“Cemetery=Civilization”: Circus Wols, World War II, and the Collapse of Humanism

Circus Wols is a multimedia spectacle conceived by Wols during World War II at the Camp des Milles where he was interned between May and October 1940. As a German citizen, the artist was considered an enemy of France and Circus helped him bear the harsh conditions of his imprisonment. Wols envisioned a show of high intellectual and aesthetic value that would employ advanced technology but remain accessible to the masses. As such, it is comparable to a utopian avant-garde total artwork. However, through its assumed incompletion and fragmentation, Circus Wols destabilized the ambitions of the avant-garde and modernism; it even went further, rejecting anthropocentrism. Shortly after his liberation from the camp, Wols began to claim that his art should not be considered a human creation. Prefigured by Circus Wols, the artist’s dismissal of European humanism as a valid social and cultural paradigm only grew after the war. His stance is best understood in relation to the contemporaneous notion of “abhumanism”, first theorized by playwright Jacques Audiberti, and embraced by Wols’s close friend, artist and poet Camille Bryen. The article argues that approaching Wols through the lens of abhumanism highlights the pressing historical concerns of his work, which, associated with post-war Parisian Abstraction, is usually depoliticized.