No, I Don’t Really Want to Die, I Only Want to Die in Your Eyes

by Jeff Poe

 

Friedrich Kunath. You know the man. You’re holding his life in your hands. Anyway, he died today. So sad. Poor guy. And he has died a bunch of times over the years, and then again a few days ago, and he will die many more times in the years ahead.

When you see an artists’ work you are looking at a symptom of who they are. The really good ones embrace their symptoms. They can’t help make the work they make, and sure, the choices made can be hard fought, but at the end of the day the work on the wall or on the floor or projected or held in one’s hand is a piece of that person, somehow broken off and made physical.

Artists make ideas articulated as objects, but in Friedrich’s case he makes emotions articulated as objects. It does not matter what he does: paintings and drawings, sculptures and videos, music and photographs; ultimately his authorship is clear. His touch is deeper then just a mark or a signature or a canoe. His touch is a nakedness; a melancholic, heroic and wonderfully romantic communication touching on a deeper level, a place we all go privately, when alone, inside, below, gone.

Every great artist suffers. The cliché written down is that every single artist has a crutch or malady which explains it all. And it is true! They usually do die from whatever it is that tortured them to greatness. Drugs, booze, depression, you know the list. Friedrich’s trouble is a touch odd: homesickness. Yet you have no idea how painful this illness can be. His sense of homesickness is far beyond missing a place. It’s deeper. It’s a longing, a hope that soon won’t be fulfilled. It’s a lingering moment, something not easily gotten over. It’s a heart tug, foolish. It’s an ache not unlike heartbreak. But really, at the end of all this, isn’t homesickness somehow about missing yourself? And even after all his attempts to burn like a phoenix or discard his clothes, I think that for Freddy, even nudity is still not naked enough. Sure, there’s our skin and bones and blood. But how does one show us that place that feels? Where is it in there, in here, on this earth? Oh it’s just hopeless. Why go on? Even the art will fail us.

But go on we must! Therefore, blissfully, like a shape shifting ghost, his nearly daily death takes various forms.

If Buster Keaton was working with the Jackass crew and they were directed by Jean Renoir, that collaboration might be able to come up with “One day it will all make sense”, one of Fred’s early videos. Dressed as the Tin Man, his exposed face and hands painted silver, he looks like those foolish ‘still as a statue’ mimes that frequent cobblestone streets in Europe and appeal only to children, country bumpkins, drunks, and the insane. Standing atop a soapbox, normally distant, untouchable and remote, this man without a ticker falls out of character, comes off the box and attempts to connect with anyone that will give him a moment of attention. Having the appearance of tumbling to earth from the cheapest planet in the galaxy, it does not help that he is falling down drunk, nor, incredibly, that his journey starts in Hamburg, with our sad sack of a hero painted silver, and ends in Thailand with him painted gold. Nothing seems to make sense other than his deeply human need to be acknowledged, loved, accepted. This is a tin man with heart. Yet no one will give him the time of day. Children, bumpkins, drunks, and the insane flee from him. It is difficult to watch. Could there really be any other ending for him than to exit this earth by walking into the tropical sea at sundown, a vision in hard metallic gold becoming one by merging into our hot bronze sun?

How incredible it must be to awake every morning after dying the day before and spring straight from bed onto a tightrope that spans across a canyon of emotion, paintbrush and pencil held as a balancing pole in his hands, a camera strung around his neck, a guitar strapped to his back, lightly misted in Chanel No. 5, a slight smile gracing a face that does not have a line on it, eyes clear and steady staring straight ahead, happily going a step too far, free falling now and tumbling end over end, floating down like a feather onto a pile of canvases, paper, wood, birds, old cushions, tents, cabinets, a piano, a bathtub, the idea of a house, his memories and life up to that very moment. Landing with not a scratch on him. Cheating death. Every day. Miraculous!

His paintings are not filled with heavy brushstrokes, they are often stained, no touch evident, with words sometimes scrawled on them that feel like they were set down by a needle on a record player that got elbowed, the line choppy and swift and black with the resultant letters puppet dancing on the surface. The words feel rushed, impulsive, like there is potentially something wrong here. A gentle breeze at the right time could shift those letters into shapes, eventually disappearing off the canvas, becoming memories, or returning to what they often are, lyrics remembered, poetic fragments, that once held their own in song, suddenly not solid but real, floating and heard somewhere and now recalled, humming in your head, however fleeting.

Ah, the great poet, clown hero, pushing memories and emotions forward, somehow making them universal, giving them forms. Faulkner nailed it: The past is never dead; It’s not even the past.

But remember we must! How else to explain his use of carbon paper for many of his drawings. The obsolete tool of duplication and its cohort, memory. Did I remember to mention that the paper is black as night or that this is what we see when the lights go out and we close our eyes, going in, way in for the evening, before we begin conjuring moments from our complex lives lived? The screen before the film rolls. What better base to use as a recording device then not just simply a blank sheet but a black sheet that makes fuzzy, hazy duplicates? Our slippery memories made real.

 

The stress and strain is almost too much so before I raise my forearm to my forehead and fall backwards fainting onto my velvet fainting couch, I’ll just attempt to put into words how Fred’s sculptures function…actually I can’t even start. It’s too difficult. Forget the photographs too. These emotions now made into images and things are just too aware of a world that he is trying to make more clear and alive for us since we poor souls can’t do it on our own.

You are holding this monumental document in your hands. Do not just look, that is too easy. You need to deeply consider what you are cradling in your lap. It is proof of a spirit guide running wild, making us better by orchestrating little operas that if you choose to listen, will be playing out, right now, in the page held, universally simple in story, but needing subtitles, in a language, that yes, is private, but spoken by everyone. It’s a language beyond language called human. And while we can all speak it, only this calm, approachable, lovely gentleman can actually whittle an ancient redwood down into a wooden songbird that sprouts feathers, becomes as real as it gets, takes flight, will land on your shoulder and tweet sweet somethings into your ear.

So open your heart and pay close attention: there’s a man imploding here, diving down deep inside, returning us gifts from a place we can’t go, below somewhere, but also above, and then doubling back from that horizon line were blue meets blue, where the earth and the heavens kiss, bringing us his strange treasures. People, look and listen, this man is out there, out here, whispershouting, making these discoveries, rainbows of wonder and pain, feeling too much, everyday, killing himself for us!