Punk and the art of forgetting  Geniale Dilletanten (sic!)

Dilettantes generally don’t have a very good reputation. And probably for good reason. They meddle in world politics, of which they understand nothing; start wars they can neither win nor end; recommend absurd UV treatments for viral diseases; can’t implement neither pension reform or the transition to renewable energy; botch their personnel policies; always think they know better; and, in reality, understand very little about most things. One can see this state of affairs as the late result of a politics of empowerment that began with the triumph of the well-intentioned idea of participation and reached its climax with social media: everyone is allowed to do everything, all the time, and when a few experts step in because there are, in fact, things you need to know something about before you weigh in on them, they are branded elitists.

Know your “Dilettantes”

It is important, however, to distinguish these troublemaking nuisances from those Dilletanten (sic) who set themselves apart from the dullards of their time through the deliberately misspelled name and the adjective “Genial” alone. Unlike the fools whose stupidity makes life more difficult for all of us, and in some cases costs lives, these Dilletanten turned their lack of conventional expertise into a creative principle. The “Geniale Dilletanten”(Genius Dilettantes) can be described as a short-lived, elusive phenomenon in early-1980s Germany, one that could hardly be called a “movement” at all. Its protagonists responded to the somewhat monotonous abrasiveness of punk by choosing play, humor, and experimentation instead, testing out their deliberately unskilled explorations of new artistic forms across every medium: music, film, graphic design, visual art, and, of course, video, which was still a relatively new medium at the time.

Demigods deconstructed

It all began with an event: the “Festival der Genialen Dilletanten” at Berlin’s Tempodrom on September 4, 1981, organized by Wolfgang Müller, the driving force behind the conceptual-art collective Die Tödliche Doris. Against punk’s deadly seriousness and rage, Die Tödliche Doris offered the grotesque, the absurd, and a sometimes bitter wit. Their most famous work is probably the film Das Leben des Sid Vicious (“The Life of Sid Vicious,” 1981), in which a small child plays the lead in two episodes. In one, the film reenacts the scandalous and probably apocryphal stroll supposedly taken by the Sex Pistols’ bassist along the Champs-Élysées, wearing a swastika T-shirt. In the other, it stages the murder of Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, a death for which Vicious was blamed but never proven responsible. In a complicated way, the film combines punk’s provocative obscenity, a child reenacting a killing and wearing a symbol criminalized under German law, with a critique of punk’s own childish taste for provocation. The child’s waving of a rubber knife not only makes a laughingstock of punk’s demigod; it also skewers the thick fog of myth that has surrounded him ever since.

DADA dadadum

Things were equally strange, and initially even more experimental, with Der Plan, whose members were musicians as well as the operators of a record label, Ata Tak, and an art gallery. Their masks and costumes took their cue from the Dadaists, notably Hugo Ball and his famous Dada costume of 1916. The tracks on their early albums, with their electronic bleeps and bloops, tiptoeing drum machine rhythms, and distorted vocals, cut sharply against the slick arena-rock bombast of the 1980s. Minimalist and deliberately dazed, Der Plan lurched through a world that seemed both eerie and absurd.

Tabula Rasa

At the opposite end of the spectrum were Einstürzende Neubauten. Formed in 1980 out of a chance encounter, they quickly became the favorite band of Germany’s cultural glitterati and were invited to the Paris Biennale and documenta as early as 1982. Martial noise produced with angle grinders and sledgehammers on homemade instruments fashioned from scrap metal, combined with Blixa Bargeld’s theatrical recitation and screams (always with that rolling ERRRR!) quickly earned the band cult status. Especially abroad, they seemed to embody a stereotype of the German: aggressive and despairing on principle, obsessed with visions of the end of the world, eccentric and extreme. Titles such as “Tabula Rasa” and “Kollaps” played masterfully on the keyboard of German Angst and reinforced a persona of existential radicalism. The three groups mentioned here are merely among the most prominent examples of the Geniale Dilletanten guild. There were countless other bands and collectives, often short-lived and project-based, many of which left behind little more than a self-produced cassette tape. They soon disappeared beneath the wave of what came to be known as Neue Deutsche Welle, whose chart-friendly blandness proved more commercially viable than the the Genialists’ eccentric, raw racket. Yet they were far more than the brief flare-up of some peculiar strain of post-punk. Rather, they represented the latest incarnation of a “art of forgetting” that European art theory had dreamed of since the nineteenth century: a forgetting of tradition that nevertheless remained part of a tradition itself, namely the determined protest against imitation, copying, and mimicry. Instead of imitating what had come before, they dared to risk a completely new beginning, just as so many before them had tried and failed. In place of the knowledge of the academy and the conservatory, the Geniale Dilletanten preferred what D. Diederichsen called “existential knowledge”: you know you can do what you are doing simply because you know that you are doing it.

Subjective wrong turns

The immediate ancestors of the Geniale Dilletanten were, of course, the Dadaists. Johannes Theodor Baargeld (whose name was borrowed by the Neubauten singer Blixa Bargeld, born Christian Emmerich) had already published a work with Max Ernst in 1920 titled Schammade. Dilettanten erhebt euch (“Schammade. Dilettantes, rise up”). Just how diametrically opposed Dadaism and the Genius Dilettantes were to any form of artistic practice aimed at classicism and balance can be conveyed by even the most cursory glance at Schiller and Goethe’s 1799 notes on dilettantism. Nothing did the two Weimar heroes despise more than the “subjective wrong turns” of sentimental artistic bunglers, whom they contrasted with the genius endowed by nature with exceptional gifts. But how might the esteemed Privy Councilor Goethe have responded to the political wrong turns confronting us today? With considerable confidence, one might imagine that, faced with the rampant amateurism of the real world, Goethe would have sent an encouraging dispatch to the artists of the Geniale Dilletanten experimenting with jackhammers and flaming microphones. After all, Goethe had a sense of humor, too.