Corpse Cleaner

What often holds true for other symbol carriers such as gestures, signs, and speech acts also applies to film props: on their own, their appearance might seem banal; in exchange with other objects and animated by a narrative, they create a network of meanings that dissolves any disbelief and leads to another time or place. The video work Corpse Cleaner by research and production collective 13BC (Thirteen Black Cats), comprised of artists and authors Vic Brooks, Lucy Raven, and Evan Calder Williams, philosophizes about this potential for illusion: It features a dolly shot through the rooms of Encore/Eclectic Props Ltd. in Los Angeles; a roundelay of props and replicas that turns into an eclectic montage of eras and localities, without a single edit.

The view of this archive of past film productions is accompanied by an exchange of letters a female voice—spoken by Hollywood actress Dana Wheeler-Nicholson—has with two people who only appear indirectly: Claude Eatherly, the former U.S. military pilot who gave the “All Clear” when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 and about whose trauma-ridden life Bob Hope Productions wants to make a film, and Günther Anders, a Jewish-German philosopher and critic of modernism who fled to the U.S. from the Nazis in the mid-1930s and made his living as a cleaner in a movie prop warehouse.

The correspondence between the two, published in several books by Anders, one a now highly regarded intellectual in postwar Germany, the other committed to a psychiatric hospital, forms the basis for 13BC’s multi-part project Fatal Act, of which Corpse Cleaner is a fragment. For the latter, the collective formulated fictional replies to both of them, thus reflecting the intersections of fictionality and representation that convene in the mediatized image—be it in our everyday media culture, in Hollywood’s production apparatus, or in an artistic project as this one. In a diary entry quoted in the work, Anders described his former workplace as “a museum of the entire costume past of humanity”—and in the course of his work also encountered replicas of Nazi military uniforms: “We flee the original, and then run the risk, a few years later on the opposite side of the world, to have to clean the duplicates for pay!” Films thus have the ability to conjure up a historical testimony in which relics become props and costumes become testimonies.