Thomas Macho
Electrified
Few technological advances have produced as many metaphors as the gradual electrification of the world beginning in the late nineteenth century: electrification of lighting, first in theaters, then in streets and on public squares, and finally in homes; the electrification of trains and streetcars; and finally the electrification of the entire household: refrigerators, ovens, washing machines. As part of electrification, power grids expanded; in 1895, there were 148 active power stations in Germany; by 1928, it was 4,225. German has common idioms such as “schnell zu schalten” [literally, “switch on quickly,” meaning “to be fast on the uptake” – Trans.] and “eine lange Leitung zu haben” [literally, “to have a long (power) line,” meaning “to be slow on the uptake” – Trans.][1] On the Internet, people seek and make “contacts,” connecting and disconnecting. Since Luigi Galvani’s experiments with frog’s legs (on November 6, 1780), we know that electricity can be a medium to revive things: how often have we seen defibrillators used on various TV shows to reanimate someone after a sudden heart failure? A shock revives one; a vital creative person is “electrified.” But that which revives can also kill, as demonstrated by lightning and, since January 1, 1889, by the electric chair. The danger of fatal accidents with electricity motivated the physician Stefan Jellinek to found the Elektropathologisches Museum in the Allgemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna in 1936. It featured some 1,300 objects, including defective electrical devices, singed clothing from accidents with electricity, installation instructions for electricity, charts, wax models and taxidermic specimens. Jellinek, the first holder of the first chair in electropathology, had proposed the theory of “electrical suspended animation,” which recommended continuing efforts to reanimate using electric shocks until signs of postmortem lividity were evident.
A strange dialectic: something that twitches and thrashes about when subjected to electricity is not necessarily alive; something that appears dead need not remain dead if subjected to electricity. Jellinek’s theory of electrical suspended animation takes into account both the vitalizing and deadly effects of electricity; in fact, it ought to be supplemented by a theory of “electrical animation,” which is always cited metaphorically when things are “brought to life” by being connected to a power supply or battery. As it happens, we regular hear how a thing is “brought to life”: humming, crackling, buzzing and screeching. Experimentelle Neurose [Experimental Neurosis] is the title of a new work by Jürgen Klauke: it shows the artist hanging from various strands of cable, like umbilical cords; not all of the cables are plugged in. His body is moving and rotating; his head and arms are thrashing about. Experimentelle Neurose: in Königsberg in 1849, Hermann von Helmholtz was studying nerve conduction velocity. How does an electrical impulse take to trigger a muscle contraction? For a frog, the interval between stimulus and response is about one second for every thirty meters; its nerve conduction velocity is thus not very fast. To measure nerve conduction velocity in humans, Helmholtz stimulated the thigh and toe simultaneously; from the difference in the reaction time, he was able to calculate a velocity between fifty and a hundred meters per second.[3] No stimulus produces an immediate reaction. Perceptions always come too late. Helmholtz illustrated this delay using the example of a whale, which notices that its tail has been injured only after a second has passed, and requires another second “to order the tail to defend itself.”[4] Klauke’s photographs, which reference the serial nature of the documentation of experiments, demonstrate the time delay that the viewer’s eyes also experience in the chronophotographic overlapping of physical movements, from the head and arms to the legs. The electrified human being is transformed – in the photographs of Gegen den Tag [Contra Day], for example – into a chaotic whirlwind.
When nearly everything can be “electrified,” even the strangest products seem plausible: for example, Douglas Adams’s Electric Monk, who believed on behalf of his users and thus spared them the need to believe “all the things the world expected you to believe.”[5] But even those who have never seen an Electric Monk will be familiar with electrical statues of the Virgin (with a cloak of stars that blink) or illuminated crucifixes – crosses that can be connected to electricity, as seen in Jürgen Klauke’s Verdichtungsvorgang [Compression Procedure]. As if it had foreseen the current debates about the sexual abuse of children, the Bilwet media agency developed, even before the turn of the millennium, an Electronic Child, designed to meet the special needs of working parents: “It is especially robust, easy on the nerves, low-maintenance and can be switched between day and night operation (according to preference and lifestyle). If you lack the time or inclination, just push the standby button on the back of its head, and the Electronic Child® is deactivated. One advantage: there are no unpleasant side effects such as bruises or psychological damage (a fact that opens up a broad range of possible applications: there are no limits to what you can imagine). The Electronic Child® has five levels of difficulty; it can be happy in three languages and is the ideal present for all those who truly love children.”[6] Ideal gifts such as Electric Monks, children, pets, sheep, and owls are already circulating in the world of androids and their hunters as depicted by Philip K. Dick in 1968 and brought to movie screens by Ridley Scott – under the title Blade Runner – in 1982, the year Dick died. Genetic designer J. F. Sebastian remarks in the film: “I make friends. They’re toys. My friends are toys. I make them. […] They’re my friends. I made them.”
