Ma(r)king Myth, Imagining Nowhere: A German Exile's Alaskan Archive

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But all the stories, even the most political ones, are investigations into the nature of reality, which must be the most contested thing in all existence. Our sense of power, our ideologies, our politics, our loves, our fears are all bound up in it.

—Ben Okri[1]

CARL Heidenreich, Untitled, c. 1958–65. Mixed media on Japanese paper and hardboard. N.d. Collection of Patricia Recendez. Courtesy of the Carl Heidenreich Foundation.

Carl Heidenreich lived as a political exile from 1934 until his death in 1965 as a consequence of the state-led violence that began to unfold globally preceding World War I and II. Whether by choice, imposition, or necessity, Heidenreich’s way of life was ambulatory. He moved frequently and from one geopolitical location to another, each marked by varying forms of sociopolitical horror: Nazi Germany to Francoist Spain, Nazi-occupied France, and finally to New York via Martinique at the dawn of the nuclear age, a global moment prompted by the U.S. militarized atomic massacre of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In this essay, as I consider a selected series of paintings made by Heidenreich in the early 1960s following travel to the Alaskan tundra, I examine the works together as a “semi-transparency”[2] and in the context of his life as a painter, state citizen, and wanderer. Here, the images form a transparency through which is transmitted the reality—what Jean-Paul Sartre might call facticity[3]—of another place and time, situated farther out from the visible. Thus, the work presents one with perception’s paradox; although the perceived object cannot appear without a perceiver, at the same time perception also involves the “beyond” of that which is offered in the act of perception.[4] The paintings not only register Heidenreich’s situatedness across a dissonant sociopolitical transition, they also pose a question that moves the work beyond this primary referent: How to reckon with one’s implication in the social before and after an unimaginable event is realized? Heidenreich’s Alaska Series, which could equally be called his Alaskan Archive, contends with this question by creating a form of action that re-imagines in the face of a reality that is unimaginable, paradoxical, one-dimensional,[5] and incongruous.

From an optical perspective, the Alaskan Archive points a cursory lens onto segments of the nameable visual field—ice, rock, reservoirs—and moves the eye toward somewhere else. Although the series is composed of two-dimensional images that are opaque and composed of layers, forms, and materially visible matter (here, pigment and paper), the works also visually segment themselves from recognizable space. This alter-place is seen from a point of distance, located at the surface’s membrane, as much as it is also seen through imaginary depth; total transparency would render this place missing in plain sight, alienated, and with no means to communicate. The images hold semi-transparent status by illuminating the visible and the imaginary to puncture the fabric of the “real”; in so doing, the Alaskan Archive contests discernible words, worldviews, beliefs, and socialities to make a case for the myth of reality.

Ma(r)king Myth

However paradoxical it may seem, “myth hides nothing”: its function is to distort, not to make disappear.

—Roland Barthes[6]

Untitled (Alaska Series) from 1962 is foregrounded by translucent layers of watercolor, gouache, oil, and other media, which meld into one another, absorbed by paper. The image holds areas of earth, soil, and mud tones; in the painting’s upper left quadrant, they appear from varying sheens of turquoise, emphasized by dabs of opaque markings that resemble finger or hand prints. Heidenreich consistently and almost compulsively constructs the work, phenomena forming, slipping, and seeping between one layer and another. An application of paint, just several molecules thick, blends colors together to subtly signal a fusion of light—“light in all its functions and power.”[7] Glimmers of crystalline pigments accumulate in the painting’s centralized form, triangulated and made jagged by vectors of changing blues. This form could be identified as a plane of ice over a reservoir, a refraction of light, a glacier, or an architectural landscape of chiseled rock set beyond a haze.

The locale is segmented from “the real,” nondescript and yet particularized by an ambulatory form and structure. This place is neither here nor there and could nearly be anywhere. The surface is a transparency, the weighty covering of a place partially seen. It functions as an amorphous partition, a visual semiotic of difference, which brings together and differentiates as a serial comma does, placed in a series of terms/figures in order to separate, coordinate, and conjoin. Mirroring this technique, the work operates by ma(r)king the depth or distance of a place: somewhere seen from here, yet also seen over there and interpreted to be imaginary.

The irregular form continues in Untitled (c. 1958–65) although it is more tonally muted and flattened by farther distance. The figure breaks and moves peripatetically—in all directions. A vertical line bisects the image, making notable to the eye the points at which two sheets of paper break and join to expand the visual field. The sheets are bridged and mounted on a single board; the painting is presented as a singular work but is also a diptych. Although the locale of “elsewhere” is transmitted through the image, its depth is now less pronounced, assuming an imaginary form beyond the limits of the visual plane.

The Alaskan Archive’s tension appears somewhere in and between melancholy, restlessness, and anxiety—bridging divisions of landscape/light, terrain/air, macro/micro, distance/depth, translucence/opacity, here/elsewhere. The allusive subject matter plays with our understanding of representation and reality as image-readers, demanding an alternative approach to registering and speaking to the work’s ontology as object (image) and action (to imagine).

In communicating the impossibility of communication in the first place, Heidenreich places himself outside institutional demands for legibility—whether they be those of art institutions, political regimes, socialities, or the lines (visibly and invisibly) grafted onto the planet that serve to contrive and distinguish one nation-state from another. This is the disquiet that looms among the images; it does not so much make a declaration or clarification, but instead presents the image-reader with both the paradox and denial of monolithic meaning itself.

Carl Heidenreich, Untitled (Alaska Series), 1962. Watercolor and gouache. n.d. Collection of Karla Lortz. Courtesy of the Carl Heidenreich Foundation.

If one reads the Alaskan Archive using Roland Barthes’s distinction of myth as not only the means to which a culture “value[s]”[8] and grants meaning to the world, but also as a tool for perpetuating the idea of society’s adherence to the ideologies of the ruling class (the state) and media (state aide or apparatus), then the myths of Heidenriech’s contemporary moment are charged by the currency of the state’s investment in violence at a global scale. Taking into account this geopolitical perspective and given Heidenreich’s direct experiences with state violence (genocide, torture, family separation, high-risk passage via international refugee routes, and the destruction of homes, beloveds, and communities) and his multiple relocations to nations fraught with its degenerative effects, his life and artistic practice were inescapably shadowed by state power. In the face of insurmountable personal and collective uncertainty, the only certainty offered to Heidenreich was the extremity of the state’s biopolitical power, particularly as he witnessed this power take a turn and operate under the banner of what Achille Mbembe identifies as necropolitical structures and strategies of power.[9] Necropower—the management, and thereby politics of death—operates by making unclear distinctions between life and death in both the physical and the social body. This brings into question how life, and its subjection under state powers, is politicized through life’s very abandonment to the unconditional power of death. What Mbembe makes clear, in conversation with Michel Foucault’s formulation of biopower as the power to “make live and let die,”[10] is the fact that modern state organizations have the power not only to murder en masse, but also to rule over the representation of this fact via sanctioned regimes of sight and broadcast (the media).

Whereas ancient myths connect to agricultural and seasonal cycles, the earth, planetary systems, or celestial unknowns, this is a time marked by the state’s production of myths-at-large, including grand narratives of sovereignty, imperial (and certainly white) supremacy, and biopower. No longer do myths function to nourish communities; now they function to connect persons (subjects) to the state and thereby neutralize the relationship via significations of devotion, mightiness, and success.[11] For instance, in the years following Heidenreich’s arrival to the U.S., images of the atomic bomb detonated in Hiroshima circulated globally. These images produced a disavowal of state-sanctioned mass murder by absenting any and all bodies from the images, an intended or unintended consequence of this visual erasure being to generalize and deny mass murder. The sheer magnitude of the images, spectacularized in form and circulation, both masquerades and drives hegemonic conventions of language, narrative, and vision. In essence, the images stage plumes of smoke as stand-ins for the mass eradication of human beings.

The image of the atomic bomb exploding in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where at least 225,000 people were either severely injured or murdered,[12] is unimaginable and yet readily identifiable in mainstream culture. The image established Hiroshima and Nagasaki globally as sites of U.S. military might in order to perform a relationship that narrativizes U.S. dominance-at-large, a myth that can come to seem natural and given. The visual strategy not only inscribes the U.S. as the center of advanced capitalism, society, and global power, but also marks Hiroshima’s peripheral—killable—position in the audience’s imaginary. The term “mushroom cloud” performs a great denial, invoking a harmless fungus to jettison the bomb’s fatal significance. This figurative language suspends the atomic bomb’s intent to be used for the mass production of individual deaths. Returning to Barthes, myths carry the power to surprise and leave the reader with an indelible residue more potent than any resulting resistance or invalidation might offer. A myth does not need to hide its intentions because its intentions have been neutralized; in the case of the atomic bomb, the following meanings are transmuted to form: “the Empire, my taste for [American] things, the Government.”[13]

Heidenreich experienced the breakdown of a social contract and worldview. From a place of disillusionment, he grieved the former by producing works which re-imagine the myths of the present day. Understanding the power of myth to communicate reality beyond word and image, the process of making a place elsewhere becomes a dedicated practice, thus an applicable strategy for creating an otherwise inaccessible and denied possibility for agency.

Imagining Nowhere

Heidenreich’s Alaskan Archive does not seek to define the limits and possibilities of contentious histories and political movements. Instead, the images project an imaginary elsewhere in transparent layers, treading somewhere between appearance (paint, canvas, paper; from one surface over another) and the undisclosed. Together, the works make the act of place-making urgent, lest it become disappeared. They also hold the knowledge that time and place as projected through their surface will never be—how can the painted image be anything but a fiction?—thereby suspending the series in alterity by distinguishing between here and there, now and never, and consequently assuming the existence of elsewhere. Time does not follow linear or finite logics in Heidenreich’s visual world. Here, creative action puts down the remains of a turning point that never comes to pass. It surrenders form and figure to absorption elsewhere. The imaginary “never” place and “never” time are made sacred, mythic, by existing neither before nor after anything else.

Jackie Valle is a creative steward and cultural producer, working with artists, art thinkers, makers, and mission-driven organizations to realize previously unseen works and projects. Her practice is based on creative inquiry and underscored by deep forms of looking. Here, vision is critical, playful, and ultimately holds court as a site where the body, psyche, and social meet.

  1. Ben Okri, “On Perception and Illusion” (interview by Deborah Treisman), The New Yorker, February 1, 2021.  ↩

  2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: Followed by Working Notes, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000 [1968]), 127. Here, “transparency” refers to the visible and invisible matter that appears and is also appearing through the visual field. “If the flesh is viewed as wholly opaque,” it acts as an obstacle that alienates the perceiver from what is seen. But if “seen through as much as seen, the ‘thickness’ [l’épaisseur, implying something between transparency and opacity] of the flesh is what enables us to be aware of the other and of ourselves as embodied beings, and becomes the means of communication between the two” (127). Further, Merleau-Ponty uses the analogy of something seen through water at the bottom of a pool—and the word used here of the semi-translucent water is l’épaisseur, where the English translation is literal “thickness” (128).  ↩

  3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Sarah Richmond (New York: Washington Square Press/Atria, 2021 [1943]). Facticity, understood as a quality or state of being that refers to facts, factuality, or reality, resists explanation and interpretation. It is paradoxically the central component of one’s experience of the world. According to Sartre, individuals are born into the world or into a “situation” or “facticity,” which imposes limits on the individual by the world. Facticity signifies concrete details against the background of which human freedom exists and is limited (433–37).  ↩

  4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie, trans. William Cobb (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964). Merleau-Ponty articulates this paradox of perception as immanence vis-à-vis transcendence: “The perceived thing itself is paradoxical; it exists only in so far as someone can perceive it … if I attempt to imagine some place in the world which has never been seen, the very fact that I imagine it makes me present at that place. I thus cannot conceive a perceptible place in which I am not myself present. But even the places in which I find myself are never completely given to me; the things which I see are things for me only under the condition that they always recede beyond their immediately given aspects. Thus there is a paradox of immanence and transcendence in perception. Immanence, because the perceived object cannot be foreign to him who perceives; transcendence, because it always contains something more than what is actually given. And these two elements of perception are not, properly speaking, contradictory. For if we reflect on this notion of perspective, if we reproduce the perceptual experience in our thought, we see that the kind of evidence proper to the perceived, the appearance of ‘something,’ requires both this presence and this absence” (16).  ↩

  5. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964).  ↩

  6. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 2013 [1957]), 231.  ↩

  7. Gabriele Saure, Carl Heidenreich (New York: Goethe-Institut, 2004). Although Heidenreich did not offer much commentary on his work or artistic intention, on the significance of light to his practice he writes: “My subject matter is light—light in all its functions and power. The movements of light are transformed into the shapes and forms of the finished composition. Friends of the works refer to it as ‘Luminism’” (121).  ↩

  8. Barthes, Mythologies, 238.  ↩

  9. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.  ↩

  10. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003 [1997]), 239. Mbembe questions what Foucault’s biopower can and cannot account for: “Under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?” (“Necropolitics,” 12). Furthermore, Mbembe notes that certain lives are lived in an ongoing state of basic survival—in particular, bodies of color where “no rule” is the rule. He speaks to the non-subject of dominant power, i.e., the “undead” who exist in a camp, plantation, penitentiary, or colony where bio- and necropower meet at an intersection. Furthermore, Mbembe refers to those who exist in places where all things are possible, namely, the horror of being always almost already dead and nearly alive: “My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of human bodies and populations” (14). The contemporary prison is an example of such a place, as a state-sanctioned site of mass human eradication.  ↩

  11. Barthes, “Preface to 1957 Edition,” in Mythologies. The break in the sociological functions of myth and subsequent disillusionment and frustrations are articulated by Barthes: “The starting point of these reflections [on mythologies] was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the 'naturalness' with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (xi).  ↩

  12. “It is not unlikely that the estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are over conservative,” according to “Children of the Atomic Bomb: A UCLA Physician’s Eyewitness Report and Call to Save the World’s Children,” accessed May 2, 2022, https://www.aasc.ucla.edu/cab/200708230009.html.  ↩

  13. Barthes, Mythologies, 232.  ↩