Photo: Karin Plessing Lutz Dammbeck's Heracles Concept by Eckhart Gillen Lutz Dammbeck, born in Leipzig in 1948, began working on the Heracles Concept in 1982 as an archaeology of memory using the most diverse artistic techniques - from collage, installation, painting, literature, animation and documentary film styles to the unusual form of media collage. In a fairytale figure's reflection of a legendary figure of ancient myth, Dammbeck succeeds in deconstructing the idealistic construction of the »new man«, thereby artistically anticipating its hoped-for and final downfall in 1989, 200 years after the French Revolution. The black pedagogics of the Brothers Grimm found in their fairytale »The Willfull Child« punishes stubbornness with death as the ultima ratio of the failed teacher. As everyone knows, this teaching method ended in Auschwitz and Gulag: the camp as institution for the elimination of the those not moldable. Relying on one's own sense, that is - the ability to use the five senses as one sees fit, is followed by punishment but also by the chance to leave the protective cave of »Father Country« and »Mother Party« in order to only trust one's own senses from now on. Representing the embodiment of the willful child, the dancer Fine Kwiatkowsi struggles with reproductions of Arno Breker's metallic heads mounted on scaffolding and placed haphazardly in space; the psychodrama of the birth of the self is confronted by the musclebound military man of the world wars, a societal by-product held together solely by his uniform. At the end of her action, Fine destroys the rigid skeleton and returns to the protective cocoon, a pyramid on whose filmy surface emerges a blurry, silent scream. (See illuminated billboard motif.) The text »Heracles 2 or the Hydra« by Heiner Müller superimposes the Brothers Grimm fairytale as if painted over it. Heracles, as the mythical figure of the »Übermensch«, roams the forest »alone to battle the animal.« He soon realizes, however, that »the forest was the animal« which sized him up from head to toe. Heiner Müller describes how society's power structures size up and colonize the body and thereby its own entanglement. No longer comprehensible in the context of imagery, the conflicts create a horror, a wake which in turn reveals to the subject the fascination of being subjectless. Heracles suddenly realizes that he has become a part of the Hydra, partly responsible for the disaster's function. A growth in the body of the Hydra, he is captured as well as safe in her lap. As he begins »to cut the cord, to leave the lap that protects as well as holds him in order to achieve his own identity, he falls into conflict with the Hydra. At the same time he is afraid to refuse and begins to ‚rebuild' himself in hurried obedience«. (Lutz Dammbeck) In his research for the media collage »Heracles«, Dammbeck inevitably came across analogous situations between the National Socialist government and the SED government. The »childhood patterns« of the parents' generation from the time of the Nazi's continued into the GDR's everyday life in the form of daily incapacitation, double ethics and fear. Was there such a thing as a repetition of the NS system with a completely different political premise - only more secret, more unspeakable, more forbidden? The madness of a programatically antifascistic nation revealing fascistic traits brought the generation of postwar children into an ordeal between the approval of antifascism and the rejection of the totalitarian repression. With the fading out of the National Socialists' everyday life from the antifascistic education, the structural kinship of the two German dictatorships - with their totalitarian methods of surveillance, seduction and subjugation meant to form the population into a »community« or rather a »socialistic community of people« - was made taboo. Dammbeck's mounting and combining of images, emotions, dates, family histories, myths and fairytales to a »fine, floating tissue« defies all form which could potentially destroy it. It does not claim: this is how it was, but rather: this is how it could have been. Because at the moment we speak of truth, we close the door to other possible interpretations. Without the banner of truth we could probably all live with each other peacefully. (translation: Rebeccah Blum) Download this text (Word6/Win9x) ©   Text: Eckhart Gillen Photo: Karin Plessing Website: uinic - Pat Binder, Gerhard Haupt Dammbeck  |  Artists  |  Project  |  Home