I
If one approaches Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie in the Spring of 2008, this icon of modernist architecture will appear marked. In its neighbourhood of the still crumbling chic of Potsdamer Strasse, amidst the zestful Kulturforum and flanked to the East by the flashy architecture of Potsdamer Platz, Mies van der Rohe’s building gives an alien impression, time and time again. Now, the austere clarity of the cube is interrupted by hangings that give the impression of amulti-coloured barcode fromafar. For this year’s fifth edition of berlin biennale, Daniel Knorr has lined the rim of the overlapping roof of the building with coloured, vertically-aligned textile panels. On closer examination, one notices that the line of panels is incomplete on the west side, where it is cut short after one fifth of the length. This void does not represent a metaphorical gesture, but emanates froma factual constraint: The hangings consist of the banners of all student fraternities that have in the past and presently do exist in the city of Berlin.1 As the banner’s distribution follows the numeric proportion of the roof’s steel-frame structure, their limited amount accounts for the above-mentioned gap. Beyond these demuremodulations, as an additional formal gesture, the artist’s choice to align the colour panels vertically contrastswith their traditional horizontal orientation in representational use.
Knorr’s Nationalgalerie (2008) is a work that requires the spectator to adopt at least two different, but complementary, points of view. The external view of the building raises questions about the interrelations between the banners and the Neue Nationalgalerie as an institution and architectural landmark, which is imbedded in a number of specific historic, economic and institutional contexts. In contrast to such a reflection on the locality of the event, when perceived frominside the glass gallery building, the banners create a setting that initiates a contemplation of society as a whole. In this mode of perception, the signifier ‘nation’, as it appears in the title, becomes virulent in a twofold way: in its reference to a situated space of interaction and as well as to a political and historical construction.
Daniel Knorr establishes a heterogeneous territory of reception that draws on political, cultural and artisticmodels of representation. In the onward processes of reading, these appear as ciphers that allow negotiations of specifically artistic as well as broader societal issues. The straightforward gesture in which the artist addresses these models offers a prism to observe the changes and ruptures that these concepts undergo over time. Here, a heterogeneitymay be seen to shape the character and actions of student fraternities in the history of German society, the political and aesthetic inscriptions associatedwith the Neue Nationalgalerie as an institution, aswell as the potentials of interpretation offered by the corpus of its collection.

II
When Daniel Knorr deals with the subject of student fraternities, he explicitly includes the less visible but maybe even more influential networks of Ehemalige (‘old grads’); this suggests a sensitive perception of sociopolitical processes and their formal expressions. With their persisting and intricate entanglements, these organisations are prominent examples of seemingly outdated social formations, that have blended well with contemporary liberal developments. The German Burschenschaften (‘corporations’) represent a peculiar type of fraternity, unknown to other countries. Tracing their roots to German nationalist and unificationmovements in the 1800s, their evolution becomes closely intertwined with the history of the German nation state.
Collegiate associations were already developing in the course of the creation of the European universities in the middle ages. Their international air was reflected by the gathering of students in so called nationes, whose orientation was however based more on territorial attributions—measured by the points of a compass—rather than on the existing national boarders within which they ‘belonged’. In the seventeenth century, as German universities increasingly came under the influence of the regional sovereigns, Landsmannschaften (‘territorial associations’) emerged as the first private student fraternities, who time and again aroused the suspicion of university officials with extensive feasts and carousals. Besides the maintenance of these traditions, Landsmannschaften were the first to introduce attire and banners as community symbols. In the eighteenth century, the Studentenorden (‘student order’) were formed, which were modelled on masonic lodges. Here the substantial common characteristics of fraternities, still effective today, became manifest for the first time; namely the constitution, as charter and fundamental law in one, and the principle of Lebensbund (‘life’s bond’) that defines a lifelong affiliation and solidarity to the organisation. Later, the Convent came along, an assembly that guarantees full and equal vote to all members.
