On the Metaphysics of the Decline, or on the Hour of the Angelus by Michael Kunze
Someone who writes his doctoral thesis on the Greek philosopher Heraclitus and a book entitled “The
Decline of the West” would not have had an easy time of it in the climes of 1920s and 1930s Germany.
Oswald Spengler’s swan song to universal progress immediately triggered a dispute—and he subsequently
rejected the offer of a professorship from the University of Göttingen. The political forces that
made a stand against the prophesized decline at that time and then infamously nearly made this
downfall of the “Old Europe” a reality, ensured a caesura in the history of modernism that still resonates
today. He also turned down a number of offers made by the National Socialists in 1933 (including
an appointment at Leipzig University) and even resigned his position on the board of directors of the
Nietzsche Archive in 1935 because he disapproved of the one-sided interpretation of the philosopher he
so highly revered. But he had already been declared persona non grata by then. Spengler died in Munich
on May 8, 1936, as the result of a cardiac arrest.
Fifty years later, Michael Kunze—a painter who is familiar with the Greeks as heroes and
the Germans as the antithesis of a Europe of Spenglerian dimensions, and whose painting represents
an antithesis to the expressive and capricious Nouveaux Fauves movement that defined the 1980s—
studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there. And he also did not have an easy time of it. What Spengler
was to the false prophets of his time, Kunze has become to trendy German painters and connoisseurs. He
overlooks their cynicism and ignores their overbidding for “Bad Painting” or the despicable salon style.
Trained in the philosophy and theater of classical antiquity, Kunze explores the path of a different type
of Western decline, namely the one trodden by Arnold Böcklin and Giorgio de Chirico in opposition to
Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Remarkable in this context is his “Les Messieurs d’Avignon” series,
which was presented as a complete exhibition block at the Museum für Neue Kunst Karlsruhe in 2007.
The small alteration of the famous painting title zeroes in on a momentous historical nuance: Two
diametrically opposed approaches to art veered off in different directions in the late nineteenth century,
one of which began with Cézanne and found its continuation in cubism and the roundel of subsequent
avant-garde art movements, suggesting, up to and including the minimal and concept art of the 1970s,
an ostensibly historical, logical and linearly understandable “progressive” modernism. This so-called
“official” modernism, as Kunze has characterized it and which has been canonized by our museums, is
still the textbook version of a narrative that an era full of tension and upheavals made up about itself.
The “shadow line,” by contrast, began with Arnold Böcklin, continued in the pittura metafisica
of a Giorgio de Chirico and in the different varieties of surrealism and finally arrived at a renewed
flowering in the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly in European cinema of the 1960s and
1970s (with Antonioni, Buñuel, Pasolini, Fellini, Tarkovsky etc., for example, and with Lars von Trier
today). In the fine arts it is not “directions” that dominate the field, but rather such potent individuals as Balthus,
Francis Bacon or even Anselm Kiefer. A labyrinthine, historically interwoven context with a
partial tendency towards the gloomy, the complicated and the politically incorrect prevails in this seemingly
hidden and less catchy side of modernism, that does not offer any reliable morals or any stringent
utopias—and also always contradicts pop cultural harmonization endeavors.
The many almost forgotten references that impact this Nietzschean-inspired dark side of
modernism also cast an unaccustomed light on the now trampled-down path of mutual consent that
questions some of the interpretations of the past and the present which have long been taken for granted
and become all too orthodox. Kunze’s investigation is deliberately targeted at this anachronistic narrative
thread by means of ambiguous text-and-image constructions in which the elegiac is tied to the
ideal, the surreal to the historical and the legible to the illegible.
This artist’s book, which primarily accompanies Michael Kunze’s exhibition at the Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf, encompasses most of the works produced by the artist since 2007. It additionally
flanks his subsequent participation in a dialogical exhibition with three further contemporary positions
at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The groups of pictures from this five-year period, some of which are made up of multiple
parts, are closely related to each other textually and are owed, on the whole, that genealogy of a supposedly
antimodernist modernity whose influence on present-day pictorial worlds—from film to the computer
game—seems all the more powerful, the more concealed and hidden it becomes. Kunze’s painting
stands in the tradition of Böcklin’s “Isle of the Dead,” the fifth version of which was painted in Florence,
the city of the Renaissance, exactly 50 years before Spengler’s death, that late, dark and unwieldy conglomeration
of a “German soul” between daybreak and nightfall. Salvador Dalí, incidentally, painted
a surrealist landscape in 1932, a year before the German furor, that is entitled “The Real Picture of the
Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin at the Hour of the Angelus.”
At the Hour of the Angelus. The shadow line of modernism followed by Michael Kunze can
continuously be described in this way. Since the spectacular Morgen, which was shown for the first time
in 1990 at the Forum Kunst Rottweil, it has concerned itself with a reset and not a restart of modernism
in the sense of a continentally determined cultural migration from the north to the south of Europe
and back again. The exhibition and book title is also to be understood this way: proceeding from a
mythological metaphor, it pursues an identity formation that has crossed numerous borders, which once
began on Aegean coasts and now displays its global ramifications in the shape of a chided and admired
Western culture.
Together with purely construed and fantastic scenarios, the pictures also depict transformations
of photographic portraits (from Gabriele D'Annunzio to Michel Houellebecq). Alongside the painterly
reinterpretation of historical constellations (for example the “Spiegel Interview” between Martin Heidegger
and Rudolf Augstein), we can also find film stills from the aforementioned era of European
continental cinema, up to and including Peter Stein’s production of “Faust” at the EXPO 2000. The
references range from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s surreal and violent 1970 Western “El Topo” and Lars von
Trier’s “Riget” [The Kingdom] to “300,” the film version of the comic series that deals with the decisive
battle fought by another occident, namely Sparta, that was still in its infancy and yet already threatened
with downfall.
Halcyon days. The sequence of illustrations in the present book is interrupted by brief texts
written by the artist that are often compressed to the level of absurdity and are hermetically linked, all
proceeding from idealistic and culture critical questions. The texts themselves, which do not stand in an
explanatory or discursive relationship to the pictorial material, seem like solitary romantic fragments
of system architecture that is first complete when it has fallen into ruin. The similarly interconnected
photographic works were produced over the course of extensive trips to Greece. Kept mostly in black and
white, they combine idealized and archaeological documentary aspects of an image that, regardless of
the simultaneous disassociation from high-gloss postcards and scientific documentation photographs,
trace the supposed spirit of a place. Despite, or perhaps particularly because the heyday of antiquity
seems so far off, one must again track down the nesting season of the halcyon on cold Mediterranean
days: the end and the beginning of Europe merge in a sharply surreal, deeply shadowed light to form a
wildly configured scenario in which the abundance of a possible narrative often turns into the void of an
impossible story.
Michael Kunze “is a very strange masterpiece”—and we are particularly grateful to him for
nearly 30 years of consequential straightforwardness on a very stony path! Look forward to this pilgrimage
to the sacred grove without idolatry and temple servants. May painting be with you!
Xαίρετε. Chairete! Rejoice!
Halcyon Days, Cologne 2013, p. 07