Die Plage
Die Plage (English: The Plague) is a large-scale photomontage installation by artist and composer Harley Gaber (1943–2011) consisting of roughly 4,200 canvases that interpret German history from the Weimar Republic to the end of World War II.
Gaber had a lifelong fascination with German culture: historical references recur throughout the entirety of his creative output, in visual arts and music alike, though nowhere more thoroughly than in Die Plage.
[3][4] Gaber's Die Plage may refer to Albert Camus' 1947 work of the same name, La Peste, a novel about political morality and humanity during a plague in Algeria as an allegory of the French resistance to Nazi occupation in World War II.
[5][6] To make the canvases in Die Plage, Gaber used a range of techniques including collage, photomontage, painting, xerographic manipulation, pastel, and charcoal.
Die Plage as a whole (running across the walls in five straight, continuous lines) mimics the form of sheet music, while the blank canvases act as notations for "pause and counterpoint,"[6] as rest notes would.
Gaber's approach to Die Plage draws inspiration from German photomontage pioneers Hannah Höch, John Heartfield, and George Grosz, whose influence is acknowledged in several canvases within the series.
Höch, Heartfield, and Grosz, as artistic collaborators in the avant-garde Dadaist and New Objectivity movements, were credited with inventing the "anti-art" technique of pasting together pre-existing photographs, text, and clippings.
[9] The first section is dedicated to the Weimar Republic (1918–1933)[11] and the first seven years of the Third Reich, including Hitler's rise in popularity, propaganda campaigns, the political defamation of modern art, the 1936 Olympics and the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibition.
[9] Jonathan Saville of the San Diego Reader described the relationship between Die Plage's movements, writing, "images are introduced like musical themes, reappearing again and again, continually transformed.
"[7] Gaber wrote in the program for his Half Moon Bay Coastal Repertory Theater exhibit: In Die Plage, I make distinctions regarding how and why people behaved as they did where others see unanimity of intent.
After a while, you become aware of the remarkable artistry displayed in each of the individual canvases, the powerful composition, the dramatic treatment of darks and lights, the fabulously expressive use of such aesthetic elements as repetition, contrast, density, patterning, and texture, where even the graininess of the enlarged photos is given an artistic purpose (Gaber's medium may be photo-montage, but his sensibilities and talents are those of a painter – and an exceptionally gifted one).
Mark Shlim, after seeing the installation at The Laboratory in Los Angeles, critiqued Die Plage in an essay in Artists' News in April 2000, alleging that Gaber's art-historical collages amounted to an appropriation of the Shoah's place in the Jewish 20th century identity.
