German Visual Culture

To remain popular, the German music band “Tokio Hotel” consistently reinvents itself,1 allowing the phenomenon this group exemplifies to be considered as a research topic of notable interest when locating trends in recent youth culture in Europe and beyond. We will unfold a new kind of imagery in German pop that transmits a queer message to the youth2 and can be read as text in the sense of Bachmann-Medick’s “culture as text”3 concerning the issue of uncanniness and its connection to technology. For this cultural study, the imagery of the official music video of the German song “Automatisch” (from the band’s 2009 album) including its lyrics will be exemplarily analyzed together with a recording of the song’s live performance. In this song automation is thematically used and interconnected with the genre of pop music. Their corresponding live performance displays a compelling artistic redefinition of the human body as technology in an uncanny way. The question of body concepts within the imagery of Tokio Hotel reveals a path to contemplating a new kind of playful post-gender identity that becomes a broad part of European youth culture, especially from a German perspective, inside this technical information age of the “cyber.”

In this paper Victoria Walters addresses Joseph Beuys’s interest in the notion of Eurasia – Europe and Asia as a joint entity – not solely in terms of its geographical physical reality, but as a utopian sculptural concept. She argues that Beuys’s Eurasia project, shaped by collaborations with others, including the Korean-American artist Nam June Paik, reflects a form of nomadism. This nomadism goes beyond a purely geographical, geopolitical idea towards a spiritual and artistic project with the goal of initiating new co-created forms, including social forms, within Europe and beyond. She considers the degree to which this work continues to be of relevance today.

Much has changed in North America affecting the practicality of writing about and exhibiting Central European modernism. While the perspective of centres and peripheries can still be considered as a backdrop to understanding evolving practices of transnationalism and cultural exchange, new possibilities are suggested in the current discourse.
Evolved in part through nomadic modernism— Matthew Rampley’s ‘networks of mobility of art and artists’ – the ‘Modernist Other’ of the formation ‘Eastern Europe’ was ‘being transformed into the postmodernist Other (of undulating expanse) in the 1920s (Andrzej Turowski). Chance and fragmentation in photomontage further disrupted the chain of determinism, contributing to a self-reflective discourse about time and space seen in dada, as well as in the Devětsil photocollages of Jindřich Štyrský and Karel Teige—all suggesting that we consider a more episodic historiography.
In the global present, episodes of encounter involving non-European self-identifying modernist movements have prompted many useful metaphors that expose entanglements in colonial and post-colonial asymmetrical circumstances including ‘transmodernism’ (Christian Kravagna), microhistories, ‘cultural mediation’ (Piotr Piotrowski), ‘contextual modernism’ (R. Siva Kumar), microsociology (Thomas Hauschild), micro-stories, and what David Joselit calls a ‘reanimation’ of heritage, a concept similar to Rampley’s ‘critical heritage discourse’. Moreover, the much needed ‘critical museum’ hoped for by Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius and Piotrowski appears to be in full swing across the U.S. and Canada, prompting a further shift in priorities from post-colonial to decolonization, audiences to communities, collecting to repatriation, and global to local. Curators and scholars may become entrepreneurial facilitators drawing together diverse objects and ideas in unexpected juxtapositions, not unlike Joselit’s notion of a ‘curatorial episteme’. Central European modernism is rich in vanguard strategies that could invigorate contemporary discourses in smaller, more focused, more affordable, and ecologically sustainable exhibitions and publications.