Austrian art history still has a lot of difficulty, or so it seems at least, with concrete procedures, with conceptual and political positions from the first three decades after the Second World War. This is particularly true of approaches that do not offer a ready analogy to the structural acting-out of bodily rhetoric or to the ritual theatre of breaking through boundaries with which the Viennese Actionists responded through psychodrama, with abreacting games, to Austrian society’s orgiastic repression of awareness in the first post-war decades.
In German-speaking literary circles Heimrad Bäcker has the reputation of being one of the few authors to have worked directly with the textual legacy of the Shoah: with the records and registers, the files and timetables, the lists of names and murder sites in which henchmen in the camps and the offices recorded extermination machine’s administration. His concrete montage »Nachschrift«1 is a grandiose attempt »to process political content directly by working with the devices of concrete poetry in order to display this content « (Ferdinand Schmatz). However, few people in the literary and art world are aware that Bäcker sought to extend this method to the medium of photography.2 As a photographer – as the author of a photographic oeuvre over and above the sporadic appearance of these works in publications of his concrete literary work – of the Mauthausen concentration camp, of the Gusen auxiliary camp in Upper Austria, near where Bäcker grew up and lived, in texts that appeared in the »edition neue texte«, and in his work as a publisher in that key publishing house for Austrian experimental literature in the 1970s, ranging from Friedrich Achleitner to Reinhard Priessnitz. At first glance one identifies a documentary photographer in these publications. And Bäcker’s photography is indeed also documentary. It fixes documents.
Bäcker began his work back in the last years of the war. In the few works from this period published to date, such as the view of bombed-out Berlin in »Leihhaus Steglitz« (»Steglitz Pawnshop«) (1944), Bäcker’s framing of the photos and his compositional eye for colour balance valeurs are already striking. Bäcker’s photos from the last years of the war are also documents of an episode in his own biography that he later always perceived as a blemish, indeed almost as a mal, a sickness, namely his work as a reporter for a Nazi local party newspaper in Linz – the author of »Nachschrift« would later again and again write condemning this, accusing himself. Bäcker’s photographs »Ritterkreuzträger«, (»Man Wearing Ritterkreuz Medal«), »Abschlusskundgebung« (»Final Rally«), or »Trommler» ( »Drummer») are depictions in a conventional vein of the organisational forms of hegemonic representation. However, they hint at his later approach: seriality, an interest in the grammatical side of photography, succinct, undramatic, purportedly scholarly objective observations. Bäcker’s early documentary photography portrays what is present, whilst the topic he later made his own involved deploying concrete means to depict the structure of being absent, of being excluded from vision.

[b]Gusen, Mauthausen, the Stairs of Death[/b]
Heimrad Bäcker began his photographic project of recording and analysing the topography of Mauthausen in 1968. It continued until the end of the eighties. In this project he documented a place of destruction and a process of annihilation; the place in which the detainees in the camps were exterminated and the process of destruction of the traces of this annihilation. He uses the instrument of a photography whose compositional density was utterly in keeping with the times; a photography that was beginning to reflect upon itself and its work of representation.
In this project however Bäcker is concerned with more than a sophisticated game with the questions that occupied many of his colleagues at the time: the primacy of the readable over the visible or vice-versa; the question of the ontological hierarchy of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. Right from the outset this was a much more all-encompassing project, seeking to take a much more profound look at questions about representation and the issue of »what images do«. Bäcker aims to direct attention away from the physical object, turning the focus onto something absent and onto the process of iconogenesis.
In contrast to the subject-matter of petrol stations, car parks or blocks of flats described by the founders of conceptual photography, the domain where photography in the USA toiled away exploring the flipside of Modernism, and distinct from, yet somewhat closer to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s series capturing remnants of the industrial world that formed the material basis for the instrumental, abstract and hence modern form of organisation of Nazism, Bäcker seeks, for an event of the magnitude and particularity of the Shoah, to render the general compositional form and the individual forms within the composition legible with and in the present: to be more precise, with contemporary art and in contemporary art. For Bäcker as an author, and also as a photographer, this legibility depends to a considerable extent on a gaze that examines the countless particularities, the singularities, through which the event presents itself. Represents itself in its absence. Here, in these details, Bäcker searches for correspondences and he does this in series, comparisons, montages.
