Collection Study
Horst Ademeit, 4725, 4274 and Untitled

Text by Rosanna McLaughlin
July 2020

Cold Rays

For at least the last twenty years of his life, likely many more, Horst Ademeit believed that a malevolent organisation was out to get him and the rest of the world. Operating out of Düsseldorf, the city in which he lived, he suspected it of flooding the atmosphere with a pernicious phenomenon he called ‘cold rays’. He held the rays responsible for lowering the air temperature, interfering with brain waves and electrical currents, jamming the signal of his radio, even turning bottles of wine sour. (Clearly he felt the organisation was not above a certain pettiness.) Ademeit began recording the perceived impact of the cold rays with a Polaroid camera in 1992. Over the next eighteen years he amassed upwards of 6,000 images, finding the effects of foul play in what appear to be utterly unremarkable aspects of the home and city. A building covered with scaffolding; an electrical switch board; a recycling bank; parked cars; slow-moving traffic; a street on which construction work is taking place; bicycles chained to railings; a tangle of brambles; a junction in the rain; a weather-worn metal grate. Ademeit also maintained a practice of documenting and measuring newspapers, which he believed were under the influence of the organisation.¹ 30 of the Polaroids now reside in the collection of David and Indrė Roberts. Among them is an image of what appears to be the inside of a sink, the surface of which has eroded and spoiled, assuming a grotty kind of psychedelia.²

¹ See Horst Ademeit, 4725, undated, inscribed Polaroid
² Horst Ademeit, 4724, undated, inscribed Polaroid

In the margins of the images Ademeit made notes, listing the dates on which they were taken and describing the scenes in varying levels of detail. Over time the ink has bled and faded, as a result of which many of the notes on the Polaroids in the David and Indrė Roberts Collection are no longer entirely legible. For Ademeit this may not have been a cause for concern. He never intended his photographs to be viewed as artworks, or even to be viewed at all. Art was a designation given to the them at a later date, after their significance had been agreed upon by medical and cultural professionals. In the short documentary ADEMEIT, created by Michael Bauer and Marcus Werner Hed and released in the year of Ademeit’s death in 2010, he explains that the Polaroids “were valid to me only as documents of the day”, and that he had no intention of returning to study them after they had been created.³ Along with the little wooden balls he put in his ears as a first line of defence – eight millimetres in diameter, he said, to correspond with the maximum dilation of the pupil – they were a kind of survival strategy performed in the moment. No matter what he did, he felt that the power of the rays continued to get stronger. Like trying to prevent a ship from sinking by scooping up the water in a paper cup, each photograph was a small act of resistance against a relentless adversary.

³ dir. Michael Bauer and Marcus Werner Hed, ADEMEIT, 2010

“The purpose of paranoia”, wrote Sigmund Freud, is “to ward off an idea that is incompatible with the ego, by projecting its substance into the external world.”⁴ While Ademeit’s fears may seem irrational, the form they assumed echo events and language specific to the time in which he lived. Born in Cologne in 1937, he grew up in the shadow of the Cold War. It was then that the camera, previously an instrument of the rich, became a familiar feature of everyday life in Europe. Following the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty the ‘ray’ took hold in the popular imagination, when the US launched satellites into space to investigate the presence of gamma rays – suspected evidence of a secret Soviet nuclear war programme that transpired to be a naturally occurring phenomenon.

⁴ ed. Carrie Lee Rothgeb, Abstracts of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Jason Aronson Inc, 1980)

My mother, a child in Britain during the 1960s, recalls government pamphlets distributed through the post, containing tips on how to survive a nuclear attack and its aftermath. Included among them were “Try to avoid bringing fallout dust in from outside”, and “keep a change of footwear (gumboots or stout shoes).”⁵ The pamphlets attempted the impossible: to contain and control an unbounded horror within simple and familiar terms. If a nuclear bomb had been detonated, of course, in all probability the owners and their shoes would have been destroyed instantaneously. Such advice belonged to a time when conspiracies were read into the stars, mistrust introduced to the banal. Those taught to doubt the dust that creeps into the home, and read danger into the soles of their shoes, may well begin to see evidence of the enemy in the the fuzzy radio signal and the sour wine.

⁵ Civil Defence Handbook No.10 Advising the Householder on Protection Against Nuclear Attack (UK Home Office, 1963)

In a Polaroid dated 12 May 1992, now part of the David and Indrė Roberts Collection, Ademeit photographed a neglected area of urban scrubland. On the right-hand side of the picture is a tall unpainted breeze block wall. To the left and covering the ground are trees and a tangle of overgrown foliage. Every era has its concomitant paranoias, its ways of dealing with intolerable fears, threats too nebulous, vague or vast. Ademeit’s shot of the brambles echoes the many ordinary-looking photographs of trees circulated as evidence of the deleterious impact of the 5G network, blamed, among other things, for the spread of COVID-19, cancer, the death of bats – and for killing trees. Paranoia over 5G led to a spate of incidents in which at least 20 telephone masts, believed to be radiating dangerous waves, were set alight in the UK in the first quarter of 2020. The phone masts did no such thing, yet the cause of the fear is not so easily dismissed. A faster internet will continue the erosion of civil liberties, the breaking up of the work force, the mediation and surveillance of human interaction and behaviour; it will continue to have global consequences for health and the environment, which may in turn increase the chances of future pandemics. When faced with the sprawling, abstract and apparently lawless reign of the global tech industry, a pole in the ground provides a target a that a single, disempowered human may feel equipped to reckon with.

