Thomas Kilpper
don't look back
 

"No time for hesitation! History is being made."

Since grey is always deceptive in colour enlargements, grey tones should
wherever possible be avoided - hold on, until things clear up"

Felix Philipp Ingold

History, they say, leaves its mark. This commonplace phrase disguises what
actually occurs - people leave their mark on history. Undoubtedly, the one
state cannot compensate for the other. A tension remains, an insoluble
dialectic through whose dynamic it becomes unclear whether the individual
has a particular position in relation to conditions, or whether the conditions
- the famous class, political and social conditions - have been allocated to
the individual. And then whatever you have ready to serve by and large as an
explanation for your own situation is always only going to be a story, even
when it is grandly described as a history - a story interpreted in a
particular sense, however much the explanation may also intend to be objective.

Thomas Kilpper's woodcut in the former basketball court of a site steeped in
history in Oberursel is located both concretely and metaphorically within the
field of these problematics. With this work, his attempt to occupy a position
in the present is born out of the conviction that this will not be possible
without confronting the past. What Kilpper has cut and shaped into the
parquet floor, across a surface area approaching 300 square metres, has to
do with the history of the place and with the destinies of the people who went
about their business there, as well as with his own biography.

The series of images begins with Kilpper's great grandfather's time as a
missionary in South East Asia but reaches its first main focus during the
period of World War II. The site was an assembly camp for captured pilots of
the Allied Air Forces. Here, they were interned and interrogated. The
reigning atmosphere of the period was tied to the values of the so-called
soldier's code of honour. This led to the expression of respect for the
enemy officer, also utilised by Kilpper: "You had your job, and I had mine."

At the end of the war, the site was taken over by the US Forces and was used
mainly for secret service purposes. The enemy was no longer the German
troops but instead the communist Soviet Union. There was now partial collaboration
with the former National Socialist enemy. With "Operation Paperclip" the US
Americans tried to deploy German scientists and sections of the political
elite for their own ends, thereby divesting them of accountability for their
work under the National Socialist State. In the course of these actions,
Klaus Barbie was pretty much able to slip away from Oberursel to Bolivia.
And Reinhard Gehlen, former Chief of the National Socialist Secret Service
"Fremde Heere Ost" (Foreign Army Eastern Division) founded a West German
Foreign Secret Service in Oberursel, the forerunner to the subsequent
Federal Secret Service . The overlapping of personnel discernible within these two
examples, and the power relations that endured across ideological and
political divides are significant for Kilpper's work. He follows them
through right up to the present time. The image of the execution of a member of the
Vietcong (US soldiers were trained in anti- guerilla warfare at Oberursel at
the time of the Vietnam War) and the image of the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin
Schleyer are examples of this. (Schleyer, as a former member of the SS with
a position of leadership in Eastern Europe, and later as President of the
federation of German employers' association  was a practitioner at a high
political level of the above-mentioned overlapping in the deployment of
personnel.) And this is where Kilpper's own biography comes into play. It is
marked by his father's confrontation with the past as a member of the German
Armed Forces  and also by the political conflicts of the Seventies and
Eighties in the spheres of left wing radicality.

Through the subjects of the pictures, which are not presented according to
either a rigorous thematic or to a chronology, Kilpper sets in motion the
question "Where, pray, might I get my grey tones back again?" This question
is aimed at the loss of differentiation within political confrontation and
treatments of history. It is not for nothing that Kilpper uses as his models
photos that are widely known and often reproduced by the media. Through
these pictures, he can on the one hand make the political intention of his work
more accessible and on the other hand, he also demonstrates an approach that
is only allegedly simple with regard to the historical developments in which
we are situated.  For it is not as if the question simply swings between the
poles of black and white, or good and evil. To understand it requires much
more than the simplistic signals transmitted via pedagogical or other mediation.

Kilpper turns the cliché of bearing-the-marks-of-history around and uses it
graphically, in the printing sense. Through prolonged and heavy duty work,
he has chiselled a history into the floor. He has made his mark on the
history-bearing images through the act of his physical labour. He has
appropriated them in the fullest sense of the word. Through working on this
woodcut, he has transformed the feeling of being overpowered by history into
the energy of the overpowering itself. The fact that in the process, he
destroys the parquet floor, cutting it up with chisel and chainsaw is not
the least important aspect of the work. For the flooring, at one time functional
and in use for basketball games, can be taken as a symbol of an unalterable
history whose end has been written - and whose authority is stolen by
Kilpper. His way of working can also be compared to hip hop sampling. Just
as there, afro-american musicians utilise elements taken from a pop music
history stamped "white" in order to realise a tradition of their own, so
Kilpper utilises samples from the "official" history in a confrontation with
his own, with a view to making them his own, too.

He has used form to solve the problem of a mere reversal. As it stands, the
enormous woodcut is at best half of the work. You could say that it simply
becomes the tool towards a further step. For the whole series of images can
be seen in their mirror versions. The woodcut is therefore a negative.
Prints can be taken from it that show the images the right way round. It is the
printing plate for the pictures that Kilpper prints on to various materials,
materials whose origin and structure play an important role in their use.
The curtains and wallpapers stand for the border between private and public
space, whilst advertising posters and flag fabric bring with them an
assortment of influences through their symbols and invitations to
identification. For the most part, Kilpper hangs the prints up on thin ropes
across the space of the former sports hall and makes the positives confront
their own negatives, cut into the floor beneath them. Once again, the viewer
is caught in the middle, where it lies with him or with her to confront both
the depicted images and the associations that Kilpper draws, and to get the
missing grey tones back.

Translated by Josephine Pryde

Martin Pesch is a music and art critic for, amongst others, frieze and Spex
 

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