In the Napoleonic Wars the Freikorps (‘free corps’), whose volunteers were mainly university students and who maintained close personal and ideological links to the later Burschenschaften, acted as a military avant-garde in the struggle against French occupation, partly in opposition to the German sovereigns, who still held a formal coalition with Imperial France. With the foundation of the umbrella association Allgemeine Deutsche Burschenschaft in 1817, a most apparently political branch of the fraternity movement was formed. Since then and up to the present day, the Burschenschaften focus on the themes of a free and united German fatherland, national identity and tradition. It seems inevitable that this folk-nationalist (or more precisely, what the Germans refer to as völkisch) orientation would also offer a stand for positions of the extreme right. But notwithstanding the fact that already at the foundation of the Burschenschaftliche Vereinigung, a significant event took place involving the ritual burning of writings and objects classified as anti-national or ‘un-german’, a simple equation to national-socialist ideology falls short.
With the creation of internal laws and constitutions at the dawn of the nineteenth century, the fraternities had already established democratic structures, while many countries were still denying to their citizens the most basic rights of gathering and participation. In this respect, they acted as precursors of a movement that, in 1848, led to the formation of the first national assembly in the Frankfurt Paulskirche and the proclamation of a German nation. This constellation attests to the fact that the German national flag, with its combination of the colours black, red and gold, originates from the fraternity context—the tricolour first served as a banner of the Jena-based Urburschenschaft in 1815. A century later in 1919, as an expression of its civic-republican orientation, the Weimar Republic adopted those colours referring to the revolutionary years of the German confederation. While the Third Reich returned to the imperial banner black-white-red in 1933, after the defeat of Nazi Germany the colours black-red-gold returned and were respectively branded with the national emblem of each German state: Western Germany’s federal eagle and the GDR’s hammer and compass.
Despite, or maybe because of, their emphatic commitment to the idea of a German nation, the fraternities never straightforwardly identified with an existing state or society as a whole. This characteristic emerged for the first time in their avant-garde role in the liberation wars, and was reflected by a ban they faced in the course of the antiliberal Carlsbad Decrees, which lasted for decades. And although their male völkisch egalitarianismaimed at representing amodel for an ideal national community, in reality it was never an integrative and all-comprising, but an elitist concept. This self-perception as an elite, involving the idea of the cultivation of an integrated personality, is reflected by the aspiration of graduates to assume political and social positions of power and leadership. However, from a more pragmatic stance, it can also refer to the strategy of forming an influential solidarity-based network with the purpose of funnelling positions of high influence, prestige and income to fellow fraternity members.
It is possible for an outsider to see through such interrelations and linkages only to a very limited degree. Fraternity behaviour and markings rarely resonate in the same sense within and outside its exclusive circles. The banners and emblems decorating old respectable city mansions in German university towns or quarters that one occasionally catches sight of, could thus be seen both as ciphers—referring to an invisible set of rules and agreements—and as camouflage. In quite a similar manner, the Schmiss, a duelling scar deliberately inflicted to the face in some fraternities, is used as a mark that allows members to recognise each other at official occasions without further communication and more or less unnoticeable for outsiders. Aims, strategies and actions thus often remain opaque; although sometimes they can be traced quite easily.
One case of brief and unexpected transparency came via the reaction to the broadcast of an episode of the popular German Sunday TV crime series Tatort in the fall of 2007. The entirely fictional storyline involved a student fraternity as a subject to the inquiries in a murder case. One of the issues dealt with were the male bonding rituals of the traditional duelling fraternities such as the Mensur, which is a swordplay ritual between corps members. The very next day, the largest German tabloid, edited by the Springer group BILD, gave an account of the “Mysterious ARD-Tatort on student’s fraternities: Do these bloody rituals really exist?”2 and felt itself compelled reciprocally to depict the fraternities in an all-to positive and sometimes even factually wrong manner.3 Such a reaction to a TV series is rather uncommon, but an extraordinarymotive could be linked to the fact that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Kai Diekmann, is himself an active member of a fraternity. Finally one of the co-authors of the article, which concluded with a link to an organisation’s web site touting “Tradition with a Future”, turned out to be a fraternity’s PR agent.4
Student fraternities exist world-wide and most of them only share a few characteristics with the German Burschenschaften, which represent something of a historical peculiarity. Many of them define their common interest as sportive, scientific or confessional. There have also been Jewish fraternities and women’s fraternities have increasingly appeared in the meantime. The diversity of orientations notwithstanding, fraternities share the conception of a virtually hermetic sociality taken as a vantage point for a proactive expansion of influence and activity. Representing a functional unity, they are able to take advantage of fissures showing up in functional structures of society, that cannot be capitalised on by their own dependants and other individuals due to lack of mobilisation and resources. However, seen from the perspective of present outlines of network economies that conceive of individuals as intersections of the most heterogeneous communicative relations, it is precisely their internal homogeneity and the connected mechanisms of discrimination that render the traditional fraternity model a rather inflexible structure.

III
As it is constantly shown by various strategies of reinterpretation, the concepts and images of representational politics appear to be more open to change. This also applies to a seemingly established entity, such as a national gallery.
Similar to the genesis of other public museums, the motive for the creation of a national gallery in Berlin was to make formerly private art treasures accessible to a greater public, when in 1861 Wilhelm I of Prussia placed donations by the collector and banker Johann HeinrichWagner at public disposal for the foundation of a museum. The main focus of this collection and the consequent exhibitions were and—in case of the present Alte Nationalgalerie —still are works of Romanticism and the French Impressionists.
An important figure for the creation of the later Neue Nationalgalerie was Ludwig Justi, director of the institution from 1909 to 1933. With the reorganisation of the collection and the additional opening of a venue for contemporary art in the Kronprinzenpalais Unter den Linden, he set important benchmarks for further development. Between 1919 and 1939—and suffering serious setbacks towards the end—his was the first model for a progressively orientated extension to the Gallery. As with many cultural institutions, the Nazi take-over did not leave the Nationalgalerie unaffected. Directors were incessantly replaced and, in 1937, in the course of the ‘degenerate art’ campaign, the authorities deaccessioned 435 works fromits collection. Later, the main establishment and the Kronprinzenpalais were shut down completely, and during World War II a great deal of their inventory was displaced to different locations in Germany for security reasons. After the end of the war, the magistrate of the city of Berlin resolved to create a collection of contemporary art which, for the time being, would belong to the city. But when Berlin was divided in 1948, the Soviet authorities resumed the operation of the present Alte Nationalgalerie, whereas the West went a separate way. Following the merger of the city’s collection with the inventory of the Nationalgalerie that had been deposited on western territories, all works were temporarily placed in the Schloss Charlottenburg. The construction of the wall in 1961 then indefinitely deferred the possibility of a merger of eastern and western inventory. Consequently the senate of West Berlin decided on a representative new building to house a collection of twentieth century art, as part of the newly created Kulturforum in the centre of Berlin, on the threshold of the wall.
