For a few days and until Saturday, an unusually colorful Bismarck has been standing in the Berlin zoo. The statue of the Reich Chancellor suddenly looks as if in costumes, and that for Christopher Street Day and Neptune Festival at the same time: all the colors of the rainbow cover the figure up to the pimple on the pimple hood. Above it are wild net structures that seem a bit dizzying, up there on the scaffolding that the artist duo “Various & Gould” had erected. Because the Berlin Bismarck monument is about six and a half meters high even without a base. Various & Gould are a woman and a man who consider their names to be insignificant and have been working together since studying art in Weißensee, “mostly in a playful way tackling socially relevant issues”, as it says on a handout.
The socially relevant topic in this case is colonialism, specifically the so-called Congo Conference, at which the colonial race of the Europeans was coordinated in Berlin from 1884 to 1885 and Germany also became a colonial power – as well as the role that Otto von Bismarck played as a midwife . The two artists consider this role to be underexposed so far and, as they explain to visitors with ostentatious friendliness, now want to “bring it into today with color”.
From the base: the Bismarck statue was wrapped in paper mache in the first step.
(Photo: Raisa Galofre)
Anyone who is upset about the desecration of a monument (and there are plenty of passers-by who do this) can be reassured here insofar as it was not the statue itself, but a paper mache cover that was pimped in color. The impression is to be cut into individual parts this Saturday, August 21st, to be taken down later, around the day of the open monument on September 11th, in the course of a deformation performance, or “Verformance” for short, to be critical of colonialism.
Bismarck is thus “taken from the pedestal”, at the same time the monumental bronze, which the sculptor Reinhold Begas put into the cast in 1901, remains as it was. Under these circumstances, the responsible authorities were given permission and the Senate even worth funding, and the Savvy Contemporary culture house is also on board. If the school goes to school, and the artist duo still has a number of statues in Europe on the list, it would perhaps finally raise the iconoclastic impetus of the recent protest movements to a less simple-minded, less premodern, picture-magical and dialectic-free level, while Begas’ pompous Bismarck continues like a forgotten grandpa is allowed to stand in the bushes and stare angrily in the roundabout around the Victory Column, which has been transformed into an LGBTQ symbol.