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Does it make a difference what motivates our actions? Even if the outcome is the same? This question is the starting point for Olaf Nicolai’s 1999 installation Viele, die eine Ahnung haben… (Many People Who Are Aware...). The title harks back to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1974 film adaptation Fontane Effi Briest. The film’s subtitle (“Many People Who Are Aware of Their Own Capabilities and Needs Just Acquiesce to the Prevailing System in Their Thoughts and Deeds, Thereby Confirming and Reinforcing It.”) is printed on two posters – with one simple difference: “By replacing the word ‘deshalb’ (‘just’) with ‘trotzdem’ (‘therefore’), I named a different perspective on motivation. This ‘therefore’ opens up a paradoxical situation,” the artist says.

The change seems at first to completely reverse the text’s meaning, but that is less clear than it might appear. After all, both wordings affirm the situation that is in place in each case: “This is a position that interested me in the 1990s as an experience of the change of systems and with respect to a world that defines itself to a great extent through growth and consumption and where I encountered this motivation strategy. But never pure and clean.” It wasn’t “either or,” or black and white, in other words – everything was shades of gray, or perhaps orange and magenta. Nicolai chose these colors because they had no clear political implications in the spectrum in use in the late 1990s.

What does this installation say in the context of current events and as presented within Tell me about yesterday tomorrow? “Fassbinder was very interested, in his position as a homosexual, in criticism of a hierarchical, homophobic society that practically ignored gender issues. He faced a lot of hostility, including here in Munich, and he had a love-hate relationship with the city. And National Socialism and the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism have a very intensive relationship with Munich.” Nicolai explains.

The posters are stacked and ready for visitors to take with them. In choosing one or the other, visitors express a certain stance – only to discover that the other quote is on the reverse, whichever one they pick. This renegotiation of a decision that has already been made is the point, Nicolai says: “I doubt that opposition is in fact the productive description of what we think. But I don’t want to highlight that through a theoretical statement or some long, discursive work, but rather by using a method that invites consideration of renegotiation. You can react reflexively to it, you can worry about it, but it still remains unresolved.”

In this way, Viele, die eine Ahnung haben... points out the complexity of taking a position in a society that tends toward polarization. Just as in Fontane’s novel and Fassbinder’s film, though, the installation does not offer any simple, concrete solutions. What remains, instead, is a call for reflection on our own actions with/within/against the systems in question.

By Mareike Schwarz, a student of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich