There are beautiful books, but there are also mad beautiful books. With ethereal pages.

And here we have surprise, which should not be a surprise at all (since the surprises ought to be surprising), because we wouldn’t expect a thing of sheer beauty from Deutsches Historisches Museum. Perhaps it is when the major galleries went so sterile and uninteresting, the last vestiges of art one can access through the unexpected places, that took care to suspend the world's blunt determination.

There’s a fascinating catalogue entry. The considered exhibition, Schmitz's "Ars Armandi Lege Artis (1992)", prompts Monika Flacke to ponder a remark from "Minima Moralia", that the great military conceptions are "inseparable from cunning and imagination" (or fantasy, "untrennbar von List und Phantasie"). Flacke takes this literally. War is not the opposite of art, but something that historically employs the very faculties of artistic relevance: invention, image-making, symbolism, staging.

Lion, for example, as an allegorical machine. Courage, strength, are military virtue – and these, granted, are projected onto the lion, but, Flacke argues, the process also works in reverse. The lion becomes a screen upon which the warrior recognizes himself. More than symbolizing courage, it allows courage to become visible.

Lisa Schmitz radicalizes this, and according to Flacke, the artist understands the lion as the warrior does: both confront it as a permanent challenge that must be mastered. The qualities projected onto the lion are in fact the qualities of the artist.

At Linger, we’d say: the exhibition is not to investigate the history, of war or propaganda, but the pictorial logic of war. The way violence first has to become an image before it can become an institution. And so the major question reads: if the truth of the subject is always her unconscious truth, where is the plane where things play out differently, according to a different structural dynamic? that is to say – truthfully?

***

Lisa Schmitz
"Ars Armandi Lege Artis"
1992

Essay by Monika Flacke
Design by Dreizack / MovimentoDruck, Berlin
Published by the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

See Also
A recent iteration.