With regard to images, the media theorist Vilém Flusser speaks of “significant surfaces” [1], which also applies to photographs. A fundamental difference between photographic, technically mediated images and those assigned to the classic visual media results from the act of their creation. In comparison to painting, the most important reference medium, photography has something random about it. Emerging from a process of searching—which in the camera as such manifests itself in the so-called “viewfinder”—the photographic image is described as a found one. It preserves a moment that has already passed using the appropriate physical, chemical or digital technology. The analogue photograph appears as an imprint of light and is interpreted as a trace of the real world. [2] It testifies to the actual existence of a person or situation in the past. [3] Because of these characteristics, photographs have served as a medium of remembrance and as externalised memory since the mid-19th century. [4] This has hardly changed to this day. In the age of selfies, which are taken in their millions and spread via social networks, they become proof of the existence of the actors.

The various aspects of photography are related in several respects to the artistic process underlying Markus Döhne’s work. He belongs to the generation that questioned the silence and suppression efforts predominant with the war and immediate post-war generation and significantly influenced West German memory and remembrance culture. Driven by his interest in historical events and social processes in the context of the history of the left, which are conveyed through mass media, i.e. images and texts, Döhne combs through analog and digital image repositories and archives in search of image material that is aesthetically, formally, and content-wise useful to him. He finds it published in newspapers, magazines, books or on the Internet. With their publication, the photographs lose some of their original materiality and objectivity. Of course, this only applies if they were created analogically and existed as paper prints. In terms of this loss, the photographs depicted are similar to images of other visual media and artifacts. It is precisely the frequently reproduced images that are imprinted in our cultural memory. André Malraux explored this question of reproduction in detail in his Imaginary Museum, thus giving photography and reproduction a new meaning beyond Walter Benjamin’s aura theory. [5]

For Döhne, the images that have become icons due to their mass distribution are less interesting. He devotes himself to the repressed, not to the intrusive. The fact that he does not include any of the well-known photos of the American moon landing in his latest group of works, which examines space travel during the Cold War, confirms this observation. Compared to the Americans who documented their flight to the moon in detail and broadcast it live […] the advance of the first human being into space was only sparsely documented. Yuri Gagarin was photographed before takeoff. We see the launch of the rocket and photographic evidence of his return. Apart from the launch, the actual flight remained without images. The advance into space seemed impossible to represent and could only be imagined. This gave the event which was perceived worldwide in the context of the Judeo-Christian concept of resurrection, ascension and return a special ideological connotation. The Soviet Union conquered the skies, the USA the moon. Against this backdrop, it is all the more astonishing that the moon landing which became a media spectacle has never completely shaken off suspicions of being a fake staged by Hollywood. It also testifies to the distrust of photography. When Döhne shows various Russian and American rocket types, a monkey and portraits of American astronauts he evades this discourse.

He prefers to operate in an indirect manner. This distinguishes him significantly from Andy Warhol, whose work is occasionally used as a comparison. Warhol, who stylized himself as an icon of Pop Art, was one of the founders of this form of artistic appropriation of photography as a material and used precisely those idols and fetishes of the consumer world (including Marilyn Monroe and Mao) that are absent from Döhne's work. Like Warhol, Döhne also subjects his imagery to various stages of transformation. Details of the photographic material are cutout, enlarged, color-shifted, or blurred. The rockets and groups of people, the ladders, filing cabinets and interiors, the blurred portraits and abstract structures that can hardly be assigned to the real world have become useless as visual evidence that depicts specific situations or documents events. When removed from context and alienated, the photographic images lose their function, including their significance “as fetishes of a private memory cult”. [6] However, with this transformation and fragmentation, the visual information of the moment captured in the photograph, the essence, can emerge even more clearly. For example, when people flee and scatter or shadowy silhouettes of individual figures move across larger surfaces, as seen in the work group Green Screens, Refugee Series. (1999–2008), a sense of unease is conveyed that requires no explanatory text. It corresponds to a general collective experience.

The work Cinéma shows the negative of an empty auditorium with rows of seats and a projection screen. The photograph was taken in the Buchenwald concentration camp; the cinema was used to show films and newsreels for the camp inmates and camp employees. A view into the cinema hall provides no information about the mass murders that took place in the immediate vicinity. Even the title doesn't provide any direct information. The red in which Döhne immerses the image as well as the black screen create a sense of unease that only becomes fully apparent in the context.

Georges Didi-Hubermann describes a similar constellation in his study Images Despite All That. There, the author focuses on several photos that were secretly taken in 1944 in the Auschwitz concentration camp and smuggled out of the camp. Their informational content is minimal. One of these images shows only the silhouette of branches against the sky. A moment captured by chance that testifies to the situation and circumstances of the image's creation. Georges Didi-Hubermann comments that: “each of these images is an indecipherable and meaningless photograph as long as one does not imagine a speculative connection that links what one sees there with what one knows from another source.” [7] Both aspects can be found when looking at Döhne’s various groups of works and the imagery he has selected. He processes unimportant moments of important events just as he creates images whose existential and documentary content coincides with the significance of the event. In both cases, his works are given context through the title, i.e., through words, even if this context is just as fragmentary and blurred as the images themselves. He names the places where the depicted events took place. For the knowledgeable, the story is brought back to life through the location. The titles of other works refer to individuals, often artists of the Soviet avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century whose work is significant to him.

For example, there is a portrait of Vladimir Mayakovsky based on a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko. It is titled Rodcenco (1989). Another work shows two iron structures towering into the sky, which he calls Tatlintransmitted – Dedicado al pueblo de Valencia de la Tercera República (1990). In all of his works, he combines artistic reflection on historical and social processes with the question of their representability in images. If Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is based on the presumption that only text, not images, can bear witness to the events, Döhne is among those working to prove the opposite.

He began his first major body of work, which also marked the beginning of his exploration of sculptural issues, in 1988/89 with the series 40blöcke. Forty paraffin blocks are housed in twelve display cases. They depict images that appear blurred, as if cast in place. In fact, the reprographically processed photographic material was screen-printed onto the blocks and then coated with a thin layer of paraffin. The display case places the work in the context of museum collections. Museums are places of collecting and preservation. They serve cultural memory.

In subsequent groups of works, he presents large rolls of paraffin, such as Petrograd Tubes (1991/92). In Pamplona Rotation, the title and construction evoke the rotary printing presses used in newspaper printing. In this way, he links the reference to the historical event with the production process of the newspaper as a mass medium, which serves as his primary visual source.

The paraffin he uses is an industrially produced substitute for the natural material wax and is still connected to its extensive material symbolism to such an extent that it is worth looking at the works from the perspective of the material, especially since Döhne himself refers to them as wax works. The decision to use a substance similar to wax introduces a material that lends the works additional symbolic charge. Since Plato, the easily malleable wax has served as a symbol of the soul and the ability to remember. One basis for this symbolic meaning is probably the wax tablet as a medium for writing, which was already in use by Plato, but also the special material properties of wax, which predestined the material for the reproduction of the human body or individual parts for ritual and secular use.

In Theaetetus, Plato formulates his wax metaphor: “So now, so that we may at least have a word, let me place in our souls a waxen cast that can receive impressions, larger in some, smaller in others, some of purer wax, some of dirtier, some harder, some wetter, some just as it should be [...] This, we shall say, is a gift from the mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne; and whatever we wish to remember of what we have seen or heard, or even thought ourselves, we impress on this cast, [...] as when sealing with the stamp of a ring. Whatever is imprinted, we remember and know it, as long as its image remains. But if this image has been erased, or if it could not be imprinted at all, we forget the thing and do not know it.” [8] Similar to photography, Plato’s theory is also about an impression that is added to the material wax. It leaves a haptic and visual trace. The trace of light on the light-sensitive layer of the film is inaccessible. Analogue photos, reproductions in magazines and even prints of digital photographs are material and can be touched. When Döhne prints images on paraffin and covers them with another layer of paraffin, they elude visual and haptic access. They are there, preserved as it were, yet unattainable. What he achieves in the wax blocks through the production process is resolved in the green screen work complex through presentation. The images hang unattainably high, as if floating away. The motif of being unattainable or of being lost from view can also be found in Á Nous les Fraises – (1996/97). Of the figure depicted we only see the legs on the ladder.

Even memories can disappear. In Siegmund Freud’s text Note on the Magic Pad [9], a child’s toy serves as a model of the unconscious. A wax-coated tablet is covered by a sheet of tracing paper attached to the tablet. When writing on the tablet with a stylus, the text is initially visible because the paper partially adheres to the waxy surface due to the pressure of the stylus. A slider placed between the paper and the wax layer separates the paper from the wax layer. The writing disappears, remaining as a trace in the wax layer, but can be repeatedly overwritten. Freud's model can be read as an analogy to Döhne’s working method. The contrast between visibility and disappearance is present, directly or indirectly, in all of his paintings. He uses it as a symbol for cultural memory. The connotations of the materials and techniques correspond precisely to this artistic intention. As solid as the paraffin works appear, they remain fragile. They could break or melt. This would not only destroy his works, but also the traces and testimonies of memory stored there.

The works on wood, including the Rockets exhibited in Wiesbaden (from 2011 onwards), are of a different nature. Panels covered with silver leaf serve as the picture support onto which several layers of lacquer are applied using screen printing. The paint thus stands almost three-dimensionally on the ground, which makes the depiction of the missiles appear more present. The material and composition of the image refer to the origins of Western panel painting with its golden skies. The selected photographic material shows the rockets during launch or in flight. Döhne illustrates the flight motion through the image details, their composition on the picture surface and by attaching the panels to the walls. The slight distance between the panels and the wall makes the images float. Some rockets almost dissolve in some places due to the enlarged raster of the original image material. Some have slipped away from view. We see them only as colored traces on black. They are on their way. Skywards.

Gdansk, Easter 2015