DISCOVER US! A Foreword

Uta Grundmann

The seeds of “Carnival Within – An Exhibition Made in America” were planted quite some time ago. The idea of showing contemporary art from the United States in Berlin came about shortly before the reelection of George W. Bush in November 2004—a time when public debate about America here in Germany was characterized by feelings of complete alienation. Admittedly, conceptions of the US had always been based less on real political facts and more on imaginary constructions conveyed by the media. However, anger about the Bush administration and its actions in the world turned the usual myths on their head, provoking the question as to how such conceptions and images arise and how to comprehend them.
It had become evident by the time of the dispute about the Iraq war at the very latest that the relationship of the United States to Germany (and Europe) was defined by irreconcilable differences. The war of words reflected two visions of the world. These differences did not merely relate to political actions, but also influenced other spheres of what was referred to as the “free West.” People started to question whether any common values or history had actually outlived the Cold War. It was not only the United States’ go-it-alone stance toward the “rest” of the world that created doubt and resentment. The apparent rise of evangelical Christianity and its sustained influence on the US administration also met with incomprehension. Summing up at the time, the New York Times said that the upcoming election was essentially a Kulturkampf, a battle to decide a cultural civil war between liberals and conservatives that had broken out openly in the 1960s and had been bubbling away under the surface ever since. To put it another way, the contention was that Bush and his entourage were planning to do away with modern, secular America and replace it with an empire underpinned by a Christian fundamentalist conviction that it was in possession of the eternal and binding truth. We regarded this modern, secular America—the one characterized by its civil rights movement and its campaigns for social change, by its search for expanded states of consciousness and self-actualization—as the real thing, for this was the America that we saw expressed in great music and literature, in movies and in art.
Things have changed fundamentally since 2004. By electing Barack Obama as president, the United States has shown the world that it is capable of renewal. The fact that it took the Bush years, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, to top it all, the financial and economic crisis to help a new political and cultural vision of America to gain acceptance would appear to confirm Hegel’s notion of history based on the “cunning of reason.” However, it was no coincidence that one of the underlying sentiments of this election was that it was time that the United States finally overcame the battles of the 1960s. The sense of a new beginning was being compared with that experienced in the 1960s and Obama with John F. Kennedy. Obama symbolized in equal measure the alleged reconciliation of the ethnic groups and—in the interlinking of his biography and his image—the American dream as the renewed promise of the chance of happiness for all. What people often fail to mention is that the other side of America, which has been embodied by Bush in recent years, also existed back then in the 1960s and continues to exist today. America remains a divided country, whose divisions even Obama cannot magically heal for the very reason that American society defines itself just as much in terms of its differences as its commonalities. The country is at loggerheads with itself over the importance of the family and sexual morality, about questions of utopia and religion, race and sex, war and peace, consumption and violence, order and chaos. The 1960s were a collective trauma because they split the country in two. The protagonists of both camps believed that they were fighting to save the future of civilization, while their visions of redemption could not have been more at odds with one another. The 1960s were just as much a trauma as September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. Accordingly, rather than divorcing America from its present-day problems, these symbolically contested battles define them.(1)
If we consider the question posed above about the evolution of conceptions of America on this side of the Atlantic in terms of the lasting effects of that period, then it becomes evident that the images that we created always solely pertained to either one camp or the other. In my case, these images were shaped by my fascination with US counterculture and protest movements. The title of our project DISCOVER US!—which also included an extensive program of contemporary American jazz as well as readings of conceptual poetry and a symposium about the relevance of conceptual writing—is an allusion to The Strawberry Statement, a 1970 movie about the student protests at Columbia University in New York. In one scene, the camera pans for several minutes along the empty streets of the rather ravaged city, pausing briefly as a barricaded shop window comes into focus on which the words DISCOVER AMERICA are painted in large letters. One might contend that America no longer needs to be discovered these days because our culture, particularly our visual culture, has become so Americanized that it is well nigh impossible to escape. But there is always something to discover beyond all the clichés, prejudices, and resentment. That is indubitably the case both in and about America. The exhibition “Carnival Within” is a voyage of discovery of this kind.

