All cultures of violence resemble each other insofar as they cannot bear the truth. On the committed art of Nils Burwitz - South Africa Pride breeds tyrants. Pride only has to swell up defiantly, foolishly, untimely, uselessly, so he must, even though he climbed towering pinnacles, plunge from heights inevitably where his feet find no support. Sophokles: King Oedipus Memory is not an organ, but an activity. Because what is remembered suddenly does not fit the image anymore, which we have fashioned about ourselves, we forget what we once knew. This active forgetting, however, destroys ourselves; it becomes a violation of oneself. Transitoriness not only lies in the fact that experiences are past, but above all that they are forgotten. Of course what is forgotten is Freud´s unconscious, the repressed: only that is not all. This making to forget is done to the person by something or someone, the repressed is repressed by something or someone. It is painful when, as e.g. during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the repressed is lifted into consciousness again. And this although those who now claim they knew nothing, only had had to open their eyes. There was a certain picture by Nils Burwitz: Bypass Nr 4: Port Elizabeth / Schoonmakerskop. There one could read: "Malays only". From the eye to the hand it is a long way. Because the eye is after all no camera. Stripes on a sign. The lines can be deciphered. The eye sees a writing. The writing can be read. "Alleenlik Chinese" - "Chinese only". The writing at a beach in South Africa, the beach is called Schoonmakerskop, we are near Port Elisabeth. "Europeans only". Now, people come from Malaysia now and then, China too, perhaps even from Europe to Schoonmakerskop, but why certain sections of the beach have to be reserved for these rare guests, is not clear. The observer is confounded. The South African observer is not confounded. The signs are commonplace. He sees them and does not see them. The obvious is always invisible, even when the eye brushes over it. It is obvious that people are divided into Malays, Europeans, Coloureds, Chinese, Bantu, although they all are South Africans. And that they may swim only at their respectively different beaches, divided strictly from each other. That they may only live in their respectively different areas, strictly divided from each other. That they may only carry out certain professional activities reserved for their race, only study at certain schools and universities and that they may not love each other across the ´colour bar´. The South African observer is not surprised. Confined to his laager, he observes his surroundings only through the embrasures of his fortress. In his fortress the ability to see dwindles in the stifling atmospere of a racist society which can only see difference and diversity as a threat to its own identity. Every story has three sides: my side, your side and the truth. Ruled by their fears and constraints, white South Africans cannot and do not want to see what is so ´obvious´ after all. Just like King Oedipus they believe: "I speak as one disinterested, I have / nothing to do with the oracle, nothing to do with the murder." (Sophokles: King Oedipus) They have the same sensory apparatus as the artist, but they have paralysed it, they have blocked it, they have cut off the lines, through which the painful signs of life flow. They have "eyes persuaded to be blind" (P.H.). Already in 1971, Nils Burwitz exhibited a painting (The Progressive Development of a Triangular Hat), in which, as in Bruegels Parable of the Blind from the year 1568, the blind lead the blind. But in his case the blind are not blind by birth: they blind themselves with a triangular hat which reminds one of the pointed hats of the Ku Klux Klan. The plunging of the unhappy ones embodies the ethical blindness with a force bordering on the monumental. Those who pass the truth blind or blinded, stumble into the abyss. So the gift of predicting the future, which can be read from one´s own actions so easily, appears as an extraordinary gift. Similar to Breugel, Burwitz shows us the world turned upside down, in which we mirror ourselves, the senselessness of human action - for example the "Scaly Anteater", an allegory of the armaments race of the South African government, which believed itself to be surrounded by enemies on all sides - Burwitz´ contribution to a satirical revue by Robert Kirby, 8 Beasts. The accompanying text pointed out that animals which surround themselves excessively with protective armour, are close to extinction, a prophetic statement, even if it took another few years, before the Apartheid state eventually collapsed beneath its military expenses. Nils Burwitz finds that astonishing too. And he displays his astonishment as a picture. In the picture it becomes unmistakably obvious what was visible everywhere, but also the consternation that something like that exists. Out of this astonishment and consternation emerges committment. Here, art is not committed, because it is indebted to an ideology. It is committed because it cannot but see. The commitment has grown out of the necessity of a social or private situation. Similar to Miró, Nils Burwitz translates the ideological conflicts (not only in South Africa) into the oppositions on the surface of his pictures. The print Writing Signs from the Miró-map - entitled "Writing on the Wall" recalls