MEA CULPA by Olga Smith 

“1970. December: Warschauer Kniefall or Warsaw Genuflection. As Brandt approaches the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising Monument, he publicly, and apparently spontaneously, falls to his knees. With the world’s press, dignitaries and general public looking on, he remains still and silent. It is generally perceived as a gesture of humility and reflection.”1

Taking as its starting point West German Chancellor Willy Brandt’s emotional genuflection Mea Culpa follows the trajectory of expansion, from a specific historical event to a meditation on the theme of public apology at large. The same trajectory becomes apparent in the overall gestation of Ryan Ras’ artistic project: from his research into the individual cases in The Incomplete History of Public Apology (2005), where meticulously collected data has been graphically interpreted in such a way that it highlighted the flaws within the mechanism of public apology, to this new site-specific work that explores apology as a genus. This process of expansion, paradoxically, is concomitant with self-effacement and disappearance of a kind that brings to mind Christian Boltanski’s words: “I hold a mirror to my face so that those who look at me see themselves and therefore I disappear”.2 The emotional impact of Boltanski’s works owes in no small part to his ability to facilitate shared experiences, predicated upon the effect of expansion of the referential precision of the specific this (my face) to the malleability of the universal any (so that those who look at me see themselves). This disappearing act – the evaporation of the authorial presence – is entirely characteristic of the genuinely self-effacing Ras, who surrendered the project to the interpretations of his collaborators: Hannah Coulson, Sara Crow, Paul Jackson and Jonny Pilcher.

The disappearance of the persona of the author, however, is distinct from the disappearance of the body, and the self-effacement – from the effacement of the individuality in the anonymity of death. The tradition of commemorative monuments where loss and absence form the core of their material fabric may be relatively young, but it offered viable solutions for articulating structurally and spatially that which resists articulation. From Boltanski’s relatively modest The Missing House (1991) that gestures helplessly towards the gap where a building once stood, to the Libeskind grand-scale Jewish Museum, the materialisation of voids seems to have become the guiding principle in memorial architecture.3 Ryan Ras’ Untitled (The unreleased plans for a monument) belongs to this tradition of actively valorising voids and negative spaces, without any attempt to fill them. In this installation, solid black shapes are projected onto a wall, one following another in silent progression. These shapes are so dark that they can only be shadows, negative projections of the simplified silhouettes of the bodies in the act of genuflection, silent and penitent in their abstraction.

An irreparable void lies at the heart of what Derrida calls ‘the absolute pardon’: “the unconditional, gracious, infinite, aneconomic forgiveness granted to the guilty as guilty”.4 In Derrida’s scheme, the unconditional forgiveness opposes the economy of what he calls the “therapy of reconciliation” that proposes to fill in the hole of guilt with pardon, in a response to a pragmatic imperative to restore social and national wholeness. It was Brandt who initiated the process of the restoration of German national unity, but this process necessarily entailed the internalisation of the fault (the fault also as a crack, a split in the national consciousness that must remain incomplete, un-mended; “the guilty as guilty”). Ras’/Jackson’s incomplete autobiography of the man who united Germany inherits the spirit of this imperfect process. (More generally, Ras’ refusal to give definitive titles to the works in this exhibition is motivated by the same aversion to completing and concluding.)

The embroilment of the political into the matter of apology necessarily ushers in the double absence – the (real) absence of the victim’s body in whose name forgiveness is requested and received, and the (hypothetical) absence of the body of the representative of the State, whose anonymity is assured by their formal wear. Derrida’s awareness of the limits of the power of the political to receive and grant pardon provides an occasion for voicing a concern:

“[I]f ‘politics’ is what you designate in speaking of ‘pragmatic processes of reconciliation’, then, taking seriously these political urgencies, I believe also that we are not defined through and through by the political, and above all not by citizenship, by the statuary belonging to a Nation-State. Must we not accept that, in heart or in reason, above all when it is a question of ‘forgiveness’, something arrives which exceeds all institution, all power, all juridico-political authority?”5

A spontaneous, un-choreographed genuflection posits the materiality and the individuality of the gesture (“I hold a mirror to my face”) that momentarily achieves the transgression of the political. Initially at least, the anonymity of the man in Ras/Crow’s Untitled (Choreography for an apology), projected on one of the gallery walls, seems complete: we can see no face, only his back, clothed in a black formal suit. And yet as the action progresses, it transpires that the ‘choreography’ he performs is more akin to a ceremony replete full of impenetrably obscure and private meaning, performed in private and for private reasons.

Brandt’s un-choreographed, spontaneous falling silent too represents a kind of a void – a rupture of the fabric of communication, aporia of signification and reason. It is significant that Brandt has been able to rationalise his gesture only in the aftermath of the event: “I did what people do when words fail them.” Paradoxically, Brandt’s power of expression attained its highest at the point of its total break-down. I doubt, however, whether the silence that pervades Mea Culpa (and most palpably, Jonny Pilcher’s Untitled (Anthem for Apology)) relates to the empowerment. A modest, self-deprecating logic that utilises the language of minimal gestures lends this project a peculiar kind of silence that belongs to a moment where the offering of a pardon has not yet been articulated. This site-specific intervention is also space-specific: this space, more than anything else, resembles a concave, a hollowed out, negative space of air around the convex of a diaphragm filled with air of the (yet unsaid) apology. Like the negative space that cut-out typeface of the words MEA CULPA carves out of the darkness.

Footnotes:

1. Ryan Ras and Paul Jackson, Untitled (An Incomplete Biography of Willy Brandt) (2008), unpaginated.

2. Christian Boltanski in an interview with Tamar Garb, in Semin, Didier, Tamar Garb and Donald Kuspit, Christian Boltanski (London and New York: Phaidon Press, 2004), p. 24.

3. “Libeskind’s building, a zig-zag form inspired by the Star of David, is constructed around what he calls ‘voids’, vertical shafts of open space intersected by corridor along which visitors walk from one room to the next. The voids are ‘the embodiment of absence’ (Libeskind 1998: 10). One of them, the Holocaust Tower, Libeskind described as a ‘voided void’ because emptiness has as it were been taken and materialised as a building.” Bill Niven, Facing the Nazi Past: United Germany and the Legacy of the Third Reich (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 209.

4. “However, I would be tempted to contest this conditional logic of the exchange, this presupposition, so widespread, according to which forgiveness can only be considered on the condition that it be asked, in the course of a scene of repentance attesting at once to the consciousness of the fault, the transformation of the guilty, and at least implicit obligation to do everything to avoid the return of the evil. […] It is important to analyse at [the base of this tradition] the tension at the heart of the heritage between, on the one side, the idea which is also a demand for the unconditional, gracious, infinite, aneconomic forgiveness granted to the guilty as guilty, without counterpart, even to those who do not repent or ask for forgiveness, and on the other side, as a great number of texts testify through many semantic refinements and difficulties, a conditional forgiveness proportionate to the recognition of the fault, to repentance, to the transformation of the sinner who then explicitly asks forgiveness.” Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 34-35.

5. Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, p. 54.

About the author:

Olga Smith is a doctoral student at King’s College, Cambridge University, working on a dissertation entitled The Erosion of Real in French Art since 1968. Olga co-organises a conference entitled ‘The French Connection: New Perspectives on French Contemporary Art’, and is the curator of the accompanying exhibition showcasing works by the emerging French artists.