Friedrich Kunath: Rising vs. Setting

by Anna Grande

 

“How is the time of our lives … a rainbow, soon to disappear”

-Josua Stegmann

Friedrich Kunath’s artistic work spans all media that play a role in contemporary art. His oeuvre includes works on paper and canvas employing highly diverse painterly and graphic techniques, sculptures and installations, photographs, videos, and serial prints, some of them manipulated further. If this spectrum of techniques and forms seems broad, the subjects realized in such formal variety are far from arbitrary. Kunath’s works are often perceived, especially outside of his own country, as expressions of typically German states of mind. It would seem that, besides clichéd notions of south German nostalgia about the mountains, the topos of the Romantic artist lives on, an indestructible image associated with Germany. Ideas regarding the German artist, such as those disseminated in France and subsequently all over Europe by Madame de Staël’s “De l’Allemagne” (1810), her famous work about intellectual and artistic currents in Germany, seem to have lost none of their prevalence. She offers a highly perceptive description of the return to feeling and the affinity to nature characteristic of early German romanticism, a current strongly influenced by Protestant spirituality. Examples, to name a few, include Novalis’s “Hymns to the Night,” the religiously charged representations of nature in Caspar David Friedrich, and the allegories of Philipp Otto Runge—and much admired and yearned for in contemporary France, where rationalism reigned supreme. Especially in the wake of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work, which had highlighted man’s fateful estrangement from nature and popularized the call back to nature as a means to counter the aberrations of humankind, the various currents of early German Romanticism were perceived as exemplary demonstrations of how trust in one’s emotions and a return to a nature saturated with the divine would blaze a path toward a better society in which art would be able to build a bridge across the chasm between man and nature. Inseparable from this utopia were a consciousness of division and the loss of innocence, a skepticism regarding the possibility of repentance and atonement, melancholia, and selfdoubt to the point of inner strife.

The landscapes of early Romanticism reflect this ambivalence. The nature represented in them is emblematic of a vast and unfathomable creation; yet the human being in it seems a nothing, threatened and lost in its barren expanse. Nature, as a forceful antithesis to Enlightenment Rationalism, appears erratic and capricious in the transitory meteorological phenomena that are a favorite subject. Yet such painting is also founded on an unshakeable faith in the benevolence of creation, a faith that gives hope and confidence. Thus, in the middle of inhospitable nature, we find radiant phenomena, often in combination with religious symbols, that signal a turn toward the better. These may be rays of sunlight breaking through a wall of clouds, or a rainbow, an atmospheric phenomenon in which disaster, hope, and the precarious experience of a kairos are condensed in simultaneous presence. Friedrich Kunath’s work likewise contains occasional representations of rainbows. Yet Kunath’s rainbows have little in common with the frequently pantheistic enthusiasm for nature shared by the German Romantics; nor should they mislead the beholder into stamping his oeuvre with a label such as “New Romanticism.” After all, there is no trace in his works of reactionary sentiment, of a heroization of childlike innocence, let alone of an escapist attitude whose ultimate consequence would be the establishment of an artistic religion. For even if many of his works are suffused with a subtle melancholia, it never seems firmly committed to the past, or to itself, but is instead always fractured by irony, rendering the notion of tragicomedy more relevant. Be that as it may, the occasional appearance of rainbows merits closer examination, for it appears to be a central motif in Kunath’s oeuvre. A work on canvas Kunath made in 2007 can serve as a point of departure here; before the insubstantial sphere of a background in hues of blue—traditionally symbolic of the sky, the infinite, eternity—unfold the black outlines of a Gothic architecture with its characteristic pointed arches. A rainbow, its spectrum composed of bars of thickly applied colorful paint, stretches across almost the entire left-hand edge of the canvas; to the left appear the words “New Jerusalem.”

