Material Ciphers: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Concrete Conceptualism and the Informational Imaginaries of the Cold War

Abstract

The “dematerialization” thesis has long animated studies of conceptualism. Stemming from Western social formations and information theory, it is dialectically related to cybernetic theories from East Germany that cast information, labor, and material as inseparable. This essay draws on these understudied theories to frame Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s typewritten prints in terms of concrete conceptualism, which mediates the material and the informational via transnational mail art networks and electronic surveillance infrastructure. Ultimately her work reveals a complex picture of Cold War culture in which informational imaginaries coalesce across geopolitical lines.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This article was made possible by a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst for research at the Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Bundesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen (BStU), and the Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Archives. I am grateful for the generous feedback on earlier drafts that I received from Robin Kelsey, Jennifer L. Roberts, Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Max Boersma, Clemens Finkelstein, Emi Finkelstein, Jakob Schillinger, and Zsofi Valyi-Nagy. Special thanks go to Jennifer Chert and the staff at ChertLüdde for assisting with my numerous inquiries, and to Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt for sharing her notes, works, and recollections. Valuable suggestions from Christy Anderson at The Art Bulletin and anonymous reviewers helped clarify my argument. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine.

1 Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1961), 11.

2 Lucy R. Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31.

3 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (1990): 105–43; Alexander Alberro, Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Eve Meltzer, Systems We Have Loved: Conceptual Art, Affect, and the Antihumanist Turn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017).

4 See, for example, Victoria Salinger, “‘Writing Calculations, Calculating Writing’: Hanne Darboven’s Computer Art,” Grey Room, no. 65 (2016): 36–61; Elena Shtromberg, Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016); Christian Berger, “Wholly Obsolete or Always a Possibility? Past and Present Trajectories of a ‘Dematerialization’ of Art,” in Conceptualism and Materiality: Matters of Art and Politics, ed. Berger (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2019), 15–53; Heather Diack, Documents of Doubt: The Photographic Conditions of Conceptual Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Karen Benezra, Dematerialization: Art and Design in Latin America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020); and Elize Mazadiego, Dematerialization and the Social Materiality of Art: Experimental Forms in Argentina, 1955–1968 (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2021).

5 Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: The Avant-Garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, trans. Anna Brzyski (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 322–23; and Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 223–25.

6 David Crowley, “The Art of Cybernetic Communism,” in Utopian Reality: Reconstructing Culture in Revolutionary Russia and Beyond, ed. Christina Lodder, Maria Kokkori, and Maria Mileeva (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2013), 224–29.

7 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, ed. Maurice Dobb, trans. S. W. Ryazanskaya (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 206.

8 On the importance of Western cybernetics for understanding postwar art and its political entanglements, see Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).

9 Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, interview in person by author, March 19, 2019.

10 This dating derives from “Biografie,” in Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, ed. Benjamin Rux (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2021), 144–51.

11 Joachim John, “Roberts Underground,” in Robert Rehfeldt: Kunst im Kontakt, ed. Lutz Wohlrab (Berlin: Verlag Lutz Wohlrab, 2009), 25–26.

12 Jan Böttcher, “Die frühen Jahre des Lyrikclubs Pankow (1965–1970),” in Der Lyrikclub Pankow: Literarische Zirkel in der DDR, ed. Roland Berbig (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2000), 57.

13 Freelance work typically required membership of the official art association, of which she became a candidate in 1975 and a full member only in 1978. Her self-description at this early point, then, appears more an assertive reappropriation of official terminology.

14 Precisely which symposium she attended remains unclear, as does the dating of her first typewritings. She elsewhere stated that she had been producing them “etwa seit 1971” (since around 1971). See Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt: Schreibmaschinengrafik (Type Writings), exh. cat. (Magdeburg: Kulturbund der DDR, Freundeskreis Bildende Kunst, Klub “Otto von Guericke,” 1980), n.p.

15 See the discussion with Wolf-Rehfeldt in Kornelia Röder et al., “Gespräch / Discussion,” in Mail Art: Osteuropa im internationalen Netzwerk, ed. Kornelia von Berswordt-Wallrabe, exh. cat. (Schwerin: Staatliches Museum Schwerin, 1996), 133–34.

