Storms at sea and waves of history. A long series of photographs of choppy seas and of landscapes devastated by the battles of World War I. It was impossible not to suspect that a secret genealogy lay behind this exhibition showing the sublime and devastating force of nature alongside lands ravaged by the barbarism of man. The Sturm und Drang literary movement is conventionally associated with the notions of freedom of expression, productive genius, and love of nature, but alongside the misadventures of the young Werther, Georg Büchner sensed the consequences of that same unstoppable Drang, portraying the irrational drives that assail human nature as schizophrenia in the case of Lenz (1839) and jealousy in the case of Woyzeck (1837). The compulsion underlying it reappears on the high seas in Ahab’s mad pursuit of Moby-Dick in Herman Melville’s great novel of 1851.

The sorrows of the soldier Woyzeck might have inspired Bertolt Brecht’s antiwar parable Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), and this informal genealogy might be traced further to Stanley Kubrick’s critical revision of the stress of war in Paths of Glory (1957). Despite these calls to reason, the waves of history continue to let out their uncanny roar, threatening to unleash further ruination on the earth. It is not for nothing that, with greater or lesser success (Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse [2011] and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia [2011], respectively), there are still so many explicitly apocalyptic stories. Romanticism might have been the last attempt to come up with a poetic key by which to interpret the world, but it was first and foremost the awareness that this effort was in vain. Beyond an adolescent nihilism, the possibilities to which Romanticism gave rise made it necessary to devise mechanisms—aesthetic and political strategies—with which to grasp the problem of meaning in terms of poeisis—or “production”— rather than the difficult and sudden revelation of a secret.

This smattering of references is an informal attempt to paraphrase and delve into the background of the methodologies used by Peter Piller. Indeed, as with most of Piller’s work, the black-and-white photographs that make up the series “Immer noch Sturm” (Still Storming), 2012, are the result of archaeological and archival work. In this case, the images come from books and postcards from the period around World War I; nature’s storms and those made by man are made to reflect each other. As a maker of meaning, Piller connects found images to produce an explosion of new semantic possibilities. This panel-like work combines the strategies of the objet trouvé, the photographic Conceptualism of the Düsseldorf School, and the pictorialism of early-twentieth-century photography. By means of a crescendo of parallels and analogies, what might have seemed trivial becomes a dense narrative rich in echoes and hermeneutic possibilities. Hence the license to slide between literary references that connect aesthetics and history, the sublime force of nature and the vicissitudes of the human history of destruction.

—Martí Peran

Translated from Spanish by Jane Brodie.