The commission of the German-born Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—illustrious exponent of modernism and one of the most prominent architects of the era—for the project sent a decisive signal. With its transparency, clarity and modernity the Neue Nationalgalerie became a symbol for western progressiveness and pre-eminence. Remarkably, the draft design was not even destined for amuseumfunction in the first place. Faithfully adhering to his conception of an universal architecture,Mies van der Rohe transposed ideas that already had been the basis of his plans for an administration building for the Bacardi Rum Company at Santiago de Cuba in 1957 to his sole realised museum project. As the architect had been granted the broadest creative freedom, he could strive for the greatest degree of aesthetic universality, in a tendency that at the same time inhibited a museum-specific layout. Nevertheless its pure and clear composition is in accord with the rhythm of the neo-classical Altes Museum on Berlin’s Museumsinsel designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1825. There is a number of further details that show the architect’s pronounced awareness of the symbolic stakes of the task. The distinctive presence of the vitreous corpus is accentuated by a basement, which represents the functional core of the museum, containing its collection in a setting that is invisible from the outside and has a rather conventional interior design. Furthermore, the advocate of industrially prefabricated assembly parts, Mies van der Rohe has allowed himself an exemption from serial production for the eight supporting pillars of the extended roof, whose tapered gradient quotes design features of classical representational edifices. Thus, in outright opposition to his own modernist ideal of pure functional form, in the case of the Neue Nationalgalerie Mies van der Rohe repeatedly opted for an architectural aesthetic interpretation.5
The museum was opened in 1968 under its first director Werner Haftmann. Its curatorial tendency appears to be most distinct in the 1980s as well as the immediate present. Dieter Honisch, director from 1975 to 1997, especially pursued an acquisition policy that drew close connections between American and European art. In this respect he acquired highly symbolic works such as Ellsworth Kelly’s Grey Panels or Barnett Newman’s Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV acquired in 1980s. Given such an apparent orientation to the United States as West Germany’s most powerful ally, it is quite understandable that the Neue Nationalgalerie —both in its form and content—becomes one of the most prominent symbols of the city’s division. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the following reorientation of the city’s museums and collections, the focus temporarily shifted to the history of the two German states, and the museum became a location that stood for the crossing of boundaries and the overcoming of partition in a newly reunified German Republic. Nowadays, under its soon retiring director Klaus-Peter Schuster, and particularly fostered by the activities of the ‘friends of the Neue Nationalgalerie_’, it presents itself as a participant in the circuit of globalised art events. With _Das MoMA in Berlin in 2004 and Die schönsten Franzosen kommen aus New York, in co-operationwith two renowned New York institutions, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum, global culture-brandswere strategically deployed and superlative visitor numbers achieved. Yet its present stand and historical significance do not result from a striking affinity to, and mere somnambulant flair for, the most influential grand narratives of modern art. Rather, its aesthetic decisions remain inextricable entangled with political as well as economical constraints and strategies.

IV
Part of Daniel Knorr’s work Nationalgalerie consists of background material, comprised of sketches and photomontages and a series of research photos that Knorr shot in the Neue Nationalgalerie itself. Significantly, these shots not only show the respective artworks, but also the adjoining labels. With this gesture, Daniel Knorr not only explicitly makes an issue of the museum’s inventory and acquisition policy, but also establishes a focus on the modes of presentation and reception that contextualise the works within the exhibition setting.
As these photos establish a relationship between fraternity flags replicated outside and the museum’s inventory, they play on a formal affinity between the flags’ hard-edged areas of flat colours and the formalist and conceptual works of artists like Barnett Newman, Imi Knoebel and Ellsworth Kelly. And as Knorr alludes to the correspondence between this tradition ofmodernist painting and the abstract codes of political signification, his work can be read as a meta-commentary on prior artistic and political strategies. Stands ofmodernist Colour Field painting, with their programof the emancipation of colour from factual reference, excluded any social impact in favour of the intended, immediate sensual impression. In the case of the banners however, it is a similar emblematic composition that enables their functionality and universal comprehensibility within political interaction. In the light of this juxtaposition, works that strive for pure visual presence by suspending social context in pure colour, can conversely be adopted as projection screens in the framework of political and ideological positioning.
Processes of intertwining and even contradictory signification become particularly apparent with regard to the museum labels which represent both a reception manual for the viewer and a form of historical classification. For example, if in the case of Barnett Newman’s Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue IV, “the new position of America”6 is identified, this work assumes an immediate obligation to represent a western political stance that refers beyond art; beyond this an interconnection between this ‘new position’ and the political concepts that go along with the museum’s architectural designmay be perceived. Already with incidents accompanying its acquisition it became apparent that Newman’s iconic painting had a symbolic meaning that did not meet an indifferent public. When the then director Dieter Honisch, largely funded by the friends of the Nationalgalerie, purchased the number IV for 1.2 million US-dollars, he faced public and private affront.