16 Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, manuscript notes and studies (set 12), 1960s–1970s, RW-R/T 4955/U, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Archives, ChertLüdde, Berlin.

17 Klara Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc: Experimental Art in Eastern Europe, 1965–1981 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 284.

18 Jan Chwałczyk, untitled essay, in Kontrapunkt: Dokumentacja Zbioru, ed. Chwałczyk, exh. cat. (Wrocław: Wrocławska Drukarnia Kartograficzna, 1974), n.p.

19 On her typewriting tactics, see Sven Spieker, “Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt’s Typewritings between Labor and Virtuosity,” in Für Ruth: Der Himmel in Los Angeles / For Ruth: The Sky in Los Angeles, ed. Kathleen Reinhardt (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2021), 33–51.

20 Julia E. Ault, Saving Nature under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968–1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 56–69.

21 Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 33. See also Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).

22 Oliver Sukrow, Arbeit. Wohnen. Computer. Zur Utopie in der bildenden Kunst und Architektur der DDR in den 1960er Jahren (Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2018), 67–74.

23 Dolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 122.

24 Ibid., 161.

25 Sampsa Kaataja, “Expert Groups Closing the Divide: Estonian-Finnish Computing Cooperation since the 1960s,” in Beyond the Divide: Entangled Histories of Cold War Europe, ed. Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 101–20; and Victor Petrov, Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age behind the Iron Curtain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2023).

26 Kurt Hager, “Grundfragen des geistigen Lebens im Sozialismus,” Neues Deutschland, April 30, 1969, 4. The motto “richtig programmiert” also featured in debates over the asserted computing prowess of the GDR. See Sukrow, Arbeit. Wohnen. Computer., 333–46.

27 Hager, “Grundfragen des geistigen Lebens im Sozialismus,” 6.

28 See Jérôme Segal, “Kybernetik in der DDR: Begegnung mit der marxistischen Ideologie,” Dresdener Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technikwissenschaften, no. 27 (2001): 64.

29 Kurt Hager, “Die entwickelte sozialistische Gesellschaft,” Einheit 26, no. 11 (1971): 1215.

30 Ingrid Pfeiffer, “Ein bekannter Unbekannter: Aktuelle Blicke auf A. R. Penck,” in A. R. Penck: Retrospektive, ed. Pfeiffer and Max Hollein (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2007), 35–36; and Katharina Neuburger, “Under the Grey Noise: Thoughts on A. R. Penck’s Early East-West Works until His Expatriation in 1980,” in A. R. Penck: How It Works, ed. Hans Janssen (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2020), 362. A notable exception was poet Carlfriedrich Claus, who drew upon Georg Klaus’s writings. See Sarah E. James, Paper Revolutions: An Invisible Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 211–12.

31 Karl Böhm, “Der Sozialismus und Kommunismus: Die Zukunft der Menschheit,” in Weltall Erde Mensch, 13th ed. (Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben, 1965), 395.

32 In her wide-ranging analysis of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s practice, Sarah James notes these intersecting material and informational metaphors, though she probes neither their methodological possibilities nor their redeployment by Wolf-Rehfeldt. See James, Paper Revolutions, 258–60.

33 On Klaus and East German cybernetics, see Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 141–84; and Segal, “Kybernetik in der DDR.”

34 Wiener, Cybernetics, 132.

35 W. Ross Ashby, An Introduction to Cybernetics (London: Chapman & Hall, 1956), 1.

36 More specifically, Klaus stresses that informational signaling processes were physical and would trigger energetic or material effects. See Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr, Marxistisch-leninistisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, Geschichtliches Denken: Opportunismus, ed. Klaus and Buhr (1972; repr., Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1977), 571.

37 Klaus and Buhr, Marxistisch-leninistisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 2, 571.

38 Ibid., 572.

39 Ibid. See also Georg Klaus and Heinz Liebscher, eds., Wörterbuch der Kybernetik (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), 288.

