In Search of the Wonderful

by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Director and Chief Curator

 

The protagonist of Samuel Johnson’s The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia was born into, and lives in, the “happy valley,” where everything that one not only needs, but also in any way desires, is provided. The happy valley is identified as a type of utopia. However, Rasselas—similar to many people living in our contemporary era—is not satisfied. He wants something more. So he leaves the supposed paradise in order to find, if not experience, adversity. This pursuit is part of a larger goal to achieve fulfillment. Johnson utilizes Rasselas to confront the question of whether humanity is essentially capable of attaining what it seeks. His eventual conclusion is that there is no easy path to happiness.

Rasselas’s search has at least superficial affinities with that of Siddhartha, the Buddah—both are princes who leave home in search of truth and meaning. But what is truth and what constitutes meaning? And, in our contemporary era, how do we get there?

For a conscious person, aware of all of the potential delights of fulfillment and the seduction of the quest—however tortured—of the quest, there is a lot with which to reckon. In his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera addresses some primary philosophical conundrums. Working from the perspective that something that happens only once is arguably akin to having never happened at all, he questions the significance of any individual life. Overwhelmed by the transcience, he ponders the unbearability of it, of its lightness, its insignificance, the unbearable lightness of being.¹

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben posits “whatever we can achieve through merit and effort, cannot make us truly happy. Only magic can do that.”² He continues, “happiness has a paradoxical relationship with its subject. Someone who is happy cannot know that he is.”³ Agamben states that magic—and happiness too—comes from being free of traditional nomenclature. The association of freedom with a shedding of convention and attachment also references Buddhist philosophies.

Philosophical questions about happiness, truth, knowledge, justice, vision, and the existence of God offer insight into the way we live, work, relate to each other, and see the world.⁴ What do we need to be happy, both in the here and now, as well as for all eternity? In The Bucket List, a movie featuring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, one character reveals to the other that when the ancient Egyptians were at the gates of heaven they were asked two questions: “Did you know joy?” and “Did you bring joy to others?” Despite the Hollywood context, these questions are both simple and profound. Of course, there is no single answer to either, as well as no means for quantification or proof.

One way to know joy is through the experience of wonder. Wonder is defined as both the astonishment at something awesomely mysterious and a feeling of doubt or uncertainty. This duality helps explain the sensation that works of art such as those made by German artist Friedrich Kunath can elicit. Kunath works in a variety of media including sculpture, painting, photography, drawing, and installation and explores themes heavily associated with the legacy of German Romanticism. Melancholy, desire, vulnerability, hope, failure, and loneliness run throughout the work.

 

The human condition is suffused with the quest to seek, to discover not only the wide world but also the depths of our own souls. Kunath taps into this need, positing that the path one travels is perhaps more important that what one eventually finds. Kunath is interested less in the shamanistic aspects of art—embodied in the work of fellow German artists such as Joseph Beuys and Wolfgang Laib—and more in the magical, mysterious powers of art as explored in the work of Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader.

For a conceptual artist, Bas Jan Ader created decidedly romantic work. Perhaps this is the reason that his small body of work has had such a profound influence. Ader was presumed dead when he disappeared at sea attempting to cross the Atlantic in a small boat. The passage was part of an art performance entitled In Search of the Miraculous. Both the title of the work, and the implied search, embody an artistic response to a basic human quest: if we find the miraculous, what else will be there? For example, the mythic pot of gold located at the end of the rainbow. A repeated image in Kunath’s work is the rainbow, an image that has discrete but interrelated meanings across vast cultural and religious lines. The Navajo people portray the rainbow as the bridge between the human world and the other side. The rainbow is also seen as a Goddess who appears during ritual chanting to heal the sick.⁵ Kunath’s use of this imagery contributes to the work’s highly associative nature, which is constantly unpinned by a sense of the deeply personal and the utterly sincere.

Possibly Ader’s most popular work is his 1970 short film piece I’m too sad to tell you. Here the artist makes himself cry in front of a camera. Why, the viewer wonders, are you too sad? What happened to make you so? The work is at once brazenly personal— particularly as it was made at a time before masculine sensitivity was expressed in society—and also inherently silly. There is an equally important element of slapstick comedy element present in much of Ader’s work.⁶ Although it is tinged with optimism, dark humor is often incorporated in Kunath’s work as well. Much of the humor he uses is self-reflexive, another way to shed light on topics of self-actualization and seeking.

 

Both Ader and Kunath repeatedly explore failure in their work. Ader often used gravity as a medium, making works in which he falls from a roof, drops from a tree, or rides into a canal.⁷⁸ In I am Not Patrick Swazye (2001) Kunath also falls from a tree, trying again and again to climb and repeatedly falling on the ground. This work is less about gravity than about the need for human interaction. Similar to After a While You Know the Style (2000), in which Kunath repeatedly falls on the pavement in Hamburg in front of passersby, the artist is interested in who will stop to help, as well as who will not, and why.

For Kunath, life is an amalgam of best efforts at connection, finding and being oneself, love, friendship, poetry, and music. He often incorporates song titles, lyrics, and other bits of mainstream culture, as well as personal items that are important to him: movies, books, CDs. Playful shifts of scale and a poetic use of materials are employed by Kunath to redouble a feeling of fragmented experience. In Untitled 2008, Kunath explores a literal means of disappearing. He has photographs of himself as a silhouette taken against a white background as he paints the canvas in black until he has visually vanished with only the bottom of his legs visible below the canvas. When we make the effort to see beyond the visible, we can be rewarded. In Untitled 2008 a stuffed rooster stands in for us, the viewer, and peers through a keyhole. Akin to Alice in Wonderland, what lies beyond the wall is inaccessible beauty. Check. It is an indoor rainbow.

Kunath’s works seem to say that despite (or perhaps because of) the existence of indescribable beauty, life is hard, but life is life. What are your options? One is distraction. In a recent work of fiction, Vietnamese author Nam Le accounts a treacherous journey and explains some techniques used for survival, “Because beneath the surface was either dread or delirium…[as such] she seized distraction from the immediate things: the weather, the next swallow of water, the ever-forward draw of time.”⁹ Another option is action. Each year tens of thousands of people seek psychotherapy, large numbers begin a Masters of Fine Arts degree, still others attend religious services, frequent bars, or take long walks in nature. Yet another option is to enjoy the ride. Sometimes, when I stand in front of a particularly wonderful Kunath work, one filled with--and that fills the viewer with—awe, joy , magic, I can almost hear its solace-inducing whisper, “Vaya con Dios.”

 

NOTES
1 Unbearable Lightness of Being, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unbearable_lightness_of_being [April 15, 2008].
2 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2007), 19.
3 Ibid., 20.
4 Leszek Kolakowski, Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? 23 Questions from Great Philosophers
(New York: Basic Books, 2007).
5 Rainbow Mythology: Religious Myths, www.zianet.com/rainbow/frrelig.htm [April 15, 2008].
6 Bas Jan Ader, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_Jan_Ader [April 15, 2008].
7 Bas Jan Ader, 1942-1975, www.basjanader.com [April 15, 2008].
8 Kathy Geritz, Bas Jan Ader at UC Berkeley, http://basjanader.com/ [April 15, 2008]
9 Michiko Kakutani, “World of Stories From a Son of Vietnam,” The New York Times, 13 May 2008, E1.