The electrification of the world and its cultural metaphors – between life and death – increased against the horizon of experiments in “electrifying” people, which had been imagined and carried out as early as the nineteenth century. Frankenstein galvanized his monster to life (in Mary Shelley’s novel of 1818); and beginning in 1842 the French physiologist Guillaume Benjamin Amand Duchenne de Boulogne tried to clarify the mystery of the human physiology by using electrodes to stimulate and contract the facial muscles of his patients. Duchenne charted the muscles of laughter, for example. As a result, the unforced smile, in which the corners of the eyes participate as well, is still known as a Duchenne smile. In 1862, Duchenne published the results of his empirical research under a title that promised its utility to the arts: Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine; ou, Analyse électro-physiologique de l’expression des passions applicable à la pratique des arts plastiques; which demonstrated with several charts how the electrically produced expressions of the face could be carved in stone, as forms for expressing joy, satisfaction, sadness, pensiveness, horror or pious meditation: a stimulus-response system. Following Helmholtz, Duchenne and Emil du Bois-Reymond, experiments with electricity led to considerable progress in brain research and neurology, electrocardiology and psychology (electroconvulsive therapy, for example). But the interplay between life and death remained: whereas electronic prostheses – from pacemakers to electrodes in the brain, which have recently been praised as a cure for depression – are intended to extend life and improve its quality, electric shock prods and Tasers have been used as weapons, not only for self-defense and to control attackers but also for torture, which has been systematically perfected in the age of electrification.
How can this ambiguity be represented in art? The analogy Duchenne made on his charts – faces distorted by electricity, which seems to respond to the distorted faces of sculpture – overlooked the distinction, the point of transfer between forced revivification and lifeless expression. The relationship between sculptors and electrophysiologists is by no means as compelling as the relationship between sculptors and taxidermists that has been asserted since the mid-1990s by Gunther von Hagens as the aesthetic rationale for his Body World exhibitions. What Duchenne surveyed was not the symmetry between stone and musculature but the tension between a expression compelled by electricity and a photographed pose. The electrodes produce masks, not faces; in that sense, they are opposed to the camera that documents their effect. They are an answer to the question of the physiognomic identity, like the 96-part tableau Antlitze [Faces] that Jürgen Klauke constructed between 1972 and 2000: as a system of individual disguises, which reveal nothing other than their distinctions. Each photograph testifies to a personal way of hiding one’s face.[7] By contrast, some of the photographs of Klauke’s Physiognomien [Pysiognomies] of 1974 show that they were thwarted, which gives them a diabolical point.[8] They distantly recall the marks that Marilyn Monroe made on the contact prints of her final photo shoot with Bert Stern in June 1962 for Vogue.[9] Anyone who visits Jürgen Klauke’s home page will be confronted with a twelve-part arrangement of twelve self-portraits resembling passport photos:[10] Das menschliche Antlitz im Spiegel soziologisch-nervöser Prozesse [The Human Face as Reflected in Sociologically-Nervous Processes] (1976–1977). The captions of the two passport photographs – plus or minus, cheerful or stern – trigger associations with the Szondi test.[11] Naturally, the electrification of the world culminates in self-electrification: no attentive contemporary travels without cables, chargers and adapters for mobile phones, laptops and navigation systems. Soon it will be proposed that we no longer go into the office but instead wear “smart clothing,” such as the Communication Jacket, slipping on a mobile workplace that makes every conceivable kind of networking possible, even in the mountains or on a South Sea island. Strategies of self-electrification degrading the body to a prosthesis, an artifact between the electrical outlets and cables that disappears in the wall of electrical contacts. Gegen den Tag: the torn-out cables also reject the compulsion to light things, the apocalyptic prophecy of night overcome by eternal light: “And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it […]. [T]here shall be no night there” (Revelation 21.23–25). The heavenly Jerusalem was, of course, supposed to be built for the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. In Lichtblicke: Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Wolfgang Schivelbusch recalled the project by the architect Jules Bourdais to construct a tower of light and sun in Paris for the World’s Fair in 1889 – to compete with the tower by the bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel – which would make the boulevards as bright as day. With this Tour Soleil, “the nineteenth-century imagination of light built itself a monument, which was no less impressive for remaining unbuilt and soon falling into oblivion. This tower project marked the climax of an evolution in which previous technical progress made any quantity of light seem obtainable and which ‘making night day,’ as a popular expression of the day put it, was seriously considered.”[12] Paris would have become the “city of lights” of enlightenment and electricity once and for all.
