Bert Theis, collage as Political Paradigm
Marco Scotini
The illustrated parable of profit
It is not clear how and why, sometime in 1986, The Parable of the Water Tank became a collage novel by the Luxembourgish artist Bert Theis, although we may safely assume it was for artistic and political reasons. Illustrations of capitalists in nineteenth-century bourgeois clothing with heads of birds of prey, or of working-class people in folk dress with fish-shaped heads, stand out in the form of mustard-coloured silhouettes against landscapes populated with instruments of physics and mechanics, scientific diagrams and Empire-style armchairs.
‘Avid birds and parasites (representing the bourgeoisie), fish heads (symbolizing mutism)’ are the subjects of this simultaneously political and oneiric bestiary.[1] Incongruous figures, but understandable to all. They have the appearance of assemblages as precise as they are unrealistic. They are cut-out images assembled on the same page from different graphic sources, distant in time and no longer functional, but rendered homogeneous by unusual conjunctions and montages in repeated but continually changing visual constellations. Images that also share in an archaic, anachronistic character, belonging to a pre-photographic past. As if the illustrations and the old German typeface (Fraktur) harked back to the same period as the original text.
Theis’s Parabel is a grandiose yet unpublished project organised in eleven chapters and defined in all its detail. The version of the text used by the artist, which he collaged into the illustrated book, was taken from a very small German edition that does not fully comply with Bellamy’s publication. The translation by Margarethe Jacobi was published by Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in 1898, just four years after the American release of Equality.
The fact that in its conception Theis referenced Max Ernst’s Une semaine de bonté from 1934 is another aspect that asks to be explored here — not out of philological or antiquarian interest, since this facet of Theis’s work, on its own, would change little in terms of its profile. Rather, the relevance of this observation derives from the fact that the collage technique of Parabel vom Wasserbecken is not an isolated episode. In fact, collage was a steady presence in the activity of the Luxembourgish artist, although it seems to have been overshadowed by his works from the 1990s onwards. Now, thanks to the major retrospective Bert Theis. Building Philosophy – Cultivating Utopia, held at Mudam Luxembourg in the spring of 2019, much of his activity prior to the 1990s — that is, prior to the production of the pavilions and platforms with which Theis gained international acclaim — has resurfaced. With this change of perspective on his artistic path, collage now appears to be an essential element in his oeuvre, as we will try to explain below.
Theis began the 1980s at the Scuola del Libro of the Istituto Statale di Urbino. Throughout that decade he worked almost exclusively on collages, although the materials were often different, the approaches transforming from work to work, as did the media and the image carriers he employed: Chaocoll (1982), Materialcollages (1982), Dia-collages (1985), collages for the book dat lest by Robert ‘Gollo’ Steffen (1985), collages for the book Amerika läit jhust viroan Ëlwen, also by Steffen (1987), and, finally, Piccollages (1990). In a biographical note published in 1993 in the catalogue of a group exhibition held at Konschthaus Beim Engel, Theis, with his usual irony, traced his first collages back to when he was four years old. The terse information he provided — in the style of Debord — is worthwhile to cite in full:
1952
born in Luxembourg
1956
collages of materials and disassemblages
1964
serious doubts about the existence of God
(N.B. at around the same time God doubts the existence of B.T.)
1968
1978 – 1981
1981 – 1983
Istituto Statale d’Arte di Urbino, Chaocollages
1981 – 1985
the usual exhibitions, awards, publications, collections, in Luxembourg and abroad
1986
The fact that Theis includes the name of Max Ernst among his teachers is already confirmation that the explicit reference to Une semaine de bonté in the conception of Parabel vom Wasserbecken is not anecdotal, but points to a deeply rooted aspect of his artistic practice. When Ernst made his three collage novels from the late 1920s to the early 1930s — La femme 100 têtes, Rêve d’une petite fille qui voulut entrer au carmel, Une semaine de bonté — he wanted to displace the language of images from its authorial matrix. What was at stake was to break free from the slavery of the language, relying on chance and on the unexpected associations that can only arise if we relinquish full control over the image. Ernst’s passage from Dada to Surrealism makes him a chief advocate of the ban on writing novels formulated by André Breton in those same years. Collage novels are not simply stories told with images, but are above all the pursuit of another language that would be able to rid itself of meaning as such. The power of combination (its enigma) is undoubtedly the aspect of Ernst’s research that truly interested Theis. If we put aside the accentuated oneirism, the attraction to eroticism and the lack of sequential order of Ernst’s three collage novels, what remains in Parabel vom Wasserbecken is the taste for minutely assembled microcosms, the almost maniacal precision, the practice of incongruous juxtapositions. But above all, there is the attraction to the power of association, the combinability of what has already been done, once it has been freed from the inner censorship of pre-established meaning, the immobility of fixed ideas.
When Theis made Parabel vom Wasserbecken he was a political activist who had been enrolled in the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), for which he made the posters for demonstrations in support of social equality and against war. Theis interprets Bellamy’s Parable in a strictly Marxist sense and sees it as a guide to class struggle, as is made explicit by the series of notes following Bellamy’s text in his pamphlet. In an interview I conducted with him in 2003, Theis remarked that ‘the figure of the heroic artist, the solitary genius, is an ideological fake. Actually, both the construction of the work and the construction of its meaning are the result of collective labour’. I believe that his continuing work with collage should be seen in the light of this position. In the sense of a collective effort, to be precise. Not only to utilize and break up images already created previously by someone else, but also to invite the viewer to give a new meaning to the recomposed images, forcing the mind to reassemble its own alphabet in an open game of possible combinations: of attractions and collisions, condensations and shifts. A game with a political matrix, in substance.
[1] Press release of the exhibition Bert Theis. Zeichnungen Collagen Druckgrafik at Galerie Terre Rouge in Esch-sur-Alzette in 1981. Several motifs from the works shown there would later appear in Parabel vom Wasserbecken.