Ruth Beckermann’s temporary installation The Missing Image recontextualized Alfred Hrdlicka’s 1988 Memorial against War and Fascism. Her intervention related to the bronze figure of a prostrate bearded old man with a brush in his hand, which is intended to commemorate the Jews harassed to clean the streets during the pogrom after the “Anschluss” in March 1938. Ruth Beckermann completed the scene by adding the missing images of laughing spectators. Using brushes and sometimes even toothbrushes, Jews were forced to remove the symbols and slogans of the Austro-fascist Ständestaat regime from the city’s sidewalks with biting suds. These acts were called “scrubbing parties” and were the brain child of Viennese anti-Semites.

The film clip discovered in the Austrian Film Museum is the only known document of this kind showing such a “scrubbing party” to date. Ruth Beckermann edited the eleven-second take to create a loop. It tells a Viennese story showing a crowd of bystanders laughing at the two well-dressed Jews on their knees cleaning the pavement. An SA man holds the broom of a young Jewish woman into the camera. The bystanders have fun. They enjoy the feeling of power, looking down on those that have to crawl on the ground.

By incorporating the film clip into the memorial, Ruth Beckermann brought three different bodies and subjects together: the bronze figure of the victim, the two-channel-installation of the perpetrators projected on LED-screens, and today’s pedestrians confronted with their historical counterparts.

I am not in favor of taking down this or any other compromised monument. Karl Lueger & Co. belong to the history of this city. It is up to the present citizens to put the then beloved anti-Semites in a new perspective, whether in an exploratory or a provocative manner. In this sense, my installation The Missing Image is an intervention. It depicts the repetitive mechanism of exclusion: those who are forced to their knees are dirty. Those who are lying on the floor can be looked down upon. Ruth Beckermann