Babylon's Haus der Kunst Markus Proschek (*1981) born in Austria and now living in Berlin
seems to invariably perceive subliminal Nazi aesthetics and totalitarian architectures as
artistic challenges. The bronze sculpture of the »Swimmer« (2006) painted in oil is one such
case. It refers in a certain way to the pictorial tradition of Psyche or Narcissus but
oscillates aesthetically as a Breker-esque beauty between Nazi bombast and Bauhaus coolness.
Proschek's highly subtle works aim to trace this ambivalent balance between ideological
appropriation and works of art that are open to interpretive manipulation. His oil painting
»The Fallen Merz« (2007) its ironic-fictitious scenery set at Haus der Kunst in Munich
features in the foreground a sculpture based on Caspar David Friedrich's famous painting »The
Sea of Ice« with elements of Kurt Schwitters's »Merzbau« piling up in the adjoining room. The
canonic repertory is thus parodistically confronted with the possibility of its disavowal when
it is presented with an element of insubordination - such as with the Nazi aesthetics of the
exhibition hall. Jacques Derrida already emphasized that culture and art do not constitute a
stable currency in the sense that meaning derives only from the relationship between things
which at the same time makes obsolete the idea that there actually is something like an
original true meaning. Markus Proschek comments: »I thought the views on the subject were a
little unsatisfactory. Most of the contemporary works of art that examined these subjects
always seemed to me either very moralistic superficial or even worse boring.«
