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INS Inspectorate Berlin: Office of Interpretation
installation by Anthony Auerbach, 2006

As part of the exhibition Pantheon: Heroes and Anti-Monuments, Anthony Auerbach devised an apparatus for working on the material from Aerial Reconnaissance, carried out in 2005 as part of the International Necronautical Society (INS) Inspectorate Berlin.

The exhibition was about the ideological functions of sculpture (sculpture and memory, sculpture and state, sculpture and nation, sculpture and masculinity) in the context of recent history and its representations in eastern Europe. The curator Daniel Grún commented:

Aerial Reconnaissance is as much about knowledge and history — according to the INS’s central interests ‘marking and erasure, cryptography and death’ — as it is a critique or commentary on monuments and memorials. The sites selected for inspection (such as: where a projected memorial was half-built and then demolished; where a monument now marks the site where an earlier monument was destroyed; or where monuments commemorate the repression of doomed uprisings) emerge as symptoms of neurosis, that is, behaviours associated the ‘failure to mourn’, with the urge and the inability to deal with the past, its trauma and guilt.
[...]
Auerbach’s Aerial Reconnaissance and the work of the INS Inspectorate are not artworks in the usual sense of the word, but in essence perfectly grasp the intentions and strategies of anti-monuments.

Anthony Auerbach writes:

I set up the temporary Office of Interpretation as a kind of parasitic apparatus, in other words, an apparatus which could exploit its host to advance the process initiated by Aerial Reconnaissance. The host environment which provided an apt context for the examination of the material obtained in Berlin was the exhibition Pantheon: Heroes and Anti-Monuments at the Galéria Medium, Bratislava.

The photographic surveys carried out in Aerial Reconnaissance are intensive observations and although in a way systematic, and full of information, they are not complete. The survey makes the surface yield to inspection and calls for its interpretation. In turn, interpretation requires an apparatus, on the one hand conceptual, and on the other hand practical and communicative. In the Office of Interpretation worked on Transcript, which applied a diagrammatic logic to recording the discussion which took place in Berlin on the occasion of Inspecting the Inspectorate, and Atlas, which was an apparatus for carrying out a survey of a survey. Each sheet of Atlas presented an enlargement of one (of 275) photographs from Aerial Reconnaissance Survey B and was equipped with devices for counting.

More details are available at INS Berlin