The Guardian
Thursday 1 August 2019 11
I was in my mid- 20s when Cornell Capa,
director of the International Center of
Photography in New York, recommended me
for a job documenting life in the American
sector of Berlin while the city was still divided.
As a young photographer, I was so nervous.
All of these senior German offi cials were
swanning around my studio inspecting my
work. I blurted out that I wasn’t American, that
I was born in Canada, almost like a confession.
I felt I had to tell them. They just looked at me
quizzically, laughed and started speaking in
German. I have no idea what they thought of
me. But I got the job.
I went to West Berlin in 1982 to document
what was called Mauerkrankheit , which
roughly translates as “wall sickness”. It was
a disorder, identifi ed in Berlin, caused by
the fact that you’re living in this divided city,
surrounded by the tension between the Soviet
and American sectors. It’s a slow-motion
trauma that culminates in depression.
I heard that nearly 10% of people living in
the east were diagnosed with it.
In the west, I discovered a diff erent side to
the disorder. Every Saturday in Kreuzberg,
punks would hang out, drink beer and blare
music through their soundsystems. Cars would
be set alight and bank windows smashed in.
The cops would arrive, teargas them and send
them running to shelter in nearby bars, and
the whole cycle would repeat. They were
sceptical of me to begin with. One guy even
headbutted me. Though in retrospect, I think
that was a sign of acceptance.Getting to know them wasn’t easy, and it
happened in the strangest of ways. I would
carry a bunch of bananas to snack on if I got
hungry while I wandered the streets. When
I found the punks, I didn’t know what to say,
so I off ered them bananas. They just stood
there and laughed at me. But they must
have liked it, because they welcomed me
into their crew.
As I got to know them, I realised they fi tted
into the idea of the “wall sickness”, but they
were the manic side of the depression that
reigned in the east. There was something
psychotic about punk at the time. These
weren’t just weekend punks and “punk”
wasn’t just a look – this was their life.
The woman in this shot was called Miriam,
and the rat on her shoulder is called Bestia.
I met her in Kottbusser Tor, or Kotti for short,
the station that was the heart of the punk
scene in Kreuzberg. It was a week or so
before Reagan was planning to visit, and
there were windows smashed all over the
city in protest. Despite the violence and the
militancy, she was extremely gentle. She
was big, much bigger than me, but she had
a soft way of gesturing and a slow, laconic
way of moving.
The fi rst time we met, she invited me to
her place, a nearby squat. We hung out, drank
tea, took some shots and became friends.
She introduced me to her rat Bestia, who
lived in her oven. Being a squat, it had no
electricity, so it was perfectly safe. Bestia
was almost like a guardian angel for Miriam,
keeping her safe amid the anarchy. I think it
was useful to keep
guys off her back, too- nobody’s messing
when you have a
rat draped around
your neck.
This image has been
exhibited around the
world, and it’s become
a kind of icon. People
feel it represents a
moment in Berlin’s
history, or the punk
movement more
broadly, but to me
it’s a shot of someone
I got to know, who
welcomed me into a
hard-to-reach scene.
It was a doorway for
me into other activist
and protest scenes,
and I remember the
time fondly.
People seem to think
that punk has died,
and maybe elements
of the aesthetic have.
But the spirit of punk
was so much more
than a look, and I think that lives on, albeit
in diff erent forms. I think we saw it in the
Occupy movement , within elements of the
Arab spring, and I think we are seeing it today
in the UK with Extinction Rebellion.
Interview by Edward Siddons
Philip Pocock
My best shot
‘The Berlin punks were sceptical of my presence.
One guy even headbutted me. In retrospect I think
that was a sign of acceptance’
The CV
Born Ottawa,
Canada, 1954.
Training Film and
TV production,
New York University.
Infl uences Diane
Arbus, Brassaï,
Eikoh Hosoe, Helen
Levitt, Gordon Parks,
Aaron Siskind.
High point ‘My
1997 Documenta X
commission.’
Low point ‘A life-
changing accident
on a fi lm set, 1979.’
Top tip ‘Draw with
your eyes. Think like
a writer.’torturing opponents in a “caravan
of death”. Jaar escaped in 1982 after
fi nishing a degree in architecture.