The curators were not aiming to provide any manner of overview of contemporary American art, to put on a politically motivated exhibition, or to reflect upon the state of American art today in an exhibition of that type. However, given the questions about the relationship between Germany and the United States that have surfaced in the last few years, it was natural to examine art in terms of its perspective. Would it, as a medium of critical analysis, be capable of reflecting upon the situation of America? Of course, the election of Barack Obama as president and the related shift in philosophy, politics, and ethics was of central importance for the exhibition concept. “Carnival Within” was nothing less than inspired by the belief in the possibility of transformation, or, to put it another way, by the slogan with which Obama won the election: “Change. The change we need. Change we can believe in.”(2) In their essay in this catalogue Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk demonstrate how American culture typically expresses its will for change and transformation, above all, in carnivalesque forms, not just masquerades or circuses, for example, but also pleasure parks like Coney Island and Disney World, and the likes of Las Vegas and Hollywood. Along with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Russ and Volk draw on the Russian literary scholar and philologist Mikhail Bakhtin, who regarded carnival as “the world turned upside down,” a state in which the possibility of freedom exists for the moment thanks to the power of carnivalesque laughter to undermine all authority and order.
It would seem fitting to search for the most appropriate expression of American freedom in the carnivalesque; after all with his use of the metaphor “Disneyland,” French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had, back in 1986, already described America as a domesticated pleasure paradise in whose culture the categories of simulation and fiction are genuinely inscribed.(3) The questions of one journalist who asked in the run-up to the exhibition whether Obama’s election should be seen as a “function of carnivalesque catharsis,” or whether America should be regarded as a theme park in which the new administration was marking a “puritanical Ash Wednesday” are informed by the same thinking. This query makes very clear that not only political events in America but also its art and—with one eye on the theme of the exhibition—the function of carnival for the cultural identity of US society are interpreted very differently both here and there. Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk are more concerned with an aesthetic than a political phenomenon, with the links between Puritan heritage, positivism, and entertainment; they stress the anarchic quality of carnival and the moment of freedom inherent in it. In their eyes the election of Obama is proof that the improbable is probable—and Bakhtin would, no doubt, have seen it as one of those great social shifts that he thought would always be preceded by a preliminary “carnivalization of consciousness.” One European commentator preferred to adopt the caution of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who would have interpreted the victory as a sign of the possibility of freedom, a sign that the unthinkable can happen, while, at the same time, bearing in mind the possibility of freedom turning into terror.(4) Moreover, the Euro­pean reception of carnival also takes a decidedly different tack. Here there is an almost complete consensus that carnival does not possess an anarchic function that disables existing systems. Instead, the temporary inversion of hierarchies is regarded as serving to reinforce existing social relations and legitimate social power structures. And this view is not new. Austrian writer and journalist Karl Kraus referred to war as “perverted carnival,” while Elias Canetti in his novel Auto da Fé de­scribed carnival­esque laughter as an aggressive act and
a substitute for physical violence. Russian philosopher Boris Groys goes even further, perceiving in Bakhtin’s description of carnival a “reproduction of the atmosphere of Stalinist terror” and assuming that Bakh­tin’s goal was “not the democratic critique of the revolution and of Stalinist terror, but its theoretical justification as an action based on an archaic tradition.”(5) Even if you do not go as far as to regard carnival as the flip side of terror, it is obvious that war and terror are themes that have preoccupied America over the last few years. In Bakhtin’s defense, it has to be said that the aim of his theory of the novel based on the meaning of comedy in culture was solely to develop the equivalent in the humanities of Einstein’s theory of relativity. It was derived from the insight that absolute meaning was no longer possible in modern societies and that meanings have to be understood in relative terms and depend decisively on the viewer’s standpoint.
Our exhibition “Carnival Within” can perhaps be more readily understood by Germans and Europeans by means of a concept of “sensation,” in particular if you understand this as a synonym for the definition of carnivalesque in US culture. A decisive feature of this culture, according to philosopher and legal scholar Jedediah Purdy, is the greed for sensation, for spectacle and ecstasy, happenings and a never-ending supply of sensory experiences that is reflected just as much in the ubiquity of evangelical religiosity and a society’s distorted relationship to food, as it has been in the politics of recent years, which, says Purdy, has elevated greed more and more to the status of a law in its own right.(6) While the term originally meant nothing more than a physical feeling or perception, nowadays the word sensation is also used to refer to any event that is capable of captivating our senses. In pre-modern societies sensation was also experienced as a holy epiphany and a means of achieving ecstasy, enabling people to escape their dreadful conditions of existence for a short while at least. Nowadays, in its function as a “surrogate of vanished divinity,” it is the “modern form of perception” per se.(7) The theme of carnival was intended to serve as a framework for art that would allow visitors to devote themselves to the “sensations” of the works, while the splendid architecture of the Uferhallen building in the Berlin district of Wedding provided a congenial venue for the exhibition. You could stroll the space as if it were a cleverly laid-out garden of sensations. Berlin photographer Arwed Messmer recorded the walk through our “pleasure park”.
“Carnival Within” very authentically manages to reflect contemporary America as a local event, while subtly picking up on the issues discussed above. The deconstruction of the Superman myth is evident in the works of David Herbert and William Pope.L. The dual nature of the “sensation” of Nadine Robinson’s star only becomes apparent if you know that the title Wormwood alludes to the Book of Revelation and thereby sees the terror of destruction as inherent to religiosity. In the case of evangelical Christianity practiced in the United States, the promise of an ecstasy of redemption has more to do with the satisfaction of the hunger for sensation than with any kind of meditative contemplation.(8) Lawrence Weiner’s work A PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS [ASAP] makes clear that the hunger for messianic redemption is definitely compatible with an expectation of happiness in this life. Concepts such as “hope” (also one of the buzzwords of the last US election), “optimism,” and “positive thinking” have long been part of the vocabulary of spiritual wellbeing in the United States. This “cult of positivity” has not only resulted in the emergence of a “self-improvement industry,” but also the new academic discipline of “positive psychology,” complete with annual conferences and a Journal of Happiness Studies(9)—all with the aim of helping people achieve a state of happiness “as soon as possible.”

