Friedrich Kunath: Rising vs. Setting

by Gregor Jansen

 

“Wie der wesenlose Regenbogen spannt sich unsere Seele über den unaufhaltsamen Sturz des Daseins. Wir besitzen unser Selbst nicht: von außen weht es uns an.” ¹

 

Sometimes life is not as smooth as we would like. Often we learn this at school. An ambush makes its way into the world in the crude form of a story, the prospect of spiritual malaise looms large, a dark existential chapter unfolds—a delicate sense of being. Our need for vitality, the joy of life, is “Teenage Lust”²—and at the same time, a drag. The end of innocence is foreshadowed, naïve perspectives fall away. Let us sample the mood of the divided, cold world of the mid 1980s: a curious girl is at school, she’s reading futuristic novels—weird “books about UFOs.” She sees the future, romantically obsessed with a search for new planets, one of which will be named after her. A distant feeling of belonging, the travel bug, adventurous ambition and escapism.³ “Her life revolves around all of the planets.” Sunken and drowned in a sea of light, we write new phrases out of this sense of loss, develop images, and expect fantasy to compensate for reality. A misfit and the quest for happiness, music as an expression of feeling, reading books, the rush of love in the colors of nature, virtual journeys to the planets in the starlit sky—we have endless metaphors for our tiny island of the soul, our Elysian fields. A utopian spot of land beneath palms that we—among vultures—chase until the ends of the earth, the end of our days. Or put another way: just as in road movies where it’s about being on the road and finding your place in the world, I want to ride with Friedrich Kunath the soul searcher at the wheel. On a quest for the ideals of freedom and independence at the end of the rainbow.

Spotlight—rainbow. Kunath is in fact a painter, a genre meister. But there, surrounded by black clouds, is a dam of color—a game of prisms and abstract condensation. These days it seems incredible that painters only arrived at a point at which they could venture a realistic representation of a rainbow at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Joseph Wright of Derby’s rainbow obsession influenced the development of John Constable and William Turner. Unlike Turner, he was not taken with natural light alone. Instead, he was one of the first to deal with artificial light—it lent itself to the staging of interiors. Wright introduces the move from natural to artificial light that we meet again in Kunath’s desk lamp with its physical cone of embodied light—the epitome of the sun as natural light source—a rainbow. Rainbows are a refraction of the sun through billions of miniscule raindrops—prisms that deliver a virtual and anamorphic distortion of the image of the sun. At the same time, it is a symbol for the connection between us as Earth dwellers and the transcendental heavens above. Caspar David Friedrich (let’s take him along for the ride) drew his imagery from this—in the political spirit of which the world soul as human soul could and should find a blank screen for projection. Friedrich and Friedrich, both touching in their own ways on the secrets that art knows but that our world remains oblivious to, and vice versa. Art expresses a desire, one that is rooted in and utters its revelation to the world. The same can be said for nature, things, being, the psyche and its subconscious sense of this desire. And also a sense of the subconscious, since only here is an experience of the world authentic.

There is a humanistic trend, a popular immersion in our presence of mind: the artistic and critical reflection of the political, social, and cultural currents stage a melancholic return in these dubious times. Their effects are pervasive: from conservative cultural debates to stagnation, regression, dread, uncertainty, lethargy, and nostalgia. The prescription of the day seems to be boundless pessimism or personal or state-sponsored optimism.

In this context, contemporary art is frequently read conservatively as an enigmatic response to an always already traumatic life. Or we hear sighs of relief heralding the “return of the romantic”—read syrupy and depoliticized. “Worlds of desire. The new romantics,” and “between two deaths” are catch-all labels for recent positions propping up a search for sensuality and insecurity. Or negating such theses. These strands reveal today’s “melancholic” subjectivity as a Gestalt that can be broken through, crossed out, traversed.

 

We also encounter a Zeitgeist in the works of Friedrich Kunath. The artist as restless traveler of no fixed abode, creating work with a wide variety of materials: painting and drawing, sculpture, text, objects, photos, and video. He deploys them in an attempt to work through his personal experience of our complex world, offering the viewer a chance to join him as he blazes a path through the jungle of visual experience. Life is permanently in flux, yes, this may be true. But where is the jungle of visual experience? Where is the sensory overload? Isn’t it really a jungle of emotional uncertainty, of strangeness?

Is Friedrich Kunath’s quietly resigned protest against the rituals of the real world and art system merely a provocation? Or knowing irony—at the threshold of a subversion of received convention? The grotesque and ironic are always there, as is polychromatic color play and the fine grain traction of caricature. He takes a philosophical approach to his conversation with the opposites of illusion and reality in works that are simultaneously bitter, debonair, and gloomy. He does not make harmless jokes—offering instead a warm, charming delivery of ice-cold metaphors. Like art itself, these are always a question of perspective.

Nostalgia. Friedrich Kunath—and this is typical for many artists of his generation—is caught up in a process of rereading, and has set off on a path of discovery into the fabric of life and art. He examines the known and that which is assumed to be known about form and content. It is in this image full of sorrow and beauty, this glance in the rearview mirror of a fast car, that we see the artist waving and smiling in the distance, far away, so close, in the evening sun. New Day Rising. He is immune to negative associations, spontaneous sensory overload and vacant confusion. There is enough usable material at hand. The world is much too beautiful and much too sad and much too broken for us not to be able to make something wonderful from it. In failure lies also perennial hope, an unhappiness that drives creativity. Nostalgia as a strategy for a new desire for distant places. This is precisely what his work seems to address. Kunath reduces, focuses, and uses comic relief as a melancholic mourning process on a path to joy. Silhouettes like paper cut-outs, vast landscapes like dreamscapes, misfortune as misinterpretation of subjective events. He is not interested in Weltschmerz, not at all. Instead, his work is simply and beautifully about individual needs and hopes, about developing and enjoying individual sensitivity. Laughter catches in the throat, the sadness and depressive pathos in his work offers a kind of cheerfulness—full of joy. At the base of our existence we are all alone, looking for ourselves in others and escaping wherever we can. We travel the world to find ourselves, read books about UFOs, or watch rainbows after storms. Friedrich Kunath helps us—his works provide sanction, projections of human longing, life rafts on the restless sea of fractured identity—islands of crude beauty!

What constitutes the world? Logic exceeds faith in constructions. Taking leave of the senses is the end of the world and beginning of art. The specters that we call upon—capitalism, materialism, hedonism—will not let us rest. They haunt Kunath’s obliterated backgrounds. His works depart from the real world, the realm of the possible, and then imperceptibly cross the brink into the impossible. In a profoundly sensual, melancholic way, they depict the beauty of experience without insight, without a point that was not there to look for in the first place. Getting it—with irony or generally in contemporary art—is far from a given. Why would it be? Who can offer a plausible explanation of meaning in this world?

Let us delve instead into the world as abyss. The one that, according to Hegel, can be seen in the eye of the other:

The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity - a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and non of which are not present. This [is] the Night, the interior of [human] nature, existing here - pure Self - [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out towards us.⁴

This may sound old fashioned or out of date, but it is precisely this moment that forges the instant of death with love. So we are talking about life and death! About the valence of the in-between. I have a hunch that Friedrich Kunath is obsessed with this abyss, this glimpse into the interior of the eye. The abyss announces itself via death, or perhaps one of Jacques Lacan’s symbolic deaths, in the expression of a moment of beauty rooted in life. It depicts the meaning of life through feelings of deep melancholia, not the sentimental pathos of an oh-so-market-friendly German Romanticism. Such melancholia offers a dimly illuminated path to the German soul. Think of his wonderful gold silhouette, its back to the viewer—a refined absence transcending its fleeting existence. Experimenting with multiple media, deploying and romancing a narrative engagement with the gaze, with the eye of the other. Evil and mischievous at the same time, the chicken on the chair peers into a hole and discovers absurdity there. Curiosity and insight. Together they lay claim to turmoil, a motivation from the East that leads to the West, a restless search for freedom, to the sea in the West and the edge of the world. Here on the beach, beside the roaring sea, he lies in a bed and waits for his moment. The instant is bereft of the scaffolding of symbolic order—language and the canon of art history are also nowhere to be found. Only a face, a figure or an idea flash through the mind. With Hegel’s words—the abyss. The world of drawings, paintings, and photographs is flat yet surprisingly deep. For Kunath, surfaces hold a touch of nostalgia—personal memories and collective feelings. They leave us with the night, conjure the sunrise.

 

Communication is the basis of human culture, and culture always consists of an exchange of abstract forms. Forms representing the actual meaning of things, as media theorists from Marshall McLuhan to Vilem Flusser have made clear in recent decades. Do not ask me why, but this is exactly where the beauty of the world lies. Concepts and images rally against anything that threatens to extinguish it. There is a crude poetic power in the work of Friedrich Kunath, waiting for you to fall into its abyss. Windows, stairs, boats, silhouettes, absurd details, outlined symbols and animals, the schematic iconography of the emotional world of desire—these are the meditative stylistic devices of the abstract world of feeling. Form is orderly and follows function; the approach is expressive, probes depths. The more society invests in progress, as if it were a cure-all solution for everything, the more individuals tend to withdraw—to cloak themselves in their alienation. As in all cases of melancholy, this is the mourning for a loss of the suffering self; individuals mourn their own non-existence in the symbolic order that constitutes them as a subject. Credible art is the happy alternative to an incredible world.

Art should move people, touch them, evoke melancholic, depressive, or upbeat emotions. It should encourage a belief in the absurd, coax laughter, or at least raise a smile; this is important and necessary. Between two deaths, the grim reaper lurks everywhere—sometimes even happily ensconced in a field, as in one of Kunath’s photos. But above all, death is evident in orchestrated, pure lust for life. Especially in the allure and subculture of youth and its cults of vigor, the body, the car, and speed. These things, “ironically,” are becoming increasingly important. Yet this art means something very different, something much more significant. This art is mean—in the best sense of the word—despite its humor it remains deadly serious. Such gravity is a rare and very important quality.

 

Translated by David Hatcher

NOTES
1 “Like an fleeting rainbow, our soul spans the eternal abyss of being. We can lay no claim to the self: it is thrust upon us from afar.” -Hugo von Hofmannsthal
2 Cf. Larry Clark, Tulsa (1971), Teenage Lust (1983), The Perfect Childhood (1993).
3 Books about UFOs, on: Hüsker Dü, New Day Rising, 1985, SST 031
4 Rauch Leo, Hegel and the Human Spirit - A Translation of the Jena Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805-6) with commentary, Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1983, p. 87