 

The symbolic import of an infinite blue, exemplified by the much-cited “Blue Hour,” is not the only element here that takes up a romantic motif. The architecture of Gothic cathedrals is likewise a motif to which German Romanticism frequently returns, as an expression of the hope for a religious as well as political renewal. In an era of slowly incipient industrialization, as well as an enlightenment committed to utilitarian and, in some of its schools, antireligious thought, people longed to renew their bonds with God, bonds on which a new society following the medieval model was to be founded. The ecclesiastical architecture of the past was regarded as a symbol corresponding to this ideal, and Gothic architecture in particular was not only an appropriate emblem of an idealized medieval world, but also regarded, since the Italian Renaissance art connoisseur and author Giorgio Vasari created the term “Gothic,” as a characteristically German style. (Vasari was not yet aware that the Gothic style originated in the Île de France.) The Gothic cathedral thus served to fuse religious implications with a hope for national renewal—the Germany of the late eighteenth century, fragmented into petty states, was far away from a political union.

Besides these seemingly romantic topoi in Kunath’s painting, the motto-like inscription “New Jerusalem” would appear to be yet another considerable gesture toward hope, since the Judeo-Christian tradition over-invests Jerusalem, as both a real and an ideal city, with positive theological significance. In the Christian tradition, there is a profound connection between the cathedral and Jerusalem: in the Revelation to John, bestowed upon him during his banishment to the island of Patmos, the vision of a Heavenly Jerusalem is set down in writing, a vision of God’s eternal presence, after the apocalyptic fulfillment of all eschatological events, in a renewed paradisiacal creation. On the basis of numerous commentaries created by the exegetes of the Middle Ages, this text, with all its detailed descriptions, became the source of the architectonic model of the cathedral. For instance, the colorful diaphanous glass windows through which the sun’s light is refracted—like a dancing prism, onto the delicate pillars and columns, making the building appear immaterial—correspond to the twelve precious stones upon which the Heavenly or Eternal Jerusalem is founded. Long before John, the Jewish tradition had interpreted the multiplicity of colors and the phenomenon of the rainbow as signs of the divine presence. The natural phenomenon is first mentioned in Genesis, where it is revealed to Noah after the Deluge as the sign of the covenant. As a sign visible to anyone of the covenant God has made with man, it is both a hope-inspiring promise and an admonishment: it is, on the one hand, the manifestation within nature of God’s promise and brings man the gift of confidence; on the other hand, it reminds him of the catastrophe of the Deluge with which God destroyed almost all of mankind. The prophet Ezekiel similarly discerns in the rainbow the appearance of God, not only as a sign of God’s eternal presence revealed by him to man but also as a phenomenon accompanying God, whose glory is veiled in gleaming light broken up as though by a prism into its components. According to Ezekiel, this aureole consists of only three colors: red, green, and blue.

Whenever medieval art represented rainbows—in most cases in the context of the covenant made between God and Noah—the colors selected for the rainbow were not those of the natural spectrum but those of Christian symbolism. This was not only because the rainbow was not investigated scientifically and the colors of the spectrum were not discovered until Descartes and Newton. The earliest representations adopt the description offered by Ezekiel as well as the medieval exegetes who studied the symbolism of color. The dominant colors are primarily blue and red, as the emblems of the Old and New covenants. Accordingly, blue refers to the waters of the Deluge and, beyond it, to the eternity and transcendence of the heavens; red, by contrast, to the blood with which Jesus Christ, in his sacrificial death, renewed the covenant.

Besides this religious dimension, which recommends the rainbow to Romanticism as an established sign of a new departure in faith in God, there is a second dimension to the rainbow of no less importance: that of world-weariness, a sentiment connected by analogy to the religious signification. Just as the rainbow, on the one hand, holds out the hope of fair weather and sunshine, it is, on the other hand, the effect of a passing storm toward which it still gestures. As a precarious phenomenon, it is simultaneously the embodiment of the transience of all natural phenomena and objects, a transience to which man, as a short-lived part of nature, is equally subject. The rainbow thus not only relativizes the hope for a well-disposed nature by pointing out that the latter is an ephemeral phenomenon, but simultaneously casts humanity upon its own transience. This very ambivalence is in fact the decisive aspect that makes the rainbow such a popular subject among the painters of German Romanticism—at least on the level of representational content. The more formal aspect of atmospheric lighting is a different matter.