40 Georg Klaus, “Kybernetik und ideologischen Klassenkampf,” Einheit 25, no. 9 (1970): 1188.

41 Klaus and Liebscher, Wörterbuch der Kybernetik, 285.

42 Georg Klaus, Kybernetik und Gesellschaft, 3rd ed. (Berlin: VEB Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1973), 19–20.

43 Ibid., 16. This mathematized regulation of quantities aimed at a qualitatively different system: actual existing socialism. See Benjamin Robinson, The Skin of the System: On Germany’s Socialist Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 235.

44 For her diagrams, which refer to concepts from information theory and cybernetics to art and nature, see Wolf-Rehfeldt, manuscript notes and studies (set 10), 1960s–1970s, RW-R/T 4953/U, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Archives, ChertLüdde, Berlin.

45 Lindsay Caplan, Arte Programmata: Freedom, Control, and the Computer in 1960s Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 129–49.

46 For the most extensive account of the group, see Medosch, New Tendencies.

47 Margit Rosen, ed., A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973 (Karlsruhe: ZKM/Center for Art and Media, 2011), 478.

48 For this discussion, see Ralph W. Gerard, “Some of the Problems Discerning Digital Notions in the Central Nervous System,” in Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences 1946–1953, ed. Claus Pias (1950; repr., Zürich: DIAPHANES, 2016), 173–202.

49 See Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); and Meredith Anne Hoy, From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2017).

50 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 243–45. First published in German in 1986.

51 Ibid., 245–47.

52 Wolfgang Ernst, Technológos in Being: Radical Media Archaeology and the Computational Machine (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 30.

53 Bernhard Siegert, “Coding as Cultural Technique: On the Emergence of the Digital from Writing AC,” Grey Room, no. 70 (2018): 10.

54 Wolf-Rehfeldt’s techniques also challenge Kittler’s fundamental claim that the typewriter, as an emblem of digital signification more generally, rests upon an absolute impasse between “matter and information, the real and the symbolic.” See Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 16. As she shows, those symbolic elements are always already on the edge of dissolving into amorphous fields of ink.

55 For Klaus, the binary logic structures of information theory were necessarily articulated to their concrete correlates. See Georg Klaus and Manfred Buhr, Marxistisch-leninistisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 1, A (logisches Symbol): Geschichtsauffassung, idealistische, ed. Klaus and Buhr (1972; repr., Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1976), 43.

56 Claude Shannon, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” Bell System Technical Journal 27, no. 3 (July 1948): 379.

57 Ibid., 380.

58 Bronac. Ferran, “The Movement of the Poem in the 1960s: From Circle and Line to Zero and One, from Concretion to Computation,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42, no. 1–2 (2017): 41. Such periodization is complicated by initiatives such as Belgrade-based Miroljub Todorović’s Signalism, initiated in 1970 as an attempt to reckon with the poetic dimensions and consequences of cybernetics and information technology. See Todorović, “Signalism,” Signal: International Review for Signalist Research, no. 1 (November 1970): n.p. As might be expected, Todorović also referred to Shannon and Wiener.

59 It is highly likely that Wolf-Rehfeldt was familiar with Bartnig’s work. In 1976 he exhibited at Galerie Arkade, which she frequented and where Rehfeldt had exhibited in 1975.

60 On Bartnig’s ocular focus, see Friedrich W. Heckmanns, “‘Vision in der Kunst Offenbart Einsicht - Innere Sicht - von Welt und Leben’: Zum Werk von Horst Bartnig,” in Horst Bartnig, 1968–1998, ed. Klaus Werner, exh. cat. (Leipzig: Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, 1999), 16–18.

61 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 247.

62 Ernst, Technológos in Being, 30. Emphasis in original.

63 At least some prints from this series were produced for the exhibition Werkstatt ‘78, held at the Otto-Nagel-Haus (June 28–July 20, 1978). One of the Komposition designs serves as the exhibition poster.

64 Sarah E. James, “Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt: An Art Worker at Home,” in Rux, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, 37. See Paul Klee, “Creative Credo,” in Paul Klee Notebooks, vol. 1, The Thinking Eye, ed. Jürg Spiller (1920; repr., London and New York: Lund Humphries and George Wittenborn, 1969), 76.