Within the assemblage of icons of modernist abstract painting used by Daniel Knorr as a reference, the reproduction of George Grosz’ Stützen der Gesellschaft (‘pillars of society’, 1926) stands out. This gesture initially appears as a historical reference to the topic of student fraternities, given that it shows a stereotypical alumnus (Ehemalige) of a fencing fraternity, adorned with a rapier and a coloured ribbon, bearing both fraternity colours as well as a duelling scar and a swastika. But again the classification on the adjoining label is more conspicous:

The title is an allusion to Henrik Ibsen’s drama of the same title.With biting fierceness Grosz caricatures the footholds of the Weimar state hierarchy. Behind a Stammtischbruder7, bearing a duelling scar and swastika, there congregates an assembly of the press, politicians, the church, andmilitary. Disclosing the skullcaps of those representatives of the state, Grosz unmasks ‘the elite of mankind as ‘virtual pigs’ (Berthold Brecht)—a bitter reckoning with the republic from a leftist radical’s point of view.8

In a manner that is not necessarily evident, the text panel pushes Grosz into the domain of the radical left. It remains unclear, however, whether the label’s authors based their classification—one that has quite strong connotations in Germany—on Grosz’ short time membership in the German communist party (KPD), which he left due to his opposition to any kind of dictatorship, or if the identification was based solely on the stylistic device of critical exaggeration. The display of political signs in their social context seems to provoke a compulsion to identify a political message and a correlative stakeholder. The presentation and intermediation of art places its objects into a culturalpolitical regime that conveys an institution’s self-conception, as well as it actively shapes the views of its audience.

V
Art itself always operates on a symbolic level and only on this level can it provoke change. Seen that way, Nationalgalerie has the potential to establish significance, but at the same time to challenge and suspend the certainty of signs. The work becomes the intersection of different lines among which the coloured barcode set by Daniel Knorr acts as a reference point for a number of heterogeneous aesthetic statements. The formal correspondence between the banners and the positions of American modernist painting from the 1960s opens up a space for reflection wherein a tension unfolds between the cancelling of symbolic function in favour of opaque presence and its deployment in the context of symbolic policies. Within this realm of representational politics, the multiple quotation of ‘nation’ shows how this concept itself is heterogeneous, fragile and pervaded with internal ruptures. The specific genealogy of national emblems refers to the fact that a given concept of the nation is to some extent the effect of a policy set by particular groups, who themselves have diverse aims and strategies. Likewise, the concept of a national gallery appears to be—among other things—a strategic unit that co-opts the seemingly universal formal vocabulary ofmodernismas a demarcation of a political position. By appropriating aesthetic and political material and placing this reflection in a concrete historical context, Daniel Knorr renders transparent historically sedimented societal narratives, all the while opening up a unique space of experience.

NOTES
1. According to the umbrella association Marburger Konvent studentischer Verbindungen the number of student fraternities in the city of Berlin adds up to fifty-nine, including one fraternity that does not bear any banner.
2. http://www.bild.t-online.de/BTO/leute/2007/10/29/tatortserie/studenten-verbindung-ritual,geo=2793542.html
3. http://www.bildblog.de/?cat=4%3Cbr%20/%3E&paged=3
4. http://www.tradition-mit-zukunft.de/community/article_o.php?p=index
5. Posener, J. 1973. ‘Absolute Architektur’, Neue Rundschau 84(1): 79–95.
6. The complete words are: „Barnett Newman was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He represented an art that is uncompromisingly abstract, but at the same time addresses sensation in an intensemanner. It is the distinctive feature of this tableau to build a bridge between European and American painting. With the isolation of colour, that had been traditionally bound to objects and meanings, Newman represents the new position of America. Beyond that, European traditions are called up that trace back to Malevich, Mondrian and Matisse.”
7. Term is virtually impossible to translate. It literally means ‘member of a regular‘s table’ and in this case is used pejoratively to refer to the fact that these all-male gatherings are commonly regarded as the breeding ground for ultraconservative or populist political views in Germany.
8. The term ‚virtual pigs’ is the author’s translation of Brecht’s, somewhat awkward German phrase ‘faktische Schweine’.