Gerd Arntz, political prints and image statistics

The print should be read as a text. The various figures function as words: 'worker,' 'nurse,' 'officer.' The image is architectural, functioning as a building with floors. The floors - three in number - are expressions of levels in social power. Whoever is highest in the image has the most authority in society. But unlike, say, the print The Third Reich, Barrack Occupation depicts the social hierarchy in a shocked state. The bottom “layer” is no longer content with the place it has been assigned. Workers revolt, they push up from the lower level, arm themselves (center left), are already present at the highest levels. The severity of the architecture, so striking in most of (Gerd Arntz ) Arntz’s prints, is broken to a great extent in Barrack Occupation. The dominant horizontals and verticals face fierce competition from the side of the diagonals. The worker’s mass, rendered in the form of a pyramid in the manner characteristic of Arntz, not only breaks through the division between the lowest and middle levels, but also at once connects the base with the upper image layer, and does so by a (stepped) diagonal from lower right to upper left. This diagonal is balanced by the two parallel “lines of force” in the image, both running from lower left to upper right, the first cutting across the workers’ pyramid, the second through the group of soldiers in the upper left

Note to Print "Barrack Occupation" (1939)

The severity of the architecture, so striking in most of (Gerd Arntz ) Arntz’s prints, is broken to a great extent in Barrack Occupation. The dominant horizontals and verticals face fierce competition from the side of the diagonals. The worker’s mass, rendered in the form of a pyramid in the manner characteristic of Arntz, not only breaks through the division between the lowest and middle levels, but also at once connects the base with the upper image layer, and does so by a (stepped) diagonal from lower right to upper left. This diagonal is balanced by the two parallel “lines of force” in the image, both running from lower left to upper right, the first cutting across the workers’ pyramid, the second through the group of soldiers in the upper left -

- corner, and the barracks gate. This organization of slanting lines produces a bold zigzag dynamic, lending great internal movement to the mostly static image. This does justice to the action depicted (not by slavish depiction, but by the organization of the material in the work itself), and works down to the smallest details: (looking along with the action scene) the many differentiations, based on observation, within the, at first sight, possibly schematic-looking workers’ pyramid; the movement and gestures in the scene with the handing over of the weapons; the deviations from a purely horizontal-vertical structure in the group of soldiers guarded by armed workers: the pushing of the occupiers into the gate, and finally the comical scene in the upper right with the 'rushing into civilian clothes’ officers. I point further to the subtle “rhyme” between a smaller diagonal fragment like the shadow line of the barracks wall in the upper left, and the onset of the lower diagonal axis (under the nurse’s feet). And on the revealing correspondence between the encroachment of the worker group out of the lower image level, and the “lowering” of the group of disarmed soldiers out of the highest image layer. The combination of different proportions, through the insertion of the colossal decapitated (!) statue of a high-ranking soldier contributes in no small way to the tension in the image, and thus to its political effectiveness. Decisive, however, is the mastery with which Arntz treats black and white. One becomes best aware of the behavior of these “colors” when examining the leaps they make around the two lines of force mentioned. Or when one takes into account all the different functions they perceive in the image, as planes or as lines. Arntz's print makes clear how much tendency and artistic quality, “truth” and “form” are intertwined and presuppose each other in good political art.

Image Statistics

The Gruppe progressiver Künstler, to which Arntz belonged before his Viennese time, was politically on a council-communist standpoint and artistically assumed a constructivist but at the same time figurative visual form. They wanted to overcome any form of socialist naturalism and anecdotalism - as well as the “pure” abstraction of the suprematists (Malevich). They believed that social coherences should be visualized. The image should work as text, the image-sign was supposed to be readable. The graphic contrast black and white had to be used to depict the social contradictions, the construction of the image to represent the social structure. Arntz in particular developed rigorously standardized image types (for example: male with hands in pockets = unemployed). There is no longer any illusionism: the sign is not a unique and immediate manifestation or appearance of the signified reality, it is an emphatically reproducible signature, an exemplary iconogram. This characteristic made Arntz’s work ideally suited to function within the set-up of the Viennese pictorial statistics. Arntz’s pictorial signs were given a place in Otto Neurath’s Aufklärungsuniversum. With this, they were distributed on a proper scale for the first time.

