Developed on site for an exhibition space at the Kunstverein Springhornhof at Lüneburg Heath, the installation Triangel (Triangle) uses cultural landscape to image/reenact history, a reenactment hard to separate from the landscape itself.
Of the numerous photos she took near and less near to the exhibition site while traveling in the Lüneburg Heath area, Michaela Melián traced a small number in outline for her project Triangel (2002) using a sewing machine. The museum of local history, the characteristic windows, the towns, traffic arteries, the “Schäferhof” (where the typical German heath sheep spend the night) and the varied topography of Lüneburg Heath were items of interest. But also places whose past is severely tarnished, such as Bergen-Belsen, or the farm estate “Triangel,” point of departure for Bernward Vesper’s novel Die Reise (The journey) which lent its title to the sequence of works on paper and a floor sculpture that Melián developed out of it. Bernward Vesper, who took his life in Hamburg in May 1971, wrote autobiographically of the postwar period, growing up with his parents and their NS past, and of perpetual clashes with his father, Will Vesper, who, under National Socialism, was highly esteemed as poet, essayist and editor of the journal die Neue Literatur. K.D. Wolff, founder of the März-Verlag, published the book in 1977 with letters filling in on how the book came about. He thus integrated it into the old Federal Republic’s literary stock at a time when, after the student movement, the postwar generation’s score-settling with parents and establishment was culminating in the “Deutscher Herbst,” with witch-hunts, dragnet searches and radical if not implacable state control of power.
Michaela Melián’s technique of drawing with the sewing-machine here depersonalizes, deconcretizes. Everything depicted or pulled into view is translated into simple contours as the thread wanders from stitch to stitch—one wants to go out and seek the matching landscapes. It could also be described as a sewing-in of history. We find images of road junctions and stations, a top view of a model of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, or the entrance to the memorial site whose cultural landscape scarcely differs from the surrounding countryside. The single thread used for each picture suggests the interconnectedness of everything: present-day countryside, historical sites of political mass murder and of individual biography. The result is an “afterimage,” or rather a filter, as stereotypically imprecise and “normative” as the stamped or computer-generated facial-ID images the artist uses in other works to explore history, biography and identity. Alongside this construction of an historically overlaid cultural landscape Melián sets a large felt object—a bolt of felt in the shape of a triangle, like a traffic island. It picks up the triangularity of Triangel Farm, otherwise depicted in the sewn drawings only by its station. What we have, in a sense, are the three sides of a coin, if one takes into account the symbolic view. One must bear in mind that the process of sewing gives the drawings at least two sides, upper and under. The sides differ in degree of orderliness, but they cannot be thought apart from each other. The sculpture marks out the artificial site, the site of art, as a part of the surroundings it depicts. Not by chance does the material—Michaela Melián has used it often—remind one of Joseph Beuys, whose utilization of felt, copper, fat and honey embodied the process of working through German postwar history.
As traffic sign, the open triangle of Melián’s felt sculpture is a warning to pay attention; as musical instrument, it recalls bourgeois musical education and its tarnished Carl Orff “instrumentarium”; or it can be read as a diagram of the female pubis. The artist does not forget to locate herself in her personal explorations and partial appropriations of history—as female subject, with her own standpoint and view of things, even if she does do it with needle and thread.
excerpt from
Frank Wagner, Low Tech - High Concept, The Reenactment of History and Personality in Michaela Melián’s Art Projects
published in Triangel, Lukas und Sternberg, 2003