Ohne Titel [Hitler]

The collages of Austrian artist Marc Adrian are an attack on the visual codes and conventions of seeing of the Nazi period. His work “Untitled (Hitler)” is one of a series of photo collages made in 1957 and 1958. The artist’s critique is not directed at Nazi art ideologies alone, but also their continuing effects on the collective consciousness of the postwar period. Adrian began by defamiliarizing and deconstructing found images according to the principles of “methodical inventionism,” a programming and analytical procedure based on language. In the Nazi period, photo postcards played an important role in the propagation of the Hitler cult. A frequently reproduced postcard motif for “pilgrims” to the Obersalzberg showed a friendly Hitler greeting children. These cards were intended as souvenirs and also as a symbolic substitute for people who hoped for a real meeting with Hitler. Many postcards also showed works of art or Nazi architecture. These art postcards are good examples of the kind of art that was canonized under the Nazis, presenting their ideology to a mass audience. In Adrian’s work, the postcards are cut into pieces with a few usually horizontal or vertical cuts, then put back together. Adrian leaves out sections of the pictures, or he rotates some sections by 180 or 90 degrees, or puts them back in the wrong place. Sometimes he also combines pieces of different cards. Like in a jigsaw, these collages invite us to try to put the cut-up images back into their original form, but the different combinations also produce new, finished images with distorted, compressed, or abbreviated torsos, people, landscapes, and buildings. What does it all mean? Is something being unmasked? Is Nazi reality being distorted?