65 On the bitmap, see Jacob Gaboury, Image Objects: An Archaeology of Computer Graphics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2021), 69.

66 See Yve-Alain Bois, “El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility,” Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 174; and Jennifer L. Roberts, “Backwords: Screenprinting and the Politics of Reversal,” in Corita Kent and the Language of Pop, ed. Susan Dackerman, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 2015), 66–67.

67 John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15.

68 On the constitutive role of noise, see Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

69 Claus Pias, “Analog, Digital, and the Cybernetic Illusion,” Kybernetes 34, no. 3/4 (2005): 547.

70 Ibid. This claim proved influential, as in Gregory Bateson’s declaration that “the subject matter of cybernetics is not events and objects but the information ‘carried’ by events and objects.” Bateson, “Cybernetic Explanation,” American Behavioral Scientist 10, no. 8 (April 1967): 30.

71 Klaus, Kybernetik und Gesellschaft, 408.

72 For important accounts of Glöckner’s practice, see Sarah E. James, “Hermann Glöckner: Waste as a Figure of Thought?,” New German Critique 44, no. 1 (2017): 169–203; and Konstanze Rudert, “Mythos und Mysterium: Hermann Glöckner im Kontext der Moderne / Myth and Mystery: Hermann Glöckner in the Context of Modernism,” in Hermann Glöckner: Ein Meister der Moderne, ed. Michael Hering and Franziska Stöhr (Munich: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2019), 256–77. On his distinctive position in the GDR, see Paul Kaiser, “Purposeful Alternative Routes: Hermann Glöckner: A Lone Modernist in the GDR Art System,” in Minimalism in Germany: The Sixties / Minimalismus in Deutschland: Die 1960er Jahre, ed. Renate Wiehager (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012), 117–27.

73 Werner Schmidt, Hermann Glöckner zum 80. Geburtstag: Zeichnungen, Gemälde und Tafeln aus den Jahren 1911–1945, exh. cat. (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 1969). By the early 1970s, Wolf-Rehfeldt had also noticed that his lack of visibility stemmed from his resolute pursuit of abstract idioms. See Wolf-Rehfeldt, interview.

74 Notably, this method contrasted with Josef Albers’s exercises at the Bauhaus. Cuts and other manipulations of paper were encouraged, though in an economizing mode. See Albers, “Werklicher Formunterricht,” Bauhaus: Zeitschrift für Gestaltung 2, no. 2/3 (1928): 5–6.

75 The “erste eigentliche Papierfaltung.” Hermann Glöckner, “Meine Arbeit ist mein Leben,” in Hermann Glöckner: Ein Patriarch der Moderne, ed. John Erpenbeck (Berlin: Buchverlag Der Morgen, 1983), 83.

76 On the Selectric, see Radek Krolczyk, “Ein Heiligenschein für Erika,” Taz [Die Tageszeitung], August 4, 2012. Ruth explained that Robert had traded collages for the typewriter, which she used from the later 1970s. See Wolf-Rehfeldt, interview. On the use of the Erika, see Benjamin Rux, “Manifest der Freiheit: Die Künstlerin Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt,” in Rux, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, 12; and Lutz Wohlrab, untitled essay, in Rux, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, 141.

77 Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 150.

78 See Ibid., 139–54.

79 “Im System des Sozialismus bilden Ideologie, Politik, Kultur, Ökonomie, Erziehungswesen, Produktion und andere Bereiche ein einheitliches geschlossenes Ganzes.” See Klaus, Kybernetik und Gesellschaft, 17.

80 Ibid., 140–42.

81 Ibid., 144.

82 For an overview, see Johanna Gosse, “New York Correspondence School,” in Ray Johnson c/o, ed. Caitlin Haskell and Jordan Carter, exh. cat. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2021), 194–213.

