IN THE ART NITE

Gerz’s strategy of dislodging culture from its orderly setting creates as much discomfort as his questions… During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gerz presented his position with increasing clarity in… pieces which subverted the current system of culture with mordant irony. In the Art Nite call me Traitor is the title of one such piece he made in 1989. … Couched in imagery influenced by the video technique of scrolling, the white panels do not herald the conventional optimistic promise of a screen that is still empty or a page yet unwritten; instead, they might just as easily be indicating erased images or erased texts... Yet is there not a strong similarity between his radical pursuit of the zero point he describes and a vision of utopia? And does his zero point not indeed contain some lingering echo of what Lévinas calls the “rip” in the fabric of time? Is there not a similarity between Gerz’s radical demand that the past be wrenched into the present – his call to fully expose the self to itself – and the bursting “present of the existent” on which Lévinas based his ethical and material experience of existence? In the Art Nite call me Traitor the artist repeatedly endeavours to identify his own subjectivity, to lay it bare and unearth the other potentiality and the uncanny (das Unheimliche) within himself.

Doris von Drathen 2004