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“Why are the figures placed at such a distance? They are what I came to see.”
Exhibitions exploring literature and theory are faced with a paradox: They attempt both to reveal that which defies visibility and at the same time to assign the often banal objects of the visible world a significance that will always remain extrinsic to them. This paradox is generally circumvented by making the author the subject of the exhibition, invoking the monographic illusion of the unity of life and work, which are seamlessly juxtaposed. Display cases gather a couple of illegible, handwritten manuscripts, a few yellowing photographs, a pipe; the accumulation of biographical material is used to shed light on literary or theoretical content, or vice versa. To put it negatively, the effrontery that texts represent in a visually oriented culture is palliated with biographically charged, visual “extras”; more positively, however, forms like this can effect a rehabilitation of literature.
The reading that emerges for the visitor from this translation into biographical/iconic material is unambigious. The unknown is translated directly into the known in the manner prescribed, and is largely divested of any element of surprise. The intended illustration risks the “stultification” described by Walter Benjamin in a 1928 conversation about exhibition technique: “For any illustration which lacks the moment of surprise must have a stultifying effect. What is there on display must never be the same—or simply more, or less—as the description given by the accompanying text, but it has to carry with it something new, a trick of evidence that can never be achieved with words” (qtd. in Tiedemann, Gödde, and Lonitz 1990, 7).