CONCLUSION

Contemporary artists who consciously look back to the 1960’s may thus be exploring liminality both in their chosen sources and also in their methodology. For they address a period in which anti-structural and anti-disciplinary energies irrupt into society. But, as I have argued, they are more likely to succeed in evoking a living and dynamic relationship between the Then and the Now of the early twenty-first century when they implement strategies for keeping liminal energies in circulation in their own work. This is what Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image describes – an attempt, as Didi-Huberman puts it, to engineer the ‘productive collision between the Now and an unexpected, reinvented Then’.

In this context Margreiter’s co-opting of the East German communist’s typography is an allegorical meditation on how this moment of collision can be actively incited in the Now through the exploration of typographical forms. The contradictions and ambiguity that are evident in Margreiter’s medial nomadism involve shifts in character from image to text to sculpture to moving image. As Barbara Clausen writes, ‘after the initial uto¬pian impulse and the revival of its forms in the fashions of mainstream culture several decades later’, Margreiter’s hopes that ‘there is still the possibility of a new lease on life, for a critical-reflexive relationship to the Then’. Specifically, as Clausen writes, ‘Margreiter documents and redeploys the remnants of modernism before they disappear and, subsequently, keeps them “alive”….. ‘Since’, as she goes on, the typeface regains presence because ‘the zentrum font is neither an homage to the original nor an imitation of its ’60s copy, but rather a graphic set of modules existing between the two- and three-dimensional’. As a consequence, the use by the East German state of this style of font succinctly embodies the uneasy relationship that exists between modernism, nationalism and totalitarianism, as well exposing the shared roots of these impulses in a modernist rhetoric of liminality.

Margreiter’s works in general are emblematic of the possibility of a shifting borderline between the Now and the Then. Because of their inherent ambiguity, lack of clear synthesis, and absence of teleological reconciliation, they qualify as constellations of ‘dialectical images’. But in this sense, Magritte’s works aim both to be in themselves luminal-charged ‘dialectical images’, while at the same time also invoking through subject-matter an historical moment during which the nature and role of the liminal experience was especially contested within western society. They are definitely ‘betwixt and between’.