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CHAPTER III




Introduction
In contrast to Sotos Cintisme, which developed within the Europe post-modern context, Gegos
re-creation of the art and culture of the pre-war Weimar period took place, at least initially, in
tandem with a dynamic Venezuelan Constructivism. However, during the late sixties and seventies,
the Venezuelan elite increasingly adopted a French ideal of republicanism and established very
strong state structures. This now constituted the framework for both, Gegos and Sotos,
development and thus permits comparisons between their respective responses. In this chapter I
argue that the aims of Gegos retrospective project and her use of an abstract formal language
differed in significant ways from Sotos. I will attempt to establish a link between Gegos artistic
concept and the problematic definition of a pre-war and post-Holocaust Jewish identity. This
seemed important for the obvious reason that it is unlikely that Gego would have lived in Venezuela
had there not been German anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It seemed plausible, that Gego asked
herself the question why she lived in this part of the world and not in the place where she had been
born and had felt fully integrated.
195
In this context, I will raise the issue of the integration of Jews
into French and German culture during the Weimar Republic and the early 1930s. Gegos revisiting
of an aesthetic and cultural model elaborated during this crucial period for Jewish culture, which is

195
That this was case Gego confirmed in her 1987 autobiographical text where she wrote, Our Jewish origin
was a known fact but we fully belonged to the German community: into the tradition of German and
Hamburg culture (My translation). In the original, Jdische Herkunft war als Tatsache bekannt, aber wir
gehrten damit vllig und ganz in die Gemeinschaft Deutschlands: in die Tradition Deutscher +
Hamburgischer Kultur. Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 240.
160
described in the critical literature as a veritable Renaissance, is of paramount importance. Despite
Gegos German nationality, I will approach these issues, in a first step, from a French rather than a
German theoretical perspective. My reason for doing so is that Gegos oeuvre developed in an
artistic context which was increasingly animated by the values of French republicanism. By
emphasising cultural context over origin, I am taking in account that in Gegos case her Jewishness
had primarily a social meaning and that, crucially, in pre-war Germany she had experienced
Jewishness as a marker of difference. Thus, in order to consider the importance of her German
Jewish identity in the Venezuelan exile I started my inquiry from the perspective of a
predominantly Catholic society and republican state structure. The writings of the philosopher Alain
Finkielkraut provide entry into a set of questions that directly affected Gego and Soto in their status
as citizen of France and Venezuela. The republican ideal, dating back to the eighteenth century,
demanded the radical separation between state and religious institutions and the pressures to adapt
to enlightened society led many Jews either to convert to Catholicism or become atheists. I want to
show that in Gegos case we find a similar trend in favour of anonymous sameness over
difference however for different reasons. While republican sameness has its strongest foundation
in a representational aesthetic, the sameness articulated in Gegos oeuvre has clearly a socio-
theological basis in which the measure for sameness is the successful incorporation of all material
parts into one structural whole.
Nonetheless, Gegos experience of the catastrophic consequences of pre-war materialism
and functionalism gave her the advantage of a critical distance toward the reinterpretation of
Bauhaus modernism under way in Venezuela. In a sense, it is for this very reason that Gegos
oeuvre allows us today invaluable insight into the psychological processes at play in the emergence
of utopian modernism as well as in exilic experiences. Picking up my account of Gegos youth in
chapter I, I provide here more nuanced discussions of the issue of assimilation based on a close
analysis of Gegos work. I will point out the parallels between French Jews assuming full
citizenship and the wish, at the beginning of the previous century, of many German Jews to
161
acculturate. My interpretations respond also to more recent secondary literature that seeks to
incorporate Gego firmly into the Venezuelan Constructivist context.
196
These interpretations, so I
argue, neglect an enormously rewarding angle on Gegos oeuvre which takes into account
continuity with Bauhaus modernism but also Gegos strong revisionist impulse.
197
Significantly, the
dividing lines within Gego scholarship seem increasingly drawn by the issue of Gegos upbringing
in Germany and her lasting attachment to German culture. For instance, Gegos life-long defence of
Paul Bonatz has repeatedly fed doubts over the authenticity of her Venezuelan citizenship and her
support of nationalistic ambitions. However, authenticity or non-authenticity were the very terms by
which the success of Jewish assimilation was normally judged. Indeed, some material found during

196
Hanni Ossot was the first to give a systematic account of Gegos work describing it in the language and the
spirit of Constructivist art. See her exhibition catalogue accompanying Gegos 1977 retrospective show,
GEGO, exhibition catalogue, Ediciones de Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Caracas, Caracas, 1977. Many
important texts written by contemporaries of Gego were published only after Gegos death in 1994 and often
provide a retrospective view on her persona and her work. See especially Iris Peruga with Josefina Nuez,
GEGO: 1955-90, exhibition catalogue, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2000; and, Ruth Auerbach, Gego:
Constructing a Didactics, Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-1990, Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Gego,
Fundacin Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, pp. 407-12. However, a recent text by the young
Venezuelan art historian Mnica Amor seeks to place Gego again more firmly within the socio-political
context of Caracas, pitting her against Cinetismo artists Cruz-Dez and Soto and grafting an interpretation
onto her work which is in clear response to the recent resurgence of a Marxist populism in Venezuela. Mnica
Amor Another Geometry: Gegos Reticulrea, 1969-1982, October 113, summer 2005, pp. 101-25. The
same line of argument is used in the catalogue of the recent large retrospective exhibition held in Barcelona.
GEGO. Desafiando Estructuras, exhibition catalogue with essays by Mnica Amor, Yve-Alain Bois, Guy
Brett, et al., Fundao Serralves, Porto and Museo dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006-7. Other recent
publications on Gegos work are much more open in their approach. See for instance Gego: Between
Transparency and the Invisible, Mari Carmen Ramrez, Josefina Manrique, Catherine de Zegher, Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston, 2006.
197
Gegos German Jewish identity is also the central concern of the most recent publication on her work.
However, it is evident that research on Gego is still young and the discussion of her oeuvre under
consideration of the theoretical issues of exile and post-war German Jewish identity will take much longer to
fully develop. See Thinking the line, Gego 1957-1988, exhibition catalogue, with essays by Peter Weibel and
Nadja Rottner, Hatje Cantz, 2006.
162
my research recalls those anti-Semitic prejudices that accused German and French Jews, in the
thirties, of being disingenuous in their efforts to adapt to a nationalistic identity and, hence,
integrate into society.
Thus, Gegos oeuvre confronts us with an intricate network of possible references,
associations and influences. Does the non-representational form of Gegos work manifest her will to
assimilation, her acceptance of a civic anonymity in which she relinquishes her specific history in
order to merge with an ideal state? Or do we need to see it as an expression of Gegos radical self-
reflexivity in which she defined a moral subject that responded to societal laws and simultaneously
to the forces of time and materiality? The latter is my main claim namely, that Gegos work can be
compared to Kantian thought as interpreted by the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas (b. 1929)
who described a moral subject that answers to the religious demand for individual self-perfection
and to the imperative to improve the society he or she lived in.

In the concluding sections I turn my attention once again on Europe and, more specifically, on
Germany. Immediately after the war, anxieties over a possible future relation between Germans and
the Jewish people were evident in the taboo that befell the discussion of Jewish identity. Only the
highly critical Left in Germany and to a lesser degree in France had raised this issue, often from
their exile abroad.
198
Within the wider population, consciousness of anti-Semitism and the

198
In Germany Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), Max Horkheimer (1875-1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903-
1969) led the critical post-war discourses on the Holocaust. The latter two had met during the thirties at the
Frankfurt School of Social Research. They collaborated on a key text for German post-war critical thought
Dialectic of Enlightenment written in exile in California during the 1940s. It was first published in New York
in 1944 and republished as Dialektik der Aufklrung in Amsterdam in 1947.In France, among the first to
address openly the issue of a post-war Jewish identity was the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.
Immediately after the publication of his book Rflexions sur la question juive in 1946, Sartre addressed in
1947 a Jewish audience in two lectures in which he raised the Jewish Question. His book and the content of
these lectures have recently become the subject of a controversy that I will discuss in more detail later. At this
point it is important to note that immediately after the war in both countries discourses on the Holocaust
163
Holocaust as part of German and French history remained vague. The very word Jew was loaded
with uncertainties and often deliberately excluded from everyday language. By the mid-eighties,
however, integration of the history of Jewish persecution into a German history became the source
of a public debate. The Historikerstreit marks in hindsight one of the most decisive moments of
recent German history. The enormous complexity of the argument and its specificity to German
politics at the time are addressed, necessarily, only superficially. Instead, I use the exhibition
Spielraum-Raumspiele, held at the Frankfurter Alte Oper, as an example for the problematic
within German culture that lay also behind the theoretical discussion of the Historikestreit. It is
occasion for me to compare Gegos Reticulrea, installed in the so-called Liszt Salon, to works of
an aggressive male artistic avant-garde. I confirm my argument that Gegos impulse to re-read the
past had a strongly reparative quality and enabled her to express this in her oeuvre. Whether Gego
was conscious of this impulse or whether she simply acted intuitively, repeating what she had
observed without thinking, what had been transmitted to her by her family and in the Jewish and the
Protestant circles she frequented in Hamburg, this will never be clear - but it will guide my line of
inquiry.



3.1 Unreal Returns: A question of Identity
In July 1949 Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) delivered a paper at the 16
th
international congress of
psychoanalysis in Zrich. Le stade miroir comme formateur de la function du Je
199
introduced the

existed and a literary production which was concerned with the effect and implications of the Second World
War and the Holocaust began to develop. Clearly, they soon took very different directions and evolved along
separate political, cultural and intellectual axes. Critics in each country were under pressure to respond to two
reconstruction discourses with, respectively, emphases on ethical or on economic and social issues.
199
Jacques Lacan, Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, crit I, ditions du Seuil,
Paris, 1966, pp. 89-97. English translation, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed
164
notion of the mirror stage, during which, Lacan contested, the child, in his infantile narcissism,
identifies the image it apprehends in a mirror of itself with an imaginary total Gestalt. Moreover,
this Gestalt acquires a symbolic meaning. Thus, the child constructs an ideal image of him or
herself, an imago, which it nonetheless feels constantly frustrated in realising for lack of motor
control over his or her body. Lacan writes, This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the
child at the infans stage, still sunk in this motor incapacity and nursling dependence, would seem to
exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitate in a primordial
form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language
restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.
200
The inadequacy of an interior ideal imago
within an external material context gives rise eventually, to neurotic symptom formation. Lacan
continues, Correlatively, the formation of the I is symbolized in dreams by a fortress, or a stadium
its inner arena and enclosure, surrounded by marshes and rubbish-tips, dividing it into two
opposed fields of contest where the subject flounders in quest of the lofty, remote castle whose form
(sometimes juxtaposed in the same scenario) symbolizes the id in a quite startling way. Similarly,
on the mental plane, we find realized the structures of fortified works, the metaphor of which arises
spontaneously, as if issuing from the symptoms themselves, to designate the mechanisms of
obsessional neurosis inversion, isolation, reduplication, cancellation and displacement.
201
On the

in the psychoanalytical experience, crit a selection, translation Alan Sheridan, Tavistock, Routledge, 1977,
pp. 1-7.
200
Jacques Lacan, crit a selection, p. 2. Lassomption jubilatoire de son image spculaire par ltre encore
plong dans limpuissance motrice et de la dpendance du nourrissage quest le petit ce stade infans, nous
paratra ds lors manifester en une situation exemplaire la matrice symbolique o le je se prcipite en une
forme primordiale, avant quil ne sobjective dans la dialectique de lidentification lautre et que le langage
ne lui restitue dans luniversel sa fonction de sujet.Jacques Lacan, crit I, p. 90.
201
Jacques Lacan, crit a selection, p. 5. Corrlativement la formation du je se symbolise onoriquement par
en camp retranch, voir un stade distribuant de larne intrieure son enceinte, son pourtour de gravats et
de marcage, deux champs de lutte opposs o le sujet semptre dans la qute de laltier et lointain chteaux
intrieure, dont la forme (parfois juxtapose dans le mme scnario) symbolise le a de faon saisissante. Et
de mme, ici sur le plan mentale, trouvons-nous ralises ces structures douvrage fortifi dont la mtaphore
165
symbolic level the self is always constructed around an ideal that has to be defended by way of a
negation of reality. This negation takes different forms of neurotic symptoms, inversion, doubling,
isolation, negativity, displacement and obsessive neurosis. Now, the real surprise in Lacans speech
is left to the last paragraphs where he suddenly turns to politics. Lacan launches from his
psychoanalysts position into a direct attack on Existentialism and historical materialism. He writes,
At the culmination of the historical effort of a society to refuse to recognize that it has any function
other than the utilitarian one, and in the anxiety of the individual confronting the
concentrational
202
form of the social bond that seems to arise to crown this effort, existentialism
must be judged by the explanations it gives of the subjective impasses that have indeed resulted
from it: a freedom that is never more authentic than when it is within the walls of a prison; a
demand for commitment, expressing the impotence of a consciousness to master any situation; a
voyeuristic-sadistic idealization of sexual relation; a personality that realizes itself only in suicide; a
consciousness of the other that cannot be satisfied except by the Hegelian murder.
203
Lacans angry
reaction to what he identifies as Existentialisms unjustified optimism and belief in a rationalistic
project extends his argument for the existence of an unconscious, an idea Sartre was critical of.
Lacan continues, These propositions are opposed by all our experiences, in so far as it teaches us

surgit spontanment, et comme issue des symptmes eux-mmes du sujet, pour dsigner les mcanismes
dinversion, disolation, de rduplication, dannulation, de dplacement, de la nvrose obsessionnelle.
Jacques Lacan, crit I, p. 94.
202
Here the translator inserted a footnote Concentrationnaire is an adjective coined after World War II (this
article was written in 1949) to describe the life of the concentration-camp. In the hands of certain writers it
became, by extension, applicable to many aspects of modern life. crit a selection, p. 7.
203
Jacques Lacan, crit a selection, p. 6. Au bout de lentreprise historique dune socit pour ne plus se
reconnatre dautre fonction quutilitaire, et dans langoisse de lindividu devant la forme concentrationnaire
du lien social dont le surgissement semble rcompenser cet effort, - lexistentialisme se juge aux justifications
quil donne des impasses subjectives qui en rsulte en effet: une libert qui ne saffirme jamais si authentique
que dans les murs dune prison, une exigence dengagement o sexprime limpuissance de la pure
conscience surmonter aucune situation, une idalisation voyeuriste-sadique du rapport sexuel une
personnalit qui ne se ralise que dans le suicide, un conscience de lautre qui ne se satisfait que par le
meurtre hglien. Jacques Lacan, crit I, p. 96.
166
not to regard the ego as centred on the perception-consciousness system, or as organized by the
reality principle a principle that is the expression of a scientific prejudice most hostile to the
dialectic of knowledge. Our experience shows that we should start instead from the function of
mconnaisance that characterizes the ego in all its structures, [] For, if the Verneinung represents
the patent form of that function, its effects will, for the most part, remain latent, so long as they are
not illuminated by some light reflected on the level of fatality, which is where the id manifests
itself.
204


I introduced this chapter by quoting Lacan in order to provide an entry into a complex set of
questions arising in Europe, almost forty years after the end of the Second World War. Here, I want
to consider the issue of a gradual reformulation of European post-war identities which took place in
the early 1980s. I will ask to what extent narcissism, and perhaps symptom formation, played an
important part in this process and further, how this relates to the strong responses by Jews and non-
Jews to the impact of the Holocaust. Identification with the victims of the Holocaust became
particularly important in the political debates of late sixties and during the seventies. Empathy with
a Jewish people and Israeli politics was often combined with a commitment to the political Left and
it was this, so I will suggest, that came in the early eighties under severe critique from within the
French Jewish community itself. By considering issues of Jewish identity under the aspect of a
changing political landscape I am laying the ground for issues discussed in the two subsequent
chapters concerned with Gego work of the seventies and eighties. There, I will develop an
interpretation based on the suggestion of a self-reflective narcissism, which I see manifested in

204
Jacques Lacan, crit a selection, p. 6-7. A ces propos toute notre exprience soppose pour autant quelle
nous dtourne de concevoir le moi comme centr sur le systme perception-conscience, comme organise par
le principe de ralit o se formule le prjuge scientiste le plus contraire la dialectique de la connaissance
pour nous indiquer de partir de la fonction de mconnaissance []: car si la Verneinung en reprsente la
forme patente, latents pour la plus grande part en resteront les effets tant quils ne seront pas clairs par
quelques lumire rflchie sur le plan de fatalit, ou se manifeste le a. Jacques Lacan, crit I, p. 96.
167
Gegos work from ca. 1969 onwards. Questions of identity are of such significance in Gegos case
because positive identification with a social other had been severely disrupted by the experience of
pre-war anti-Semitism and enforced exile. I will consider the ways in which Gego negotiated her
place within a reality in which she remained at all times Ein Mdchen aus der Fremde.
205
Referring
only in passing, now and then, to Lacans psychoanalytical text it still provides a theoretical
framework to be kept in mind throughout the remainder of the following paragraphs.

We have seen that in post-war France, Germany and Switzerland many artists consciously sought a
position of political neutrality, an attitude that was expressing the desire of a society to move out of
the shadow of the Second World War. As demonstrated in the case of Soto, this coincided with the
socio-political conflicts concerning Frances colonialist past. Abstraction served at this moment a
dual function; it deflected from discourses on the collaborationist Vichy government but also from
more contemporary issues, the conflicts in Algeria and the intense social stratification within France
itself. Despite the efforts of left-oriented intellectuals, writers and artists to come to terms with the
immediate past, post-war narratives of the Second World War often remained ridden with the
symptoms of complex feelings of guilt. More serious attempts at systematic historical analysis were
actively repressed until the late sixties and occurred really only decades later, in the nineties.
Nonetheless, while official politics in France, Germany and Switzerland sought to design
representational models for their respective nation states, critical artistic and intellectual circles
continued throughout the sixties and seventies a deconstructive project that was marked by dissent
and eruptions of open revolt. In Sotos oeuvre we have identified instances in which abstraction
could no longer contain modernist violence and the symptoms of an unresolved past broke through
the surfaces of a carefully reconstructed male identity. Within this psychologically complex setting
empathy with victims of the Holocaust was an option that allowed many to deal also with their

205
A young girl from afar. This term was used by Karl Jaspers in a letter addressed to Hanna Arendt in
October 1963.
168
shame over a previous generations crimes. It could be stated that the identification with the victims
was a self-conscious staging of narcissistic longing, for instance, in performance art where it took
the form of enactments of masochistic desire. Of course, such overt identification with victims of
violence may well match the mechanism of displacement, identified by Lacan as a symptom of
narcissistic neurosis. From this perspective, it appears that positive identification with the Jewish
suffering did channel symptoms that had their source in the contemporary political and social
situation. The psychological shift from self-critical analysis to imaginary identification with victims
is understandable as reaction in a society in which images of extermination camps and the
deportation of Jews had given rise to great anxieties. The major question for artists, filmmakers and
writers remained: how was one to represent the unspeakable horror, how should one write about
events that could hardly be put into words? It is conceivable that the long silence, imposed by an
overtly cautious and also insecure Left played in fact, into the hands of a reactionary Right who had
no interest in raising the issue of the Holocaust. Not least because many ex-Nazis and Nazi
supporters had been cleared of their past crimes and were reinstated into the very same positions
they had held before the war. This was particularly so in Germany but also in France. Truly
escalating was the political underground in Germany and Italy in the seventies, which brought back
unresolved content in the most brutal manner and alarmed an innocent population of both countries.
Sadly, it was only the fanatical violence of the RAF and Brigade Rossi that awoke a large part of
society to the urgency of a self-critical engagement with the immediate past. However, the real
issue at hand, namely the question of what methodology was to be employed in the production of
historical accounts of the Second World War remained untouched until the mid-eighties. Until then
German, French and Swiss historians preferred to keep a polite silence on the significance of the
Holocaust for the definition of post-war national identities. Instead school curricula and the media
excluded the Second Word War or reproduced a historically falsifying, manipulative and an often
more obscuring than instructive history of the Weimar period and the Third Reich.
169
It can be claimed that many of those narcissistic ideal imagos, which Lacan described in his
prophetic text of 1949, had sustained nationalistic superstructures in Europe. However, these
infantile modernist mirror images began to be dismantled from different sides at a point when the
non-synchronicity between projected images and a material reality became too extreme. At least in
Germany, the project of a total post-war history disintegrated rapidly during the eighties and fell
into its many uncontrollable and highly inadequate parts. In France the shattering of the idealistic
post-war self was articulated by some French philosophers in terms of a morphological process,
which to some degree effectively reconstituted another mirror. I am thinking here especially of Jean
Baudrillard (1929-2007), Paul Virilio (b.1932)
206
and Jean-Franois Lyotard (1924-1998) and not of
Sarah Kofman (1934-1994) or Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) whose very projects were the
deconstruction of surfaces and totalising narratives.
As an example of a very French way of negotiating the question of post-war Jewish identity
from within the historical revisions of the eighties stands the writings of the philosopher, Alain
Finkielkraut (b. 1949). In Le Juif imaginaire published in 1980
207
, he described the effects of social
and political changes of the eighties from the perspective of a Jew born in 1949, incidentally, the
year of Lacans mirror phase essay. His slender but highly polemical book made a strong
impression, not always positive, on French intellectuals and scholars thinking about Jewish history,
anti-Semitism and post-war Jewish identity. Clearly, the role Finkielkraut assumed within French
culture at the time was of an agent provocateur. Joan B. Wolf writes, In the Imaginary Jew
Finkielkraut had expressed concern about Jews newfound need to separate themselves from the
rest of the nation. In proudly brandishing the badge of their particularity, he argued, Jews confound