Burwitz's writing board in front of his studio in Johannesburg, on which he wrote complex provocative "truths", only now there is no writing to be discerned anymore. The writing has dissolved into minimal patterns and scriblings. And he sees that the landscape which we observe is "out of true", out of joint, but also out of truth. In 36 "exposures", which implies taking a photograph, but also to unmask, to bare, the artist already shows in 1971 what he sees. Aesthetics is, where it still evokes the meaning of the word, "perception", perception intensified to the highest attention of all senses, and not that bad consolation and that opium and marihuana which hinders any insight, to which "art" can easily degenerate in times of mass consumption. Aesthetics is the highest concentration of sensual perception: "Nils Burwitz has a seers vision of the human form. His authority of line goes deeper than the flesh." (Nadine Gordimer). The separation of art and politics is not mystified as being part of its nature, but is grasped as a consequence of the violence which does not allow a rational, i.e. a politics which accomodates the wishes of the people. It therefore must be the task of the imagination which aesthetics can unchain to resolve precisely this separation through the transformation of politics, to follow precisely that condition in which a person can guide its own production processes, and can engage its own imagination aesthetically. Art cannot exist outside of society. Those who, seeing Goethe´s Gretchen in her dungeon or the fate of the peasant boy in Werther, are not reminded of Steve Biko, Neil Aggett or the thousands of nameless victims of Apartheid-barbarity, may refer to Goethe, the minister, but not to Goethe´s text, which contradicts his praxis. South African writers, contemporaries of Nils Burwitz, have experienced and described the brutality of the Apartheid system, the restricted freedom of movement in South African society as a loss of their individuality and as senselessness. In Autopsy Arthur Nortje writes: "The luminous tongue in the black world / has infinite possibilities no longer." Arthur Nortje felt his country of birth to be a huge prison cell, in which the tongue could no longer say what it wanted to say. In 1972 the South African writer in exile, Lewis Nkosi, wrote in The Will to Die: "Time, frustration and despair, with their attendant drugs —alcohol and suicide — are taking a toll on South African writers. Nat Nakasa. Ingrid Jonker. Now Can Themba ... Their deaths are not simply natural deaths even when they are technically so ... their anguish is in many ways related to the anguish of the people of South Africa." An art, which does not avert its eyes, which painted the situation in its confinement and menace, many South Africans and the South African goverment understood as a provocation in turn. When the picture with the Apartheid signs was supposed to be sent to Athens in 1976 in order to represent South African art there, a heated debate flares up in the press and the governemt deliberated, whether the picture is a criticism of its politics. In 1981 the government refused to send pictures of Nils Burwitz to the Biennale in Valparaiso in Chile and the minister of culture, Gerrit Viljoen, considered far-reaching changes to the laws concerning cultural politics. All cultures of violence resemble each other in the sense that they cannot bear to look. They have to split their ego into a part which sees and a part which overlooks what it does see nevertheless. Looking away is silenced violence, the violence, which has made something silent within me. Not all have looked away. Certainly, there were, as I wrote at the time, artists, who have sold themselves to the regime, or who at least taught us to look away: the poet always was a pimp providing alibis for those that seduce But the notion presented by Sue Williamson, e.g., that there was no politically committed art before 1976 is just as incorrect as Breyten Breytenbach´s sweeping statement that white artists and poets had retreated from the political problems to their secluded little intellectual milieu. Certainly, the sixties and early seventies after the massacre of Sharpeville was a time of intensive repression. Every political utterance had to count on sharp sanctions. Yet nevertheless there were journals like the The New Classic, The Purple Renoster and Ophir, in which politically committed - black and white - artists had their say. And there was Nils Burwitz. Who had drawn the generation of black and white writers who had begun to write and publish at this time before 1976. That did not change either when Nils Burwitz settled in Valldemossa on Mallorca, because working in South Africa became more and more difficult. His art is, and that too depends on his origins, an art of migration: from Pommerania to South Africa to Mallorca. The circumstances under which he left South Africa, are not unfamiliar to those who went into exile in the sixties and seventies, not unfamiliar to the "kasie ouens" (the types from the township), who had anything to do with the struggle: musiciancs, artists, thinkers, politicians, poets, talented young men and women, who could not take it in South Africa anymore. And then there were those of course who were simply sick of it, and left the republic: "ek-is-gatvol-van-die-toun, ek klerie", who simply searched for a better future, in England, America, Europe, in Africa or the Eastern Bloc states. But Spain, Mallorca too, is not without a history: Picasso has captured it in Guernica, e.g., (it is hardly coincidental that a young black South African artist, Dumile Feni, also an exile, referred to this picture in African Guernica). And Nils Burwitz' homage to Miró is also a homage to someone, who in 1937 participated in the international exhibition in Paris with the famours print Aidez l'Espagne which portrays a man with a raised fist. Nils Burwitz´ Schwurhand (Hand of Oath) refers first and foremost to Käthe Kollwitz' print Mai més guerra! of 1925, but also to Miró's poster of 1937. Germany, too, divided, becomes a topic of his pictures. Im Wendebereich (Turning Point) Burwitz shows, eight years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, how one can be on both sides of the wall. The Mauerspringer (Walljumper) tries to overcome the wall, and eventually that moment, when a Deus ex machina rips open the wall. That, too, is political art. In 1971 Nils Burwitz already had portrayed the behaviour of the Apartheid society in the exhibition 36 Exposures (Lidchi Art Gallery) in his "Barometer of Sensibilities": the belief that the air pressure could be kept at a certain value through a lock, the belief that the revolutionary energy of an oppressed people could be suppressed, if only one could remove the indicator of the accumulated anger, its representation in art and the media. Such a barometer, disconnected from the pressure in any case, which it is supposed to indicate, cannot indicate anymore and it is of little use to hang a stethoscope around it: the physician is now missing, who could diagnose the disease. It is not coincidental that the "Landmine/Explosive Force" repeats that curve, only that it is now no longer an instrument of indication, but a weapon, the indicator cannot be arrested anymore, and which now shows, where one goes, if one ignores all warning signs. "Not wanting to know the truth about oneself, the Pole Brandys proclaimed, is the contemporary state of sin." (Christa Wolf, Kassandra) Aesthetics is, always starting from the facts, and especially from the unpleasant ones, it is the exertion of the imagination, to show up the other possibilities in the facts. The aesthetics of Nils Burwitz is multi-layered, and one of the layers is almost always humour or a satirical twist. Multilayered at first in a very literal sense, as e.g. in Exposure 36: A multidimensional Game of Chess, played to S.A. Rules. The introduction of the Apartheid laws in Natal, the Eastern of the South African provinces, were the occasion for this portrayal: on a map of South Africa the division of the land and the landtheft through the Apartheid laws were made visible in many superimposed layers, a patchwork which tries in vain to spatially separate the races which are so mixed up in any case. The uppermost layer was a transparent chess board, on which three dozen black peasants romped (no king, no queen, no towers, but all the same two bishops!). Next to this multi-layered artwork lay a hammer with the hint: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY - BREAK! The handle of the hammer pointed to a white player. On the print No, Dr.V. one initally sees in a kind of target a piece torn from a newspaper: the picture of a hostel, those hovels unworthy of human habitation, in which black miners were housed. In the top right-hand corner the date "June 28 1964" refers to the time, in which "Dr. V.", the then prime minister Dr. Verwoerd, architect of apartheid, ruled South Africa. Several stamps refer to a bureaucracy which was supposed to deal with the problem - "For the Minister's attention" - but which tries to get rid of the "problem": "Pending" - "uitgestel" (postponed) - "not approved". And finally at the centre: "Does not exist". The civil planning department claims: blacks do not exist (in the white towns), although they undoubtedly work there for the whites. Indeed, the racial ideology tried to view blacks merely as temporary visitors in the white cities of the country. The allusion to the magazine "Financial Mail" is an allusion to that economy which exploits blacks with the help of Apartheid as cheap labourers and then deposits them after work at those hovels unworthy of human habitation. No, Dr. Verwoerd, the artist asserts firmly. Of course, art is not easily dissolved into concepts, even if it engages committedly with what the eyes cannot but see, but if, e.g. in a sculpture such as Gegenabsichten / Crosspurposes, one immediately reaches the point, where one only sees the essence of things but not their exterior, it means reducing the multi-layered nature of the artwork to mere allegory. It is in the first instance an "aesthetic substitute for the memory of the artist" (Pierre Restany). Someone who was banished from his country of birth in Swinemünde like Nils Burwitz by historic events, wandering from continent to continent, needs memory all the more urgently, as far as the objects themselves, which have accompanied his life, are no longer accessible. "It constantly bewilders me how quickly and how much one forgets, if one does not transcribe everything. On the other hand: To retain everything would not be realisable, one would have to stop living." Thus the narrator reflects in the story "Tuesday, September the 27th." (Christa Wolf, Gesammelte Erzählungen/Collected Stories). Yet