Abstract
Circus Wols is a multimedia spectacle conceived by Wols during World War II at the Camp des Milles where he was interned between May and October 1940. As a German citizen, the artist was considered an enemy of France and Circus helped him bear the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. Wols envisioned a show of high intellectual and aesthetic value that would employ advanced technology but remain accessible to the masses. As such, it is comparable to a utopian avant-garde total artwork. However, through its assumed incompletion and fragmentation, Circus Wols destabilized the ambitions of the avant-garde and modernism; it even went further, rejecting anthropocentrism. Shortly after his liberation from the camp, Wols began to claim that his art should not be considered a human creation. Prefigured by Circus Wols, the artist’s dismissal of European humanism as a valid social and cultural paradigm only grew after the war. His stance is best understood in relation to the contemporaneous notion of “abhumanism”, first theorized by playwright Jacques Audiberti, and embraced by Wols’s close friend, artist and poet Camille Bryen. The article argues that approaching Wols through the lens of abhumanism highlights the pressing historical concerns of his work, which, associated with post-war Parisian Abstraction, is usually depoliticized.
Highlights
Like many other German citizens residing in France, Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951), known as Wols, was arrested in September 1939 when France declared war on Germany
It is my contention that considering Wols’s project as an abhumanist response to World War II underscores the historical importance of both Circus Wols and abhumanism, suggesting a reconsideration of post-World-War-II cultural history as well as a historical precedent for such contemporary notions as posthumanism (Section 5)
Even though Wols was an utterly singular creator, his feeling that his art was not human recalls the precepts of abhumanism, a largely overlooked and deliberately downplayed (Guérin 1999, pp. 10, 24; Toloudis 1980, pp. 109–11) philosophical literary trend which emerged in his neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés after the Second World War, led by writer and playwright Jacques Audiberti
Summary
Like many other German citizens residing in France, Otto Wolfgang Schulze (1913–1951), known as Wols, was arrested in September 1939 when France declared war on Germany. The subsequent discussion will focus on its oscillation between joyful fantasy and gruesome war experience (Section 3.1) as well as its paradoxical combination of humanist utopianism and rejection of the humanist paradigm. It will critically analyze the criteria and methodologies according to which Wols has been considered in art history (Section 4.1), exposing the relevance of abhumanism to Wols’s oeuvre (Section 4.2). It is my contention that considering Wols’s project as an abhumanist response to World War II underscores the historical importance of both Circus Wols and abhumanism, suggesting a reconsideration of post-World-War-II cultural history as well as a historical precedent for such contemporary notions as posthumanism (Section 5)
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