Something that may appear analogous to the innumerable repetitions of conceptual art fashionable in those years – namely the reference to the material that the photography produces, the concrete game with the signifier operations of the zealously semiotic sixties and seventies, suddenly becomes a scandal of forgetting through Bäcker’s particular stance and through his gaze: it becomes a revelation of blindness towards one’s own approaches, to the interpretation already described conceptually by the mindfulness of the photographic gaze, which transliterates the concrete: seriality and distance are considered signs of an intellectual and conceptual practice directed against realism – photographers of the era are interested in the relationship between the individual image and the grid, the series. However, Bäcker seems to say: these are also characteristics of the extermination machine itself, working to render anonymous, with sequences and grids, stripping away narratives, concealing the concrete, working with codifications. These codifications are also inscribed in the technological nature of photography.
Right from the outset Heimrad Bäcker also photographed objects he had found in Mauthausen and Gusen on their own, in isolation, then placed them in series alongside each other. He collected relics and treated these relics like concrete objects: »However many years it is since what happened, in the documents it is acutely contemporary«. Yet the places that have turned into ruins as monuments of time and now preserve this present solely as a document, as a fragment, remain in the present in the images. Bäcker’s gaze sets the objects and photographs of them into the context of post-war art. In the process he finds traces of the vocabulary of forms of this art in the objects – Tachiste paintings, expressive-abstract plastic art, the assemblages of Nouveau Realisme with their critique of civilisation, geometrically abstract sculpture, environment art.
Bäcker’s topographies are thus not just topographies of terror, inscribing a monument into time through documentary fixation processes, they are, as Bäcker has put it, again referring to »Nachschrift«: »the densest point, the nexus, where statistics and the ensuing methodological text also coincide, the written word from that time becomes the written word addressed to time through transcription, through the investigative form«. They are observations of the form of historical appearance, which is always excluded in representation, and thus also observations of ambiguities, of paradoxes. One might say that Bäcker’s photography poses questions about the source of the forms it captures and the compositional form of capturing these forms as photography, asks how these individual forms themselves combine with other information and slot into another knowledge. In this manner Bäcker’s photographs portray a parallel narrative, ordered through patterns of presences and absences, through patterns of representation, through patterns of patterns, drawing, traces and outline. Mauthausen or Gusen – the real of the coercion machine read from fragments of ruins, which now mark only a place in time. Bäcker’s photography does more than engage in a precise and detailed pursuit of the traces of camp inmates’ work in the abstract layers of strata in the quarry or the industrial organisation of labour that constructed the camp, drawing on the toil of camp detainees; Bäcker’s photography does not see only the present, which wishes to dispose of these sites, the camps as something burdensome, inconvenient, by systematically allowing them to vanish. Bäcker’s photography documents more than simply blotting out, corrosion, the wanton removal of the spaces of a possible memorial site and the »cleansing« of what exists to create an abstract monument. His photography opens our eyes to the state of these places. That is part of the vast, almost monumental project pursued by this photography. The triptych about the Mauthausen Stairs of Death is merely one demonstration of this.
In discourses about what cannot be depicted or about the prohibition on representation that accompany efforts to address the Shoah, abstraction often seems to be the only way out. This impossibility of depiction did not exist for photo artist Heimrad Bäcker. Possibilities of selection existed instead. An inventory of the present, rather than historicisation and monumentalisation, was his objective, compiling a list of what has not yet vanished. As a photographer Bäcker pursued the materiality of traces, in which something like the legibility of history must unfold through their tangible and particular graphic power. And he tracked down their after-images and re-emergence in the inventory of forms that European post-war art tapped into.
All of this with a view to »discovering the crystal of the event as a whole by analysing the small individual moment«, as Walter Benjamin once put it.

This text is an abridged version of a speech by the author in the context of the award of the Heimrad Bäcker Prize 2006 to Ferdinand Schmatz.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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