Electrification as illumination: self-electrification too is intended to illuminate, as a glance at Joseph Beuys and his prominent self-promotion in La rivoluzione siamo Noi makes clear. The poster and postcard from 1972 depict the artist frontally, walking toward the viewer with a energetic step and with a leather bag strapped over his shoulder. The motif recalls not only Jean-François Millet’s Semeur (Sower) of 1850 or the young man with pistols accompanying the flag-waving Marianne in Eugène Delacroix’s Liberté guidant le peuple of 1830 but also the cover of the first edition of the German translation of Carlos Castaneda’s Teachings of Don Juan (published by März-Verlag in 1972), which would later be popularized in numerous versions by Fischer-Verlag. The first German translation was by Heiner Bastian of all people, Beuys’s friend and secretary for many years; the motif for the cover was initially attributed to Hans Wehrli, but all subsequent editions credited the Leipzig-based book designer Hannes Jähn, the winner of many awards, who at the time was living in Cologne and had just founded the Chihuahua-Press – in collaboration with the art book dealer Walther König. La rivoluzione siamo Noi: on the Castaneda cover the hero’s head (and hat) have been replaced by a glowing lightbulb. Klauke is far removed from such self-apotheosis. He also knows the other side of self-electrification: playing with the pleasures of subjugation and fetishism, the currents of eroticism and fetishism. Above all, however, he knows that electrification does not necessarily require people. For that reason, his Elektrophysiologische Exzess [Electrophysiological Excess], Wackelkontakt [Loose Contact] and Sich selbst optimierendes System [Self-optimizing system] are as liberating as they are amusing. The photographs no longer promise redemption, and neither esoteric nor erotic emancipation; they reveal the pure, futuristic aesthetic of an order composed of contacts, connections and interruptions, which no longer calls for physiognomic explications and “other realities.”
Notes
[1] Cf. Lutz Mackensen, Die deutsche Sprache unserer Zeit: Zur Sprachgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Quelle & Meyer, Heidelberg, 1956, p. 28.
[2] Cf. Stefan Jellinek, Der elektrische Unfall, skizziert für Ingenieur und Arzt, Franz Deuticke, Leipzig, 1925.
[3] Cf. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Messungen über den zeitlichen Verlauf der Zuckung animalischer Muskeln und die Fortpflanzungsgeschwindigkeit der Reizung in den Nerven,” in: Archiv für Anatomie, Physiologie und wissenschaftliche Medicin, Johannes Müller (ed.), Veit, Berlin, 1850, pp. 276–364.
[4] Hermann von Helmholtz, “Ueber die Methoden, kleinste Zeittheile zu messen, und ihre Anwendungen für physiologische Zwecke,” in: Königsberger Naturwissenschaftliche Unterhaltungen, vol. 2, no. 2, Bornträger, Königsberg, 1851, pp. 169–189; esp. 189. Vgl. auch Christian Kassung, Das Pendel. Eine Wissensgeschichte, Wilhelm Fink, München, 2007, pp. 116–117.
[5] Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Pocket Books, New York, 1988, p. 4.
[6] Agentur Bilwet, Elektronische Einsamkeit: Was kommt, wenn der Spaß aufhört?, trans. Petra Ilyes, Supposé, Cologne, 1997, p. 113.
[7] See Jürgen Klauke. Absolute Windstille: Das fotografische Werk, exhib. cat, Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, 2001, pp. 190–195.
[8] Ibid. p. 273.
[9] Cf. Bert Stern, Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting, Schirmer & Mosel, Munich, 2002.
[10] http://www.juergenklauke.de.
[11] Stern 2002, p. 244.
[12] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Lichtblicke: Zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Carl Hanser, Munich, 1983, p. 11.