’s party may or may not retain its power to perturb, but watching last year’s party, like watching the 1974 Beuys video included in the show, quenches a certain nostalgic lust, whether the memories are real or imagined. What the exhibition most powerfully conveys is the extent to which Anglo-Americans remember Germany as a stand-in for memory itself—a figure of figuration—much as America conjures visions of the future—that is to say, of memory’s obliteration.