The Man in Revolt,
or
A strange, slightly melancholy and cumbersome feeling
Camus knew better. He was born in 1913. Then the misses were
already six years old and still had more ecstasy and asceticism awaiting them, until they in the end had the 25-year-old Picasso, of
equivalent birth—that is, life-size—standing opposite them, looking
lascivious. Life size, who has it really or what is that exactly? Previously
one achieved that in later life, but the misses are prohibited
from this like a curse. Camus knew better, surmounted it, on an
arch of Romanesque origin in Algerian Tipasa, already grousing
about the connection between Hellenism and Christianity, bound
to the earth and turned towards the heavens. Three years before
his return to France, in the war year 1940, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York bought the misses from Avignon from a Parisian
art dealer for 24,000 dollars. They were subsequently not to be
met up with in their home country. We shall follow the path of
another (to freely follow Camus) foreign gnosis, which made itself
felt from the end of the nineteenth century as a twilight of the
gods and slowly via the utopias of the twentieth again as a subversive
culture within civilization. The Berlin painter Michael Kunze
presents us with his Les messieurs d’Avignon dark shapes in dark
pictures which we meet, gnostic oblique thinkers as thinkers of the
Other and nevertheless believers in cognition, bad boys of Modernity,
solitary figures. Men one and all, those of whom (following
Herbert Marcuse and Horkheimer/Adorno) »negative thought« is
inscribed as the final form of a Hegelian dialectic: »The absent
must be made present, because the largest part of the truth is
hidden in what is absent.«1
Intensification of participation. »They expound for the
most part, works appearing to hurry against their own destruction
have a better chance of surviving than those which in the name
of the idol of security preserve their time-bound core... Thinkable,
today perhaps encouraged are works which via their time-bound
core burn themselves up, their own life in the moment of their
appearance set to work and go under without a trace without lessening
that in the slightest. The noblesse of such an attitude would
not be unworthy of art, after their nobility of attitude and ideology
went to seed.«2 Adorno’s pretentious censure of the nothingness
of the noble need not hamper us. Artaud and Bacon look at us
mournfully, Bunuel in front of Malevich, de Chirico in laurel leaves
and grasping for Dali, a proud Heidegger, Ernst Jünger with
hobbyhorse along with Kafka, Majakovsky almost a self-portrait,
Spengler’s empty room wound through with vague lines of force,
Trier in the herd with animal-like Ernst and Stoffer, the story continues...
A novel, revolutionary but also borrowed pictorial world
takes possession of our visual domains. In the nostalgia for time
come to a standstill, in the undertow of melancholy stands painting—
when it takes itself seriously—with its energy-loaded reception
space indubitably foremost. Peter Sloterdijk describes something
similar. For it is altogether questionable whether the pursued
intent, that the contemplative »mental« reception of the production
of art (and its »real« aesthetic transaction) correspond in their autonomy
to the greatest extent possible, is still so attainable today.
In our mediatized era, independence and self-determination according
to Sloterdijk have to be thought altogether anew as »intensification
of participation«. This allows us with Michael Lingner to
proceed from there, that in place of the form of reception previously
dominant within art—that is, the aesthetic experience which has
become consumptive—an active aesthetic negotiation and a perspective
of realization now have to supercede it.3 Which means,
concretely speaking, artworks: in particular paintings, are less able
to be used as the art system’s software or as media instructors.
In painting lies—and this is made overly apparent by the paintings of Michael Kunze—a risk whose daring to trust itself with something
opposes itself to the world with idolatry and verve.
Appropriation as empathy. The inherent character of empathy,
understood as a passionate relationship which primarily means
an intuitive, emotional, or psychic comprehension, is a salient sign
of »participatory« image production and an ambiguous, nonetheless
marketing-relevant, advertising-aesthetic element. It must
remain hidden to an analytical researcher, due to that deliberate
methodical approach. But it can open the eyes of a contemplative
art observer, which usually means a gain in appreciation, in the
process of a perception of absence. Michael Kunze begins a discourse,
via the lost customers of the misses from Avignon—a student
and a sailor—by means of painting, which signifies the
Modernist split between Cezanne and Boecklin. Just as Sloterdijk
attempts in Zorn und Zeit (Passion and Time),4 in addition to the
passion of contradiction a new era presents itself. Here the defensive
reactions of the self have their home base, where they as the
premonition of all negativity, all revolt, and all contradiction (from
the paradoxical to the dialectical) yield to the temptation of passion
with a thymotic deployment of power. Creation thus becomes a
catastrophe—as in Camus’ car-wreck—which makes redemption
or representation into a hopeless thing. A strong painter nevertheless
need have no fear of such representation, as he faces off not
against the universe but rather his predecessors. It has to do with
history, creative history, participation as the continuation of writing
the gnosis. And when the predecessors cannot be overcome, so
then at least a truce can be rigged up. Look at Camus, how on the
antique ruined arches close to the heavens yet inflected, sensing
the Algerian passion in indolent and at the same time erect bearing,
blows his whiff of smoke towards us. Head-wind and contradiction
drive the world, just as representation is the aesthetic
translation for a reintegration or elucidation: representation is a
process of improvement. This kind of restitution almost literally
strengthens thought into memory. The illusionism in the image
however strengthens, as a product of the intellect, the superiority
of its own power over all that which is not spirit, including the
image.
Michael Kunze travels between worlds and within history.
His paintings are world revolutions of the soul, an image-and-word
reader of the gnosis,5 using which the Old and New Testament of
the Modernism never written can be unlocked. From Antonioni to
Weininger, from photographic blow up in swinging London to
suicide in the house of Beethoven’s death in Vienna—four years
before the misses’ birth mind you—in the neighborhood of the
superego, and in front of a pregnant musical background an transhistoric
arch spans, on which Camus unjustifiably still enjoys his
last cigarette. All of this also reminds one a little bit of lipstick traces.6 Yet the music as well as the erotics are absent, or the latter
exists in the end or in the sense of Weininger only as platonic love,
and woman’s beauty—or better, the »Nature of female beauty is
performative, that is, it is the love of the man which creates the
beauty of the woman.«7 Picasso must also have thought that way.
And the Pre-Raphaelites, in the sense of Christian renewal, in
whose instance—as paradoxical border case in art history—the
avant-garde overlaps with kitsch.8 Kunze thinks and paints otherwise.
His documentary gaze is evident in the photographs which
were produced in remote areas of Greece, and in his employment
of painting as an old new means of communication that must be more than only a corrective of new media. The impurity of painting
becomes a theme in Les messieurs d’Avignon, its content is in
contrast to the officially carried-through program »less handy, less
easily occupied, and in no sense linearly progressing. An unusual
looseness slightly tending in the direction of melancholy appears
here...« speaking along with Hegel, the tendency to negativity
shows this path to be a kind of timeless shadow-side of Modernity,
and as a lower stratum which is crucial to an understanding of
Modernity.9 While at the end of the catalogue essay Texte ohne
Verben (Texts without Verbs) Nelson Goodman is quoted from
Fact, Fiction and Forecast by Michael Kunze,10 it seemed to me to
make sense not to use a quote, but rather to append Michael
Kunze’s text, in which he himself comments upon his »bad boys of
Modernity« work series—created between Fall 2005 and Summer
2006—from his own point of view. In the interview with Raimar
Stange a culturally critical context which reaches far beyond media
questions is thematized. Finally, Rainer Metzger—for whom the
literalism of pictures has been a concern since the (luminous) Munich
days—opens up this cycle of works to an entirely different
consideration, which is an important cornerstone for comprehending
not only the oeuvre proper to Michael Kunze. All these texts
wish to contribute to an understanding of another reality at another
border of our self-understanding.«
All authors are to be thanked here for their willingness to
collaborate on this publication and to thereby provide the exhibition
with a verbalism in the clearest sense in the form of this
accompanying catalogue, which is necessary and off the track,
as these pictures also mean »it must be« as well as answering an
affirmative no. Boris Dworschak took over the wonderful graphic
layout, Julia Bernard the translations, and Sally Defty the proofreading.
Not least I have to thank Michael Kunze, whose painting
I have held in dreamily alien memory since 1993, the lenders, and
a few supporters and admirers of the Kunzean painted world, that
this catalogue and the exhibition of Les messieurs d’Avignon
could emerge out of the darkness of uncertainty into the light so
as to become a reality.
Les Messieurs d’Avignon, Cologne 2007, S. 06
[1] Marcuse, Herbert, ‘A Note on Dialectic’ in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Arato and Gebhardt (eds.), (New York: Continuum 2000, pp. 444–451), p. 448.
[2] T.W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p.265.
[3] See Michael Lingner at http://ask23.hfbk-hamburg.de/draft/archiv/ml_publikationen/ kt97-9.html
[4] Peter Sloterdijk, Zorn und Zeit. Politisch-psychologische Versuche (Frankfurt/Main, 2006).
[5]See Peter Sloterdijk/Thomas Macho, Weltrevolution der Seele. Eine Lese- und Arbeitsbuch der Gnosis (Zürich, 1993).
[6] Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Cambridge 1989 (Hamburg 1992).
[7] Slavoj Zizek, Die Metastasen des Geniessens. Sechs erotisch-politische Versuche (Vienna, 1996), p. 63.
[8] »Thus they were at first perceived as the carriers of an anti-traditional revolution in painting... to only a short time later to be evaluated—with the emergence of Impressionism in France—as the simple embodiment of a homosexual, Victorian, pseudoromantic kitsch. This underestimation lasted up into the sixties of our century, that means until the appearance of Postmodernity.« (Cf. Zizek, Die Metastasen, p. 95.)
[9] Susanne Prinz in conversation via email with Michael Kunze in Texte ohne Verben / Texts without Verbs, Arbeiten / Works 1991–2001 (Cologne, 2002), p. 81–126, quote p. 100.
[10] Michael Kunze, Texte ohne Verben / Texts without Verbs, Arbeiten / Works 1991–2001, (Cologne, 2002), p. 177: »We have become accustomed to perceiving the real world as one of many possibilities. This image must be put straight. All possible worlds lie within the real one.« (From Nelson Goodman, Facts, Fiction and and Forecast.)