caro

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Disasters of War
Caroline Lillian Schopp
Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s

opp
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Concrete Violence – Wolf Vostell’s
Disasters of War
Caroline Lillian Schopp

Wolf Vostell is best known for the intermedial interactive events he staged on 1. See Vostell’s anthologies: Wolf Vostell and
the streets of West Germany throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Berlin/100 Jürgen Becker (eds), Happenings. Fluxus. Pop art.

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Nouveau réalisme. Eine Dokumentation (Reinbek bei
Ereignisse (Berlin/100 events, 1965) exemplifies his work from the period, which Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1965); Wolf Vostell, Vostell:
he preferred to call ‘events’, ‘happenings’, ‘actions’, and ‘demonstrations’, thus Happening & Leben (Neuweid, Berlin:
blurring the boundary between art and life while affiliating artistic practice with Luchterhand, 1970); Wolf Vostell, Aktionen:
Happenings und Demonstrationen seit 1965 (Reinbek
political activism.1 Berlin/100 Ereignisse involved driving around the Western bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1970).
sector of the city in a car and making one hundred stops: to bury a clock in the
2. For documentation of Berlin / 100 Ereignisse,
rubble of Görlitzer train station, meet a naked woman wearing a gas mask, see the exhibition catalogue Jörn Merkert (ed.),
confront a sign prohibiting loitering with ‘der realität einer straße’ (the reality of Vostell: Retrospektive 1958–1974, Neuer Berliner
a street) by wielding posters with current headlines as lowercase slogans – Kunstverein in collaboration with the
Nationalgalerie Berlin Staatliche Museen
‘weinender U.S.-soldat im vietnamkrieg!’ (crying US soldier in the Vietnam Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Berlin: Neuer Berliner
War), ‘straßenkampf in rhodesien!’ (rioting in Rhodesia), ‘rocker mit motorrä- Kunstverein, 1975), pp. 154–63, as well as a
dern!’ (bikers with motorcycles) – pour out a bag of sugar near the Berlin Wall, selection in the smaller related exhibition
and perform an array of other more ordinary activities like eating and waiting, catalogue, Suzanne Pagé (ed.), Vostell:
Environnements / Happenings, 1958–1974 (Paris:
all for a ‘Zufallspublikum’ (chance public).2 These ‘events’ indicate the ambiva- Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris,
lent politics and site-specificity of Vostell’s work, which often explored the to- 1974). Unless otherwise noted, all translations
pography of post-war Germany.3 from German into English are mine.
Like Joseph Beuys, Vostell was an internationally recognised German affiliate 3. See Claudia Mesch, Modern Art at the Berlin
of Fluxus and was represented by Galerie René Block in West Berlin. Of the Wall: Demarcating Culture in the Cold War Generation
(London: Tauris, 2008) and Claudia Mesch,
two artists, Vostell is arguably less well known. Unlike Beuys, he did not hold ‘Vostell’s Ruins: Dé-collage and the
an official professorship in Germany, nor has his work been exhibited in an Mnemotechnic Space of the Postwar City’, Art
international retrospective.4 Vostell’s art-historical reception has been written History, vol. 23, no. 1, March 2000, pp. 88–115.
Mesch reads events like Berlin / 100 Ereignisse as
primarily in German and has tended to focus on action-based events like Berlin/ commemorative performances, meant to
100 Ereignisse and to position Vostell at the apex of an avant-garde trajectory of encourage remembrance of the destruction of
the politicisation of art originating in the early twentieth century.5 It is perhaps war.
for this reason, and the artist’s own insistence on the vocabulary of action, that 4. The 1974 retrospective in West Berlin (see
Vostell’s apparently more conventional visual material works have long footnote 2) was followed by another in 1992
remained out of sight. which also did not travel outside of Germany. See
Rolf Wedewer (ed.), Vostell (Bonn: Edition Braus,
This essay offers a new perspective, not only on the form of Vostell’s artistic 1992).
practice, but also on its main concerns. In the same years that Vostell was
5. German art historian Jürgen Schilling,
exploring the contours of artistic action, he also developed the distinctive Vostell’s good friend and frequent collaborator,
artistic technique of ‘Betonierung’ (concreting). In several series of little- initiated this framework. See Jürgen Schilling,
known works, Vostell used concrete to accentuate the violence of contemporary Aktionskunst: Identität von Kunst und Leben?Eine
Dokumentation (Luzern: C.J. Bucher, 1978). It has
history, from the Vietnam War to consumer capitalism and climate change. been compellingly taken up by Christoph Zeller.
Attention to Vostell’s concrete works reframes the impetus of actions like See in particular ‘Aktionen. Wolf Vostells
Berlin/100 Ereignisse by drawing out his long-standing preoccupation with struc- Happenings’, in Christoph Zeller, Ästhetik des
Authentischen: Literatur und Kunst um 1970 (Berlin:
tural violence. Taking up Francisco Goya’s artistic concern with the representa- De Gruyter, 2010), pp. 134–80. This framework
tion of the violence of war, Vostell’s technique of Betonierung operates in two is also exemplified in the artist’s exhibition
ways to make violence ‘concrete’: by emphasising the production of structural history, most significantly in the recent show and
violence and the precarity to which it gives rise, and by arresting the shock of catalogue, Fritz Emslander (ed.), Das Theater ist
auf der Straße: die Happenings von Wolf Vostell ¼ El
graphic violence.
# The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press. OXFORD ART JOURNAL 44.2 2021 307–330
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which
permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Caroline Lillian Schopp

Vehicles of Violence
Pasted into the artist’s book Leben gleich Kunst (Life equals Art, 1964–1974), an
teatro está en la calla: los Happenings de Wolf Vostell, archive of images, excerpts, schedules, and notes that Vostell drew upon
Museo Vostell, Malpartida; and Städtisches throughout the decade, is a newsprint image of two military aircraft dropping
Museum Leverkusen, Morsbroich (Bielefeld:
Kerber, 2010).
bombs while cruising above a blanket of clouds (Fig. 1). The image caption
indicates that they are B-52s on a mission over Laos, and the surrounding text,
6. The article ran under the headline, ‘B-52
which has been torn through, suggests a recent controversial American assault.
bombardieren laotische Hochebene –
Nordvietnamesen in Laos erfolgreich – US- Like many of the materials in Leben gleich Kunst, Vostell carefully folded the
Senatoren fordern Aufklärung’, in the section excerpt before pasting it into the book, allowing the reader to turn the image
‘Zeitgeschichten unserer Zeit’, Die Zeit, 27 over (Fig. 2). On the other side of the B-52s, another vehicle can be seen: a car
February 1970, p. 12 (this section of the newspa-

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per was not individually authored).
glittering in the rain, identified in the torn-through mise-en-page as ‘B-1-17’
and advertised with the words ‘comfort’ and ‘classy’. The reversible juxtaposi-
7. Advertisement pictured in Die Zeit, 27
February 1970, p. 11.
tion of the B-52 and the B-1-17 was not, I propose, just incidental for Vostell. It
configures the underlying intersection of the violence of war and the violence of
8. On what he proposes to call the ‘society of consumer capitalism that informs much of his work from the period and which
security’, see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977– he seeks to emphasise through his use of concrete as a material supplemental
78, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and form.
Michel Senellart (eds), (New York: Palgrave Vostell tore the image of the B-52s out of the issue of the German weekly
Macmillan, 2007). See also Ulrich Beck, Risk
Society – Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage,
newspaper Die Zeit published on 27 February 1970. The article it illustrates
1992). reports on the ‘dangerous stage’ the crisis in Laos had reached as American
9. See Vostell’s comments in Jörn Merkert, ‘Pre-
pilots in B-52s sought to hinder anticipated attacks on Vientiane by the North
Fluxus Vostell’, Art and Artists, vol. 8, no. 2, May Vietnamese Army, which was said to have recaptured areas on the outskirts of
1973, pp. 32–7; or Wolf Vostell and Jürgen the capital.6 On the reverse of the newspaper page, ‘B-1-17’ refers to the new
Schilling, Vostell, das plastische Werk, 1953–87 German Audi 100 LS ‘Sport-Komfortklasse’ edition, which is showcased for its
(Milano: Mult(h)ipla, 1988), p. 12.
extreme speed and especially secure brake system: ‘brake in seconds instead of
10. ‘B-52 bombardieren laotische Hochebene’, p. seconds of terror’ touts the byline.7 Epitomising the logic of security, the
12.
advertisement for the car explicitly invokes fear and a calculus of risk,
11. Theo Löbsack, ‘Dreck, den wir atmen – promoting brand-new brakes with the implicit threat of a crash.8 This logic in-
Zwanzig Millionen Tonnen Giftstoffe in der Luft’,
Die Zeit, 27 February 1970, pp. 51–2, and
terested Vostell, who would often remark that buying a car was equivalent to
announced on cover. buying an accident.9 And it is with the same logic of security that the article on
the B-52s frames the pre-emptive airstrikes, justifying the bombings as a way
‘to put a brake on the enemy’s advance’.10 By excerpting and mounting the B-
52s and the B-1-17 in Leben gleich Kunst as he does, Vostell emphasises these
often-overlooked connections, insisting on the relation between the two
vehicles, as well as the activities they enable – military strikes on a neutral coun-
try and high-speed joy-riding – and the violent consequences to which they are
designed, accidentally or intentionally, to give rise, whether in distant lands or
close to home.
The cover story of the same issue of Die Zeit, ‘Filth, that we breathe’,
indicates a further connection.11 In an issue punctuated heavily by ads for
European cars, the article highlights direct, yet systematically overlooked, links
between motor vehicle emissions and climate change, lung cancer, and
environmental damage. It shows that the life-threatening increase of carbon
monoxide and other poisonous gases in the atmosphere is generated primarily
by cars and the automobile industry. Vostell’s excerpt from Die Zeit in Leben
gleich Kunst foregrounds these perfidious implications and the far-reaching hy-
pocrisies and paradoxes that interpolate everyday life by cutting them out and
inserting them into a work of art, where they can be made explicit. It was in
the process of attempting to address such violent coincidences that, I suggest,
Vostell came up with his artistic technique of Betonierung.
Just two weeks after its publication in Die Zeit, the image of the B-52s
appeared in Vostell’s work B 52 in Laos im Einsatz (B 52 in Laos on a Mission,

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Figs 1–2. Wolf Vostell, Leben gleich Kunst (Life equals Art), page opening, 1964–74, mixed-media spiral-bound
Objektbuch (Skizzenbuch) (object-book, sketch-book) in a wooden box, 36 x 50 x 40 cm. Land NRW
(North Rhine-Westphalia), on long-term loan to Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. (Photo: Jochen Mueller/
Museum Morsbroich; courtesy of The Wolf Vostell Estate.)

Fig. 2.

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Caroline Lillian Schopp

1970) (Fig. 3). It was one of six image-based concrete works included in his ex-
hibition Utopische Betonierungen (utopian concretings) from 14 March through 15
12. Until the recent exhibition Vostell Concrete,
April 1970 at Helmut Rywelski’s gallery, art intermedia, in Cologne.12 The ti-
1969–1973 at The Smart Museum of Art, tle of the work is taken directly from the image caption in the source article. As
University of Chicago (January 17–June 11, his blue pen annotations around the B-52s in Leben gleich Kunst indicate, Vostell
2017), which I co-curated with Christine
Mehring and Diane Miliotes, these works had
cropped the surrounding text and increased the scale of the newspaper image
rarely been seen since the 1970s. dramatically, translating its three-centimetre width to 108 centimetres in an
enormous silver gelatin print. The bombs pixilate in the clouds, transformed
into vague coagulations of ink. More than five centimetres of plaster, coated
with particulate and grey acrylic to look like concrete, is carefully placed to

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cover the B-52 in the foreground, articulating and accentuating its intricate con-
tours. Vostell’s application of ‘concrete’ to the bomber in this way emphasises
its physical structure, crystalising within the vague blurred photographic image
a concrete material form. This concreting also shifts the narrative of the bomb-
ers’ mission. It suggests a refiguration of the abstract notion of the pre-emptive,

Fig. 3. Wolf Vostell, B 52 in Laos im Einsatz (B 52 in Laos on a Mission), 1970, plaster with acrylic, graphite, and lithographic crayon on gelatin silver print
on chipboard, 139 x 109 x 8.4 cm. Collection of Dr. Bernard Descamps, France. (Photo: Wolfgang Günzel; courtesy of The Wolf Vostell Estate.)

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 Concrete Violence

supposedly protective strike in terms of its concrete consequence – which is to

say, the decisive material outcome – of the bombing itself. The concreted
bomber articulates a different perspective on the security logic for which the 13. Vostell writes four lines in black lithographic
entire image stands. It sets into petrified relief the precarious condition of those crayon on the work: ‘Projekt B 52 für die USA in
people and environments, concealed beneath the diffuse layer of clouds, imme- Laos þ Vietnam / Einbetonierte B52 fliegen im
diately and catastrophically affected by the bombs being dropped. Finally, in the Verband mit / ohne Pilot elektronisch gesteuert
/ Auch fliegende Zementwolken sind
concreted form of the B-52, B 52 in Laos im Einsatz captures the attrition of willkommen’.
agency at the core of techno-scientific warfare.
14. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia –
Vostell further elaborates the tension between responsible, autonomous Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Berlin:
agency or agents, and automatic, anonymous deployment in the short text he Suhrkamp, 1951), p. 27: ‘In der abstrakten
inscribes on the work. It suggests that concreted American bombers fly Vorstellung des universalen Unrechts geht jede

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konkrete Verantwortung unter’.
together in formation over Laos and Vietnam, without pilots, controlled
electronically, and that ‘flying concrete clouds’ would also be welcome.13 Like 15. American President Dwight Eisenhower used
the unpiloted concreted bombers, these concrete clouds pose an uncertain yet the phrase in his farewell speech delivered 17
January 1961. See James Ledbetter, Unwarranted
manifold threat. Both ironic and macabre, the use of concrete in B 52 in Laos im Influence: Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Military-
Einsatz investigates the paradoxes of the attribution of responsibility that had Industrial Complex (New Haven, CT: Yale
concerned Theodor Adorno when he wrote, ‘In the abstract idea of universal University Press, 2011).
wrong, all concrete responsibility is wiped out’.14 Vostell’s critique of violence 16. After periodically publishing her reports on
by means of concrete emphasises the very perplexity Adorno points to: it is the trial of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann in 1961 and
1962, she collected and revised them in a book.
neither sufficient to abstractly denounce injustice in general, nor to seek out See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
specific responsible individuals. Such concrete individuals can no longer be Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking,
easily identified insofar as they are inserted into broader structures which they 1963).
can claim neither to control nor independently to resist. Two names for such 17. Wolf Vostell, Letter to Jan van der Marck,
structures in regular use by the end of the 1960s had already been established 14 March 1970, The Gilbert and Lila Silverman
circa 1961: ‘The military–industrial complex’15 and what Hannah Arendt Fluxus Collection Archives, I.1182, The Museum
of Modern Art Archives, New York.
called ‘the banality of evil’.16
B 52 in Laos im Einsatz unfolds the relation of the B-52 to the B-1-17, which 18. See Vostell’s comments in an interview by
Jürgen Schilling, ‘Gespräch mit Wolf Vostell’, in
can be seen as a point of departure for Vostell’s corpus of image-based concrete Jürgen Schilling (ed.), Wolf Vostell: dé-coll-agen,
works. Concealed behind the military bomber is the consumer’s fast, noxious Verwischungen, Schichtenbilder, Bleibilder,
car. And concealed behind the direct violence of a distant war is the tacit vio- Objektbilder, 1955–1979 (Braunschweig:
lence effected across the globe by Western consumerism. These interrelated Kunstverein Braunschweig, 1980), pp. 10–14.
forms of violence are each driven by false promises of the secure and comfort-
able life these vehicles are supposed to ensure, at home and abroad. Vostell’s
use of concrete stresses violence that is concealed, abstract, impersonal, unspec-
tacular, and, as I will argue, structural. The technique of Betonierung makes
such abstract violence tangible in a concrete way.
The Violence of Zeitgeschichte
At first, Vostell thought of his new concrete works in terms of an artistic
technique he had previously explored, characterising them as ‘Verwischungen’
(blurrings or obliterations). In a letter written to Jan van der Marck on 14
March 1970, the eve of his Utopische Betonierungen exhibition in Cologne, Vostell
described the concrete works in the show as ‘Beton-Verwischungen’ (concrete-
blurrings).17 His own adaptation of the French word ‘effaçage‘ (effacement),
the term ‘Verwischung’ describes a destructive technique that Vostell developed
in 1959 and throughout the early 1960s to obscure and – however impotently –
negate the violence of what he referred to as ‘Zeitgeschichte’ (contemporary
history, or history of our time).18 As a technique of representation,
Verwischung is commensurate with erasure. Vostell applied corrosive
photographic emulsion to found-images or full-page spreads from current mag-
azines and newspapers, which he typically photomechanically transferred to
photographic paper, enhancing the destructive effect of the emulsion. Like the

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Caroline Lillian Schopp

news clipping of the B-52s, the images subject to Verwischung present juxtapo-
sitions of news coverage of conflict, catastrophe, and war with ads for main-
stream brands.19
Vostell’s earliest works of Verwischung censoriously limit the visibility of the
source images, partially shielding the viewer from them. Later works of
Verwischung, like Miss America (1968) (Fig. 4), reveal more than they conceal.
In this work, the technique of Verwischung is formalised in vibrant washes of
blue paint, which evoke Pop Art palettes and Abstract Expressionist gesture.
These washes of colour both highlight and suture, provocatively situating the
brutally violent image of the execution of a Vietnamese Communist prisoner in
Saigon in 1968 between the striding legs of a woman modelling in an American

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fashion advertisement.20 The woman is modestly attired, a figure of
international exchange. Yet Vostell’s placement of the execution image between
her legs introduces a grotesque militant eroticism. In the lower register, the
executed prisoner’s body appears twice more: once in an echo of the fashion
model with his bare legs splayed limply apart, and finally in a posture of fatal
collapse. Vostell’s careful screen-printed over-layering of these images synchro-
nises with his painted application of colour, which draws the printed images to-
gether again through visual alliteration. The blots of red evoke make-up as well
as wounds. Through these techniques of superimposition, Miss America exagger-
ates the found juxtapositions of luxury advertisements and war photojournalism
Fig. 4. Wolf Vostell, Miss America, 1968,
characteristic of Vostell’s works from the 1960s. Nevertheless, as Miss America
photograph, silkscreen, and coloured varnish
on canvas, 200 x 120 cm. Museum Ludwig, makes clear, despite the use of Verwischung, the direct repetition of the graphic
Cologne. (Photo: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, war images candidly risks, as Vostell must have been aware, aestheticising and
rba_c004388; courtesy of The Wolf Vostell sexualising the violence it sets out to efface.21
Estate.) Vostell’s use of concrete continues the intervention in the violence of
Zeitgeschichte with which his Verwischungen of the 1960s were concerned.
19. For the most extensive documentation of
However, in the technique that he would call ‘Betonierung’, Vostell ultimately
Vostell’s Verwischungen, see René Block, Wolf discovered a more precise critical practice, one that neither reproduced – nor
Vostell: Dé-collagen: 1954–69: Plakate, simply effaced – the duplicitous mode of image production employed by the
Verwischungen, Objekte, Happening Partituren, news media. As the case of B 52 in Laos im Einsatz exemplifies, the technique of
Happening Fall Outs, Elektronische Verwischungen,
Elektronische Objekte, Galerie Block Edition 17
Betonierung is an additive procedure whose primary effect is neither repetition
(Berlin: Galerie René Block, 1969). nor negation, but rather a supplementary stress or emphasis generated by the
20. American photojournalist Edward Adams
application of concrete to a distinct zone of an image, an object, or a body.
took the widely circulated execution photograph, Indeed, the word ‘Betonierung’ resounds with the German noun ‘Betonung’,
first printed in newspapers on 2 February 1968. which means ‘accent’ or ‘stress’ in a linguistic or poetic sense and, simply,
For a discussion of this photograph in German ‘emphasis’. The artistic technique of Betonierung also works in this way,
contexts, see Gerhard Paul, Bilder des Krieges –
Krieg der Bilder: die Visualisierung des modernen
accentuating, rather than erasing or blurring, something in the image that it
Krieges (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004), treats. And it achieves this emphasis, coincidentally – for the words are not
pp. 327–8. On the execution itself and the etymologically related – through the addition of ‘Beton’ (concrete), as the
repercussions of the photograph, see Barbie material is called in German.22
Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the
Public (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
With his use of Beton in his concrete works Vostell emphasises structural
pp. 218–66. Vostell pasted a cut-out of the fash- violence, which he seeks to make concrete, which is to say ‘konkret’ in the
ion advertisement used in Miss America into Leben German adjectival sense.23 Concrete in this sense of ‘konkret’ rather than
gleich Kunst. ‘Beton’, belongs to a philosophical tradition that analyses the dialectic
21. A Cologne clothing shop owner’s use of a between the general and the singular, the theoretical and the empirical, ‘the
reproduction of Miss America in a window abstract’ (das Abstrakte) and ‘the concrete’ (das Konkrete).24 While he
showcase in 1971 to display a ‘progressive’
approach to fashion realises this risk. See Hurra!?:
would have been exposed to this use of ‘concrete’ in the thought of Adorno
vom Unsinn des Krieges; sechste Jugendausstellung der and other Marxist writers and activists popular in the period, Vostell would
Kölner Museen im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Köln also have been familiar with such questions as they were explored in the
1971–1972 (Cologne: Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, contemporary artistic movement known as ‘konkrete Poesie’.25 Concrete
1971), pp. 60, 64.
poetry plays on the tension between what a poem looks like and how it means.
Instead of devices like narration, metaphor, or allegory, concrete poetry favours a

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visually self-evident presentation of the structuring forms and graphemes of lan-

guage. Its task, as Eugen Gomringer, one of its earliest theorists and practitioners,
describes it, is to produce a ‘material, concrete presence’ rather than generate 22. The German ‘Beton’ is from the French
external reference or significance.26 Concrete poetry often looks, consequently, ‘béton’, and not etymologically linked to
quite abstract.27 ‘Betonung’.
This concrete (konkret) idiom is the one in which Vostell’s concrete (Beton) 23. This duality of concrete – ‘Beton’ /
speaks. By introducing emphatic concrete forms, the technique of Betonierung ‘konkret’ – does not, as Vostell knew, exist in
foregrounds latent structure rather than narrative reference. This is what makes English, where the word ‘concrete’ is
polysemantic, serving both nominal and adjectival
the technique, and the material it deploys, so compelling as a means to reframe meanings, as exemplified in Vostell’s shrewd title
the representation of violence. What I propose to call the ‘concrete violence’ of for his only site-specific concrete work based in
Vostell’s work stresses the evident yet so often obfuscated structures that an English-speaking country, Concrete Traffic

