Palavras-chave: Metabolic rift, Expressionism, Inflation, Money, Germany
A 1921 banknote from the German town of Itzehoe shows a figure in a garden with his trousers down, shitting; the turd forms the denomination of the note, 1 Mark. The German inflation of 1914-1923 was accompanied by a deluge of Notgeld or emergency money, small denomination notes issued by towns and businesses to make up for a lack of small change. As a collectors’ market developed around these objects, local artists were hired to design colourful, bizarre and sometimes disturbing notes; the one described above was produced by the expressionist painter Wenzel Hablik. Though Hablik’s shitting man may seem an unusual theme for money, several examples of Notgeld show people and animals in the act of excretion. These are eloquent regarding the status of money in this period, when currency had become as worthless as the most worthless substance of all. But by far the most common iconographic motif on Notgeld was landscape. In part, the proliferation of local scenes reflected the localisation of money in this period, when control of the currency splintered into 5,000 issuing bodies. It also evinces what Jens Schröter recently identified as a key feature of the money-medium: the attempt to shore up belief in the value of these dubious tokens by referring to that most solid and dependable referent, the land. But it is my contention that this iconographic localisation also expressed a conservative impulse to counteract the solvent power of money - which had been accelerated by inflation - via the supposed stability of landscape. In some cases, this conservative grounding tipped over into an extremist insistence on localisation: the Blut und Boden doctrine that would become a cornerstone of Nazi ideology. Seen in this light, I argue that Hablik's scatology is not as cynical as it might first appear. Instead, I speculate that it is a critique of dominant Notgeld motifs, envisioning instead a different relationship with the earth - not nostalgic, like the landscapes of conservative designers, or immovably fixed, like the radical localisation of proponents of blood and soil, but mediated by metabolic processes. In fact, Hablik imagines a closure of the metabolic rift, the process (described by John Bellamy Foster using concepts taken from Marx) by which humans were torn from the land during capitalist urbanisation, breaking the cycle whereby nutrients are returned to the soil through excretion and causing soil depletion in the countryside and pollution in the city. The artist was not alone in his concern for this problem at the time, as the work of landscape designer Leberecht Migge shows: Migge designed a special toilet for workers' housing which would collect residents’ waste for use on their own allotment gardens. However, Hablik's utopia of shit contains an ambiguity: the turd, the link between human and nature, is also the number 1, the denomination of the note: in other words, an abstraction representing monetary value. Under capitalism the expressionist crystal of the turd ineluctably turns to the money crystal.
Tom Wilkinson is a writer and historian specialising in modern and contemporary architecture and the visual culture of modern Germany. Tom is currently a Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He was previously a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Warburg Institute and has a PhD in the History of Art from University College London. He is also the History Editor of the Architectural Review, where he has worked since 2012. He has written for the Guardian, Domus, Tribune, Apollo, and the Architect’s Journal, among others, and his first book, Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made was published by Bloomsbury in 2014. He is co-director of New Architecture Writers, a programme for young Black and ethnic minority design critics that he co-founded in 2017. Tom has organised lecture series at the Warburg Institute, the Soane Museum, and the Royal Academy, where he also co-curated an exhibition titled Futures Found: The Real and Imagined Cityscapes of Postwar Britain in 2017.
Tom Wilkinson é escritor e historiador especializado em arquitetura moderna e contemporânea e na cultura visual da Alemanha moderna. Tom é atualmente professor em Birkbeck, Universidade de Londres, e no Courtauld Institute of Art. Anteriormente, ele foi Leverhulme Early Career Fellow no Warburg Institute e possui doutorado em História da Arte pela University College London. Ele também é editor de história da Architectural Review, onde trabalha desde 2012. Escreveu para o Guardian, Domus, Tribune, Apollo e Architect's Journal, entre outros, e seu primeiro livro, ‘Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made’ foi publicado pela Bloomsbury em 2014. Ele é codiretor do New Architecture Writers, um programa para jovens críticos de design negros e de minorias étnicas, que ele cofundou em 2017. Tom organizou séries de palestras no Warburg Institute, no Soane Museum e na Royal Academy, onde também foi co-curador de uma exposição intitulada Futures Found: The Real and Imagined Cityscapes of Postwar Britain em 2017.