Pretty Mummies

Zeche Hannover, LWL-Industriemuseum,Web 2010

Zeche Hannover (Coal mine Hannover) 1973, Bernd and Hilla Becher

In Bottrop, a town near Oberhausen, you will find the wonderful Museum "Quadrat" ("Square"). It just has become the venue of a collection of photos, performed by the famous artists Bernd and Hilla Becher ("Bernd und Hilla Becher. Bergwerke und Hütten – Industrielandschaften" - till May 2nd). In a special way, this exhibition spends a touch of presentiment relating the "Feuerländer", to be shown in the LVR-Industriemuseum from July 25th onwards.

Pictures in Black and White from all over Europe, pictures from Pennsylvania too, give insights into a grey and dirty past. The scenes seem to be blast-frozen, only by pure chance you will find people, workers on the photos. The Bechers wanted to objectify their subjects visiting only shut down plants under cloudless sky and using a slightly heightened vantage point. Since the early 1960s their as cold as meticulous eyes have been portraying "structural sculptures", as they call them, pale and silent witnesses of former realms: discharged winding and water towers, abandoned coal mines, dormant coking plants, iron and steel works.

These obituary notices are manifesting the power and force of a bygone world, already out of operation but with an aura borrowed from Egyptian pyramids, perhaps a little more complicated regarding structures and details. When firstly published or exhibited, these pictures have been going to change the perception of a whole generation of historians, who started to detect, to discover and to conquer what Germans should call later "Industriekultur". At best the Bechers not only opened eyes and changed minds, but even saved some buildings from demolition.

Are we, however, still strong enough on bearing the rough and austere beauty of these awe-inspiring monuments, these mighty memorials? Outside the photographs they became more harmless, pleasant, stylish, got cheered up by advertising decoration, by clever recycling, by imaginative transformation, and – matter of sheer luck – by inspiring art: new kind of embellishing the truth?

We are talking about pretty mummies, about cases of eloquent self-denunciation: An epoch is fading definitely, fading not only in the Halls of the "Square". But about 5.000 miners are still at work in real mines and coking plants, just in Bottrop, absolutley not squaring with.