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(1970) in Chicago.
interlink the violence of capitalist consumer society and techno-scientific war-
fare, exposing the very operations that produce this link. 24. On the philosophical notion of ‘the
concrete’, influentially taken up by Adorno
amongst others in the 1960s, see Georg Wilhelm
Structural Violence
Friedrich Hegel, ‘Begriff des Konkreten’, in Eva
It is not by chance that the phrase ‘structural violence’ was established in the Moldenhauer (ed.), Werke in zwanzig Bänden
1960s in the context of the Vietnam War, independence struggles in former (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), xviii, pp.
42–6; and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, ‘Wer
European colonies, civil rights and women’s rights movements, and burgeoning denkt abstrakt?’ in Eva Moldenhauer (ed.), Werke
anxieties about the relation of pollution and consumer waste to disease, famine, in zwanzig Bänden, ii, pp. 575–81.
and environmental devastation. Anticipating what would soon be called 25. Vostell himself experimented with concrete
biopolitics, Johan Galtung opposed ‘structural or indirect violence’ to ‘personal poetry, and also published it in his journal dé-coll/
or direct violence’ in 1969.28 In contrast with personal violence, structural age (Cologne, 1962–1969). See also Christoph
Zeller, ‘Wolf Vostell und die experimentelle
violence confounds attribution of guilt, lacking what Galtung calls ‘concrete Literatur’, in Anne-Rose Meyer-Eisenhut and
persons as actors’ who can be held accountable for decisive actions.29 Resistant Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (eds), Fluxus und/als
to analysis and unspectacular in nature, structural violence is often invisible, Literatur: zum Werk Jürgen Beckers (Munich: Edition
habitual, normalised. It eludes representation and is difficult to oppose; as Text þ Kritik, 2014), pp. 15–34.
Galtung writes, it ‘does not show’.30 Instead, it blends into the habits and 26. Eugen Gomringer describes konstellationen
banality of everyday life, accommodating naturalised abstractions, such as (constellations) as a ‘materielle, konkrete
anwesenheit’ in Daniel Spoerri (ed.), material 1
Galtung’s disturbing metaphor, ‘structural violence may be seen as about as (Darmstadt: D. Spoerri, 1957), n.p. It was
natural as the air around us’.31 typical for concrete poets to abandon standard
No work of art better presents this anti-image of structural violence in German capitalization.
concrete terms than Vostell’s serenely ominous Betonwolke über Chicago 27. See, for example, the works included in the
(Concrete Cloud over Chicago, 1970) (Fig. 5). Suspended in the centre of a sil- foremost publication for concrete poetry and art,
ver gelatin print of cumulus clouds, a bulky moulded clod of cement is para- Eugen Gomringer, Dieter Roth, Marcel Wyss
(eds), Spirale (Bern, 1953–1964). Wyss defines
doxically weightless. Air is made ‘to show’ concretely – and it is gritty, concrete poetry as ‘der nicht abbildenden, neues,
filthy, sharply edged. When it was first exhibited, Vostell titled his concrete- konkretes erschaffenden kunst’ (the not-
cloud not Betonwolke über Chicago, but rather Chicago Concrete Traffic.32 The representational art that generates the new and
the concrete) and its aims in terms of ‘absoluter
contours of the moulded cement ‘cloud’ distinctly reiterate the Cadillac- abstraktion’ (absolute abstraction), Spirale, vol. 3,
silhouette of Vostell’s Chicago event-sculpture made earlier that year, 1953, n.p.
Concrete Traffic (1970), thus linking cloud to car, and the air and environment 28. Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
to urban traffic and the automobile industry. A further indication of such Research’, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 6, no. 3,
coincidences, on 16 January 1970, the day the concrete for the event- 1969, pp. 167–91.
sculpture Concrete Traffic was poured over the Cadillac car in Chicago,33 a 29. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
headline in the Chicago Tribune read, ‘Filthy air blankets Chicago – Relief is Research’, pp. 170–1.
due’.34 The article cites a path-breaking environmental health specialist, Dr 30. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
Bertram Carnow, who urged doctors to consider environmental factors like Research’, p. 173.
pollution when diagnosing and treating illness. Carnow also happened to 31. Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace
treat Vostell as a patient that January, when he fell ill with pneumonia while Research’, p. 173.
making Concrete Traffic. Vostell would integrate a Wallgreens pharmacy pre- 32. See the catalogue Wolf Vostell: environments,
scription bottle bearing Carnow’s name into a later work.35 pintura, happenings, dibuixos, video de 1958 a 1978
Betonwolke über Chicago should be seen as an inflection of all of these (Barcelona: Fundació Joan Miró, 1979), pp. 57,
incidences. It foregrounds insidious structural violence. ‘The air around us’ 107.

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Fig. 5. Wolf Vostell, Betonwolke über Chicago (Concrete Cloud over Chicago), 1970, cement on gelatin silver print on chipboard in a Plexiglas box, 71 x
109.1 x 12.5 cm. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Purchased by a donation from Amy L. Gold
and funds from The Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions. (Photo: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The University of Chicago;
courtesy of The Wolf Vostell Estate.)

33. On the event-sculpture Concrete Traffic, see materialises as a site where difficult-to-perceive, airborne threats lurk – from
Christine Mehring, ‘Car Culture’, Artforum,
January 2017, pp. 164–75.
vehicle emissions to viruses to bombs. It presciently brings to mind what Rob
Nixon has more recently called ‘slow violence’, which refers to the all but
34. Casey Banas, ‘Filthy air blankets Chicago –
Relief is due’, Chicago Tribune, 16 January 1970.
indiscernible creep of pollution and ecological damage, as well as to the
My thanks to Lisa Zaher for calling my attention deferred violence of war and the slow-motion execution of survivors, and their
to this article. future children, by landmines, unexploded bombs, and the long-term effects of
35. See Wolf Vostell, Zyklus Mania: Fliegen (Cycle airborne chemical warfare like the use of napalm and Agent Orange in the
Mania: Flying, 1973), a mixed-media work Vietnam War.36 Structural in nature, ‘slow violence’ disproportionately affects
housed in the collection of the Neue the very impoverished populations that already habitually suffer political invisi-
Nationalgalerie, Berlin.
bility and neglect. Betonwolke über Chicago accentuates the connections between
36. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the slow structural violence and personal violence. It evokes the inscription on B 52
Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2011). in Laos im Einsatz – which welcomes concrete clouds to join the action – and
can be read as the flipside to that work, linking the personal violence of war
37. Exceptions include three works from the
early 1970s that address police violence and racial with the banal ubiquity and indirect violence concealed in the air around us.
violence in the context of civil rights protests in
the USA. See Mehring, ‘Car Culture’, p. 173;
and the exhibition Vostell Concrete, 1969–1973, Precarity
The Smart Museum of Art, University of In contrast with his Verwischungen, direct representations of the human body
Chicago (January 17–June 11, 2017).
are strikingly absent from Vostell’s early Betonierungen.37 In this respect, the
structural violence exposed in the early concrete works remains arguably
abstract – even as works like B 52 in Laos im Einsatz and Betonwolke über Chicago
begin to indicate the concrete experience of violence that such structures
perpetuate and conceal. Yet as Vostell was exploring the technique of
Betonierung as a way to stress structural violence, he also began to uncover the
peculiar potential of concrete to reframe graphic violence. For structural

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violence is not only violence that ‘does not show’, as Galtung observed, it is
also the occlusion and anaesthetisation of personal violence.
In recent writings on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Judith Butler 38. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life
performs a related gesture in her critique of violence. Instead of investigating Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), p. 25.
the missing place of the agent, as Galtung had done, Butler addresses
39. Butler, Frames of War, p. 26.
structural violence from the perspective of embodiment, vulnerability, and
what she calls ‘precariousness’: the susceptibility of all life to being 40. Butler, Frames of War, p. 25.
‘expunged at will or by accident’.38 While all life is precarious, the 41. See Daniel C. Hallin, The “Uncensored War” –
differential distribution of precariousness produces the related condition of The Media and Vietnam (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986). Gerhard Paul
‘precarity’, which is the experience of structural violence as what Butler characterises the exceptional character of the
calls the ‘politically induced condition of maximized precariousness’.39

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images of the My Lai massacre in terms of a new
Deprived of forms of social and institutional support, populations in ‘Täter–Opfer–Diskurs’ (perpetrator–victim–
precarity are ‘differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’.40 This discourse) in Paul, Bilder des Krieges, p. 329.
distinction is complicated in Butler’s account by the question of 42. Hal Wingo, ‘The Massacre at Mylai [sic]:
representation, for arguably the first injury that populations in precarity Exclusive Pictures, Eye Witness Accounts’, Life,
suffer is structural invisibility: they may be seen, but are not recognised in vol. 67, no. 23, 5 December 1969, pp. 36–45,
esp. p. 36. The My Lai massacre is thus a
any politically consequential sense. At the limit, and this is Butler’s main paradigmatic example of ‘horrorism’. See
concern, life in precarity is not grievable. Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary
In December of 1969, as Vostell arrived in the United States to make the Violence (New York: Columbia University Press,
2011).
event-sculpture Concrete Traffic, the influx of photographs of the Vietnam
War showing violated human bodies reached an unprecedented extreme 43. Haeberle recounts, ‘Guys were about to
around the massacre at My Lai. Whereas previous photojournalism docu- shoot these people. I yelled, “Hold it,” and shot
my picture. As I walked away, I heard M16s open
menting the violence of the Vietnam War had focused on apparent confronta- up. From the corner of my eye I saw bodies
tions between ‘heroic’ American soldiers or pilots and their enemies, falling, but I didn’t turn to look’, in Wingo, ‘The
whether ‘guerrillas’, ‘communists’, or ‘the jungle’ in which they were hid- Massacre at Mylai [sic]’, p. 36.
ing, the victims of the My Lai massacre represented an indubitably different 44. See Michael Arlen, Living-Room War (New
component of the population.41 On 5 December 1969, Life magazine pub- York: Penguin, 1982); Hallin, The “Uncensored
lished colour photographs by war correspondent Ronald Haeberle with the War” ; and on differences between the USA and
Germany, see Paul, Bilder des Krieges, pp. 311–46.
report ‘The Massacre at Mylai [sic]: Exclusive Pictures, Eye Witness
Accounts’. It described ‘an indisputable horror – the deliberate slaughter of 45. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of
old men, women, children and babies’.42 The problem of the politics and Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004),
p. 150.
ethics of representing violence, as well as the question of whom to hold ac-
countable, was laid bare in Haeberle’s unflinching photographs of scores of 46. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York:
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1973), p. 14.
unarmed civilians who were tortured, raped, and killed, their denigrated
bodies heaped together in mass graves – and then shot again by the camera.43
While these images sparked intensified anti-Vietnam political sentiment in
Europe and the USA as well as debates in the public sphere about responsibil-
ity and war crimes, evidence and journalism,44 the question remained of
what to do – from ethical, legal, and artistic perspectives – with the unbear-
ably violent images now circulating in mass culture. This question would
persist in and propel Vostell’s use of concrete.
These very debates about the politics of photography and the Vietnam
War also inform Butler’s approach to contemporary questions of the
representation of precarity. At the end of her book Precarious Life, she argues,
‘it was the pictures of children burning and dying from napalm that brought
the US public to a sense of shock, outrage, remorse, and grief’. For Butler,
the political effect of these photographs resides not in the graphic violence
they show, but rather in the way in which ‘they disrupted the visual field and
the entire sense of public identity that was built upon that field’.45 Butler is
implicitly in dialogue here with Susan Sontag, who, writing throughout the
times of the Vietnam War, was much more circumspect about the political
potential of photography. Sontag argues that images such as Haeberle’s
provoke only a ‘negative epiphany’.46 At first, graphic images of violence

