Michaela Melián
If anything is clear today about the era of modernism, it’s that it was divided against itself. The utopias of the avant-gardes now seem contaminated by their totalitarian leanings, while Fascist and Nazi art and architecture can seem shockingly modern—and not just from a purely technical standpoint. The simple dichotomy between good and evil, modern and antimodern, is no longer credible. So how can a politically critical visual artist who also feels committed to a (Habermasian) project of modernity, as Michaela Melián surely does, deal with her ambivalence?
This dilemma is crucial to Melián’s recent works, in which she develops her own expressive language of form that in its very fragility enables her to approach these questions closely. After being invited to present her work at Aktualisierungsraum (Space for Actualization), an exhibition site in Hamburg curated by Nina Köller and Kerstin Stakemeier, Melián (who as a member of the band FSK has since the 1980s been a part of the German punk-pop counterculture) began to engage with Victory over the Sun, the futuristic opera conceived and produced by Kazimir Malevich, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Mikhail Matyushin in 1913. Despite—or indeed because of—the opera’s essential anti-bourgeois intentions, the plot involves the self-empowerment of a new race of “futurist strongmen” who subjugate the sun to their will to power. The opera therefore exemplifies the implicit duality of modernity with its schizophrenic goal of freedom through mutual subjugation. Melián confronted this theme with an installation: A table is set with a collection of transparent things—prisms and other glass objects, as well as simple items made of clear plastic—lit by the beam of a slide projector. A prism is set in motion by a tiny motor, creating a magic-lantern-like projection on the walls of the exhibition room. The resulting forms immediately bring to mind some of the utopian projects of the early twentieth century: Paul Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture or Bruno Taut’s Glass Chain, as well as Bauhaus visions of transparent architecture, which were linked to visions of a similarly transparent political society. The title of Melián’s installation—Lunapark—refers to the amusement park in Saint Petersburg, Russia, where Victory over the Sun originally premiered. The creation of sculpture through light, shadow, and movement is also reminiscent of László Moholy-Nagy’s famous Light Space Modulator, 1930, an association supported by the projection screen installed at the end of the table. At the same time, the hypertrophic projections on the walls remind one of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) and the universal gigantomania of modern city construction. In a related work, Diorama, 2012, recently on view at the Neues Museum in Nuremberg in the exhibition “30 Artists—30 Rooms,” Melián subtly superimposed an image of the city’s skyline on such prism projections, recalling the ideologically charged reputation of Nazi-era Nuremberg.
Lunapark makes something as abstract as the ambivalence of modernity concrete and vivid: The fascination with the fantastic blends with a certain degree of unease; the modernist utopia tilts toward a Fascist demand for power. Melián’s way of realizing this idea through self-contradiction seems only logical: Inexpensive materials such as plastic cups or cassette-tape boxes and costly custom-made prisms are equally sublimated by the light’s beam. The installation, which radically reveals its own construction, thereby exposes itself as an almost cheap trick; the incongruity between the reality and appearance of things is made visible. Through Melián’s dialectical perspective, we see a modernity that does not mask its own negativity, but is able to withstand it.
Translated from German by Anne Posten.