These are just two examples for the multi-faceted way in which the artists in the exhibition deal with sensations and spectacle. The essay by Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk deals in detail with all of the works. The essays in this catalogue also take up the debate about the perception of the United States in Germany (or Europe), by reflecting our relationship toward and thereby our conceptions of America. As well as the essay about the exhibition and the artists involved, the catalogue includes a philosophical commentary about America and its ideal of freedom by Martina Siebert, an artist and philosopher, who lived for many years in New York. This is followed by a text by Uta Grundmann about the iconography of German-US imaginary images. The American studies scholar Thomas Irmer looks back upon the image of the United States in East Germany in the company of the Digedags, the main protagonists of one of the GDR’s best-loved comics MOSAIK; and Jed Rasula’s essay, which came about thanks to the cooperation between the exhibition and Jazzwerkstatt Berlin-Brandenburg, looks at jazz and its roots in European avant-garde music.

The entire program of DISCOVER US! (the exhibition “Carnival Within — An Exhibition Made in America”; the series of concerts “Across the Border — American Jazz Now”; and the literary program “Conceptual Writing and Its Environs — New Strategies in American Poetry”) was devised in cooperation with Ulli Blobel and Melanie Martin from Jazzwerkstatt Berlin-Brandenburg, Catrin Gersdorf from the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin, and Robert Fitterman from New York University.


(1)    Rick Perlstein, “Getting Past the ’60s? It’s Not Going to Happen,” The Washington Post, February 3, 2008, B01: “Like a patient under psychoanalysis, we still repress much that was most searing in those times, only to have it burst forth in odd moments. The after-effects of the divisions are so great that, glibly seeking to master these ghosts, we manage mostly to reproduce them.”
(2)    In an interview with the German daily Die Welt, US political scientist Walter Russell Mead explained that Obama’s talk of change was not just a slogan, but a fundamentally American vision. See “Wandel ist das Lebenselixier Amerikas,” WELT ONLINE, December 15, 2008.
(3)    Jean Baudrillard, America (London and New York, 1987).
(4)    Slavoj Zizek, “Use Your Illusions,” London Review of Books, November 14, 2008.
(5)    Boris Groys, “Grausamer Karneval. Michail Bachtins ‘ästhetische Rechtfertigung’ des Stalinismus,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 21, 1989.
(6)    Jedediah Purdy, “Jeder ein König,” DIE ZEIT, no. 44, October 21, 2004.
(7)    Christoph Türcke, Erregte Gesellschaft. Philosophie der Sensation (Munich, 2002).
(8)    Purdy, “Jeder ein König.”
(9)    Barbara Ehrenreich, “Pathologies of Hope,” Harper’s Magazine, February 1, 2007.


Uta Grundmann is an art historian and works as a freelance author, project manager, copy-editor and graphic designer in Berlin. She is co-author of the book Revolution im geschlossenen Raum. Die andere Kultur in Leipzig 1979–1990 (2002).