83 Jean-Marc Poinsot, Mail Art: Communication à Distance, Concept (Paris: CEDIC, 1971), 14.

84 April A. Eisman, “East German Art and the Permeability of the Berlin Wall,” German Studies Review 38, no. 3 (2015): 597–616; Boris Pofalla, “Chocolate, Pop and Socialism: Peter Ludwig and the GDR,” in Art beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989), ed. Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2016), 81–89; and Briana J. Smith, “Experimental Art and Cultural Exchange in Late Cold War Berlin,” in Cold War Berlin: Confrontations, Cultures, and Identities, ed. Stefanie Eisenhuth and Scott H. Krause (London: I. B. Tauris, 2021), 151–64. For an earlier precedent, see Christoph Tannert, “Der Westen im Osten (und Umgekehrt?): Berliner Künstler auf der Suche nach Dialogen,” in Interferenzen: Kunst aus Westberlin, 1960–1990, ed. Barbara Straka (Berlin: Verlag Dirk Nishen and NGBK, 1991), 146–47.

85 Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, 296–98. Ruth and Robert maintained their own extensive archive of mail art and associated correspondence from across the world, from Argentina and Brazil to Australia and Poland. Other important collections that incorporate mail art include the Signalist Documentation Centre in Belgrade, founded by Todorović in 1970, and the Artpool Art Research Center in Budapest, founded by György Galántai and Júlia Klaniczay in 1979.

86 See Piotr Piotrowski, “On the Spatial Turn, or Horizontal Art History,” trans. Marek Wilczyński, Umění/Art 56, no. 5 (2008): 378–83; Piotrowski, “Toward a Horizontal History of the European Avant-Garde,” in Europa! Europa?: The Avant-Garde, Modernism and the Fate of a Continent, ed. Sascha Bru et al., trans. Marek Wilczyński (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 49–58; and Piotrowski, “The Global NETwork: An Approach to Comparative Art History,” in Circulations in the Global History of Art, ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Catherine Dossin, and Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 149–65.

87 See the discussion with Wolf-Rehfeldt in Röder et al., “Gespräch / Discussion,” 133.

88 Rux, “Manifest der Freiheit,” 16.

89 On the NET, see Kemp-Welch, Networking the Bloc, 97–123.

90 Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, letter to Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, April 11, 1978, Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, Bezirksverband Berlin, VBK-Bezirksverband-Berlin 72, folder 7212, Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

91 See Hans Werner Schmidt, letter to Jürgen Schuchardt, June 21, 1979, Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, Bezirksverband Berlin, VBK-Bezirksverband-Berlin 72, folder 7213, Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. For Wolf-Rehfeldt’s rejection, see Jürgen Schuchardt, letter to Hans Werner Schmidt, July 25, 1979, Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, Bezirksverband Berlin, VBK-Bezirksverband-Berlin 72, folder 7213, Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

92 Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, “Antragsformular [application form],” October 6, 1988, Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR, Bezirksverband Berlin, VBK-Bezirksverband-Berlin 70, folder 7012, Archiv, Akademie der Künste, Berlin. In keeping with her resistance to state-organized politics, she describes herself as parteilos (nonaffiliated), which could itself become a point of suspicion. See David Bathrick, The Powers of Speech: The Politics of Culture in the GDR (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 16.

93 Kornelia Röder, Topologie und Funktionsweise des Netzwerks der Mail Art: Seine spezifische Bedeutung für Osteuropa von 1960 Bis 1989 (Cologne: Salon Verlag, 2008), 31–37; and Kornelia Röder, “The Mail Art Network: A Forum for Experimental and Conceptual Graphic Art,” in Außer Kontrolle! Farbige Grafik und Mail Art in der DDR, ed. Röder, Christina Katharina May, and Paul Kaiser (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, 2015), 130–35.

94 Klaus Groh, “Mail-Art/Correspondence-Art: Eine künstlerisch unbedeutende Randaktivität oder ein ernstzunehmendes Betätigungsfeld für freie Kommunikation zwischen den Völkern?,” in Bildende Kunst in Osteuropa im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans-Jürgen Drengenberg (Berlin: Spitz, 1991), 286. Groh credits the diagram to Bernd Löbach, “Mail-Art Is Not Jail-Art,” INUIT, no. 6 (1983): 11. See also Colby Chamberlain, “International Indeterminacy: George Maciunas and the Mail,” ARTMargins 7, no. 3 (October 2018): 57–85.

95 “Ich hatte den Ehrgeiz, wie eine Spinne im Netz, zu jedem Ort der Erde meine Fäden zu spinnen.” See the discussion with Wolf-Rehfeldt in Röder et al., “Gespräch / Discussion,” 133.

96 “Jede Einwirkung der Umwelt ist eine Deformation meines Systems.” See Wolf-Rehfeldt, manuscript notes and studies (set 15), 1960s–1970s, RW-R/T 4958/U, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Archives, ChertLüdde, Berlin.

97 Jens Gieseke, The History of the Stasi: East Germany’s Secret Police, 1945–1990 (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 81.

98 Ibid., 122.

99 “Hinweise über einige Probleme im Zusammenhang mit feindlich-negativen Aktivitäten von Personenkreisen auf dem Gebiet Kunst und Kultur [Bericht K 3/13] [28 June 1977],” in Die DDR im Blick der Stasi 1977: Die geheimen Berichte an die SED-Führung, ed. Daniela Münkel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 183.

100 Gieseke, History of the Stasi, 147–48.

101 Andreas Glaeser, Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition, and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 489–507. Such actions were taken against mail artists, as recounted in Lutz Wohlrab, “Mail Art als Gegenpropaganda: Die Kunst der Korrespondenz in der DDR,” Gerbergasse 18, no. 95 (2020): 42–46.

102 “Ein Märtyrer wollte ich nicht werden.” See the discussion with Wolf-Rehfeldt in Röder et al., “Gespräch / Discussion,” 136.

103 See Nikolaus Wegmann, “An Ort und Stelle: Zur Geschichte der konkreten Poesie in der DDR,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 84, no. 2 (June 2010): 252; and Alison Lewis, A State of Secrecy: Stasi Informers and the Culture of Surveillance (Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books, 2021). Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether the Stasi was able to exert substantial influence over artists, galleries, and critics, despite repeated and systematic harassment. See, for example, Yvonne Fiedler, Kunst im Korridor: Private Galerien in der DDR zwischen Autonomie und Illegalität (Berlin: Ch. Links, 2013), 249–74; and Sara Blaylock, Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022). On the more general and influential argument that Stasi surveillance was “embedded” within everyday life, rather than hovering over it, see Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 21–50.

104 John C. Schmeidel, Stasi: Sword and Shield of the Party (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 21.

105 Sylvia De Pasquale, “‘Ich hoffe, daß die Post auch ankommt.’ Die Brief- und Telegrammkontrollen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der DDR,” in Ein offenes Geheimnis: Post- und Telefonkontrolle in der DDR, ed. Joachim Kallinich and Sylvia De Pasquale (Heidelberg: Edition Braus / Museumsstiftung Post und Telekommunikation, 2002), 57–73; and Peter Hellström, Die Postkontrolle der Staatssicherheit: Aus der Sicht eines Zeitzeugen (Berlin-Schönefeld: Morgana Edition, 2010).

106 Uwe Dressler and IM “Christian Wolf,” “Ein Gespräch zwischen U. D. und seinem IM ‘Christian Wolf,’” in Mail Art Szene DDR, 1975–1990, ed. Friedrich Winnes and Lutz Wohlrab (Berlin: Haude & Spener Verlag, 1994), 115.

107 There were numerous reasons for inclusion on a watch list: purported affiliations with Linksextremismus and Rechtsextremismus (undefined in the document), along with connections to the punk scene or churches, or being a “Porno-Fan.” Number five was “Mail-Art.” See “Erarbeitung einer Merkmalskartei,” October 31, 1983, Stasi-Unterlagen-Behörde (hereafter BStU), MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 19425, fol. 17, Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin.

108 Mail art played a role in the “Verbreitung von Antisowjetismus und falschen Informationen . . . um einen konterrevolutionären Zynismus zur gewünschten Wirkung zu verhelfen” (spread of anti-Sovietism and false information . . . in order to help counterrevolutionary cynicism achieve its desired impact). See [author’s name redacted], duplicate of a memo sent to Chief Commissioner Michel, May 17, 1982, BStU, MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 2929, fol. 30, Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin.

109 “[E]ine entsprechende gesellschaftliche Einflussnahme auf die weitere Entwicklung der ‘MAIL-ART’ sowie deren gezielten Steuerung und Kontrolle allein durch das MfS ist jedoch nicht möglich.” See Beyer, “Information über politisch-operativ bedeutsame Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiet der ‘MAIL-ART,’” June 30, 1982, BStU, MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 17962, fol. 14, Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin.

110 Beyer, “Information über politisch-operativ bedeutsame Erscheinungen auf dem Gebiet der ‘MAIL-ART,’” June 30, 1982, fols. 15–16. For strategies of incorporation applied to galleries, see Smith, “Experimental Art and Cultural Exchange in Late Cold War Berlin,” 155.

111 In at least one instance, Wolf-Rehfeldt attempted to evade scrutiny by separating her work and mailing it via different postboxes. This attempt at physical packet switching did not succeed; she later discovered that the Stasi intercepted and reassembled the set of packages. See Wolf-Rehfeldt, interview.

112 Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109.

113 Christian Booß, Vom Scheitern der kybernetischen Utopie: Die Entwicklung von Überwachung und Informationsverarbeitung im MfS (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021), 135–38.

114 Rüdiger Bergien, “‘Big Data’ als Vision. Computereinführung und Organisationswandel in BKA und Staatssicherheit (1967–1989),” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 14, no. 2 (2017): 280.

115 Untitled research dossier on developments in digital techniques for optical character recognition, 1972, BStU, MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 19430, fols. 94–100, Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin.

116 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 231.

117 Hauck, reproduction of a manuscript on algorithmic methods for optical character recognition and filtering, BStU, MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 19430, fols. 154–64. On East German attempts to develop its computing industry via industrial espionage, see Kristie Macrakis, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 112–40.

118 R. Hauck, “Optische Zeichenerkennung mit inkohärenter Principal Component Filterung,” in Bildverarbeitung und Mustererkennung: DAGM Symposium, Oberpfaffenhofen 11.–13. Oktober 1978, ed. Ernst Triendl (Berlin: Springer, 1978), 45–51.

119 Ibid., 48.

120 Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 26.

121 “Masch. Nr. 280286,” undated, BStU, MfS, Archiv der Zentralstelle, HA XX, 19428, fol. 85, Bundesbeauftragter für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Berlin.

122 Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 247.

123 Marc Silberman, “Problematizing the ‘Socialist Public Sphere’: Concepts and Consequences,” in What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Public, ed. Silberman (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1997), 10.

124 Oliver Bange, “The Stasi Confronts Western Strategies for Transformation, 1966–1975,” in Secret Intelligence in the European States System, 1918–1989, ed. Jonathan Haslam and Karina Urbach (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), 180.

125 Claude Shannon, “Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems,” Bell System Technical Journal 28, no. 4 (1949): 664–65.

126 “die harmloseste Mitteilung konnte als verschlüsselte Botschaft angesehen werden.” Klaus Staeck, “Von John Heartfield zur Mail Art,” in Winnes and Wohlrab, Mail Art Szene DDR, 1975–1990, 89.

127 Hager, “Grundfragen des geistigen Lebens im Sozialismus,” 4.

128 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (1973; repr., New York and London: Continuum, 2007), 22. First published in German in 1966.

129 For a key contribution to this revision, see Delinda Collier, Repainting the Walls of Lunda: Information Colonialism and Angolan Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Recent interventions in histories of media and science may yet prove invaluable for art history. See, for example, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016); and Xiao Liu, Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).

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Christopher Williams-Wynn

Christopher Williams-Wynn is a postdoctoral fellow at the 4A_Lab, a joint program of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut, and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz in Berlin. He received his PhD in the history of art and architecture from Harvard University in 2023 [Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 4A_Lab, Stauffenbergstraße 41, 10785, Berlin, Germany, [email protected]].