206
The texts to consult in this context are Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, translated by P. Foss, P. Patton and P.
Beitchman, Semiotext(e), New York, 1983. Originally published as Simulacres et Simulation, Collection
Dbats, Galile, Paris, 1981; and Paul Virilio, The Aesthetics of Disappearance, Semiotext(e), New York,
1991. Originally published as Esthtique de la disparition, Balland, Paris, 1980.
207
Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, ditions du Seuil, Paris, 1980. English version, The Imaginary Jew,
Translation Kevin ONeill and David Suchoff, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
170
assimilation with anti-Semitism, and the former becomes the modern face of the latter.
208
He
argued that the problematic appeared together with the Enlightenment project which aimed,
idealistically, to secure the equality of all citizens of a society by way of assimilation. In the French
republican ideal the citizen is asked to subscribe to a consensus on forms of participation and on
constitutional rights defined by the citizens of the very nation in which he or she lives. In this
political model the citizen is above all asked to actively take part in the formulation of state
legislations and structure, with the important exception of questions that concern religion and the
structure of religious institutions. Since the eighteenth century, the modern state is based on the
strict separation between the political and the religious spheres. Religious questions are relegated to
a personal domain because they complicate and obstruct the political process. This, so Finkielkraut
emphasised, repeatedly excluded Jews from the French nation state and he argued that
republicanism
209
effectively suppress the expression of Jewish identity. Indeed, more controversial
were Finkielkrauts critical views on the identification, by Jews and non-Jews, with the victims of
the Second World War. These he denounced as inauthentic and false, as verging on narcissism.
Wolf sums his argument up by writing, Jews were not the only ones emphasising their difference.
The need for roots, Finkielkraut wrote, has become the evil of this quarter century. These days
Jews are perceived to possess the origins that before were the outrage of anti-Semites but now are a
talisman for philo-Semites who imagine that Jewish life has meaning, that the life of victimization
has meaning. Far removed from the practical experience of being victimized, he wrote, Jews
narcissistically embrace their fetishized role in national culture.
210
More scandalous even was
Finkielkrauts suggestion that Jews themselves, including himself, had operated within society by
way of an idealising identification with Jewish suffering. He argued that, properly speaking, Jews

208
Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The politics of Memory in France, Stanford University, Stanford,
California, 2004, pp. 97-8.
209
Finkielkraut referred at this point to a Jacobin republican ideal, belonging to a political Left, and not to
contemporary French or American republicanism.
210
Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The politics of Memory in France, p. 98.
171
born in the post-war years no longer had access to a Jewish tradition that had vanished with the
Holocaust and for this reason, failed to find positive representation for their Jewish identity. Wolf
notes that, He accused both himself and his fellow Jews as living in the security of an
anachronism when a chasm separated them from the Nazi genocide. [] Jewish identity, he
concluded, was a pathetic affirmation, ostentatious and emptythe ostentation of nothingness.
211

Admittedly, Finkielkrauts book is a highly polemical essay but this quasi confessional account
serves here as an incentive to explore the problematic arising from Jewish assimilation into modern
societies. I will make use of quotations taken from Finkielkrauts book, which I insert throughout
the chapter like stumbling blocks, in order to address Jewishness as a possible or impossible
identity to assume by Jews living, like Gego, after the Holocaust. Joan B. Wolf notes that in
Finkielkrauts view, To embrace the mantel of the eternal victim was to revel in a pyrrhic identity.
Instead, he argued, that Jews should cease to pretend that they lived in 1930s Europe and that a
Hitler was behind every act of anti-Semitism. They should acknowledge their comfortable
assimilation into the secular and non-Jewish world and forfeit the monopoly that the Holocaust and
Israel claimed on their lives. It was time, wrote Finkielkraut, for Jews to recognise that with the
human collective defeat in the catastrophe [they] had no common homeland. The imperative of
Jewishness today was not identity but memory, he concluded, and that memory was predicated on a
conscious separation from the past.
212

Finkielkrauts argument was written from the perspective of the same intellectual context
that so crucially influenced Venezuelan society and artistic community. In some sense, his project
was a critical analysis of the supposed neutrality of modern universalism as it was advertised by
Sotos Cintisme. It allows suggesting parallels between this particular moment in French

211
Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The politics of Memory in France, p. 98; Finkielkraut, Le Juif
imaginaire, pp. 76-77, 121.
212
Joan B. Wolf, Harnessing the Holocaust: The politics of Memory in France, p. 98; Finkielkraut quote, Le
Juif imaginaire, p. 51.
172
intellectual history and the acknowledgement of the failure of Venezuelan modernism around the
same time. There, a derailing economy combined with reawakened populism and gave rise, among
other demonstrations of nationalism, to a public chastising of Gegos work. She was subjected to
anti-Semitic hostility, her national identity was scrutinised and, by implication, judged
inauthentic. In fact, the comparison between Gegos and Finkielkrauts relation to pre-Holocaust
Jewish culture reveals that Gego maintained a strong sense of continuity with Weimar culture,
while the latter described a radical rupture and argued that identification with Jewish culture was no
longer an option. In Finkielkrauts view post-Holocaust Jewish identity had acquired the function of
Lacans mconaisssance that is, a misunderstanding, by the subject, of the expectations of society
due to a narcissistic denial. According to Lacan, the infans seeks to overcome the painful split
between subjective and objective world by way of neurotic symptoms such as those listed in his
mirror stage essay, inversion, isolation, doubling, cancellation, displacement and obsessive
neuroses. One could state that from Lacans perspective the narcissistic subject does not perceive
Jewishness as emerging from the experience of an external world but that it apprehends it as an
imago, as a fundamental misapprehension of reality. Very consciously, Finkielkraut undertook in
Le Juif imaginaire the painful shattering of the imago he had created in conformity to and as a
reflection of social expectations. He acknowledged that positive identification with the heroic
French Resistance but also with images of Jewish life and especially Jewish suffering shown in the
photographs of Nazi camps and scenes of deportation had played a significant part in this. Both
types of images were widely available after liberation and from the late seventies onwards,
appearing even in the popular press and in television. Speaking of the generation of 1968
Finkielkraut wrote, Properly speaking we had no ego and replaced the self with a supply of glossy
images, sustained by an indefatigable power of projection. Ours was a generation with a genius for
mimicry. Yet it never occurred to these activists, who professed only contempt for those who lived
173
in forgetfulness of history that their own political commitments rested on a phantasm of history at
best. [] - the generation of 1968 had its head stuffed full of legendary tales.
213

We have seen earlier, that Gego remembered the pre-war period already as a time of Jewish
acculturation and integration in which she and her family had lost already contact with Jewish
tradition.
214
The very same distance Finkielkraut described as part of his experience as Jew living in
the post-Holocaust and the post-1968 period. Thus, a double negative emerges as the governing
structure in both, Finkielkrauts and Gegos understandings of Jewish culture. I have argued earlier
against the view that Gegos sense of continuity with a social project, in which Jews had found full
emancipation into German culture, was a denial of the brutal rupture incurred on Jewish culture by
the Holocaust. Here, Finkielkrauts analysis of post-Holocaust Jewish identity as mconnaissance is
useful because his focus on social expectations and explained the problem as particular to European
societies. Gego had no need to address it because few Venezuelans had historical knowledge of the
Second World War or pre-war Judaism and, hence, she had to conform to few expectations as a
Jew. Gegos recuperation of the idealism of the Weimar Republic was not motivated by
Verneinung, which is a symptom of trauma, but by her affirmative wish to integrate into
Venezuelan society. What needs to be seen is whether her turn, in the seventies, to a self-reflective
individualism can be understood, in psychoanalytical terms, as a defensive reaction to narcissistic
injury. It seems significant that the proliferation of double structures within Gegos oeuvre

213
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 20. Nous navions as, proprement parler, dEgo mais, en fait
de moi, un rservoir dimages dEpinal et une puissance infatigable de projection. Cette gnration avait le
gnie de mimtisme, et, professant le plus grand mpris pour les indiffrents qui vivaient dans loublie de
lHistoire, elle ntait pas mme effleure par lide que cest un fantasme dHistoire qui lui tenait lieu
dengagement. [] - cette adolescence soixante-huitarde avait la tte farcie de rcits lgendaires. Alain
Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, p. 29.
214
A certain degree of ambivalence and displacement seems at work when Gego claimed her familys
complete assimilation into German culture but, within the same text, confirmed her sense of isolation during
the thirties. For Gegos comments on her experience of Jewishness during the pre-war period see Huizi and
Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 235.
174
produced before 1969 startlingly disappeared thereafter and gave way to a more embodied
subjectivity.

What I sought to delineate in thinking about both, Gego and Finkielkraut was their respective
relation to what could be called an origin or subjective centre, the moi the existence of which Lacan
contests with his text on the infantile mirror stage. Finkielkrauts confession of his disconnectedness
from Jewish tradition as well as from a victim identity seemed to confirm this loss of a subjective
centre. In 1980 he stated that, Proclaiming itself firmly grounded in history, even claiming the
status of the historical avant-garde, this generation [of 1968] arrogantly ignored the fact that
phantoms possessed it, and that the pastiche was the governing principle of its deeds.
215
This avant-
garde is of course not the same modernist avant-garde discussed here in chapter II but the
intellectuals of the French Left. In contrast, radical modernists had indeed sought liberation from
guilt and ugly phantoms by way of conjuring the innocent shapes of things to come. ZERO artists,
for instance, or those engaged in the activities of La Nouvelle Tendance (see appendix 1) and
Concrete Art, which in its applied form became graphic and product design, were indifferent to
what had happened only twenty years earlier. Finkielkraut warned, The origins of this
misunderstanding lay in the belief in Progress. Along with most of their contemporaries, newly
emancipated Jews took it for granted that Reason worked itself out in history. Such teleological
optimism reduced barbarity to an archaic remnant, and regarded Evil as a violent form of stupidity
or error. Intolerance would wreak its depredations in vain: for these inheritors of the French

215
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 20. En proclament quelle tait de plein pied dans lHistoire,
lavant-garde mme, elle ignorait avec superbe que des fantmes lhabitaient et que le pastiche rgnait en
matre sur ses entreprises. Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, p. 29.
175
Revolution, it was merely a symptom of the past.
216
Gego shared this pessimism when she
commented on progress presumably, sometime in the late seventies.

Fortschritt Progress
Rckschritt Regression
Einschritt einschreiten Intervention one-stepping
Zweischritt zweischreiten March!
217
marching
pas de deux dreischreiten pas de deux three-stepping
er schritt vierschrtig he marched forcefully (four-stepping)
sie schritt fnfschrtig she marched more forcefully (five-stepping)
es schritt sexschrtig it marched sexily (six-stepping)
Gleichschritt
218
in step
Ungleichschritt out of step
schritthalten to keep up pace
schrittmachen to set the pace
Schrittmacher pace-maker

216
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 70-1. A lorigine du malentendu, il y a lide de Progrs. Avec
la plupart de leurs contemporains, les Juifs nouvellement mancips tenaient pour acquise linscription de la
Raison dans lhistoire. Cet optimisme temporel rduisait la barbarie un archasme, et faisait du Mal la forme
violente de la btise ou de lerreur. Lintolrance avait beau continuer faire des ravages elle ntait quun
symptme rsiduel pour les hritiers de la Rvolution franaise. Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, p. 89.
217
There is no exact equivalent in English for Zweischritt but it implies the command used by a superior
during military exercise or a parade to signal his troupe to begin marching in step.
218
Again, this reference is only understandable within the pre-war German context. With Gleichschritt Gego
clearly denotes the marching of armies. This term was in fact used for the same critical purposed during the
thirties, for instance by John Heartfield. One of his sarcastic photo collages is entitled Der Zweck vons Janze
Olympiagste, im Gleichschritt marsch! Made for the 1936 Olympic games in Munich the poster shows
a Nazi flag waving and goat footed Goebbels leading a group of athletes on nose rings through what looks
like a gate inscribed with the words Come and see Germany!.
176
Schittmacher shit-maker
Schittschritt shit-step
schittschreit zum Himmel shit crying out to heaven
zur Hlle F O R T schritt to hell with progress,
F O R D schritt FORD step.
219


Linguisticisms were brief poems, the outcome of associative word games she liked to play with
her children or with friends. It seems Post-modern for its deconstructive strategy and regressive,
reactionary tone. This irreverent word game brings together the notion of progress, allusions to pre-
war Germany and North American Taylorism. The scatological pun on Schritt, the German word
for footstep, and the culmination in a damning of US-style progress expressed uninhibited
resentment and ridiculed the false beliefs in rationality, progress and human achievement.

At the beginning of the eighties the terms of modern universalism and neutrality became
particularly poignant and discursively relevant again. It was a moment when Images of the camps,
of the emaciated bodies of Jews starved to death, the horrors of an industrialised killing machine
began to appear on television sets in Germany, France and Switzerland almost on a daily basis. The
complexity of the history of the Holocaust and the unethical and often superficial treatment it
received in the media led to tensions and uncertainties within wide parts of society. Parents who had
lived through the Second World War felt unable to respond to the increasingly critical and hostile
questions of their children. In this hotpot of unresolved history, which led in Germany to the so-
called Historikerstreit of the mid-eighties, modernity came under attack. It had promised, so it was
claimed, false solutions by its conjuring of a world of equality, a world free of conflict and injustice.
Thus creation of guilt on a large scale coincided with the rejection of an idea that had promoted
openness toward the future. The second critique of modernity was a reactionary turn and articulated

219
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, pp. 116-17.
177
in Finkielkrauts book when he wrote, If the future is for all things the measure of value, memory
has no ground
220
: for he who looks to gather the materials of memory places himself at the service
of the dead, and not the other way round. [] modernity, in love with itself, absorbed by daily
intrigues, will not even notice that they [the dead] have disappeared.
221
What really was at stake in
the early eighties was the question of how to integrate the historical object after a massive shift had
occurred toward the communication of immaterial signs. Choosing Jewish identity was from this
moment no longer a question of choosing authenticity over assimilation but depended on a
certain relation to the Holocaust, its acknowledgement or denial as a rupture and hence, as the
trauma of death. In 1949 Lacan had written, [] we place no trust in altruistic feelings, we who
lay bare the aggressivity that underlies the activity of the philanthropist, the idealist, the pedagogue,
and even the reformer. In the recourse of subject to subject that we preserve, psychoanalysis may
accompany the patient to the ecstatic limit of the Thou art that, in which is revealed to him the

220
Finkielkrauts claim that modernism was a dynamic in which the subject is prevented from remembering
was contradicted, more recently by Georges Didi-Huberman. He proposes quite the opposite by quoting
Walter Benjamin, Old-fashioned and immemorial go together [for Baudelaire]. Objects that are past their
time have become the inexhaustible receptacles for remembering which is to say, the privileged objects for
all modern art. It is no less characteristic that, according to Benjamin, the historian of the modern is presented
as a materialist historian whose interest for the past is always, in part, a passionate interest for what is within
himself resolved, finished and radically dead. Translation, Surann et immmorial vont ensemble
chez Baudelaire. Les [choses] qui ont fait leur temps sont devenues des rceptacles inpuisables de
ressouvenir - cest-dire des objet privilgis pour tout art moderne. Il est non moins caractristique, selon
Benjamin, lhistorien moderne soit prsent comme un historien matrialiste dont lintrt [quil] prend au
pass est toujours, pour une part, un intrt passionn pour ce quil y a en lui de rvolu, de fini, de
radicalement mort . Georges Didi-Huberman, Ninfa Moderna, Gallimard, Paris, 2002, p. 49. My translation.
The Walter Benjamin quotes are taken from, Paris capital du XIXe sicle: le livre des passages, translation J.
Lacoste, Paris, Cerf, 1989, pp. 256, 370, 379.
221
Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 54. Si lavenir doit tre la mesure et la rfrence de toutes
choses, la mmoire est injustifiable : car celui qui cherche rassembler les matriaux du souvenir se met au
service des morts, et non linverse. [] et la modernit, amoureuse delle-mme, accapare, par les intrigues
qui la traversent tous les jours, ne sapercevra mme pas de cette disparition. Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif
imaginaire, p. 70.
178
cipher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that
point where the real journey begins.
222

Lacan described a process in which the narcissistic imago is overcome by way of
acknowledgement of mortality. The ability for compassion and a sense of responsibility toward the
other depended on the consciousness of the radical separation between the subjective and the
objective material world. Anxieties in the face of change may well have been the trigger of
Finkielkrauts ambivalence towards the modern idea. In the eighties, France was experiencing the
effects of a Gaullist defeat, the socialist Franois Mitterrand was elected president in 1981, a change
that had been on the political agenda since the late seventies. An existing imago, including a critical
avant-garde image, had lost its validity in a society that wanted to move on and embrace, among
other things, a new communication tool, the computer and soon, the internet. Finkielkraut was
sensitive to trends at the time that ran the risk of nihilistic negativity, very much in the vein of Jean
Baudrillards simulation theory. Instead of developing wide and objective understanding for the
specific history of Jewish life Finkielkrauts polemic, by pessimistically casting off the values of
Jewish culture, ultimately, may have prevented Jews from making free choices in their personal
definition of what it means to be Jewish.

222
Jacques Lacan, The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in the psychoanalytical
experience, crit a selection, translation Alan Sheridan, Tavistock, Routledge, 1977, p. 7. Les souffrances
de la nvrose et de la psychose sont pour nous lcole des passions de lme, comme le flau de la balance
psychanalytique, quand nous calculons linclinaison de sa menace sur les communauts entires, nous donne
lindice damortissement des passions de la cit. A ce point de jonction de la nature la culture que
lanthropologie de nos jours scrute obstinment, la psychanalyse seule reconnat ce nud de servitude
imaginaire que lamour doit toujours redfaire ou trancher. Pour une telle uvre, le sentiment altruiste est
sans promesse pour nous, qui perons jour lagressivit qui sous-tend laction du philanthrope, de lidaliste,
du pdagogue, voir du rformateur. Dans le recours que nous prservons du sujet au sujet, la psychanalyse
peut accompagner le patient jusqu la limite extatique du Tu es cela , o ce rvle lui le chiffre de sa
destine mortelle, mais il nest pas en notre seul pouvoir de praticien de lamener ce moment ou commence
le vritable voyage. Jacques Lacan, Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je, crit I,
ditions du Seuil, Paris, 1966, p. 97.
179
Identity as Politics
The problem of Jewish post-war identity as it arose anew at the beginning of the eighties was, at
least in France, a response to political changes.
223
The very idea of republicanism came under
scrutiny as Gaullist conservatism was replaced by a more open, pluralistic socialism under Franois
Mitterrand. In an increasingly laic French society which had adopted Americanism more than ever
before, the old republican ideal of the right to indifference became a main cultural theme. This
coincided with the recognition that the experience of the Second World War would soon no longer
be part of the memory of a majority of people living and voting in France. Increasing distance from
these events inevitably yielded more dispassionate analyses, comparing the events of the mid-

223
The social and economic re-structuring effected under Mitterrand led within the art world and the art
market to a radical re-formulation of the function and status of the art object. Fine art was suddenly available
and on display in new non-specialist public projects such as the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Art
definitely lost its privileged place within a society that broke down some of its internal divisions based on
class difference. Initially, this was welcomed as positive change by galleries such as Denise Rens. Denise
Ren stated that, When Jack Lang asked me, a few years ago, Do you think something has changed? I
responded positively. Popular initiatives of the type such as Rues vers lart or Allons-ides had helped in
opening up, a little the views of the audience. Replacing the word culture, they succeeded in triggering
curiosity that went beyond the a single tradition. People wanted to take part in this culture. And that is how
we saw, little by little, French people enter the gallery, sometimes as collectors. She and the artists she
represented had always promoted on the one hand, an open-minded avant-garde image and on the other hand
were severely limited by the dependence on an exclusivist clientele. A more accessible, more social art
discourse would, so Ren hoped, generate interest in the type of abstract art she promoted. However, we know
that in the long run this was not the case. Instead, the opening of the art market toward a non-specialised
audience led also to a radical transformation of artistic production itself and soon Rens Geometric
Abstraction would figure as Modern classics rather than the avant-garde of contemporary art. Original,
Quand Jack Lang me demandait, il y a quelques annes: Avez-vous limpression que quelque chose a
chang? , je rpondais positivement. Des opration populaires du genre la Rue vers lart ou Allons-ides
ont contribu ouvrir un peut lesprit du public. force dassener le mot culture , on a russi dclencher
une curiosit qui sest porte sur autre chose que le seul patrimoine. Les gens ont eu envie de prendre part ~a
cette culture. Cest ainsi que, petit petit, nous avons vues des Franais entrer dans la galerie, certains comme
collectionneur. Catherine Millet, Conversations avec Denise Ren, A. Biro, Paris, 1991, p. 145.

180
century to other wars and to other genocide. The very foundations of Jewish history, the idea of
Jewish Diaspora, came under pressure within a society that, under the influence of a moderate
socialism, sought to erase differences in order to create a liberalist society. Finkielkrauts inquiry
into the history of anti-Semitism was only one voice in a discourse that would lead to critical
revisions of the history of Vichy France.
224
Among the scholars critically engaged with the history
of French anti-Semitism is the political analyst and historian of Judaism, Pierre Birnbaum. His
efforts focused on the issue of a very specific French anti-Semitism based on the projection of
physical negativity, abjection, and often pronounced in a sexualised form.
225
In 1955, the Jewish
historian Lon Poliakov (1919-1997) had explained biological racism, together with the
incorporation of Jewishness, as one of the effects of the secularisation of French and German
societies during the nineteenth century. He wrote, As long as the Jews actually lived under a
special legal rgime, they were regarded, in good theological doctrine, as possessing all the
attributes of human nature, and the curse hanging over them as being only an expiation, from the
point of view of Christian anthropology. It was when they were emancipated and able to mix freely

224
Promptly, around the same time, Anti-Semitism and revisionist accounts of the Second World War, which
effectively deny that the Holocaust ever happened, re-emerged in France. And so did attacks on Jewish life or
places devoted to Jewish ritual. In 1980 a Jewish synagogue in the rue de Copernic in Paris was bombed and
triggered, as the political historian Pierre Birnbaum suggested, further anti-Semitic crimes as well as an over-
identification by a large part of French society with an imaginary Jewish Community. Birnbaum thus
confirmed Finkielkrauts argument that to promote an assumed Jewish community might contribute to the
resurgence of anti-Semitism. See Carpentras, or the Toppling of Clermont-Tonnerre, Jewish Destinies:
Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, translation Arthur Goldhammer, Hill and Wang, New
York, 2000, p. 241-51. The book was first published as Le Destin Juif: De la Rvolution franaise
Carpentras, Calmann-Lvy, Paris, 1995.
225
Pierre Birnbaum has written extensively on the projection of homo-phobia and sexual perversion onto
Jews. See the chapter Hermaphroditism and Sexual Perversion in Anti-Semitism in France: A political
History from Lon Blum to the Present, translation Miriam Kochan, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, 1991,
pp. 147-77; and Carpentras, or the Toppling of Clermont-Tonnerre, Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and
Community in Modern France, translation Arthur Goldhammer, Hill and Wang, New York, 2000, pp. 229-51.
First published as Le Destin Juif: De la Rvolution franaise Carpentras, Calmann-Lvy, Paris, 1995.
181
in bourgeois high society that the curse became, under the terms of the new so-called scientific
anthropology, a biological difference or inferiority and that the despised class became an inferior
race. It was as if the badge or the conical hat-of-yore were henceforth carved, internalized, into
their flesh, as if Western opinion could not dispense with a definite distinction and that this
distinction became an invisible essence once the visible symbols identifying the Jew had been
erased.
226
Thus modern anti-Semitism was no longer theologically defended but with a backing in
natural science, biology and anthropology. It was scientifically approved studies that identified
Jewish difference and, eventually, symbolically charged it as abject. Physiognomic difference and
abject deformation became the underpinnings of anti-Semitic propaganda during the Third Reich. In
Poliakovs history of anti-Semitism it was modern science and rationality that provided the most
powerful and most cruel arguments for the stigmatisation of Jews. As we have seen in the previous
chapter, French positivism and the repression, within post-war societies, of figuration and narrative,
which also means the representation of the Holocaust, are inextricably linked. Jewish identity
politics of the early eighties may have contained a narcissistic impulse but it proved to be necessary
step toward the scholarly historicising of the Holocaust. French society was far from resolving its
problems with the history of French anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, by the end of the 1990s, Pierre
Birnbaum felt confident enough to express with a much more hopeful voice that, At the end of the
twentieth century, signs of a fragmentation of extremist protest can be perceived for the first time in

226
Lon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Volume 3, From Voltaire to Wagner, translation Miriam
Kochan, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1975, p. 309.Tant que les Juifs vcurent effectivement sous un
rgime dexception, ils furent considrs, en bon doctrine thologique, comme participant pleinement de la
nature humaine, la maldiction pesant sur eux ntant quune expiation, du point de vue de lanthropologie
chrtienne. Cest lorsquils furent mancips, et purent se mlanger librement la grande socit bourgeoise,
que la maldiction devint, aux termes dune nouvelle anthropologie dite scientifique, une diffrence ou
infriorit biologique, et que la caste mprise devint une race infrieure, comme si la rouelle ou le chapeau
conique de jadis tais dsormais grav, intrioris, dans leur chair, comme si la sensibilit de lOccident ne
pouvait se passer de la certitude dune distinction qui devint, une fois effacs les signes visible identifiant le
Juif, une invisible essence. Lon Poliakov, Histoire de lantismitisme, Tome 2, Lge de la science,
Calmann-Lvy, 1955 and for the present edition, Seuil, Paris, 1981, p. 163.
182
a society that is both open and secular, and in which Jews no longer hold leading roles. It is as if the
Jews of France, who have so often been urged to remember the past and to remain faithful to their
traditions, have begun to retrace the path that led from Biblical times to the dawn of modern history.
As if, even as they have become a primary focus of historians studying events from Dreyfus to
Vichy, French Jews themselves felt compelled to turn their backs on a history that is no longer
within their grasp.
227
This suggests that only now, at the point when Jewish history has become
accepted as a subject of serious historical research, are Jews liberated from their lonely obligation to
remember, free to choose between tradition or the modern, free to turn over a leaf and embrace a
new century.

With Pierre Birnbaums thought in mind I want to return now to Gego and ask how she negotiated
her cultural difference within Venezuelan society and how the perception of difference might have
found its way into her work. The emphasis on remembrance, as it was promoted by Jewish identity
politics in France, shall be contrasted in the following to Gegos belief in a universal that she
successfully fused with an emphasis on materiality.



3.2.Gego and the Anonymous
In the previous chapters I have consciously left unaddressed the issue of Gegos status as foreigner
of German-Jewish origin living and working in Venezuela. If on occasion I have drawn attention to
the fact that she was a woman and a foreigner holding a prominent position within a strongly
paternalistic society this was in order to show how little these differences seem to have mattered at
the time. To be sure, the list of reasons for which Gego could have been marked as different and,

227
Jewish Destinies: Citizenship, State, and Community in Modern France, p. 277.
183
within the logic of racism, excluded from Venezuelan society is long. Indeed, the revival of Gegos
work occurred first in the late nineties within American Feminist discourses
228
while the most recent
art historical texts appear to highlight the political aspects of Gegos work within Venezuelan
artistic production of the late sixties.
229
This trend toward emphasising Gego and her works
difference rather than sameness, which is what I propose within the present thesis, contradicts the
testimony and commentaries given by her contemporaries. Remarkably, we find instead that the
critical literature especially of the seventies and early eighties strongly convey Gegos full
integration as citizen of Venezuela.
230
Moreover, many of these texts were written by women, for
instance Marta Traba, Hanni Ossott, Iris Peruga, Lourdes Blanco, Marie Elena Ramos and others,

228
See Rina Carvajal, 'GEGO: Weaving the Margins', Inside the Visible: The Elliptical Traverse of 20th
Century Art in, of, and from the Feminine, exhibition catalogue, Catherine M. de Zegher (ed.), MIT Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts, 1996, pp. 341-345; and Rina Carvajal, GEGO: Outside in, Inside out, The
Experimental Exercise of Freedom, Rina Carvajal and Alma Ruiz (eds.), exhibition catalogue, The Museum
of Contemporary Art, LACMA, Los Angeles, 1999, pp. 111-53.
229
Most important for the development of a formal analysis emphasising difference and the informe in Gegos
oeuvre was the Venezuelan art historian and today, curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, Luis
Enrique Prez-Oramas. See his, La Resistencia de las Sombras: Alejandro Otero y GEGO, Cuaderno 8,
Fundacion Cisneros, Caracas, 1996; GEGO, y la escena analtica del cinetismo', Heterotopias, medio siglo,
sin-lugar, 1918-1968, exhibition catalogue, Mari Carmen Ramrez (ed.), Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de
Arte Reina Sofa, 2000, pp. 245-251; This landmark exhibition was held again in the United States four years
later. Prez-Oramas essay was translated as Gego and the analytical context of Cinetismo, Inverted
Utopias: avant-garde art in Latin America, Mari Carmen Ramrez and Hctor Olea, exhibition catalogue,
Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, Yale University Press, 2004, pp. 255-61; 'Gego, Residual Reticulreas,
and Involuntary Modernism: Shadow, Trace and Site', Questioning the Line: Gego, A selection, 1955-1990,
exhibition catalogue, Mari Carmen Ramrez (ed.), Houston Museum of Fine Arts, 2002, pp. 83-116; 'Gego:
The Paradigm of Laocon', Trans>, no. 7, 2000, pp. 160-167. Republished in, Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-
1990, Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Gego, Fundacin Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, pp. 394-400.
230
See Hanni Ossot, GEGO, exhibition catalogue, Ediciones de Museo de Arte Contemporneo de Caracas,
Caracas, 1977; Roberto Guevara, Reticulrea de Gego, Ver todos las Das, Monte vila Editores, Caracas,
1981, pp. 49-53; Para Estar con Gego, Ver todos las Das, Monte vila Editores, Caracas, 1981, pp. 54-6;
'GEGO. Doing and Undoing Space', Bienal Internacional de Sao Paulo, 23, Catalogo das salas especiais, Sao
Paulo, 1996, pp. 150-69.
184
which is indication of the strong positions women were able to assume within Caracas society. Well
understood, these are not feminist texts but short essays and catalogue entries written in a highly
objective language and emphasising Gegos technical skills and the cleverness of her constructivist
concept. In particular, Gegos public sculptures of the sixties are described as significant
contributions to the Venezuelan Constructivist effort. Some attempt was made for instance, by
Hanni Ossott in the 1977 catalogue, to identify a poetic and lyrical dimension in Gegos fragile
Reticulrea, Troncos or Columnas of the seventies. However, these texts cannot deflect from the
impression that Gego remained at all times an architect, thinking primarily in material and structural
terms. Clearly, Gego was partaking in a project that sought the construction of a post-war
Venezuelan national identity to which functionality and progress were the most positive attributes.
Questions of gender, race and religious identity mattered in Venezuela at this particular point far
less than they would only ten years later. We can ascertain that Gegos natural pragmatism, her
curiosity and her enthusiastic engagement as artist and teacher allowed her, so I have argued earlier,
the almost complete assimilation to leading sections of Caracas society and culture.
This following chapter draws attention to the fact that Gegos assimilation was possible
only via the more or less conscious separation between a public and a private sphere. Even after
many years in exile Gego led a bilingual life-style in which she conversed in German with friends
and relatives but elsewhere spoke Spanish with a strong German accent. This is important because
it links this section to issues raised in the previous chapter where I identified Sotos conformity to a
French type of republicanism which favours, precisely, the separation between a political and a
private domain. France, more than any other European country, excluded and actively repressed
individualistic trends or the representation of religious content from the political and social space of
the nation. French republicanism had in turn, not least via Sotos and Cruz-Dez public sculptures,
enormous influence on Venezuelans although the benefits of this influence remained often limited
to a cultural and economic elites. By the late sixties, when in Europe as well as in Venezuela, a
highly constructive period had run its course and a more market oriented society developed, this
185
split between state and the individual became ever more accentuated. Simultaneously, Gegos social
position became increasingly characterised by her difference and her quasi exotic status as
foreigner. If in other respects she seemed more adaptable to the Latin American context she
nonetheless had created for herself a public persona that was clearly non-Venezuelan. (Fig. 49 Gego
at the Museo de Arte Contemporneo, 1977) Thus a structural doubling of identity sustained Gegos
conception of herself certainly during the first thirty years of her exile and throughout the first half
of her artistic career. In which way, if at all, this changed in the later phases of her life shall be
explored further on. The immediate task will be to establish parallels or discontinuities between
what we have identified as the issues of Jewish identity politics in Europe and those arising for
Gego by adopting the highly original self of a foreigner in Venezuela.

Doubling
In chapter I, I have made allusion briefly to Gegos use of a particularly interesting technique, the
significance of which I want to expand upon here. During the earliest phase of her career Gego
imitated, with an almost photographic sensibility, her immediate surroundings, for example, details
seen on one of the many large building sites ubiquitous in Caracas at the time. She appears to have
literally abstracted structures and shapes seen in the material world in order to re-materialise them
in her work. (Fig. 50 Caracas building site, Parque Central, c.1975) and (Fig. 51 Gego, Torrecilla,
1968) Moreover, until the late sixties Gego repeatedly mimed existing structures and formal
propositions and sometimes quite shamelessly even stole ideas from artists who were active around
her. A good example of her copying of Cinetismo artists is her repeated use, until the late sixties, of
optical distortions and moir effects which she had quite clearly appropriated from Jess Soto and
Carlos Cruz-Dez.
231
(Fig. 10 Gego, Vibracin en negro, 1957) and (Fig. 52 Jess Soto, Estructura
en hierro, (Pre-Penetrable), 1957) This was not necessarily done in a spirit of competition but is an

231
A first exhibition of the work of Jess Soto, Estructuras Cinticas took place in June 1957 at the Museo
de Bellas Artes in Caracas.
186
indication of a shared interest and the companionship among artists working in the same town.
Gego was indeed very close to Soto, Otero and Cruz-Dez and on occasion even collaborated with
them. Another example of her mimetic impulse is the surprising piece Partiendo de un cuadrado of
1958 which was very close in style to the work of a fellow Venezuelan artists, Pedro Briceo. (Fig.
25 Gego, Partiendo de un cuadrado, 1958 and Fig. 25a Pedro Briceo, Despliegue Interno-Externo
del Prisma, 1958) The fact that this is the only example of a work of this kind in Gegos entire
oeuvre supports my suggestion that she simply copied and briefly experimented with Briceos
idea. As far was we can tell, there was no critical comment contained in this practice, as it was for
instance in North American Appropriation Art of the eighties. Gegos mimicry was more likely
the expression of her desire to assimilate to Venezuelan society but, simultaneously, it allowed her
to rationalise, that is, become conscious of and abstract from Venezuelan reality. Gegos mimesis is
important to register because it confirms, to my mind, Lacans theory of a neurotic doubling taking
place during the mirror stage. In Lacans concept, the ideal imago formed within the self is
compared with an exterior world by way of a projection. Applied to Gegos work this suggests that
she projected an ideal onto an outside world. Lacan further claimed that the child attempted to
control his unmediated experience, the chaotic incoherence of a threatening reality, by way of an
ideal structure or Gestalt formed within fantasy. Thus, what could be called Gegos mirror stage
was compensating for her insecurity within an unfamiliar social and cultural context. The
appropriation of her Cinetismo peers ideas manifested her attempt at overcoming a debilitating
sense of inadequacy.
Within Gegos mimetic practice falls also her use of technical drawings taken from
textbooks on structural engineering and architecture. One of the earliest examples of this emerging
trend is Cuatro tetraedros of 1966. (Fig. 26 Gego, Cuatro tetraedros, 1966) A drawing of a
187
practically identical structure is reproduced in a book called Order in Space
232
which Gego would
use extensively in her Basic Composition course. (Fig. 27 Keith Critchlow, Order in Space,
technical drawing, 1965) This is strong indication that representational geometry, which she had
taught from 1960 onwards, had begun to replace her focus on the optical effects generated by
Cinetismo artist Soto and Cruz-Dez. Her emphasis on geometric forms and transparent structures
announced also her radical turning away from the optical illusion of Op-art, which was promoted
primarily in the North American and British context.
233
Gego, by combining geometry with a use of
reflective materials, increasingly fixed visual interest onto the surface of structures rather than

232
Keith Critchlow, Order in Space: a design source book, Thames and Hudson, London, 1969. Republished
by The Viking Press, New York, 1970. Clearly, the similarity between this work and those of Brazilian artists,
especially Lygia Clarks (1920-1988), is striking. However, not a single reference exists in either Gegos
notes or in the content of her library that she was interested or in contact with Brazilian artists. In contrast, the
significance of Critchlows book as inspiration for many of Gegos works has been noted recently in two
essays by Guy Brett and Yve-Alain Bois, respectively. Both affirm similarities between the conceptuality of
Gegos structures of the mid-sixties to the design principles outlined and illustrated by Critchlow. Yve-Alain
Bois identifies a link to a term defined by Buckminster Fuller, tensegrety (the word is a contraction of
tension and integrity), but admits that Gegos application of tensegrity principles actually predate the
publication of the book. Yve-Alain Bois, From the Spiders Web, GEGO. Desafiando Estructuras,
exhibition catalogue, Fundao Serralves, Porto and Museo dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006-7, p. 48.
On the other hand, Guy Brett writes, Interestingly, as a fascinating sign of cross-cultural interaction of ideas
at the time, a starting-point for the work of the seminar [Gegos Spatial Relations Seminar] was a book by
the English scholar Keith Critchlow, Order in Space. Published in 1970 in an elongated format with a plastic
spiral binding looking like a technical manual and with a recommendation from Buckminster Fuller on the
back cover, Critchlows book illustrates scores of examples of space-defining geometries. Critchlow later
went on to study Islamic patterns and ornamentation, interpreting them as cosmological/mystical models of
infinity. Guy Brett, Gego: Art, Design and the Poetic Field, GEGO. Desafiando Estructuras, exhibition
catalogue, Fundao Serralves, Porto and Museo dArt Contemporani de Barcelona, 2006-7, p. 39.
233
One of Gegos early pieces, Sphere of 1959, was included in the Responsive Eye exhibition held in 1965
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, at this point her work had been part of the museums
Latin American collection since 1960, and its inclusion was presumably, beyond Gegos control. Also, she
received no mention in the exhibition catalogue. See The Responsive Eye, exhibition catalogue, William C.
Seitz curator, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in collaboration with the City Art Museum of St. Louis,
1965.
188
within a diffuse immaterial space. Further, she blatantly disregarded the idea of authorship or
originality and instead proposed a practice of transfer or transformation of existing geometric
shapes thus rendering hommage to the modern universal. Mathematics and its spatial representation,
geometry, were used as an tant donn in order to create highly conceptual and expressly anti-
subjective objects. This strategy she applied to smaller works as well as larger architectural
installations. (Fig. 53 Gego, Cinco pantellas, 1968-71) A later development of the transfer
technique was of course the Reticulrea of 1969 and all subsequent versions of it. (Fig. 54 Gego,
Reticulrea 75, 1975) The Reticulre was almost certainly inspired by a book that has, curiously,
been omitted in the literature on Gego. John Borregos book Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal
Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems
234
formed part of Gegos library and to my mind there is
little doubt that it provided inspiration for many of Gegos works of the seventies and even of the
eighties. A direct visual comparison between Reticulrea 75 and a page from John Borregos book
(Fig. 55 John Borrego, Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems,
1968) renders it evident that the cell-like pattern of this work is the result of the same joining
strategies as they are, admittedly in a more systematic manner, demonstrated in Borregos book.
Important to note is the strong visual similarity between the two images and less the correctness or
faultiness of Gegos copy. She obviously did not pay much attention to keeping the length of each
individual piece of wire the same nor did she neatly separate the structurally different systems of
joining the elements. Further, two Dibujo sin papel, the first of which is from the late seventies and
the second from the late eighties, give evidence of the permanence of Gegos strategy of
superficially copying textbooks illustrations. (Fig. 56 Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 78.15, 1978 and Fig.
57 Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 87.25, 1987) Again, the visual comparison to another page from Space,
Grid, Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems reveals the strong formal parallels
between Gegos work and the illustration. (Fig. 58 John Borrego, Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal

234
John Borrego, Space, Grid, Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems, MIT Press,
Cambridge Massachusetts, 1968.
189
Frameworks and Stresses Skin Systems) This comparison between these Dibujos and the dry
technical drawing highlights also the humour in Gegos idea to use chicken wire as a regular grid on
which toperform her intrusions. However, more important is that it confirms my thesis that she
used, throughout her career, textbook illustrations as source of inspiration for her works. In
conclusion I wish to emphasise that Gegos appropriation practice was guided by a visual impulse
in which she copied images rather than structural ideas. I suggest that, ideal geometric structures
provided Gego, one the one hand, with an obstacle to push against and, on the other hand, with the
framework for containing the imperfections of a material reality. In Lacanian terms one could state
that Gegos use of abstract ideas were her way of controlling the profusion of inadequate
perceptions coming toward her from an unfamiliar world.

Memory and Denials
In 1987 Gego remarked that Perhaps one of the outstanding characteristics of my education was
the respect for ideas, thoughts, and cultures other than my own. Another important aspect was to
take the community into account, not to bother anyone and not to be bothered, that is to say, to
integrate oneself.
235
Gegos interpretation of social integration does give emphasis to the right to
privacy and each citizens duty to respect the others personal sphere. The same kind of distance
seems implied in her respect for ideas, thoughts and cultures other than my own. Thus, in contrast
to the French republican ideal which in its most radical form sought the elimination of cultural and
religious differences, Gegos enthusiasm for the social is moderated by an individualism, that was
also typical of a Liberal German Jewish bourgeoisie. The subject of Jewish assimilation into
Weimar culture is enormous and I can discuss only those aspects that seem most relevant to Gego.

235
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 235. Original version: Vielleicht ist der Respekt vor andersdenkenden,
anderen Meinungen und anderen Kulturen eines der wesentlichen Charakteristiken meiner Erziehung. Ein
anderer Punkt war die Anforderung, Rcksicht auf die Gemeinschaft zu nehmen, niemanden zu stren +
selber nicht gestrt zu werden, d.h. sich einzuordnen. Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 241.
190
Foremost, it needs to be pointed out that Gegos memory of Weimar Germany had significantly
influenced her career choices as well as her public persona, as German-Jew, within Caracas society.
Which aspects of Weimar culture Gego recovered is important because, as the historian of Jewish
culture Michael Brenner observed, One of the main features of the transformation of liberal
Judaism in Weimar Germany was its gradual detachment from the optimistic belief in human reason
and progress. This development must be seen in relation to the general intellectual framework, and
especially to contemporary Protestantism. Belief in human reason, scientific progress, and the
settlement of theological questions by historical analysis had characterised Protestant liberalism
[], but these beliefs were shattered in the early twentieth century.
236
This describes a situation
immediately after World War I and the reaction of only a part of the Jewish community, precisely,
those German Jews that sought to found a Jewish Community.

Michael Brenner writes, The
trauma of World War I had dashed the hopes that German Jews had, to be finally included into the
German Volksgemeinschaft. Still, they shared with their non-Jewish neighbours the need to
establish new forms of community. Some satisfied this need by emphasizing their Germanness,
others became socialists or communists, and many found refuge in the rediscovery of a Jewish
Gemeinschaft. [] Weimar Germanys organized Jewry aimed to change this rather vague sense of
Gemeinschaft into a concrete culture, thus transforming an invisible community into a visible
one.
237
Various steps were undertaken by way of which German Jews sought to re-create a strong
sense of community based on Jewish culture and tradition. Among these initiatives was the Jewish
Lehrhaus in Frankfurt, founded by Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), whose life-project was the fight
against the eradicating forces of a shallow modernism. Founded in 1920, the Lehrhaus was one of
many similar institutions established by Jewish intellectuals who by providing Jewish adult
education, sought to re-create a genuine Jewish tradition. Michael Brenner concluded that, More

236
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, Yale University Press, New
Haven and London, 1996, p. 42.
237
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 36-7.
191
than any other German Jew, Franz Rosenzweig helped to build a distinct, modern Jewish culture,
while remaining deeply rooted in his German surroundings. He identified with Liberal German
Judaism but shared the Zionists radical critique of assimilation.
238
Like the German founders of
the Volkshochschule (adult education) Rosenzweig deplored the lack of rootedness, community,
and spiritual orientation.
239
In reference to Gego we must assume that her family did not share this
enthusiasm for Jewish tradition or spirituality and that the Goldschmidts fully integrated into
German Protestant culture during the Weimar period. Yet, Vereinigung, the union between
Germanness and Jewish traditions, proved to be illusory despite Rosenzweigs claim that,
Judaization made me not a worse but a better German.
240
Other German Jews sensed that the
relation between Deutschtum and Judentum could never mean to unite, only to get along with each
other.
241
As we know from Gegos autobiographical notes, she had fully embraced the progressive
optimism of the Weimar period and sustained this belief throughout the thirties. This is evident first,
in her aspiration to adopt a masculine professionalism, second, in her insistence on staying in
Germany until the very last months before the outbreak of war and thirdly, in her support for an
architectural modernism promoting by now also the values of the German Reich. Throughout my
thesis I have suggested that the humiliation she experienced by enforced exile was of having been
expelled from the country she loved, by the people she had wanted to belong to. Since Gego left no
written evidence directly confirming this view I am forced to forward my own interpretation of
passages from Gegos autobiographical text of 1987. A traumatic rupture seems, in my view,
evident in the contrast between the positive image Gego painted, on the first pages of the text, of her
upbringing in Hamburg and the shattering scene in Bonatz office during which she finally had to

238
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 71.
239
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 77.
240
Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebcher, Rachel Rosenzweig and Edith Rosenzweif-Scheinmann, (ed.),
Vol. I of Franz Rosenzweig: Der Mensch und sein Werk, The Hague, M. Nijhoff, 1984. p. 887.
241
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 89. Brenner is quoting here
Richard Koch to Julius Goldstein, Julius Goldstein Collection, LBI-AR 7167.
192
accept that life in Germany had become impossible for her.
242
The inescapability of her emigration,
the fact that she simply had no other choice, if she wanted to save her life, than to leave Germany
becomes here understandable as deeply humiliating. Again, I can only suggest that this led to an
over-valuation and, subsequently, inspired Gegos re-interpretation of the culture of Weimar
Germany. Late in her career, I will discuss this particular moment shortly, Gego gave her own
interpretation of the historical when she wrote that, Everything pertaining to history consists of
much failure and error of memory and very little truth. Why waste effort now in obsessive
reflections on the past?
243
However, it is important to read this statement in the context of its
appearance. It was Gegos defensive response to an article in which she had been accused of a lack
of transparency with respect to her past. At this point she also stated that, All before and after
can be transformed by the here and now into events in ones personal history: an insignificant
before takes on importance, and vice versa. Some events are erased from memory because they
have no significance. My memories consist of images without dates. These images are often
imprecise; a little clearer if they have been relived in conversations or chance meetings.
244
I dont
think one could express any clearer what it means to be critically engaged, from the perspective of
the present, with a personal history.
Crucially, in her recuperation of the values of pre-war Germany, Gego revitalised those
spiritual elements that had been repressed during the Nazi period, those of the early Weimar
Bauhaus. As explained in chapter I, Gego was attracted to the idealism that had sustained the
Weimar Bauhaus, its liberalism, its experimental atmosphere and the individualism that was
fostered among the students by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten, among others. In
my view, Gegos identification with Bauhaus modernism established continuity with the pre-war
reaction, by Jews and non-Jews, to the secularizing forces of Western civilisation. One aspect of

242
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 240-42.
243
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 183.
244
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 183.
193
this was the search for authenticity and spiritual experience, manifested so strongly in the Bauhaus
artists embrace of Eastern mysticism, especially Johannes Ittens. The Bauhaus dream was the
spiritual education of society by way of a synthesis of different fields of artistic production, in order
to create one harmonious whole and, in this sense, it was a utopian project. Gegos use of Ittens
highly individualistic pedagogy was a significant departure from other post-war developments of
Bauhaus design and the total integration of art into culture. She wished to recover values that had
sustained the Bauhaus community before the functionalist turn, which occurred at the Dessau and
Berlin Bauhaus and lasted until its definite closure in 1933. Michael Brenner explained, Thus it
was Weimar, and not the Third Reich, in which German Jews set out to explore new and creative
modes of Jewish culture within a non-Jewish environment. By establishing publishing houses and
journals, adult education systems and libraries, schools and youth activities, museums and music
associations, they prepared a new tradition, and mostly (though not exclusively) secular Jewish
culture, one with which many highly acculturated German Jews could and did identify.
245
The fact
that Gego confirmed the beliefs of a liberal German Jewry of the pre-war period, hopes that were
brutally shattered by the emergence of German populism and anti-Semitism, constitutes a key point
for my argument that Gego's artistic oeuvre cannot be read outside the history of the Renaissance of
Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany.
The post-modern idea of the necessarily fragmentary quality of memory would no doubt
have appealed to Gego and on occasion she stated that her thinking was a-historical. When asked, in
1987, to answer questions regarding her German past she replied, I have tried to write down all my
memories that are still alive, and found they were too insignificant and too personal for a wide
audience or for an archive.
246
Gegos answer implied that the personal was insignificant and it

245
Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 219.
246
Professor Dr Fritjhof Trapp of the Hamburger Arbeitsstelle fr Deutsche Exilliteratur had approached
Gego as part of a research project conduted in association with the University of Hamburg. She wrote the
letter in German. 'Ich habe versucht all sehr lebendigen 'Erinnerungen' aufzuschreiben, und habe sie zu
194
contained, in her rebuttal of an academics search for and belief in historical truth, the reminder that
desires and the pain of an individual mattered little in the real world. However, added like an aside,
she noted that her memories were too personal for sharing with an anonymous audience, which
amounts to admitting just how precious they were to herself. Gegos refusal to share her memories
suggests scepticism towards historical truth as well as her wish to preserve her most personal
memories, as absence. Moreover, she claimed that the very absence of subjectivity constituted the
driving force of her infinite creativity.
247
However during the seventies, the speed of modernisation
reached new levels, globally, and brought about the end of many highly idealistic projects. In most
parts of the world this decade is remembered as the mid-seventies oil crisis, for Venezuelans, it was
the glorious oil boom, which created an over-blown self-image and renewal of nationalistic pride
boosted primarily, by Venezuelas unprecedented wealth. The economic dynamism allowed Soto
and Cruz-Dez, who had in the meantime found considerable success in France, to return to their
now oil-rich home country. They were supported by a conservative elite interested in protecting a
Francophile culture from the onslaught of North American pop culture. In 1968 the Catholic party
COPEI under leadership of Rafael Caldera had taken over power from the socialist Accin
Democrtica. Accin Democrticas influence was restored in 1974 when Carlos Andrs Prez (b.
1922) was elected president of the state. Between 1968 and 1988 Venezuela was under a more or
less stable two-party rule and the Catholic partys effect on Venezuelans cultural development
competed with the one of the political Left. Thus, throughout the seventies until the late eighties, a
French aesthetic vocabulary exerted massive influence in Caracas and, indeed, French Cintisme

unwichtig und zu persnlich gehalten fr ein breiteres Publikum oder Archiv. From an unpublished letter to
Professor Dr Fritjhof Trapp, Universitt Hamburg. Hamburger Arbeitsstelle fr Deutsche Exilliteratur, (dated
7. November, 1987).
247
In a brief lecture Gego gave at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop near San Francisco in 1966 she said,
There is no danger for me to get stuck, because with each line I draw, hundreds more wait to be drawn. That
is the circle of knowledge with the ring around, you enlarge the inner circle and the outer one becomes greater
without end. Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 171.
195
and Cinetismo began to dominate the field of public sculpture. In contrast, Gego maintained that her
work had remained at all times completely a-political.
248
A certain indifference to the political
quarrels within Venezuelan society was condition for Gego to develop an oeuvre of an increasingly
intimate quality. In 1972 she had turned sixty years old, her personal needs changed and her desire
to slow down was reinforced by a hearing impairment that affected Gegos ability to socially
interact and feel comfortable in public. The work produced after 1969 gives evidence of a personal
maturation and deliberate retreat from the material into an increasingly imaginary world.
Accustomed as she was to working with assistants, she now preferred working alone at her own
pace and she greatly enjoyed the freedom of a more subjective engagement in the creative process.
All Reticulrea of the seventies and especially Gegos Dibujos sin papel, a series begun in 1976,
are evidence of a liberation from social and practical restraints. (Fig. 59 Gego, Dibujo sin papel
76.4, 1976) Dibujos sin papel became ever more pronounced in their playful lyricism and as the
title Drawings without paper suggests, these objects are traces of memories and sensual pleasures
recorded on an absent ground.

Differences
Although there is no evidence to support the view that Gego was under critical pressure before
1980, it is plausible to suggest that Gegos interior exile was the result not only of her age but also
of the emergence of increasingly negative speculations on her past and the authenticity of her
Venezuelan national identity. The nations success, for which Cinetismo became symbolic
representation, was celebrated and amplified in the popular press. Gegos large retrospective
exhibition of 1977 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas thus turned into a media event
that suddenly brought Gego back into the limelight of Caracas society. The local media, newspapers

248
In an interview conducted by the German curator Dietrich Mahlow in 1982 Gego stated, I keep out
[intentionally] of politics and big world problems. Interview published in Zeitung zur Austellung:
Spielraum-Raumspiele, pages not numbered, Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 1982.
196
and television had generated enormous attention for the exhibition and Caracas audiences had
embraced Gego as one of theirs not without, of course, subjecting her to the usual idealisation and
immediate appropriation of her work for marketing purposes. Reticulrea patterns had been printed
on the paraphernalia found today in all museums shops and they even appeared on the museums
own delivery van. All this occurred only one year before a dramatic economic down-turn signalled
the end of the boom period. In 1980, in a climate of heightened populism and with social tensions
rising under the prospect of a looming recession, Gego came under unexpectedly hostile,
xenophobic attack.
A certain Jos D. Benavides published an article in a Caracas newspaper, ltimas Noticias,
with the title Fisonoma neutralizante de Gego.
249
The title was clearly meant as a critique of her
choice of a neutral and non-political position. In his article Benavides reports that he had asked
Gego for an interview to which she seems to have agreed but preferred to conduct in writing. Three
of Benavides five questions are of particular interest to this discussion.

1. Among the mishmash of countries which you passed through before reaching
Venezuela, which is past and which your future?

4. From this unravelled patchwork of disintegrated and motley materials with which you
work, how on earth do you impose some possible order?

5. What is it that changes in your work, the external now or the inner element from
before?

Gego wrote down her answers and she replied,

1. There is no mishmash of countries on my way to Venezuela.
All before and after can be transformed by the here and now

249
Jos D. Benavides, Gegos neutralising physiognomy, ltimas Noticias (Caracas), 31/08/1980, Sunday
supplement. The title implies that she did not show her true face.
197
into events in ones personal history: an insignificant before takes on importance, and
vice versa. Some events are erased from memory because they have no significance.

My memories consist of images without dates. These images are often imprecise; a little
clearer if they have been relived in conversations or chance meetings. Everything pertaining
to history consists of much failure and error of memory and very little truth. Why waste
effort now in obsessive reflections on the past?
250



To the fourth and the fifth question she replied,

4. There always exists a partially recognizable order.
5. I do not understand the question.
251


Gego never sent these answers to Benavides but instead posted three separate cards:

1 For me: too sophisticated and literary for ones own good
2 I dont want to analyze my life, my experiences and my creative work in public now.
3 O.K. Gego, Warm regards.
252


The exchange between Jos D. Benavides and Gego suggests that during the seventies a
repositioning of Gegos status within Caracas society had taken place. I suggest that this coincided
with formal changes within Gegos oeuvre initiated with Reticulrea of 1969. The work was
commissioned by the prestigious institution of the Museo de Arte Nacional and was at the same
time more intimate and more informel than any of her earlier public sculptures. Benavides
xenophobic attack focussed on the informel quality of Gegos work linking it to a supposed cultural
mishmash. His use of the term, indicating a chaotic and abject materiality, his sarcasm and
emphasis on cultural difference is common to all types of racism. However, insinuations of the

250
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 183.
251
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 183.
252
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 179.
198
abject are specific, as Lon Poliakov and Pierre Birnbaum have argued, to anti-Semitism in strongly
republican state structures.
253
Gegos unravelled patchwork of disintegrated and motley materials
prevented this Venezuelan nationalist from appreciating the work of an artist, a woman moreover.
Benavides found himself compelled to ask how on earth do you impose some possible order? The
supposed absence of history and the impurity of Gegos past fused in this racists mind into an
indefinable informel.
Anti-Semitic thinking has two main sources, one of which is biological racism, exemplified
in Benavides attack on the strong materiality of Gegos work, the second is political and economic
anti-Semitism. In this type of anti-Semitic argument Jews are accused of being unfairly privileged
because of their adherence to a cultured and politically influential class.
254
This form of anti-
Semitism is voiced normally from the Marxist Left but appears also in very conservative quarters
who resent the liberalism of an educated bourgeoisie. Benavides interrogation of Gego did take
place at a moment when social unrest was channelled from both political poles into nationalistic

253
Pierre Birnbaum observed, that it is in strong states, that is, states in which a powerful administrative
bureaucracy recruits its members on merit, is open to all on an egalitarian basis, and strives to demonstrate its
independence of all social, religious or ethnic particularism where anti-Semitism most likely occurs. He
contrasts these to weak states, comparable to the one in place between 1958 and 1968 in Venezuela, in
which political democracy blossoms rapidly, facilitating the representation of a multiplicity of interest groups
including religious and ethnic groups- []. Birnbaum continued, In the first model, the secularization of
state space as well as of citizenship is evidence of the almost unique identification with the state. In the
second, on the other hand, private space is infinitely more extensive, and this permits each citizen to have
various religious or ethnic allegiances. [] France is a good example of the first category. Pierre Birnbaum,
Anti-Semitism in France, Translation Miriam Kochan, Blackwell, Oxford and Cambridge, 1992, p. 6. First
published as Un myth politique: La Rpublique Juive, Arthme Fayard, Paris, 1988.
254
Gego was privileged in the sense that she never had to produce art works in order to survive. She and all
other members of the Goldschmidt family had received Wiedergutmachung that is, compensation payment
from the German government after the Second World War. Further, although the family business was
dissolved only at very late stage, in 1938, it is also very likely that her father had the foresight to bring
substantial savings to safety earlier than 1933, before the Nazis prevented the transfer of money abroad.
Gegos sister Hanna lived in England already in 1931 and the family had business contacts and relations
living in the United States.
199
discourses. Conceivably, Gego had provoked resentment because she occupied a prominent position
that she, as a non-Venezuelan, simply did not deserve. Gegos past became suspicious only at the
moment when purity of race and roots in Venezuela, that is, when differences began to matter
again.
The problematic in any discussion of anti-Semitism is what methodology to employ in
order to explain the psychological mechanisms behind it? Anti-Semitism and racism are irrational
projections, based on a consensus formed within a society and as part of a societys morality.
Assuming stigmatisation to occur on the level of representation would be an obvious answer but
this is also problematic. The issue provides me with a link from 1980s Caracas to Existentialist
Paris immediately after the war. In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre, expressing the opinion of many French
intellectuals, stated that anti-Semitism remained often undetected because it was accepted as normal
by a profoundly racist society. In Rflexions sur la question juive
255
he claimed that societys
negative projections, otherness, was borne by Jews like an inscription, thus becoming integral part
of their Jewish identity. Sartres view was informed by Heideggers ontology, while post-modern
philosophies have stressed since that identity is formed and transformed within language. Today,
many scholars reject Sartres book for confirming the biological racism and anti-Semitism of the
time. In 1999, Pierre Birnbaum was most outspoken in his critique of Sartres text in Sorry
afterthought on Anti-Semite and Jew.
256
He wrote, One could attempt to defend Sartres logic by
assuming that, since he was working only on a phenomenological level, he has some excuse for his
ignorance and navet. But what about his prejudices?
257


255
Jean-Paul Sartre, Reflxions sur la question juive, Gallimard, Paris, 1946.
256
Pierre Birnbaum, Sorry afterthought on Anti-Semite and Jew, October 87, MIT press, Cambridge
Massachusetts, 1999, pp. 89-106.
257
Pierre Birnbaum, Sorry afterthought on Anti-Semite and Jew, p. 92. He continued, Anti-Semite and Jew,
taking as its starting point the French case, disconcerts with its banal clichs, and we are struck by Sartres
ignorance concerning French Jews. It is this ignorance that leads Sartre to statements that belong to anti-
Semitic propaganda and this even after Vichy. [] Sartre thought he understood the life of Jews of France
200
During the thirties, in order to deflect attention Jews sometimes sought to protect
themselves from anti-Semitism by accommodating to unfair social rules. In some sense, this was the
fantasy of total disappearance within society and existence as a quasi negative presence. When the
situation became more precarious and dangerous even for assimilated Jews, Gego was literally
forced into isolation despite the fact that her Jewish origins did matter little to her. In her 1987
autobiographical text Gego wrote, During my years of study, I was never offended or rejected by
any colleague or professor, although it is true that I avoided all except academic activity.
258
Social
engagement was limited to the most formal occasions, clearly a self-protective isolation Gego and
other Jews had come to accept as a given. In 1938, when Bonatz asked Gego to join the celebration
organised for recent graduates, Gego was one of them, it was she who told him that this would be
seen as inappropriate by her fellow students. She wrote, I had to explain to him that the young
graduates would not like that very much.
259
Nazi propaganda was ubiquitous after 1933 and soon
Nazi aggression against Jews would become an accepted norm. Gegos trend to introversion, which
I identify in her work from 1969 onwards, repeated in my view a behavioural pattern that she had
formed much earlier in her life. Echoing perhaps the traumatic moments of her experiences in 1930s
Germany, many of her more expressive objects and especially her drawings seem to resound with
violence. (Fig. 60 Gego, Sin ttulo, 1963)

but his ignorance of Jewish reality is most apparent when he takes it upon himself to draw up a physical and
psychological picture of two extremes of the social hierarchy: on the one side the poor Jew from the rue des
Rosier and on the other his little pal Raymond Aron. This is where it turns into a painful exercise that leaves
the reader upset and shocked by the description of the rue Rosier Jew, the fondness Sartre feels for this
neighbourhood with its little gloomy caf opposite a second-hand clothes stall, where Sartre had often
walked with Wanda, Olga, Bianca, as well as with the Beaver [Simone De Beauvoir], since he was
particularly keen when he was with his girlfriends on slumming in those narrow, gloomy streets of exotic
Pletzl, where he was never anything but a tourist. Pierre Birnbaum, Sorry afterthought on Anti-Semite and
Jew, p. 94. The Sartre quotes are from his War Diaries, p. 120.
258
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 235.
259
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 235.
201
The anonymous referred to in the heading to this chapter acquired in Gegos work
additional meaning. The post-modern I seek to identify in her work is not the projection of
theoretical structures lacking connection to the object at hand. Her anonymous post-modern subject
was in reaction to a specific place at a certain moment. In 1987 Gego described a scene experienced
in Germany only a few months before emigration. She wrote, Suddenly I realized how I was
hovering above ground; + in order to clear a path toward the future, I now followed him to his
office, where we had the most impressive conversation. He didnt even know of my 100%
Abstammung [Jewish origins].
260
It is Gegos description, written fifty years later, of the moment
when she had to accept the inevitability of exile, the radical break within her life. Perhaps more
traumatic at this moment, was the sensation that staying on in Germany would mean her certain
death. The floor was literally taken from under Gegos feet, expressed in her assertion that she felt
as if hovering in mid-air. From 1957 onwards, Gego produced hundreds of works which were
attached to the ceiling, or perhaps more precisely, they were works hovering above ground. With
the Reticulrea of 1969 this trope of the free-floating, suspended structure became a constant
theme: Reticulrea, Chorros, Troncos and Columnas are rarely touching the floor.
261
It took forty
years for Gego to work through the scene in Bonatz office and only with the Dibujo sin papel was

260
Unfortunately, the editors omitted in the English translation of this originally German text a metaphor that
seems to me important. For this reason I offered here my own translation. Da wurde mir klar, wie sehr ich in
der Luft schwebte; + um Zukunftswege zu ebnen, ging ich ihm nach in sein Bro, wo ich die eindrucksvollste
Unterredung mit ihm hatte. Er wusste nicht einmal von meiner 100% Abstammung. Huizi and Manrique,
Sabiduras, p. 241.
261
Finkielkraut might have been articulating a similar sensation when he wrote, Thats why I, an Ashkenazi,
am a Jew without substance, a Luftmensch, []. Todays Luftmensch is the Jew in a state of zero gravity,
relieved of what could have been his symbolic universe, his personal place or at least one of his homes. Alain
Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew, p. 38 Et cest pourquoi moi, Juif ashkenaze, je suis un Juif sans substance,
un Luftmensh, mais pas au sens traditionnel de vagabond ou de mendiant Le luftmensh daujourdhui, cest
le Juif en tat dapesanteur, dlest de ce qui aurait pu tre son univers symbolique, son lieu particulier, ou
lun au moins de ces domiciles : la vie juive. Alain Finkielkraut, Le Juif imaginaire, p. 51.
202
she able to return to a quasi narrative imaginary. Until then Gego decided to break with
representation in order to live and sense in an alternative world.



3.3 Public and Private Works
The following section is developing my argument in the analysis of the function of materiality
within French Existentialism. By comparing Gegos works with those of her fellow Cinetismo
artists I will suggest that the values Gego assigned to material presence reached into the realms of
ethics and religion.
In chapter II I argued that with Cintisme the tension that arose from the incompatibility
between a lost material specificity and a claim to universal truth, was given relief in a fantasy of
progress and dynamism, but also, projections of intense negativity. I proposed as a main
characteristic of all Cintisme works by Soto the radical disjunction between the material object, the
work of art per se, and a symbolic immatriel. Soto seeks to attract the viewers attention by way of
optical illusions that disturb normal perception of spatial relations and psychologically unsettle a
centred self. Thus, Sotos main object was to create unstable subject-object relations which can be a
psychologically unpleasant experience, and ultimately, creates desire for release. In short, Cintisme
sought to seduce while confirming a radically rationalistic empiricism. The redundancy of the
historical object or rather, the fetishistic over-valuation of the products of industrial reproduction
was one of the effects of post-war optimism. Cintismes displacement from a post-war French
context to Venezuela took on such violent character because its abstract universalism brutally
disregarded the particular and individual. (Fig. 61 Photograph of Caracas, c.1978) European
idealism and a French aesthetic were imitated by Venezuelan designers, town planners, architects
and Cinetismo artists. The appearance of shopping malls and food chains in the capital Caracas
203
changed the perceptions and values of this society.
262
(Fig. 62 Jess Soto, Volume suspendue, Cubo
Negro, Centro Banaven, Caracas, 1979) And Soto was now an established artist active on an
internationalist platform

.
263

In a comparison to Soto and Carlos Cruz-Dez, Gegos contribution to the production of
public sculptures during this period was modest but also more diverse. Her large projects of the
seventies and early eighties intervened in newly created spaces for social interaction but never
acquired significance as representations of Venezuelan national identity. (Fig. 63 View of Atrium at
Centro Simn Bolvar with Gego, Cuerdas, 1972) Although Gego continued to design important
public works, Cuerdas in 1972, Nubes in 1974 and Cuadrilteros in 1982-83, which was part of an
initiative to incorporate works of art in Caracas new underground system (Fig. 64 Gego,
Cuadrilteros, 1982-83 and Fig. 64a Gego, preparatory sketch for Cuadrilteros, 1982), her focus
was on the development of a highly individualistic and intimate oeuvre. Throughout the seventies,

262
With the introduction of television even poorer people had access to a televised world which brought home
the message of Venezuelans insularity and anachronistic self-image. This imaginary world was in stark
contrast to the deterioration of infrastructures in poorer areas of Caracas where people were living (they still
do) in makeshift homes with running water only once a week. Thus, the feeling of cultural disconnectedness
was removed at the same time as it was re-enforced. Instead of feeling cut off from history, Venezuelans
could now watch history pass them by, on screen.
263
The list of Sotos international successes around 1970 is astounding: In 1967 he achieved truly
internationalist status with the installation, commissioned by Carlos Ral Villanueva, of a Volume suspendu
in the Venezuelan pavilion of the Exposition Universelle in Montral. In 1969 the Muse dart moderne in
Paris held a Soto retrospective which included one of his largest Pntrable ever. In 1970, with the help of
Heinz Mack, Soto was able to show his work in solo exhibitions touring Germany from Mannheim to
Kaiserslautern and Ulm. Simultaneously, Soto became an almost permanent presence at the Museo de Bellas
Artes in Caracas, which held retrospective shows in 1971, 1972 and 1974. In 1974 he was invited to install a
Pntrable in the central hall of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1975 he re-designed the entire
lobby of the Renault headquarters in Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris, and so forth. 1975 marked a turning
point in the sense that Soto now increasingly executed commissions for the most prominent French and
Venezuelan companies: car producers, banks, chemical industry. For a comprehensive chronology of Sotos
career see, Daniel Abadie. Soto, exhibition catalogue, Francoise Bonnefoy, Sarah Clement, Isabelle Sauvage,
Arnauld Pierre, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Le Seuil, Paris, 1997.
204
Gego sought to consolidate her personal artistic career, showing now regularly small works,
drawings and prints in Caracas art spaces. She was represented by the gallery Conkright in Caracas
and able to show in galleries and museums abroad.
264
Despite the fact that Gego had created a
considerable name for herself as artist and as teacher of architectural design, she now became
increasingly marginalised because she was a woman and an immigrant. Earlier, I have proposed that
the aesthetic and conceptual terms of French post-war Geometric Abstraction and Cintisme were
defined by a discourse that was pronounced masculinist and often misogynist. I suggest here that
the repression of the feminine within the European avant-garde, identified with the abject informel,
had parallels in the highly competitive Venezuelan context. In 1969 a small group show with the
title El arte cintico y sus orgenes was mounted at the Ateneo de Caracas, a small venue just next
door to the Museo de Bellas Artes, where Gegos first Reticulrea was on show. Among the
exhibiting artists were Los Disidentes Manuel Manaure, Pascual Navarro, Oswaldo Vigas (b. 1926)
and of course the up and coming Cinetismo artists Soto and Cruz-Dez. Gegos contribution to this
minor event was retrospective and conservative, small welded pieces made in the late fifties. Most
likely, her efforts had all gone into the concurrent show at the MBA. In art historical terms, and
despite its non-spectacular appearance El arte cintico y sus orgenes signalled the official
recognition of Cinetismo in Venezuela, its establishment as ism. Today, more important than the list
of artists and works collected in that show are the pages of the modest exhibition catalogue which
included a diagram that constructed a genealogy for Cinetismo and was an attempt by the curators,
to situate it more firmly within a European fine art tradition. (Fig. 65 Diagram from El arte cintico
y sus orgenes, exhibition catalogue, Ateneo, Caracas, 1969) Point zero of this art history was

264
Here, only three examples: In 1970-71 Gego had a personal show in New York at the Betty Parsons
Gallery, in 1975 she was included in the 7e Biennale International de la Tapisserie in Lausanne, Switzerland
and in 1982 she installed a version of the Reticulrea in an exhibition called Spielraum-Raumspiele in
Frankfurt a. M., Germany. For a complete list of individual exhibitions and inclusion in group shows see,
Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-1990, Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Gego, Fundacin Museo de Bellas Artes,
Caracas, 2003, pp. 417-21.
205
located somewhere at the beginning of the century, where the canonical names of the modern
masters Piet Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp and Kazimir Malevich loomed large. The diagram was
then developed around artistic families and on the horizontal axes four thematic categories, Plane,
Movement, Light and Environment fixing each artist in formal terms. With the sole exceptions
of Bridget Riley (b. 1931) and Lygia Clark (1920-1988) not a single womens name was mentioned.
Gego was not included in the diagram despite that fact that, at this moment, she had been involved,
very actively, in the creation of an artistic community and of social structures in Caracas for more
than fifteen years. This event, which certainly was of no great importance at the time, still serves as
a perfect illustration of the rules that defined social relations even among the most liberal
Caraqueos.
In 1971 Gego was able to show her work at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York.
265
She
installed an unusually expressive series of Chorros. (Fig. 66 Gego, Chorros, 1971 and Fig. 66a
Gego and Chorros, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York, 1971) These works affirmed Gegos capacity

265
Gegos interest in North American culture led to her prolonged stay in 1960, in New York City. This
allowed her to make important contacts within the emerging American op-art milieu. David Herbert and Betty
Parsons included Gego in a group show, Recent Sculpture, at their New York gallery and her metal objects
now stood alongside Alexander Calders and Robert Nevelsons works. In the following, the Museum of
Modern Art acquired Esfera of 1959 for its Latin American collection and the same piece was shown, in 1965
in the Museum of Modern Arts Responsive Eye exhibition. This is significant because Soto famously
refused sending works to the show. He disapproved of the curators emphasis on the optical quality of the
works on show. Instead he had sought recognition, with much justification, of his works value as conceptual
propositions with a philosophical and intellectually demanding content. The misunderstanding led to a split
between the camps of American Op-art and European Cintisme.
During her one year residence in New York Gego also briefly met the Russian Constructivist Naum
Gabo (1890-1977) whose oeuvre had been a point of orientation for some years. However, she was
disappointed by their brief conversation and their relationship did not continue. She writes, When I bought
Gabos book, many years ago, I never thought I was going to have the possibility of working near New York,
like him. [] And it is strange, I met Gabo once for lunch in New York and he was only interested in
promoting himself, hoping for support from Venezuelan institutions. Totally different from how he was in
1920. Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 195. The same applies to her meeting with Joseph and Anni Albers
which did leave no strong traces either in Gegos work or in her personal memories.
206
to employ materiality in a highly controlled manner by using gravity as a form-giving force.
Chorros, meaning Streams in English, allow for associations with waterfalls and they seem to
express, metaphorically, enormous dynamism while remaining structurally, entirely conceptual. It
appears that Gego applied in the Chorros a formal vocabulary that until now had been reserved for
prints and drawings and thus, translated two-dimensional expressivity into three-dimensional space.
After the lesson of the Chorros, Gego continued to integrate into the design of her structures the
deforming forces of gravity
266
thus denoting material degradation and the passing of time.
Negativity in Gegos work was never the result of psychological analysis of subjective drives but
effect of natural laws, used as a metaphor for transition and as a quasi moral reminder of the
contingency of material existence. Gravity as a form defining element is central to all works
suspended from the ceiling; Reticulrea, Columnas, Troncos and Chorros. (Fig. 67 Gego,
Reticulrea cuadrada no 5, 1973) They are clearly negations of conventional sculpture and their
transparency can be understood as a direct response to modernist architectures opaqueness and
emphasis on volume and surface. Moreover, while traditional sculpture strives upwards, these
works point downwards and are splayed out horizontally. Their inside is revealed simultaneously as
an outside and thus Gegos structures describe an imaginary world that is inverted in every sense
and direction We know, that Gego loved word games and I want to suggest that these inversions
have common associations with expressions such as, To stand on ones head, a world turned
upside-down, to see the world from the opposite end, all of which suggest disorientation, rude
irreverence, even madness.
267
Today, they appear like creations of Gegos dark sense of humour,
ridiculing architects striving towards the heavens, mocking Caracas skyscraper landscape erected
in the name of progress.

266
Order in Space by Keith Critchlow and Space Grid Structures, Skeletal Frameworks and Stress-Skin
Systems by John Barrego are only two of the technical books on Gegos shelf that indicate that she was
particularly interested in the effect of physical force on regular shapes.
267
See the associative word game reproduced under the heading Lingisticidades in Huizi and Manrique,
Sabiduras, pp. 104-13.
207
Admittedly, the Reticulrea of 1969 signalled a re-orientation in Gegos thinking. (Fig. 68
Gego, Reticulrea ambientacin, 1969) This should not blind us to the strong formal continuity
within Gegos oeuvre right from the beginning until the very end of her productive life. If formal
changes are evident around that time they merely apply to the over-all scale and internal dimensions
of her pieces, now much closer in size to the human body. This was due no doubt, to changes within
Gegos artistic practice in which she no longer wanted to depend on the help of assistants and
therefore, was forced to reduce the dimensions of her designs and the techniques used in the
execution. Gego felt a sense of relief when she found that the strategy first devised in the
Reticulrea of 1969 enabled her to engage, even in larger pieces, on a more intimate level.
268

However, the conceptual similarities between works produced before and after 1969 outweigh by
far their differences. All pieces produced during the seventies, most of them without title and
numbered in sequence testify to a refinement of a previous aesthetic concept. Indeed, these works
represent the culmination and fullest realisation of intellectual and artistic ambitions Gego had
pursued since the early sixties. Since then, she had resolved the problem of how to create self-
supporting planes and volumes with elements that had little spatial extension or weight. More
important was her discovery of the synthesis of geometric form, articulated materiality, and
immaterial optical effects, which allowed her to express more complex emotional contents. It
carried the significance of her work beyond mere architectural design into the realm of fine art. All
variations of Reticulrea stimulate synchronic perceptions, fantasies of an ideal, quasi cosmological
wholeness, by way of a subtle play between material presence and immaterial optical effects. (Fig.
69 Gego, Sin ttulo, 1977) When approaching these works, most viewers will first notice the fluid
play of light on highly reflective surfaces and the regularity of geometric structures. The contrast
between totalising visual perception and the fragmentary character of an analysis of the rigid and
angular structures further stimulate the viewers perceptions. Moreover, the contingency of the

268
This was confirmed to me in a conversation with Josephina Manrique held in Caracas in February 2004.
208
merely material, its inorganic and essentially passive quality, subject to degradation under the laws
of nature, is set in contrast to the immaterial a-temporal qualities of reflected light and the
rigorously geometric. As if Gego were intent on defending, on an emotional level, against the
blandness of mere materiality and contingency by using unifying and universal values. A similar
strategy, namely, to use the extreme reflectivity of metal in order to deflect the viewers attention
from materiality and at the same time engage his imagination Gego had already employed in a
public sculptures of the early sixties. (Fig. 11) This is evidence of the strong continuity in Gegos
development and of her will to refine and conserve an existing concept, rather than break with it
altogether. The magnificent detail of joining devices enabled her to introduce colour accents into
these pieces and add a lighter, often humorous tone. Combined with the austerity of geometric
structures and highly reflective material this creates a sense of coherence and wholeness that is of
enormous aesthetic appeal. (Fig. 70 Gego, Columna, (Reticulrea cuadrada), 1972) The beauty of
these works resides, precisely, in the containment of every shade of human emotion within
seemingly weightless structures. They cannot be interpreted as narratives and Gego does not seek to
communicate in any conventional sense. Instead, her objects conjure up the magical appearance of a
perpetuum mobile, a machine that creates life itself.
The 1977 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas signalled
that, as an artist, Gego had achieved her goals. A letter, which Gego sent to all members of her
family one week after the opening of the show, is evidence of her enormous relief.
269
Each sentence
conveyed her sense of achievement and perhaps, her pride of having had her moment of well-
deserved public attention. She also acknowledged her indebtedness to Gerd Leufert and to those
who had assisted her in the installation of the show during which she had broken her ankle. This
letter reveals that Gego thought of the show as the conclusion and culmination of a particular phase
of her life. She was 65 years old and signs of physical exhaustion and frailty appeared in her

269
Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, Dear family, p. 215. The original was written in German Liebe
Familie, Huizi and Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 219.
209
description of the event. In the following years Gegos career slowed down considerably. The
structures she would produce after 1977 were marked by a dramatic change in scale from full
human size to what might be called the size of a face or a hand.
270
In 1976, Gego began working on
the Dibujos sin papel, a series of magnificent objects, full of poetry and humour, which she
continued to develop until the end of her life. They represent a last innovation within Gegos
oeuvre, by introducing narrative and pictorial composition. Yet the series became also physical
evidence and a record of what might be called an entropic process. (Fig. 71 Gego, Dibujo sin papel
79.9, 1979) Self-containment and emotional restraint were diametrically opposed to the sensibility
promoted in seventies Venezuela. Her non-gendered anonymity was the retreat from an outside
world, freeing her from the imagined look of an imagined viewer. Gegos is an art of the inward
look in which the self is controlled and guided by a self-critical mind commanding a respectful
distance. Her consciousness being folded onto herself Gego sought to define the limits that only
made possible the unfolding of her drives.

Kantian Structures
Gegos turn toward a more self-reflective practice acquires enormous meaning when considered
within the larger context of the seventies economic boom. The following section seeks to describe
the analytical structures which allowed Gego to preserve contents that correspond neither to the
utopian ideals of Constructivism nor to the scientific materialism of French Cintisme.
The dual significance of Venezuelan modernism for Gego, as the new and yet familiar, has
found little attention in writings on her work. This is surprising to the extent that it constitutes the

270
Gego had always disliked the term sculpture and instead preferred to call her works 'Bichos', which means
a little thing that has a life of its own. Even her large Reticulrea of 1969 Gego had first imagined as an
arrangement of separate objects and only on the suggestion of Miguel Arroyo did she create a work that
properly speaking was an environment. See Mnica Amor, Between Spaces: The Reticulrea and its place in
History, Gego. Obra Completa, 1955-1990, Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Gego, Fundacin Museo de
Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, p. 400-6.
210
key to an understanding of her oeuvre as well as her artistic identity. I have suggested that Gego
created her Venezuelan identity around an ideal imago which introduced a split in her
consciousness and hence, a dialectical modus of thinking right from the beginning of her career. It
could be claimed that Gego (re-) experienced her insertion, in infancy and adolescence, into an
unknown and threatening society for a second time in Venezuela. Returning once more to the
Lacans mirror stage essay, I want to suggest that just as inappropriate as the infant experiences his
uncontrolled body parts, Gego, experienced her first movements, as a foreigner in Caracas, to be
gauche and a-synchronic. Her misinterpretation of other peoples reactions may be comparable to
the alienating experience of the infans, described by Lacan as mconnaisssance. Foreigners tend to
be more self-conscious, uncertain about their image and inhibited in verbal expression and form of
address. Gegos strong German accent reinforced the pains she took in communicating verbally
within her Spanish speaking environment. Gegos writings, even her German texts, give evidence of
a speech inhibition by their uneven rhythm and lack of imaginative vocabulary. From a certain point
onwards, presumably from around the late seventies, this was made worse by a strong hearing
impairment. Just like the narcissistic infans, Gego sought relief from anxieties caused by the
disturbing perception of a radical split between herself and the world. Thus exile did, I suggest
further, engender regressive reaction formation in the form of strategies such as doubling and
inversion which allowed her to master her sense of alienation. As examples I have described Gegos
mimetic appropriation of the formal vocabulary of Cinetismo and Arte Abstract, her practice of
copying technical drawings and the radical inversion of traditional sculptures groundedness
effected by the suspension of her works from the ceiling. With these formal strategies Gego fulfilled
simultaneously her need to find a position within Caracas society and artistic circles, for creation
and control of an ideal imago and for projection of this subjective image onto an exterior world.
During the second half of her career a more experimental artistic practice enabled her to
abandon this austere and somewhat clumsy formalism and articulate her emotions more freely in
light, open and seemingly free floating structures. These pieces, Reticulea, Troncos and Columnas
211
I understand as conceptual propositions that on a formal level manifest, so I suggest, strong
affinities with images employed in Protestant and German-Jewish spirituality. By using excerpts of
the German philosopher Jrgen Habermas recent interpretation of Kants critique of religion
271
I
wish to emphasise the strong moral aspect that seem to me part of, even central to, Gegos
rigorously abstract aesthetic. Idealism, the preference of abstract idea over materiality and hence,
the sacrifice of authorial intention to a supra-subjective law is key to an understanding of my
argument. Kantian thought is explicit on the point that submission to an impersonal idea - or moral
law - is the only and ultimate freedom human beings can achieve. Idea is the basis of everything,
engagement with the material world, action, is only secondary knowledge. In this sense, the idealist
is more realistic than the so-called realist who believes that he can confront concrete reality,
without taking first the detour via abstraction to the idea. On the example of the Reticulrea of the
seventies, I have demonstrated the tension in Gegos work between immaterial light and geometric
abstraction and the contingency of materiality. Further, I argued for her preference for optical
effects, light reflection and the visual image, over structure which seems to me evident throughout
her career. I have explained this preference not as intentional but as effects of exile and by way of
an analysis of her artistic practice, which included strategies of visual doubling and inversion. In the
following, I wish to tie these observations to my argument for the strong continuity in Gegos work
and its links to German-Jewish culture of the pre-war period. Historically speaking, neo-Kantian
idealism was particularly strong during the period preceding the revival of Jewish traditions during
the 1920s, and was articulated, for instance, by the highly influential Jewish philosopher Hermann
Cohen (1842-1919). His idealism was indebted to Kants Enlightenment philosophy and sustained
by a belief in rationality, which both had motivated the Jewish Emancipation movements of the

271
Jrgen Habermas, Die Grenzen zwischen Glauben und Wissen: Zur Wirkungsgeschichte und aktuellen
Bedeutung von Kants Religionsphilosophy, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, Suhrkamp Velag,
Frankfurt am Main, 2005, pp. 216-57.
212
nineteenth century.
272
The liberalist drive was sustained well into the twentieth century and it is
conceivable that Gegos ambition to study architecture during the pre-war period was still inspired
by this same will to emancipation. However, only in exile and in her work as an artist became the
belief in absolute rationality (geometry) manifest as an idealism indebted, so I suggest, to a Judeo-
Christian Protestantism. I propose that this is manifest in Gegos emphasis on a-temporal
immateriality against material contingency and hence, the abstract quality of her work. On the basis
of this analysis I can ascertain that Gego sought to convey universal rather than historically specific
values. This is relevant in view of the question of how we are to understand Gegos relation to
authorial intention. It appears that her choice of abstract laws communicated, if she sought to
communicate at all, a kind of muteness or perhaps, what Jrgen Habermas called an
incomprehension in the face of the worlds injustice.
273
Muteness and the inability to comprehend
relate here in the sense that they both denote impotence and passivity, even indifference, because of
a profound lack of belief in or will to Glckseligkeit (fulfilment). Gegos works never stipulate the
possibility of perfection precisely, because subjective intentionality is surrendered to the anonymity
of abstract laws. At best, they engender a hope for Glckswrdigkeit that is, to be worthy of
happiness.
274
Even the most irregular and incomplete forms, found in the Reticulrea and more
often, in the Dibujos sin papel, confirm Gegos acceptance of laws that render the subjective self no

272
The Jewish Renaissance was in Michael Brenners description the revolt of the son against the father.
Hermann Cohens philosophical outlook was defining for the father generation while the writings of Franz
Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) and Franz Kafka (1883-1924) must be understood as reactions
against Cohens call for Jewish assimilation. They had all been brought up without much knowledge of
Jewish culture and their search for a lost Judaism responded directly to what they experienced as a debilitating
lack of spirituality and authenticity fostered under Cohens influence. See, Michael Brenner, The Renaissance
of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, p. 3.
273
[] einem Unverstndniss gegenber der Ungerechtigkeit der Welt, Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen
Naturalismus und Religion, p. 222. All translations of Habermas original German text are my own.
274
Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 222. Gego practiced a philosophy of
religion by way of which she continually questioned the possibility of absolute truth and fulfilment
is foreclosed when the absolute is under critique.
213
more and no less than glckswrdig. From this perspective, all derivations from the norm, that is the
rigorous abstract system, have no meaning or consequence. They are never considered a fault
because the aim is not in the first place to be perfect. All that can be hoped for is to be glckswrdig
(worthy of happiness) which lies outside subjective intervention.
A more critical mind might recognise in modernism the risk of derailment and protest
against the contingency of a social fate that is governed by natural laws alone and which throws
those, who thought themselves the object of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos
of matter.
275
Against reactionary nihilism and pessimism, so Habermas argued, Kant held up the
possibility hinberzuretten, of rescuing the spiritual values of the past from oblivion, rescuing those
meanings that enable the members of a society to establish community (Gemeinschaft). This is a
retrospective gaze looking forward at the same time.
276
Again referring to Kant Habermas contnued,
Against scepticism he [Kant] wants to rescue those religious contents and liabilities of Religion
that are justifiable within the limits of reason. His critique of religion combines here with the
motive of a rescuing appropriation.
277
Making art can thus become a self-reflective process in
which the subject seeks to define limits to his or her drives, and the destructive forces of rationality.
This idea of a rescuing appropriation allows me to make a link between Habermas analysis
of Kantian thought and trends identified in Gegos development as an artist. Her revision of
Bauhaus aesthetic was informed, so I suggested, by similar impulses. Her emphasis on the universal

275
die Kontingenz eines gesellschaftlichen Naturschicksals, das die, die da glauben konnten, Endzweck der
Schpfung zu sein, in den Schlund des zwecklosen Chaos der Materie zurckwirft . Jrgen Habermas,
Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 223. Quote, Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, A 423/B 482.
276
Michael Brenner remarked that, Much of Jewish culture in Weimar Germany was, to rephrase Goethes
Mephistopheles, ein Teil von jener Kraft, die stets das Alte will und stets das Neue schafft (a part of that force
which wants the old but creates the new). Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar
Germany, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1996, p. 5.
277
Gegen den Skeptizismus mchte er Glaubensinhalte und Verbindlichkeiten der Religion, die sich inerhalb
der Grenzen der Vernunft rechfertigen lassen, retten. Die Religionskritik verbindet sich mit dem Motiv der
rettenden Aneignung.Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 218.
214
value of geometry and on visual rather than structural thinking pointed beyond practical rationality,
into the realm of the imaginary. Habermas wrote that, Without the treasure of images derived from
positive Religion, which stimulates our imagination, practical reason would lack epistemic stimulation
[].
278
Gegos originality resides precisely in her surpassing, by way of visual perception, the mere
application of a practical knowledge. Yet Habermas warned that, In order to protect a moral
disposition from the discouraging blandness of mere appearances, the former shall be opened up
toward a dimension of trust in an ultimate success, to which all moral acts of this world might
finally add up.
279
It is not enough to conjure images but they also need to be sustained by the belief
in the possibility of their realisation within the structures of this world. To draw again a parallel to
Gegos Reticulrea; only the successful synthesis of immaterial effect and material structure, and
the belief in their dependency on each other, made them into convincing formal propositions. Gego
thought from within a humanist tradition and reflected, abstractly, on the condition of being within
this world. With the example of Kants philosophy of religion in mind, Habermas argued that
human beings Bedingtheit (dependency) means that Goodness (das Hchste Gut
280
) can take

278
Ohne den historischen Vorschuss, den die positive Religion mit ihrem unsere Einbildungskraft
stimmulierenden Bilderschatz liefert, fehlt der praktischen Vernunft die epistemische Anregung []Jrgen
Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 231.
279
Damit die moralische Gesinnung gegen den mutlos machenden Augenschein gefeit is, soll sie um die
Dimension eines Vertrauens auf einen endlichen Erfolg, zu dem sich alle moralischen Handlungen in der
Welt doch noch summieren knnten, erweitert werden. Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und
Religion, p. 230.
280
Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, A 230 f. The institution of a religious community,
understanding itself as people of God under ethical law stimulated Kant, in his philosophy of religion, into
formulating a term that offers the faint metaphysical legacy of das Hchste Gut (supreme good)
embodiment in the concrete form of a [particular] way of life. Kant developed the term ethical community
not in the context of practical philosophy but in the course of its application to an existing history. Die
Institution einer Kirchgemeinde, die sich als Volk Gottes unter ethischen Gesetzen versteht, regt Kant in
der Religionsphilosophie zur Bildung eines Begriffs an, der fr das blasse metaphysische Erbstck des
hchsten Gutes die plastische Verkrperung in der konkreten Gestalt einer Lebensform anbietet. Kant
entwickelt den Begriff des ethischen Gemeinwesens nicht in Zusammenhngen der paktischen
215
place only within history. He continued, The eschatological [] thought of a God manifesting
himself within History permits us to translate the idea of the Realm of Purpose from the
transcendental paleness of the merely intelligible into a utopian beyond.
281
Gegos insistent use of
geometry, a non-subjective law allows me to conclude that the tension between immaterial
abstraction and the historically conditioned was one of her central concerns. And her preference of
universal laws over material contingency might be a choice informed by logic as well as stoicism
Habermas wrote that Since it is impossible for human reason to predict the complexity of the
effects of moral cooperation in a world that is governed by natural laws, only that one acts dutifully,
who orients himself toward Ideas and limits the choice of his aims according to moral laws; he
cannot be asked, [under a moral imperative], to pursue an excessive aim, that is, an aim that goes
beyond existing moral law, in order to bring about an ideal situation in the world.
282
Abstract
geometry seems to have taken in Gegos explorations the function of this irrevocable, unchangeable
because logical system. Gegos works are made to be looked at and understood, and not to be
physically engaged with. They were not made with the intention to be touched. Her intention may
be expressed in Habermas words, The meaning of a reasonable and moral belief can only be
religious belief (my emphasis). because not only is it impossible to define mere utility as the
ultimate aim of ones actions, moreover, this would take away from belief its morality which

Philosophie, sondern im Zuge ihrer Anwendung auf eine vorliegende Geschichte . Jrgen Habermas,
Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p. 232. He quotes Immanuel Kant from Metaphysik der Sitten, A 182 f.
281
Der ber alle platonischen Ideale hinausgreiffende eschatologisch Gedanke eines in der Geschichte
wirkenden Gottes erlaubt es die Idee vom Reich der Zwecke aus der tranzendentalen Blsse des
intelligentiblen in eine berweltliche Utopie zu bersetzen. Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und
Religion, p. 230.
282
Weil es dem menschlichen Verstand verwehrt ist, die Komplexitt der Folgen sittlicher Kooperation in
der von Naturgesetzen gelenkten Welt vorauszusehen, handelt nur der aus Pflicht, der sich nach Ideen richtet
und die Wahl seiner Zwecke nach moralischen Gesetzen einschrnkt; er kann nicht auf ein
berschwngliches, d.h. die moralischen Gesetze berbietendes Ziel, die Herbeifhrung eines idealen
Zustandes in der Welt, wiederum moralisch verpflichtet werden.Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus
und Religion, p. 226.
216
precisely, represents the value that reaches beyond mere personal self-fulfilment.
283
This belief in a
world beyond mere utility, manifested in the aesthetic experience, was central to Gegos thinking
and her continued personal investment into the society that exile had forced her to live in.



3.4 German Memories
In the following I wish to describe the social and political changes taking place during the early
eighties in Germany and demonstrate their effects on the example of an exhibition to which Gego
and Soto contributed. Spielraum-Raumspiele took place in Frankfurt in 1982 and Gego was
invited on this occasion to return to Germany and install her largest ever Reticulrea. This gives me
the opportunity to compare her piece to works of artists from the German and North American
context. My interpretation of the state of artistic production and the cultural climate in Germany is
set in direct relation to significant political events of the decade. A conservative reaction against the
German Left entailed a shift, in a large part of German society, in the perception of the history of
the Second World War. In 1986, this became accentuated by a public debate over the history and
explanations for the Holocaust, which involved prominent historians, philosophers and intellectuals.
The so-called Historikerstreit appears in hindsight as symptomatic of a period in which an
increasing distance to the trauma of the Second World War necessitated conflicts in which the
painful memory of it could be integrated into valid historical accounts. In political terms, these
academic debates became an important step towards the re-definition of a national identity in an

283
Der Sinn eines Vernnftig moralischen Glaubens kann nur der Glaube sein weil jeder blosse Zweck, als
Endziel nicht nur unmglich zu bestimmen ist, mehrnoch es nhme ihm die Sittlichkeit, die ja eben ein Wert
ber das rein persnliche Glck hinaus darstellt.Jrgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion, p.
224.
217
undivided Germany. They were part of the processes leading up to the highly symbolic fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989, an event that loudly proclaimed Germanys Re-unification.

In the most general terms, on a global scale the early eighties radicalised class differences,
increased inequalities in human rights, health and per capita income and reinforced the ideological
rifts between political Left and Right. Symptomatic of this situation was for instance, that
Germanys turn to a conservative capitalism was paralleled in Venezuela by the collapse of its
social and political structures. The benefits of the oil boom had primarily been reaped by the
conservative elites while substructures were left underdeveloped.
284
In Germany the cultural and
economic conservatism of the early eighties was supported by a large provincial middle-class and
the bourgeoisie on the political Right. A conservative ethos also permeated philosophy and history
departments at most important German universities. It informed the opinions of young Germans by
way of the educational system and it was here that the reaction against the writings of a whole
generation of Marxist sociologists, historians and theorists could take shape.
285
One of those who
continued to write from a perspective of the political Left was the Left-Hegelian Jrgen Habermas.
He had developed his post-war philosophical thought and his social criticism from within the
Frankfurt School, the Institute for Social Research where he had studied under Max Horkeimer and

284
It is crucial to take into account, in interpretations of Sotos and Cruz-Dez works the radical a-
synchronicity between the two sites of cultural production, Venezuela and France. The meaning of specific art
objects made in Europe could be in inverted relation to the significance they acquired in Venezuela, and vice
versa. This became even more paradoxical in the early eighties, when the Venezuelan boom went bust. While
European avant-garde artists were engaged in dealing with the debris of a modernity that had derailed Soto
and Cruz-Dez remained stubbornly attached to the symbolisation of modernist progress, which by then had
effectively turned into articulations of post-modern detachment.
285
Among those who held powerful positions and taught at German universities was the historian Ernst Nolte,
who in the mid-eighties would initiate the Historikerstreit defending a revisionist history of the Holocaust.
Ernst Nolte was professor of Modern History at the Universitt Marburg since 1965. In 1973 he became
professor of Modern History at the Freie Universitt in Berlin and continued to hold an academic post as
professor at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut in Berlin until 1991.
218
Theodor W. Adorno, to whom he had been an assistant. He was outspoken in his critique of neo-
conservatism in Germany and the United States and identified critical issues within post-modern
society in direct relation to the specific problems of the German Left.
286

In terms of the German artistic production, popular reaction against the critical Left of the
seventies meant that artists, even if they had come out of a Marxist tradition, were forced now onto
a quasi neutral middle ground or into neo-expressionism. The return to painterly expressivity and
figuration was announced for instance, in the important Zeitgeist exhibition held in 1982 in the
Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.
287
The exhibition showed the paintings of the socalled Neuen
Wilden (New Savages) Rainer Fetting (b. 1949), A.R. Penck (b. 1939), Georg Baselitz (b. 1938),
Walter Dahn (b. 1954), Jrg Immendorff (b. 1945) or Julian Schnabel (b. 1951). The painter of
historical monumentality, Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945), was expressing perhaps best the emotional
tensions within a society that suffered from repression as well as under the weight of a historical
trauma that had remained unarticulated. (Fig. 72 Anselm Kiefer, Nrnberg, 1981/82)
Clearly, these socio-political developments acquire their full meaning only when
understood in relation to the state-critical and violent activities of the political Left during the
seventies. With German terrorism the state and its legislative and executive personnel had come
under direct attack. They were accused first, of failing to hold former Nazis responsible for their
crimes committed during the war and second, for re-instating them in positions that had given them
enormous power and influence in post-war Germany. Further, the traditionally strong and highly
corrupt fusion, in the German government, of political with economic interests was supported, so
the Left argued, by an educational system and by the media which both aided the repression of
critical thought and its expression in word and image. One could state that at the beginning of the

286
See Jrgen Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Sptkapitalismus, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main,
1973; and Die Neue Unbersichtlichkeit, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1985.
287
Zeitgeist: Internationale Kunstaustellung Berlin 1982, exhibition held Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlin,
Frlich & Kaufmann, Berlin, 1982.
219
eighties, it was admitted that the violence of the seventies forced Germans to face up to and take on
responsibility for their history of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
288
Since 1945, a critical
German Left, often living in exile, had sought to analyse the psycho-pathological mechanisms
behind the rise of German fascism, which had made possible anti-Semitism and unimaginable
cruelty on a mass scale.
289
The aim of such analytical approaches was, beyond mere understanding
of the unintelligible, to create critical historical consciousness outside a literary or artistic circle.
Post-war societies needed to be made aware that similar horrors could only be prevented if fascist
thinking was understood, in a wide public, as pathological. In the sixties and seventies, at least in
the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the task was also to show to what degree political, legal and
academic structures were still permeated with pre-war German nationalism and the radical Left
expressed, very violently, its own sense of discontinuity and rupture. This project failed in the sense
that by the eighties, in many European countries including Germany, school curricula preferred to
gloss over or leave untouched these aspects of Germany history. Instead of reformation German
conservatives began to promote in the eighties the recuperation of a sense of wholeness and
continuity, something most Left intellectuals agreed upon, was impossible after the Holocaust. In
this reactionary moment an idealistic socialist camp was accused of misguided optimism and its
self-critical project denounced as overtly moralistic. Implied was, that the Left in fact prevented

288
From the later half of the seventies onwards, History itself became the subject of critical studies. See for
instance, Peter Brger (b. 1936), Aktualitt und Geschichtlichkeit: Studien zum gesellschaftlichen
Funktionswandel der Literatur, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1977.
289
See especially the essays collected by Karl Pfeifer in 1945 and published first in English in the United
States in 1946. They were republished in German in 2002. Antisemitismus, Ernst Simmel (ed.), Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag 2002. It contains the essays by Max Horkheimer, 'Der soziologische Hintergrund des
psychoanalytischen Forschungsansatzes; Otto Fenichel, Elemente einer psychoanalytischen Theorie des
Antisemitismus; Ernst Simmel, Antisemitismus und Massen-Psychopathologie; Douglass W. Orr,
Antisemitismus und Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens; Else Frenkel Bunswik u. R.Nevitt Sanford, Die
antisemitische Persnlichkeit; Theodor W.Adorno, Antisemitismus und faschistische Propaganda.

220
Germans from defining a positive identity. The defeat, in 1982, of Helmut Schmidt of the Socialist
Party (SP) and the election instead, of Chancellor Helmut Kohl of the Christian Democratic Party
(CDU) announced that in Germany radical political and cultural transformations were under way.
The coalition formed between the Christian Social Party (CSU) at the head of which stood the
former Nazi Franz Joseph Strauss and Kohls CDU ensured that this new political landscape would
remain in place throughout the eighties. German terrorism and an aggressive literary, artistic and
journalistic Left had created so much anxiety within the bourgeoisie that popular opinion could take
in 1982, a sharp turn toward the Right.

The exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele
A good example of the clash of ideologies in 1980s Germany was an exhibition held at the
Frankfurter Alte Oper in 1982. Spielraum-Raumspiele followed closely on the inauguration of the
newly refurbished grand old opera house. Gegos inclusion in this show appears significant in view
of the history and symbolic meaning of this institution. The prestigious Alte Oper had been almost
completely destroyed at the end of the Second World War but was now restored to its old
nineteenth-century glory. (Fig. 73 Photograph of Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 2005) The architect
responsible for the original design of 1870 was Richard Lucae (1829-1877) and building works
were completed in 1880. According to the Alte Opers official website [] in seven years a 34
meter high building was erected, of which the ground plan shows the influence of the neo-classicist
architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879) and of his Renaissance style designs, which in turn make
references to Hellenistic models.
290
Kaiser Wilhelm I (1797-1888) himself had attended the
opening night at this splendid opera house. The building survived the First World War but was

290
[] siebenjhrigen Bauttigkeit ein 34 Meter hohes Gebude errichtet, dessen Grundriss den Einfluss des
berhmten Architekten Gottfried Semper und seine von ihm entwickelte Formgebung im Renaissancestil in
Anlehnung an hellenische Vorbilder verrt. Official website of the Frankfurt Alte Oper.
http://www.alteoper.de/
221
turned to rubble in the Second. In the night of March 23 1944 the interior of the opera house
burned down to its foundations and the roof construction was in part damaged. Discussions on its
reconstruction soon followed. Save the Opera House was the slogan of an appeal launched by an
interest group, which were able, already in 1952, to use donations in order to take construction
safety measures and thus prevent Germanys most beautiful ruin from destruction.
291
In 1976,
enough money had been raised from private businesses and sponsors, in order to start reconstruction
works, which were completed in 1981 with the spectacular re-instalment of two Pegasus horses on
the roof of the building. The opening gala took place only days later with a performance of
Mahlers 8
th
symphony.
In the following year, on August 28, the exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele opened to the
public. It had been organised by Dr Dietrich Mahlow, an early promoter of Fluxus in Germany but
at this point in the more prestigious position of director at the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. In the year
of Helmut Kohls election, he had brought together the work of a rather heterogeneous group of
artists with the intention to present a critical avant-garde. Most names on the list of included artists
are today found only in the margins of art history, under the heading of provinces rather than
Paris, Berlin or New York. The list names George Rickey (1907-2002), an American constructivist
who had developed his work towards kinetic art
292
; Ji Kol, born in 1914 in Bohemia, then still in

291
In der Nacht zum 23. Mrz 1944 brannte das Opernhaus bis auf die Grundmauern und Teile der
Dachkonstruktion vllig aus. Die Diskussion um den Wiederaufbau blieb nicht lange aus. Rettet das
Opernhaus lautete der Spendenaufruf einer Initiative, die bereits 1952 mit ersten Einnahmen bauliche
Sicherungsmanahmen durchfhren lie und somit Deutschlands schnste Ruine vor dem Abriss
bewahrte. http://www.alteoper.de/
292
Rickey had been living in Paris before the war but returned to the United States during the war and studied
in 1948-49, at the Chicago Institute of Design, the American equivalent to the German Bauhaus. In the fifties
and sixties he taught design at various universities in the United States. Rickey added a flavour of an already
outdated cold-war Constructivism to the show. His kinetic contributions clearly lacked the psychological
intensity many of the European works had. Nonetheless, his work seems to have attracted enough audiences
in order for him to literally tour Europe between 1979 and 1985. His pieces were included in several group
222
the Czech Republic, active at the time of the exhibition in Paris; the Italian Arte Povera artist Piero
Manzoni (1933-1963); the American Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929); ZERO artists Otto Piene, Heinz
Mack and Gnter Uecker ; the American composer John Cage (1912-1992); two Japanese Gutai-
influenced artists, Kazuo Katase and Chihiro Shimotani; the Venezuelan artists Jess Raphael Soto
and Gego. Bauhaus artist Oskar Schlemmer (1888-1943) received hommage on a double page and
in a few paragraphs of his Triadisches Ballett. The layout and content of the somewhat chaotic
exhibition catalogue give little idea of a coherent concept or didactic purpose. What strikes one
immediately, however, is the fact that fragmentation, aggressive splitting but also, the theme of
narcissistic mirroring jump out at the reader from almost every single page. (Fig. 74 Christian
Megert Spiegelplastik, undated) The image of a fragmented and nailed opera house by Gnter
Uecker seems paradoxical in the context of an exhibition that was after all, celebrating the
renovation of this venerable institution. (Fig. 75 Gnter Uecker, Nailed and Fragmented Alte Oper,
1982) Clearly, the organisers believed that art had to be critical in order to attract an audience and
institution critique, which today is a standard artistic practice, was more innovative and radical
twenty-five years ago.
Gnter Ueckers work is interesting for several reasons and I wish to expand on it here
because it expressed, in my opinion, contents typical for the psycho-sexual conflicts of this
generation of German men. In 1976 he stated, However, one remains a Westerner and with that
tradition, and the preservation of the truth comes into consciousness really only by way of the
unconscious memory, so that one feels oneself in a history.
293
Not surprisingly, aggression and
irreverence toward paternal authority and institutions of any kind dominate Ueckers entire oeuvre.

and solo exhibitions in Northern Europe, especially Germany and in England. See George Rickey, Directions
in Kinetic Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, University Art Gallery, University of California, Berkeley, 1966.
293
Gudrun Imboden und Stephan von Wiese, Gnter Uecker, exhibition catalogue, Staatsgallery Stuttgart,
1976, p. 9. Reprinted in Dieter Honisch, Uecker, Translation Robert Erich Wolf, Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Publishers, New York, 1989, p. 48. First published in German by Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart, 1983.
223
(Fig. 76 Uecker Nailed Nail, 1962) Further on in the same text, Uecker tied aggression to
materiality when he stated that, For the people of today who have become what they are through
Christianity - whether they are themselves Christians or not to preserve the truth is nonetheless an
enlightening necessity in order to break down the aggressions, this aggressive imperialism of the
domination of a monotheism, which in its attachment to material things becomes dangerous for the
thinking beings.
294
Interesting seems here Ueckers reference to aggression by way of a critique of
monotheism and its dangerous attachment to material things. These material things in fact appear to
induce panic, an anxiety strongly reminiscent of Sotos ambivalent sensation in relation to objects.
Indeed, Uecker and Soto knew each other well from their collaborations in a ZERO exhibition held
in Dsseldorf in 1961. They were both part of the artistic scene around Iris Clerts gallery and under
the influence of Yves Klein. Klein had married Gnter Ueckers sister Rotraut in 1962, shortly
before his unexpected death from a heart attack, at the age of 34, in the same year.
Ueckers biography holds some clues to the question why he felt such unbearable
inhibitions in embracing the material, that is, the historical object. He was born in Wendorf in
Eastern Germany in 1930 and grew up on the Baltic Island of Wstrow. After the war, he studied
painting first in Berlin-Weissensee (1949-1953) and later in Dsseldorf (1955-1958) where he
continued to teach fine art. In the 1983 catalogue we can read, That Uecker grew up in Nazi
Germany, and that an attempt was made to impose the regimes thinking on the boy explains both
his readiness to use the possibilities for training in the new German Democratic Republic and his
wish to escape the petty bourgeois, rural milieu from which he came. Unlike his father, a man
bound to the past, the young Uecker eagerly took the path toward the future represented by a
Marxist oriented educational system and Marxist-Leninist philosophy.
295
What is not clearly spelt-
out here but can easily be deduced is that Ueckers father had not only been a man bound to the
past but also a Nazi sympathiser. Uecker was able to escape to the West before the wall went up

294
Dieter Honisch, Uecker, p. 48.
295
Dieter Honisch, Uecker, p. 11.
224
but he was unable, so I claim, to come to terms with the painful memory and presumably
ambivalent feelings toward his father. We have no testimony to confirm that this father had been
cruel or even sadistic in his relation to Uecker, the child. Nonetheless, the symptoms of an
unresolved relation to paternal order was made most explicit in the staging of provocative
homoeroticism in a performance Uecker created together with the painter Gerhard Richter (b.
1932), also from the Eastern part of Germany, in 1968. In this Aktion the two men invaded the
Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in pyjamas and staged, among others, a scene in which they kiss each
other in a bed placed under Gerhard Richters painting Studentin of 1967. This work shows a young
woman facing the camera while spreading her legs in order to display provocatively, her vagina.
296

(Fig. 77 Gnter Uecker and Hans Richter, Occupation of the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1968). The
performance represented an illegal storming and occupation of the Kunsthalle and was meant as
a critique of the institutionalisation of avant-garde art.
297
More interesting to me is that the two
performers sought to create outrage by acting perversely, obviously ridiculing bourgeois morality.
To make a joke at the expense of others is however, as Freud argued, also the symptom of a real
sexual repression in the subject. In this case, Ueckers and Richters provocation aimed at a
repressed middle-class, revealed simultaneously a very post-war male trouble. That
homoeroticism was ridiculed and aggressively deflected onto the womans body revealed,
ultimately, their problematic relation as men to each other and worse, their contempt for women as
sexual objects. In an earlier chapter I have already theorised the denial of male longing for
homoerotic wholeness and simultaneous defamation of femininity.
298


296
It is interesting to note in this context that in Dieter Honischs book of 1983 the image in the background
was wrongly described as a lascivious photograph of a prostitute.
297
It took place without the knowledge of the museums director. For a detailed description of the
performance see Dieter Honisch, Uecker, p. 105.
298
Abigail Solomon-Godeaus analysis of the representation of masculinity in French revolutionary and
romantic painting provided me there with arguments. Her work could, to my mind, provide an excellent basis
225
This provocative performance staged at the beginning of the eighties contrasts only
superficially with Ueckers earlier Zen-influenced work. (Fig. 78 Gnter Uecker Sand Spirale,
1965) He had shared a strong interest in Eastern mysticism with the members of ZERO, which he
joined temporarily in the mid-sixties. ZERO activities have recently become a focus of the renewed
interest in sixties art, which includes also Kinetic Art or the performances of Yves Klein.
299
In the
case of ZERO, interpretations emphasised the a-historical and aesthetic, which seems alarmingly
nave considering that these objects and events were produced merely twenty years after the
Holocaust. (Fig. 79 Otto Piene, Feuerbild, c. 1960) For instance, in a catalogue of a recently held
ZERO exhibition we can read, Otto Pienes [co-founder of ZERO] smoke images are yet another
example of the idea shared by ZERO with GUTAI, that subtraction, understood even in the radical
sense of annihilation and destruction, liberates the powers of purity, immediacy and the essential
just as much as triumphal innovation. Smoke is a precise metaphor for the already invoked attitude
of a release toward the new. Fire splits matter into dead cinders and living smoke. Smoke stands
symbolically for the success of the transformative process of reduction and the birth of the new
from the obsolete.
300
This text described the most important aspect of ZERO activism, its

for further studies on post-war male ambivalence. See Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Male Trouble: a crisis in
representation, Thames and Hudson, London, 1997.
299
See for instance the exhibition catalogues, Force Fields, Hayward Gallery, London, 2000; Loeil moteur:
Art optique et cintique, 1950-1975, Muse dart Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg in 2005; Bewegliche
Teile : Formen des Kinetischen, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2005; Zero : internationale Knstler-Avantgarde
der 50er-60er Jahre : Japan, Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland, Niederlande-Belgien, die Welt, Museum
Kunst Palast, Dsseldorf and Muse d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-2007; Yves Klein, Corps, couleur,
immatriel at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, 2006-2007.
300
Otto Pienes [co-founder of ZERO] Rauchbilder sind ein weiters Beispiel fr die von ZERO und GUTAI
geteilte Auffassung, dass Subtraktion, auch durchaus radikal im Sinne der Vernichtung und Zerstrung, die
Krfte des Reinen, Unmittelbaren und Eigentlichen ebenso freisetzt wie Innovation aus berwindung. Der
Rauch ist eine przise Metapher fr die erwhnte Haltung des Aufgebens zugunsten eines Neuen. Das
Feuer separiert tote Asche und lebendigen Rauch aus dem Material. Zeichenhaft steht der Rauch fr den
Transformationserfolg der Reduktion und die Geburt des Neuen aus dem Alten. (My translation) Rainer
Zimmermann, Zum Geleit, Von Reduktion bis Nul Zero : internationale Knstler-Avantgarde der 50er-60er
226
mysticism, but omitted explaining the reasons for ZEROs emergence and temporary success during
the sixties. Its spirit of polite silence was rendered more explicit in the following quote, ZERO
testify to an unbroken post-war optimism, which rejects all ideology, aims at an open-minded
reconsideration of the relation between nature, man, progress and technology as well, as Heinz
Mack once put it, the promulgation of a positive outlook toward the world and life itself, free of
the engagement for or against anything.
301
And more to the point ZERO, obviously unified a
Zeitgeist, and not only here in Germany but far beyond narrow cultural boundaries lending it
adequate expression. This [Zeitgeist] corresponded with a refutation, which simultaneously pointed
toward the future, of an annoying obsession with [a historical] inheritance as well as with the
attempts to ban the brown terror [Nazism] with the means of art, and [instead] return to those
sources of spirituality that the Nazis not only defamed but also violently smashed. It was the only
way to bridge the hole left by the Blood-and-Soil-Dictatorship in the art historical accounts.
302


Jahre : Japan, Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland, Niederlande-Belgien, die Welt, exhibition catalogue, Jean-
Hubert Martin Curator, Museum Kunst Palast, Dsseldorf and Muse d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-
2007, p.17.
301
ZERO zeugen from Geist eines ungebrochenen Nachkriegsoptimismus, der sich jeder Ideologisierung
widersetzt, zielt auf das Scheuklappenlose Neubedenken der Verhhltnisse von Natur, Mensch, Fortschritt
und Technik sowie, wie Heinz Mack es einaml formulierte, auf die Verbreitung einer positiven Welt und
Seinsbetrachtung, frei von einem Engagement fr oder gegen etwas. Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Der grosse
Aufbruch, Zero : internationale Knstler-Avantgarde der 50er-60er Jahre : Japan, Frankreich, Italien,
Deutschland, Niederlande-Belgien, die Welt, exhibition catalogue, Jean-Hubert Martin Curator, Museum
Kunst Palast, Dsseldorf and Muse d'Art Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-2007, p.37.
302
offenbar den objectiven Zeitgeist, und zwar nicht nur hier in Deutschland, sondern weit ber die engen
Kulturgrenzen hinaus, in sich vereinte und ihm einen adequaten Ausdruck verlieh. Dieser korrespondierte
sowohl mit einer den Weg in die eigentliche Zukunft bahnenden Absage an den leidigen Erbschaftszwang und
an die Versuche einer Bannung des braunen Schreckens durch die Kunst als auch mit einem Beschwingten
Zurck zu den von den Nazis nicht nur diffamierten, sondern auch gewaltsam verschtteten Quellen des
Geistigen. Das von der Blut-und-Boden-Diktatur hinterlassene Loch in der Kunstgeschichte konnte nur so
bersprungen werden. Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Der grosse Aufbruch, Zero : internationale Knstler-
Avantgarde der 50er-60er Jahre : Japan, Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland, Niederlande-Belgien, die Welt,
227
Ueckers rude and provocative work was a response to the inarticulate attitude of the other
ZERO members and his liking for violence led soon to his breaking away from the group. From the
early sixties onwards, Ueckers trademark was a quasi performative sculptural practice in which he
rammed nails obsessively and violently into anything that was reminiscent of bourgeois culture.
(Fig. 80 Gnter Uecker, TV auf Tisch, 1963) However, his materialist project developed throughout
the seventies in the direction of performances rather than sculpture which, finally, led to
commissions for theatrical stage designs. His career culminated in his collaboration in the
production of performances of Wagners Parsifal in Stuttgart, 1976, Lohengrin in Bayreuth, 1979
and Tristan in Stuttgart, 1981. The development of Ueckers career from sculpture to performance
and stage design seems to exemplify a general trend toward a new visual monumentality. Wagners
operas and the idea of the Gesammtkunstwerk stand perhaps symbolically at the end of a career in
which Ueckers had sought, violently, to break with the past and now found himself rewarded with
a sense of wholeness. In the sixties, one wanted, as Piene once expressed it, to discard a world
that was felt to be faulty" and begin anew, that is with Zero, at the point where all doors and
gateways are still open, where nothing seems predetermined.
303
In the early eighties that door was
definitely closed again.

I have made this long excursion into the work and biography of Gnter Uecker in order to give a
sense of the prevailing cultural climate in Germany at the time of the Spielraum-Raumspiele
exhibition. The catalogue was clearly designed as a manifesto rather than for the purpose of

exhibition catalogue, Jean-Hubert Martin Curator, Museum Kunst Palast, Dsseldorf and Muse d'Art
Moderne, Saint-Etienne, 2006-2007, p.34.
303
Man wollte sich, wie Piene es winmal ausdrckte, von der als fehlerhaft empfundenen Welt lossagen
und von vorne, also bei null beginnen, wo einem noch alle Tren und Tore offenstehen, da doch nichts
vorgeprgt scheint. Heinz-Norbert Jocks, Der grosse Aufbruch, Zero : internationale Knstler-Avantgarde
der 50er-60er Jahre : Japan, Frankreich, Italien, Deutschland, Niederlande-Belgien, die Welt, exhibition
catalogue, Jean-Hubert Martin Curator, Museum Kunst Palast, Dsseldorf and Muse d'Art Moderne, Saint-
Etienne, 2006-2007, p.37.
228
providing information. Accompanying texts are, throughout, a mixture of word collages and
experimental texts. There are only few exceptions to the collage pattern which I would designate as
typical for a Left critical avant-garde at the time.
304

We know that Gego was very actively involved in the event because we have a series of
photographs showing her during the installation of her work in the so called Liszt Salon. (Fig. 81
Gego Installation of Reticulrea, Spielraum-Raumspiele, 1982) It was a very large and highly
disciplined version of the Reticulrea. She clearly responded to the neo-classical style of the
interior as well as giving expression to the importance this event had for her personally. The curator
Dietrich Mahlows interpretation of Gegos work was published in the German daily newspaper
Frankfurter Allgemeine a week before the opening of the show.

Here, wire is taken as the most neutral, the most open form, the form that is least weight
down by emotions. One is reminded of Albers-squares.
[]
Is my space not created by the context into which I was thrown: Family home and schools,
later work place, own apartment, places were I spend my spare time?
Within this space I am present, active and engaged. Such dependence does not need to be a
limitation, my space is simply there and I make myself conscious of its existence.
[]

304
Jess Sotos work was represented in a large double-page photograph of what looks like naked teenage
boys playing among the plastic bands of one of his Penetrables. The photograph is accompanied by the words
fton la maison, presumably a reference to the inaugural celebration of the opera house. It is unclear whether
Sotos work was actually installed in the show or only presented in the form of a photographic
documentation. In any case, the synthetic fusion of two boys youthful bodies clashes dramatically with the
dark aggression manifest in other works. Sotos links to the German avant-garde became far less important
after Yves Kleins death in 1962 and the dissolution of ZERO in 1967. Although he often exhibited in
Germany he was now highly celebrated as a French artist based in Paris and Venezuela. Presumably, Soto had
been asked to send a work and he had sent a photograph.
229
It is for this reason that what Gegos produces is a space that is also my space. Everymans
space. It provokes a feeling of space that everybody can count his or her own. Count the
amount of wires!
[]
If we experience our space as a prison, when we feel prisoners of our origins, education,
society, language and representations, then we will want to stir in order to unfold, in order to
realise ourselves, in order to become man, in order to be able to live: then we will seek to
break it open. Yet this would be all wrong. Gego shows us: we ought to subvert it, soften the
grid (become softeners) and bend [it] open, with gentle force, in order for the spaces energies
to reinforce our own.
305


John Cages composition Roaratorio provided the sound background to Gegos Reticulrea. His
piece was played twice a day over sixteen loudspeakers. It was based on the idea of intoning all
written noise Cage was able to find in James Joyces Finnegans Wake and its title, Roaratorio,
was Cages appropriation of a Joycean neologism. The contrast between the severe concreteness of
the Reticulrea and an experimental, I-Ching-inspired conceptualism steeped in North American
Protestantism was attractive and thought provoking. The photo reproduced in the catalogue shows a

305
Draht ist hier genommen als die neutralste, offenste, als die am wenigsten gefhlsmssig belastete Form.
Man denkt an Albers Quadrate.[...]
Bildet sich ein Lebensraum nicht erst aus den Bezgen, in die ich geraten bin: Elternhaus und Schule, spter
Arbeitsplatz, eigene Wohnung, Freizeitstationen.
In meinem Lebensraum bin ich anwesend, ttig, bin ich eingebunden. Diese Bindung muss doch keine
Beschrnkung sein, mein Lebensraum ist einfach da und ich mache ihn mir bewusst. [...]
Deshalb ist das was Gego macht mein Raum. Eines jeden sein Raum. Es ruft ein Raumgefhl hervor das jeder
sich zu eigen rechnen kann. Zhlen sie die Drhte![...]
Wenn wir unseren Lebensraum aber als Gefngnis verspren, als Gefangene uns fhlen im Raum unserer
Herkunft, Erziehung, Gesellschaft, Sprache und Bilder, dann rkeln wir uns, um uns zu entfalten, uns zu
'verwirklichen', um Menschen zu werden, um Leben zu knnen: versuchen wir ihn zu durchbrechen. Aber das
wre ganz falsch. Gego zeigt uns: wir sollten ihn unterlaufen, die Gitter weichmachen (Weichmacher
werden!) und aufbiegen mit sanfter Gewalt, so dass die Krfte des Raumes die unsrigen verstrken.
Typewritten and undated page written by Dietrich Mahlow and published as 'Gego's Rume' in connection
with the exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele held between 28/08/1982 10/10/1982, the Alte Oper in
Frankfurt a. Main. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 23/08/1982. (My translation).
230
child gingerly touching the wires of the Reticulrea. (Fig. 82 Gego, Page from Spielraum-
Raumspiele catalogue, 1982)
306
The accompanying text is a passage taken from a radio play by the
now forgotten writer Franz Mon.
can you hear?
can you see?
can you hear something?
can you see something?
can you hear something finally?
isnt there something to see after all?
in case something should be possible to hear.
it should be possible to see at least something.
should there not be something to hear, for some time now?
surely, it should be possible to hear something if there was something to see.
we wont be able to see, if we cant hear anything.
but we wont hear, if we dont want to see.
yesterdays snow?
by word of mouth.
or the black from under the fingernails?
our alibi.
like the white of the lords eye.
what luck.
307


306
One might be tempted to interpret this photograph as exemplifying Gegos interest in the sense of touch.
However, it would be misleading to establish a parallel between Gegos Reticulrea and for instance, Lygia
Clarks Bichos or other works from the Brazilian context. While Clark and Oiticica had made the engagement
with the art object central to the concept of their works Gego discouraged, by way of the rigidity of her
structures and choice of a non-malleable cold materials, direct physical engagement. In my view, this
photograph gives simply evidence of a childs desire to touch and not of Gegos intention to provoke this
particular response. There is no reason why Gegos Reticulrea should not be replaced with a trunk of a tree
or a stone wall.
307
hrst du? siehst du? hrst du was? siehst du was? hrst du endlich was? ist denn nicht doch was zu sehen?
falls endlich was zu hren wre. wenigstens sehen msste man doch was. msste nicht lngst was zu hren
sein? bestimmt wre was zu hren, wenn sich was sehen liesse. wir werden nichts sehen, wenn wir nichts zu
hren kriegen. wir hren aber auch nichts, wenn wir nichts sehen wollen. den schnee von gestern? vom
231
While the organisers main interest had obviously been the critique of consumer society and
institutionalisation of radical art, Gegos inclusion implied a separate discourse. In contrast to the
passionate critique of capitalism and consumer habits, the relation of Germans to the victims of
anti-Semitism and to the Holocaust was not touched upon in the exhibition. After all, Dietrich
Mahlow had suggested in his text on Gego only a modest revolution in line with most art audiences
who had accepted, together with the artistic neo-avant-garde, that fetishism was wrong but for the
time being, the only thing to worry about.

The Historikerstreit
Only three years after the Alte Oper exhibition the German Historikerstreit erupted and set a
discourse in motion that had and still has effect on German history writing. During the eighties
Neo-conservative historians demanded, in tune with the political and economic transformations of
the new decade, a more objective historicising of the period. The opposition insisted on a praxis of
history writing and use of a Marxist and psychoanalytically informed methodology, based on a
body of theoretical work conducted since the end of the war. Right-wing revisionism implicitly
promoted its scientific approach with the argument that it would remove some of the emotional
charge and symbolic meanings that had distorted previous critical accounts. In its most despicable
form revisionism tried to prove that the Holocaust had never occurred or, as in the thesis defended
by the historian Ernst Nolte (b. 1923), denied that it had been the result of a specifically German
anti-Semitism. Nolte had proposed that the destruction of the Jews had been Hitlers reaction to and
imitation of the violence of the Russian revolution.

hrensagen. oder das schwarze unter den fingerngeln? unser alibi. wie das weisse im auge des herrn. was fr
ein glck. Quoted from Franz Mon, Hren und Sagen vergehen, reproduced in the catalogue the exhibition
Spielraum-Raumspiele held between 28/08/1982 10/10/1982 at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt a. Main. Pages
are not numbered.
232
Initially, the Historikerstreit involved the historian Ernst Nolte a former student of Martin
Heidegger, Michael Strmer (b. 1923), at the time political advisor to Helmut Kohl, the historian
Andreas Hillgruber (1925-1989) and Jrgen Habermas. It erupted in 1986 and continued beyond
Germany's Re-unification into the mid-nineties engaging the voices of many prominent German
thinkers of the political Left and Right. Beyond being a controversy over methodologies and
function of historical sciences the Historikerstreit touched upon an issue that has a long tradition in
Germany. What was at stake was no less than the integration, or non-integration, of Jewish
experience into German national identity and history. Apparently seeking the rationalisation of the
catastrophe of the Second World War and the Holocaust, this debate revealed also its significance
as a national trauma and more dangerously, its mythical dimensions. The uniqueness of the Shoah,
the ethical questions around comparative studies on the Holocaust and Noltes anti-Communist
thesis were focus of an increasingly nasty political dispute.
308
It took place in the media and

308
Ernst Nolte initiated the debate and his original text was quoted in the following paragraph taken from an
internet source. He claimed that Auschwitz was not the result primarily of traditional anti-Semitism and was
not a mere genocide, but consisted in the reaction, born out of fear, to the destructive processes of the
Russian revolution. Although Hitlers destruction of Jews had been more horrific [...], because it was
undertaken in a quasi industrialised manner; was more revolting because, it was based on mere
assumptions and almost lacking in [real] misanthropy. This did not alter the fact, that the so-called
annihilation of Jews during the Third Reich had been a reaction or distorted copy and not a primary act or an
original. (My translation) Auschwitz resultiert nicht in erster Linie aus dem berlieferten Antisemitismus
und war im Kern nicht ein bloer Vlkermord, sondern es handelte sich vor allem um die aus Angst
geborene Reaktion auf die Vernichtungsvorgnge der Russischen Revolution. Zwar sei die Hitlersche
Judenvernichtung entsetzlicher [], weil sie die Menschenvernichtung auf eine quasi industrielle Weise
betrieb; sei abstoender, weil sie auf bloen Vermutungen beruhte und nahezu frei von [] Massenha
war. Aber dies ndere nichts an der Tatsache, da die sogenannte Judenvernichtung des Dritten Reiches
eine Reaktion oder verzerrte Kopie und nicht ein erster Akt oder das Original war. Nolte quotes are taken
from Rudolf Augstein et al., Historikerstreit. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der
nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Piper, Mnchen and Zrich, 1987. See
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit#_note-RA
233
opinions were exchanged in the form of letters and short articles.
309
The emotional intensity of the
dispute and the interest it raised in a large part of German society beyond academia, was indication
that by mid-eighties German Vergangenheitsbewltigung (struggle to come to terms with the past)
had simply not taken place. The Historikerstreit was shocking because it revealed the lack of
understanding especially among younger Germans, of the theoretical, philosophical and theological
implications of the Holocaust. However, the integration of a problematic past into the experience of
the present and reaching of a consensus on its interpretation are crucial for social cohesion. At the

309
On the same website we can read that Habermas replied a few weeks later in the newspaper Die Zeit of
July 11, 1986. Habermas stated that he had identified as emerging a kind of process of guilt relief and he
opposed the apologetic trends in German history writing. Against Nolte he argued that, [in Noltes account]
Nazi crimes lose their singularity, because they are made intelligible as response to the (supposedly still
existing) threat of Bolshevist destruction. Auschwitz was reduced [in this view] to the format of a technical
innovation and explained by way of the threat of an Asian enemy, who was supposedly, still at the door.
Against Strmer he held that he was pleading for a unified image of history, which in place of religious
values shall now found identity and secure social integration. This he saw as a German-nationalistically
coloured Nato-philosophy. Those who tried to exorcise in Germans their guilt over Auschwitz, those who
were trying to recall them to a conventional national identity, were destroying the only reliable basis for a
link to the West. In short: The only patriotism that does not alienate us from the West is a constitutional
patriotism. (My translation) In the original website article we can read, Habermas [sah] einige Wochen
spter in der Zeit eine Art Schadensabwicklung erwachsen und wandte sich gegen die apologetischen
Tendenzen in der deutschen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung. In response to Nolte he wrote, Die Naziverbrechen
verlieren ihre Singularitt dadurch, da sie als Antwort auf (heute fortdauernde) bolschewistische
Vernichtungsdrohungen mindestens verstndlich gemacht werden. Auschwitz schrumpft auf das Format einer
technischen Innovation und erklrt sich aus der asiatischen Bedrohung durch einen Feind, der immer noch
vor unseren Toren steht. Strmer warf er vor, er pldiere fr ein vereinheitlichtes Geschichtsbild, das
anstelle der ins Private abgedrifteten religisen Glaubensmchte Identitt und gesellschaftliche Integration
sichern kann. Darin sah er eine deutsch-national eingefrbte Natophilosophie. Wer den Deutschen die
Schamrte ber Auschwitz austreiben wolle, wer sie zu einer konventionellen Form ihrer nationalen Identitt
zurckrufen will, zerstrt die einzig verlliche Basis unserer Bindung an den Westen. Kurz: Der einzige
Patriotismus, der uns dem Westen nicht entfremdet, ist ein Verfassungspatriotismus. Quoted from Die Zeit,
July 11, 1986 and Rudolf Augstein et al., Historikerstreit. Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die
Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, Piper, Mnchen and Zrich, 1987, pp. 71, 73,
76, 75. See http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit#_note-RA
234
end of the cold-war period the task to create meaningful historical narratives with validity for the
whole of German society became paramount. The vehemence of Habermas response to Noltes
thesis was indication of these pressures and a measure of the debates significance for a future self-
understanding of Germans.
Gego was affected indirectly by the Hitorikerstreit in 1987. At the time she was 75 years
old. Dr Frithjof Trapp of the Hamburger Arbeitsstelle fr deutsche Exilliteratur, (Research Centre
for German Literature written in Exile) approached Gego with a questionnaire. He was undertaking
research for a project supported by the University of Hamburg called, Exil and Emigration der
Hamburger Juden, that is, Exile and Emigration of the Jews of Hamburg. Trapp asked Gego to give
testimony of her experience of anti-Semitism during the pre-war period and for a description of the
exact circumstances of her emigration. Gego only reluctantly engaged in a written exchange that
lasted for almost two years and she remained very brief and factual in her replies. More important
than this correspondence is in fact a text Gego wrote but never sent off. Trapps insistence had
provoked Gego into writing the forty page autobiographical document that I have quoted so often
throughout this thesis.
310
Without a doubt, Trapp's request for Gego's testimony was part of an
earnest attempt to forge an unproblematic relation between Germans and Jews. Social studies were
more likely to encourage the establishment of university departments and research centres dedicated
to Jewish history aiming to create knowledge of the social, historical, religious and political aspects
of Judaism and the Holocaust. Trapp's academic background does not surprise. In 1979, he had
earned his PhD in sociology with a study on German exile literature from the period 1933 to 1945.
In 1980, he became co-editor of the journal Exil and from 1984 onwards he acted as director of the
Arbeitsstelle fr Exilliteratur.