there is a yearning for duration, because the daily movements do not coalesce meaningfully, never and nowhere. Memory is an attempt to give that which occurred cohesion. "Incessently time slips into the past and requires points of reference, the exposed celluloid, the handwriting in numerous papers, letters, maps containing cuttings. Always a part of the present day has to give in order to secure the past one in one´s memory." (Christa Wolf) „The forgotten ... is never only something individual. Each forgotten thing mixes with the forgotten of the previous world, enters numerous, uncertain, changing connections to form ever new outgrowths." (Walter Benjamin) In Nils Burwitz´ case such seemingly simple objects are, however, never simply esoteric experiments in abstract assemblages. He himself has rejected that vehemently: "For four days and nights the press-photographer Peter Magubane stood on three building-bricks in cross-examination. When this misuse of building-bricks will one day be unthinkable, I will be prepared to reflect on the merits of a building-brick assemblage and about art aesthetics in itself in the Tate Gallery." As long as there is barbarity, everyone is an accomplice who looks away, who joins in the officially ordained silence. It would be barbaric, because contrary to the spirit of mnemosyne, to undermine with mere gimmicks the work that has been handed down by all those who resisted barbarity, thereby minimising, distorting, deriding, and declaring it as unimportant. Because those who govern apply violence time and again, as Peter Magubane and many others had to experience. In prison Eleutheromania, freedom mania, originates. The stories which were told beore the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, now show retrospectively how repressive life was under Apartheid. Far too many petty laws concerning the lives of the black townships, the constant surveillance by inept policemen meant untold misery. The crooked and often criminal actions of the police turned daily life into a nightmare. Life in the black townships had surreal features: "awash in the city tide/ or swimming between the rage of bottles, / floating in muck, flotsam and tossed jetsam,/ rockbottom smelling the gutter." (Nortje) Journalists, writers, musicians and artists, — Todd Matshikiza, GR Naidoo, Nat Nakasa, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Can Themba, Lewis Nkosi, Peter Magubane, Dennis Brutus, Cosmo Pieterse, James Matthews, Wally Serote, Abdullah Ibrahim (Dollar Brand), Don Mattera and many others, too many for me to recount here, nevertheless did their best to make these stories public. Nils Burwitz also belongs into this context. our law is fear: eyes eyes eyes silent in the vaults o lord lord in the vaults of this city fear and hate (SPIRITUAL) The trace of this violence is fear. The fear botches the process and is the only hopeful sign in it. We all know the misdeeds, an endless chain of heinous deeds, to uphold the rule, the intrigues around power, repression, censorship. But one may not speak out about them, because to break the ordained and generally accepted silence, threatens more than the security of the rulers. Naming the misdeed means breaking the language of rule, in which there may be no talk about the misdeeds of the rulers. The form of information in a state of lawlessness is such that information cannot come about, that this information remains mere appearance. Packed between nonsense and superstition, between signals which only those can read who learnt to read (not in the sense that one learns in school but as one learns in the office of the managing director), disinformation and obscuring of the actual news. Mirages emerge: illusions, double vision, where one does not know any more, what one sees, and what is pure imagination. But it could become a model for an alternative information which in the process of clarifying the hidden connections dismantles the credibility of the mass media itself, precisely if it probes the limitations of the media and their artificial darkness around the machinations of the powerful through its sounding out, controlling, criticising activity as artwork. Then the mirages, as with Burwitz, suddenly show something different. The mother of art is called memory. Above all, mnemosyne is the precondition for a life worthy of humans. Those who forget and repress, forget and repress the violence which made them what they are: an oppressor. They believe themselves to be free, they constitute themselves new all over again as a subject responsible to itself. And when this fiction shatters in the face of reality over and over again, the resulting psychic conflict thrusts them ever deeper into the unconscious. It is thus one, perhaps the most important function of art that it makes possible as memory that relief and inhalation: by protecting us from consciouslessness as "mneme", as memory, it restores the humantiy of the artist and the viewer. What Pierre Restany said about the Miró admired by Nils Burwitz also applies to Nils Burwitz: "The artist and his true palette is he, who sees justly and believes truthfully." Certainly, no picture, no drama can compare itself with the degree of reality of an authentic political manifestation. But, as Pierre Restany wrote about Nils Burwitz in 1995: "These pictures will definitely bring about a transformation." Peter Horn (Translation by Anette Horn)