At the same time, they were torn from their politically-partisan pictorial context. Whereas in his “free work” Arntz tried to emphasize the qualitative character of relationships that presented themselves as quantitative, in his static work he had to do the opposite. Here he could no longer address the (capitalist) quality of society, but had to concentrate on the purely numerical side of things, reducing historical processes to their abstract-quantitative properties (population numbers, sizes of armies, population quanta of cities, etc.), on the basis of which they become mutually comparable. He could not prevent that making those processes comparable led to the liquidation of something essential: their particularity, the specific.

Arntz’s work is a unique attempt to depict the capitalist structure of Western societies. His graphics from the 1920s/30s excel in a precise characterization of the people he knew around him - a characterization according to their position within the social (economic, legal, political, military) hierarchy. He “summed up” the different types (manual workers, unemployed, soldiers and senior military officers, clergymen, prostitutes, entrepreneurs, diplomats, etc.) in legible signatures. He inserted these into the picture plane in such a way that the structure of the plane corresponded to the structure of the ‘signified’ society. This eliminated the need for superficial, exaggerated and caricatural characterizations to visualize the various social classes. The disadvantage, perhaps, was that a predominantly static image was created, an image of an unwept - stratified order - and thus the historical movement of society, and the functioning of the different layers in relation to each other, was not affected. Not the dynamic relations of the various elements to each other are represented, but these elements themselves, detached from the movement. But “capital” - to take one example - is not a static element in a historical “context,” but itself a process (the process of surplus value creation); this should concern political art as much as dialectical theory. Arntz’s method relies on abstraction and generalization more than on historical concretization and specification. In the prints, the concrete phenomena (strikes, for example) are reduced to the “being” (capitalism) - but how that “being” relates to the concrete-historical (the phenomenal, which is the only real thing), how it manifests itself concretely, becomes much less clear.

This tendency toward logical reduction must have made the work attractive to Neurath. There is an internal conflict in many of Arntz’s prints: on the one hand there is the intention to criticize the historical totality of society pictorially (which requires a differentiated and movable form; this is found in his sense of characteristic gestures, etc.), on the other hand there is the tendency to fix social reality in fomely pictorial and political formulas (formulas that can easily be conveyed in a purely gestalt context - in pictorial statistics).

Arntz’s council-communist-oriented “free work” after 1924, in which he constantly actualized and generalized the spontaneous workers’ uprisings of the first years after World War I - without specifically addressing the history taking place at the time - and his work for the Viennese “Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum,” show, apart from formalism, more substantive coherence than at first glance appears.

History remains something external to the signatures. It is not the signs themselves that are historically active and thus subject to change - this is only the case with the pictorial context (the arrangement, the context) in which they are placed. Thus history is detached from individual things and persons; these no longer change and act themselves, but drift with the flow of time. The representation of things as history-less elements in an empty time continuum made the work suitable for a productive relationship with Neurath’s positivism.

P.S. The relationship between text and image, and thus between the historically and disaggregated functions of (distinctive) reading and (illusionally attached) looking, is addressed in quite a different way in the paintings of René Magritte, a contemporary of Arntz and Neurath. How related the historical problem is, which this critical “surrealism” and image statistics faced, is evident from the following words of Magritte: “Sometimes the name of an object stands for an image. A word can replace an object in reality. An image can take the place of a word in a sentence”. With Magritte, the gap between the discursive and the drawing itself becomes a theme. The paintings in which certain objects are combined with “wrong” names (e.g., the words the door under the image of a horse’s head) problematize the identity of both things (the images) and words; they shock the established classification and ordering of reality and the affirmative nature of text and image (which is tied to the capacities of language and art to represent reality). See: M. Foucault, Ceci n'est pas une pipe1 , 1973.

Stijn.
M.S.

(1) This is Not a Pipe — Michel Foucault

Source: Te Elfder Ure 17. Marxisme 3, het marxisties wetenschapsbegrip.