 

This ambivalent dimension of the rainbow, a cause for melancholia, is by no means a Romantic invention. As early as the sixteenth century, the rainbow is represented in the context of melancholia, which here appears less as the warm and gentle world-weary sentimentality of romanticism than as the manifestation of a cold and pessimistic vision of the end of time. Albrecht Dürer’s engraving “Melencolia I” (1514) is the most well-known example: the personification of melancholia, cowering in the folio’s foreground and resting her head on a bent arm, is presented as a female figure whose heavy limbs underline her dejection; at the same time, her wings refer to the soul’s attachment to transcendence. Curiously, this figure is surrounded by numerous technical instruments such as a compass, a rhombohedron, nails, a smoothing plane, pliers, a goniometer, an hourglass and a sundial, a quill and an inkwell; all references to sciences such as mathematics, astronomy, or alchemy, and to their application in, for instance, architecture. The various professions corresponding to these fields were typologically associated with the god Saturn, who was in turn regarded as the deity of melancholia. In the background, a comet as well as a rainbow above an open and inhospitable sea announce an imminent disastrous cosmic event-perhaps a divine punishment of the hubris inherent in man’s attempt to fathom the creation with scientific methods. Yet a cause for melancholia is present also in the Faustian recognition that creation cannot be comprehended by all human wisdom. The rainbow appears here not as an ambivalent symbol but as a purely admonitory or portentous omen that, in conjunction with the open sea, creates the expectation of a catastrophe similar to that of the Deluge.

Although Friedrich Kunath’s works are suffused neither with an apocalyptic mood, a fundamentally pessimistic attitude, nor romantic sentimentality, melancholia nonetheless appears in them as an important aspect. One frequently recurring motif is death surprising us amid the celebration of life. Far removed from the solemn pathos of the classical memento mori, death, in one of Kunath’s video works, hides behind the wall enclosing an urban cemetery and hits unsuspecting passersby on the head with a rubber foam hammer. Dressed in a cumbersome hooded cloak, he appears like a caricature of himself. Suddenly and unexpectedly breaking in upon life, he turns out nonetheless to be subject to its structures, playing a naïve and banal prank like a thoughtless TV comedian complicit with the viewer. Or death appears depersonalized, in a sculpture of a coffin dressed in fashionable jeans. In one serial photographic work, the artist extinguishes himself by walking ever further away from the beholder while taking off his clothes until he has finally disappeared altogether; only the trace marked by his dress, upon whose shape his existence had been inscribed, gestures toward one who has always already passed out of existence.

The consciousness of transience flashes up here and there all over Kunath’s oeuvre, and is the foundation of its melancholia, especially when death takes the stage amid the plenitude of life. Yet in contrast with, for instance, Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Everyman,” there is no moral component whatsoever to this consciousness, no critique of consumerism or call to ethical action as a consequence of the impermanence of worldly riches. Instead, fully aware that the undertaking will be in vain, the artist submits to the structures that make up human existence. Without promising salvation, he affirms the quest for meaning (even though it is doomed to fail), the quest for precarious moments of happiness, perfectly aware that these are always already stale traces of memory, like a childhood memory of a rainbow’s fragile beauty. For the thematic center of Friedrich Kunath’s oeuvre is human existence as such—the position of man as he finds himself caught up in the structure of desire, a structure he cannot escape since it is only within it that he becomes a subject. Inevitably joined to an existential lack that is also the death of God, this structure is revealed to be the fundamental precondition of all of man’s vain striving, his quest for meaning, his search for identity and his fear of death. This would seem dramatic enough to generate pathos, but Kunath avoids the pitfall of sentimentality by ironically fracturing the drama of the individual without, however, exposing the latter to cynical ridicule. His work comically questions rites that promise a temporary escape from this fatal structure, while it simultaneously affirms them. Kunath turns out to be a knowledgeable observer, one who, despite his analytical distance, submits to the deception that is man’s condition and his fate.

 

Translated by Gerrit Jackson