comments from Daniel Grún’s catalogue Pantheon: Heroes and Anti-Monuments (Bratislva, 2006)

‘The Aerial Reconnaissance phase of the INS Inspectorate carried out by Anthony Auerbach in 2005, adapted the techniques he had earlier developed in the works Planet and Enemy Contact Surface — aerial surveys, but from a very low altitude — to the open air of Berlin.

‘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.’