By the time Ademeit was in his early seventies, the Cold War was long since over. He was a pale, elderly-looking white man with short grey hair and worried eyes, dressed in inexpensive and nondescript clothes. He was also dying of cancer. As with the bushes and trailers and traffic lights he photographed, he too could easily have been passed by unnoticed on a suburban European street. His neighbours, however, were paying attention. In 2007, worried that he was no longer able to look after himself they reported him to social services, after which he was moved into a care home.

While sorting through Ademeit’s apartment a social worker came across two blue bin bags filled with photographs. Recognising their potential interest, she contacted a local psychiatrist named Dr Kurt Behrends. Behrends found the photographs astonishing – where else could such a comprehensive record of a life and its struggles be found? – and in turn brought them to the attention of Susanne Zander, a gallerist in Cologne. When I spoke with Zander on the phone she told me that Ademeit welcomed the interest of the gallery, seeing it as an unintended but useful means of spreading the word about the cold rays. Shortly before Ademeit died she acquired his photographic archive and diaries.

The film-director Pier Paulo Pasolini wrote that “Only completed acts may be coordinated among themselves and thus acquire meaning”; by which he meant that death bestows upon a person a clarity of narrative, character and significance necessarily absent while their life is still in flux.⁶

⁶ Pier Paolo Pasolini, ‘Observations on the Long Take’, October, Vol.13, 1980

In 2011, the year after Ademeit’s death, 30 Polaroids were purchased by David Roberts from Zander’s booth at Art Cologne. The former contents of the blue bin bags are now mounted within glass-fronted frames. Post-mortem the effects of an isolated, sensitive, and productive man have become rarified and protected property. The story of the ‘discovery’ of Ademeit’s photographs has historical echoes, and, along with the sequestered nature of his practice, has seen him placed in the contentious lineage of outsider artists. As Olivia Laing wrote in her book The Lonely City (2016), while a landlord and fellow tenant cleared out Henry Darger’s Chicago apartment shortly before his death in 1973, they “began to unearth artworks of almost supernatural radiance” – scenes of battles between good and evil, between little girls and sadistic men – that turned their author into the object of lurid speculation.⁷

⁷ Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Macmillan, 2016)

More recently, in 2008, a box of Polaroids was discovered by an estate liquidator in the Californian home of a person known to the world as Alan Schaefer after they passed away. Inside, thousands of self-portraits appeared to reveal the deceased’s private existence as a woman named April Dawn Alison: “a gorgeous dream who came into what we call her real life in front of the camera”, the writer Hilton Als described her.⁸ The photographs, a personal undertaking during life, came with no explanation as to their author’s intentions, and have since been displayed at SFMOMA. With Ademeit and Alison/Shaefer, the medium of photography enhances the sense of discovery. As Susan Sontag wrote in her 1977 book On Photography, “Photographs are, of course, artifacts. But their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects – unpremeditated slices of the world.”⁹

⁸ Erin O’Toole, Hilton Als, Zackary Drucker, April Dawn Alison (Mack, 2019)
⁹ On Photography, p.54

The category of outsider artist has always said more about the fetishes and anxieties of those on the inside of the cultural establishment than it does those to whom the moniker becomes attached. Modern Western art, in particular, often seemed to crave precisely those qualities that it did not possess: a type of production that was unpretentious, poor, automatic, accidental even, made without the supposedly corrupting influences of self-awareness, knowledge of an audience, history, discourse, education, or market. Like a prince daydreaming about life beyond the court, addled fantasies of otherness have inspired no end of inadvisable cosplay and simplistic projections of freedom, naivety and insanity. As with many figures tagged with the label of ‘outsider’, Ademeit is an awkward fit. He may not have intended the photographs to be read as artworks, but he was certainly no stranger to the role of the museum or gallery, or to discourses and methods of artistic production. (Nor was Alison/Schaefer, who worked by day as a studio photographer.) As a young man Ademeit studied art under Joseph Beuys, and later in life he worked as a drawing teacher.

Despite the note-taking, despite the scrupulousness with which he attended to his work, one cannot conclusively know what it was that Ademeit saw in the brambles that so alarmed him – whether it was the brambles at all, or something growing in the cracks between the breeze blocks, or a cloud formation in the sky.¹⁰

¹⁰ See Horst Ademeit, Untitled, 12 May 1992, inscribed Polaroid

The rays, the decades-long focus of Ademeit’s gaze, remain elusive. In today’s hyper-confessional era, there is something to be savoured in the not knowing, in the absence of visibility. Ademeit’s photographs constitute a kind of diary, but one that can never be fully under- stood. They are a record of paying a particular kind of attention – methodical, intense, anxious; mythological but also humdrum; structured but mysterious; “clouds of fantasy and pellets of infor- mation”, as Sontag defined the photograph – but a record that cannot reveal what it was, precisely, that was being attended to. During a time in which private lives are being surveilled, commodified and publicly performed on an unprecedented scale, a diary such as Ademeit’s, intended for nobody but himself, is a spectacle of interiority; a way of making and being in the world fast becoming unthinkable.