The pedestal of the National Monument in Berlin attracts its fair share of ambivalence. Now an empty space in the centre of Berlin, it once bore a monolithic equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Commissioned by the emperor’s grandson and namesake, Kaiser Wilhelm II, the monument sought to embody the strength of Germany’s unity as a nation, later being gratefully incorporated into the mythology of the Third Reich. Though the East German government toyed with the idea of replacing the monument with a memorial to antifascism, the empty pedestal of the figure dismantled in 1950 was to become the memorial, another site having been chosen to showcase the symbolism of the new system.

It was the defiant emptiness of this strangely expectant pedestal which sparked the idea behind Victor Kégli and Filomeno Fusco’s large-scale art installation weiss 104. Passing by the pedestal one evening in the early days of the new millennium, Kégli found himself participating in that old Berlin pastime of putting something on the pedestal, of making one’s own monument so to speak. The lethargically malfunctioning washing machine tossing a dirty I  Ungarn T-shirt he had just come from installing at the Centrum Hungaricum suddenly multiplied before his eyes to become a battalion of washing machines assembled in rank and file, a vast liberation army of white goods proffering some kind of strange topographical link between the Federal Chancellery, the Palast der Republik, the Foreign Office and the Deutsches Historisches Museum. An inspired conversation with Fusco later and their millennial meta-monument was in the making.

All intended monuments have something of the washing machine about them. No matter how many horses or dragons they might sport or how opulent or minimal they might be, no matter how large or small, mythical, abstract or would-be close to the bone – in functional terms they inevitably cleanse and rinse and spin their contents; they remove traces and stains, seemingly restoring their object to some earlier, though not originary, state. Bearing in mind the relatively short lifespan of specific iconographies and the perceived relentlessness of historical events, in most cases a monument’s simple attestation of the cleansing rituals of cultural production by far outlasts the legibility of its content. As Kégli and Fusco’s 104 unlikely heroes gracing the pedestal of the National Monument made manifest: What monuments consolidate more than anything else is an institution’s need for consolidation.

Connected to the city’s water and electricity supplies and surrounded by clothes lines, for all their sculptural pretensions the washing machines made no secret of their instrumentality. Unveiled on 2 September 2000 amid one of Germany’s juicier political scandals, the laundry was open to the public twelve hours a day, seven days a week in the month leading up to the national celebration of the ten-year anniversary of German unity on 3 October. As befitting the inauguration of any memorial of substance, the action was accompanied by a programme of events, music, talks, demonstrations, performances, and equally befitting such an inception, some of the tens of thousands of visitors were rather concerned with the potential symbolism of the monument while others were more interested in the free public laundry, quickly accepting it as a welcome and self-evident part of the urban landscape.

By including in the title the pseudo-significant number of 104, the artists pointed both to the arbitrary nature of the signifiers selected for us by the state and to the role we play as inhabitants of a city and a culture in imbuing our environment with meaning, irrespective of whether one was intended or not. Indeed, even Kégli and Fusco found themselves constructing convincing historical references for the number of washing machines they had in fact arrived at by chance. There was paragraph 104 of the legal code, for example, in which the process of denazification was set down in law in 1946, or there were the 104 years to have elapsed since the unveiling of Kaiser Wilhelm’s National Monument in 1896. Yet more important than such potential meanings, however worthy of remembering each may be in its own right, is the acknowledgment that monuments have a limited control over their narrative, that the washing machine is as legitimate a historical hero as any, that memorials often have a lot more to do with forgetting than remembering and, as history has shown, for the most part endure as a place to sit and pass the time of day.

Catherine Nichols)