The Centaur in difficulties to dismount, … is civilised man who finds it hard to rid himself of this civilisation.”

Karlheinz Nowald 1976

But what then matters to the author? To breathe, to remain flexible, trunk circling, as he repeatedly states with a sporty undertone: “To move without getting anywhere.” To be indifferent, to watch, not to take up a position, not to take part in the “organisation”, to be empty, to let it pass through oneself, to remain adaptable. “Not to serve the good cause. Not to free Jerusalem. To exhale.” That might sound Far Eastern, but in its provocative softness it is without fatal mysticism. More situationist instead, clinging to the moment as an atom of time.

Günther Metken 1978. Translated by e_CR editors

Was zählt aber dann für den Autor? Atmen, beweglich bleiben, Rumpfkreisen, wie er immer wieder mit sportlichem Unterton sagt: "Sich bewegen, ohne von der Stelle zu kommen." Indifferent sein, zuschauen, keinen Posten annehmen, bei der "Organisation" nicht mitmachen, leer sein, durch sich hindurchgehen lassen, weich - anpassungsfähig bleiben. "Der guten Sache nicht dienen. Jerusalem nicht befreien. Ausatmen." Das klingt fernöstlich, ist aber in seiner provokanten Sanftheit ohne fatale Mystik, eher situationsitisch, dem Augenblick als Atom der Zeit angeschmiegt.

Günther Metken, 1978

Gerz’s view of art as a weapon and of the somehow permanent performance of aggression in the pavilion building is made the ironic subject of his installation, The Centaur’s Difficulty When Dismounting the Horse. The Centaur, resembling in fact a hollow wooden horse, was installed in two adjacent rooms in the left wing of the building, with most of the abdomen and rear of the horse in one room, and the upper body in the other. The horse was a threatening but fragmentary object of perception, since there was no way to grasp the whole from one position… The allusions in this historically resonant performance are both concrete and threatening: German fascination with Greek art, anchored in nineteenth-century philhellenism, was the official aesthetic of National Socialism, driven by the Nazi belief in a mythic connection between the German and Greek “races.” Gerz may have been poking fun at the equestrian monstrosities of the two most prominent residents of the German pavilion under Hitler, Arno Breker and Josef Thorak… While seeming to idealise the Greeks, and celebrating the plot that ended the Trojan War, Gerz positioned the horse as a destructive, even self-destructive element inside the architecture. The Aeneid tells how the Trojans dismantled their own city wall to get the horse inside, suggesting that they were partly responsible for their fate. Is the Centaur an imaginative invitation to dismantle the pavilion, the real monument in question? Or a threat of architectonic Blitzkrieg from an official German artist? It is hard to decide. Gerz’s hostility to both pavilion and his role as public artist is summed up in the metaphor of the trap meant to destroy the city and its inhabitants. The ambiguity implicates the viewer in the functioning of the monument. In parsing Gerz’s Greek metaphors, we must take our places imaginatively as the authors or the victims of violence. The perspective of Gerz’s early work allows us to see the affinity of his and Beuys’ Venice projects. In both projects, performance destabilises the monument, which is at once reestablished at the intersection of action and history: Beuys by shaping the reception through photographs, interviews, and the change in display, Gerz by allusions that are threateningly vague, an indeterminacy of content achieved by the rumour of unknown actions performed inside the horse and the display of illegible diary entries and monochrome images that look like they had been painted over. Both artists combine history, myth, and biography in an attempt to engage spectators individually, in ways radically unlike the institutionalised performance of history in French Revolutionary and fascist mass rallies. Neither artist has at his disposal a new convention suited to individual commemoration.

Mechthild Widrich 2014