Artists & Agents – Online

+++ The exhibition Artists & Agents - Performance Art and Secret Services has duely closed on 19 April 2020. With Artists & Agents Online, we are keeping this exhibition accessible to you beyond the exhibition period. On this site, we collect additional material, videos, podcasts, etc., which illuminate special aspects of the exhibition. You can also follow us on social media the hashtag #HMKVathome. +++

The ‘reading room’ in our exhibition presented eight case files that provide an in-depth look into the working methods of secret services – as well as into their distrust of artists.

Artists were often directly summoned to interviews by the Stasi. This was a typical "disruption measure" with the purpose of "undermining self-confidence". There were also cases where citizens were summoned to fake, "legendated discussions", i.e. to interviews whose purpose was to stoke suspicion that the summoned person was working with the state. These were "discussions" where both of the examining Stasi officers were interested not only in the artists but also in action art as a genre. State security feared action art – as a genre from the West, as a praxis of the historical avant-garde, as an unpredictable event.

Audio recording of a transcript of an audio recording, abridged and redacted by the curators, Source: BSTU, MFS HA II TB 198 ROT © HMKV

For reasons of privacy, we present here a recording spoken by actors which avoids references to any specific actions.

In this podcast the co-curator of the exhibition Artists & Agents – Performance Art and Secret Services, Kata Krasznahorkai, talks about a chance discovery in the archive of the BstU (Federal Commissioner for Records of the the State Security Service) in Berlin.

"It's about showing the massive interferences into people's lives." – Using examples from the exhibition, curator Sylvia Sasse shows the extent of disinformation and 'decomposition' of artists by secret services in the former socialist states, which goes far beyond simple observation. These cases demonstrate that those conflicts are not an issue of the past, but continue to this day.

Artist or agent? The man with long hair and a blue shirt introduced himself as László Algol in artistic circles around György Galántai. But his real name was Gusztáv M. Hábermann. Hábermann/Algol worked under the alias "Pécsi Zoltán" for the Hungarian State Security, in the end as a full-time officer.

Curator Kata Krasznahorkai talks about this particularly exciting case in which an artist was at the same time an agent and spied on an entire art scene.

What happens if you take the reports of the Stasi seriously? In September 2019, the three curators Sylvia Sasse, Kata Krasznahorkai, and Inke Arns undertook an experiment: Using the Stasi files on the artists' group "Clara Mosch", they tried to find the exact location where the group had held a happening in 1980. Kurt Buchwald, an artist friend, celebrated his birthday together with "Clara Mosch" on this day. Slogans were written with paint on the country road near Dittmannsdorf. Ralf-Rainer Wasse, a friend and photographer of the group "Clara Mosch", wrote a particularly provocative message on the street: “Das Sch(w)eigen von Clara Mosch wird unterbewertet” ("The si(l)ence of Clara Mosch is underrated"). An allusion to Joseph Beuys' action The silence of Marcel Duchamp is overrated from 1964, but the slogan can also be read as a protest against the closure of the group's gallery. Why the "w" is missing in the word "Schweigen" is not known. Buchwald suspects a reference of Wasse to himself, a kind of signature of his work.

Artist and agent in a double role

As it turned out later, Wasse, alias IM "Frank Körner", was a long-time Stasi informer. With his photos he documented the group's actions both for artistic as well as for purposes of observation. It was not until four years after the happening - in 1984 - that he wrote his report on the "smearing" and blamed the slogan on Buchwald. In the Stasi file we see forensic photos of half crumbled letters that were meticulously measured. But why was this report written four years after the "crime"? At the time, Buchwald was trying to gain admission to the Artists’ Association (Verband bildender Künstler) - and the report by Wasse was intended to compromise Buchwald ("Compromat"). Buchwald was accepted anyway.

The curators’ research trip to Dittmannsdorf was a success thanks to local help: With the enthusiastic assistance of Enrico Münzner, chairman of the Dittmannsdorf local history association, and the Chemnitz taxi driver Toni Baeßler, and with the help of Wasse’s photos, it was possible to find the exact site, which has since been covered over. The Stasi files only gave a rudimentary and rather inaccurate picture of the location on the country road. Nobody in the village could remember the happening or the writing, not even the elderly former LPG farmers who were phoned.

In Dittmannsdorf, the research trip led to the (re)discovery of an unknown chapter of the village’s history which has so far received little attention from art history. The slogan "The Si(l)ence of Clara Mosch is underrated"- forgotten for over 40 years - has now found its way into the village’s everyday culture since its use at this year's carnival meeting.

Read more about the group "Clara Mosch" and the Stasi strategies of surveillance and subversion of artists in the magazine accompanying the exhibition. It can be downloaded as a free PDF from the website.

Design: Nathow & Geppert, Bielefeld, ng gestaltung.de

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