The experience has informed his
work ever since.
“I know fascism when I see it,”
Jaar says. When he escaped, “not
even in my wildest dreams” did
he expect to see the world facing
what it is facing now. “We have
fascism growing everywhere. In this
country, in your country, in half of
Europe, in Latin America.”
Jaar has been tackling nationalism
since at least 1987 when he erected
a lightbulb-studded screen in Times
Square, A Logo for America , reading:
“This is not America. ” It was saying
the US was part of a continent, not
the continent itself, at a time – then
as now – of great confl ict between
the US and its neighbours. It was
“a huge controversy. People were
saying, ‘This is illegal, how could
they let him do it?’” He has restaged
the work several times since and its
meaning has shifted as the politics
have changed. Today, it seems to
have been adopted as a comment
on Trump, he says. “The semantics
of what is America have changed
completely and I accept that, gladly .”
Nonetheless, the situation today
is very diff erent from the 1980s or
Pinochet’s Chile. Back then “we
lived under censorship. The entire
media system was controlled by
the military.” The free press may
be under attack now, but , at least
in the west , it is not yet at the level
endured under Pinochet. “When you
live with a sense of censorship, you
don’t know [things]. And this lack of
knowledge makes you fearful. You
don’t know what will happen to you,
what you can and can’t do, how you
can express yourself. And if there is
something worse – self-censorship.
Fear makes you censor yourself.”
Today’s problems seem just as
dangerous. Thanks to social media
and the rise of “fake news”, people
are drowning in information and
increasingly unable to disentangle
truth from lies. “It’s insane,” Jaar
says. “When the internet was
created, we thought we had found
this extraordinary tool that would
change our lives. It was going to
create the free fl ow of information, of
ideas, with the rest of the world and
so on. And now we have discovered
the ugly end of these technologies.”
He points to the way technology
has been used to infl uence elections,
both in the US and the UK, the
constant distractions it creates,
the undermining of truth. This, he
believes, is where art has a role. Art
can teach people to see, it can off er a
way to get “back to the essential ”.
In a 2006 piece, The Sound of
Silence, Jaar built a mini-theatre
dedicated to one image, the Pulitzer-
prize winning photographer Kevin
Carter’s devastating picture of a
starving Sudanese child crouched
in a stony fi eld and stalked by a
vulture. The idea was to ask viewers
to dedicate time – eight minutes – to
the picture and its story. A green
light bids you to enter to watch
a fi lm that examines the history
and politics of the image. Given
the average time someone spends
in front of a piece in a museum or
gallery is 15 to 30 seconds , it’s a
big ask, but it’s one Jaar believes
is essential. “We see, but we don’t
understand, because there is a lack
of context. We have not created the
models to resolve these problems.”
Around the world, people are
taught to read, “but who teaches us
the infl uence that images, the media
landscape, have? How it changes
our vision of the world,” Jaar says.
“I really believe that images are not
innocent. Every image contains
a conception of the world.” And
too often those conceptions go
unchallenged.
The art world – not the art market,
Jaar is keen to point out, which is
fi xated on money – is perhaps the
only place where those conceptions
are being challenged today, he
believes. A place made up of millions
of young people “who against the
wishes of their families and the
pressures of society have decided
to become artists and are trying to
make sense of the world ”.
He’s hopeful about the new
generations now coming up, new
artists, new thinkers, new leaders
such as Thunberg. It’s one of the
reasons he dedicates a third of his
time to teaching. “I learn from them
enormously,” he says. Perhaps
someone who sees his Edinburgh
piece this week will be inspired
to make their own work. Perhaps
they will off er us a new vision that
can help us navigate the darkness.
Intellectually, Jaar may be pessimistic
about whether others can really
succeed where he keeps “failing”.
But his will is fi lled with optimism.
Alfredo Jaar: I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
is at West College Street, Edinburgh,
until 25 August.Causing
outrage ...
A Logo for
America in
Times SquarePHOTOGRAPH: PHILIP POCOCK/COURTESY INDA GALLERY, BUDAPESTРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS