Flowers for Kim Il Sung
MAK, Vienna, Austria
The current exhibition at Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art (MAK) includes paintings, posters and drawings from the Korean Art Gallery in Pyongyang, North Korea, as well as drawings and plans of public buildings. In terms of style, the pictures adhere to socialist realism, some using traditional pen and ink techniques. They are meant to express the nationalism formulated in the dominant Juche ideology. The most striking are a series of pictures of Kim Il Sung (1912–1994), the ‘Great Leader’ and ‘Eternal President’, and his son, Kim Jong Il. They show the two dictators in everyday settings – on a winter trip to the front, at social gatherings. In President Kim Il Sung with the Artists (1972), a picture painted by a collective, the assembled artists are seen writing down the Great Leader’s words – an example of the infinite loop of total power.
The museum fulfils the conditions laid down by the lenders, who view the pictures as icons, as sacred emanations of the divine leader. Velvet ropes and guards prevent visitors from getting too close to the pictures. The degree to which the museum entered into the insane spirit of Juche became clear even before the show opened, when a portrait of the leader was withdrawn by the MAK press office on the grounds that a misprint might have desecrated ‘The Great One’.
The idea for the exhibition came from MAK director Peter Noever, who gave a peculiar explanation: The cultural Other, be it of Japanese or North Korean origin, disturbs our Eurocentric perceptions. ‘One must stop wanting to understand everything,’ says Noever. This exhibition represents an unprecedented aestheticization of political violence by an Austrian state museum. In anticipation of a possible cancellation by the North Korean authorities, neither the exhibition nor the catalogue makes any reference whatsoever to the context of the pictures. While Kim Song Min was painting his picture We Are The Happiest Children In The World (1995), hundreds of thousands of North Koreans were dying of hunger. Noever defends this absence of contextualization by saying that ‘the aesthetic unmasks the content’.
The function of Nazi euphemisms cannot be explained in this way. Although the specialist literature on the Holocaust is rather more extensive than that on North Korea, schoolchildren visiting museums are still told the meaning of ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (‘Work makes you free’, the motto placed at the entrance to Auschwitz and other concentration camps). The soldiers and workers in these paintings, who look like they have just been breastfed by Mother Kim, are not devoid of a certain fascination, either. Not to see this is to underestimate the power of images.
Accusing Noever (and co-curator Bettina Busse) of allowing themselves to be used for the purposes of propaganda doesn’t go far enough. Noever relates how he was quizzed again and again by the North Koreans concerning the purpose of the exhibition. While Noever has shown no scruples in his contact with a state where the finance minister was executed due to a failed currency reform, the museum staff in Pyongyang was apparently astonished at the omnipotence of the Austrian museum director. They got what they asked for. Even Culture Minister Claudia Schmied wished them well in the catalogue. Over the past twenty years, Noever has turned one of the world’s best design collections into a laboratory for his ambitions as a meta-artist. The exhibition ‘Flowers for Kim Il Sung’ is another work in his oeuvre – a dictatorship as a ready-made.
Translated by Nicholas Grindell
Matthias Dusini
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