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‘transfix’ viewers, making the atrocity of the events represented ‘more real’
and shocking. Yet their mass circulation and continued viewing ultimately
47. Sontag, On Photography, p. 15.
‘anesthetizes’ the viewer, depleting the sense of realness at first evoked, and
assimilating graphic violence to contemporary visual culture.47 While Sontag
48. Butler, Frames of War, p. 71.
finds graphic war photography to be politically suspect and ultimately de-
49. Butler’s dialogue with Sontag in Frames of War politicising, Butler, by contrast, insists that all war photography has a
does not involve the question of precarity, but political potential on account of the structural instability of what she calls
rather counters Sontag’s claim that photographs
no longer have the power, in visual culture after ‘framing’: ‘The question for war photography . . . concerns not only what it
the Second World War, ‘to communicate the shows, but also how it shows what it shows’.48 This tension between Sontag
suffering of others in such a way that viewers and Butler illuminates the complexity of politicising precarity.49 Ultimately,
might be prompted to alter their political
Sontag is worried that the ubiquity of images of graphic violence in visual

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assessment of war’, p. 68. Sontag makes this
claim most forcefully in Susan Sontag, Regarding culture perpetuates the structures of precarity they were meant to expose.
the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus, and For Butler, such images are not reducible to the graphic violence they depict
Giroux, 2003).
because there is something about them that always exceeds and so unsettles
50. Butler, Precarious Life, p. 150. the frame: ‘Despite their graphic effectivity, the images pointed somewhere
51. For a thorough account of the politics of this else, beyond themselves, to a life and to a precariousness that they could not
poster, see Francis Frascina, Art, Politics and show’.50 When Vostell turned his attention to the structural violence of
Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in Sixties America precarity, his practice of concreting served to accentuate precisely this
(Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1999), pp. 160–208. precarious remainder.
On 26 December 1969 in New York City, the Art Workers’ Coalition
52. A copy of Vostell’s schedule for that week in
New York is housed in the Getty Research
distributed fifty thousand copies of the anti-war poster Q. And babies? A. And
Institute, Los Angeles (890164). babies. (1969) to be plastered up in public spaces.51 The poster adapts one of
53. See Vostell, Aktionen, n.p.
Haeberle’s photographs of the My Lai massacre, massively enlarging it and
excerpting a statement from a televised interview with an army private in order
to demand accountability for the horror of what it represents. Vostell, en route
from Cologne to Chicago, was in New York at the time and met Jean Toche, an
influential member of the Art Workers’ Coalition, the following day.52 He
would paste a black-and-white Polaroid of the Coalition’s poster into his artist’s
book Leben gleich Kunst and include the poster, along with the Coalition’s
‘Guerrilla Art’ actions, in the anthology Aktionen: Happenings und
Demonstrationen seit 1965 (Actions: happenings and demonstrations since 1965)
that he published the following year.53 The Coalition’s inflationary militant aes-
thetic tactics stood, however, in stark contrast to Vostell’s current artistic ap-
proach to the problem of representing violence. He would address the question
of how to politicise images of violence through art not by directly representing
them, but through his indirect yet emphatic artistic technique of Betonierung.
First indicated in his B 52 in Laos im Einsatz, which he made just two months af-
ter the Coalition circulated its protest poster, the whole of Vostell’s concrete
production presents itself as a working through of the challenge of how to rep-
resent violence, without repeating it. And how to acknowledge precarity with-
out perpetuating it.
Following his exhibition Utopische Betonierungen in the spring of 1970, and
still dwelling on the circulation of images from the massacre at My Lai, Vostell
embarked on a multifaceted concrete work dedicated to the Vietnam War,
Vietnam Sinfonie oder Desastres de la Guerra (Vietnam Symphony or Disasters of War,
1971–1972) (Figs 6–8). In contrast to his first structural concrete works,
Vietnam Sinfonie oder Desastres de la Guerra attends to the vulnerable human body
exposed in the continued dissemination of violent images. Vostell, too, extracts
and repositions Haeberle’s notorious photograph. Yet by looking to art history,
Vostell made at this moment a notable reappraisal of how to intervene with his
artistic practice in the violence and politics of contemporary history, turning to
the work of Goya as precedent and paradigm.

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Fig. 6. Wolf Vostell, Vietnam Sinfonie Desastres de la Guerra – 2, 1971, mixed-media (grasshopper,
cigarettes in a transparent bag, photo collage, pencil and coloured pencil on card paper in an object
box),100 x130 x10 cm. Land NRW, on long-term loan at Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen. (Photo:
Jochen Mueller/Museum Morsbroich; courtesy of The Wolf Vostell Estate.)

Fig. 7. Wolf Vostell, Vietnam Sinfonie Desastres de la Guerra – 6 – Si, 1971, mixed-media, 102 x
131.7 x 12.2 cm. Private Collection. (Photo: Ketterer Kunst GmbH & Co KG; courtesy of The
Wolf Vostell Estate.)

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Fig. 8. Wolf Vostell, Vietnam Sinfonie Desastres de la Guerra – 8, 1972, mixed-media assemblage,
102.5 x 130 x 12 cm. Private Collection, Germany. (Photo: Kai-Annett Becker/Berlinische Galerie;
courtesy of The Wolf Vostell Estate.)

54. Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch, Disasters of War, 1807–1814 / 1955–1975
Goya: The Last Carnival (London: Reaktion,
1999), p. 90. Goya’s corpus has been described as revolving ‘time and again, either directly
55. Sontag finds in Goya’s Desastres the art
or indirectly’, around a common theme: ‘that of the almost unbearably violent
historical precedent for representing atrocity, image, the image that, instead of attracting the spectator, drives him away’.54 In
specifically ‘the suffering endured by a civilian particular, his series of eighty-two etchings, Los Desastres de la Guerra (The
population’ at the hands of ‘soldiers run amok’. Disasters of War, 1810–1820), have been called upon in the history of art to serve
See Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 42–3.
as a key point of reference for the representation of secular violence and its vul-
56. For an orientation of Goya’s work, and garities.55 Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra address his own Zeitgeschichte: the
specifically of Desastres, in Spanish history, see
Jörg Traeger, Goya: die Kunst der Freiheit (Munich:
Peninsular War, in which the colonising Napoleonic army occupying Spain faced
C.H. Beck, 2000), pp. 114–67; and Werner a partisan insurgency in one of the first ‘guerrilla wars’.56 The etchings show
Hofmann, Goya: To Every Story There Belongs rampant acts of torture, assault, vast civilian casualties, years of attrition war-
Another (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2003). fare, and environmental destruction leading to mass-displacement and starva-
On Goya in a broader context of the
representation of war, see Ronald Paulson, tion. Viewed from the vantage point of 1970, these images must have seemed
Representations of Revolution, 1789–1820 (New to represent Vietnam.
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. Goya was particularly important to Vostell, who had studied his work as a
286–387.
student in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts, and had been travelling regularly
57. Vostell in ‘Wolfgang Becker: Interview mit since 1958 to Spain, where, especially in museums in Madrid, Goya’s work was
Wolf Vostell’, in 6. Wolf Vostell: Elektronisch: Neue permanently on view. In an interview from 1970, Vostell reflects on the violent
Galerie im Alten Kurhaus, Rheinisch-Westfälische
Technische Hochschule Aachen (Aachen: Neue associations of his own work by invoking Goya, whose Desastres de la Guerra, he
Galerie, 1970), p. 8. He states that like Goya, suggests, supply the example of how an artist can approach ‘destructive inci-
‘Ich gehe an destruktiven Vorgängen und dents and the exemplary historical events of life’.57 Goya’s broader resonance in
geschichtsexemplarischen Ereignissen des Lebens
nicht vorbei’.
the 1960s and 1970s is furthermore attested to by the numerous exhibitions
and reproductions of his Desastres de la Guerra series.58 The etchings were her-
58. At the height of the USA’s offensive
operations over Southeast Asia, Goya’s Los
alded as realist, if not documentary, condemnations of war based on Goya’s eye-
Desastres de la Guerra were reproduced in book witness experiences.59 It was not, however, simply to invoke his name and the
form and exhibited repeatedly throughout images of war with which his name was synonymous that Vostell turned to
Western Europe and in the USA. Of the Goya. Rather, I propose, Vostell was interested in returning to Goya’s central

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artistic and political problem: the presentation of ‘almost unbearably violent’

images.
Although compared frequently to war photographs,60 Goya’s Desastres de la countless examples, I will mention only two that
Guerra are neither documentary nor realist in any conventional sense. They were particularly significant to Vostell. First,
hinge, rather, on disturbances within a decidedly pictorial space that trouble Vostell’s Miss America was included in the
viewership. While revisiting her 1970s texts on war photography, Sontag would transhistorical, anti-war exhibition at the Wallraf-
Richartz-Museum in Cologne, Hurra!?: vom
suggest that Goya’s prints – as opposed to photographs – position the viewer Unsinn des Krieges, which ran from September
‘close to the horror’ by eliminating ‘the trappings of the spectacular’ with 1971 through May 1972. The show positioned
which photography is so often bound up.61 By contrast, Victor Stoichita and works by contemporary artists in a historical line-
age with figures including Théodore Géricault,
Anna Coderch claim, as cited above, that the defining characteristic of Goya’s James Ensor, Kathe Kollwitz, Otto Dix, and
‘almost unbearably violent’ images is how they ‘drive [the viewer] away’. The

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Pablo Picasso, and featured Goya’s Los Desastres de
disconcerting framing of distance and proximity, the sense of being brought la Guerra. Second, Goya’s complete prints were
near to or repelled by Goya’s etchings has to do, I would argue, with how the exhibited at the Stadtmuseum Oldenburg in
1972. See Goya – Druckgrafik des Oldenburger
representation of the graphic violence of war is achieved not through direct Stadtmuseums (Oldenburg: Verlag Isensee, 1972).
means, but by exhibiting instead how the very attempt to artistically represent A schedule including Vostell’s travel dates for
violence does violence to the apparatus of representation. spring and summer of that year refers to
Los Desastres de la Guerra generate tensions and torsions that, in ways ‘Oldenburg / Desastres de la Guerra’, indicating
Vostell’s plan to visit in September. The schedule
unsettling for the viewer, defy the reality of bodies and spaces. In the one is housed in the Zentralarchiv des internationalen
etching that Vostell selected from Goya’s series for reproduction in the Kunsthandels (ZADIK), Cologne, Inge Baecker
catalogue for Vietnam Sinfonie oder Desastres de la Guerra, these tensions are Files.
particularly evident (Fig. 9).62 Estragos de la Guerra (Ravages of War) suggests a 59. On Goya as eyewitness, see Hofmann, Goya;
cramped interior in a state of pictorial disintegration. Bodies barely clothed in and Jan Bialostocki, ‘The Firing Squad – Paul
Revere to Goya: Formation of a New Pictorial
crumpled garments conceal the floor; limbs break at hard angles and press Theme in America, Russia, and Spain’, in Moshe
against loose boards; furniture levitates. Assaults on the figured bodies are Barasch and Lucy Freeman Sandler (eds) with
represented as an assault on representational space. The collapsing walls serve Patricia Egan, Art the Ape of Nature: Studies in

Fig. 9. Francisco de Goya, Page from The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), “Los Estragos de la Guerra,” 1810–20 (plates, published 1863),
Intaglio plate (etching, engraving, and aquatint), Album (oblong quarto), 24.8 x 33.3 x 2.9 cm. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Purchase: The Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions. (Photo: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of
Art, The University of Chicago).

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as a perverse scaffolding for a room that threatens to fall further inwards

around the central figure suspended upside-down, apparently mid-air, as though
Honor of H. W. Janson, (New York: H.N. Abrams,
hurled into the space by an obscene force. Other bodies succumb to a pictorial
1981), pp. 549–58. gravity, slipping, like the prone woman and child in the foreground, beyond the
image frame. These upheaved, reversed, contorted, and constrained postures
60. Fred Licht, for example, writes, ‘In many
ways, Goya, in Disasters, resembles more the few test the limits of realist representation, physical composition, and visual appre-
photographic news reporters of genius and hension alike. The viewer is brought near to the ‘ravages’ and repelled by the
dedication of the twentieth century than he does image insofar as the devastation depicted is always also the devastation of realist
any of his contemporaries or predecessors’, in
representation.
Fred Licht, Goya, the Origins of Modern Temper in
Art (London: John Murray, 1980), p. 130. This dialectic of distance and proximity is complemented by the
juxtaposition that Stoichita and Coderch insist upon, ‘of the concrete (clothes)

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61. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 44–5.
and the abstract (space)’.63 It is the concrete, historically specific representation
62. Vostell included Goya’s Estragos de la Guerra of banal everyday realia that paradoxically lends Goya’s prints an unfamiliarity.
on the back inside cover of the catalogue for his
exhibition, Vostell: VS/DDLG; Vietnam Sinfonie oder
And while they testify to a distinct historical locality, his Desastres de la Guerra
Desastres de la guerra. 14 Objektzeichnungen als nonetheless unfold in an uncertain, abstract place. Clothes, weapons, walls,
Partituren 1971/72 en homenaje a Goya (Munich: tools, and furnishings all figure perilously in the disjointed space of
Galerie van de Loo, 1972). representation, the destruction of which they, too, contribute to. While lending
63. Stoichita and Coderch, Goya, p. 42. themselves to allegorisation as depictions of ‘disasters of war’ in general, Goya’s
prints exhibit the same suspicion with which he regarded the realist tradition of
painting. For they resist the tendency to represent violence in universal terms.
It is a matter, to cite the title of another of Goya’s etchings from the series, of
Lo mismo en otras partes, the same elsewhere (Fig. 10). Heaped one upon the
other, the decaying contours of the figures in Lo mismo en otras partes echo in the
barren, crushed horizon line. Terse hatch-marks and scoring offer the only shel-
ter for displaced figures whose plight is, lamentably, all too familiar to late-
twentieth and early twenty-first century viewers. Nonetheless, these images are
concerned neither with timelessness nor universality. They insist rather on the
question of historical and political locality: the same elsewhere. It is in this way

Fig. 10. Francisco de Goya, Page from The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), “Le Mismo en otras partes,” 1810–20 (plates, published 1863),
Intaglio plate (etching, engraving, and aquatint), Album (oblong quarto), 24.8 x 33.3 x 2.9 cm. The David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art, The
University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. Purchase, The Paul and Miriam Kirkley Fund for Acquisitions. (Photo: The David and Alfred Smart Museum of
Art, The University of Chicago).

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that Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra represent violence concretely, without aestheti-

cising or spectacularising it.
Whereas for Goya the problem was how to create an unbearably violent 64. See Vostell: VS/DDLG.
image, for Vostell the problem was that unbearably violent images were
ubiquitous. Under the media conditions of capitalist consumer society and 65. See ‘Calley Takes the Stand’, Life, vol. 70,
no. 8, 5 March 1971, pp. 22–8. Calley is
techno-scientific warfare, the problem was thus not just how to represent vio- photographed for the article smoking on his sofa
lence, but what to do with the superfluity of images of violence already circulat- below a reindeer pelt and the concluding page of
ing in mass culture. Vostell’s Vietnam Sinfonie oder Desastres de la Guerra the article is an ad for Marlboro cigarettes. The
association of Calley, a ‘war hero’ in the eyes of
(hereafter VS/DDLG), a series of fourteen ‘Objektzeichnungen als Partituren’ many Americans, with the heroic cowboy
(object-drawings as scores), takes on this problem. It is also dedicated to Goya. Marlboro Man is unavoidable.
And when Vostell exhibited the series in 1972 at Galerie van de Loo in Munich,

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66. Vostell exhibited this work with the title
a selection of Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra etchings was interspersed with Vietnam-Sinfonie at the experimenta 4 in Frankfurt
Vostell’s work.64 in 1971. See Der Frankfurter Kunstverein zur
Evidently following the continuing coverage of the My Lai massacre in Life experimenta 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter
magazine from Germany, Vostell tore out and saved the same image used in the Kunstverein, 1971).
Art Workers’ Coalition protest poster. Haeberle’s photograph had been 67. In ‘Anmerkungen zu Vietnam Sinfonie /
reprinted in an article from 5 March 1971 that documented the prosecution of Desastres de la Guerra’, Rainer Wick pointedly
notes that viewers may be surprised to find the
the only individual ever convicted of war crimes in My Lai, William Calley.65 ‘Happeningmann’ Vostell making drawings. See
Vostell approaches this image in a different way, taping it into the upper-right Vostell: VS/DDLG, n.p.
corner of VS/DDLG – 2 (1971), where it is juxtaposed with bagged cigarette
68. For the only complete documentation of this
butts, a pinned grasshopper, and hand-written instructions for passengers on a series, see Vostell: VS/DDLG.
train to participate in an action (Fig. 6).66 Across the upper register of the
69. See the review by future curator Laszlo
object-drawing, three loose figural sketches of the lower half of a torso, Glozer, ‘Im Reiche der Heuschrecke’, Münchner
highlighted with soft watercolour, repeat rhythmically. While evocative of a Kulturbericht, 23 February 1972. Press clipping in
typical posture of vulnerability that recurs throughout Goya’s Desastres de la the documenta archiv, AA, d05, Mappe 57, fol.
Guerra and that is particularly central to Estragos de la Guerra, Vostell’s drawings 259.
clearly reiterate the limp splayed legs of a young victim of the My Lai massacre 70. Heinz Ohff, ‘Vom Happening zum Film’,
in the middle of the heap of bodies captured in Haeberle’s adjacent image. By Tagesspiegel / Feuilleton, 3 October 1972, p. 4.
Press clipping in the Archivo Vostell, Museo
drawing out the body of this victim, Vostell seems to attempt to make the vio- Vostell Malpartida, Project Box: Desastres.
lence of the image, and the posture of precarity that it captures, even more
acute.
At the same time, he translates the immediacy of photojournalistic evidence
back into the artistic medium of the draughtsman and repositions it in time.67
Each of the fourteen object-drawings of VS/DDLG combines pencil drawings,
images excerpted from current newspapers or magazines, new electronic and
medical instruments as well as age-old agrarian tools (from walkie-talkies to
axes), boxed entomological specimens, often an additional organic component
(potatoes, a fish, hair, earth), and handwritten annotations.68 Some of the tex-
tual annotations cite titles from Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra series in tight
poem-like stanzas, while others are score-like instructions indicating what one
art critic describes as ‘planned yet not further clarified actions’.69 Over time,
the organic elements of the object-drawings decompose, the specimens – al-
though preserved for perpetuity – become brittle and break, the tools and
instruments become more dated or defunct, Zeitgeschichte becomes history.
VS/DDLG generates a tension similar to the one in Goya’s works between con-
crete realia, and an abstract representational space whose temporality is
uncertain.
Art critic and Vostell chronicler Heinz Ohff characterised the works in the
VS/DDLG series as ‘brutalster Realismus’ (the most brutal realism) from which
no certain meaning can be derived.70 This ‘most brutal realism’ has to do, I
would suggest, with the dialectic, also in play in Goya’s Desastres de la Guerra, of
proximity and distance, the concrete and the abstract, which Vostell’s works
exhibit in order to attempt to address the structural violence of precarity. In the

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Caroline Lillian Schopp

first five object-drawings, Vostell’s figural drawings examine, reposition, and

uncover, again and again, the exposed lower torso of the victim at the centre of
71. On the systematically overlooked and
the image of the massacre at My Lai affixed to VS/DDLG – 2. In Haeberle’s im-
suppressed violence of sexual assault and rape in age, the exposition of the genital zone is concealed by the child’s collapsed
the Vietnam War, see Valerie Wieskamp, ‘Sexual hands. Vostell’s drawings obsessively strip the body of this protective gesture, as
Assault and the My Lai Massacre: The Erasure of though attempting to bring the viewer closer and closer, to expose more vio-
Sexual Violence from Public Memory of the
Vietnam War’, in Jennifer Good, et al. (eds), lence, or a hidden violence beyond the frame in order to arrive at a concrete
Mythologizing the Vietnam War: Visual Culture and presentation. Each iteration of the drawn figure increasingly focuses on the vul-
Mediated Memory (Newcastle: Cambridge nerable genital zone. Enlivened hands open a wound-like space, and with the ap-
Scholars, 2014), pp. 127–43. On sexual
violence, sexuality, and the representation of rape
plication of red pencil marks, the drawings in VS/DDLG – 2 culminate and
falter in a transformed figure that repeats throughout the series, at once ambig-

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in Goya, see Gerlinde Volland, Männermacht und
Frauenopfer: Sexualität und Gewalt bei Goya (Berlin: uously and clearly vaginal.
Reimer, 2000). This vulnerable body functions throughout VS/DDLG as a body structurally
72. Vostell wrote to Jan van der Marck on 5 exposed to violence, to sexual assault, and to death.71 In representing this
February 1972, ‘I’m working on 14 drawings violence, however, Vostell’s drawings risk accruing, as he surely knew, a
with objects. They are scores for my documenta-
happening, although there are no specifications or pornographic valence. Attending to this tension, Vostell introduces with VS/
more structured plans known from Szeemann DDLG – 6 – Si (1971) a different representational technique (Fig. 7). Rather
yet’. Wolf Vostell, Letter to Jan van der Marck, than attempting to make visible the violation of the vulnerable body by means
5 February 1972, Silverman Fluxus Archives,
I.1182, MoMA Archives, NY.
of graphic representation, he concretes it. Vostell draws an angular slab of
concrete over the genital zone, labelling it ‘Betonvagina’ (concrete-vagina). The
73. Their correspondence, from Vostell to concrete slab traces no pre-existent contour and has no referent – neither in the
Szeemann on 22 February 1972 and Szeemann to
Vostell on 3 March 1972, is housed in the original newsprint image, nor in the world commensurate with the realia in
documenta archiv, AA, d05, Mappe 57, fol. 260. Vostell’s object-drawings. This work continues Vostell’s exploration of the artis-
tic technique of Betonierung. In order to mediate the graphic violence of war
and emphasise the structural violence of precarity, Vostell’s use of concrete
throughout the VS/DDLG series is, paradoxically, abstract.
In the subsequent eight object-drawings, Vostell repeatedly draws out and
transforms the body at the centre of the image of the My Lai massacre, concret-
ing its various parts – head, torso, leg, foot (Fig. 8) – and exhibiting ‘concrete’
in order to stress violence in the very hidden or abstract modes that so insidi-
ously constrain and violate the human body under conditions of precarity. The
concrete violence of VS/DDLG captures in the recurring image of a concreted
body the graphic personal violence the Vietnam War, and the non-sensational
but all the more oppressive character of the structural violence of everyday life.
It is no surprise, therefore, that when he came to translate VS/DDLG into a
film, this concreted body – in the form of material concrete placed on the body
of a living woman – is at its centre.
Desastres, 1972
Initially, Vostell had conceived of his object-drawings as scores for a train action
that would take place between Kassel and Munich, thus linking the upcoming
documenta 5 with the 1972 Summer Olympics.72 VS/DDLG – 6 – Si indicates
the railway connections between these two cities. Ultimately, however, docu-
menta 5 curator Harald Szeemann declined Vostell’s proposal,73 and it was in
West Berlin with the help of Jörn Merkert of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein,
filmmaker Helmut Wietz, and a woman credited only as ‘Sarah Ormigon’ (a
playful pseudonym, ‘hormigón‘, is the Spanish word for concrete) that Vostell
would translate his ‘disasters of war’ series into the forty-five minute, 16mm
colour film, Desastres (1972).
Filming took place in the late summer of 1972 at two primary sites in the
American sector of West Berlin, as images of the refugee crisis in India
following the Bangladesh Liberation War, apartheid violence in South and South

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 Concrete Violence

West Africa, and the arrests of affiliates of the West-German Red Army Faction
circulated in the news.74 Wietz shot most of the footage in the vicinity of the
Berlin Wall, which plays both a specific and a multivalent role in the film. As a 74. Vostell collected news clippings in his artist’s
geopolitical and architectural locus of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall functions book Leben gleich Kunst and in the series VS/
as a perplexing readymade concrete form in Desastres. It appears in the film as a DDLG. In VS/DDLG – 12 – Los (1972) he places a
concreting of division in its own right and as a trenchant reminder of the wider full opening from an issue of Life magazine from
4 February 1972 showing white police officers
significance of concrete as ‘the medium of the Cold War’.75 The material was with leashed German Shepherd dogs intimidating
used extensively in military contexts – bunkers, missile silos, aircraft hangars, Black protesters in then Gwelo, then Rhodesia.
fallout shelters – but also increasingly in the bulky high-rise apartment blocks 75. Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material
emblematic of the period not only in the Soviet Union and in East Berlin, but History (London: Reaktion, 2012), p. 157, italics
also throughout Western Europe in subsidised precast concrete structures. By original.

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1970, the association of concrete with the new ‘modern’ architecture of the 76. Forty, Concrete and Culture, pp. 149–64. On
interwar years had lapsed, at least from the perspective of the West, into a new the history of the use of concrete in architecture
form of architectural brutalism.76 Beyond its immediate geopolitical signifi- more broadly, see Peter Collins, Concrete: The
cance, the Berlin Wall stood for these material and political transformations in Vision of a New Architecture (Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press, 2004).
the cultural legibility of concrete.
In Vostell’s Desastres, the Berlin Wall stands for itself, which is to say, for the 77. The removable cuff was constructed of
wooden scaffolding and foam, with a thin layer of
divisions it articulates in the city of Berlin and more generally in Germany. Yet, concrete as veneer. Vostell gives the following
framed as it is in Desastres, the Berlin Wall figures, in its very ‘concreting’, for material description: ‘Lappen, Gips, Leisten,
the structural violence that differentiates and divides people even, or especially, Sperrholz, Styropor’ (cloth, plaster, scaffolding,
where boundaries are invisible. Wietz’s footage from around the Berlin Wall plywood, Styrofoam). Hand-written document in
the Archivo Vostell, Museo Vostell Malpartida,
captures everyday movements as well as the system of weaponised surveillance Project Box: Desastres.
encompassing them. Guards train dogs, eyes peep through the embrasure of a
watchtower, civilians meander near a Western boundary and look over the wall
to the East from viewing platforms. The film itself works by means of a series
of cuts and repetitions of this footage, to produce coincidences and overlaps that
highlight the interrelationship of explicit state violence with the indirect
violence of consumer capitalism, much like the coincidences Vostell had been
tracing in his artist’s book Leben gleich Kunst. Still images of newspaper clippings
showing victims of violence ranging from car crashes to allied bombings, from
the Vietnam War to domestic terror organisations, persistently interrupt the
sequence of moving images drawn from Wietz’s footage, making the Berlin
Wall the material but also pictorial site of violent separations close to home,
and in distant countries.
At the first filming site for Desastres, in Kreuzberg near Luckauerstraße,
Vostell provocatively placed his work Berliner Stuhl (Berlin chair, 1971), a
concreted Bofinger chair, directly against the Berlin Wall for twelve hours on
20 July 1972 (Fig. 11). At the second site, in the main marshalling yard of the
Deutsche Bundesbahn station at Halensee, Merkert helped Vostell organise the
temporary placement of a massive concrete ‘Manschette’ (cuff) over a train-car
(Fig. 12).77 While the concreted chair suggests the pervasive structural violence
in everyday domestic life to which mass production and consumerism give rise,
the Betonierung of the train-car evokes violent associations of the deportation
and mass genocide of victims of Nazism in Germany. While both of these con-
cretings near the Berlin Wall call attention to the immediate boundaries dividing
post-war Germany, the train-car in Halensee also served as an interior, an ‘ab-
stract space’ in which historically-specific bodies and everyday realia become
uncannily concrete.
In Desastres, it is here, within the cramped space of the train cabin, that the
figure at the centre of the film, through and against which divisions
encapsulated in the Berlin Wall are framed, appears: a woman whose naked
body is stressed and accentuated by angular concrete cuffs. As such, the body of
the woman presents the coincidence of two particular and historically-localised

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Figs 11–17. Wolf Vostell, Desastres, 1972, 16 mm film. (Film: Helmut Wietz; courtesy of The Wolf Vostell
Estate.)

Fig. 12.

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figures in Vostell’s work: ‘Miss America’, the beautiful woman beloved by

consumer capitalist culture, and the prostrate civilian victim of the My Lai
massacre. In the film, the woman is first encountered with a heavy concrete 78. Butler, Frames of War, p. 128.
slab pressing into her belly and around her genital flesh (Fig. 13), the
embodiment of Vostell’s drawing ‘Betonvagina’ in VS/DDLG – 6 – Si. As the
filmic sequences repeat and unfold, various body-part concretings – face, arm,
thigh (Figs 14 and 15) – are superimposed with the footage from the Berlin
Wall, and with the still images of disasters documented in the news. Filmic su-
perimposition serves to draw out incidences and locate the embeddedness of the
concreted body within both local and distant structures. A frame of the
concrete-cuff placed on the woman’s genital zone is overlaid with a frame of a

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panting German Shepherd dog, and again with a frame of the watchtower over-
looking the Berlin Wall (Figs 16 and 17). In its carefully composed sequences,
Desastres presents a political anatomy, emphasising the mechanisms that differen-
tially manipulate precariousness, the ‘permeability that traverses all corporeal
life’,78 in order to demonstrate how the political condition of precarity is pro-
duced in and through image making.
The concrete cuffs, most striking as the woman’s body inhales against their
evident weight, extend and delimit the body’s contingency. They appear
unfamiliar, at once threatening and protective, yet neither are they clearly
instruments of torture nor defence or adornment. In contrast with the familiar
image of the Berlin Wall and the excerpts of contemporary Zeitgeschichte, the
concrete cuffs are split from any site of reference. They articulate a mere
‘material, concrete presence’, to recall Eugen Gomringer’s description of
concrete poetry, and appear as nothing other than disturbingly abstract concrete
forms, bringing concrete violence into view.

Fig. 13.

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Fig. 14.

Fig. 15.

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Concrete Violence

OXFORD ART JOURNAL 44.2 2021 329

Fig. 16.

Fig. 17.
Caroline Lillian Schopp

When first screened at the inauguration of the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein

Videothek on 1 October 1972, contemporary viewers described Desastres as
79. See Lucie Schauer, ‘Unter hämmerndem
tedious and too long, referring to the lulling repetition of motifs, wide camera
Herzschlag: Wolf Vostells Film “Desastres” zur angles, and slow camera movements.79 Yet Vostell’s deliberate, unhurried
Eröffnung der Berliner Videothek’, Die Welt, 5 structuring of frames in Desastres inflects the crucial temporal dimension that
October 1972, p. 22. Press clipping in the underlies the concrete violence stressed by his artistic technique of Betonierung.
Archivo Vostell, Museo Vostell Malpartida,
Project Box: Desastres.
The film articulates the slow pace and difficult artistic rendering of structural
violence and precarity. Even the soundtrack, which is composed of the
constant, pulsing throb of a heart beating, the anxious bleeping of an EEG, and
punctuated by erratic screams, insists on this slow pace. Desastres supplies
Vostell’s technique of concreting with its temporal key and attests to the

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problem of concrete violence in his work more widely. For any critique of
violence risks becoming implicated in the violence it would delimit. This,
however, is the very ambivalence inherent in the problem of the ‘concrete’ that
Vostell so painstakingly explores.

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank Christine Mehring, who first got me thinking
about Vostell’s uses of concrete. Together with Christine and Diane Miliotes, I had the
pleasure of co-curating the exhibition Vostell Concrete,1969–1973 at The Smart Museum
of Art, Chicago ( January 17–June 11, 2017) . In preparing for the show, as UChicago
Arts Research Associate, I had the privilege to conduct extensive research locating artworks
and related materials in France, Germany, Switzerland, and the USA. My sincere thanks
go to Inge Baecker, Fritz Emslander, Jörn Merkert, Werner Munk, Ulrike Ottinger,
Jürgen Schilling, Helmut Wietz, Raphael Vostell, and the many other collectors, gallerists,
curators, museum staff, and individuals who have so kindly supported my research,as well
as to Zsofia Valyi-Nagy for sharing her research at Museo Vostell Malpartida, Lisa Zaher
for great conversations and comments on an earlier version of this essay, and Barbara
Reisinger, Richard Wrigley, and the anonymous OAJ peer reviewers for their helpful
comments on this text. I dedicate this essay to the memory of Inge Baecker.

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