310
This document and other texts by Gego have been collected and were published in 2005. Huizi, Mara
Elena and Josephina Manrique, Sabiduras and other texts by Gego, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and
Fundacin Gego, Caracas, 2005.

235
The positive aims of such rare research projects should not deflect us from the fact that they
occurred in a period that strongly promoted a conservative national identity. The wish to leave
behind a guilt-ridden past can become manifest also in the will to create archival knowledge. The
eighties also brought the fictionalisation of the Holocaust and the War in television documentaries,
feature films and literature, which then first began to be exploited as a marketable genre. In contrast
to a monolithic and linear understanding of history the Left vehemently defended a methodology in
which history, especially of the Second World War and the Holocaust were submitted to a
permanent critique. In this dialectical process the status of the historical object remained always at
stake anew. However, many German citizens agreed that the time had come to return to good old
German values and wholeheartedly embraced nostalgia. The reconstruction of the Frankfurter Alte
Oper, which turned this institution into a symbol of German historical continuity, was expression
precisely, of this new German conservatism and it signalled historical processes in which wholeness
was re-established as a legitimate term in German lands.

The above adds poignancy to Gegos inclusion in the exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele.
311
At the
time of the show Gego was exactly seventy years old and for 44 years she had lived far away in
Caracas, which had not made her a Venezuelan but more likely, as I have argued throughout this
thesis, a German Jew living in exile. Gegos Reticulrea appeared out of place, her German-ness, if
this was what she sought to represent, had become anachronistic in Germany itself. It fitted neither
into the category of a regressive anti-modernism nor was it a critique of consumer society. Parallels
existed, if at all, only to United State experimental conceptualism or the revival of spiritualism

311
I suggest that the invitation extended to Gego was meant symbolically as reconciliation between Germans
and Jews. Her inclusion does not lack in irony, since it happened in the context of the celebration of a
buildings reconstruction to its original imperialist form. The link between the history of the German Jewry
and German imperialism is far beyond the space of this thesis and I can only allude to the significance of
showing an oeuvre that had been developed in Latin America in a building that symbolises German
expansionism of the nineteenth-century.
236
during the sixties and seventies and, as I have argued earlier, structurally it was closer to neo-
Kantian idealism. The Zeitung zur Austellung, published in conjunction with the exhibition,
featured a short interview with Gego. It allowed rare insight into her thinking and gave evidence of
just how conscious she was of her isolated position. The author [presumably Dietrich Mahlow
speaking of himself in the third person] wrote,

A woman returns to her country of origin, which she had been forced to leave in 1938, then a
26 year old student. Now, this graceful and agile 70 year old lady crawls, like a spider around
the Liszt Salon, among her so called reticulrea Raumgreiffende Raumnetze and the 16
loudspeakers provided to play Cages roaratorio [] With both, [Gego and Leufert] the
curator Dr. Dietrich Mahlow had become acquainted in Caracas where he was establishing an
international section at the Museum for Modern art.
Interviewer: Does one need an Adrianes thread in order to understand your labyrinth?
Gego: That you have to find out for yourself this is precisely what turns it into a game.
Interviewer: Gego, you are not only bi- but multilingual. Does this double existence, this
bridging between old and new world influence your thinking, your work?
Gego: Certainly. It is a question of origins and encounters, of cultural context and immediate
experience of the ambience in which one lives. Over the years one learns to combine the two.
Interviewer: Is this the source for your impulse to create instead of figures, spaces and
connecting networks?
Gego: This is something that comes out of the materials very properties and the work with it.
But also from observation: how are museums built nowadays? Naturally, this predilection for
space is a given and result of my formation as architect. [what I intend to make is] Not Art
for Architecture but something that will enhance the architecture and will add emphasis: the
idea of sticking a mural onto a wall or a (sacral) figure in front of it was always contrary to
my own convictions. The fact that I have created here at the Alte Oper, something that does
not fit into the environment is entirely new to me. []
Interviewer: Is it not becoming increasingly difficult to play within these spaces, among these
perspectives and trends?
Gego: Oh no, we only need to learn it and insist on it. That is the reason why I keep out of
politics and big world problems. []
237
Interviewer: this provokes the question, which many visitors will secretly ask themselves: this
is art, I can do that?
Gego: Well then do it, I wont object!
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This short interview reveals also the contrast between Gegos optimism and a very European
malaise expressed in the interviewers profound scepticism. Gegos insistence on the value of
integration, playful creativity and material specificity seem nave in a German society that had
experienced, since the early seventies, the heavy burden and high price to pay for advanced
capitalism, disillusion, cynicism, ennui and uncontrollable violence at the margins of society. The

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Eine Frau kehrt in ihr Herkunftland zurck, das sie 1938, 26 jhrig als Studentin verlassen musste. Nun
krabbelt die zierliche agile Frau, 70 jhrig, wie eine Spinne im Liszt Salon herum, zwischen ihren 'reticularea'
genannt "raumgreiffende Raumnetze" und den 16 Lautsprechern fr Cages "roaratorio" [] Beide lernte
der Ausstellungleiter Dr. Dietrich Mahlow in Caracas kennen, als er dort eine internationale Abteilung des
Museums fr Moderne Kunst aufbaute. Mahlow: Braucht man einen Ariadne Faden um ihre Labyrinth zu
ergrnden Gego? Gego: Das mssen Sie selber herausfinden - das est vollendet ja das Spiel.
Mahlow: Sie sind nicht nur zwei- sondern vielsprachig Gego: Prgt diese Doppelexistenz, dieser
Brckenschlag zwischen alter und neuer Welt Ihr Bewusstsein, Ihre Arbeiten?
Gego: Unbedingt. Das ist eine Frage der Herkunft und Begegnungen, des kulturellen Bezugsrahmens wie des
unmittelbaren Ambientes, in dem man lebt. Im Laufe der Jahrzente lernt man das Zusammenfgen.
Mahlow: Kommt von daher auch der Impuls, nicht Figuren sondern Rume, Verbindungsnetze zu gestalten?
Gego: Das hat sich ergeben aus dem Material und der Arbeit damit. Aber auch aus der Beobachtung: wie
werden Museen heute aufgebaut? Natrlich steckt in diesm "Sinn fr Raum" auch meine Ausbildung als
Architekt. Nicht "Kunst am Bau" sondern etwas machen, was die Architektur wirklich steigert. Mehr zur
Geltung kommen lsst: die Vorstellung dass man irgendeine Mural an die Wand klebt oder einen (Sulen)
Heiligen davorstellt geht mir gegen den Strich. - Das ich hier in der Alten Oper jetzt mal etwas gemacht habe,
was berhaupt nicht reinpasst in das Umfeld, das ist was Neues fr mich.
Mahlow: Wird es heute nicht immer schwieriger in der Welt zu spielen, in diesen Lebensrumen, inmitten
dieser Perspectiven und Trends?
Gego: Oh nein, wir mssen es nur lernen und darauf bestehen. Aus der Politik und den grossen
Weltproblemen halte ich mich deshalb auch heraus.
Mahlow: Das provoziert die Frage, die sich mancher Besucher sicher insgeheim stellt: das ist Kunst, das kann
ich doch auch?
Gego: Na mach's doch, hab ja nichts dagegen! Interview published in Zeitung zur Austellung: Spielraum-
Raumspiele, pages not numbered, Alte Oper, Frankfurt, 1982.
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very term play invoked by the organisers in the title began to appear tainted by the knowledge of
its marketability. That play had become an often lonely, a masturbatory, pleasure was implied by
Mahlow himself. In his article Gegos Rume he wrote that, Then we play with this space as we
do sometimes play with our own body. When man is alone in his space [].
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In Europe, where
history had become an immaterial screen the material object became charged increasingly, with
ambiguous feelings. Gegos work seemed anachronistic because it conveyed a fusion of visual and
material experience and thus acknowledged limits to the imaginary paradise of infinite possibility.

Dibujos sin Papel: Letting it all go
The Frankfurt exhibition had been a turning and an endpoint. Gego had shown her work in
Germany before, mostly drawings and prints, but never had she been invited to take such a central
place, show such a large piece, in such a noble and cultured setting. And so Gego sat down and
looked at what she had done. (Fig. 83 Gego looking at the Reticurea, in Liszt Salon, 1982) The
impulse to sit down and meditate on images that appeared in front of her eyes rather than from
within her body, brought forth a series of works called Dibujo sin papel. Drawings without Paper
are occasionally also called Bicho, which in Spanish means a little thing with a life of its own.
(Fig. 84 Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 79.19, 1978) As ever, she drew from her vocabulary of geometric
forms but increasingly also used found objects symbolising renewal as well as decay. (Fig. 85
Gego, Dibujo sin papel, 85.12, 1985) Gego meticulously numbered and recorded each of these
objects adding to their title the year in which they had been produced and their number in sequence.
She was beginning to count the years. The experience of the Frankfurt exhibition had created a
sense of distance between her and the objects of the world. The unexpected appearance of

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Dann spielen wir mit dem Raum; so wie wir manchmal mit unserem Krper spielen. "Wenn einer alleine
im Raum ist", nennt das Franz Mon, der Hrspielautor. Typewritten and undated page written by Dietrich
Mahlow and published as 'Gego's Rume' in connection with the exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele held
between 28/08/1982 10/10/1982, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt a. Main. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
23/08/1982. My translation.
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something like a narrative mode only emphasised this trend. From the mid-eighties onwards a
different kind of memory seems to have taken hold of Gego and inspired her work. Gegos nephew
told me that during the last years of her life she had become more absent minded, in other words she
had become a little senile. In a letter composed in 1990
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, she complained about her increasing
physical frailty, the rising cost for doctors and medication, her worries for the future of Venezuela,
which was in a precarious state since 1983 and the political situation becoming more unstable with
each day. She wrote in German about her hopes, so typical of old people, to recover her strength
and return to normality. Gego began to be distant and only in increasingly informal ways confirmed
what she had always insisted on, the universal value of geometry and a concrete attachment to
materials. Like figures of thought they reappeared in Dibujos sin papel as if to say see I was right
all along. Her narratives neglect the steps of a linear trajectory and written on invisible paper they
are without ground expressing perhaps, this very moment I suddenly realised how I was suspended
in mid-air.
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Gego had always insisted on her talent in conceptual thinking and suddenly, in the
Dibujos sin papel, she seemed to let go. As if in visiting, for a last time, those big and small events
that had made her the person that she now was, she could at last confirm her own voice, a voice that
made her original and unique. Gego insisted on what she had learned in a very painful experience,
namely that loving attachment to places, to a particular culture and foremost, to an other person is
always and irrevocably specific. Gego concluded her career with her most tender and most beautiful
objects, objects that speak in a curious tone, perhaps the ironic humour of an old person, of burning
pain and sadness but also of the deep love she had felt for this world and for those who inhabit it, if
only for a brief moment in time. (Fig. 86 Gego, Bicho no 11, 1987)

314
Gego wrote the letter in German probably in autumn 1990. It is reprinted in, Seit lngerer Zeit, Huizi and
Manrique, Sabiduras, p. 225.
315
Da wurde mir pltzlich klar wie sehr ich in der Luft schwebte. The moment when Gego realised she had
to leave Germany behind is described in Huizi and Manique, Sabiduras, p. 241.
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Conclusion
My thesis focused on Gegos three-dimensional work and I argued that her work was sustained by a
strong revisionist impulse and that this was linked directly to her experience of enforced exile. This
radical rupture deprived her of familiar surroundings and necessitated their reconstruction, as an
ideal and positive image, which Gego identified in the liberal and dynamic cultural environment of
the Weimar Republic. Gegos oeuvre can be described as post-modern in the sense that she
undertook a more or less conscious revision of the Bauhaus aesthetic of the 1920s and 1930s. Close
analysis of her early sculptural oeuvre showed that the surface reflectivity of her preferred
materials, stainless steel and aluminium, was an important tool in the articulation of her artistic
concept. Mimicry , that is, a doubling of surface effects, was a crucial first step in the development
of her career and suggested that it was used strategically, expressing Gegos efforts to assimilate to
Venezuelan culture and society. The Right to Indifference of my thesis title refers to this moment
when Gegos work subscribed fully to the ideal of equality among citizens, guaranteed, in
democratic states, by constitutional rights. Only his or her fundamental non-difference and the right
to belong, regardless of gender, race or religion and enables the foreigner, the outsider, the exile to
go through a difficult process of mourning in order to find his or her place within a new world.
After the initial mimetic phase Gego progressed by turning, around 1969, to a more self-reflective
practice. This date signalled the beginning of Gegos mature period during which she created, so I
suggested, her most successful works. In the so called Reticulrea Gego accomplished the perfect
synthesis of optical surface effects and the evocation of gravity and material substance.

In conclusion I wish to recapitulate the steps and the line of argument taken in the defence of my
thesis. In the first chapter, I provided the early biographies of Gego and Jess Soto and an outline of
the cultural and political history of Venezuela. At this point, the notion of exile was introduced as a
term signifying a radical rupture from a familiar cultural context. In the second chapter I followed
the trajectory of Sotos career by describing aspects of the evolving artistic scene in 1950s Paris and
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against this background, explained the reasons for the establishment of Geometric Abstraction and
Cintisme in continuity of the project of a pre-war abstract avant-garde. As in the first chapter, I
have again given emphasis to the role of modern architecture and abstract art in the formulation of a
post-war modernist aesthetic. Thus, chapters I and II highlight the importance, in Venezuela and
France, of a revival of pre-war European abstraction for the definition of their respective post-war
national identities. In addition, this provided the historical explanation for the cultural and economic
exchanges between the two separate sites of artistic production.
My next step was to draw attention to the problematic relationship of men living in post-
war Europe to the generation of their fathers. I explained why this had the effect of a simultaneous
repression of homoeroticism and the feminine within post-war French culture. I argued that gender
ambivalence became manifest in the trend of Geometric Abstraction toward dematerialisation, most
prominent in Cintisme. This provided the basis for my interpretation of Sotos early oeuvre in
which I identified a problematic relation to the historical object and its representation. I proposed
further that, after c.1962, Sotos oeuvre was characterised by an intense repression of object
attachment, fusing the effects of exile with the formal expectations carried toward him by his
European audiences. These are issues that I consider crucial for an understanding of Sotos
Cintisme and, beyond the individual, the socio-historical context of post-war France. Thus, in
chapter II, I highlighted the problematic around the integration of memory contents after emigration
or the experience of a radical rupture caused, in Europe, by the Second World War.
In Chapter III, I addressed first, in a very broad manner, the problem of the definition of a
post-war Jewish identity. The writings of Alain Finkielkraut and Pierre Birnbaum allowed me to
discuss assimilation and persecution of Jews in conjunction with the Enlightenment ideal of a
republican state and equality among citizens. These political and sociological implications of
Jewish assimilation allowed me to suggest that Gegos oeuvre must be analysed from a sociological
perspective and interpreted as highly abstract models for the integration of the individualistic and
embodied into existing social structures. Here, I picked up my earlier account of Gegos biography
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and described her insertion into Venezuelan society under the aspect of the issues around post-
Holocaust Jewish identity. I argued against the view that the abstract quality of Gegos oeuvre was
the symptom of traumatic experiences and suggested instead, that it signalled foremost her ambition
to introduce Bauhaus formalism in order to assimilate to a specific cultural context which, at the
time, was dominated by Constructivism and Bauhaus design. I proposed that this allowed Gego,
simultaneously, the recuperation of the spiritualism and the cultural programme described by
Michael Brenner as The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany. I provided then my
own interpretation of Gegos late oeuvre in terms of historical materialism and proposed its
affinities to neo-Kantian thought and morality as defined by Jrgen Habermas in 2005.
In the last section, I focused on the historicising of the Second World War and the
Holocaust in Germany after 1980. I provided an outline of the German political situation at the
beginning of the decade and suggested that neo-Conservatism engaged an abusive mediation and
banalisation of painful memory contents for its own political aims. Discontent with the repression
of memory had found expression in the artistic production of artists, writers and political activists
since the late sixties and throughout the seventies. While European post-war abstraction had been
invented in order to en-lighten the bleak and fragmented inner landscapes of Europeans living in the
shadow of the Second World War, they intended to unsettle the repressive social consensus on easy
forgetting. However, the eighties brought a return to monumentality and history. The contrast
between the two trends, the first critical and engaged, the second utalitarian announced the
historians debates (Historikerstreit) of the mid-eighties. I provided a broad outline of the argument
and showed that the integration or non-integration of the traumatic memory of the Holocaust and
the Second World War was crucial for the reformulation of the national identity in an undivided
Germany. The exhibition Spielraum-Raumspiele allowed then for reflections on Gegos
achievements in a comparison with those of artists working within the socio-political context of
post-war Germany. In conclusion I wish to emphasise that in Gegos case, despite the pain that it
caused her, exile was a condition that afforded her the freedom to reinvent herself outside and
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beyond a national identity. Dispossessed of cultural attachment she redefined her identity by way of
a revisiting of the past, by forming a positive relation to pre-war German Jewish and Protestant
culture, and by gradually releasing her nostalgic fixation, in order to become once more herself, in
Venezuela.

My thesis seeks to provide a new perspective on Gegos and Sotos oeuvres by taking into account
the issues of anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the pre-war and post-war periods. In the case of
Gego, this view is an alternative to texts written either from within the North American Feminist
context or those informed by post-colonial theory or from within discourses on Latin American
Constructivism. By linking Gego to the history of Jewish persecution I challenged the views of
other art historians who have developed, since the late nineties, interpretations of Gegos oeuvre
that either foreground Constructivist influences or entirely de-contextualise her work.
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Just how
productive differences in art historical methodology can be is demonstrated in the variety of
interpretations that have emerged in the last ten years within Gego scholarship. The Venezuelan art
critic Mnica Amor, for instance, had recourse for her interpretation of Gegos oeuvre to the
writings of the German system theorist Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998). She wrote, Conventional
notions of history do not offer suitable models for examining the structural affinities between
Gegos work and paradigmatic sculptural practice of the 1960s. Ultimately, history is associated
with assessment of fact and veracity, the logic of cause and effect moments of influence, and
chronologically ordered geographically bound facts such as the foundation of a given nation,
region, or period, and its Zeitgeist in relation to which objects acquire historical meaning. This
essay circumvents such historical concepts to explore the Reticulrea (1969), Gegos most
significant piece, in relation to other works or writings from the 1960s to which her art, due to its

316
As the latest example of a de-contextualising discourse can count the exhibition, Gego: Between
Transparency and the Invisible, organised by Mari-Carmen Ramirez, Josefina Manrique and Catherine de
Zegher at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas in 2006.
244
spatial and temporal distance, has never been associated.
317
Amor was referring here to the artistic
context of New York and to Minimalism and she then established structural affinities between
Gegos and Eva Hesses work suggesting parallels between the two oeuvres based on structural and
aesthetic grounds. Amor explained in the same text, I will not dwell on the theoretical
contributions of those thinkers and writers who have provided the groundwork for the elaboration of
alternative histories. Enough has been said about the monolithic quality of a history of modern art
that privileges Paris as a site of origin and reaches its climax in post-war New York with the
displacement of cultural (and economic) power, as well as with the emergence of Abstract
Expressionism.
318
Instead Amor proposed that, At this point I find it more effective to experiment
with creative concepts, analogies and affinities that, both consider the local social and cultural
differences that structure our object of study, and also allow for the tentative development of a
praxis that can expand our cultural horizon.
319
The question remains whether it is legitimate to
forge conceptual and formal links between geographically separate oeuvre and in reference to Gego
and Eva Hesse, between two artists without historical connection and incompatible artistic aims?
Such questions have contributed in the last decade to the emergence of an increasingly
complex and fertile art critical discourse around Gegos oeuvre. By contrasting it to the work of
Jess Soto and by embedding it more firmly within a larger history of anti-Semitism I added a
dimension which will enable future researchers to understand her abstract oeuvre as more than a
confirmation of her belief in rationality or expression of emotional indifference. Moreover, I am
convinced that, ultimately, only historical evidence will allow European, Latin American and North
American writers to gain profound insight into Gegos cultural identity and thus carry her
achievements beyond a tradition of formalist interpretations. In Gegos case only serious

317
Mnica Amor, Between Spaces: The Reticulrea and its place in History, Obra Completa, 1955-1990,
Fundacin Cisneros, Fundacin Gego, Fundacin Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 2003, p. 400.
318
Amor, Between Spaces: The Reticulrea and its place in History, p. 400.
319
Amor, Between Spaces: The Reticulrea and its place in History, p. 400.

245
engagement with the issues around assimilation, the revival of Jewish culture during the Weimar
Republic and anti-Semitism in nationalistic states will truly expand horizons. More research will be
necessary in order to clarify the meaning of Gegos use of a Bauhaus pedagogy which was part of
the reaction, by Jews and non-Jews, to the trauma of the First World War and a growing
conservatism in Germany. Also, still underdeveloped is the issue of Gegos use of a quasi
metaphorical expressivity which renders attempts to identify in her work the effects of trauma
caused by enforced exile problematic. A growing body of research material on post-Holocaust
(Jewish) identity combined with psychoanalytically-informed studies on trauma need to be
employed in interpretations of Gegos oeuvre in order to widen the scope of this discourse.
In conclusion I wish to invoke Melanie Kleins insight that only at rare moments and under
the influence of a self-preserving impulse can sadness over the loss of narcissistic wholeness be
acknowledged. It entails the painful recognition that separation is inevitably part of human
experience and nonetheless, is fundamental for the articulation of a loving attachment to the
other.
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Separation and despair can be integrated into experience precisely, via a store of images
that do not invite identification but are forms of knowledge. Artistic work is and needs to be
interpreted as the acknowledgement of our dependence on others, not for narcissistic reassurance,
but in order to overcome the loneliness of the selfish self. Only then can the social be experienced
not as a prison but as that which truly opens up our limited human knowledge - toward eternity.

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Melanie Klein described the process of mourning after the loss of a loved object in Mourning and Manic-
Depressive States. Here she stated that the success of mourning depend, ultimately, on the subjects ability to
renounce its loving attachment to the lost object, which induces depression but enables him/her to re-
construct, in fantasy, the lost object as a good object. She wrote, It is by reinstating inside himself the
good parent as well as the recently lost person, and by rebuilding his inner world, which was disintegrated
and in danger, that he overcomes his grief, regains security, and achieves true harmony and peace. Melanie
Klein, Mourning and its Relation to Manic-Depressive States (1940), The Selected Melanie Klein, Juliet
Mitchell (ed.), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1986, p. 174.